State versus Style: Naturalism and Avant-Gardism under the Early Third Republic, 1885-1900

这本书的中心前提是自然主义在19世纪末的法国文化中占据主导地位。自然主义把物质世界放在首位，把可以看到、感觉和描述的东西放在首位。在文学和视觉艺术中，自然主义倾向于描述和报道的习语，强调现代存在，摒弃典故或荒诞，支持叙事性和可观察性。特别是，自然主义在第三共和国早期蓬勃发展，不仅是因为它是19世纪末资本主义社会特有的实证主义哲学的文化表现，而且因为它适合这个政权。自然主义强调事实而不是信仰，这与共和国从天主教会手中夺取权威的目标背道而驰。它强调通过科学和技术来理解和征服物质世界，这与共和国对进步和现代性的承诺相匹配，甚至塑造了这一承诺。自然主义艺术和写作的易读性和明显的易懂，符合共和国的平等修辞，即支持艺术形式的制度，以自己的意识形态价值观满足尽可能广泛的选民。自然主义的另一个优势--无论是对在美学领域工作的艺术家，还是对它的使用者，无论是政客、科学家、收藏家还是普通大众--都是如此，它允许极大的表现灵活性；可以说是自然主义的宽广边界可以包括克劳德·莫奈和帕斯卡尔·达格南-布弗莱特、埃德加·德加和爱德华·丹坦、卢西安·L·德尔默和亨利·德·图卢兹-劳特雷克。它在流行文化中也很常见，从La Natural的插图到即时摄影的发展，再到格雷文博物馆的蜡像。然而，最重要的是，先锋艺术家们反对的是这种自然主义的霸权。他们不再反对学院主义，因为早在19世纪70年代，一代艺术家就转向了自然主义，他们自己成为共和国赞助的建制派人物，其中包括达南、阿尔弗雷德·罗尔和亨利·热尔韦克斯等不同的艺术家。自然主义根深蒂固，是一种意识形态和资产阶级力量，从最小的书籍插图到最大的壁画委员会，无处不在。因此，新艺术在某种程度上几乎必然带有政治色彩。它可以选择适应共和党/自然主义者的霸权，也可以选择对其做出反应。这本书将考察对这种霸权的不同反应。它不仅将讨论皮埃尔·博纳尔和爱德华·维亚尔为什么无法维持他们纳比时代的文体实验，而且为什么他们已经恢复到19世纪90年代末的自然主义。它将探索不同的风格可能性，特别是平民的概念，为人民甚至可能来自人民的艺术。这种表面上民主的美学既可以适应自然主义，也可以发明新的习语。这本书通过文森特·梵高、欧仁·布兰、亨利·卢梭、乔治·修拉和亚历山大·夏彭蒂埃等不同艺术家的作品来研究这位平民，这本书将提出对文体变化的重组解读。它还将调查那些反对占主导地位的自然主义的艺术，讨论如何以及为什么漫画边缘在这个时期成为劳特里克和费利克斯·瓦洛顿等艺术家手中的一股如此重要的力量。它还将研究其他艺术家借用当权派风格的手段和动机，比如保罗·西格纳克对古典主义的变化。

The central premise of the book is the dominance of naturalism in late 19th century French culture. Naturalism gave primacy to the material world, to what could be seen, sensed and described. In literature and the visual arts naturalism favoured idioms that described and reported, laid emphasis on modern existence, and pushed aside the allusive or fantastic in favour of the narrative and observable. In particular, naturalism flourished under the early Third Republic not only because it was the cultural manifestation of the positivist philosophy characteristic of late 19th century capitalist societies, but because it suited the regime. Naturalism's stress on fact rather than faith elided with the Republic's aim to wrest authority from the Catholic Church. Its emphasis on understanding and conquering the material world via science and technology matched, indeed shaped, the Republic's commitment to progress and modernity. The legibility and apparent ease of comprehension of naturalist art and writing served the Republic's rhetoric of egalité, the regime favouring art forms that addressed the widest possible constituencies with its own ideological values. Another of naturalism's advantages - both for the artists who worked within the aesthetic and for its users, be they politicians, scientists, collectors or the general public - was that it allowed for great flexibility of representation; the generous boundaries of what might be described as naturalistic could embrace Claude Monet and Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret, Edgar Degas and Edouard Dantan, Lucien Lèvy-Dhurmer and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. It was also generic in popular culture, from illustrations in La Nature through the development of instantaneous photography to the waxworks in the Musée Grévin. Above all, however, it was against this naturalist hegemony that avant-garde artists operated. They were no longer opposed to academicism, as already in the 1870s a generation of artists had turned to naturalism, themselves becoming establishment figures sponsored by the Republic, artists as different as Dagnan, Alfred Roll and Henri Gervex among them. Naturalism was entrenched and establishment, an ideological and bourgeois force the ubiquity of which was apparent from the smallest book illustration to the largest mural commission. As a consequence, new art was almost necessarily political at some level. It could choose to adapt to the republican/naturalist hegemony or to react against it. This book will examine different responses to that hegemony. It will argue not only how but why Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard were unable to sustain the stylistic experimentation of their Nabi years and by the late 1890s they had reverted to naturalism. It will explore different stylistic possibilities, in particular the notion of the populaire, art that was for and perhaps even from the people. Such an ostensibly democratic aesthetic could either adapt naturalism or invent new idioms. By investigating the populaire via the work of such varied artists as Vincent van Gogh, Eugène Buland, Henri Rousseau, Georges Seurat and Alexandre Charpentier, the book will be proposing restructured readings of stylistic change. It will also investigate art that reacted against the dominant naturalism, arguing how and why work with a caricatural edge became such an important force at this period in the hands of artists such as Lautrec and Félix Vallotton. It will also examine the means and motives by which other artists could appropriate the establishment's styles, in the case of Paul Signac variations on classicism.