Page 67 - Studio International - November 1971

concision, accuracy, a refusal to qualify one's century proceeds, historical background in Dr Brookner's study. Her tone can stay
judgements into oblivion. The dangers are Dr Brookner's book tends to become indistinct. buoyant because she stops at 1900. If you want
obvious enough, and sometimes they are not And the public, from being Diderot's 'handful to judge the quality of her book, you have only
avoided: occasionally aphorism declines into of more or less enlightened European despots' to compare her chapter on Zola—marvellously
bon mot, there are paragraphs—like that on or Stendhal's Happy Few, has a less and less generous, impatient with the sentimental
Baudelaire's concept of nature, for instance— specific outline. That last, of course, is precisely finger-wagging of art historians—with Mlle
when one cries out for less certainty. But better what happened in the space of the century. But I Ehrard's preface to Zola's Ecrits sur l'Art. The
a wrong-headed paragraph than a tome which am never quite sure whether Dr Brookner sees selection itself is very useful : it lacks Mes
misses the point (there have been several on this the tragedy in that blurring of edges, that fading Haines, which will go into another volume of
very issue). And in any case the paragraph is of an elite into a mass. the series, but it includes most of Zola's other
usually succeeded by another with no such She writes superbly at one point of Zola's writing on the arts. But alongside The Genius
fault: a page where the author links Delacroix's .7' Accuse. As she rightly says, it was the of the Future, Mlle Ehrard's approach to Zola
Sardanapalus with Baudelaire's poem 'Spleen', opportunity for which Zola had waited a whole seems familiarly dreary, apologetic where no
suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux' , or a lifetime. And part of its splendour for him apologies are needed. About the only thing she
section on Baudelaire's response to Ingres, where —what animates his language and steadies his gets right, where Dr Brookner gets it wrong,
`his pictures made Baudelaire feel physically ill nerve—is that here is a situation, almost is the spelling of Meissonier. Which is, when
because they tied him down to the here and now, artificially produced, where a definite public you think about it, hardly a victory at all. q
they were finite statements, they did not laisser exists. Two publics in fact, pro- and TIM CLARK
carrière a la conjecture'. anti-Dreyfusard, but fused by their hatreds
The Genius of the Future has not got a theme, and fears into recognizable form. But the
exactly. But it suggests several to the reader. Dreyfus affair was a unique opportunity for Decor artif
One, as the choice of title implies, is that art the writer; and novelists as different as Zola The Decorative Thirties by Martin Battersby.
criticism is necessarily utopian, on the watch for and Proust exploited it. The typical state of 208 pp with 125 illustrations, 23 in colour, and
an art which will interpret the world and even affairs in nineteenth-century Paris was quite 62 line drawings. Studio Vista. 6.40.
change it. Another is the change in the relations different. It was that amorphous, faceless thing The World of Art Deco by Bevis Hillier. 224 pp
between the critic philosophe and the artist : we now elect to call 'mass society'. And the with 316 illustrations, 16 in colour. Studio
from Diderot's confident belligerence to the Goncourts were all too aware of what that Vista. £4.20.
modern critic's apologetic rehearsal of the phrase indicates —the opening of the streets
`visual facts'. And a third theme, interlinked into boulevard and café, the end of the old, Here are two books which deal with an
with the last, is the relation of the critic to his stable forms of social life, the rise of a literature undefined subject. Martin Battersby's is
public. and an entertainment aimed ruthlessly, unassuming. It is written 'from a personal point
On this, Dr Brookner begins very well. Her condescendingly, at the semi-literate. In such of view and experience'. It chronicles movements
chapter on Diderot places the man firmly in a a society, what was the critic—and above all the of taste and fashion in the thirties, mainly
social context, and puts due stress on the art critic—to do ? Whom should he talk to ? English, mainly where the money was,
peculiar readership of his Salons: that small list Whose concerns should he embody and clarify describing mural painting, interior decoration,
of subscribers which included Empress and criticize ? furniture design and the like. Bevis Hillier's
Catherine of Russia, the Queen of Sweden, and It was not enough to state his faith in book, on the other hand, is the catalogue of the
various Italian and German royalty. The whole `modern life', or 'le vivant', or 'temperament', major exhibition which he arranged at the
chapter on Diderot has to be read at least twice: or 'individuality'. These are the phrases of Minneapolis Institute of Art this summer, and
its whirling shifts of focus correspond to the Dr Brookner's critics, but they all evade the is a list of 1441 exhibits, 400 of which are
critic's own, freely explored, contradictions. obvious questions : whose life, whose modernity, illustrated. Mr Hillier contributes a rambling,
And isn't the certainty of Diderot's individuality for how many, at what price ? At whimsical and self-justificatory essay. Unlike
manoeuvring bound up with his sense of a one point the author mentions the Goncourts' Martin Battersby, he does not content himself
definite public to address ? He could be by claim to have written, in Germinie Lacerteux, with simply presenting a subjective and eclectic
turns jester, moralist, materialist, connoisseur, the first working-class novel; she quotes Zola's cross-section, but aspires to higher realms of
all in the space of a page; and we admire above letter of 1886, `Toutes les fois que j'entreprends objectivity and stylistic criticism. His exhibition
all the ease with which he moved from one role une etude maintenant, je me heurte au presents, in Hillier's view, 'a coherent style'
to another. How different from the private, socialisme' ; she accuses Huysmans of paranoia which has 'continuity and essential unity'.
rigid poses—changed once a decade or so—of in his description of the street landscape of Paris It is difficult to know what to make of this.
the Goncourts or Huysmans ! And isn't the key in 1889. But was he so paranoid ? Or at any The underlying idea is that the entre deux
word here 'private' ? Diderot's criticism really rate, was not this paranoia a shared experience guerres period forms a totality, bounded on each
was a private matter, in manuscript, distributed for those who knew anything of working-class side by the wars, rivers of blood, and punctuated
to the happy few; yet with a natural sense of Paris ? (One thinks of the journals of David by an internal caesura, the Crash. The flowing
public concerns, matters of State underlying the d'Angers, or the essays of Valles, or even line of kitsch, haute trend and second-rate
discussion of Boucher or Deshays. A natural Baudelaire himself in the Intimate Journals or vanguardism which Hillier celebrates is thus
sense, since how else was one to talk painting parts of the Spleen de Paris.) divided into two hemistiches, two decades; the
with the Queen of Sweden or the Empress of Qu'est-ce que la modernité? It is a question 20's (itself pivoted on the 1925 Paris exhibition)
Russia ? French writers still ask, and they still ask who and the 30's (with its melancholy backdrop of
The history that follows is one in which that pays for it, who partakes and who is excluded. storm troopers and hunger marchers). These
sense of a public dwindles and that certainty of If even the Goncourts felt the pressure of these two decades form subsidiary semi-unities, each
the range of its concerns disappears. It seems questions—they are, to put it plainly, the blending into a transcendent unity of the era
to me that the book rather loses track of this questions posed by the existence of a proletariat and its style; Art Deco. The 'essential unity' of
theme as it proceeds. In the opening chapters —then no wonder art criticism became desperate this embraces, for instance, everything from
on Diderot and Stendhal, an effort is made to or hysterical, or, the other side of the same coin, trompe l'oeil marquetry to screens with collages
define the critic's place in a quite specific beat a new retreat to l'art pour l'art, and talked of Vogue covers to Erté gouaches to the Chrysler
history, and describe his audience and his notions of painting as of some rule-bound technology. Building.
about it in some detail. But as the nineteenth That of course came later than the limits of After a while I began to feel that it was not so

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