/lackman I'm writing a dissertation on invective in French art criticism Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:23:27 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en [Delacroix] was showered with insults more offensive and ignominious than would ever have been addressed to a thief or an assassin." --Théophile Gautier, 1864 Why did Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, and the Impressionists, who also had their defenders, receive such virulent abuse? History shows that invective thrives when uncertainty prevails to such ... /lackman/2008/02/19/beginnings-of-an-introduction/ "…I led him before the Ploughed Field of M. Pissarro. At the sight of this astounding landscape, the good man thought that the lenses of his spectacles were dirty. He wiped them carefully and replaced them on his nose. "By Michalon!" he cried. "What on earth is that?" "You see ... /lackman/2007/10/30/impressionist-criticism/ "Throughout the twenty-four years of his active artistic life Edouard Manet continually sent his paintings to the Salon where he met criticism which in constancy and bitterness surpassed that directed against any of his nineteenth-century predecessors." [George Heard Hamilton, Manet and His Critics, p. 4] All the following quotations are taken ... /lackman/2007/10/30/manet-criticism/ "To the exhibition of paintings by Courbet. I was amazed at the strength and relief of his principal picture--but what a picture! what a subject to choose! The vulgarity of the forms would not signify, the vulgarity and futility of the idea is what is so abominable, and even that ... /lackman/2007/10/30/courbet-criticism/ "Badly maimed horses in a more than foreign land, beneath an impossible sky, an incredibly dirty colouring and drawing which is wilfully inaccurate." [by Vergnaud, taken from Art Criticism and Its Institutions In Nineteenth-Century France, p. 74] Even his defenders seem horrified by him at times: "Quelle pâleur pestiférée ! quel ... /lackman/2007/10/30/delacroix-criticism/ Vol. 2 of Corot, raconté par lui-même et par ses amis (Vézenaz-Genève: Pierre Cailler, 1946) has a chapter entitled "Sottisier" [pp. 195-199]. I'll include here my rough translations, sometimes together with the French originals: C'est un malheureux qui promène sur sa toile une éponge qu'il a trempée dans la boue. (Définition ... /lackman/2007/10/30/corot-criticism/ The notion of 1830 as a turning point toward virulence in French arts criticism seems born out by my reading. "Even Ingres, so often regarded as the archconservative, was disgusted with the treatment which the critics accorded his work at the Salon of 1834 and refused to exhibit there again." ... /lackman/2007/10/30/art-criticism-in-the-1830s/ In his article, "Comment fonctionne la polémique ," Artur Greive argues that lexicographers have defined polemics as hostilities, excesses, or art. In the Meyers Konversationslexikon of 1890, polemic is not dispute itself, but rather "the art of conducting a dispute" ("Streitkunst"). The majority speaker rebuking the opposition for indulging in "small-bore ... /lackman/2007/10/30/is-there-an-art-of-invective/ "Now that calm has settled over this grand name – of those that posterity will not forget – it is difficult to imagine the tumult, the scorching dust, in which he lived. Each of his works occasioned deafening clamors, storms, furious discussions. The artist was showered with insults more offensive ... /lackman/2007/10/30/observations-on-invective-art-criticism/ Insults are of course related to invective. They are usually oral, whereas invective is usually written. as Robert M. Adams' argues in Bad Mouth: Fugitive Papers on the Dark Side (Berkeley and L.A.: University of California, 1977). He notes that in the Greek epics, the hero insults his foes before ... /lackman/2007/10/30/insults/