Abstract
In a career spanning half a century, Robert Lethbridge’s research on French culture of the second half of the nineteenth century has been motivated by two critical passions: French painting in and around Impressionism, and the writing of Émile Zola. It seems fitting that these passions should now reach full fruition in this outstanding volume of Zola’s art criticism, which no serious scholar in this field can afford to ignore. As such, it represents an invaluable addition to the complete works of Zola under the expert direction of Didier Alexandre, Philippe Hamon, Alain Pagès and Paolo Tortonese. Within this series, Classiques Garnier have, over the past decade, been issuing Zola’s fiction in non-chronological order so as to make the work of its editors available to readers as quickly as possible. Lethbridge’s volume has the merit of providing, in a single scholarly volume for the first time, the entire chronology of Zola’s vast and diffuse body of art criticism: ‘La présente édition se veut la première édition intégrale et critique de ses écrits sur l’art’ (p. 116). Any scholar who has actually tried to track this body of work through the minefield of its myriad Second Empire and Third Republic sources will recognize just what a service this single volume will provide to generations of future scholars. To extend the range of Zola texts readily available, Lethbridge reaches back to the earlier work of Roger Ripoll and adds over 100 unsigned texts ‘restés dans l’ombre (p. 115), most published in Le Sémaphore de Marseille between 1871 and 1877.
The first half of this collection of Zola’s art criticism (pp. 119–409) includes all his accounts of the Salon: from the Second Empire, 1865, 1866 and 1868; following the année terrible, each year from 1872 to 1881 (1878 being the year of the Exposition universelle); and to complete this half, Zola’s account of the 1896 Salon. The second half (pp. 411–672) ably organizes Zola’s ‘Études et chroniques’ within a very helpful structure, under the following headings: ‘Artistes et critiques’; ‘La politique des beaux-arts’; ‘Expositions et musées’ (including the Expositions universelles of 1867 as well as 1878, the salons des refusés and the Impressionist exhibitions); ‘Le Prix de Rome’ (1868 to 1876); ten pieces on the ‘Disparitions’ of artists, including Millet and Corot; ‘Ventes de tableaux’; and finally, a set of ‘Variantes’. Literally underpinning every page is a truly remarkable set of notes which reveals a rare knowledge of the field. Lethbridge shows himself to be sensitive to Zola’s ambitions, yet able to identify the occasional errors of this busiest of writers, profoundly aware of the importance of other primary sources from Zola’s own time which define the aesthetic and political context, and alert to how these sources have informed the most recent scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic.
Through both halves of the volume, Lethbridge adds, in square brackets, very user-friendly descriptive headings to those many pieces which would otherwise remain untitled. This indispensable sign-posting is underpinned by the index of names that closes the volume (pp. 751–66) and by the detailed chronology that precedes Zola’s texts (pp. 105–11). To call the near-100-page analysis that precedes this chronology merely an ‘Introduction’ is to undersell Lethbridge’s infinitely rich and dense essay which is organized into six parts. The opening section, ‘Écrire sur l’art’, culminates in a remarkably delicate balancing of rival interpretations of that emblem of ‘artistic relations’, Manet’s famous portrait of Zola from the 1868 Salon, in which Lethbridge finds ‘une ambivalence foncière, recouverte d’une ironie quasi-flaubertienne’, and ultimately ‘la plus éloquente réfutation du point de vue de Zola selon lequel la peinture était marquée par son incapacité discursive’ (pp. 17–22). Lethbridge’s own history as an analyst of Zola’s novels bears fruit in his account of the latter’s informal education in art, ‘Une formation continue’, which concludes with Lethbridge returning to the ‘Visit to the Louvre’ scene of L’Assommoir: ‘en y étalant ses propres connaissances en histoire de l’art . . . Zola lance un défi aux auteurs de guides de vulgarisation ainsi qu’aux soi-disant professionnels de la critique’ (p. 47). The history behind the binary structure of this volume is tracked in ‘Zola salonnier et chroniqueur’; and then at the core of his highly nuanced analysis of ‘“L’inventeur de M. Manet”’, he makes a key distinction: ‘Si Manet fut . . . pour Zola le peintre prééminent de sa génération, c’est dans un sens parce qu’il n’était pas Cézanne’ (p. 68). A keen sense of école and genre informs the penultimate section, ‘Les paysagistes. De l’école de Barbizon à l’impressionnisme’, in a way that clarifies patterns of influence and affiliation (not least between Daubigny and Pissarro). Finally, ‘L’évolution de la peinture contemporaine’ leads us to Zola’s dislike for the increasing disorder of the ‘anarchie de l’art’, at odds with his own ‘besoin d’ordre quasi-obsessionnel’ (p. 93). At the centre of this stands his critique of Moreau’s idealist art, and in particular ‘l’invasion du littéraire dans le champ pictural’ (p. 92). Put candidly, we will never read Zola’s art criticism in the same way again.