Styles Artists and Influences
1814-1900
(1) Influence of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
(2) Public statuary and the influence of government.
(3) Romanticism, academicism and 'national' sculpture.
(4) Challenges to Beaux-Arts classicism.
(1) Influence of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
For the greater part of the 19th century French sculpture
was dominated by the training of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
Although histories of painting in the period have largely
dismissed the Ecole as retardatory and nugatory, for sculpture-always
more dependent on 'official' support-it was crucial. Its
hegemony was challenged by the more artisanal courses offered
by the Ecole Gratuite de Dessin (or 'Petite Ecole'), especially
after 1831 when Jean-Hilaire Belloc (1786-1866) took over
the direction of this lesser rival, but up to the 1880s
the history of French sculpture is preponderantly the history
of the winners of the Prix de Rome: David d'Angers, François
Rude, James Pradier, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Henri Chapu,
Alexandre Falguière, Louis-Ernest Barrias and Antonin
Mercié.
By mid-century it was increasingly felt that the series
of concours (competitions) punctuating the curriculum and
culminating in the Prix de Rome were an outdated and inaccurate
yardstick for gauging student potential. An attempt to reform
the system in 1863 largely misfired, the reformers only
partially succeeding in their aim of breaking the hold of
the Institut de France over the Ecole, since most of the
professors were members of both bodies. They did, however,
bring to an end the system of apprenticeship, in which students
had learnt their craft in the private studios of their chosen
masters, and sculpture studios were established within the
Ecole itself. An attempt to modify the concours and the
regulations affecting envois (works sent back from Rome
by prizewinners) foundered against strong internal opposition.
The rigours of the training in Paris, based on study from
life and from antique models, were somewhat lessened when
the successful student reached Rome; there is conspicuously
greater variety in sculptors' Roman envois than in their
Prix de Rome entries, the latter executed under duress within
the precincts of the Ecole. These envois include some of
the most striking works of the 19th century-Pradier's Bacchante
(marble, exh. Salon 1819; Rouen, Mus. B.-A.), Guillaume's
Anacreon (marble, exh. Salon 1852; Paris, Mus. d'Orsay),
Carpeaux's Ugolino and his Children (version, bronze, 1857-63;
Paris, Jard. Tuileries), Chapu's Christ with Angels (plaster,
1857; Le Mée-sur-Seine, Mus. Chapu), Mercié's
bronze group Gloria victis (plaster version, exh. Salon
1874; Paris, Petit Pal.); although some of them met with
doctrinaire strictures from members of the Institut or from
the professors on the grounds either that their subjects
were neither classical nor biblical or that their style
was too personal, such departures were a common occurrence
and were in most cases accepted as indications of the qualities
expected of laureates. In the Ecole itself the range of
source material was widened, particularly from the 1840s,
to include a generous selection of casts of Quattrocento,
High Renaissance and post-Renaissance works. Casts of Greek
works up to the Early Classical period were also acquired.
Concessions were thus made to eclecticism but none to the
contemporary world. Modern subject-matter was formally proscribed
for student envois in 1872, and to this has been ascribed
the growing interest among Ecole-trained sculptors in allegory
as a vehicle-however indirect-for commentary on modern life
and events.
Government patronage, whether through a ministry, the Court
or municipal or regional bodies, provided the most dependable
source of employment for sculptors. The history of sculpture
in this period is closely linked with changing political
regimes and the projects that they initiated: the instability
and transience of these regimes imposed on sculptors the
necessity of adapting to new conditions in order to survive,
a situation that brought into focus the question of the
artist's social and political commitment. In the course
of the century two sculptors in particular stood out for
their refusal to compromise: David D'Angers, during the
July Monarchy (1830-48) and in the early years of the Second
Empire (1852-70); and
Jules Dalou, after the Commune of 1871. In both cases fidelity
to Republican ideals earned them periods of exile.
(2) Public statuary and the influence of government.
Training in sculpture at the Ecole did not accord in detail
with the requirements of public statuary. Intended to inculcate
elevated precepts and aesthetic ideals, it provided in only
a general sense a suitable rhetorical language for the polemical
or propagandist aims of the State, which in practice often
called for an ability to convey specific political messages,
through portraits, scenes of recent history or allegory.
Overt political propaganda is most evident in works produced
between 1815 and 1848. The government of the restored Bourbons
revived projects initiated under the ancien régime
and embarked on a series of monuments expressing national
expiation for regicide and the Reign of Terror. Jean-Pierre
Cortot and François-Joseph Bosio returned to pre-Revolutionary
types of allegory and apotheosis in the sculpture of the
Chapelle Expiatoire in Paris (e.g. Cortot's Marie-Antoinette
Succoured by Religion, marble, c. 1825) and in the commissions
of Charles X's government for statues of Louis XVI (begun
1827; Paris, Place de la Concorde) by Cortot and of Louis
XVIII (1826; Paris, Pal. Bourbon) by Bosio.
Following the Revolution of 1830 the new government of Louis-Philippe
commandeered and adapted to its own ends schemes proposed
in the previous decade, notably the decoration of the Arc
de Triomphe du Carrousel and the Madeleine, both in Paris,
and the Porte d'Aix in Marseille. The government also returned
Ste Geneviève, Paris, to the secular function of
the Panthéon, which it had enjoyed between 1791 and
1821, with a new pediment (1830-37) commissioned from David
d'Angers; undertook the sculptural embellishment of the
Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile; and instituted a programme
of polemical decorations at the Palais Bourbon. Considered
overall, this group of schemes was impressively orchestrated;
it suppressed all that was anti-Revolutionary in the Restoration
projects, acknowledging the existence of Napoleon as Emperor,
while extolling the military prowess of Bonaparte as General,
promoting a State-sanctioned Catholic morality (hardly recognized
as such by Catholic critics), reassimilating Voltaire and
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and a selected group of Revolutionary
figures among the great men of the nation, and representing
in staid allegories the moderate principles of constitutional
monarchy.
(3) Romanticism, academicism and 'national' sculpture.
The climate of liberalism in the Salons of the early 1830s
permitted younger sculptors, some of them affiliated with
the Romantic tendency, to come before the public. Prix-de-Rome
winner, François Rude, created a precedent for moderate
emancipation from classical canons in the treatment of the
nude, exhibiting relaxed Neapolitan genre subjects (see
fig. 39). Antoine-Louis Barye and Christophe Fratin (1800/02-64)
launched what was to become another vogue, Animalier Sculpture.
Other forms of local colour-literary, geographical and historical-along
with a colouristic handling of bronze emerged in the works
of the Romantic sculptors Antonin-Marie Moine, Auguste Préault,
Etienne-Hippolyte Maindron, Théodore Gechter, Jean-Bernard
Du Seigneur (1808-66) and Jean-Jacques Feuchère.
When Salon juries from 1836 began to suppress the more interesting
work of this loose-knit school, some of its followers found
alternative outlets in the expanding market for statuettes
and decorative domestic sculptural ornament. Another alluring
feature of the statuette trade was its accommodation of
fashion and topicality, in the caricatures of Jean-Pierre
Dantan, for example, and in delicate portrayals of stage
personalities by Jean-Auguste Barre and others. Neither
was the classical repertory neglected in this type of sculpture,
the largest contribution coming from James Pradier, whose
mythological themes were interspersed with modern erotic
genre subjects.
Remaining aloof from such commercial endeavours, David d'Angers,
Antoine Etex and Rude maintained an individualist concept
of a 'national' sculpture that led them finally into opposition
with the July Monarchy. David d'Angers increasingly turned
his attention to the task of honouring great men in commemorative
statues, tombs, busts and portrait medallions. The commissioning
of such statues in France dated back to the years just prior
to the Revolution. The restored Bourbon monarchy gave the
activity a wider, national, base by erecting statues in
the subjects' places of birth. David d'Angers's achievement
was in bringing his personal initiative to bear in the choice
of subject and location, stimulating local interest and
sponsorship but sometimes giving his own labours free of
charge.
The last major monument erected under the July Monarchy,
the tomb of Napoleon I in the church of the Invalides, Paris,
was characterized by an extreme aesthetic conservatism.
The sculptors involved were Pradier (marble Victories, 1843-52),
Duret (bronze allegories flanking door to the tomb, c. 1843)
and Pierre-Charles Simart (marble allegorical reliefs and
marble and bronze portrait statue, 1846-52). Such conservatism,
which paradoxically the short-lived Second Republic (1848-52)
did nothing to undermine, was inherited by the Second Empire
(1852-70). The resurgence of academicism was accompanied
by a comparative diffidence on the part of Napoleon III's
government about political statements interpreted in monumental
form. A lack of ideological content was compensated for
by the sheer quantity of State commissions that were dedicated
mainly to enlivening the surfaces of focal metropolitan
buildings. 335 sculptors were employed between 1852 and
1857 on the restoration and extension of the Musée
du Louvre, Paris; 131 sculptors worked from 1860 to 1875
on the Paris Opéra. Images of Napoleon III and of
his imperial forebears appeared in the Louvre programme,
but particular statements were swamped by an abundance of
abstracted personifications and portraits of worthies. At
the end of the 1860s the floridity of Charles Garnier's
architectural conception of the new Opéra found in
Carpeaux's allegorical group representing Dance (stone,
1866-9; in situ; a true sculptural counterpart, at least
in the judgement of futurity: the immediate response from
both the architect and the public was shock at what they
deemed its excess and a demand for its removal.
During the July Monarchy the family of Louis-Philippe, notably
Ferdinand-Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, had played its
part, through personal patronage, in promoting the 'minor'
Romantic genres in sculpture. Similarly, in the Second Empire
certain sculptors received Court approval, which helped
them to make their mark in both the private and the public
domains. The florid styles of Carpeaux and ALBERT-ERNEST
CARRIER-BELLEUSE were as much embedded in the tradition
of decorative sculpture as in the traditions of the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts. It was the support that both these sculptors
received from the imperial household that in the later years
of the Empire established their styles as a viable alternative
to academic orthodoxy. Of the two, only Carpeaux succeeded
in forging, from an eclectic grounding, a truly personal
style that was excitable and impressionistic and that transcended
its sources; Carrier-Belleuse, inventive enough in decorative
composition, was usually content with a pastiche of the
Renaissance or Rococo periods.
In certain cases, sculptors during the Second Empire were
compelled to subordinate personal originality to the demands
of archaeological reconstruction, since it was in the 1850s
that Adolphe-Napoléon Didron and Eugène-Emmanuel
Viollet-le-Duc introduced a more historically enlightened
note into the restoration of such ancient monuments as Notre-Dame
in Paris and the château of Pierrefonds in Oise. The
erudite medievalism of Viollet-le-Duc's chief sculptural
assistant, Geoffrey Dechaume (1816-92), is but one of the
historicisms practised in this eclectic period.
In creating Ugolino and his Children, Carpeaux revitalized
the sculpted nude, sharing this ambition with a group of
young sculptors who took their inspiration from Michelangelo
and the 15th century and subsequently became known as 'Les
Florentins'. Two members of the group, Alexandre Falguière
and Paul Dubois (i), studied in Rome in the early 1860s
and were preoccupied with the youthful male figure and with
anatomical characterization as opposed to the normative
idealization encouraged by the Ecole. After 1870 ANTONIN
MERCIÉ and Louis-Ernest Barrias reinforced their
early endeavours, and it was their emphasis on modelling
and on emotive effects that informed much of the sculpture
exhibited in the annual Salons between the Franco-Prussian
War (1870-71) and the beginning of the 20th century. Rodin,
in his early works, was clearly indebted to them, his Age
of Bronze (version, bronze, 1875-7; London, V&A; and
St John the Baptist (version, bronze, 1878; Copenhagen,
Ny Carlsberg Glyp.) both finding their closest counterparts
in the pieces exhibited by Mercié in the Salons of
the early 1870s.
During the Third Republic (1871-1946), up to World War I,
there was a tremendous increase in the number of commemorative
statues being produced in Paris and the provinces, instigated
mainly by the initiatives of regional and municipal governments,
as for example the two monuments to the Republic commissioned
by the City of Paris from Léopold Morice (1846-1920)
(1883; Paris, Place de la République) and Jules Dalou
(bronze, 1879-99; Paris, Place de la Nation;. Societies
also commissioned works from sculptors, as for example the
Société des Gens de Lettres, which commissioned
Rodin's monument to the writer Honoré de Balzac (plaster,
exh. Salon 1898; rejected by the Société;
bronze version erected 1939, Paris, intersection Boulevards
Raspail and Montparnasse). In the case of war memorials
or monuments of national interest a local contribution or
a fund raised from public subscription might be augmented
by funds from the central government. From this period the
biggest concentration of sculpture within the City of Paris
was a municipal project, the Hôtel de Ville, requiring
the collaboration of 230 sculptors. The building was embellished
with many portraits of famous men and women of Paris, the
sculptures combining costume pageantry with a new emphasis
on realism.
In outdoor commemorative monuments of the last two decades
of the 19th century, such as Dalou's monument to Delacroix
(bronze, unveiled 1890) in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris,
or Barrias's monument to Victor Hugo (inaugurated 1902;
mostly destr. 1942) in the Place Victor-Hugo, Paris, elaborateness
of composition and dramatic silhouette were the dominant
trends. The variety of solutions proposed was a consequence
of the increase in the numbers of such statues, as well
as of the desire to educate through imagery. Here, as in
the architecture of the same period, a total accommodation
with the vocabulary of the Baroque was made. For David d'Angers,
responsible for so many commemorations earlier in the century,
the simple ingredients of a full-length portrait statue
with subordinated attributes, an inscription and, optionally,
reliefs on the pedestal illustrating incidents from the
life of the subject, had been sufficient. To this type sculptors
of the Third Republic added a wealth of allegory and of
symbolic and anecdotal detail, such as had been used on
tombs in the 17th and 18th centuries.
(4) Challenges to Beaux-Arts classicism.
The sculptural mood of the 1870s was elegiac, a response
to France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71).
After the establishment of the Third Republic, public statuary
in particular entered an ebullient and ingratiating phase.
Rodin's début as an exhibitor at the Salon coincided
with the elegiac phase, and against a background of what
he saw as the charlatanism and false poetry of most Salon
exhibits he pursued his own introverted researches in preparation
for the unfinished Gates of Hell (bronze, 1880-1917; Paris,
Mus. Rodin;. Some of his projects for commemorative monuments
take the allegorizing mode of his contemporaries to its
furthest limit; others, like that to Balzac, incorporated
symbolism in a single figure. However, he always made the
monumental rhetoric his own, endowing it with a personal
feeling above all for the language of the body itself, developed
through his immense output of drawings and experimental
models. At the same time he aknowledged his debt both to
Michelangelo and to medieval sculptors, while retaining
links with the more immediate traditions of the 19th century.
This occurred at a time when, simultaneously with the erection
of statues to great writers of the Romantic movement, a
reassessment was underway of the achievement of earlier
Romantic sculptors, some of whom were still active in Rodin's
youth.
In the 1880s, within the Ecole, the innate conservatism
of the more official sculptors made them ideal bulwarks
of the establishment. In 1864 the post of Directeur of the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts had been taken up by the sculptor Jean-Baptiste-Claude
Eugène Guillaume; in 1878 it had passed to another
sculptor, Paul Dubois (i), who retained it until his death
in 1905, after which long-overdue reforms were finally introduced.
However, in practice, the ascendancy of Rodin, who had been
refused admission to the Ecole, and of Dalou, who had been
a disappointed runner-up in the Prix de Rome, was an indication
of the loosening of the grip of the Ecole on sculpture at
large. Furthermore, at the Impressionist exhibition of 1881
EDGAR DEGAS showed his startlingly veristic wax sculpture
of the Young Dancer of Fourteen (version, bronze, Rotterdam,
Mus. Boymans-van Beuningen), a work closer in many ways
to both contemporary and historic Italian sculpture than
to anything then being produced in France. It took a critic
of the originality of Joris-Karl Huysmans to appreciate
the challenge being posed to the system. It was the first
occasion in which an innovative painter-sculptor had cared
to show his sculpture to the public at large; the vigorous
modelling power of Théodore Gericault and Honoré
Daumier remained a secret known only to frequenters of studios.
After the Young Dancer of Fourteen, Degas, like them, chose
not to exhibit his sculpture and turned exclusively to small-scale
and experimental work in three dimensions.
A problem of the period that was brought into focus by Rodin
in his marbles was that of authenticity. The deputing of
the final execution of carved works to assistants or professional
praticiens had been practised before the 19th century, but
as the technical aspects of sculpture became more developed
and the entrepreneurial systems facilitating the division
of tasks became more sophisticated, a reaction set in, exacerbated
by the virtuosic appearance at the Salons of a number of
marble showpieces depicting mythological subjects by such
sculptors as Denys Puech and Laurent-Honoré Marqueste
(1848-1920). The reaction had already been registered by
the Ecole, where classes in stone- and marble-carving were
instituted in 1883, but it was in the exhibitions of sculpture
at the Salons of the Société Nationale des
Beaux-Arts during the 1890s that a more fundamental revision
made its appearance, such Symbolist sculptors as Jean Dampt,
Jean Carriès, Jules Desbois and Pierre Roche preferring
the dual identities of poet and craftsman to the grandiose
conception of statuaire and finding alternatives to marble
in wood, pewter, ceramic, wax, gypsum, ivory, lead and combinations
of these. Such experiments with mixed-media and polychromed
sculpture were not practised exclusively by those who favoured
an Arts and Crafts approach. Polychromy had been tentatively
espoused by Neo-classical sculptors earlier in the century,
after the publication in Paris in 1815 of Antoine Quatremère
de Quincy's account of the ancient Greeks' use of colour
in sculpture, Le Jupiter olympien, and experimentation of
this kind had increased around mid-century. Sometimes the
motive was archaeological, as with Simart's chryselephantine
reconstruction of the Athena Parthenos (1846) for the château
of Dampierre, Marne (in situ); sometimes it was to contribute
to a work's voluptuous charge, as in Auguste Clésinger's
Woman Bitten by a Snake (exh. Salon 1847; Paris, Mus. d'Orsay),
in which the white marble of the subject's body was originally
set off against a bed of tinted flowers. A more consistent
commitment to coloured sculpture, exploiting gorgeous combinations
of bronze, marbles and semi-precious stones, had been demonstrated
from the mid-1850s by Charles Cordier in his busts of ethnic
types, and in the final decade of the 19th century this
ostentatious and materialistic polychromy was practised
by Jean-Léon Gérôme and Barrias. Degas
and Gauguin, the painter-sculptors connected with the Impressionist
movement, both used polychromy in their three-dimensional
work; but although Gauguin's use of wood and ceramic and
of colour to enhance the Symbolist import of his sculpture
validates a comparison with the work of more conventional
Symbolist sculptors, the hostile reception to such works
as the polychromed wood reliefs Soyez mystérieuses
(Paris, Mus. d'Orsay) and Soyez amoureuses et heureuses
(Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.), which he showed in 1891 at the
exhibition of Les XX in Brussels, and the rejection in 1895
of his stoneware statuette Oviri (1894; Paris, Mus. d'Orsay;
from the Salon of the Société Nationale des
Beaux-Arts, Paris, showed how far beyond the boundaries
of Europe his primitivism had taken him, as opposed to the
restricted European travels of other fellow sculptors.
In the 1890s two other, quite opposed, challenges to the
closed world of Beaux-Arts classicism emerged. On the one
hand, social-realistic representations in sculpture no longer
had aesthetic and political inhibitions, as evidenced in
the work of Jules Dalou, who led the way in the 1890s with
his projects for a Monument to Workers (unexecuted; preparatory
clay sketches, Paris, Petit. Pal.); on the other there was
a fundamentalist classicism proposed by ARITIDE MAILLOL.
It was the latter-the line of least resistance, in a sense-that
was to prove the more enduring, providing a link between
the long tradition of classically inspired sculpture in
France and the formalist researches of the 20th century.
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