Domestic Space in France and Belgium: Art, Literature and Design, 1850–1920 9781501341694, 9781501341724, 9781501341717

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Domestic Space in France and Belgium

Material Culture of Art and Design Material Culture of Art and Design is devoted to scholarship that brings art history into dialogue with interdisciplinary material culture studies. The material components of an object—its medium and physicality—are key to understanding its cultural significance. Material culture has stretched the boundaries of art history and emphasized new points of contact with other disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, consumer and mass culture studies, the literary movement called “Thing Theory,” and materialist philosophy. Material Culture of Art and Design seeks to publish studies that explore the relationship between art and material culture in all of its complexity. The series is a venue for scholars to explore specific object histories (or object biographies, as the term has developed), studies of medium, and the procedures for making works of art, and investigations of art’s relationship to the broader material world that comprises society. It seeks to be the premiere venue for publishing scholarship about works of art as exemplifications of material culture. The series encompasses material culture in its broadest dimensions, including the decorative arts (furniture, ceramics, metalwork, textiles), everyday objects of all kinds (toys, machines, musical instruments), and studies of the familiar high arts of painting and sculpture. The series welcomes proposals for monographs, thematic studies, and edited collections. Series Editor: Michael Yonan, University of California, Davis, USA Advisory Board: Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware, USA Claire Jones, University of Birmingham, UK Stephen McDowall, University of Edinburgh, UK Amanda Phillips, University of Virginia, USA John Potvin, Concordia University, Canada Olaya Sanfuentes, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile Stacey Sloboda, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA Kristel Smentek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Robert Wellington, Australian National University, Australia

Volumes in the Series Childhood by Design Ed. Megan Brandow-Faller British Women and Cultural Practices of Empire, 1775–1930 Ed. Rosie Dias and Kate Smith Jewellery in the Age of Modernism, 1918–1940 Simon Bliss Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe Ed. Imogen Hart and Claire Jones Material Literacy in 18th Century Britain Ed. Serena Dyer and Chloe Wigston Smith Georges Rouault and Material Imagining Jennifer Johnson

The Versailles Effect Ed. Mark Ledbury and Robert Wellington Enlightened Animals in 18th Century Art Sarah R. Cohen Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art Ed. Sharon Hecker and Silvia Bottinelli Materials, Practices, and Politics of Shine in Modern Art and Popular Culture Ed. Antje Krause-Wahl, Petra Löffler and Änne Söll Domestic Space in France and Belgium Ed. Claire Moran

Forthcoming Titles Domestic Space in Britain, 1750–1840 Freya Gowrley Transformative Jars Ed. Anne Grasskamp and Anne Gerritsen Intimate Interiors Ed. Tara Zanardi and Christopher M. S. Johns Art and Material Culture in the Global 18th Century Ed. Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek

The Material Landscapes of Scotland’s Jewellery Craft, 1780–1914 Sarah Laurenson Édouard Vuillard and the Nabi Francesca Berry The Art of Mary Linwood Heidi A. Strobel

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Domestic Space in France and Belgium Art, Literature and Design, 1850–1920 Edited by Claire Moran

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2022 Selection and editorial matter © Claire Moran, 2022 Individual chapters © their authors, 2022 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xxi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: The Artist’s Sister at a Window, 1869 (© Berthe Morisot / Ailsa Mellon Bruce Collection / National Gallery of Art) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4169-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4171-7 eBook: 978-1-5013-4170-0 Series: Material Culture of Art and Design Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

In loving memory of my sister, Jennifer Moran and of my father, Patrick Moran.

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Contents

List of Plates List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Cultures of domestic space in the nineteenth century  Claire Moran

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1

Part 1  Representing the Domestic Interior 1 2 3 4 5 6

‘Louis-Philippe ou l’intérieur’: The emergence of the modern interior in the visual culture of the July Monarchy  Matteo Piccioni 13 Shattered spaces: The domestic interior in nineteenth-century French literature  Anne Green 33 Art and domestic space: Continuity and change in private collectors’s interiors in Belgium, c. 1830–1930  Ulrike Müller and Marjan Sterckx 51 Inside/out: Modernity and the domestic interior in Belgian art and literature  Claire Moran 79 A place to grieve: Georges Rodenbach, Marcel Proust  Nathalie Aubert 105 ‘Cromedeyre tout entier est une seule maison.’ The domestic interior in Jules Romains’s Cromedeyre-le-Vieil  Dominique Bauer 121

Part 2  Gender and Domestic Space 7

Impressionist interiors and modern womanhood: The representation of domestic space in the art of Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt  Sinéad Furlong-Clancy

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Bricolage and the domestic interior in the French feminine press of the 1860s and 1870s, from La Ménagère to Stéphane Mallarmé’s La Dernière Mode  Caroline Ardrey 9 The bourgeoisie, their homes and sexualities in Colette’s Claudine  Aina Marti

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Part 3  Aesthetics and the Domestic Interior 10 Missing affinities? Brussels Art Nouveau and Belgian Symbolism  Aniel Guxholli 11 Villa Khnopff: The home of an artist and the palace of art  Maria Golovteeva 12 The bedroom as metonymic portrait: ekphrasis, Balzac and Impressionism in the nineteenth century  Jill Owen 13 Private rooms of the Cubist still life  Anna Jozefacka Notes Index

207 229 253 263 285 341

List of Plates Fernand Khnopff, Portrait of Jeanne Kéfer, oil on canvas, 16 × 16 cm (1885, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles). 2 Fernand Khnopff, I lock this door upon myself, oil on canvas, 72.7 × 141 cm (Munich: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Neue Pinakothek). 3 Xavier Mellery, The Stairway, Light effect, black chalk on paper, 59 × 46 cm (1889, Antwerp: Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Collection KMSKA – Flemish Community). 4 James Ensor, Hippogriff, interior elements, drawing on paper, 17 × 22.5 cm × 28 cm (1880–5, Ghent: Museum voor Schone Kunsten). 5 James Ensor, The Flea, black chalk and pencil on paper, 22.6 × 16.8 cm (1886–8, Private Collection). 6 James Ensor, The Haunted Furniture. Destroyed in the Second World War (1940). (1885; reworked in 1890, previously held at Ostend, Museum of Fine Arts). 7 James Ensor, Skeletons trying to Warm themselves, oil on canvas, 74.8 × 60 cm (1889, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas ©2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Brussels). 8 Léon Spilliaert, Self-portrait with red pencil, Indian ink wash, brush, watercolour and coloured pencil on paper, 48.5 × 63.1 cm (1908, Copyright Mu.ZEE, Oostende ©SABAM Belgium 2016.). 9 Berthe Morisot, Young Woman at a Window, also known as The Artist’s Sister at a Window, oil on canvas, 54.8 × 46.4 cm (1869, Washington: National Gallery of Art). 10 Berthe Morisot, The Cradle, oil on canvas, 56 × 46.5 cm (1872, Paris: Musée d’Orsay) Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/ Michel Urtado. 11 Mary Cassatt, The Tea, oil on canvas, 64.77 × 92.07 cm (c. 1880, Boston: Museum of Fine Arts). 12 Mary Cassatt, The Child’s Bath, oil on canvas, 100 × 66 cm (1893, Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago). 1

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List of Plates

13 Berthe Morisot, Woman at her Toilette, oil on canvas, 60 × 80 cm

(1875/80, Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago). 14 Édouard Manet, Olympia, oil on canvas, 130.5 × 190 cm (1863, Paris: 15 16

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Musée d’Orsay). Edgar Degas, Interior, oil on canvas, 81 × 114 cm (1868–9, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art). Pablo Picasso, Nude Woman, 1910, oil on canvas, 187.3 × 61 cm, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. © 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Pablo Picasso, Pipe Rack and Still Life on a Table, 1911, oil on canvas, 49.5 × 127 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls Collection, 1997. © 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Pablo Picasso, Guitar and Wine Glass, 1912, collage and charcoal on board, 47.9 × 37.5 cm, Bequest of Marion Koogler McNay, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX. © McNay Art Museum/ Art Resource, NY.

List of Figures 1.1 François-Etienne Villeret, Dressing Room with Tented Ceiling, Brush and gouache, watercolour, graphite on tan paper (1848, New York: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum) 1.2 Honoré Daumier, Inconvénient de rêver tout haut, Mœurs conjugales, 44, in La Caricature, March, 27, 1842 1.3 Bertall (Charles Albert d’Arnoux), from Petites misères de la vie conjugale (Paris: 1846, 352) 1.4 Bertall (Charles Albert d’Arnoux), from Petites misères de la vie conjugale (Paris: 1846, 149) 1.5 Bertall (Charles Albert d’Arnoux), from Petites misères de la vie conjugale (Paris: 1846, 103) 1.6 Jean-Jacques Grandville, Illustration for Un autre monde: transformations, visions, incarnations … et autre choses (Paris: Fournier, 1844, 250) 1.7 Paul Gavarni, On rend des comptes au gérant, Les Lorettes, 22, original lithography, 1841–3, reprint as woodcut in Le Diable à Paris, vol. 2 (Paris: Hetzel 1846) 1.8 Bertall, Coup d’une maison parisienne le 1er Janvier 1845 in Cinq étages du monde parisien, in «L’Illustration», January, 11, 1845 1.9 Jules Gagniet, La Chanoinesse, from Les Français peints par euxmêmes, vol. 1 (Paris: L. Curmer 1840, 193) 1.10 Félix Vallotton, La raison probante, plate IV from Intimités, 1897–8 2.1 Charles Marville, Photograph of demolition between rue de l’échelle and rue Saint Augustin, Paris 1877 3.1 Ernest Slingeneyer, The Art Collector (1881, oil on panel, private collection) 3.2 The Picture Gallery of Duke Engelbert Marie d’Arenberg in Brussels (c. 1903/4, Edingen: ACA) 3.3 Pierre Degobert, Théodore de Coninck de Merckem in his picture gallery, lithography after a drawing by Henri Van der Haert, published in: Galerie de Tableaux du Chevalier de Coninck (Brussels: Degobert, 1838), Ghent, University Library, BIB.G.014161

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24 25 26 28 40 55 57

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List of Figures

3.4 View of the first salon of Les XX, Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2 February–2 March 1884© Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium/Archives of Contemporary Art of Belgium, inv.4651 3.5 A selection of the collection of Fernand Scribe exhibited in the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, early twentieth century, Ghent, ©Archive of Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, www.artinfranders.be 3.6 A selection of the collection of Fernand Scribe as displayed in his private house, before 1913©Archive of the Museum of fine Arts, Ghent, www.artinflanders.be 3.7 The entrance hall of the house of Charles-Léon Cardon, Brussels, published in: Joseph Fievez, Collection Ch.-Léon Cardon. Première vente. Catalogue de tableaux anciens … (Brussels: Dewarichet, 1921), Ghent, University Library, BIB.ACC.061445 3.8 Photo Album of the Collection of Albert Loïcq, Melle, Kasteel Zwaanhoek, The hallway, c. 1927–9, RES Collection, courtesy Galerie St-John, Ghent 3.9 Photo Album of the Collection of Albert Loïcq, Melle, Kasteel Zwaanhoek, The billiard room, c. 1927–9, RES Collection, courtesy Galerie St-John, Ghent 3.10 Photo Album of the Collection of Albert Loïcq, Melle, Kasteel Zwaanhoek, Salon, c. 1927–9, RES Collection, courtesy Galerie StJohn, Ghent 3.11 Photo Album of the Collection of Albert Loïcq, Melle, Kasteel Zwaanhoek, The boudoir, c. 1927–9, RES Collection, courtesy Galerie St-John, Ghent   8.1 Masthead of the prospectus issue of La Ménagère   8.2 Masthead of La Mode illustrée (issue from 1 June 1873)   8.3 Cover of La Mode illustrée from 27 October 1878   8.4 Inner pages of La Mode illustrée, 1 June 1873   8.5 Inner pages of La Mode illustrée, 1 June 1873   8.6 Frontispiece of La Dernière Mode, 18 October 1874   8.7 Cover of La Dernière Mode, 18 October 1874   8.8 ‘Les Maisons de Confiance’, back page of La Dernière Mode, 1 November 1874   8.9 ‘Le Chronique de Paris’/‘Le Carnet d’Or’, 18 October 1874 10.1 Victor Horta, Hôtel Tassel, rue Janson no. 6, Brussels (1893–1894). Author’s photograph

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71 164 165 172 174 175 176 177 180 181 209

List of Figures

10.2 Paul Hankar’s house at rue Defacqz no. 71, Brussels (1893). Author’s photograph 10.3 Fernand Khnopff ’s former house at rue Saint-Bernard no. 3, Brussels. A typical Flemish neo-Renaissance town-house, designed by Edouard Parys (1886). Author’s photograph 10.4 Hector Guimard, Castel Béranger, Paris (1896). Main entrance. © Susane Havelka 10.5 Victor Horta’s house at rue Américaine no. 23–25, Brussels (1898– 1901). View of main stairwell in the interior. Author’s photograph 10.6 Victor Horta’s house at rue Américaine no. 23–25, Brussels (1898– 1901). View of main stairwell in the interior. Author’s photograph 10.7 Khnopff ’s column on the Timmermans bakery in Ixelles by Paul Hankar and Adolphe Crespin in Studio: International Art, no. 40 (July 1896). Courtesy of McGill University Library, Rare Books 10.8 Fernand Khnopff, Une ville abandonnée (1904). Pastel and pencil on paper mounted on canvas © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/photo: J. Geleyns Art Photography 11.1 The antechamber in Villa Khnopff © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium 11.2 The corridor in Villa Khnopff © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium 11.3 The main studio of Villa Khnopff with the altar of Hypnos on the right © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium 11.4 The passage from the main studio to the second studio with a smaller altar to Hypnos visible between the curtains © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium 11.5 The altar to Imagination in the blue niche in Villa Khnopff © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium 11.6 The main studio with Franz von Stuck’s Amazon with the fountain in the background © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium 11.7 The Blue Room © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium 11.8 The White Room (Dining Room) © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium

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List of Figures

11.9 Facade of the Villa Khnopff © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium 13.1 Jules Dornac, ‘Ludovic Halévy’, Nos Contemporains chez aux, 1880–1917, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris 13.2 Anonymous, Pablo Picasso on a sofa in his studio at 11 boulevard de Clichy, Paris, December 1910. Gelatin silver print, 14.7 × 11.6 cm, Musée national Picasso, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY; Repro-photo: Jean-Gilles Berizzi 13.3 Eugène Atget, ‘No. 1 Petit Intérieur d’un artiste dramatique Monsieur R. Rue Vivan’, Intérieurs parisiens début du XXe siècle. Artistique pittoresque & bourgeois, 1909–10, Musée Carnavalet, Paris. © Eugène Atget/Musée Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet 13.4 Pablo Picasso, Guitar and Wine Glass, 1912, collage and charcoal on board, 47.9 × 37.5 cm, Bequest of Marion Koogler McNay, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX. © McNay Art Museum/ Art Resource, NY 13.5 La maison cubiste, salon d’automne 1912. Meubles d’André Mare. Moulures, cheminée, pendule de Roger De La Fresnaye. Verreries de Maurice Marinot. Peinture de Marie Laurencin, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger. Service à café de Jacques Villon, Fonds André Mare/IMEC

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List of Contributors Caroline Ardrey is Lecturer in French at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century French poetry and its interaction with other art forms in particular music, fashion and popular culture. Caroline’s doctoral work looked at Stéphane Mallarmés fashion magazine, La Dernière Mode. More recently, she has published on the performance and reception of nineteenth-century French poetry, both in speech and song. Caroline is currently working on a monograph examining Charles Baudelaire’s influence on popular music. Nathalie Aubert is Professor of French at Oxford Brookes University. She works on European Modernism with an interest on Text and Image (Proust and the Visual (edited volume) 2013, La traduction du sensible, 2003). She has also explored avant-garde poetry in the French and Belgian contexts (Histoire de la poésie française des 19e et 20e siècles, 2014 (co-authored); and has written the first monograph dedicated to Belgian poet Christian Dotremont: Christian Dotremont: la conquête du monde par l’image, 2012. Dominique Bauer is Associate Professor of history at the Faculty of Architecture at KU Leuven, Belgium. She works on spatial imageries, mainly in nineteenthcentury French and Belgian literature and art, and has published on this subject in Beyond the Frame: Case Studies (2016) and Place-Text-Trace: The Fragility of the Spatial Image (2018). She is the academic editor of the series Spatial Imageries in Historical Perspective. Sinéad Furlong-Clancy is an art and fashion historian specializing in French Impressionism and nineteenth-century Paris. She is on the Art Education panel at Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, and also lectures at the National Gallery of Ireland. Recent publications include the monograph The Depiction and Description of the Female Body in French Art, Literature and Society: Women in the Parks of Paris, 1848-1900 (2014) and articles including ‘Painting Modern Paris with an eye on Past Masters: Hugh Lane’s choice of Édouard Manet’s La Musique aux Tuileries (1862)’ (2017) and ‘Paintings, Parks, and Parasols: Models of Fashionable Femininity and Female Resistance of Conventional Gender Expectations in the Art of Édouard Manet and the Impressionists’ (2016).

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Maria Golovteeva is a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University. She is currently working on a project on Women Artists and the Medieval Revival in the fin de siècle. She received her PhD in Art History from the University of St Andrews in 2019. Her doctorate interrogated interactions between art and photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, particularly in the œuvre of Fernand Khnopff. She has held several research scholarships, including the Van Gogh Museum Research Grant and the Fine Art Bursary of the Catherine and Alfred Forrest Trust. Anne Green is Emeritus Professor of French, King’s College London, UK. She has published widely, mainly on nineteenth-century French literature. Her books include Flaubert and the Historical Novel: ‘Salammbô’ Reassessed (1982); Privileged Anonymity: The Writings of Madame de Lafayette (1996); Changing France: Literature and Material Culture in the Second Empire (2011); and Gustave Flaubert (2017). Her most recent book is Gloves. An Intimate History (2021). Aniel Guxholli is a PhD student at the School of Architecture of McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He obtained his previous degrees at the Venice School of Architecture. He has had a long interest in the emergence of Art Nouveau and the cultural history of nineteenth-century Belgium, and has focused his current doctoral research on the sources of Victor Horta’s hôtel Tassel interior. Anna Jozefacka is an independent scholar of modern architecture, art and design, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Hunter College, City University of New York, and Associate Curator, the Leonard A. Lauder Collection, New York, USA. Her Cubist-related publications include ‘Cubism Goes East: A Case Study of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s Central European Network of Agents and Collectors’, in Years of Disarray 1908-1928. Between Anxiety and Delight: The Birth of the Modern Central-European Citizen. Ed. Karl Srp. Prague: 2019 (co-authored with Luise Mahler) and ‘Catalogue of the Collection’ in Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection. Eds. Emily Braun and Rebecca Rabinow, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2014 (co-authored with Luise Mahler). Jozefacka earned her doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Aina Marti is a research associate on the project Architecture and Narrative at the Humanities Institute (UCD), and Associate Lecturer in Modern Languages at Kent University, UK. She is currently preparing a book exploring how domestic

List of Contributors

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architecture and its literary representations challenged discourses of normative sexuality in English-, French- and German-language prose fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Claire Moran is Senior Lecturer in French at the Queen’s University of Belfast, UK. Her research interests include late-nineteenth-century French and Belgian art and literature, theatre and performance, the domestic interior and critical editing. Recent publications include the special issues of Dix-Neuf, Intimacy (co-edited with Apolline Malevez) (2021) and Inside Belgium (co-edited with Dominique Bauer) (2018); the scholarly edition Paul Gauguin and Charles Morice, Noa Noa (2017) and the monograph Staging the Artist, Performance and the Self-Portrait from Realism to Expressionism (2016). Ulrike Müller is a Research Associate at the Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Antwerp (Centre for Urban History). She holds a PhD in art history and history from the Universities of Ghent and Antwerp (2019). Her dissertation focused on the changing public role and relevance of private art and antique collectors in the Belgian artistic centers Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent during the long nineteenth century. She has published on the accessibility, display and function of nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century private collections, and on private collectors interaction with the cultural public sphere. Jill Owen is a PhD candidate in French & Francophone Studies at Indiana University, USA. Her research interests include domestic space and the relationship between image and text in the nineteenth century. Her dissertation, ‘Space and the Self: Representations of the Bedroom in Nineteenth-Century French Literature’, explores the various connections between the domestic interior and their inhabitants in novels, poetry, essays and travelogues of the period. Matteo Piccioni is an art historian with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and an Adjunct Professor in the History of Contemporary Art at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. His research focuses mostly on the visual culture of the ‘Long Nineteenth-Century’ (1789–1914), especially the relationship between art, popular imagery, literature and theatre in relation to the themes of everyday life. Recent publications include an article on Edouard Manet’s Intérieur à Arcachon (2016).

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Marjan Sterckx is Associate Professor at the Art History department of Ghent University, Belgium. She is the founding chair of the research group ‘The Inside Story: Art, Interior and Architecture 1750–1950’, and supervises many PhDs in this field. Sterckx is founding co-editor of Brepols Publishers’ book series XIX. Studies in 19th-century Art and Visual culture. Her research focuses on art, especially sculpture, as related to gender and space, both public and domestic, as well as on historic interiors, ca. 1750–1950. In 2021 she created the exhibition and catalogue Crime Scenes, on interwar interiors through the lens of forensic photography.

Acknowledgements I would like to take this opportunity to thank all our authors and all the contributors to the Domestic Space in France and Belgium International Conference, held in Belfast in November 2016. I would particularly like to thank Anne Green, Hilde Heynen and Janet McLean. I am also grateful to the School of Arts, English and Languages and the Society for French Studies for their generous funding of this event and for financing the cost of reproducing images. Thanks are due to all of the museums, galleries and libraries, which house the images reproduced here. At Bloomsbury Visual Arts, I would like to thank Margaret Michniewicz for her support and guidance and the anonymous peer reviewers who offered valuable commentaries on this project at an early stage. I would also like to thank April Peake, who came to this project at a later and crucial stage. On a more personal note, I would like to thank my close and extended family and the many loving homes, which continue to shape and nurture my research.

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Introduction: Cultures of domestic space in the nineteenth century Claire Moran

From the late nineteenth century, the interior became an emblem of subjectivity, intellectual life and, increasingly, the separation of private and public, as best illustrated by Walter Benjamin when he wrote: ‘[t]he private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions … his living room is a box in the theatre of the world.’1 The interior has, over the last few decades, attracted scholars from a variety of disciplines, all seeking to understand its place in the history of modernity. From art history, cultural studies and the history of design, to architecture and literature, critics have been questioning the forgotten role of the domestic interior in the formation of modern art and modern identity. It is within this context of a re-evaluation of the importance of the interior that this book is situated. It aims to address one aspect of the rich history of the domestic interior: its conceptualization and representation in late-nineteenth-century France and Belgium. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century critics saw the acute connection between the newly transformed urban world and the necessity of the interior. In 1876, in an essay written in English on Édouard Manet and the Impressionists, Stéphane Mallarmé questioned: ‘Why is it needful to represent the open air of gardens, shore or street, when it must be owned that the greatest part of our modern existence takes place in an interior?’2 Mallarmé’s comments were written in the same year as those of Edmond Duranty, who argued for the realist aspects of Impressionist art, using the interior as an example: We no longer separate the person from the background, whether apartment or street. We never, in real life, see human figures on a neutral, vague or empty background. Around them and behind them are pieces of furniture, fireplaces, wall-hangings, a surface that expresses their fortune, their class and their occupation.3

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Domestic Space in France and Belgium

While for Georg Simmel, in The Metropolis and Mental Life, the city ultimately had a debilitating effect on the urban subject; the home, in contrast, offers a possible antidote or counterbalance to the danger of the street. For Benjamin, the ‘de-realized’ individual created a place for himself in the private home; it was not only the personalized sphere reflecting the taste of is owner; it was also the place where the individual could shore up his or her resources before going out to face the world. Similarly, for Hannah Arendt, writing on privacy: ‘the domestic sphere: the four walls of one’s private property offer the only reliable hiding place from the common public world, not only from everything that goes on in it but also from its very publicity, from being seen and being heard. The walls of the home proffer an umbrella of privacy, an apparent ability to retreat from the general gaze.’4 This ongoing opposition between inside and out, between private and public that underlies critical debates on the domestic interior may also be interpreted in terms of Charles Baudelaire’s conception of modernity as ‘the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, that half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable’.5 Binary oppositions between inside and outside may easily translate into a conception of the fast, modern urban (outside) world as the opposite of the quiet, reflective sanctuary of the traditional domestic (inner) one. Yet, modernity is in its very essence contradictory and dichotomies of public/private, exterior/interior dissolve very quickly when the realities and representations of nineteenth-century life are fully explored. Instead, what emerges is a rich web of interrelations, exchanges and interactions. The tumultuousness and complexities of the nineteenth century find their expression in the ways in which the domestic interior engages with, is contaminated by and comes to challenge the changing outside world. It is for this reason that it offers a fascinating insight into the development and expression of modernity. Recent criticism has enhanced our understanding of the importance of the nineteenth-century domestic interior from perspectives such as gender, aesthetics, modern design and social practice. Pivotal works in design history include Sparke and McKellar’s edited volume, Interior design and identity (2004); Sparke’s The Modern Interior (2008); Intimus: Interior: Design History Reader, edited by Taylor and Preston (2006); and Designing the Modern Interior, edited by Sparke, Massey, Keeble and Martin (2009). A series of works have also questioned the social practice of interior decoration and contemporary attitudes regarding domesticity. These include Reed’s Not at home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (1996), Gere’s Nineteenth-century Decoration: The Art of the Interior (1989), Silverman’s

Cultures of Domestic Space in the 19th Century

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Art Nouveau in Fin-de-siècle France: Politics, Psychology and Style (1989) and Kuenzli’s The Nabis and Intimate Modernism: Painting and the Decorative at the Fin-de-siècle (2010). Equally important are those critical works which draw attention to the representation of the domestic interior in art and literature, such as Downey’s Domestic Interiors: Representing Homes from the Victorians to the Moderns (2013); Aynsley and Grant’s Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior since the Renaissance (2006); Tristram’s Living Space in Fact and Fiction (1989); Muthesius’s The Poetic Home (2009); and Bryden and Floyd’s edited collection Domestic Space: Reading the 19th-Century Interior (1999). An emphasis on the domestic interior and the mass media is also seen in Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (2015), edited by Lasc, Downey and Taylor, as well as in special issues of the Journal of Design History, ‘Studying Advice: Historiography, Methodology, Commentary, Bibliography’ (Lees-Maffei, 2003) and ‘Publishing the Modern Home: Magazines and Interiors’ (1870–1965) edited by Aynsley and Berry (2005). In terms of literature and the interior, Marcus’s Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-century Paris and London (1999) highlighted the important function of literature, specifically the novels by Balzac and Zola in understanding the nineteenth-century Parisian interior, while Rosner’s Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (2004), Massey and Sparke’s Biography, and the Modern Interior (2013) and Balducci’s edited book, Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity, in France, 1789–1914 (2017), have also been important in arguing for the interior as expression of modernist identity and interiority. Moran and Bauer’s recent special issue with Dix-Neuf (2018) on the Belgian Interior has drawn attention to the role played by Belgian art and literature in shaping modernity, highlighting in particular the unique relationships between artists, writers, collectors and designers in the late nineteenth century. Impressionist Interiors, edited by McLean (2008), was one of the first books to offer a full engagement with late-nineteenth-century art and interiors with essays by Clayson and Singletary showing how painters were challenging not only the subject matter but also the formal language of modern art through the motif of the interior. Visualising the Interior by Lasc (2016) also engaged with a series of different artistic media to show how private interiors were central to the development of modern art. Articles in the journals Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture and Home Cultures have also added to debates on the domestic interior, although here the principal focus has been on twentiethand twenty-first-century design history. Together, these critics have created a body of work that enriches our understanding of the interior and its relationship to modernism. However, a gap remains, which this present volume seeks to

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address: the sustained and comprehensive study of the domestic interior as a modernist phenomenon within and across the social and artistic contexts of late-nineteenth-century France and Belgium. The centrality of France and Belgium to the history of the modern interior is paramount. In France, the widespread interest in the interior among a host of city-dwellers, including writers, artists, critics and collectors, arose largely in response to the effects of Haussmannization on the social significance of this space. As Sharon Marcus has shown: A new emphasis on the interior became widespread from the 1850s to the 1880s […]. The new configuration of the interior as a hermetic, concealed and strictly demarcated space, and the valorisation of the involuted domesticity that accompanied that innovation, involved changes in both architectural practices and cultural values.6

For Marcus, these changes produced what she terms ‘the interiorization of Paris’,7 the creation of enclosed, private spaces, which fed the imagination of artists and writers during this period. This aspect of Parisian modernity challenges and complicates the received interpretations of Second Empire Paris as uniquely a city of spectacle and flânerie, as most evidenced in works such as Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life and Prendergast’s Paris and the Nineteenth Century. Fin-de-siècle France saw artists and writers turn to the domestic interior as both thematic source and formal inspiration as is visible in Zola’s Pot-bouille, Edmond de Goncourt’s Maison de l’artiste, as well as in paintings by artists from Manet to Léger. The changes in the social demographic of Paris also led to the related concepts of the collector and the interior decorator, both propelled by a series of advice magazines, popular with the emerging middle classes. Also significant was the rise of the decorative arts, as visible in the attention given to them in the Exposition universelles and to the success of the Ecole de Nancy and the gallery of Siegfried Bing, in particular. Most significantly, the received perspective on French modernity as quintessentially urban, exterior and male undermined the female experience, as recent criticism by scholars such as BrevikZender (2015) has shown. Building on the work of scholars such as Iskin (2007) and Clayson (2008), she argues for a move away from dichotomies of public/private and exterior/interior to a more nuanced understanding of nineteenth-century lived experience. This book hopes to contribute to this understanding by offering a multifaceted, multidisciplinary approach to the domestic interior in nineteenth-century France and Belgium.

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Many of the cultural changes in nineteenth-century France saw a reflection in those in which took place at the same time in Belgium. Late-nineteenth-century Belgium underwent a profound metamorphosis that saw an unbridled dynamism of the arts against a backdrop of societal unrest, colonial expansion and social progress. Framed by the two great events of nineteenth-century Belgian liberalism, the 1892 and 1902 general strikes, the movement conventionally known as Art Nouveau, championed by Horta, Hankar and Van de Velde, is firmly set in a specific context where bourgeois individualism and personal freedom were met with progressive ideas on universal suffrage, compulsory education and improvement of working conditions. It was in Brussels that Art Nouveau thrived, principally in the design of private homes for a socially engaged bourgeoisie. Similar to France, advice literature and collecting flourished in Belgium, while representations of the interior and its complexities infiltrated a series of artistic works: from novels such as J. K. Huysmans’s A Rebours and Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-morte to the popular genre paintings of domestic bliss in Alfred Stevens and the provocative works of James Ensor. The specific social context of France and Belgium at the end of the nineteenth century and its material documentation and representation cannot be excluded from the history of the modern interior. This volume aims to meet this critical need through an interdisciplinary lens that brings together a series of chapters, each of which sheds light on our understanding of the domestic interior in France or Belgium at the turn of the century. The first part, ‘Representing the domestic interior’, gives an overview on how domestic space was represented and displayed in the period. Matteo Piccioni’s chapter focuses on the importance of the period of the July monarchy (1830–48) to an understanding of the representation of the French interior. He shows how it was during these years that representations of modern domestic life started to be popularized. He reveals how the public interest in everyday domestic life led to an iconographic transformation not just of the paintings exhibited in the Salon, but especially in literary illustrations, caricatures and vignettes. This emphasis on the role of popular representations is continued in Anne Green’s chapter on shattered spaces, which opens with a discussion of children’s books and leads to an analysis of the theme in a series of French texts from popular and high culture. With reference to the French expositions universelles in 1855 and 1867, she explains how Second Empire literature, in particular the novels of Flaubert and Zola, frequently draws on the exhibition aesthetic by representing all kinds of domestic locations as exhibition spaces. However, her analysis of these novels through the motif of destruction reveals that the prosperity projected

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Domestic Space in France and Belgium

by the  Exhibitions was an illusion that could not last. Chapter 3, by Ulrike Müller and Marjan Sterckx, moves the discussion to Belgium and discusses how domestic space was displayed in Belgium in the nineteenth century. Müller and Sterckx analyse the trends and tendencies in the display of paintings, sculptures and art objects in the domestic space of private art collectors in Belgium over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They question how the actual arrangement of art objects is related, on the one hand, to an ideal presented in normative publications such as advice literature on interior home decoration, and on the other hand, to contemporary display practices of artworks in public exhibitions, revealing the artifice of domestic space. Claire Moran’s chapter follows this focus on Belgium and questions the representation of the domestic interior in artworks as well as novels, against the backdrop of Art Nouveau. She questions whether the increased emphasis on décor, framing devices and threshold motifs in the works of Maeterlinck, Rodenbach, Khnopff and Ensor dialogue with or contest the burgeoning new design aesthetic of Van de Velde, Horta and Hankar. The final two chapters in this section further expand the discussion on representations of the interior, by considering the philosophical and psychological aspects of domestic space, as evidenced in the literature of Rodenbach, Proust and Jules Romain. Nathalie Aubert analyses two of modernism’s most archetypical works – Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte and Proust’s Swann’s Way – to explore the interdependence between literature and domestic space, as part of the ars memoria tradition. She also shows that domestic space in both novels has a direct bearing on how individuals articulated privacy in psychological terms, and may be a site of antagonism, of quarrels and of hidden anxieties. Dominique Bauer continues this focus on literary representation by analysing the dichotomies of interior and exterior in Romain’s socially conservative play Cromedeyre-le-Vieil. She argues that, set against the background of nineteenth-century strands of thought, involving key terms like ‘race’, ‘type’, ‘terroir’ historical essentialism and social immobility, the domestic space, interiority and exteriority of Cromedeyre-le-Vieil reveal the deeply conflicting and conservative aspects of modernity. This overview on representation in Part 1 leads to the second section, focused on gender and which includes chapters by Sinéad Furlong-Clancy, Caroline Ardrey and Aina Marti. Furlong-Clancy’s chapter considers two of the best-known female Impressionists – Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot – and their representation of domestic space. She argues that ‘Morisot and Cassatt’s aesthetic representations of late-nineteenth-century Parisian homes, whether private spaces of bedrooms and bathing, or semi-private reception rooms of

Cultures of Domestic Space in the 19th Century

7

leisure and dining, offer a unique insight into modern bourgeois womanhood’ (138). For Furlong-Clancy, Morisot and Cassatt’s works are ‘unique in the aesthetic possibilities that the contemporary bourgeois domestic interior affords them: the patterns, objects and frames within the frames of their works’, as well as ‘the textures, surfaces and reflections from windows and mirrors, allow them to bring an aspect of Impressionist plein-airisme into their interiors’ (156). Caroline Ardrey’s chapter offers another prism with which to view women in the domestic interior: fashion and fashion magazines. Focusing on the notion of ‘bricolage’ as an aesthetic force in both the feminine press of the 1880s and Mallarmé’s self-authored fashion journal La Dernière Mode, she argues that the practice of magazine-reading in the nineteenth century is part of an ‘économie du désir’, which drives the reading process and one which Mallarmé exploited in his modernist enterprise. Marti’s chapter offers another aspect of gendered domesticity up for discussion by questioning how the representations of domestic space in Colette’s series of Claudine novels reveal an understanding of gender as both diverse and fluid. She argues that Claudine breaks with a static and homogeneous domestic and sexual discourse, and creates a poly-discourse, one wherein space and the language used to represent it challenge the reader’s conception of gender and of the family. The final section focuses on the interrelationship of domestic space and aesthetics. Aniel Guxholli and Maria Golovteeva offer complementary chapters that discuss key figures such as Victor Horta, Fernand Khnopff and Emile Verhaeren within the context of Belgian Symbolism and Art Nouveau. Guxholli’s chapter raises the important question of the contemporary relationship between the two art movements. In particular, he questions Horta’s reception of Symbolist art and the reception of his architecture among Symbolist authors who were actively engaged in the artistic life of Brussels. Golovteeva’s chapter extends the discussion by focusing on the Symbolist painter, Khnopff and, in particular, the extraordinary villa/studio that he designed in the early 1900s. She shows how the artist explored Symbolist interiority with the designs of his villa and in his art and how the villa also embodied the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, where architecture, interior design, sculpture, painting and even music worked together to create a unified experience. Yet, unlike Horta’s homes, Khnopff ’s house emerges as a theatrical stage rather than a living space, highlighting an essential difference between Symbolism as an art of the idea and Art Nouveau’s modernist functionality. Jill Owen moves the discussion from artistic movements to artistic tropes with an analysis of ekphrasis in Balzac. Her chapter focuses on the bedroom as a portrait of its inhabitant and she argues that the bedroom objects

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described in Eugénie Grandet and Lost Illusions are set apart from the action of the narrative, thereby performing another function and become dynamic pieces that can justify or foreshadow a character’s actions. Anna Jozefacka’s chapter extends this discussion on the importance of the interior to modern aesthetics and moves the conversation into the twentieth century by contesting the prevailing notion of Cubism as a modernist art form positioned outside the domestic realm. She argues that both Braque and Picasso situated their still lifes within the daily existence of modern life filtered through their own experiences and banal personal objects and that this material world of daily life constituted the physical and conceptual interior of Cubist space. This book is for everyone interested in domestic space as a global, multidisciplinary phenomenon. As I write these lines in summer 2020, the importance of domestic space to our lives has been accentuated in ways we could not have anticipated when this book was conceived. This worldwide experience of lockdown has revealed the importance of our homes and their spaces to every aspect of our lives. Many of the discussions here question how domestic space engages with issues such as public and private, gender, creativity, social norms, grief and/or conflict, showing the pertinence of this area of research to twentyfirst-century life. The chapters here reveal how, in order to fully understand the concept of domestic space, we need to trace our steps back to the late nineteenth century and to the turbulent and culturally superabundant world of France and Belgium. By analysing the domestic interior via its multiple manifestations in literature, social history, philosophy, art, architecture, design and fashion, we see its importance in both the construction and expression of modernity. We see how we are shaped and how we shape the world via the rooms we live in. Domestic space, as seen here, is the essence of modern life, in all its contradictions, complexities and complicated beauty.

Bibliography Aynsley, Jeremy and Charlotte Grant (eds), Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior since the Renaissance. (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2006). Balducci, Temma (ed.), Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789–1914. (New York: Routledge, 2017). Bauer and Moran (eds), Inside Belgium (special issue) Dix Neuf, vol. 22, issues 3–4 (2018).

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Baydar, Gülsüm and Heynen, Hilde (eds), Negotiating Domesticity. (New York: Routledge, 2005). Brevnik-Zender, Heidi, Fashioning Spaces: Mode and Modernity in Late-nineteenth-century Paris. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). Clayson, Hollis, ‘Threshold Space: Parisian Modernism Betwixt and Between (18691890)’. In Impressionist Interiors, edited by Janet McLean, 30–51. (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2008). Downey, Georgina (ed.), Domestic Interiors: Representing Homes from the Victorians to the Moderns. (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Fuss, Diane, The Sense of An Interior: Four Rooms and the Writers That Shaped Them. (New York: Routledge, 2004). Iskin, Ruth E., Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Lasc, Anna (ed.), Visualising the Nineteenth-Century Home: Modern Art and the Decorative Impulse. (London: Ashgate, 2016). Marcus, Sharon, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century century Paris and London. (California: University of California Press, 1999). Massey, Anne, Interior Design since 1990. (London: Thames & Hudson, 4th edition, 2020). Massey, Anne and Penny Sparke, Biography and the Modern Interior. (London: Routledge, 2013). McLean, Janet (ed.), Impressionist Interiors. (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2008). McKellar, Susie and Penny Sparke, Interior Design and Identity. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Muthesius, Stefan, The Poetic Home. Designing the 19th-century Domestic Interior. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2009). Reed, Christopher, Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996). Rice, Charles, The Emergence of the Interior. Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity. (New York: Routledge, 2006). Rosner, Victoria, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life. (New York: Columbia, 2008). Rybczynski, Witold, Home. A Short History of an Idea. (London: Penguin, 1986). Sparke, Penny, The Modern Interior. (London: Reaktion, 2008). Taylor, Mark and Julieanna Preston (eds), Intimus: Interior Design Theory Reader. (London: Academy Press, 2006).

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Part One

Representing the Domestic Interior

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1

‘Louis-Philippe ou l’intérieur’: The emergence of the modern interior in the visual culture of the July Monarchy Matteo Piccioni

It is common knowledge that it was Walter Benjamin who suggested that a man’s dwelling was one of the founding elements of nineteenth-century culture: The nineteenth century was more fervently addicted to the dwelling place than any other century. It viewed the residence as a receptacle for the person, and it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling’s interior that one is almost reminded of the inside of a compass case, where the instrument with all its accessories lies embedded in deep – usually violet – folds of velvet.1

Throughout the pages of the Passagen-Werk, a dwelling is both the middleclass man’s universe and his shell, as well as being a shelter from the outside world and a container for objects purchased in the shops of the arcades (his ‘appurtenances’); indeed, it is fundamentally linked to the arcades. In fact, to all intents and purposes, even the arcades are ‘protected’ indoor streets, crowded with shops. Vincenzo Mele, a sociologist from the University of Pisa, has perceptively stated that ‘if streets are the dwellings of a community, then the arcade is that community’s living room.’2 Initially, at least, the eighteenth century identified – and therefore depicted – domestic space as a space designed for the social rituals that defined modernity and, in a way, were its very foundation stone. In the nineteenth century, however, the dwelling’s interior was mostly characterized as a private conjugal and domestic space. As soon became apparent, the number of family nuclei increased along with the use of the apartment as the standard type of dwelling, which – as Michelle Perrot stated – caused the house to be considered: ‘the quintessence of privacy, […] seat of the family and a pillar of the social order’.3 In a cultural sense, this was reflected in scenes based on the conjugal ménage. For instance,

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Domestic Space in France and Belgium

persistent references to one’s home or one’s chez-soi4 recur in many pages of contemporary literature and historical research has borne this out.5 This aspect is also linked to the fact that in the nineteenth century the path to self-awareness of one’s own individuality – which had begun a century back – accentuated its solipsism (paving the way for the supremacy of the twentieth-century focus on interiority), stressing the sphere of private life which was an interior space, and yet it was also what remained outside the self. At that time, shutting the door of one’s room also meant shutting oneself in, and at the same time building one’s own world. Indeed, it is no mere coincidence that the century was to open with a Voyage autour de ma Chambre (1790–94) by Xavier de Maistre. In any event, private space ultimately became a space for interpersonal relationships, almost an arena, acquiring a central role in the visual and literary arts.6 If the dwelling’s interior was a specific theme in 1880s and 1890s in the art of French and Belgian painters – especially in the most introspective works linked to the intimist Nabis, such as Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard and Félix Vallotton,7 and also Xavier Mellery or Georges Le Brun,8 who investigated the disturbing and mysterious aspects of a dwelling – the origin of the importance assigned to these themes is likely to date back to those years on which Benjamin was focused, that is to say the years of the reign of Louis-Philippe I or the July Monarchy (1830–48).9 In this chapter, we will focus on this period in which depictions of modern domestic life started to become popular. Interest in everyday domestic life, as we will see here, brought about an iconographic transformation on the one hand, in the paintings shown at the Salon, although they were still, at this stage, unable to provide a significant response to the theme. On the other hand, domestic life was represented but the field of literary illustrations, caricatures and vignettes, which, after all, as Charles Baudelaire emphasized,10 was, to all intents and purposes, among the best artistic expressions of this period, especially following the introduction of the use of lithography in Paris.11

Louis-Philippe, or the interior Under Louis-Philippe, the private individual makes his entrance onto the stage of the history. ‘For the private individual, the place in which he dwells is differentiated from the place in which he works for the very first time. The former constitutes the interior [l’intérieur]. Its complement is the office [le comptoir].’12

‘Louis-Philippe ou l’intérieur’

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The identity overlap of the interior and Louis-Philippe’s reign, as Benjamin has highlighted, focuses on the attitude of the social class represented by the ‘bourgeois’ monarch. In the view of this class the master of the house was the sovereign of his realm, namely his dwelling, and thus his life was an extension of the private life of the King of France. With the beginning of the July Monarchy the private citizen finally acquired the leading role that he had been trying to take on since 1789.13 The living space, the ‘place of dwelling’,14 was gaining more and more importance in everyday life: away from the workplace, in an apartment furnished with ‘dreams’ – that is to say, in Benjamin’s view, the montage of different styles based on the function accorded to each room15 – he took shelter in a world where ‘he brings together the far away and the long ago. His living room is a box in the theatre of the world’.16 In this private space, the nineteenthcentury bourgeois kept a number of devices which would allow him to live beyond his time (in the shape of purchased objects or objects that had been passed down from one generation to another, traces of remote or more recent times, mostly since 1839, thanks to the Daguerreotype and later to photography) and his space (as he was now able to get to know the world by actually travelling or comfortably seated in his armchair while reading literature or adventure books).17 Moreover, if we continue to subscribe to Benjamin’s idea – that the arcade is the external equivalent to the interior – this also implies the need to ‘domesticate’ the urban environment, that is to gentrify it and to capitalize on it. From a different standpoint, it can be seen how such a link is expressed through the phenomenon of collecting, since luxurious and rare collectable objects were sold in ateliers located in the arcades.18 Therefore, the intérieur, ‘the shelter of art’,19 is intended to be a complementary element to the comptoir (the place of work, but also the shop), where the object therefore loses value in being used as a commodity.20 Collecting and collectors were often depicted in interior illustrations created during the July Monarchy and the very first years of the Second French Empire. This is documented by both the section dedicated to collectors taken from the most important ‘physiological’ work of the time, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (1840–2),21 and the many illustrations created by Honoré Daumier devoted to amateurs and connoisseurs of prints. Ultimately, the intérieur was presented as the opposite of flânerie. The bourgeois man protected himself from the shock of being confronted with the crowd and the streets – into which, however, flâneurs were happy to dive headfirst22 – thanks to their comfortable apartments and their well-lined pouches, surrounded by their bibelots, as shown in a painting by François-Etienne Villeret (1848, New York, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum) (Figure 1.1) depicting an

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Figure 1.1  François-Etienne Villeret, Dressing Room with Tented Ceiling, Brush and gouache, watercolour, graphite on tan paper (1848, New York: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum).

antechamber owned by a Parisian collector, thus providing tangible proof of Benjamin’s considerations. The pivotal role of the interior under Louis-Philippe is expressed primarily in literature, where particular attention is devoted to domestic life, for which detailed descriptions of rooms are given.23 It is in the pages of Honoré de Balzac’s novels that one may find the first modern descriptions of interiors, which were

‘Louis-Philippe ou l’intérieur’

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considered as settings for contemporary mores.24 Along with him, Paul Gavarni and Honoré Daumier stand out as key players in a ‘human comedy’ performed through images.25 The complementary relationship between the former and the latter is a theme which has been particularly thoroughly investigated by critics, starting with Baudelaire.26 The only way in which illustrators were able to get around the 1835 September censorial laws was moral satire.27 These laws forbade caricatures of politicians in France; thus, satire could be used to indirectly lampoon political figures by criticizing bourgeois values and hypocrisy.28 This also meant exposure for the ruling class which these individuals represented. As a result, it was the need to illustrate modern habits through irony that increased the circulation of representations of interiors during the years of the July Monarchy. If the setting par excellence was the dwelling, the main expression of modern values was conjugal life. Again, the first reference was given by Balzac in La Physiologie du marriage (1829) and then in Petites misères de la vie conjugale (1846). Both of them – included in the Comédie humaine – belonged to the Etudes analytiques. Having said that, however, they cannot be considered mere novels: La Physiologie du marriage and Petites misères de la vie conjugale are ironic – almost humorous – sociological and philosophical reflections, and probably the closest thing to the caricatures of the author’s contemporaries.

Scenes of private life: The marital ménage in Balzac, Bertall and Grandville To understand how, at that time, domestic life and the spaces connected with it were the preferred field of investigation for the analysis of everyday reality – especially in a satirical way – it is useful to dwell on Petites misères de la vie conjugale.29 These are a series of anecdotes which tell the emotional and domestic stories of a young married couple. The couple’s daily life is described as though seen through the lens of their own home – their bedroom, their living room, their dining room – as if they were set on a stage performing the nineteenthcentury bourgeois family ménage. The novel talks about a veritable battle of the sexes, exemplified by the ‘conjugal battle’ between Adolphe and Caroline who, through witty remarks and petty betrayals, overpower one another in turn. Balzac’s perspective is, however, clearly antifeminist and describes – by contrast – the key role of the modern patriarchal society. Discussing the nineteenthcentury dwelling, Jean Baudrillard wrote in The System of Objects: ‘The typical

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bourgeois interior is patriarchal; its foundation is the dining-room/bedroom combination.’30 In the nineteenth-century urban community, the link between space, home furnishing and the family led to a symbolization of the rooms in a house, where ‘monumental furniture’31 such as the bed or the table stood out among the other pieces. When placed in the middle of their respective rooms, this furniture dominated the space as a metaphor of domestic life and personal relationships: the parlour was the room intended for family meetings, while the bedroom was the room intended for conjugal encounters. In Petites misères de la vie conjugale, the environment is portrayed not so much in the text itself as in the illustrations of Bertall (Charles Albert d’Arnoux), which seem to merge with the text until they almost completely replace Balzac’s lengthy descriptive passages.32 Portraits, genre and fictional scenes seem to all blend together, combining traits from Paul Gavarni (the mores) and Jean-Jacques Grandville (the style of the imaginary). Rather than simply a series of protoSymbolist illustrations with a taste of Surrealism,33 these vignettes comprise an actual pattern book of bourgeois domestic life in the 1830s and 1840s;34 starting with courtship rituals and marriage contracts35 – in perfect Hogarth style – and stretching right up to lovers’s spats in the bedroom, family difficulties and life in society, and all of this while recording the domestic changes that were taking place during the first half of the nineteenth century. Just as in other similar images portrayed by Daumier, the focus of action set in a private chamber36 is the marriage bed, where spouses talk and resolve their conjugal squabbles before going to sleep (Figure 1.2). Often these squabbles were actual contests with a predictable outcome. Balzac writes that ‘sur l’oreiller conjugal, le seconde acte [of the battle] se termine par des onomatopées qui sont toutes à la paix.’37 Sexual relations are private and intimate and barely hinted at (Figure 1.3), and seventeenth-century libertinism is hounded out of the bedchamber by bourgeois self-righteousness. Nevertheless, something of it remains. The curtains that are supposed to be closing off the bedroom come down straight as they would on a stage – a far cry from the lively scene in JeanHonoré Fragonard’s Le Verrou (1776–9, Paris, Musée du Louvre) – yet the bedroom is still a mess and clothes are randomly tossed on a chair, the last trace of the previous century’s depiction of love in the libertine tradition. The dining room, the Salle à manger, is the new room dedicated to family rituals.38 Time spent with relatives has shifted from conversations in the parlour to mealtimes. In the text, scenes which are set in the dining room – dinner, breakfast or children’s meals – are often associated with a round table and with lighting coming from the ceiling to illuminate the family circle

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Figure 1.2  Honoré Daumier, Inconvénient de rêver tout haut, Mœurs conjugales, 44, in La Caricature, 27 March 1842.

(Figure  1.4);39 and that is how it was to continue to be depicted until well into following decades. Nevertheless, the parlour is still the place intended for public relations or conjugal conversations. It is always carefully depicted: the fireplace, the mirror with candlesticks above it and the paintings decorating the wall are the background to scenes in which people converse with each other, in which the man is shown standing up while the woman is sitting comfortably on the sofa, codifying a visual behavioural distinction underscoring each

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Figure 1.3  Bertall (Charles Albert d’Arnoux), from Petites misères de la vie conjugale (Paris: 1846, 352).

Figure 1.4  Bertall (Charles Albert d’Arnoux), from Petites misères de la vie conjugale (Paris: 1846, 149).

‘Louis-Philippe ou l’intérieur’

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Figure 1.5  Bertall (Charles Albert d’Arnoux), from Petites misères de la vie conjugale (Paris: 1846, 103).

player’s gender and role (Figure 1.5).40 This setting is somewhat different in an important portrait, Le Salon de la Comtesse Somailoff (1840, private collection)41 by Eugène Lami, showing a group of people standing in an indoor space. It is a modern conversation piece in which the countess – as the most influential person in her own exclusive literary salon – appears to be standing beside her husband. However, this is an exception as we can see from another group of people again depicted by Lami, La dévote, taken from Les Français peints par eux-mêmes and engraved by Eugène Guillaumot (1841).42 The concepts of ‘home’ and domestic life are linked to the coin de feu, the fireplace or the hearth, and were to continue to be so throughout the nineteenth century, while at the same time they are also a symbol of conjugal life. A perfect visual and caricatural depiction of this aspect is found in a vignette made by Grandville, La Meilleure forme de gouvernement printed on Un Autre Monde, illustrating Puff ’s point of view in response to Krackq’s questioning him about his marriage: Je songe à couler mes jours dans mon ménage, dévisant au coin de mon feu, oublieux, oublié. Nous mettons en commun ma femme et moi tous les fruits de notre expérience […]. Crois-moi, cher ami, le bonheur est dans le marriage.

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Domestic Space in France and Belgium [I  am thinking about spending the rest of my days at home, in front of the fireplace, forgetting and forgotton. My wife and I will put all the fruits of our experience together. […] Believe me, dear friend, happiness is in marriage].43

In this dreamlike image, where reality and fantasy melt into one another, Grandville summarizes the conjugal cliché by bringing together different elements, yet all intrinsically associated with that same theme (Figure 1.6). As in Venus at the Opera, in the same book, the painter plays with the literal meaning of a metaphor:44 the metaphor of the ménage is expressed through the hearth, which is rendered by putting together those objects that are usually found around a fireplace – bellows, shovels, pincers – and become the players in a typical evening by the fireside among spouses or friends. In contrast to Daumier and Gavarni, Bertall preferred a much blunter, discontinuous style, less concerned with naturalistic and expressive realism like Grandville. For instance, Daumier was concerned less with physiognomic characterization and more with interior details such as wallpaper or picture

Figure 1.6  Jean-Jacques Grandville, Illustration for Un autre monde: transformations, visions, incarnations… et autre choses (Paris: Fournier, 1844, 250).

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frames. Gavarni, on the other hand, was more interested in capturing postures and manners and in selecting the best fabrics and objects; he also focused on a sharper and more refined mise-en-scène. These are all likely reasons why he has always tended to be more popular than Daumier, possibly also because he was less harsh in representing the July Monarchy’s values than the chroniqueur par excellence.45 The art of Gavarni was ‘la peinture fidèle de la physionomie, du geste, du costume, du décor [the faithful reproduction of physiognomy, gesture, costume and décor]’46 in accordance with the De Goncourt brothers. Gavarni’s compositions are indeed unusual, with characters often portrayed from behind or with their faces hidden, adopting relaxed attitudes and extremely modern postures, like people sitting on a couch with their legs folded or with their feet dangling out of a bed (Figure 1.7). Their attitude is quite informal; he portrays couples or parents with their children, hugging or displaying affection towards one another. The way in which he depicted interiors was stark and minimal. Sometimes the setting where the scene is taking place is a threshold or a couch, in other cases the domestic spaces are conjured up through a synecdoche, like a painting hanging on a wall, a guéridon, some curtains; or at times the spatial representation can be airier, as we can observe in several engravings from Fourberies des femmes, where the presence of a window conveys an impression of the air circulating in the room.

‘Types et intérieurs’: The representations of interiors in ‘panoramic literature’ Coup d’une maison parisienne le 1er Janvier 1845, an engraving by Bertall, was displayed in the second volume of Le Diable à Paris in 1846, although it had already been printed under the title Cinq étages du monde parisien in L’Illustration of the same 1845 (Figure 1.8). This engraving showed a cross-section of a fivestorey apartment building, a Parisian social division based on the floor where people lived. The composite pattern may appear to have been inspired by a section of some architectural illustration, especially those of the eighteenth century, showing how hotels used to be divided into apartments and rooms (e.g. the Maison du Sieur Brethous in Bayonne, by Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier, 1729, London, Victoria & Albert Museum). Each floor corresponded to a rung of the social ladder, from the janitors’s quarters and the kitchens located on the ground floor, to the artists and workmen in the attic, via the ‘noble’ floor where

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Figure 1.7  Paul Gavarni, On rend des comptes au gérant, Les Lorettes, 22, original lithography, 1841–3, reprint as woodcut in Le Diable à Paris, vol. 2 (Paris: Hetzel, 1846).

the upper middle class and the aristocracy used to live, and then there are the intermediate floors occupied by the lower and middle classes. It is an iconic and iconographic representation of Parisian interiors under Louis-Philippe – and probably the perfect visual illustration of how domestic life was understood at those times – testifying to the general idea of the dwelling seen as a ‘typification’, where each resident’s social status is expressed through their dwelling. According to this division, it is clear how the upper-middle-class space par excellence is the

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Figure 1.8 Bertall, Coup d’une maison parisienne le 1er Janvier 1845 in Cinq étages du monde parisien, in «L’Illustration», January 11, 1845.

salon (exactly as it was in the eighteenth century), it being by definition the most representative room, where the fireplace plays a pivotal and central role. The lines are rococo and refer to the need to emulate the mores of the ancien régime’s aristocracy, which the middle class was in the process of replacing. Middle-class dwellings resemble those of Daumier and Gavarni rather than those of Bertall which, as we have seen, were printed in Balzac’s Petites Misères. In those images we can find a condensed idea of the modern patriarchal family based on the

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bedroom-living room pair as suggested by Baudrillard. The presence of children and their world is symbolized through their toys, just like in contemporary family portraits, to which the image somehow seems to refer. On the other hand, next to all the apparently inevitable fireplaces and hearths, there is an old lady sitting on a chair, symbolizing a physical presence connected to the family’s history: its past, its present and future all fusing together in one single instant. Social classification in France – represented through the interior in the 1840s – was an expression of the need to typify, also characterizing French culture as represented in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, Le Diable à Paris and La Grande Ville.47 These were a series of catalogues or studies of the mores (encyclopédie de mœurs) which recorded, classified, analysed and illustrated48 everyday life in Paris under Louis-Philippe, which Walter Benjamin defined as ‘panoramic literature’, alluding to the Panorama.49 The main purpose of Les Français peints par eux-mêmes was to summarize entire groups of Parisian characters based on the concept of the ‘types’50 to which each chapter was dedicated. The tête de page was a ‘scene’ illustrating the family environment and its context51 set at the beginning of the text, while the lettre and the cul de lampe were often still-lifes referring to the attributes of the type, which – as Ségolène Le Men so effectively suggests – come together to create a ‘deconstructed portrait’.52 These types are often depicted in their dwellings, so that each one has its own, as in Bertall’s engraving, and this applied to every social class; for instance, the grisette has her small attic;53 the Chanoinesse, a lonely woman who is at once a devout figure and a socialite, has an intérieur which reminds us of all the inconsistencies in her personality (Figure 1.9);54 the Femme de chambre whose

Figure 1.9  Jules Gagniet, La Chanoinesse, from Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, vol. 1 (Paris: L. Curmer, 1840, 193).

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whole kingdom is in her own home;55 or the Lionne whose independence is stressed through a neo-medieval space embellished with armor.56 These images of interiors, often observed from up close, tend towards reduction and conciseness. If they are compared, for example, to the perspective views of German, Austrian or French zimmerbilder, or to the plates in contemporary interior design books, the formal differences are clear. However, some of these images appear to look like these same models. In fact, if a table with Candelabra Furniture and Interior Decoration by Richard Bridgens (c. 1833, London, Victoria and Albert Museum) were to be compared with the intérieur of the Lionne, or a table taken from the Recueil de Draperies d’Hallavant, published in Paris in about 1835, with the image of the Chanoinesse’s interior, such affinities would emerge so strongly that we might almost suspect they had drawn their inspiration from them. The intérieur under Louis-Philippe, as those illustrations show, is therefore often morphologically characterized by the presence of a fireplace with a mirror hanging above it, sculptures, paintings, bibelots,57 all of this a synecdoche for the domestic environment (just think of the hearth). This is the pattern of illustrations depicting indoor spaces during the second half of the nineteenth century, which seem, on the one hand, to perpetuate the eighteenth-century domestic representation of the English conversation piece, while, on the other, they also embody Denis Diderot’s indications on the bourgeois drama, where the salon is the centre around which all sorts of family stories take place.58 The interiors of the scenes that I mentioned are – basically – the décor, that is to say the scenery in front of which the characters move. In fact, if we look at them closely, the way these environments are created seems to be suggested by the contemporary comedy of manners, like Eugène Scribe’s pièce.59 This way, the interior stereotype was to be constantly be evoked as a setting for genre paintings under the Second French Empire, until it became a plain, stereotyped background in Intimité by Félix Vallotton (1897–8) (Figure 1.10). In conclusion, the artists and illustrators of the July Monarchy, in reclaiming certain thematic and visual aspects of eighteenth-century imagery, defined a real visual culture of the intérieur, indeed so much so that, in a way, it ended up being characterized as a visual cliché just as lithography was starting to be regarded as a vehicle which had indeed changed the way people at the time looked at the world, and had almost turned certain aspects of reality into visual stereotypes.60 It is likely that, because of this, it had drawn the attention of novelists such as Gustave Flaubert as he was recreating the Parisian apartments of the 1840s in L’Education Sentimentale (1869),61 and yet, although Flaubert’s rooms were based on the examples and the context conveyed by those same images, his characters

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Figure 1.10  Félix Vallotton, La raison probante, plate IV from Intimités, 1897–8.

looked at the world through the same eyes as the 1860s avant-garde painters, who were extraordinarily attentive to the sensory and perceptual aspects of everyday life.

Bibliography Adorno, Gretel and Walter Benjamin, Correspondence 1930-1940, edited by Henri Lonitz and Christoph Gödde, translated by Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). Balzac, Honoré de, Petites Misères de la Vie Conjugale, illustrées par Bertall (Paris: Chéndowski, 1846). Baudelaire, Charles, Selected Writings on Art and Artists, translated by P.E. Charvet (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972). Baudrillard, Jean, The System of Objects, translated by James Benedict (London, New York: Verso, 2005). Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk), translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belkman Press, 1999).

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Berry, Francesca, ‘Lived Perspectives: The Art of the French Nineteenth-Century Interior’. In Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior since the Renaissance, edited by Jeremy Aynsley and Charlotte Grant, 160-83 (London: V & A Publications, 2006). Bertall [Charles-Albert D’Arnoux], ‘Souvenirs intimes’. Figaro Suppément littéraire. (August 20, 1881). Blum, André, ‘La Caricature politique sous la Monarchie de juillet’. Gazette des BeauxArts 702 (1920): 257–77. Bodin, Thierry, ‘Petites misères d’une preface’. L’Année balzacienne 1 (1980): 163–8. Bordini, Silvia, Storia del panorama. La visione totale nella pittura del XIX secolo. (Rome: Officina, 1984). Clair, Jean, ‘The Self beyond Recovery’. In Lost Paradise: Symbolist Europe. Exh. Cat. (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1995), edited by Jean Clair and Pierre Théberge, 125–36. (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1995). Comment, Bernard, The Panorama (London: Reaktion Books, 1999). Daumard, Adeline, La Bourgeoisie parisienne de 1815 à 1848 (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1963). Daumard, Adeline, Maisons de Paris et propriétaires parisiens au xixe siècle, 1809-1880 (Paris: Cujas, 1965). Campbell, Douglas, Daumier, 1808-1879, Exh. Cat. (Ottawa, Parigi, Washington 1999-2000), edited by Henri Loyrette et al. (Paris: Reunion des Musées Nationaux, 1999). Fierro, Anna, Ibridazioni balzachiane. ‘Meditazioni eclettiche’ su romanzo, teatro, illustrazione (Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2013). Frommel, Sabine and Paulina Spiechowicz, ‘Balzac et les intérieurs: autour d’une déclinaison romanesque de la chambre’. In Ein Dialog der Künste. Beschreibungen von Innenarchitektur und Interieurs in der Literatur von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart, edited by B. Von Orelli-messerl. Vol. 2, 72–86 (Petersberg: Imhof, 2014). Fuchs, Eduard, Die Karikatur der europäischen Völker. 2 vol. (München: Albert Langen, 1921). Georges Le Brun: Maître de l’intime: 1873-1914. Exh. Cat. (Namur, Musée provincial Félicien Rops), edited by Denis Laoureux (Paris: LienArt, 2015). Goncourt, Jules and Edmond de. Gavarni: L’homme et l’œuvre. [1870] (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, Eugène Fasquelle éditeur, 1912). Grandville, Jean-Jacques [Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérard], Un Autre monde: transformations, visions, incarnations, ascensions (Paris: H. Fournier, 1844. Anastatic reprint edited by Antonello Negri. Milan: Mazzotta, 1982). Hamon, Philippe, Imageries: Littérature et image au XIXe siècle (Paris: José Corti, 2007). Hamon, Philippe and Alexandrine Viboud, Dictionnaire thématique du roman de mœurs, 1850-1914 (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2003). Intime Welten: das Interieur bei den Nabis; Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Exh. Cat. (Winterthur, Villa Flora, 1999), edited by Ursula Perucchi-Petri (Bern: Benteli, 1999). Janin, Jules, Les Petits bonheurs (Paris: Morizot, 1857).

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Kaenel, Philippe, Le Métier d’illustrateur, 1830-1880: Rodolphe Töpffer, J.-J. Grandville, Gustave Doré. 2nd edn. (Genève: Droz, 2005). Kinouchi, Takashi, ‘La mémoire des images dans L’Éducation sentimentale’. Flaubert [En ligne] 11 (2014), mis en ligne le 17 octobre 2014, accessed 18 August 2021. http://journals.openedition.org/flaubert/2256. Koella, Rudolph, ‘Les Intérieurs des Nabis, un écrin pour l’homme’. In Nabis 1888-1900, Exh. Cat. (Zurigo, Kunsthaus - Parigi, Grand Palais, 1993-94), edited by Ursula Perucchi-Petri, 91–103 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993). Krämer, Felix, Das unheimliche Heim: zur Interieurmalerei um 1900 (Köln: Böhlau, 2007). Le Bas, Philippe, L’Univers: histoire et description de tous les peuples – France. Dictionnaire encyclopédique (Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1840). Le Men, Ségolène, ‘Balzac, Gavarni, Bertall et les Petites Misères de la vie conjugale’. Romantisme 43 (1984): 29–44. Le Men, Ségolène, ‘Peints par eux-mêmes …’. In Les Français peints par eux-mêmes: panorama social du xixe siècle, edited by Ségolène Le Men, Luce Abélès, 4–46 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993). Le Men, Ségolène, Pour rire! Daumier, Gavarni, Rops. L’invention de la silhouette (Paris: Somogy, 2010). Lemoisne, Paul-André, L’Œuvre d’Eugène Lami, 1800-1890. Lithographies, dessins, aquarelles, peintures. Essai d’un catalogue raisonné (Paris: Champion, 1914). Lemoisne, Paul-André, Gavarni. Peintre et lithographe. Vol. I: 1804-1847 (Paris: Floury, 1924). Lurmer, Léon, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. 8 vol. (Paris: Léon Curmer, 1840–42). Mainardi, Patricia, Husbands, Wives, and Lovers: Marriage and Its Discontents in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2003). Marcus, Sharon, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 1999). Martin-Fugier, Anne, ‘Bourgeois Rituals’. In A History of Private Life. Vol. 4: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, edited by Michelle Perrot, 306–21, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: The Belkman Press, 1990). Mele, Vincenzo, Walter Benjamin e l’esperienza della metropoli. Per una lettura sociologica dei Passages di Parigi (Pisa: PLUS, 2000). Perrot, Michelle, ‘At Home’. In A History of Private Life. Vol. 4: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, edited by Michelle Perrot. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, 341–58 (Cambridge, MA: The Belkman Press, 1990). Perrot, Michelle, ‘Gli spazi del privato’. In Il Romanzo, edited by Franco Moretti, Vol. 4: Temi, luoghi, eroi: 495–519 (Torino: Einaudi, 2003). Perrot, Michelle, ‘Introduction. Les secrets de la maison’. In Architectures de la vie privée. Maison et mentalites XVIIe-XIXe siècles, edited by Monique Eleb-Vidal and Anne Debarre-Blanchard, 5–16 (Bruxelles: Archives d’architecture moderne, 1989). Perrot, Michelle, Histoire des chambres (Paris: Seuil, 2009).

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Piccioni, Matteo, ‘Le stanze di Flaubert. Intérieurs tra scrittura e immagine intorno alla metà dell’Ottocento’. In In corso d’opera. Ricerche dei dottorandi in Storia dell’Arte della Sapienza 1, edited by Michele Nicolaci, Matteo Piccioni and Lorenzo Riccardi, 241–9 (Rome: Campisano 2015). Preiss-Basset, Nathalie, ‘Les physiologies, un miroir en miettes’. In Les Français peints par eux-mêmes: panorama social du xixe siècle, edited by Ségolène Le Men and Luce Abélès, 61–7 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993). Preiss-Basset, Nathalie, ‘Le Type dans les Physiologies’. In L’illustration: Essais d’iconographie, edited by Maria Teresa Caracciolo and Ségolène Le Men, 331–8 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1999). Renonciat, Anne, La Vie et l’œuvre de J.J. Grandville (Courbevoie: Vilo, 1985). Sbrilli, Antonella, ‘Estranei nel salotto. Sogni, rebus, collages’. Engramma 100. Pensare per immagini, La Rivista di Engramma 100 (2012), accessed 20 August 2021. . Schiavoni, Giulio, Walter Benjamin, il figurelio della felicità. Un percorso biografico e concettuale (Torino: Einaudi, 2001). Scribe, Eugene, Marriage d’argent. 1827. Œuvres complètes de M. Eugène Scribe. Vol. 1. (Paris: Furne et Cie, 1841). Sidlauskas, Susan, Body, Self, and Place in Nineteenth-Century Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Sotheby’s Monaco, Tableaux et dessins anciens et du xixe siècle. Monte Carlo, December 5, 1992. Sotheby’s, Nineteenth Century European Paintings, Drawings and Watercolours. London, June 12, 1996. Szondi, Peter, ‘Tableau and Coup de Théâtre: On the Social Psychology of Diderot’s Bourgeois Tragedy’. New Literary History 11 (1980): 323–43. Vanhamme, Vincent, Xavier Mellery: L’âme des choses (Zwolle: Waanders, 2000).

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2

Shattered spaces: The domestic interior in nineteenth-century French literature Anne Green

In 1851, reviewing that year’s Great Exhibition in London, the art critic Ralph Nicholson Wornum singled out an elaborately carved French sideboard by Fourdinois as being ‘in every respect one of the noblest works in the Exhibition’. It was not only the supreme craftsmanship of this ‘extraordinary masterpiece of wood-carving’ that Wornum admired. What particularly delighted him was the skill with which Fourdinois and other French exhibitors had positioned the most elaborately carved details to protect them from accidental damage. As he put it, these items were designed to ‘bear dusting without danger’.1 Wornum’s comment provides a useful starting point from which to explore a curious phenomenon that starts to appear insistently in French literature around that time: descriptions of damaged, or indeed shattered, domestic interiors. At the Great Exhibition, as at the subsequent French expositions universelles in 1855 and 1867, there was, of course, little risk of damage. Safety rails protected Fourdinois’s sideboard from the crowds, and other domestic items were similarly safeguarded, displayed behind glass, neatly arranged on shelves or placed high up, well out of harm’s way. The brand new items exhibited and listed in the exhibition catalogues were detached from the domestic interiors they were designed to inhabit. Instead, displayed in the exhibition palaces that contemporary guidebooks repeatedly described as places of worship – as temples or cathedrals with monumental stained-glass windows and transepts and naves – the objects were imbued with an almost sacred aura.2 French literature from the second half of the nineteenth century, and particularly from the Second Empire, frequently draws on the exhibition aesthetic by representing domestic locations as exhibition spaces. In L’Education sentimentale, for example, Gustave Flaubert explicitly evokes the expositions

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universelles and their quasi-religious reverence for consumerist display in his description of M. Dambreuse’s house, bursting with showy possessions. In its dining room, the sideboard resembled the high altar of a cathedral or an exhibition of gold plate, so many dishes, covers, cutlery and spoons made of silver or silver-gilt were there, alongside cut crystal pieces that radiated shafts of iridescent light over the food. The other three salons were crammed with objets d’art [le buffet ressemblait à un maître-autel de cathédrale ou à une exposition d’orfèvrerie, – tant il y avait de plats, de cloches, de couverts et de cuillers en argent et en vermeil, au milieu des cristaux à facettes qui entrecroisaient, par dessus les viandes, des lueurs irisés. Les trois autres salons regorgaient d’objets d’art]3

… and on the list continues. Emile Zola creates a similar effect in La Curée when describing the vast and opulent dining room of Aristide Saccard, at whose centre the table […] was like an altar or a chapel of rest, where, over the dazzling whiteness of the cloth, bright flames flared out from the crystal and silver pieces. [la table […] était comme un autel, comme une chapelle ardente, où, sur la blancheur éclatante de la nappe, brûlaient les flammes claires des cristaux et des pièces d’argenterie].4

Over two long paragraphs Zola catalogues the rich and glittering objects on display, many in matching pairs, symmetrically and reverentially arranged in an artful show of wealth, order, glitter and excess – rather as they would have been at the exposition universelle.5 The fictional owners of these displays are not sympathetic characters, however; unlike visitors to the Exhibitions, the reader is not encouraged to admire their dazzling shows. Writers were aware that the order and prosperity projected by the Exhibitions was an illusion that could not last. As we shall see, from the middle of the nineteenth century their descriptions of domestic interiors worked to resist and subvert those values of order, reverence, wealth and harmony that the Second Empire regime was so eager to project. ***** One of the most famous literary descriptions of a nineteenth-century domestic interior is Honoré de Balzac’s account of Madame Vauquer’s boarding house in Le Père Goriot. The pension Vauquer has none of the rich dazzle of the Dambreuse or Saccard displays. Balzac describes a dining room whose

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sideboards are sticky and stained and whose battered furniture includes ‘broken chairs, […] wretched foot-warmers with broken holes, damaged hinges, and charred wood’ [‘des chaises estropiées, […] des chaufferettes misérables à trous cassés, à charnières défaites, dont le bois se carbonise’]. Driving the point home, Balzac adds that ‘this furniture is old, cracked, rotten, shaky, worm-eaten, maimed, one-eyed, rickety, on its last legs’ [‘vieux, crevasse, pourri, tremblant, rongé, manchot, borgne, invalide, expirant’].6 His aim in this description is, of course, to draw an analogy between the house’s furnishings and its inhabitants. Like the pension’s random collection of lodgers, the mismatched, faded, dirty and damaged furnishings have seen better days: if forty years of wear-andtear have brought the furniture to this sorry state, the lodgers have suffered a similar decline. Balzac’s 1835 description, however, is markedly different from the domestic interiors to be found in Second Empire literature and beyond. He implies that the deterioration of the faded and battered furniture in Mme Vauquer’s boarding house was gradual and in some sense natural. Just as her lodgers are a disparate collection of individuals who have once seen better days, so the items in the house have suffered from the passage of time, coupled with ill-treatment or neglect. In contrast to Balzac’s celebrated description, novelists from the mid-century start to depict interiors damaged very differently from the dingy furnishings in Mme Vauquer’s dining room. Some fictional Second Empire interiors are wrecked by children.7 Ernest Feydeau, for example, writes of the household havoc wreaked by his three-yearold son: ‘I cannot tell you how much china he has already smashed, how much furniture he has chipped, how many books he has torn, or how many drawings he has damaged’ [‘Ce qu’il m’a déjà cassé de porcelaines, écaillé de meubles, déchiré de livres, abîmé de dessins, je ne puis le dire’].8 After being given a copy of Les Infortunes de Touche à tout, a contemporary picture-book of cautionary tales about a destructive child, the little boy controls his own destructive urges for a while, but a day comes when he can contain them no longer – he takes scissors to the Touche-à-tout book and flings its ripped pages across the room. Many of the children’s books that were starting to appear in France during the Second Empire depict scenes of indoor destruction. The little girl in Bertall’s Mlle sans-soin, for example, constantly breaks things by being too impatient. Wanting to open the drawer of a washstand she pulls so hard that the table and a chair are overturned, the basin, jug and mirror smash, and water floods the floor. Spillages and damaged or overturned furniture also occur in Madame de Ségur’s children’s stories, and in Les Petites filles modèles she describes little Sophie’s destructive rage. Locked in a small, bare room where she is supposed to

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copy out the Lord’s Prayer multiple times as a punishment, her reaction is to try to wreck the place – though little has been left for her to destroy: She looked for something to smash or tear. […] Sophie seized the pen, threw it to the ground and crushed it beneath her feet; she ripped the paper into a thousand pieces, flung herself on the book, destroyed it and tore out and crumpled all the pages; she also wanted to break the chair but she was not strong enough, and collapsed on the floor, breathless and sweating. [‘Elle chercha quelque chose à briser, à déchirer. […] Sophie saisit la plume, la jeta par terre, l’écrasa sous ses pieds: elle déchira le papier en mille morceaux, se précipita sur le livre, en arracha toutes les pages, qu’elle chiffonna et le mit en pièces; elle voulut aussi briser la chaise, mais elle n’en eut pas la force et retomba par terre haletante et en sueur].9

While it is perhaps not surprising that children’s books entertained their young readers with tales of boys and girls causing damage in the home, what is remarkable is the number of books written for adults during this period that feature similar incidents – episodes where domestic items are shattered and orderly rooms overturned. In Madame Bovary, for example, Flaubert marks Emma’s physical collapse and the impending disintegration of her life and that of her family by depicting a wrecked dining room: hearing a crash and a scream, her neighbour Homais arrives to find that ‘the table, with all the plates, had been overturned; gravy, meat, knives, salt-cellar and oil and vinegar bottles were strewn across the room’ [‘La table, avec toutes les assiettes, était renversée; de la sauce, de la viande, les couteaux, la salière et l’huilier jonchaient l’appartement’].10 Likewise, L’Education sentimentale’s central theme of disintegration is repeatedly played out inside private houses or apartments. In one dining room, for example, a meal that begins in orderly fashion with food displayed around a centrepiece and with guests seated neatly around the table soon degenerates into chaos. Chairs are abandoned; oranges and corks are thrown; wine is spilled; wall hangings and furniture are stained with punch and syrup; ribbons, flowers, beads and a blood-stained napkin land on the floor; and guests smash plates against their heads, sending fragments of broken crockery flying across the room ‘like slates in a high wind’ [‘comme des ardoises par un grand vent’].11 Flaubert’s choice of simile suggests that domestic space has been infiltrated by the tempestuous world outside – a recurrent trope in Second Empire literature. Here, that sense intensifies when a terrified flock of little birds invades the room, fluttering around the lamps, crashing into furniture and battering themselves against the windows. Later in the same novel a similar pattern is played out in another diningroom, where an ostentatious and meticulously ordered table-setting is shattered

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when Frédéric reacts to an insulting remark about Mme Arnoux by hurling his dinner-plate in fury at the host: ‘It flashed across the table, knocked over two bottles, demolished a fruit bowl, and, breaking into three against the centrepiece, struck the viscount on the belly’ [‘Ella passa comme un éclair par-dessus la table, renversa deux bouteilles, démolit un compotier, et, se brisant contre le surtout en trois morceaux, frappa le ventre du vicomte’].12 In L’Education sentimentale, the destructive violence of domestic scenes such as these serves as subtle precursors to the civil unrest of the 1848 revolution. In particular, they point forward to Flaubert’s description of the sacking of the Tuileries palace, where the mob’s destructive rage knows no bounds: once inside the royal apartments, ‘the populace […] smashed and destroyed mirrors and curtains, chandeliers, candlesticks, tables, chairs, stools, all the furniture, even albums of drawings and needlework baskets’ [‘ le peuple […] brisa, lacéra les glaces et les rideaux, les lustres, les flambeaux, les tables, les chaises, les tabourets, tous les meubles, jusqu’à des albums de dessins, jusqu’à des corbeilles de tapisserie’].13 Flaubert describes the sounds of smashing porcelain and crystal, and as the destruction builds to a frenzy, the palace is set on fire. Once again, the dividing line between interior and exterior space is shattered when the drunken crowd hurls the contents of the royal apartments – ‘pianos, chests of drawers and clocks’ [‘des pianos, des commodes et des pendules’] – out of windows to crash to the ground outside, while the similarly defenestrated throne is carried to the Bastille to be burned.14 The highly symbolic sacking of the Tuileries palace in 1848 is emblematic of subsequent literature’s remarkably frequent descriptions of the destruction and chaos into which orderly domestic interiors suddenly disintegrate. Such descriptions are too common to be read innocently as straightforward realist literary representation. In some cases – as in the above example from Madame Bovary – breakages function simply as an objective correlative: the Bovarys’s dining table is overturned as the Bovary marriage falls apart; the knives and oil and gravy splattered across the room are indicative of the collateral damage that will result from Emma’s adulterous affairs. In many cases, however, literary texts betray a subversive desire to undermine the new regime’s prevailing discourse of order and harmony, as represented by the expositions universelles; they hint that the revolutionary forces that destroyed the Tuileries and the monarchy have not been forgotten. Indicative of this impulse is Dzing! Boum! Boum!, a minor play from 1855 featuring an ‘Exhibition of Stupidity’ [‘une Exposition de la Bêtise’] where a mass of ridiculous objects is presented to the public in a great exhibition hall.15 So unimpressed are visitors that they smash the display in a particularly

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vivid dramatization of a counter-current of fragmentation, disintegration and disruption characteristic of much of the literature of this period. Although Dzing! Boum! Boum!’s shattered space is not a domestic one, it typifies a vein of resistance to the new Empire’s values of order and control, which the expositions did so much to project – a vein of resistance that emerges repeatedly literary depictions of domestic interiors during the Second Empire. Writing about the piles of rubble evoked by Baudelaire in his poem ‘Le Cygne’, Richard Terdiman refers to their disorder as ‘the positively valorized contrary of an established order conceived as intolerably oppressive’.16 That sense seems to underlie the shattered interiors of nineteenth-century French fiction. It is not, however, the only explanation for the extraordinary frequency of such scenes, for at this time the very sense of private space and home was shifting. In 1869, the Goncourt brothers noted in their Journal that great changes had taken place in Paris since the 1848 revolution: ‘Our Paris, the Paris into which we were born, the Paris of 1830 to 1848, is vanishing,’ they wrote [‘Notre Paris, le Paris où nous sommes nés, le Paris des moeurs de 1830 à 1848, s’en va’].17 They saw the social life of the capital undergoing ‘a great evolution’ [‘une grande évolution’]18 as people started to live their lives in public rather than indoors, in private. Struck by the number of people – men, women and children – who appeared to spend most of their time in cafés, the Goncourts concluded: ‘Domestic life is vanishing. Life is becoming public again’ [‘L’intérieur s’en va. La vie retourne à devenir publique’].19 L’intérieur s’en va is a telling phrase. For the Goncourts, this shift from domestic life to a life lived in public was a deeply unwelcome development that made them feel like strangers in their own city. Paris no longer felt to them like the world of Balzac.20 The Goncourts’s own domestic interior in their house in Auteil, however, was a refuge from those changes. They turned it into something of an exhibition space, which Edmond, the surviving brother, celebrated in La Maison d’un artiste in 1880, devoting each chapter of the book to a different room whose carefully displayed contents he listed and described in great detail. Furthermore, in 1894, towards the end of his life, he compiled another long inventory in an eleven-page Journal entry, which described the contents of the house’s top-floor rooms for ‘people interested in art and literature’ [‘les curieux d’art et de littérature’].21 His desire to photograph those rooms and to catalogue and describe his collection of antique Chinese porcelain, Japanese bronzes and seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury paintings and drawings was a deliberate attempt to preserve them for posterity, since he knew that the collection would disappear after his death. (Indeed, it had nearly disappeared during the 1871 Commune, when nearby

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canon-fire and exploding shells shook the house with such force that paintings came crashing down from the walls.) But the Goncourts’s carefully curated rooms are an exception. Unlike the flashy new items proudly displayed in the fictional homes of M. Dambreuse or M. Saccard, their exhibits did not aim to dazzle with opulence and modernity; rather, they were intended as reminders of a bygone age of taste and refinement, consciously preserved to shield the brothers from a modern world that seemed to have lost these qualities. But if in the 1890s Edmond de Goncourt was aware that the items that he and his brother had collected in their home over the years would be dispersed on his death, such a fate was very different from the kind of disruption that had made the brothers exclaim, more than thirty years earlier, that L’intérieur s’en va! The fact was, of course, that during the Second Empire, domestic interiors were disappearing, as thousands of Parisian homes were torn down under the direction of Baron Haussmann, to make way for new streets and open spaces and public monuments. Crowded areas of housing were demolished, populations were displaced and social groupings disrupted. With the démolisseurs reducing great swathes of Paris to rubble, the emotional impact of these shattered homes was evident to all. Not only was the shattering and smashing depicted by novelists as taking place inside houses emblematic of the demolition taking place all around, but in the real world domestic interiors were being ripped apart, their privacy violated, their secrets displayed to the outside world. Although in L’Education sentimentale Flaubert ostensibly describes houses destroyed in the 1848 revolution, it is important to remember that he was writing in the 1860s: his description of ruined interiors clearly alludes also to the work of Haussmann’s demolition men. In a passage full of political resonance, he evokes stairways that have collapsed and doors that open onto thin air, and adds: You could see the inside of bedrooms, with wallpaper hanging in shreds; fragile things had remained untouched, sometimes. Frédéric noticed a clock, a parrot’s perch, and some engravings. [‘On apercevait l’intérieur des chambres avec leurs papiers en lambeaux; des choses délicates s’y étaient conservées, quelquefois. Frédéric observa une pendule, un bâton de perroquet, des gravures’].22

Those few, touching remnants serve to highlight the emptiness of suddenly exposed rooms, while drawing attention to the lives once lived there. In contrast to the immaculate wallpapers displayed behind glass at the Exhibitions, scraps of wallpaper fluttering in the breeze become something of a leitmotif in contemporary descriptions of ruined interiors.23 Fragments of exposed wallpaper

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also feature poignantly towards the end of La Curée in Zola’s description of halfdemolished houses. Likening their shattered interiors both to a broken piece of furniture and to a disembowelled body, he hints at the human costs of such destruction: tall, eviscerated buildings revealed their pale innards and opened their empty stairwells to the air; their gaping rooms hung there, like the broken drawers of some big, ugly piece of furniture. Nothing was more pitiful than the yellow or blue checked wallpaper of those rooms. It was coming off in tatters, and indicated wretched little chambers five or six storeys up, right under the roof – cramped holes where someone had perhaps spent his entire life. [‘de hautes bâtisses éventrées montraient leurs entrailles blafardes, ouvraient en l’air leurs cages d’escalier vides, leurs chambres béantes, suspendues, pareilles aux tiroirs brisés de quelque grand vilain meuble. Rien n’était plus lamentable que les papiers peints de ces chambres, des carrés jaunes ou bleus qui s’en allaient en lambeaux, indiquant, à une hauteur de cinq et six étages, jusque sous les toits, de pauvres petits cabinets, des trous étroits, où toute une existence d’homme avait peut-être tenu’].24

Figure 2.1  Charles Marville, Photograph of demolition between la rue de l’Échelle and la rue Saint Augustin, Paris 1877.

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Indeed, soon after this, one of the onlookers suddenly recognizes a tiny fifthfloor room that had once been his home and is now open to the elements: An open wall revealed it in all its nakedness, already half-demolished on one side, with a great torn piece of its big, leafy, yellow-patterned wallpaper fluttering in the wind. On the left, one could still see the space, papered in blue, where a cupboard had once stood. [‘Une muraille ouverte la montrait toute nue, déjà entamée d’un côté, avec son papier à grands ramages jaunes, dont une large déchirure tremblait au vent. On voyait encore le creux d’une armoire, à gauche, tapissé de papier bleu’].25

In the pathos of these exposed interiors Zola finds an emotive visual focus for social concerns which he wishes to share with his readers. As is evident from Charles Marville’s contemporary photographs of Paris (Figure 2.1), such descriptions may be read as realistic accounts of the demolition taking place in the French capital. But they also suggest something more, for depictions such as these are not limited to Parisian ruins. In L’Education sentimentale, for example, Louise Roque’s overgrown garden in Nogent contains the remnants of what, under the Directory, had been a small house. All that is left in this provincial setting are the remains of two empty rooms with shreds of blue wallpaper still clinging to the walls. Similarly, in Les Travailleurs de la mer, Victor Hugo describes a ruined house on Guernsey whose crumbling walls, rotting woodwork, cracked chimneys and collapsing roof are heavily charged with political metaphor. Inside, the differently patterned layers of old wallpaper peeling from the walls evoke a succession of France’s past regimes: ‘griffins from the Empire, swags of drapery from the Directory, balusters and cippi from the reign of Louis XVI’ [‘les griffons de l’Empire, les draperies en croissant du Directoire, les balustres et les cippes de Louis XVI’].26 Metaphors of ruin run throughout this novel, conjuring up an image of a crumbling, collapsing, illgoverned France. If the wallpaper in this building now hangs in tatters, Hugo implies, so, inevitably, will the regime of Napoleon III. Time and again Second Empire literature represents houses as if poised between past and future, and on the point of crashing to the ground – a theme to which Hugo’s pen-and ink drawings also return. Swaying in the breeze, ready to disintegrate at any sudden gust or be toppled by one final stroke of a demolition man’s sledgehammer, they are exploited as the perfect metaphor for a society whose core values have been eroded, or a shaky regime at risk of imminent collapse. Flaubert is not alone in describing sinister creaking or cracking sounds

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emanating from rooms or staircases, as if they, like France itself, are about to break apart. As the poet Albert Angot put it: Like a building with worn columns, Society trembles at a breath of wind; Its strongest pillars were the social mores of our past. [‘Pareille à l’édifice aux colonnes usées, La société tremble à l’haleine du vent; Ses plus fermes piliers étaient nos mœurs passés’].27

In contrast to the rooms of MM. Dambreuse and Saccard, piled high with dazzling but impersonal displays of wealth, those domestic interiors whose innards have been ripped out carry a powerful emotional freight. As we have seen, writers were acutely sensitive to the poignancy of half-demolished houses that exposed intimate details of the lives once lived there to any passer-by. Poets, in particular, recognized that the destruction of a home was also an obliteration of the lives and memories and emotions of its former inhabitants – an obliteration of history. Likening old houses to funerary urns filled with ancestors’s ashes, Anaïs Ségalas deplored the destruction of France’s cultural heritage that occurred when buildings once inhabited by great figures from the past were demolished.28 For Maxime du Camp, however, the sense of loss was more personal. In a poem entitled ‘La Maison démolie’ (‘The Demolished House’), he describes seeing the house where he had spent his youth being torn down. Its interior is slashed open in what amounts to another disembowelling – ‘The damaged building bared its entrails’ [‘L’édifice attaqué découvrait ses entrailles’]29 – to reveal another shattered space, more scraps of wallpaper and the sooty trace of long-extinguished household fires: Through the great gash you could see The wallpaper, ripped off in shreds, That used to cover the walls like a vast chequerboard; You could see those black ribbons of soot stretching upwards, Creeping up the walls from cellar to attic, Like streams turned dark by rain. [On voyait apparaître à travers la tranchée, La tenture en papier par lambeaux arrachée Qui couvrait les cloisons comme un vaste damier; On voyait s’allonger ces noirs rubans de suie Qui, comme des ruisseaux assombris par la pluie, Rampent contre les murs, de la cave au grenier].30

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As the interior comes crashing down, it is as if the poet’s own past is being obliterated: Each piece of wood panelling that cracks and collapses Takes my old memories away with it! Each stone knew part of my history. [Chacun de ces lambris qui craquent et s’écroulent Fait rouler avec lui mes souvenirs passés! Chaque pierre savait un mot de mon histoire].31

Every section of the collapsing interior evokes a different, fond memory: the stairs that his beloved used to climb to visit him; the landings where they exchanged sweet whispers; the salon’s now vanished collection of exotic bibelots that were mementos of far-off places. The poet conveys not only the destruction of his past life and his old home, but his defencelessness in the face of this invasion of what was once a private space: We were at home there! With no one to see us, no one Who might come and spy on our happiness as they passed by! No garrulous confidant, no curious stares! [Là! Nous étions chez nous! Sans témoin, sans visage Pour venir épier notre joie au passage! Sans confident bavard, sans regards curieux!].32

Despite the poet’s final defiant claim that no one can demolish the metaphorical palace that is his heart, ‘La Maison démolie’ makes manifest his powerlessness to resist the violation of his privacy and his past. In this he resembles the passer-by in La Curée, who suddenly recognizes his half-demolished former lodging and sadly exclaims, ‘Oh, my poor room! What have they done to it!’ [‘Ah! Ma pauvre chambre, comme ils me l’ont arrangée!’].33 Even when a house is still intact, however, fictional representations frequently depict the interior as violated or dysfunctionally rearranged, reflecting ravaged and broken lives. In Thérèse Raquin, Zola’s description of Thérèse and Laurent’s disrupted room conveys the lovers’s sense of guilt at having murdered Thérèse’s husband, Camille. The furniture has lost its functionality: the lovers cannot use the marital bed; a fireside chair seems occupied by Camille’s ghostly presence, so that Laurent cannot sit down; Thérèse pushes her chair away from the hearth in horror, forcing it against the bed; and through the opened windows freezing January night air chills the room. By the end of the novel, Camille’s spectral invasion of their domestic space is complete: ‘the corpse […] sat on the chairs, seated himself at the

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table, stretched himself out on the bed, made use of the furniture and of any items lying around’ [‘le cadavre […] s’assit sur les sièges, se mit devant la table, s’étendit dans le lit, se servit des meubles, des objets qui traînaient’].34 Laurent cannot touch a fork or a brush without feeling that Camille has touched it before him, and the room ceases to function as a living space. The novel closes with an image of the dining room, now more reminiscent of a morgue than an eating-area, with the twisted bodies of Laurent and Therèse lying dead on its tiled floor. Not all depictions of dysfunctional interiors were as sensational. A graphic, if mundane, example occurs in Madame Bovary, when Emma arrives at her new house in Yonville to discover that the removal men have deposited the contents of her previous home in the middle of the floor: In the centre of the apartment, higgledy-piggledy, lay drawers from a chest, bottles, curtain rods, gilt poles, with mattresses on chairs and basins on the floor – the two men who had brought the furniture having just left everything there, carelessly. [Au milieu de l’appartement, pêle-mêle, il y avait des tiroirs de commode, des bouteilles, des tringles, des batons dorés avec des matelas sur des chaises et des cuvettes sur le parquet, – les deux hommes qui avaient apporté les meubles ayant tout laisse là, négligemment].35

Although the narrator offers the removal men’s carelessness as explanation, the displaced and non-functioning jumble of domestic contents clearly acts as a metaphor for the impending breakdown of the Bovary household. Elsewhere, displaced jumbles of shattered interiors take on political overtones. Both Flaubert and Hugo reconfigure them into barricades built from the remnants of demolished houses – as happened in reality during the 1848 revolution. In Les Misérables, Hugo describes the construction of a barricade from the remains of three six-storey houses, said to have been torn down for the purpose: Look! That door! That grating! That awning! That mantelpiece! That broken stove! That cracked cooking-pot! Bring everything! Throw everything on! [Tiens! Cette porte! Cette grille! Cet auvent! Ce chambranle! Ce réchaud brisé! Cette marmite fêlée! Donnez tout! Jetez tout!]

Hugo’s barricade is an amalgam of fragments of houses whose interiors and exteriors are rolled into one great mass – a mixture of paving stones, rubble, timber, iron bars, cloths, smashed window panes, old chairs, cabbage stalks, rags, bits of attic rooms with their wallpaper, window-frames with glass still intact, ripped-out fireplaces, cupboards, tables and benches. It is the embodiment of desperately broken lives, in Hugo’s words, ‘a howling chaos’ [‘un sens dessus dessous hurlant’].36

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In every possible way, then, French literature in the second half of the nineteenth century depicts domestic space as shattered, and symptomatic of wider turmoil and disruption. Household contents – furniture, crockery, glass – are smashed within the home; homes themselves are ripped apart and demolished; or, as in the example above, house and contents are destroyed but merge into a monstrous act of defiance. There is, however, another way in which writers deconstruct domestic space, for the literature of this period frequently features a disjunction between a domestic interior and its contents. A home is separated from its furnishings; furnishings are separated from their home. Such dislocations raise questions about the meaning of ‘domestic space’. Does a bare room remain ‘domestic’ in the absence of household effects? Is it the nature of its furnishings that makes an interior ‘domestic’? Is not a domestic space a combination of room and contents? And what happens when that connection is severed? One illustrative example comes at the centre of Zola’s Pot-Bouille, when Duveyrier takes friends to meet his mistress, Clarisse, in the apartment that he has lavishly furnished for her. On arrival, he is shocked to find that Clarisse has vanished, along with the entire contents of the flat: The anteroom was empty, even the coat-hooks had disappeared. Empty, too, were the large sitting-room and the small sitting room: not a stick of furniture, not a curtain at the windows, not a curtain-rod remained. […] the bedroom, too, was empty […] Where the bed once stood, the removal of the canopy’s hinges had left gaping holes. [L’antichambre était vide, les patères elles-mêmes avaient disparu. Vide aussi le grand salon et vide le petit salon: plus un meuble, plus un rideau aux fenêtres, plus une tringle. […] la chambre était également nue […] A la place du lit, les ferrures du baldaquin enlevées laissaient des trous béants].37

Those gaping holes, together with scraped wallpaper, a ripped-out floorcloth and unscrewed floorboards, suggest not merely emptiness but further disintegration, as what was once a cherished private interior starts to fall apart. Moreover the apartment is no longer sealed off from the unsavoury world outside, for humid air blows in from the street through a window that has been left open, filling the empty rooms with ‘the damp and dullness of a public square’ [‘une humidité et une fadeur de place publique’]38 as public space contaminates domestic space. The empty, damaged apartment conveys the moral and emotional vacuity that lie at the heart of Zola’s novel, just as at the end of Madame Bovary Flaubert depicts the dead couple’s house standing empty, its contents sold, in a graphic symbol of that novel’s bleak vision of contemporary France.

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But what of those displaced contents? Significantly, it is during this period that salerooms and auctions start to appear in French fiction, displaying household effects detached from their homes. Again, the literary representation of these objects goes against the grain of the expositions universelles. Whereas the domestic items displayed in exhibition cases and listed in exhibition catalogues were new and impersonal, not yet integrated into their intended environment, in the salerooms of fiction the items on display have engaged with humanity. They possess a history and a poignancy noticeably absent from exhibition catalogues. Unlike exhibition pieces, the items in fictional salerooms are represented not as emblems of commercialism, consumption and class, but as repositories of absent lives. They carry touching traces of human experience. Describing the sale of Madame Arnoux’s possessions in L’Education sentimentale, Flaubert imposes an ironic order by segregating both human beings and objects into distinct and corresponding categories. The shoddiest goods and individuals are on show together in the courtyard  – ‘washstands without basins, the wooden frames of armchairs, old baskets, fragments of china, empty bottles, and mattresses’ [‘des lavabos sans cuvettes, des bois de fauteuils, de vieux paniers, des tessons de porcelaine, des bouteilles vides, des matelas’] – while nearby stand their equally shabby human counterparts: ‘men with vile features wearing smocks or dirty overcoats, all grey with dust’ [‘des hommes en blouse ou en sale redingote, tous gris de poussière, la figure ignoble’].39 Inside the building, on the other hand, gentlemen with catalogues congregate around works of art. Once in the saleroom, Frédéric immediately recognizes the contents of the Arnoux household: ‘the two sets of shelves from L’Art industriel, her [i.e. Mme Arnoux’s] worktable. All her furniture!’ [‘les deux étagères de l’Art industriel, sa table à ouvrage. Tous ses meubles!’]40. But divorced from their domestic space, the Arnoux furnishings have lost their raison d’être. Like the items trapped behind glass at the Exhibitions, here they have no function. Instead, they have been reordered according to size, in an absurd display where carpets hang vertically and curtains are drawn across walls: Piled up at the back, and arranged by size, they formed a broad heap that reached from the floor to the windows; and on the other sides of the room her carpets and curtains hung along the walls. [‘Entassés au fond, par rang de taille, ils formaient un large talus depuis le plancher jusqu’aux fenêtres; et, sur les autres côtés de l’appartement, les tapis et les rideaux pendaient droit le long des murs’].41

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For Frédéric, however, these items are steeped in personal associations, as are Madame Arnoux’s clothes – ‘these relics, which vaguely recalled the shape of her limbs’ [‘ces reliques, où il retrouvait confusément les formes de ses membres’] – which are also on sale.42 And as each piece of the Arnoux household is sold off, it triggers in Frédéric a profoundly emotional memory of Madame Arnoux: the big blue carpet patterned with camellias which her feet used to touch as she came towards him; the little tapestry chair on which he would sit by her side when they were alone; the two fire-screens whose ivory had been smoothed by her hands; and a velvet pincushion, still bristling with pins. ‘It was as if part of his heart were vanishing with each of these things’ [‘C’était comme des parties de son coeur qui s’en allaient avec ces choses’].43 Instead of static, dehumanized items as displayed at the Exhibitions, here we have a display of pathos-filled possessions circulating in limbo, as it were, estranged from their home environment and reflecting the painful trajectories of their former owners. The ornamental casket that circulates between different abodes – one of several circulating objects in the novel – offers a particularly striking image of the Arnoux household’s disintegration. First seen in the Arnoux home, then in that of Arnoux’s mistress, it returns to Madame Arnoux before ending up in the saleroom, where its purchase by Mme Dambreuse in a jealous act of spite causes Fréréric to break off their liaison. Symbolizing the fracturing of homes and families and relationships, the casket has no space of its own. As Champfleury observes in L’Hôtel des commissaires-priseurs, in the auctionhouse ‘all classes merge’ [‘tous les rangs sont confondus’].44 Social hierarchies dissolve there, as do the categories into which the objects on show are temporarily sorted. Changing hands, circulating, tracking the rise and fall of individuals, the domestic items that end up in the auction house reveal a distressing social dynamic that the Exhibitions sought to hide. Just as Frédéric Moreau reacted emotionally on recognizing Madame Arnoux’s belongings in the auction room, so the narrator of L’Hôtel des commissaires-priseurs senses that the displaced objects on sale retain traces of their domestic origins and former owners. ‘A writing-desk, a bed, a candlestick, a clock, are not completely inanimate beings. How many joys and sorrows have they not witnessed?’ [‘Un secrétaire, un lit, un chandelier, une pendule, ne sont pas des êtres tout à fait inanimés. De combien de joies et de douleurs n’ont-ils pas été témoins?’].45 The presence in the auctionhouse of such random articles inevitably implies the domestic space they have left behind, nowhere more touchingly than when the narrator describes the entire contents of a kitchen that includes a partly eaten pot of redcurrant jam and a soda siphon, still half full. Like the caged parrot that is also for sale, these

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poignant items make him speculate about a weeping owner, evicted from his home by a heartless creditor. Sad, untold private histories of dislocation and loss emerge from the debris of a home. Divorced from their domestic origins and displayed in the saleroom, such items undermine everything the Exhibitions stood for. They denote private failure rather than public triumph; they represent the banal rather than the extraordinary; they exemplify human pathos rather than impassive ostentation; they convey disintegration rather than progress. The emphasis is on dispersal, not on display. As represented by French writers in the second half of the nineteenth century, then, domestic interiors appear as disordered spaces far more often than one might expect. Whether trashed by unruly children, wrecked by disruptive guests, overturned by domestic disputes, emptied by bailiffs or demolished by town planners, these interiors convey a sense of private disintegration and shattered lives that reflects a wider sense of political threat and social and moral collapse. As interiors and their contents are forced apart, and as the distinction between interior and exterior is destroyed, literary texts convey a bleak picture of France that is the inverse of the orderly, cohesive, affluent and reverential image promoted by the establishment and projected by the expositions universelles. These shattered fictional spaces speak of dangers far worse than the dusting damage feared by Ralph Nicholson Wornum.

Bibliography Angot, Albert, Nos ruines (Paris: Ch. Douniol, 1871). Balzac, Honoré de, Le Père Goriot [1835] (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966). Champfleury, L’Hôtel des commissaires-priseurs (Paris: Dentu, 1867). Citron, Pierre, La Poésie de Paris dans la littérature française de Rousseau à Baudelaire. 2 vols. (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1961). Du Camp, Maxime, Les Chants modernes (Paris: M. Levy, 1855). Feydeau, Ernest, Du luxe, des femmes, des mœurs, de la littérature et de la vertu. 1866. (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1883). Flaubert, Gustave, L’Education sentimentale [1869], in Œuvres complètes, vol. II, edited by B. Masson (Paris: Seuil, 1964). Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary [1856], in Œuvres complètes, vol. I, edited by B. Masson (Paris: Seuil, 1964). Gautier, Théophile, Avatar [1856] in Romans et contes (Paris: Charpentier, 1880). Goncourt, Edmond and Jules de, Journal. Mémoires de la vie littéraire. 3 vols., edited by Robert Ricatte (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989).

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Green, Anne, Changing France. Literature and Material Culture in the Second Empire (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2011). Guénée, A., C. Potier and E. Mathieu, Dzing! Boum! Boum! Revue de l’exposition (Paris: Mifliez, 1855). Hugo, Victor, Les Misérables [1862], edited by Yves Gohin (Paris: Gallimard, 1973 & 1995). Hugo, Victor, Les Travailleurs de la mer [1866], edited by Yves Gohin (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). Ségur, Mme., La Comtesse de, Les Petites filles modèles [1858] (Paris: Hachette, 1909). Terdiman, Richard, ‘The Mnemonics of Dispossession.’ In Home and Its Dislocations in Nineteenth-Century France, edited by Suzanne Nash, 169–90 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993). Wornum, Ralph Nicholson, ‘The Exhibition as a Lesson in Taste.’ In The Crystal Palace Exhibition. Illustrated Catalogue [1851], reprinted with introduction by John Gloag, i–xxii (New York: Dover Publications, 1970). Zola, Emile, Pot-Bouille (Paris: Charpentier, 1882). Zola, Emile, Thérèse Raquin [1867] (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1970). Zola, Emile, La Curée [1871] (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1970). Zola, Emile, L’Assommoir [1877] (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1997).

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Art and domestic space: Continuity and change in private collectors’s interiors in Belgium, c. 1830–1930 Ulrike Müller and Marjan Sterckx

This chapter aims to reveal the continuities and changes in the display of works of art – mainly paintings – in the domestic space of private collectors in Belgium between c. 1830 and 1930. It questions how the actual arrangement of such artworks related, on the one hand, to an ideal presented in normative publications such as advice literature on the decoration of the bourgeois home, and on the other hand, to contemporary display practices in public museums and exhibitions. The chapter begins with a methodological consideration about ‘public’ versus ‘private’ sources on which to base such research, revealing the necessity to distinguish between the (semi-)public spaces of private collectors’s houses (such as salons and separate galleries), that are mentioned in published sources such as catalogues, journals and travel literature, and the veritably private domestic spaces, where art was certainly also present, but which are more difficult to grasp in the sources. It appears that, during the first half of the nineteenth century, collectors usually displayed the most important pieces of their collections in separate gallery spaces, hung in close proximity and in formal relationship to one another, showcasing the social and conversational function of the collections. In the second half of the century, and especially as of the 1880s, collectors developed more subjective and aesthetic approaches, often intermingling works of fine and decorative art, which reflected their individual taste and artistic aspirations. At times, these new aesthetic approaches resulted in a more sober and isolated presentation of the artworks. Yet, many different modes of display continued to exist in turn-of-the-century Belgium, mainly due to the collectors’s personal preferences as well as to the actual, material conditions of their properties and belongings.

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A number of recent studies in material culture and interior design history demonstrate how, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the domestic interior increasingly expressed the emerging division between public and private; how it became a foremost place for its inhabitants to demonstrate personality and individuality; and how it reflected changing gender positions.1 These new ideals and functions attached to domestic space are reflected in the international boom of advice literature on interior decoration published during the second half of the nineteenth century and in the increasing public discussion of matters of good taste in the contemporary art press.2 The growing concern with the creation of tasteful interior decorations must be considered in the context of the nineteenth-century rise of the middle class and the emerging ideas of bourgeois individualism.3 Over the course of the century, the generally rising standard of living of a broader social middle class due to industrialization resulted in an increasing ability and desire of this social group to acquire cultural capital and to demarcate social distinction by means of appropriating luxury goods such as expensive furniture, lavish textiles as well as artworks, and displaying them tastefully within the private home.4 Within the international history and theory of the nineteenth-century domestic interior, little attention has so far been paid to the role of paintings. In The Poetic Home, Stefan Muthesius observes that ‘pictures on the wall’ are often neglected in this discourse for the benefit of the decorative arts, because the choice and arrangement of pictures ‘was not normally the concern of professional decorators or designers’. Nevertheless, Muthesius affirms that the overall number of paintings decorating the homes ‘increased vastly in the 19th century’.5 Manifold illustrations in interior design histories, be they prints, paintings, watercolours, drawings or photographs (invented, idealized or more documentary), confirm the overall presence of paintings in a variety of different nineteenth-century domestic spaces. This chapter focuses on the position and function of paintings in the homes of one specific stratum of society, namely private art collectors, thus touching upon both the disciplines of art history and (urban) history alike. Private collectors are a particular, heterogeneous and difficult to define social group, that can certainly not function as a pars pro toto for the middle classes. With regard to their aesthetic preferences and practices of interior decoration it can at times be difficult to distinguish them within bourgeois society. After all, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries many members of the middle and upper classes richly decorated their homes with luxury and art objects of all kinds,6 while not everyone displaying artworks within the private interior can

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automatically be considered a collector. Furthermore, paintings, in particular, have been prominent elements in interior decoration in the Southern Low Countries since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the expanding art market facilitated the acquisition of artworks by a broader range of society.7 Instead, true collectors usually followed specific motivations and showed a distinct purchase behaviour and aesthetic framework (focused on bringing together a consistent and internally coherent group of objects), which is also reflected in the display of their collections in their interiors. In private collectors’s houses, art was more than mere decoration and had a specific function, meaning and presentation. Martina Droth has analysed how some late-Victorian British art collectors integrated sculptures by their artist-friends into their domestic space in order to introduce the aura of the artist’s studio into their homes, thus distinguishing their living rooms from those of other members of the middle class. By this means they could counter the criticism of writers such as Julius Meier-Graefe who fervently opposed the ‘vulgarisation of art’ through its increasing absorption into the bourgeois interior.8 Our chapter seeks to examine the continuities and discontinuities in the display and function of paintings in the domestic space of private collectors, and the collectors’s motivations in this respect. In comparing the actual arrangement of artworks within private collectors’s domestic interiors to the recommendations given in international advice literature, and to the display strategies employed in public exhibitions, we furthermore aim to reveal the synergies, interactions and manifold mechanisms of inspiration and distinction that shaped the presentation, function and meaning of art in the different public and private spheres. In the international literature on the nineteenth-century domestic interior and on the histories of private collecting in that period, relatively little attention has thus far been paid to Belgium, while cases from Britain and France are much better known. Nevertheless, Belgium can function as an interesting case study with regard to private art collections in domestic settings. During the nineteenth century, Belgium was well known in Europe as ‘the country of private collectors’,9 and their collections were frequently visited by international travellers. While in the first half of the century, Belgian collectors placed themselves more emphatically in a public and national context,10 from the 1900s, they pursued more individualized, private aims with their collections, in line with the international trend towards aestheticism and interiority. In particular the cases of Edmond Picard and the Palais Stoclet will demonstrate that Belgian collectors often were at the forefront of the development and implementation of

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new artistic ideas and display strategies. In discussing a larger sample of Belgian private collectors, we aim to show how new methods of (public and private) display were shaped, disseminated and implemented.

A methodological challenge: On ‘public’ and ‘private’ sources The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century private art collector is an intriguing figure to study. On one hand, (s)he is a symbol of the ongoing democratization and commodification of the nineteenth-century art world. As private collections frequently functioned as a means to demonstrate their (bourgeois) owner’s taste and social prestige to the outside world, the collector certainly had an interest in the public discussion and sociability of his/her possessions.11 On the other hand, the mythical art collector is an elitist (male) figure, withdrawn in his domestic space with his precious artworks as objects of individual contemplation (Figure  3.1). Similarly, although nineteenth-century private collections were semi-public in nature, attracting national and even international public attention and visitors, they were also reserved for a restricted social circle (at times for their owners only), and removed from public responsibility due to their private ownership. Nineteenth-century private collectors and their collections thus oscillate between (semi-)public and private characteristics, requiring the use of public and private source material. In line with the prominent public role of the private collector in the Belgian art world, especially during the first half of the nineteenth century, many large collections were discussed extensively in published – and thus public – sources such as travel literature, art and amateur journals, collection and auction catalogues, mainly for their artistic and historical value and their public relevance to society.12 Furthermore, famous private collections were often recorded visually in prints, paintings and photographs, which were sometimes also published, for example, in albums or auction catalogues.13 Yet, published sources usually only provide information about the most ‘public’ rooms in collectors’s houses, particularly salons and separate galleries. In the published memoirs of Johanna Schopenhauer’s travel to the Low Countries in 1828, for example, she wrote that Jean d’Huyvetter (1770–1833) in Ghent used two rooms in his ‘beautiful, spacious house’ for the display of his art and antiques collection, which she described extensively.14 Even though Schopenhauer was likely also received in the drawing room, she does not provide any details about this or other rooms in d’Huyvetter’s house. Théophile

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Figure 3.1  Ernest Slingeneyer, The Art Collector (1881, oil on panel, private collection).

Thoré, in his 1859 essay on the collection of Duke Prosper Louis d’Arenberg (1785–1861) in Brussels, notes that one could find great numbers of paintings of different genres in the ducal apartments but does not describe any of these, while his book focuses entirely on the paintings displayed in the Duke’s separate art gallery.15 Published sources thus usually do not describe the artworks that were doubtlessly present in other semi-public reception rooms of collectors’s dwellings, such as the drawing room, the parlour, the study, the library or the

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billiard room, and possibly also in the veritably private rooms, such as the boudoir and the bedrooms. During the second half of the century, the internationally flourishing advice literature on the home and interior decoration further exploits this ideal separation of the art collection from the domestic space.16 While the separate art gallery was a traditional and frequent (though not obligatory) practice among private collectors,17 a distinct picture room also became an ideal among the aspiring middle classes. The British architect and furniture designer Charles L. Eastlake writes in his influential Hints on Household Taste (1868) that ‘oil paintings should, if possible, be kept in a room by themselves’, as ‘the force of their colour’ overshadows the effect of other decorative devices.18 In his Grammaire de l’Ammeublement (1884), also the French art historian and critic Henry Havard, notably a specialist in the (decorative) arts from Flanders and Holland, advocates the presentation of paintings in a separate gallery.19 In a passage on ‘la galerie de tableaux et le cabinet de curiosités’, Havard provides a range of guidelines for adequate lighting, the choice and arrangement of suitable furniture,20 while his chapters on other rooms in the house (such as the parlour, salon, dining room and boudoir) focus exclusively on furniture and decorative accessories such as textiles and plants, and do not contain any reference to paintings or other artworks. It needs to be noted, however, that advice literature is a prescriptive source, presenting an ideal image of the domestic interior rather than providing hints on the actual and certainly also frequently changing display of artworks in the home. In order to study the actual presence and disposition of artworks in a collector’s entire home, the consultation of complementary sources, such as (probate) inventories,21 photographs,22 memoirs and other private archival material, is needed to look beyond the (semi-)public sphere. A highly detailed inventory dating from the 1880s of the pictures owned by the noble Arenberg family, for instance, demonstrates how almost all rooms (semi-public and private alike) in their Brussels residence were decorated with old and modern paintings, while the separate art gallery was reserved for the collection’s most famous Old Masters (Figure 3.2).23 Such documentary evidence is, however, rare. More often, it is difficult to trace relevant archival material, as details regarding the display of art collections were usually discussed orally and only seldom written down. This trend also relates to gender. Throughout the nineteenth century, art collecting – and, especially, the collection of Old Masters – remained a generally male-dominated undertaking, associated with seriousness, determination, knowledge and connoisseurship.24 While bourgeois women were often responsible for the interior decoration of the home and for the status, wealth

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Figure 3.2  The Picture Gallery of Duke Engelbert Marie d’Arenberg in Brussels (c. 1903/4, Edingen: ACA).

and good taste it represented,25 it is difficult to trace women’s actual role and involvement in bringing together and displaying art collections due to a lack of written sources.26 Published sources always emphasize the collections’s more public – and, thus, male-associated – aspects, as well as the position of their male owners in society. In Antwerp, Henriëtte van den Bergh (1838–1920) is mainly known for having realized the ambition of her precociously deceased son, Fritz Mayer van den Bergh (1858–1901), to turn his private collection into a museum in 1904. She commissioned a new, neo-Gothic building to house the collection, designed the display of the artworks, and published the first collection catalogues.27 All this would perhaps not have been possible had she not already been closely involved in her son’s collecting activity and plans during his lifetime.

Enlightened ideals and the social dimension of art display During the first half of the nineteenth century, published sources often praised Belgian private collections for their remarkable accessibility and emphasized their sociocultural relevance. In this period, when the public museum was

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still a relatively new institution in Belgium and of restricted influence, private collections functioned as important places of social interaction and knowledge exchange for a national and international cultural elite. While on the one hand, the collectors’s aim to share their privately owned works of old and modern art with a larger group of ‘amateurs’ reflected their collective, enlightened ideals, and often specifically national ambition, on the other hand the collectors’s individual tastes and preferences strongly determined their collections’s appeal to the public. In 1839, for instance, shortly after Belgium achieved independence, the extensive collection of Old Master paintings of Désiré Van den Schrieck (1786–1857) in Leuven was described as ‘a national creation par excellence’, where locals and foreigners could admire the grandeur of Belgian national painting.28 Painting collections were then usually shown in a separate gallery or a sequence of rooms and hung in several rows. Johanna Schopenhauer wrote about Florent van Ertborn’s (1784–1840) collection of early Netherlandish, German and Italian art in Antwerp that his paintings ‘filled only the walls of one moderately sized room’.29 In 1828, the year that Schopenhauer visited the cabinet, van Ertborn possessed c. 65 pieces.30 Schopenhauer’s description suggests that the paintings were displayed in thematic groupings and loosely arranged according to the artworks’s geographical origin. For example, van Ertborn hung his six smallscale early Italian paintings on gold ground attributed to Simone Memmi31 and Giotto32 close to each other and next to ‘a few highly rare, small panels’ attributed to Hugo van der Goes.33 A decade later, a portrait lithograph of Théodore de Coninck de Merckem (1807–55) represents the Ghent collector of primarily contemporary Belgian paintings in his gallery in front of a wall entirely covered with pictures, their frames almost touching one another (Figure 3.3).34 Also c. 1900, Duke Engelbert Marie d’Arenberg (1872–1949) displayed the masterpieces of his family’s collection in a similar accrochage (Figure 3.2), in a separate gallery which Thoré had called a ‘sanctuary’.35 According to Thoré, a separate gallery constitutes a place of honour, ‘where one seeks and where one has to seek the expression of a certain artistic originality’, as opposed to the private apartments, which may contain ‘paintings that go with the furnishings, but do not necessarily correspond to the artistic canon’.36 The method of displaying paintings in close proximity and in formal and/ or thematic relationship to one another – producing ‘harmony in variety’37  – enabled visitors to closely examine and compare paintings from different regional schools, periods or of different styles. Since the late eighteenth century, this was a common approach to the display of paintings in many public38 and private39 collections in Western Europe. The pictures were hung in vertical, axial

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Figure 3.3  Pierre Degobert, Théodore de Coninck de Merckem in his picture gallery, lithography after a drawing by Henri Van der Haert, published in: Galerie de Tableaux du Chevalier de Coninck (Brussels: Degobert, 1838), Ghent, University Library, BIB.G.014161.

symmetric groupings, with the larger, capital pieces in the centre, flanked by smaller paintings on each side, often conceived as lateral pendants (Figure 3.3). While stimulating the comparison of pictures, this hanging also emphasized the social aspect of the gallery visit. It enabled the viewer’s direct interaction with the artworks, and facilitated the discussion of one’s observations with

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other visitors.40 This display mode stands in the long tradition of the private art and curiosity cabinet, a tradition that was particularly rich in the Southern Netherlands, where already in the early modern period the collector’s cabinet functioned as a place of learned discussion and knowledge exchange.41 The use of a separate gallery and the sophisticated mode of displaying one’s paintings reflect the collectors’s aim to create within the private house a special, elevated place for art and its veneration, contemplation and discussion, mirroring the social and educational ideals of the enlightenment. Other than the conversational dimension, the hanging of pictures closely juxtaposed and touchetouche in several rows might also follow the practical necessities and difficulties brought about by larger art collections. At times, collectors of paintings even used additional walls in their salons to increase the available display space. Jean Schamp d’Aveschoot (1765–1839) in Ghent, for example, possessed so many paintings that wall space in his large mansion became scarce.42 In order to display his pictures properly, the collector hung them on ‘movable walls that could be opened and closed like swing doors’.43 Jean-Joseph Chapuis (1765– 1864) in Brussels, too, used the available space to the fullest. The Baedeker guide from 1854 recounts that he displayed his collection of nearly 2,000 pictures in fourteen to sixteen rooms of his three-storey town house. Mobile walls placed in the middle of the rooms, with paintings hung on both sides, could be turned towards the light to enable better examination of the artworks. Chapuis greatly enjoyed showing his collection to interested visitors, but his collection was so numerous that ‘only the connoisseur [could] truly enjoy the visit, while the layman cannot but leave the rooms in exhaustion’.44

Towards a new aesthetics In the annual artistic salons and other exhibitions that were held in all major European cities, including those in Belgium, it remained a common and, in part, a necessary practice to hang paintings in several rows throughout the greatest part of the nineteenth century. However, as the century progressed, the dense display of artworks – in public exhibitions as well as in domestic space – was increasingly criticized. Charles Eastlake, for instance, observed in 1868 that ‘in annual public exhibitions, the enormous number of works sent for display frequently renders it necessary to hang them three or four deep on the walls’, but ‘in the rooms of an ordinary private house’, this practice is ‘much to be avoided’. For the domestic space he strongly opposed the ‘crowding [of] its walls almost from wainscot to

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ceiling’, and pleaded for a disposal of pictures, to see them ‘with anything like comfort or attention […] in one row only’.45 In 1882, Lewis Foreman Day, an influential designer in the British Arts and Crafts Movement, even referred to the fully covered walls in public exhibitions as ‘only a qualified evil’. In the home, he advised to strictly limit the number of pictures and hang only ‘what is really worth displaying’, for ‘a dwelling room is […] a dwelling room and not a picture gallery’.46 Foreman Day’s quote clearly marks the perceived difference between a (public or private) art gallery and the domestic interior, which constituted the main focus of his recommendations. Also, other authors of advice literature such as Charles Eastlake and Henry Havard advocated the presentation of paintings in a separate room of the house. Havard showed the famous gallery of William Vanderbilt in New York, with walls fully covered with pictures, to illustrate his advice.47 This demonstrates how, by the 1880s, the separate art gallery and its associations of noble manners, erudition and enlightened values has become an ideal means for the aspiring bourgeoisie to showcase their own newly gained material, social and cultural status. For the veritably domestic space, however, Eastlake’s and Foreman Day’s recommendations clearly reflect the increased focus on the aesthetic qualities of the interior itself, so typical of fin-de-siècle aestheticism. The American art journal The Art Amateur of 1884 observed that ‘We have too many things, too much colour, too much furniture; we sacrifice quality to quantity; we have not yet found out that in household art, as in all art, enough is better than a feast’.48 In the next decennia, this call for a ‘great clean-up’ of the stuffed Victorian homes would sound even louder internationally.49 In the 1880s and 1890s, several Belgian art collectors sought new forms of display for their collections, in particular in the Brussels avant-garde scene. It was Edmond Picard (1836–1924) who played a seminal role in introducing new aesthetic conceptions of private and public display. Picard was a true animateur d’art:50 politician, lawyer, collector, maecenas and founder, author and editor (together with Octave Maus) of the periodical L’Art Moderne which helped disseminate his aesthetic ideas. He was also closely involved in the artists’s circles Les XX (1883–93) and its follower La Libre Esthétique (1894– 1914). In 1884, Les  XX introduced a more sober, bright and airy display into the Belgian salon culture, exhibiting less pictures, arranged in one row and on eye level  (Figure 3.4).51 As of 1891, the salons of Les XX, and later La Libre Esthétique, presented decorative art objects alongside the fine arts. The 1894 show of La Libre Esthétique, for instance, transformed one exhibition room into a modern domestic interior, showcasing a ‘cabinet de travail’ designed by Gustave Serrurier-Bovy.

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Figure 3.4  View of the first salon of Les XX, Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2 February–2 March 1884, Brussels, KMSKB/AHKB, inv. 4651© Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium/Archives of Contemporary Art of Belgium, inv.4651.

This cabinet and the prominent presence of the decorative arts at La Libre Esthétique were important sources of inspiration for Picard’s new project, ‘la Maison d’Art’. Picard’s Brussels home in the Avenue de la Toison d’Or 56 had been a meeting place for artists since the 1870s and 1880s. Here he integrated his rather unconventional collection of modern art (his acquisitions were guided only by his personal taste and instinct, without aiming to assemble a representative overview of a specific school or current) in his ‘inhabited interior’ (‘intérieur habité’).52 In 1891, a Danish critic compared his house to a museum,53 and in 1894, Picard transformed his house into the semi-public gallery ‘la Maison d’Art’, while Picard himself moved to another dwelling in the Rue Ducale 51. The gallery, which existed until July 1900, was run by the ‘Société Anonyme d’Art’ (actively promoting collaborations between artists, artisans and industry) and featured changing exhibitions of national and international modern artists such as Emile Claus, Eugène Laermans and Auguste Rodin, but also a permanent presentation of contemporary applied arts such as ceramics, glasswork, wallpaper and textiles, displayed in the intimate atmosphere of a ‘modern house’ (‘maison moderne’) – ‘an elegant, intimate and domestic frame’ (‘un cadre élégant, intime,

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domestique’) where one is ‘at home’ (‘chez soi’), as Picard himself described it.54 The focus on the very domestic and bourgeois character of this novel display is reflected in the gallery’s name, calling for a new approach to art for the home that upgraded domestic decoration to the level of fine art, as voiced since the 1870s by William Morris. Picard’s ‘Maison d’Art’ attracted international attention. In spring 1895, the gallery was visited by the Parisian art dealer Siegfried Bing and his artistic adviser, the critic Julius Meier-Graefe, who were both greatly impressed. The visit inspired Bing for his own gallery ‘La Maison d’Art Nouveau’, inaugurated in Paris in December 1895, and Meier-Graefe for his shop ‘La Maison Moderne’ opened in Paris in late 1897. Here they would showcase modern paintings, sculpture and (Art Nouveau) decorative arts and furniture in a similar fashion, domestic and fully integrated, with different artistic disciplines and styles combined.55 In his writings, Meier-Graefe positioned this modern interior design as a complete departure from Edmond and Jules de Goncourt’s concept of décor (largely depending on aristocratic ideals and eighteenth-century artistic models), which had been the prototype of elegant and sophisticated interior decoration since the creation of their ‘Maison d’Art’ at Auteuil in 1868, but which Meier-Graefe in 1896 characterized as conservative, ‘suffocating’ and an outdated accumulation of ‘bric-à-brac’. The critic furthermore argued that the modern house was ‘understood in America only, and in Europe nowhere else than in Belgium, namely in Brussels’.56 The salons of Les XX and La Libre Esthétique and Picard’s ‘Maison d’Art’ represent two general, and seemingly contradictory, trends in the conception of new (public and private) art display that reflected the impact of the new ideals of domesticity and interior decoration: on the one hand, a more sober and bright presentation of paintings, emphasizing the qualities of the individual artwork; on the other hand, the integrated display of paintings, sculptures and decorative art objects in harmonious ensembles and in a domestic(-like) setting, paying attention to the overall aesthetic effect (the ‘ambience’) in which the objects were displayed, as well as to their functional context.57 Although not immediately generally appreciated and successful, more sober and integrated display strategies were visible not only in Brussels and Parisian avant-garde circles but also in the presentation of Old Master paintings and ancient art. In the context of the late-nineteenth-century revival of decorative arts, historical furniture and other art objects became important elements in public and private collections. Similar to the fine arts, they were collected and exhibited for their aesthetic and decorative value. In 1905, for example, Louis

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Figure 3.5  A section of the collection of Fernand Scribe exhibited in the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, early twentieth century, © Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium/Archives of the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, artinflanders.be.

Maeterlinck, the curator of the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts, advocated a more frequent use of the integrated display of paintings, sculptures, furniture, tapestries and other art objects in Belgian museums,58 suggesting that this seemingly historicist mode of display was regarded as modern and an improvement to the standard gallery display. It was notably the exhibition of a part of the private collection of Fernand Scribe (1851–1913) in the Ghent Museum (Figure 3.5) that influenced Maeterlinck’s ideas regarding the museum’s reorganization.59 Scribe, who would bequeath his important collection of old and modern art to the Ghent museum in 1913, exhibited a major part of his collection in the museum as of 1905, where it was shown in a separate cabinet and in a similar, integrated fashion as in his private home (Figure 3.6).60 The introduction of Scribe’s collection into the Ghent museum demonstrates how private collections were also used as sources of inspiration to develop new forms of public display. Yet, the integrated presentation of artworks had only little success in Belgian public museums in the early twentieth century, mainly due to organizational and financial difficulties. Temporary exhibitions, such as the presentations of old art at the World Fairs in Brussels (1910) and Ghent (1913), proved more successful

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Figure 3.6  A selection of the collection of Fernand Scribe as displayed in his private house, before 1913© Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium/Archives of the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, artinflanders.be.

testing grounds to experiment with new display concepts of historicizing settings and period rooms.61

The creation of the artistic home In France it had been Edmond de Goncourt who fully explored the artistic potential of domestic space and shaped a concept of décor in which the combination of different works of fine and decorative art in aesthetic groupings could take on the value of an artwork itself. Accordingly, the collector’s interior became a creative sphere, a total work of art, and the collector himself an artist. Although heavily criticized by avant-gardists such as Meier-Graefe, the influence of de Goncourt’s ‘Maison d’Art’ on the creation of the artistic home is still strongly noticeable around 1900.62 In turn-of-the-century Belgium, many private collectors embraced the integrated and to some extent more sober approach to give a personal note to the display of their collections and to demarcate their interiors as special places of artistic enjoyment, distinct from the ‘normal’ bourgeois interiors. The house

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Figure 3.7  The entrance hall of the house of Charles-Léon Cardon, Brussels, published in: Joseph Fievez, Collection Ch.-Léon Cardon. Première vente. Catalogue de tableaux anciens … (Brussels: Dewarichet, 1921), Ghent, University Library, BIB. ACC.061445.

of the Brussels painter-decorator Charles-Léon Cardon (1850–1920) fully represents this aim to create a highly aestheticized atmosphere, expressing its owner’s individual taste and own artistic as well as social ideals.63 Here, art was presented not in one separate gallery, but integrated in every room of the house. The entrance hall showed a sober, uniform décor in Renaissance style (Figure 3.7).64 A large, sixteenth-century column, placed centrally in the hall, exemplifies Cardon’s personal preferences. Sculpted from Southern-Netherlandish marble but decorated with Italianizing bas-reliefs, the column symbolically merges Northern and Southern Renaissance art.65 An article by the Belgian journalist Louis Dumont-Wilden and published in the Parisian Revue Mensuelle des Musées, Collections, Expositions in 1909 provides further details about Cardon’s house and collection.66 A small cabinet, probably on the ground floor, contained a selection of Franco-Flemish primitives from the sixteenth century, arranged ‘with exquisite taste’ (‘avec un goût exquis’).67 These rare paintings were displayed together with his ‘most interesting bibelots’ (‘bibelots les plus intéressants’): historical jewellery, engraved stones, statuettes

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and ancient earthenware.68 Other salons on the ground and first floor had been adorned by Cardon himself with wall and ceiling paintings in neo-Pompeian, neo-Flemish Renaissance or Empire style, so as to present his varied collections of old and modern paintings, art objects, furniture, sculptures, tapestries, etc., in a suitably, aestheticizing frame. A vast part of the collection, among which many of Cardon’s dearest pictures, was located in the artist’s studio on the second floor, illuminated by zenithal light, ‘this mild light of the museums, seemingly radiated by the pictures hung on the walls’.69 The painted ceiling paid homage to the Archdukes Albert and Isabella, sovereigns of the Habsburg Netherlands in the early seventeenth century, known as important patrons of the arts, and to the Flemish painters Rubens and Van Dyck. In the decorative frame, Cardon thus clearly indicates his artistic and social models. The studio’s walls were covered with pictures ‘from floor to ceiling’ (‘du parquet au plafond’), seemingly arranged without any order or method: a Fragonard sketch next to a Dürer drawing, a portrait by Raeburn next to a Ruysdael landscape, a Rembrandt next to a Velazquez, and several works by Van Dyck – ‘Mr. Cardon lets himself be guided entirely by his fantasy.’70 Dumont-Wilden emphasized how Cardon’s being an artist qualified him as a true amateur. Every single element in his house breathed ‘the unique intuition of the amateur, the sure instinct of the art enthusiast’.71 Cardon was ‘a thoroughbred collector’ (‘un collectionneur de race’), equipped with a superior taste that distinguished him from ‘those who regard art collecting as a mere necessity of their status or fortune’.72 The specific context Cardon designed for the display of his art collection thus functioned as a means to display his own artistic genius, but also to inscribe himself into the tradition of learned, noble amateurship and to demonstrate his social aspirations. At the height of Cardon’s success as an artist and collector, the trend towards integration and a new, modern preference for light, air and colour in interiors – as voiced by Meier-Graefe – found its most striking expression in the collection of Adolphe (1871–1949) and Suzanne (1874–1960) Stoclet. The Stoclets nourished close contacts with the international artistic avant-garde. Their Brussels palace was built between 1905 and 1911 by Josef Hoffmann, architect of the Wiener Werkstätte.73 The Palais Stoclet was conceived as an aesthetic mirror of their owners’s personalities and taste, and designed to suit the display of the couple’s manifold collection of, among others, ancient Egyptian, Asian, preColumbian, Byzantine and Antique-Roman art, early Italian paintings, medieval and contemporary sculpture. Clarity, simplicity and contrast dominated the staging of the artworks in every part of the palace. The vast interior spaces

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displayed only a limited number of pieces, in harmony with the surroundings. The interior design seems to have been modelled after Lewis Foreman Day’s recommendations, with a focus on balance and symmetry, and a strict limitation of artworks as decorative elements.74 In the spacious hall, for example, only a few paintings in dark, simple frames were hung at eye level, paired by some statuettes on black pedestals. The dining room boasted Gustav Klimt’s large mosaic frieze, and the children’s room incorporated wall paintings specifically made for this place,75 again answering Foreman Day’s advice that the ideal way to integrate artworks into a room is to have them designed site-specifically.76 The palace, a true Gesamtkunstwerk, was ‘a world where aesthetic quality had the highest priority’.77 The sober and subtle but, at the same time, overly present and luxurious display of art in the domestic interior was described as ‘representing the taste of the collector who discovered them’.78 The purist interiors of the Palais Stoclet, however, formed an exception rather than the norm.

A private reality? The collection of Albert Loïcq Despite the proliferation of aestheticism and the new ideal of a more sober, harmonious display of artworks in public exhibitions and in domestic space, it often remained a common and, perhaps, necessary practice among collectors to arrange larger numbers of artworks in close vicinity to one another. After all, even in larger properties, space was always limited, and private collectors only rarely made use of external storages, preferring to surround themselves with their collections in the everyday life. In 1890, the Brussels collector of Belgian and French modern art Henri Van Cutsem (1839–1904) commissioned Victor Horta to rebuild his town house in the Avenue des Arts, adding two large exhibition galleries with zenithal light, which he would soon after fill with paintings hung in several rows.79 In 1901, the Antwerp art historian Max Rooses wrote about the collection of his friend, the late Edmond Huybrechts (1834–1901), how his beloved paintings occupied the entire house: ‘The pictures, attentively received, soon abused of their master’s hospitality. From the salons they conquered the staircase and the upper apartments, the fumoir and the boudoir, eventually covering all walls up to the ceilings, blocking also doors and windows.’80 While no image of the Huybrechts collection has survived, a photograph of the hallway in the castle of Albert Loïcq born (1879) in Melle, near Ghent, comes close to Rooses’s description (Figure 3.8). This picture is taken from a photo album showing interior and exterior views of Loïcq’s castle (c. 1927–9), which

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Figure 3.8  Photo Album of the Collection of Albert Loïcq, Melle, Kasteel Zwaanhoek, The hallway, c. 1927–9, RES Collection, courtesy Galerie St-John,Ghent.

constitutes one of the rarer examples of visual sources of a more private character, seemingly not intended for publication. These photographs demonstrate a strongly varying approach in the display of artworks. A photograph of the billiard room, for instance, shows light, marbled walls filled with modern paintings, interspersed with sculptures on free-standing pedestals, as well as statuettes and Art Nouveau glassware on a piano (Figure 3.9). The artworks seem to have been placed where a free spot could be found rather than according to a clear decorative scheme. Some paintings, perhaps the most recent acquisitions

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Figure 3.9  Photo Album of the Collection of Albert Loïcq, Melle, Kasteel Zwaanhoek, The billiard room, c. 1927–9, RES Collection, courtesy Galerie St-John, Ghent.

or the collector’s favourites, were placed on free-standing easels – a practice that became fashionable internationally in the 1880s – and on chairs, suggesting a continuous and organic growth of the collection. In another salon, by contrast, the paintings were hung on a neutral, dark background, all on eye level and in sets of only up to two paintings one above the other (Figure 3.10), recalling the display mode in the exhibitions of Les XX during the 1880s and 1890s. All attention is drawn to James Ensor’s painting The Intrigue (1911),81 situated centrally above the sofa. Photographs of other rooms show a more eclectic display. A so-called ‘Renaissance chamber’ boasted antique furniture, a large chandelier, several paintings and pieces of porcelain arranged against the dark, patterned wall paper, but equally a modern church interior by Alfred Delaunois,82 on a free-standing easel. The drawing room was decorated with fashionable Chinese wallpaper, comfortable armchairs, modern sculpture and glassware. Finally, two photographs of a smaller room, with a cosy corner presumably the boudoir, allow, as it were, an insight into the private sphere of the inhabitant (Figure 3.11). The walls are filled, seemingly without any sense of order, with several small-sized modern paintings and

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Figure 3.10  Photo Album of the Collection of Albert Loïcq, Melle, Kasteel Zwaanhoek, Salon, c. 1927–9, RES Collection, courtesy Galerie St-John, Ghent.

Figure 3.11  Photo Album of the Collection of Albert Loïcq, Melle, Kasteel Zwaanhoek, The boudoir, c. 1927–9, RES Collection, courtesy Galerie St-John, Ghent.

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drawings, including still lifes, landscapes and an intimate scene of three naked girls playing on a beach. These artworks mingle with small everyday items of personal value and memory, such as a little handbag, a precious purse, a photograph and a poem (‘Le Bonheur de ce monde’, a sonnet by Christopher Plantin) pinned to the wall. Here, the wall decoration clearly arose in a more organic and personal way.

Changing aesthetic norms and the continuity of an elite culture Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, aesthetic norms regarding the presentation of artworks slowly began to change and new display concepts in the public as well as private spheres developed in close interaction, revealing intricate mechanisms of inspiration and distinction between the domestic interior, private collections and public exhibitions. While in the first half of the century, collectors ideally presented their (mainly old) paintings in separate galleries and in a contextualizing hanging that reflected their enlightened social-educational ideals and national aspirations, an increasingly integrated, decorative and aestheticizing display of artworks in (almost) all rooms of the private dwelling proliferated around 1900, mirroring the collectors’s individual taste and own artistic aspirations. These new approaches to the role and place of art in the domestic interior can be linked to the collectors’s changing role in public cultural life in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the more ‘public’ task of preserving and displaying national art and heritage was gradually taken over by the upcoming public museums. Hence, private collectors became more ‘free’ to follow their own preferences and artistic ideas, in a period that interior decoration became more widespread and an actual business.83 At the turn of the century, several Belgian collectors, such as CharlesLéon Cardon, were artists, interior decorators and designers themselves, and thus had an affinity with the artful display of their collections by profession. Other collectors nourished close personal contacts to artists and architects. Edmond Huybrechts was a close friend of and advised by the painter Henri Leys.84 Edmond Picard was closely involved in Brussels avant-garde circles, and Charles Van der Stappen, Constantin Meunier and other artists were among his friends.85 Also Adolphe and Suzanne Stoclet were on friendly terms with numerous avant-garde artists through both long-established family ties and new social networks. The highly aestheticized atmosphere

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that resulted from the collectors’s own artistic activities and/or social networks functioned as a means to distinguish the collections from the interiors of the emerging bourgeoisie, and – as in the case of Charles-Léon Cardon – even to consciously inscribe oneself into the tradition of noble patronage and amateurship. In Belgium, the trend towards aestheticizing and more sober modes of display reached a climax in Edmond Picard’s ‘Maison d’Art’ and the Palais Stoclet. This trend, however, was not a straightforward and unambiguous process, and a broad range of different, sometimes contradictory, practices continued to coexist. Combinations of more sober and more complex displays within one dwelling were certainly no rarity, as the interiors of Albert Loïcq demonstrate. The Loïcq collection display moreover confirms that a distinction often needs to be made between the (semi-)public reception rooms of a private collector’s dwelling, where more representative and sober display concepts tended to prevail, and the more intimate domestic space, which, however, remain rather difficult to grasp by traditional (art) historical research methods due to a lack of sources. We may, however, not forget that the disposition of a collection within the domestic space also strongly depended on the actual material possibilities and constraints of a property, that is, the available space, the size of the collection and the type of the collected objects. Art collecting, moreover, is usually an ongoing practice, resulting in the continuous change and organic growth of one’s belongings. Avant-garde ideals, especially totalizing concepts of decoration (as exemplified in the Palais Stoclet), were exceptions and often proved difficult to realize in an existing and inhabited space. The display of private art collections within the domestic sphere thus manifests itself as a complex and multi-layered matter, as it is determined by individual biographies and a broad range of personal preferences, motivations and aims. Finally, private collections in turn-of-the-century Belgium were strongly characterized by continuity. Proximity, intimacy and tactility, that is the direct and close contact with the artworks, as well as the possibility to actually handle them, constitute constant elements in these collections. Also in Picard’s ‘Maison d’Art’ one could actually touch and manipulate the art objects that were for sale.86 These characteristics can already be discerned in the collectors’s cabinets from the seventeenth century, where amateurs scrutinize the exhibited artworks, with the actual tactile experience forming the starting point of their social interaction.87 These features are preserved in the private collections of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which remained places of an elite culture. Although

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(or precisely because) in the course of the ongoing democratization, artworks and other luxury products increasingly filled the domestic interiors of the upper and middle classes, private collectors maintained the specific aura of their collections while they also adapted new display modes that underlined their elevated social, cultural and artistic status.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Ilja Van Damme and Claire Moran for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

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4

Inside/out: Modernity and the domestic interior in Belgian art and literature Claire Moran

Introduction Nineteenth-century Belgium is synonymous with Symbolism, the artistic and literary movement which advocated mystery and suggestivity over the rational and the known and, above all, the subjective over the objective and the idea over reality.1 Belgian artists and writers who contributed to the aesthetic ideals of Symbolism, such as Georges Rodenbach, Emile Verhaeren and Maurice Maeterlinck, on the one hand, and James Ensor and Fernand Khnopff, on the other, have acquired an international reputation which probably exceeds that of their French counterparts, especially outside of the French-speaking world. While a substantial body of critical literature on Belgian Symbolism exists,2 discussions on the domestic interior are largely absent.3 This is surprising considering the number of Belgian Symbolist works that portray the interior: from Khnopff ’s ghostly portraits of his sister at home to the huis-clos of Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-morte and meditations on interiority in Maeterlinck’s Serres chaudes. More significantly, critics have failed to recognize the essential relationship between the specificities of Belgian Symbolist aesthetics and the representation of the domestic interior. The chapter aims to investigate this relationship through the lens of a dialectic between inside and outside in a series of works by established and lesserknown Symbolists, including Rodenbach, Maeterlinck, Khnopff and Ensor, as well as Charles Van Lerberghe, William Degouve de Nuncques, Léon Spilliart and Xavier Mellery.

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Inside/outside, centre/margin: The Belgian artistic scene Distance is a defining aspect of Belgian Symbolism, and of modern Belgian artistic identity more broadly, since, from a cultural, linguistic and geographical perspective Belgium has defined itself against the dominant French example. As Nathalie Aubert, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture and Patrick McGuinness argue in their introduction to From Art Nouveau to Surrealism: Belgian Modernity in the Making, distancing is at the core of the Belgian Symbolist aesthetic: The Symbolists play a game of distance and proximity with their French counterparts, in part because they are engaged in the project of defining a Belgian literature, and in part because they recognize that their own art benefits from keeping their tensions unresolved. Belgian Symbolism produces disciples, but also prodigal sons.4

Emerging as a country only in 1830, late-nineteenth-century Belgium was in an ongoing state of acceptance and resistance in relation to the French cultural example. The birth of Belgian literature was, as Patrick Laude argues, ‘intimately associated with the development of the Symbolist inspiration’,5 but, paradoxically, the principal authors of the movement, Rodenbach and Verhaeren, spent most of their literary careers in France. For Laude, this paradox is compounded further by the fact that ‘their Belgian identity tended to become recognized in proportion to their being “annexed” into the French literary world’. This annexation was never completely successful but it led ‘either to turn Belgium into a literary province of France or to deny categorically any homogeneous specificity to Belgian literature’.6 The dominance of French literary Symbolism through the figures of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine and Rimbaud, to name but a few, and the success of journals such as Mercure de France, created a literary hub from which the specificities of Belgium were only of interest for their ‘exoticism’. Belgian Symbolist painting, however, did not succumb to the same fate of French dominance, and, while the influences of French artists such as Odilon Redon had a significant role to play in the evolution of Belgian fin-de-siècle art, there were also other influences from Germany and England. Belgian Symbolist art found inspiration in and resonances with artists who had little or no links with France, such as Friedlich, Blake, Boecklin, Beardsley, Munch and Whistler. The importance of the avant-garde society Les XX is important in this respect. Founded by the lawyer Octave Maus in 1884, the society sought to supplant the academic canons and defeat the establishment by engaging radical artists both at home and abroad. These included Whistler, Redon, Gauguin, Seurat,

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Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Denis, Vuillard and Bonnard. Writers were also invited, including Mallarmé, Verlaine and Villiers d’Isle-Adam, but because of the success of its exhibitions, which were considered important social events, it was the art which triumphed. In 1888, L’Art Moderne, the polemical artistic journal set up by Maus and Edmond Picard, recognized Symbolism as a key movement for Les XX. At the 1887 Les XX exhibition, the works of Gauguin and Redon were displayed alongside a number of Belgian Symbolists, including Henri de Groux, Khnopff, Mellery, Minne and Rops. The artistic environment of Les XX thus allowed a specific form of Belgian Symbolism to thrive, one which was not indebted to the French example. But France and its cultural heritage would always remain a shadowy presence in fin-de-siècle Belgium, a type of threat that may be encapsulated in the outcry in 1887 over the display of Seurat’s Afternoon at the Grande Jatte at Les XX, which saw artists such as James Ensor lament what he saw as the negative influence of French Neo-Impressionism on Belgian art.7 As Belgian artists and writers sought out a national identity, they both embraced and rejected French heritage and the French cultural example. Difference became a defining characteristic of Belgian artistic identity. As McGuinness points out, unlike most other national literatures which were being defined in terms of purity and essence, Belgian literature is one of the few national literatures to be defined by its difference from the French example by its ‘liminality, by its either/orness’.8 Related to this tension between distance and proximity to the French cultural example is the characteristically Belgian notion of in-betweenness, of boundary crossing. For the contemporary writer Charles De Coster, Flemish culture was situated neatly between two forces: ‘the ancient Germanic element which served as a dam against the invasion of French trends’.9 De Coster’s own Légende d’Ulenspiegel is important in this respect as it is largely agreed to be foundational text of Belgian literature and one which is intimately associated with the development of Symbolism in Belgium.10 As a text which itself defies categorization, blurring generic boundaries, it has as its hero, a trickster figure, Thyl Ulenspiegel, who is a figure of in-betweenness, ‘dodging languages, categories and cultures’.11 For Laude, Thyl embodies the co-existing marginality and liminality of Belgian literature and identity: In the spirit of the Flemish hero, Belgian identity inscribes itself in an integrated marginality in which it finds its dynamism and its power of transformation and creation. Like the trickster figure that anthropology, sociology and comparative religion have defined as a functional pattern of both integration and liberation

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Domestic Space in France and Belgium (and embodied in Ulenspiegel), Belgian Francophone literature of the 1880s and 1890s could be characterized as both marginal and liminal. Its marginality was predicated upon the powerful centrality of the French model (or countermodel). As liminal, it was intent on initiating a new path and it dwelt on the threshold of a promise. As Ulenspiegel, Belgian literature strives to situate itself within the unstable space of a marginal creativity which is constantly skirting both subversion and integration.12

This marginality of nineteenth-century Belgian identity is compounded by its hybridity: for political, social, geographical and linguistic reasons, Belgium was very much a hybrid state, composed of conflicting elements. For McGuinness, an important aspect of Belgian Symbolism is that it ‘defines itself through and not against its hybrid nature and doubleness’.13 In-betweenness, duality and marginality are therefore defining aspects of late nineteenth-century Belgian art and literature. Symbolism is also an artistic movement defined by its liminality and hybridity. Set between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, encompassing both art and literature14 and crossing geographical boundaries – from France to Germany and Italy – its name was a misnomer as it had very little to do with symbols and more to a set of perspectives on creative practice and interpretation. Being ‘in-between’ is very much a characteristic of Symbolist art and literature since it has at its core the anxiety of being between the old and modern worlds, with advances in technology and science creating a need for a retreat to a safer, less threatening existence. In its strictest definition, it was a literary phenomenon, but French Symbolist artists such as Moreau, Redon and Gauguin were inspired in the first instance by Mallarmé, whose emphasis on the aesthetic potential of mystery laid the foundations of modernism. His theories on language were also applicable to painting: To name an object, is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment to be found in the poem, which consists of the pleasure of discovering things little by little: suggestion, that is the dream.15

For the avant-garde writers and artists who promoted it, Symbolism was a style that encouraged the oblique, the allusive and the inexplicit and one which, importantly, sought out participant engagement in the form of multiple meanings or radical paradox. It is therefore a style which is by its essence hybrid and difficult to categorize, being ‘international, eclectic and also incomplete’.16 The appeal of this aesthetic to late-nineteenth-century Belgian artists and writers searching for a style to represent their identity is thus unsurprising, nor

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is it surprising that Belgium would become a key site in exploring the aesthetic possibilities of Symbolism. Albert Mockel was the chief theorist of Symbolism in Belgium, expanding upon Jean Moréas’ 1886 definition to emphasize its intermediary character, stretching ‘between the finished and the unfinished, the determinate and the indeterminate, the finite and the infinite’.17 Mockel was one of the few Walloon- or French-speaking Symbolist writers, since most writers of this generation lived in a Flemish-speaking milieu, but were schooled in French. This linguistic and cultural particularity of Belgian symbolism must also be considered in discussions on its writers, as Gorceix relates: ‘[i]t is indisputable that this specific context played a determining role in their creativity, because these poets […] were able to exploit its particular characteristics.’18 Verhaeren and Elskamp pushed linguistic creativity to its limit, breaking up syntax and grammar and shocking the ear, in a bid to ‘make the language suffer’19 in order to reach pure expressivity, unhampered by (French) conventions.20 This search for a new language was closely linked to a quest for a national identity and for an art that was politically and socially engaged. Max Waller’s acclaimed declaration in La Jeune Belgique ‘Soyons-nous’ became the battle-cry for self-assertion against the cultural hegemony of France: We are not French ! Our goal has always been to create a personal art movement in Belgium, combining the Flemish and Wallon elements. It is only then that it will no longer be possible to claim that Belgian art is a cheap imitation.21

The 1880s marked the beginnings of a national literature where, for the first time, Belgium was to become a literary centre in its own right. The economic crisis of 1873–86 resulted in a social movement which embraced artists and intellectuals, who included, among others, Verhaeren and Edmond Picard.22 While before the recession, art remained a privilege of the bourgeois, these writers saw the need for an art that was politically engaged.23 Yet another less socially engaged art must also be acknowledged in order to understand how Belgian Symbolists imagined the domestic interior. Fin-de-siècle Belgium was also home to the architectural style, conventionally known as Art Nouveau and visible in the houses constructed by Victor Horta, Paul Hankar and Henry van de Velde, for the wealthy bourgeoisie.24 The style was at its heights from the mid-1880s to the first decade of 1900s and was defined above all by its reaction against previous generations, by reordering, reorienting and reinventing practices that had been pushed to the peripheries of established practices; ones which celebrated the unusual, rather than the normal, signified different forms of society and set precedents for a new European culture.25 The sources

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used tended thus towards the unorthodox, the compromised and the impure, drawn from outside the boundaries of normative expectation. This ‘impure’ style thus has resonances with the aesthetic of hybridity visible in the art and literature of the period. Yet what is most significant from our perspective is how Art Nouveau transformed domestic space through an emphasis on openness, through glass windows, doors and roofs. The use of large expanses of glass blurred the conventional distinctions between inside and outside, potentially exposing much of what had been private life to the outside world at large. Walter Benjamin was the first to acknowledge the paradox of Art Nouveau. Writing in ‘Paris, the Capital of the 19th Century’, he observed how despite being a style which seems to be focused on the individual, through technology, it leads to his downfall. The use of glass in domestic settings suggested social transparency and thereby abolished the bourgeois preoccupation with personal discreetness. For Benjamin, ‘it put an end to dwelling in the old sense’.26 It allowed the outside world to penetrate interior spaces.

The dialectics of the domestic interior in word and image It is against this very specific backdrop of the emergence of a national identity, on the one hand, and the cultural context of Symbolism and Art Nouveau, on the other, that our discussion of the interior is situated. The dialectic between inside and outside, and motifs of thresholds and margins dominate representations of interior space in Belgian Symbolism. Late-nineteenth-century Belgium is, as we have seen, a place which is as much defined by what it is not, by difference and absence, as by its own actuality and essence. The ongoing dialectics of inside and outside in Belgium Symbolism echo the larger dynamics of sameness and opposition that define Belgian culture for Verhaeren: ‘everything here exists in contrast. We love the oppositions which co-exist within us.’27 Rodenbach’s writing is typical of this on-going dialectic between inside and out, centre and margin. In ‘Paris et les petites patries’ from 1895, he wrote, ‘Paris donne du recul, crée la nostalgie’.28 Flanders emerges as part of an imaginaire, seen from the distance of the Parisian metropolis, and for McGuinness the theme of death, so central to symbolism and which is at the heart of Rodenbach’s aesthetic, is prefigured in the symbolic death of Flanders as a Belgium location in order to be reborn as a French idea.29 For Laude: The Belgian identity and inspiration of Rodenbach’s writing is predicated upon a separation from Belgium which becomes the sources of a creative nostalgia.

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[…]. Identity is therefore connected to distance, disappearance and death; it involves an imaginary and aesthetic reconstruction of the lost object.30

Nowhere is this sense of loss more pronounced than in the genre-defying text Bruges-la-morte, which tells the fantastical tale of Hugues Viane, a widow who finds a double of his dead wife in the figure of an actress, called Jane, whom he eventually strangles with the locks of his dead wife’s hair. Here, the protagonist lives in a house which is closed against the outside world, concealed through heavy drapes and shutters; ‘les persiennes et les portes closes [the shutters and doors closed]’31 and maintained like a shrine to his wife. Mirrors are omnipresent and the novel is structured according to a series of closed reflections with Jane mirroring the dead wife, and the city of Bruges reflected in its own canals, as the text is reflected in the photographic illustrations which accompany it. Hugues’s secretive meetings with Jane are observed by the curious inhabitants of the town through small mirrors which are fixed to the outside of their windows: Glaces obliques où s’encadrent des profils équivoques de rues; pièges miroitants qui capturent, a leur insu, tout le manège des passants … [Oblique mirrors which frame the ambiguous faces of the streets; shiny traps which capture, at their will, all the activities of the passersby …].32

What is happening outside in the streets of the dead city can thus be seen by its citizens through the security and comfort of their own homes. The outside world can thus be spied on without being experienced and innocent passersby become the subject of prying gazes. The tension between public and private is one of the central preoccupations of the text and the notion of secrecy is highlighted through various motifs, including these mirrors, the chest full of the wife’s clothes and most particularly in the glass casket in which he keeps the locks of hair. This ‘écrin transparent, boîte de cristale’ [‘transparent case, crystal box’]33 is a dream-like space redolent of fairy-tale but with a macabre dimension.34 The dichotomy in the novel arises not only from the interior and exterior, as Hugues navigates between his home-cum-sanctuary-cum-shrine and the streets of Bruges but also from the past and present, as his leaves his old life/wife for a new one. For Gaston Bachelard, the casket is a particularly charged image in this respect: The casket contains the things that are unforgettable, unforgettable for us, but also unforgettable for those to whom we are going to give our treasures. Here the past, present and future are condensed. Thus, the casket is memory of what is immemorial.35

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It is the explosion of the boundaries between these binary states through the intrusion of Jane into the sanctity of Hugues’s universe and her opening of the casket that leads to the unfortunate dénouement. Interestingly, in this context, the first thing Jane does on entering the house is to open the window, which Hugues shuts violently. Then she proceeds to pick up the portraits of his wife until she reaches the casket on the piano, opens the lid and ‘en retira, toute stupéfaite et amusée, la longue chevelure, la déroula, la secoua dans l’air’ [‘stupefied and amused, took the long mane of hair out of it, unrolled it and shook it in the air’].36 The casket opening is the ultimate crime for Hugues, who ‘devenu livide’ [‘having become livid’] strangles her with the hair, which is ‘tendue, était roide comme un câble’ [‘stretched, was as straight as a cable’].37 The opening of the casket is symbolic, the secret is revealed. It is also important from the perspective of the dialectic of inside and outside since, as Bachelard writes: From the moment the casket is opened, dialectics no longer exist. The outside is effaced with one stroke, an atmosphere of novelty and surprise reigns. The outside has no more meaning.38

Rodenbach’s interrogation of the tensions between the interior private world and the outside public domain culminates in the bursting open of this most private of spaces. It is may be understood as symptomatic of a general anxiety on the part of the nineteenth-century bourgeois regarding the dispelling of intimacy and private life through an increasing emphasis on transparency and a life lived in public view. Windows and glass appear as threatening motifs in Rodenbach, as in in other writers of the fin de siècle.39 In particular, they threaten the private self in its interiority and self-reflection. This is evident in Bruges-la-morte but also in Rodenbach’s poetry, such as Le Règne du Silence. Here, he resurrects Flanders and its people through a series of poems on seclusion and silence, and for Gorceix, this is the ‘silence of sleepy bedrooms, the silence of Sundays drowned in rain, the silence of the captive waters of the canals and of the enigmatic aquarium, in tune with the contemplation of the soul’.40 Here, interiority and distance, through resuscitated memory, become one, creating poems that are double, referring to the everyday interior but also to the soul, as in ‘La vie des chambres’ Les chambres, qu’on croirait d’inanimes décors Apparat de silence aux étoffes inertes – Ont cependant une âme, une vie aussi certes, Une voix close aux influences du dehors Qui répand leur pensée en halos de sourdines [Bedrooms, which we would believe to have lifeless decoration,

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ceremonial silence of inert fabrics – Have nonetheless a soul, and also certainly a life, A voice closed to the influences from outside Which spreads their thought in soft halos.]

While on the one hand, the poem points to Baudelaire’s ‘La Chambre double’ and the metaphor of the bedroom as place for respite and creativity, it also emphasizes the fragility of the panes of glass that separate inside and out: Vitres pâles, sur qui les rideaux s’echancrant Sont cause que toujours la Vie est regardée; Vitres: cloison lucide et transparent écran Ou la pluie est encore de la douleur dardée Vitres frêles, toujours complices du dehors, Ou même la musique, au loin, qui persévère, Se blesse en traversant le mensonge du verre Et m’apporte sanglants ses rythmes Presque morts! [Pale panes of glass, against which the curtains tape in Are the reason that Life is always watched; Panes of glass: lucid partition and transparent screen Where rain is still beaten pain Frail panes of glass, always accomplices of the outside, Where even music, which perseveres from afar, Injures itself as it crosses the lie of glass And brings bloodily to me its almost dead rhythms.]

The panes of glass manifest as a transparent screen through which pain and suffering penetrate and offer therefore no protection. Instead, the window is a deception, a trap: Tout cela qui gémit le soir tombé Attire mon esprit dans les vitres, doux piège Ou les larmes, les glas, les rayons morts, la neige Se mêlent dans le verre a l’azur absorbé [All of that which when evening falls wails Attracts my mind to the panes of glass, gentle trap Where tears, knells, dead rays and snow Blend with the absorbed azure in the glass.]41

In Les vies encloses, Rodenbach continues this obsession with panes of glass as separation between worlds of the material and immaterial. While in many

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poems, the interiority of the soul is highlighted through the effects of glass, in others, this same glass is the source of falsehood. In ‘Aquarium mental’, the glass case serves as a respite for the soul, where ‘tout est solitude et silence’ [everything is solitude and silence] and: mon âme s’est fermée et limitée a soi; Et n’ayant pas voulu se mêler a la vie, s’en épure et de plus en plus se clarifie âme déjà fluide où cesse tout émoi [my soul is closed in upon and limited to itself; And not having wanted to mix with life, Cleanses itself and clarifies itself more and more Soul that is already fluid where all emotions cease.]42

But this respite is short-lived where in the following poem ‘Le soir dans les vitres’, the same glass which served to contain and protect the self is instead redolent of the despair of modern life: Les vitres sont alors des aquariums d’ombres! Parmi leur verre glauque a ruisselé le soir; Une perle s’en sauve; une lueur y sombre; et contre leur paleur affleure un afflux noir. [The window panes are thus aquariums of shadow! In the midst of their drab glass is the sweat of evening; A pearl escapes; a glimmer sinks; and against their pallor a black flow appears].43

Glass therefore emerges as a dangerous force, in that it seemingly offers security from the outside world but also reflects and deforms it creating a ‘surreal and worrying’44 atmosphere. Windows are central to the Symbolist aesthetic as Andrea Del Lungo has observed: In Symbolist poetry of the late 19th century, the window is the sign of a closing-in, if not of a complete dehumanisation. This new tragic interpretation is not only due to the radical change in the status of the window itself, whose representation is no longer symptomatic of private life but of a public universe, and which reveals the desperation of the human condition.45

The window is at the heart of discussions on social identity in nineteenth-century art and literature, but is also central to any discussions of domestic space and the changing attitudes of individuals to their immediate environment. The window,

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for Del Lungo, ‘takes on the visual function of allowing the gaze to move through it even when it is closed: it thus establishes that régime of transparency which so profoundly influences the human relationship with space’.46 It is the regime of transparency and the impossibility of real privacy and interiority which comes to be represented through the motif of the window in Symbolist poetry. In Maeterlinck’s Serres Chaudes, which echo Rodenbach’s poems, the window emerges as an ominous symptom of malaise and in ‘Hôpital’, the poet cries: (Oh, n’approchez pas des fenêtres!) Des émigrants traversent un palais! Je vois un Yacht sous la tempête! Je vois des troupeux sur tous les navires! (Il vaut mieux que les fenêtres restent closes On est Presque a l’abri du dehors) [Oh, do not go near the windows! Emigrants cross a palace! I see a Yacht in a tempest! I see herds on all the ships! (It is better that the windows stay shut We are Almost sheltered from outside.)47

While the image of the glass house is visible in other Symbolists (see Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris; Zola, La Curée; and Huysmans, A rebours), what is new in Maeterlinck is the emphasis on its interiority and on the temptations or threats of the outside world, as Gorceix observes: ‘the glass house is the space where the locking in of the soul takes place, the closure of the self, which, from the inside, like the powerless traveller, witnesses the temptation of the outside world through the window.’48 In the unfinished novella, entitled Dans la serre or Sous verre, this threat is made explicit through the coupling of the image of the glass house with that of the pregnant mother and which results in an infanticide. In the notes for the text, Maeterlinck exposes his intention regarding glass as an emblem of danger: ‘rappel du vitrail dans la serre lors de l’infanticide avec le fonds de neige’ [‘The infanticide in the glass house set against a background of snow calls to mind the stained glass’].49 Inside and out become blurred in an ominous and threatening way. Glass therefore comes to emblematize in Maeterlinck, not only the danger of psychological contamination and obstruction to selfreflection, but also to human empathy and ultimately to physical survival. It is in Maeterlinck’s theatre, rather than in Serres chaudes that the relationship between domestic space and the window is explored further and where, together with

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other threshold motifs, such as doors and keys, it serves to question the dialectic between inside and out, private and public. The threshold can be defined in many ways by location, function and material. Etymologically, it can mean an opening or beginning, as well as an obstacle and is a fundamentally ambiguous and time-based construct, referring to both physical and psychological states of being. For Benjamin, the threshold occupied a private place in his theorization of the interior, representing a part of the home with potentially enchanting qualities: Threshold magic. […] This same magic prevails more covertly in the interior of the bourgeois dwelling. Chairs beside an entrance, photographs flanking a doorway, are fallen deities, and the violence they must appease grips our hearts even today at each ringing of the doorbell.50

For Benjamin, the threshold marked the fascinating but ultimately dangerous space between the exterior world of the city, in all its modern glory and the sanctuary of the home. Threshold space has, as Hollis Clayson has argued ‘a special place on thinking the interior because it was literally “on edge” – both unclear and a site of inherent tension because of its composite identity’.51 Just as interior rooms inhabited by élites were becoming more and more specialized and clearly defined, the threshold did not conform; it did not unequivocally belong to one room or one private or social function or another. When a drawing- or sitting-room, for example, gave on to a balcony, it was neither fully inside nor outside; and when a space fell between a social and private use, it belonged neither to the family nor to the visitors. It was in the threshold that the tensions surrounding modernity were made visible, as Victoria Rosner has argued: A way of life built around separation and specialisation encounters difficulty when faced with transitional or in-between states that resist categorization. Such states are architecturally embodied in the threshold, the space that forms a bridge between two discrete rooms.52

It is the window that is the most common threshold between private and public, as Del Lungo explains: Like every threshold, the window simultaneously joins and separates: it stands at the heart of a dialectic between the interior and the exterior, whose spatial delimitations are loaded with symbolic and metaphoric values. A threshold between private and public – for every window presupposes a house, or at least a conceptual dwelling, which sets up a relation between a closed place and an open space – the window separates a domestic universe, most usually figured as feminine, from the social space of the world, the prerogative of the masculine.53

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Maeterlinck’s Intérieur stages the idea of threshold through the creation of two clearly demarcated zones – a house and a garden, separated by windows. This characters are divided into two groups – one (the old man, the foreigner, two children) belonging to the garden and the other a family in the house (the father and mother, two daughters and an infant). The plot revolves around the procrastinations of the old man and the foreigner (both again liminal subjects) waiting for the appropriate moment to tell the inhabitants of the house that their daughter has drowned by. It is very much a play about waiting and watching from the outside in. The goings-on of the family are observed through three downstairs windows, which in a modernist way reveal their intimate lives. As always, Maeterlinck’s stage directions are specific: Au fond une maison, dont trois fenêtres du rez de chaussée sont eclairées. On aperçoit assez distinctement une famille qui fait la veillée sous la lampe. Le père est assis au coin du feu. La mère, un coude sur la table, regarde dans le vide. Deux jeunes filles, vêtues de blanc, brodent, rêvent et sourient à la tranquilité de la chambre. Un enfant sommeille, la tête sur l’épaule gauche de sa mère. [In the background, there is a house where three windows on the ground floor are lit up. We can clearly make out a family keeping vigil under a lamp. The father is seated at the fireside. The mother, leaning her elbow on the table, looks into space. Two young girls, dressed in white, embroider, dream and smile within the tranquility of their bedroom. A child sleeps with its head on the mother’s left shoulder.]54

While in the first instance, the indoor scene appears to be a ‘quotidian’ it is very much a staged version of the everyday. Here, it is the watching which turns this slice of life into a staged behaviour. Again, it is through the stage direction that this is understood: Il semble que lorqu’un d’eux se lève, marche, ou fait un geste, ses mouvements soient graves, lents, rares et comme spritualisés par la distance, la lumière, et le voile indécis des fenêtres. [It seems that whenever one of them stands up, walks or makes a gesture, their movements are grave, slow, strange and almost spiritualised by distance, the light and the indecisive veil of the windows.]55

It is this framing of the inaction in the house as a stage, which allows it to take on meaning. It is thus spectatorship itself which ensures that whatever is seen or heard however mundane or everyday takes on greater signification. In Maeterlinck, as Fabrice van de Kerckhove observes, ‘characters are frozen thus into positions of voyeurs and seem to outline a second scene within the scenic or narrative space.’56 This is evident in a number of plays such as La Princesse Maleine, where the prince sees (from the street outside) his father and Queen

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Anne embracing at a window or in Pelléas, where Yniold, the child is placed on Golaud’s shoulders to spy on Pelléas and Mélisande. This ‘ocular fascination’57 is extended in Interiéur through the character of the observer/old man who becomes a double for the audience. The separation between observer and observed in Interiéur occurs on two planes. First there is the gap of knowledge (about the daughter’s death), and second, there is the physical distance between exterior and interior and between the figures who inhabit each zone. The gap is crossed when the old man finally enters the house, by carefully opening the door at the same time as the crowd of villagers arrive carrying the dead body of their third daughter. The dialectic between inside and out is heightened by the remaining outside characters observing the old man inside through the windows and attempting to gauge whether he has told them the truth. This transpires through a mix of dialogue and stage directions, implicating the other set of observers, which is of course the audience. L’étranger: Il n’ose pas le dire … Il nous a regardés. […] Taisez-vous! (Le vieillard, en voyant des visages aux fenêtres, a vivement détourné les yeux. […] Il s’assoit … (Les autres personnes qui se trouvent dans la salle, s’assoient également, pendant que le père parle avec volubilité. Enfin le vieillard ouvre la bouche et le son de sa voix semble attirer l’attention. Mais le père s’interrompt. Le vieillard reprend la parole et peu à peu les autres s’immobilisent. Tout à coup, la mère tressaille et se lève.) Marthe: Oh la mère va comprendre! [The Stranger: He doesn’t dare say it … He has seen us. […] Be quiet! (the old man, seeing the faces at the window, quickly turns his eyes away. […] He sits down […] (The other people who are in the room also sit down, while the father speaks garrulously. Finally, the old man opens his mouth and the sound of his voice seems to attract attention. But the father interrupts. The old man starts speaking again and slowly the others stop moving. Suddenly, the mother shudders and gets up.]58

The audience is also reminded earlier in the play that they are watchers as the old man relates ‘on nous observe aussi’ [‘we are also being observed’].59 The diegetic space is thus abruptly thrust outwards by Maeterlinck as the foreground of the stage becomes ‘the middle ground of a greater system of spatial relations that spills across the audience/character divide’.60 Intérieur is the essence of metatheatre; one wherein boundaries and thresholds are created only to be

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dissolved. Distances and separations between spectator and spectated, audience and character gradually disappear, resulting in a foregrounding of a sense of being stuck in-between, in an ambiguous state. Yet Maeterlinck was not the first Belgian symbolist playwright to exploit the threshold motif in the domestic interior to convey philosophical and psychological concerns. Charles Van Lerberghe’s play Les Flaireurs, first published in 1888 in the Symbolist journal La Wallonie, used the image of the front door to intimate the intrusion of death into everyday life. In three short acts, the young girl and her mother hear successive knocks on the door of their home until, at midnight, the door opens suddenly and the mother dies. The play was acknowledged as the first work of Belgian Symbolist theatre, evoking through the theme of death entering the home the greater crisis felt by young Belgian artists and writers. For Paul Aron: […] Belgian Symbolists live in a broken way in the society from which they emerged […] In this context, death intervenes as much as an instance of liberation, as a condemnation, because it delivers them from this state of crisis, all the while serving as a witness of the loss of their very being.61

Thus, the symbolism of the motif of death entering the home had a particular resonance for fin-de-siècle Belgian writers. Maeterlinck would develop the theme further, in a number of plays, most notably, Annonciatrice (lost) and L’intruse to create a mood of disquiet, eeriness and anticipation that prefigures Surrealism. In L’intruse, the action takes places in what is an in-between, transitional space, the living room, flanked by doors and windows: Une salle assez sombre en un vieux château. Une porte à droite, une porte à gauche et une porte masquée, dans un angle. Au fond, des fenêtres a vitraux ou domine le vert, et une porte vitrée s’ouvrant sur rune terrasse. … [A dark room in an old castle. A door to the right, a door to the left, and a small masked door in the corner. At the end of the stage, green-glassed windows, and French windows opening onto the terrace …]62

The doors fulfil a specific function in the play, as McGuinness has argued, adding to the suspense through their closing and opening and serving as references to the invisible and the unseen. The doors bring one space to an end, and herald the beginning of another; they are both protective and symbolic […]. A door (or a window) opened or unopened, […] is a physical object which ‘alludes’ to something beyond itself, while remaining visible on one side only. Like the unanswered question, it is the intelligible half of something addressed as the unknown.63

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In each of Maeterlinck’s works, the threshold motif of the door or window is the site of a division between dream and reality, conscious and unconscious, and the characters serve as sleepwalkers in an irrational drama that is at the same time naïf and incomprehensible. Through these motifs, the domestic is therefore the site of a siege between conflicting but mutually defining forces – life and death, self and other, rational and irrational. In the work of Fernand Khnopff, arguably ‘the most important of the Belgian Symbolists’,64 it is through the motif of the threshold that the dialectic between inside and out becomes an exercise on visual aesthetics; in particular, questioning the role of the spectator in the artistic process. Khnopff was a friend and collaborator both of Rodenbach and of Maeterlinck, illustrating their works, including a frontispiece for Bruges-la-morte, as well as a number of pastels inspired by the book and illustrations for a special edition of Pelléas and Mélisande (Brussels, 1914). The atmosphere of a static universe, shrouded in mystery, dominates all of Khnopff ’s works with the image of the aquarium, with its sense of enclosure and dream serving as a recurring leitmotif. Khnopff mostly painted portraits,65 many involving his sister and many with his friends’ children posing indoors. Threshold spaces also dominate these works and are liminal spaces, in-between worlds that served to highlight a mood of uncertainty, of an intermediary state between innocence and knowledge, past and present, life and death, dream and reality. Whereas interiority and its atmosphere and effects are portrayed in Listening to Schumann (Brussels, MRBAB, 1883), one of his most celebrated and polemical works,66 spatial and psychological distances are explored in the Portrait of Jeanne Kéfer (Jean-Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 1885) (Plate 1), the Portrait of Marguerite (Brussels, MRBAB, 1887) and I Lock This Door upon Myself (1894, Vienna, Neue Galerie) (Plate 2). Khnopff ’s career began with portraits of children, and Jeanne was the daughter of the composer Gustave Kéfer and an important member of nineteenth-century Belgian artistic circles. In this painting, Jeanne is represented as a young child, no more than three or four but seems to have the air and gestures of an adult. She is set unusually against a doorway with a glass panel and the work is unlike typical Realist or Impressionist portraits of children in its emphasis on the unnatural. The abstract space is emphasized further through the contrast of colours and the shining floorboards which give a sense of distance. The figure of Jeanne is static against the dynamic background as the walls, floorboards, doors and glass panels all offer different perspectives. She seems to hover, almost ghostlike – a kind of liminal figure, in keeping with the marginal figures that populate Belgian writing of this period. The child’s face, as in other child portraits by the

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artist (such as Portrait de Henry de Woelmont or Portrait de Mademoiselle Van der Hecht), attests to a fixed gaze that, instead of looking outwards, seems to represent a type of absorption; it is although a veil separates their world and that of the spectator. For Michel Draguet, this gaze ‘imposes the necessary distance to protect the image from the invasion of reality’67 and it is a tool in an elaborate distancing process. The panes of glass on the door panel are also important in this respect since, in contrast to the precise rendering of the child’s clothes, offer a vague impression of an interior. This confusion is compounded by the lighting, which seems too bright for indoors, while outside, beyond the glass panels seems dark. The entire painting is a deception, ‘un leurre’.68 The spectator finds it difficult thus to find a way into the work and to locate its meaning. For Draguet, within this seemingly innocent portrait of a child is a complex treatise on artistic representation: The composition is symbolic. It extends, in a melancholic way, the opposition between idea and matter. Distance is no longer inscribed within the image, as in Une crise but between man and image, between existence and the ideal perfection of an icon which is hence inaccessible.69

Another ‘portrait’ set against a doorway is that of Marguerite from 1887. Here again, there is a surreal effect as, through the cropping the picture, Marguerite seems out of place against the narrow doorway. It is difficult to see what distance she is from us, and, like Jeanne, she takes on a fantastical air. As in the previous image, staging techniques are evident and the work ‘may only be inaccurately described as a portrait’, since ‘she is costumed, posed, transformed into the actress on Khnopff ’s personal stage’.70 Here, the sense of being closed in is emphasized through the representation of the frames of the door, the covered pane of glass and the key in the lock. It is also seen in the long gloves and in the unusual dress fastening, which could be almost back-to-front. The physical body is enclosed and encased, suggesting at a need for escape through the emblem of the door. Critics have noted the resemblance between the dress and human skin, where its fastenings emerge almost like a sewn-up wound and which may point to another ‘impregnable threshold’.71 Again, what is interesting from our perspective is how this play with composition challenges the spectator. Many of Khnopff ’s images of Marguerite find their origins in photographs of tableaux-vivants enacted for him to aesthetic effect, creating additional levels of reality. Marguerite appears at once inaccessible to us and also directly in our space. Her frontality is contested by her avoidance of our gaze, as she appears, like Jeanne, absorbed in thoughts which go beyond the picture frame. On the one hand, it is a portrait of

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interiority, symbolized by the closed door; on the other, however, it is a painting which challenges our attempts to give it meaning through the distancing effects of the thwarted gaze, the contorted pose and inharmonious perspectives. These elements successively distract the viewer and his or her quest for interpretation. In I Lock the Door upon Myself from 1891, inspired by Rosetti’s poem, the sense of an interior prison is also highlighted but this time with a somnolent figure set against a strange hybrid space of inside and out. The part of the painting to the left appears to be the decorated interior wall of a house but this leads to an outside doorway and further panels which seem to represent the interior with a sculpture of Hypnos and then a final panel with an outside scene. It is unclear whether this final scene is meant to represent the outside world or is a mise-en-abyme. The withering lilies (from right to left) whose orange colour is reminiscent of the woman herself hint at a metaphoric language of death and the black cloth seems to cover a piano. Charged with symbolism, what is most interesting from our point of view is this play between inside and outside. For Kosinski, the background of this work is seen as an elusive environment of flat rectangular screens and circular mirrors-apertures, all secured aby a vague geometry of frames or edges. These illogically unrelated passages, each with distinct spatial definition and texture, [which] defy attempts to recompose them into a logical-readable arrangement of walls, mirrors, doors windows, and so forth.72

As in the previous two portraits, the interrogation of pictorial space through the setting of the domestic interior leads to a questioning of representation itself, and, in particular the role of the viewer. The figures in these works, like those of Maeterlinck’s drama, all occupy liminal spaces both psychologically and physically but the real in-between space that Khnopff questions is that between the viewer and the painting. It is the effect of the work of art upon the spectator that was the real obsession of the Symbolists, as epitomized in Mallarmé’s dictum: ‘paint not the thing itself but the effect it creates’.73 It may be argued that these interior paintings, by focusing on the spectator who remains outside of the painting, problematize the essential dichotomy at the heart of modern aesthetics.

Out of the interior – into the fantastic The way in which the interior provides a context in which aesthetic boundaries can be interrogated is also seen in other Belgian Symbolists, many of whom are pushing at the boundaries of modern art. The role of the imagination and

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its reframing of reality through the grotesque and the fantastic are important to the development of modern art in Belgium, particularly in the context of Surrealism. In Mellery, Spilliart and Ensor, we also see the interior emerging as a site for aesthetic transgression. Originally a Realist, Mellery’s most influential artworks were richly atmospheric drawings of his own home. Seven drawings were exhibited at les XX in 1890 under the title of ‘L’Ame des choses’, ‘the inner life of things’, echoing Rodenbach’s poem ‘La Vie des Chambres’ in Le  Règne de silence.74 These drawings showed parts of interiors not usually given to introspective studies: corridors, stairs and doorways. What they have in common is an emphasis on mystery through graphic effects. As in Khnopff, there is a close attention to form and here, rather than composition, it is the medium which translates the mood. Playing with the effects of light and dark, through pencil, crayon and charcoal, Mellery allows these everyday spaces to express an ambiance of silence and shadow. Works such as Stairway, light effect (Plate 3) are emblematic of his style in drawing attention to the fantastic in the quotidian via an emphasis on suggestivity. Whereas this aesthetic of suggestivity has links to Mallarmé and other Symbolists, what is specific to Mellery is the role of the interior and, in particular, its intermediary spaces in creating mood: [T]he painter solicits objects and the quietest corners of interiors to express their mystery. Deserted corridors, scarcely lit, staircases which don’t seem to lead anywhere, which are used by shadows with hidden faces, abandoned clothes, doors half-opened onto strange absences – all of this extends the echo of a ceaseless questioning on destiny.75

What we see in Mellery is an aesthetic in which the interior and its inbetween and empty spaces become a pretext for psychological and philosophical concerns. The art of drawing is central to the success of this enterprise and, championed by critics such as Champfleury, Baudelaire and Gautier, graphic arts had witnessed a revival in the late nineteenth century. Mellery would also have been influenced by artists such as Odilon Redon, who exhibited at Les XX in 1886 and for whom ‘black is the most essential colour. […] It is the agent of the mind far more than the beautiful colour of the palette or the prism.’76 It is important to observe the role of the medium of drawing in developing this aesthetic of the in-between – drawing – in pencil, charcoal and pastel, emerges as a tool in forging a new aesthetic. Mellery’s interiors use form to translate a state of mind; an intimisme that is both personal and universal, as the representation of everyday objects and spaces of the domestic home do not comfort the artist or viewer but instead

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lead towards more questions, more possibilities. In a similar way to Khnopff and Maeterlinck, therefore, the spectator is left in a state of unease, wondering what lies beyond the half-opened door, down the dimly lit stairs, or behind the vestibule. The unseen aspects of Mellery’s drawings go beyond the physical limitations of the interior space and allow the spectator’s imagination thus to intervene, similar to the aesthetic of the unfinished espoused by Baudelaire: Il y a une grande différence entre un morceau fait et un morceau fini – qu’en général ce qui est fait n’est pas fini, et qu’une chose très-finie peut n’être pas faite du tout – que la valeur d’une touche spirituelle, importante et bien placée est énorme. [There is a great difference between a piece which is done and a piece which is finished – in general that which is done is not finished and something that is very finished is perhaps not done at all – the value of a spiritual, wellplaced and important stroke, is enormous.]77

But it is in the work of Ensor that the domestic interior is the site for the most radical aesthetic innovation. While best known for his Expressionist paintings of masks and skeletons and their biting critiques of late-nineteenthcentury Belgium, Ensor’s provocative art was conceived and elaborated through representations of the domestic interior. In the 1880s, Ensor reworked a number of earlier representational drawings and added elements of the fantastic, creating images whose coherence, as Robert Hoozee observes, was defined by ‘the lawlessness of associations, metamorphoses, antitheses, and ambiguities’.78 In a series of thirty-one drawings in the former collection of Ensor’s friend Ernest Rousseau, there exist thirteen images that were produced in two stages, with the artist turning to collage or adding new elements to complete the sheets. Modifying the representational images of his immediate domestic surroundings, by adding fantastic and weird forms, and unusual associations of subjects, Ensor disrupts their order and readability. Drawings such as Hippogriff (1880– 1885, Ghent: Museum voor Schone Kunsten) (Plate 4) and The Flea (1886–8, Private Collection) (Plate 5) remain the best examples of this re­imagining of the earlier images. The composition of both drawings is unharmonious, with many subjects treated in different styles, filling the pictorial space. Hippogriff resulted from Ensor’s joining of two drawings and fusing them with elements of the unreal. A vase­-like object in the foreground has been transformed into a mask, while the sketch of a horse, to the right of the drawing, has become that of a mythical creature. Strange and imaginative forms frame these images and contrast with the fragment of a still-life and the depiction of two silhouettes in the upper half of the drawing. In The Flea, elements of representational drawings

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of a floral vase and the family dog are fused to create the grotesque vision of a giant flea admiring itself in a hand mirror. Ensor’s blending of high and low pictorial hierarchies, where no single element gains prominence, is particularly modern and marks an important stage in the evolution of his aesthetic. As Marcel de Maeyer observes, Ensor’s drawings ‘amalgamate extreme realism and imagination in an unprecedented way in Western Art’.79 The jumbled nature of the images results, as Canning notes, in: a drawing whose free association invokes not only the multiplicity of lived experience, where the external world of observation and the internal world of thought collide, but also the randomness of daydream.80

Therefore, in Ensor, the dialectic between inside and out becomes translated into one about external observation and flights of the imagination. For Verhaeren, Ensor’s treatment of line, visible here in the detailed rendering of the mirror, is also key to the haunting nature of such drawings and the poet’s reflection on the importance given to the rendering of household objects is worth quoting in full: These drawings, which are quite literal, have an ample life. There is nothing industrial about them. If, for James Ensor some pieces of furniture are haunted, all of these objects shiver, move and feel. Cruelty is at home in the knife, discretion in the lock and case, respite and security in the pieces of wood. Nothing is completely dead. Each matter keeps its tendencies, its will and its mind within itself. It has been created for a specific goal. It must thus have something like a soul which reaches out to an end and it is precisely this soul which alone interests us in the inanimate and which alone constitutes, to the eyes of the artist, the beauty of the most ordinary things.81

What Verhaeren sees in Ensor’s drawings is his ability to visually express psychological and existential concerns through a dialogue between the animate and the inanimate, between reality and the fantastic. In his later works, Ensor expressed such concerns through the skeleton and the mask but it is through the domestic interior that they are first explored by Verhaeren’s review refers to one of the painter’s most evocative images, The Haunted Furniture (1885 and 1890) (Plate 6).82 Here, in another twist to the Belgian Symbolist theme of death knocking at the door, Ensor lends a certain domesticity to the motif of the skeleton as it penetrates the environment of the family home. In the image which also belongs to the category of drawings reworked by the artist, a series of eerie skeletons and masks look on, as a figure resembling Mitche aids a young child with her homework. The dialectic between the inanimate and the animate lends the image its poignancy. The chest, the skeletons and the masks are all

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invested with life, while the two female figures appear ghost-like. Similar to Khnopff and Maeterlinck, thus the viewer’s expectations are disrupted, while the theme of death lurking within the everyday, which we see in Rodenbach and Van Lerberghe also finds another voice, as does Mellery’s emphasis on the ‘life’ of domestic objects and things. Ensor’s drawings expose his mediations on the potential of domestic space to explore aesthetic possibilities and it is in his interrogation of the dividing lines between the real and the fantastic, between observation and imagination, between everyday lived experience and the human condition that his art is modern. However, unlike other Belgian Symbolists, Ensor, it is less a sense of ambiguity that defines his art, than a doubleness, a duality. As his aesthetic developed, this duality would become pronounced through a modern grotesque in paintings such as The Mask Wouse, The Entry of Christ into Brussels or Skeletons Trying to Warm Themselves, where macabre mascardes served as ironic commentaries on Belgian social and political life. The domestic remained central to these explorations and many of the painter’s most provocative commentaries on modern Belgium are set in his domestic space – the family home in which he lived and worked by Skeletons Trying to Warm Themselves (1889, Forth Worth: Kimbell Art Museum) (Plate 7) is probably one of the best examples of the domestic interior in Expressionism. Two central skeletal figures huddle around a stove, while other eerie skulls look on. On the one hand, the image is clearly personal: the skeleton, lying on the floor, his boot protruding from under an ochre-coloured smock, is linked with a painter’s palette, and, as Lesko has pointed out ‘becomes a metaphor for the artist’.83 On the other hand, the painting signals the demise of the human in the advent of modernity, as these skeletons play at being alive. For Verhaeren, this remained one of Ensor’s most haunting images: In Skeletons Trying to Warm Themselves, a sense of nothingness prevails. Nothing is poorer, more sad, more lugubrious than this idea of warmth and well-being evoked before such hollow and limp beings. They come close, gather around and worry in from of this useless fire, this flame for no good, this home that makes a mockery of them and which does not itself exist.84

Ensor’s influence is seen in other early Expressionists such as Spilliart, for whom the domestic interior was the focus of a series of drawings and pastels from the early 1900s, which presented images of unassuming subject matter (cardboard boxes, potted plants, picture frames) lit artificially and which, through their ‘perverse cropping, disorienting reflections and improbable cast shadows’, as Elizabeth Clegg observed, ‘infuse the stable and familiar with a sense

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of perilous mutability’.85 Spilliart’s extraordinary self-portraits, for which he is best known, were also conceived in the domestic interior, playing with effects of light and dark, distorted perspectives, against the family backdrop of every-day life in order to create nightmarish visions of the self, as in Self-portrait with a Red Crayon (1908) (Ostend: Mu.ZEE) (Plate 8). By allowing the macabre and the fantastic to be expressed alongside the everyday and the mundane, Ensor and Spilliart offered a new vision for modern art, which would be explored further in the work of Expressionists such as Munch and Kirchner. The inside world of the domestic conceived via the imagination therefore helped negotiate a new relationship with the spectator and allowed the language of the personal and the private, of inner experience, to become universal.

Conclusion A re-imagining of the domestic interior was at the core of Belgian Symbolism and the dialectic between inside and out that characterizes all of the works discussed may also be interpreted in terms of the fundamental duality that defined modernity. For Baudelaire, modernity is essential dual defined by its opposite: ‘Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, that half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.’86 It is in the constant dialogue with the past, in the tensions and contradictions of a present that immediately becomes outdated that modernity emerges. Yet as Aubert, Fraiture and McGuinness have argued, doubleness, duality and contradiction define Belgian culture: Belgian artistic culture, at any rate its avant-garde culture, comes with a dual sense of, on the one hand, being oppressed by examples and models; and, on the other, of being free to begin again, or reject what one had begun with. Before Belgian culture has been able to see what it is, it has always had to articulate what it is not.87

It becomes clear that in terms of both Symbolist aesthetics and modernism, more broadly, Belgium occupies a potent site, culturally emblematic of the preoccupation with the in-between, the dual and their interrelationship. Our discussion of interiors and their representation in art and literature has shown an overlooked aspect of Belgian aesthetics of the fin de siècle. It is via the ‘safe space’ of the domestic interior that Belgian art and literature renews itself and the representation of these internal spaces which are defined by what they are

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not – inside/out, real/imaginary, self/other, subject/object, artist/spectator – are at the core of modernist aesthetics. It is (in true modernist fashion) ironic that by revisiting the obscured theme of the interior in the liminal field of Belgian Symbolism that perhaps the clearest articulation on the defining aspects of modern art and literature at the turn of the century are most visible.

Bibliography Anonymous, La Jeune Belgique, Brussels, May (1886): 308–9. Anonymous, La Jeune Belgique, Brussels, September (1890): 352–3. Aron, Aron, ‘Du Divertissemement populaire au culte de l’art: Naissance de la scène moderne’. In La Belgique Artistique et Litteraire, edited by Paul Aron, 622–86 (Brussels: Editions complexe, 1997). Aron, Paul (ed.), La Belgique artistique et littéraire (Brussels: Labor, 1997). Aron, Paul, Les Écrivains belges et le socialisme (Brussels: Labor, 1994). Aubert, Nathalie Pierre-Philippe Fraiture and Patrick McGuinness, From Art Nouveau to Surrealism: Belgian Modernity in the Making (London: Legenda, 2007). Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space ([1958] Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). Baudelaire, Charles, Œuvres complètes II, edited by C. Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Interior, The Trace’. In The Arcades Project, translated by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, 19–20 (Harvard: The Belknap Press, 1999). Del Lungo, Andrea, La Fenêtre: Sémiologie et histoire de la representation littéraire (Paris: Seuil, 2014). Canning, Susan M., ‘The Devil’s Mirror: Private Fantasy and Public Vision’. In Robert Hoozee and Catherine Ziegler, Between Street and Mirror: The Drawings of James Ensor (New York: The Drawing Centre and University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Clayson, Hollis, ‘Threshold Space: Parisian modernism betwixt and between (1869 to 1891)’. In Impressionist Interiors, edited by J. McLean, 14–30 (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2008). Clegg, Elizabeth, ‘Léon Spilliart: self-portraits’. The Burlington Magazine 149, no. 1251 (June 2007): 427–8. de Maeyer, Marcel, ‘Mystic Death of a Theologian’. In Between Street and Mirror: The Drawings of James Ensor, edited by Robert Hoozee and Catherine Ziegler (New York: The Drawing Centre and University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Delevoy, Robert L., Fernand Khnopff (Paris: Skira, 1982). Draguet, Michel, Khnopff ou L’ambigu poétique (Paris: Crédit Communal, 1995). Draguet, Michel, Le Symbolisme en Belgique (Paris: Fond Mercator, 2010). Ensor, James, Lettres, edited by Xavier Tricot (Brussels: Labor, 1999). Gorceix, Paul, La Belgique artistique et littéraire (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1997). Gorceix, Paul, Fin de siècle et Symbolisme en Belgique: Œuvres poétiques (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1998).

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Gross, Stefan, Les Concepts nationaux de la littérature II, edited by Stefan Gross, Johannes Thomas (Berlin: Alano/Rader Publikationen, 1989). Hoozee, Robert, ‘Drawings and Etchings’. In Robert Hoozee and Catherine Ziegler, Between Street and Mirror: The Drawings of James Ensor (New York: The Drawing Centre and University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Kosinski, Dorothy, ‘The Gaze of Fernand Khnopff ’. In The Artist and the Camera, Degas to Picasso, edited by D. Kosinski, 142–56 (New Haven: Yale University Press). Laude, Patrick, ‘Belgian Symbolism and Belgian Literary Identity’. In Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle, edited by Patrick McGuinness, 194–209 (Exeter: University of Exeter press, 2000). Legrand, Francine-Claire, Le Symbolisme en Belgique (Brussels: Laconti, 1971). Loze, Pierre and François Loze, Art Nouveau in Belgium (Brussels: Snoeck-Ducaji & Zoon, 1993). Lesko, Diane, James Ensor: The Creative Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). Lucie-Smith, Edward, Symbolist Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972). Mallarmé, Stéphane, Correspondance (1862-1871) (Paris: H. Mondor, 1959). Mallarmé, Stéphane, Igitur, Divagations, Un coup de dès (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). Maurice Maeterlinck, Carnets de travail I, edited by Fabrice van De Kerckhove (Brussels: Labor, 2002). Maurice Maeterlinck, Intérieur, in Œuvres II, edited by Paul Gorceix (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1999), 501–21. Maurice Maeterlinck, L’Intruse, in Œuvres II, edited by Paul Gorceix (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1999), 241–81. McGuinness, Patrick, Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (London: Oxford University Press, 2000). McGuinness, Patrick (ed.), Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle (Exeter: University of Exeter press, 2000), 194–209. McGuinness, Patrick, ‘Belgian Literature and the Symbolism of the Double’. In From Art Nouveau to Surrealism: Belgian Modernity in the Making, edited by Nathalie Aubert, Jean-Phillippe Fraiture and Patrick McGuinness, 8–22 (London: Legenda, 2007). Moran, Claire, ‘Fernand Khnopff and the Aesthetics of Intimacy’. Dix-Neuf 22, no. 3-4 (2018): 204–21. Picard, Edmond, ‘Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire’. L’Art moderne, Brussels, June 14 (1891): 188–9. Redon, Odilon, A Soi-Même - notes sur la vie, l’art et les artistes ([1922] Paris: José Corti, 1989). Rapetti, Rodolphe, Symbolism (Paris: Flammarion, 2016). Rodenbach, Georges, Bruges-la-morte ([1892] Paris: Flammarion, 1998). Rosner, Victoria, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

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Scott, Hannah, Broken Glass, Broken World. Glass in French Culture in the Aftermath of 1870 (Oxford: Legenda, 2016). Stevens, Maryanne, ‘Symbolism in Europe’. The Burlington Magazine 118, no. 875 (1976): 120–4. Verhaeren, Emile, Sur James Ensor (Brussels: G. Van Oest & cie, 1908).

5

A place to grieve: Georges Rodenbach, Marcel Proust Nathalie Aubert

By the end of the nineteenth century, with the rise and triumph of the bourgeoisie, the vision of a house as a societal ideal emerged. The notion of domesticity associated with ideas of ‘privacy, comfort’ and a ‘focus on the family’1 presented the home as a place of refuge, a ‘place of peace’ amidst the chaos of modern life. As Walter Benjamin remarked, the domestic interior became synonymous with ‘the universe for the private citizen’.2 It provided ‘a stage on which one’s most intimate feelings could be acted out with the greatest authenticity’.3 This became even more apparent with the Haussmannization of Paris in the second half of the century which created changes on the urban scene and significantly altered the perception of public and private spaces. For Sharon Marcus, to the newly created public realm based on ‘mobility, exchange and visual display’ corresponded a new urban space conceived as ‘a private realm of intromission and seclusion’.4 In her view, in this period, the individualization of the urban experience led to an ‘elegiac melancholy of an enclosed and isolated narrator’.5 Thus the interior became opaque, private and cut from any intrusive gaze. Two of the most conspicuous literary examples of this process towards a domestic interior that is removed from view, harbouring a consuming form of melancholy, can be found in George Rodenbach’s novel Bruges-la-Morte written in 1892, and second, in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, particularly the two volumes La Prisonnière (translated as The Captive) (1923) and The Fugitive (Albertine disparue) (1925). These narratives deal with a highly private and absorbing experience: that of mourning. The focus of this chapter is therefore to examine the way in which the domestic interior is affected by the work of mourning by two men, who both, significantly, struggle between ‘mourning’ and ‘melancholia’, prisoners of a space that is highly masculinized despite traces of the

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lingering and obsessive presence of the deceased wife/lover. Indeed, if one of the major trends of the late-nineteenth-century interior has been that it appeared ‘as a separate sphere of feminine aesthetic self-expression and identity formation’6 it is remarkable that in these narratives where the female character is actually missing,7 the absence and mourning of woman not only has a transformational effect on how domestic space is perceived by the two male protagonists, but also makes the domestic space emerge as an intensely closed and male-oriented space. So the starting point here is to examine domestic interior as the space of mourning since, as a process based on the tension between remembering and forgetting, mourning is connected with time and memory, but it is also inscribed in space. A ‘specifically modern phenomenon’,8 domestic space has a direct bearing on how nineteenth-century individuals articulated privacy in psychological terms. In both narratives, mourning appears as an archetypal example of the connectedness between emotional mental state and seclusion. In both cases, it is expressed through forms of exclusion and cessation of interest in the outside world, bearing all the hallmarks of ‘melancholia’ as Freud described it in his 1917 essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. Indeed, if he presents melancholia and mourning as similar9 in that they display characteristics of profound dejection, loss of interest in love and all activity,10 mourning is for him a natural and healthy process (with various conflicted stages) with a finite duration, whereas melancholia is defined as a pathological, static and seemingly infinite repetition of the mourner’s self-absorption in grief which serves to psychically prolong the existence of the lost object. Given the intensity of these emotions, and their deeply private nature, grief stretches beyond the confines of the domestic interior. Like a dark cloud creating its own climate, grief unites the inside and the outside in one uniform world dominated by gloom. Bruges-la-Morte is the first narrative of the modern age to connect mourning with a space that is both intensely domestic and closed, as well as linked to the urban fabric of the city which is described/presented in a continuum with the interior of the protagonist’s house:11 Le jour déclinait, assombrissant les corridors de la grande demeure silencieuse mettant des écrans de crêpe aux vitres. Hugues Viane se disposa à sortir, comme il en avait l’habitude quotidienne à la fin des après-midi. Inoccupé, solitaire, il passait toute la journée dans sa chambre, une vaste pièce au premier étage, dont les fenêtres donnaient sur le quai du Rosaire, au long duquel s’alignait sa maison, mirée dans l’eau. Il lisait un peu: des revues, de vieux livres; fumait beaucoup; rêvassait à la croisée ouverte par les temps gris, perdu dans ses souvenirs.12

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[The daylight was failing, darkening the corridors of the large, silent house, putting screens of crepe over the windows. Hugues Viane was preparing to go out, as was his daily habit at the end of the afternoon. Solitary, with nothing to occupy his time, he would spend the whole day in his room, a vast retreat on the first floor whose windows looked out onto the Quai du Rosaire, along which the façade of his house stretched, mirrored in the canal. He read a little – journals, old books – smoked a lot, and spent hours in reverie at the window open to the grey weather, lost in his memories.]13

These are the opening lines of the novel, at once situating Viane in his house, itself symbolically in mourning (the image of ‘screens of crepe over the windows’ is explicit enough), entirely absorbed in his thoughts. From the start, the interior space (clearly connoted with wealth) is linked with the exterior (‘his house stretched, mirrored in the canal’). One of the main aims of the novel, clearly defined by Rodenbach himself in the introduction, is to link the protagonist’s own state of mind with the city, thus creating a vast ‘soulscape’, a network of états d’âme following the horizontal topography of the Belgian ‘dead city’ and its canals. This setting has all been carefully chosen by Viane himself: « C’est pour sa tristesse même qu’il l’avait choisie et y était venu vivre après le grand désastre »14 [It was for its melancholy that he had chosen it and had gone to live there after the great catastrophe].15 Once widowed, ‘il avait eu l’intuition instantanée qu’il fallait s’y fixer désormais. Une équation mystérieuse s’établissait. A l’épouse morte devait correspondre une ville morte’16 [(he) had immediately and instinctively known he must settle there. A mysterious equation gradually established itself. He needed a dead town to correspond to his dead wife].17 The city is thus the chosen setting for the exclusive devotion that his mourning requires in his view. In the letter that Léon Daudet addressed to Rodenbach congratulating him upon the publication of the novel, the French critic rightly noted: «Il n’y a plus de descriptions mais des états d’esprit, des coïncidences du dedans et du dehors »18 [there aren’t any descriptions anymore, just soulscapes, coincidences between inside and outside]. If Rodenbach seems to have complexified the dialectics of outside and inside, it is certainly that – and Proust will remember this – Viane is not closer to himself and his grief if he withdraws into himself. The truth about his own prison of mourning and melancholy is also outside, in the canals, the mournful rain and the bells of the parish, all images of sorrow and of death: Les persiennes et les portes closes, il se décida à son ordinaire promenade du crépuscule bien qu’il ne cessât pas de pluviner, bruine fréquente des fins d’automne, petite pluie verticale qui larmoie, tisse de l’eau, hérisse d’aiguilles les

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canaux planes, capture et transit l’âme comme un oiseau dans un filet mouillé, aux mailles interminables!19 [With the doors and shutters closed, he set out on his usual twilight walk, even though the heavy drizzle, common in late autumn, did not stop, fine rain, tears falling vertically, weaving moisture, sewing down the air, setting the smooth surface of the canals abristle with needles, capturing and transfixing the soul, like a bird, in the interminable meshes of a watery net!]20

The continuity between interior and exterior is expressed in the metonymic ‘tears’ of the perpetual mourner represented by the persistent rain over the canals of the dead city as well as a sense that the prison of the soul caught in this ‘watery net’ is the extension of the confinement of the domestic interior represented in physical closure of the house. Indeed, for Rodenbach and for most of Belgian Symbolist artists and writers, the city of Bruges was above all a symbol (with important intellectual, spiritual and nationalistic significance) which stood for the country’s glorious, Gothic past, viewed as a period of unparalleled political, economic, cultural and artistic accomplishment. In Rodenbach’s novel, there is an interconnection between Viane’s mood and personal tragedy and the fate of the city.21 The permeability (despite all material signs of closure such as doors and shutters closed) of the domestic space shows that in his text, a strong relationship between the interior and the exterior exists. In Proust’s novel, although expressed in a very different way, there also is an extraordinary continuity between the two worlds. It is expressed through detailed sensory descriptions of the outside (sounds, smells, even colours) produced by the often withdrawn consciousness that meticulously analyses them. After the self-satisfied inwardness of Romanticism, Proust was determined ‘not the give the least credence to the “Sirènes intérieures”’22 and the self of the narrator, even when physically removed from the outside world (spending, like Viane a lot of time in his bedroom) is always registering and scrutinizing its echoes. Significantly, in La Prisonnière, the volume dedicated to a domestic space marked by enclosure and isolation for the narrator’s lover Albertine, who comes close to being a sort of sequestered ‘slave’, the relationship between the ‘private’ space and the outside world is complex. Since, for the narrator, while Albertine is alive and living with him, hidden from view (his closest friends such as SaintLoup are not aware of her presence in the narrator’s flat), she is construed by his jealous mind as an obstacle to his own desires of travel and other encounters, but most importantly, he presents her as an impediment to his artistic achievement, he is also a virtual prisoner in his own apartment, condemned to the sterility of inactivity. Therefore the ostensible disengagement with the outside world,

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usually seen as a ‘pre-requisite of true artistic creation’,23 is here represented as a sterile phase in the narrator’s life, with, however, his hyperactive sensory disposition, registering noises and sounds of the outside world from the inside: D’autres fois encore, aux premières cloches d’un couvent voisin, rares comme les dévotes matinales, blanchissant à peine le ciel sombre de leurs giboulées incertaines que fondait et dispersait le vent tiède, j’avais discerné une de ces journées tempétueuses, désordonnées et douces, où les toits, mouillés d’une ondée intermittente que sèche un souffle ou un rayon, laissent glisser en roucoulant une goutte de pluie et, en attendant que le vent recommence à tourner, lissent au soleil momentané qui les irise, leurs ardoise gorge-de-pigeon.24 [Or yet again, at the first strokes of the bell of a neighbouring convent, rare as the early morning worshippers, barely whitening the dark sky with their hesitant hail-showers, melted and scattered by the warm breeze, I would discern one of those tempestuous, disordered, delightful days, when the roofs, soaked by an intermittent downpour and dried by a gust of wind or a ray of sunshine, let fall a gurgling raindrop and, as they wait for the wind to turn again, preen their iridescent pigeon’s-breast slates in the momentary sunshine.]25

In a perhaps unconscious, yet real allusion to Bruges-la-Morte (evoked by the whole devout atmosphere of the wet city outside), Proust contrary to Rodenbach, brings the outside world in for his character. Although he is in his bedroom, curtains drawn, his narrator is never isolated from the outside world and reality in its sensory abundance (sounds, colours, sensations). From the interior of his apartment, there always is a bridge connecting him to the external world: its precious reality is retrievable through the elaborate Proustian metaphor in a « stratification de sensations »:26 In his work Proust did not describe a life as it actually was, but a life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it. […] The important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection.27

Since reality in his work is organically linked with memory, the role of literature is to record days, places, as well as persons, creating a domestic space that is permeable to the outside. Yet, it is only retrospectively – after his lover’s death − that the narrator is able to actually understand, and feel, that the essence of intimacy requires this seclusion − intimacy, and not secrecy, not hiding of the self as he supposed, when he was keeping the elusive Albertine captive in his apartment. The interplay between the interior and the exterior is for Proust therefore a way to signify errors of judgement or errors of perception that constantly need rectifying in the novel.

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For Rodenbach and numerous symbolist writers and artists on the other hand, the connectedness between the interior and the exterior spaces is maintained because Bruges is a symbol. It is as a representative of a bygone spiritual era, a foil to the despised modern world and its materialism that Bruges was mourned by the Symbolists.28 In Rodenbach’s novel, there is a memorial gaze associated with the city. The sacredness of the various landmarks of the city (Gothic churches, towering belfries, medieval turrets) that none may remove even after its decline is conveyed through Viane’s wanderings, making the city beautiful with noble desolateness. The novel then records, with every ghostly inscription and ritual, in the ‘lente persuasion des pierres’29 [‘the slow persuasion of the stones’],30 the death of the city and its mourning, alongside the death of the spouse, in a state of resemblance. The action of mourning passes continually from the interior and the intimacy of the shrine to the exterior of the city as a shrine. In as much as mourning is intimately connected to the memories of the life both protagonists had with their loved ones, it is principally to domestic space that we need to turn to now. Since grief, like love, tends to stimulate the sense of space, innumerable impressions linked to the lovers’s life, or traces of them, are spread all over the inhabited space. In both cases however, the binary Freudian distinction between ‘mourning’ as a finite process and ‘melancholia’ as a pathological, resurgent, disability requires refining. Writing about Proust’s novel, Jennifer Rushworth has pointed out that, in order to approach the writer’s depiction of grief, Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘demi-deuil’ (incomplete mourning), this intermediary form of grief is more useful and nuanced than the Freudian binary division presented in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. Mourning is intimately connected to love, it ensues that there is, according to Derrida, an ‘ethical necessity of endless melancholic attachment’31 as a testament to the fidelity owed to the deceased. As Rushworth sums it up, the ‘demi-deuil’ constitutes ‘a sort of enduring and endurable fidelity to the deceased’:32 Une certaine mélancolie doit protester contre le deuil normal. Elle ne doit jamais se résigner à l’introjection idéalisante. […] L’oubli commence là. Il faut donc la mélancolie. [A certain melancholy must still protest against normal mourning. This melancholy must never resign itself to idealizing introjection. […] Forgetting begins there. Melancholy is therefore necessary.]33

The mourner is thus in ‘an irresolvable dialectic of remembrance and forgetfulness’34 which can be resolved – and this is what is of interest to us here –

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by the ‘preservation of the deceased in a crypt-like interior space’.35 For Derrida, a crypt is an ideal ‘lieu compris dans un autre mais rigoureusement séparé de lui, isolé de l’espace général par cloisons, cloture, enclave’ [a place comprehended within another but rigorously separate from it, isolated from general space by partitions, an enclosure, and enclave].36 Essentially, this is because ‘l’incorporation cryptique marque toujours un effet de deuil impossible ou refusé’ [cryptic incorporation always marks an effect of impossible or refused mourning].37 In Bruges-la-Morte, Viane, the archetypal widower (‘Je suis le Veuf ’38 [Widowed! Widowed! –Bereft!]39), has dedicated two rooms on the ground floor of his house to the memory of his dead wife. As befits a crypt, these rooms are below the room where he spends most of his time (his bedroom). Mostly hidden from view (‘portes d’ordinaire closes’40 [‘doors normally kept closed’41]), only accessible to him, and to Barbe, the nun-like maid who ‘avait les allures, avec sa robe noire et son bonnet de tulle blanc, d’une sœur tourière’42 [with her black dress and bonnet of white tulle she had the air of a lay sister]43 for the weekly domestic ‘ceremonial’ of housekeeping, the ‘crypt’ is where is preserved not only all the furniture, objects (‘tel bibelot précieux, tels objets de la morte, un coussin, un écran qu’elle avait fait elle-même’) and portraits of the deceased, but, most importantly, a cut-off plait, veritable ‘relic’ displayed in a glass casket on the piano, in a prominent place in the room. The function of the room is thus to provide a sanctuary, not to the body of the deceased exactly, but to the ghostly presence whose body’s imprint is everywhere: Il semblait que ses doigts fussent partout dans ce mobilier intact et toujours pareil, sophas, divans, fauteuils où elle s’était assise, et qui conservaient pour ainsi dire la forme de son corps. Les rideaux gardaient les plis éternisés qu’elle leur avait donnés. Et dans les miroirs, il semblait qu’avec prudence il fallût en frôler d’éponges et de linges à la surface claire pour ne pas effacer son visage dormant au fond.44 [He felt that Her touch was everywhere in the intact, unchanging furnishings, sofas, divans, armchairs where she had sat and which preserved the shape, so to speak, of her body. The curtains retained in perpetuity the folds she had given them. As to the mirrors, he felt the clear surfaces needed only the merest touch with a sponge or cloth, so as not to erase her face sleeping in their depths].45

Interestingly then, Rodenbach’s reflection on mourning anticipates Derrida’s meditation on the subject, in particular when the philosopher contends that the deceased needs to be treated like a ‘living dead’: ‘L’habitant d’une crypte est

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toujours un mort-vivant’ [‘The inhabitant of a crypt is always a living dead’].46 The numerous ‘portraits de la pauvre morte, des portraits à ses différents âges, éparpillés un peu partout, sur la cheminée, les guéridons, les murs’47 [‘the portraits of his poor dead wife, portraits of her at different ages, scattered here and there, on the mantelpiece, the little tables, the walls’]48 ensure her omnipresence, dead, yet alive, in this hidden shrine. The careful staging of all the objects in the room reveal the ‘irreconcilable’49 melancholia, its repetitiveness, projected onto ‘le grand salon toujours le même’; and more than images, perhaps too abstract for the mourner, the crypt conceals a ‘trésor’ in the religious sense of the term, the sacred relic of the hair of Viane’s dead wife, on display (‘la tresse nue qu’il allait chaque jour honorer’) in a bizarre mix of religious devotion and sexual fetishism: Et puis surtout […] le trésor conservé de cette chevelure intégrale qu’il n’avait point voulu enfermer dans quelque tiroir de commode ou quelque coffret obscur – ç’aurait été comme mettre la chevelure dans un tombeau! – aimant mieux, puisqu’elle était toujours vivante, elle, et d’un or sans âge, la laisser étalée et visible comme la portion d’immortalité de son amour! Pour la voir sans cesse, dans le grand salon toujours le même, cette chevelure qui était encore Elle, il l’avait posée là sur le piano désormais muet, simplement gisante – tresse interrompue, chaîne brisée, câble sauvé du naufrage! Et, pour l’abriter des contaminations, de l’air humide qui l’aurait pu déteindre ou en oxyder le métal, il avait eu cette idée, naïve si elle n’eût pas été attendrissante, de la mettre sous verre, écrin transparent, boîte de cristal où reposait la tresse nue qu’il allait chaque jour honorer.50 [Then above all […] the preserved treasure of that complete head of hair, which he had been unwilling to shut away in some chest of drawers or the darkness of some box – it would have been like consigning it to the tomb – preferring, since it was still alive and of an ageless gold, to leave it displayed, visible, as the immortal part of his beloved! In order to be able to see them all the time, these locks that were still Her, he had placed them on the piano, silent from now on, in the large, never changing drawing room. They simply lay there, a cut-off plait, a broken chain, a rope saved from the shipwreck. And to protect the hair from contamination, from the moist atmosphere that could have taken the colour out of it or oxidized its metal, he had had the idea, naïve if it had not been touching, of putting it under glass, a transparent casket, a crystal box, the resting place of the bare locks to which he paid homage every day.]51

Rodenbach associates this precious, sacred object, symbol of life (‘cette chevelure était […] l’âme de la maison’52) with the most important religious tradition of the

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city of Bruges itself, that of the display of the reliquary of the Holy Blood, said to have been brought back from Jerusalem by Thierry of Alsace: Et, dans le cadre de la fenêtre, apparurent devant Hugues les chevaliers de TerreSainte, les Croisés en drap d’or et en armure, les princesses de l’histoire brugeline, tous ceux et celles dont le nom s’associe à celui de Thierry d’Alsace qui rapporta de Jérusalem le Saint-Sang.53 [Then, framed in the window, the Knights of the Holy Land appeared before Hugues, the crusaders in cloth of gold and armour, the princesses from the history of Bruges, all the men and women associated with the name of Thierry of Alsace, who brought the Holy Blood back from Jerusalem.]54

In the dramatic climax of the end of the book, domestic and public spaces seem to blend, interweaving the fate of the city with the demise of the widower. Yet, if Rodenbach underlines the permanence of the liturgic ritual, celebrated by all in the streets of Bruges, he denounces the pathetic fallacy of Viane’s morbid cult of his dead wife (‘fidélité à son culte ou à sa mémoire’55). Indeed, if, outside the window the rich procession testifies for the enduring link that connects Bruges with the origins of Christianity and the spiritual art that flourished in the great Flemish artists; inside, with Viane’s lover’s profanation of the memory of his dead wife and her brutal murder by the incensed widower, the sacredness of the individual’s enduring mourning is shattered. The symbol of this violent destruction is represented by the impure woman’s invasion into the temple. The violation of the crypt, this particularly preserved closed space, reveals that Jane’s ‘resemblance’ was only a ‘simulacre’,56 and that Viane had succumbed to idolatry and illusion. He becomes a symbol for a troubled interiority, a self full of anxieties, the embodiment of a modern malaise. As Derrida had remarked, when analysing the crypt as the siege of mourning, ‘the self is not the proprietor of what he is guarding’, hence in Rodenbach’s narrative, Viane ‘voulait […] surveiller et garder de tout heurt’57 [‘wanted to watch over and keep from all harm’]58 what can be found in the crypt, but he eventually fails to do so. There is a reflection on an impossible ‘ars memoria’, other than collectively realized: the memorial gaze can only be collective; at the level of the self, the domestic interior turned into a shrine can only be, ultimately, a place of exclusion. Proust’s novel starts from a different vantage point since there is a before and an after in his narrator’s relationship with Albertine. She comes to live with him in his apartment in Paris, and the interior revolves around the bedroom where she is a ‘charmante captive’59 in his eyes. His indifference to his own interior and to the ‘ameublements artistiques’60 is highlighted when

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he thinks that he has reached a sort of domestic bliss with her, based on her emprisonment (‘captive’, ‘protégée par les murs’) and his achieving complete control over her existence: C’était toujours ce même calme inerte et domestique que je goûtais à la voir ainsi lourde, empourprée, opulente et captive, rentrer tout naturellement avec moi, et protégée par les murs, disparaître dans notre maison.61 [it was still the same inert, domestic calm that I felt as I saw her thus, solid, flushed, opulent and captive, returning home quite naturally with me, like a woman who belonged to me, and, protected by its walls, disappearing into our house.]62

The narrator’s fantasy of possession, even paradoxical desire for the annihilation of his lover (expressed in the ambivalent verb ‘disparaître’) is intimately connected with the interior in as much as Albertine is ‘enclosed’ in it. Thus, the apartment and, in it, some objects are connected with her. For example, and it is the only time when there is any real mention about the décor, she admires a ‘bronze’63 by Barbedienne and the narrator, although he knows this object to be ‘fort laid’,64 in his need to attach her to him, is quite pleased that the remainder of her ‘bad taste’ makes her like it: Les choses laides et cossues sont fort utiles, car elles ont auprès des personnes qui ne nous comprennent pas, qui n’ont pas notre goût, et dont nous pouvons être amoureux, un prestige que n’aurait pas une fière chose qui ne nous révèle pas sa beauté. Or les êtres qui ne nous comprennent pas sont justement les seuls à l’égard desquels il puisse nous être utile d’user d’un prestige que notre intelligence suffit à nous assurer auprès d’êtres supérieurs. Albertine avait beau commencer à avoir du goût, elle avait encore un certain respect pour ce bronze, et ce respect rejaillissait sur moi en une considération qui, venant d’Albertine, m’importait (infiniment plus que de garder un bronze déshonorant), puisque j’aimais Albertine.65 [Ugly and expensive things are extremely useful, for they possess, in the eyes of the people who do not understand us, who do not share our taste and with whom we may be in love, a glamour which a fine object that does not reveal its beauty may lack. Now the people who do not understand us are precisely the people with regard to whom it may be useful to us to take advantage of a prestige which our intellect is enough to ensure for us among superior people. Although Albertine was beginning to show some taste, she still had a certain respect for the bronze, and this was reflected back upon me in an esteem which, coming from Albertine, mattered infinitely more to me than the question of keeping a bronze which was a trifle degrading, since I loved Albertine.]66

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This rather wily approach to the interior, all entirely designed to ensnare the ‘prisonnière’, is dependent on Proust’s representation of love and jealousy and, as George Poulet noted: ‘Like a curl of smoke which creates through the whole sky its own atmosphere, love dilates, and in dilating, produces around itself its own space’.67 The same can be said of grief, so when Albertine disappears (‘Mademoiselle Albertine est partie!’68 [‘Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!’]69 and later dies accidently while still away from Paris, the pain (‘la douleur’) felt by the narrator immediately transforms the way he perceives his interior: Cette chambre où nous dînions ne m’avait jamais paru jolie, je disais seulement qu’elle l’était à Albertine pour que mon amie fût contente d’y vivre. Maintenant les rideaux, les sièges, les livres avaient cessé de m’être indifférents. L’art n’est pas seul à mettre du charme et du mystère dans les choses les plus insignifiantes; ce même pouvoir de les mettre en rapport intime avec nous est dévolu aussi à la douleur. Au moment même je n’avais prêté aucune attention à ce diner que nous avions fait au retour du Bois [la veille du départ d’Albertine] […] et vers la beauté, la grave douceur duquel je tournais maintenant des yeux pleins de larmes.70 [That room in which we used to dine had never seemed to me attractive; I had told Albertine that it was, merely in order that she should be content to live in it. Now, the sight of the curtains, the chairs, the books, had ceased to be a matter of indifference to me. Art is not alone in imparting charm and mystery to the most insignificant things; pain is endowed with the same power to bring them into intimate relation with ourselves. At the time I had paid no attention to the dinner which we had eaten together after our return from the Bois [the day before Albertine’s departure] […] and towards the beauty, the solemn sweetness of which I now turned with my eyes full of tears.]71

With Albertine’s departure, the narrator’s perception of intimacy is revisited in the light of her absence. His grief makes him focus on what he had not realized was in fact the apex of domesticity, a shared ‘home’: Je comprenais que cette vie que j’avais menée à Paris dans un chez-moi qui était son chez-elle, c’était justement la réalisation de cette paix profonde que j’avais rêvée.72 [I realised that that life which I had led in Paris in a home which was also her home was precisely the realisation of that profound peace which I had dreamed of.]73

Proust uses the language of cognition (‘je comprenais’, ‘la réalisation’) to express the ideal of ‘paix profonde’74 brought about by a domestic happiness that the narrator was unable to see as he was experiencing it, blinded by his

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jealous torment. Once she has disappeared, Albertine, this fugitive being (‘être de fuite’) suddenly embodies a ‘paix profonde’, and becomes the incarnation of a fulfilled, ordered and settled domesticity. However, Proust demonstrates here the complexity of memory because the traces of the narrator’s past life with Albertine are in fact traces of a past that never existed: the curtains, the chairs, the books, and elsewhere, her pianola, are constitutive of a bourgeois interior and yet, before her death they never occupied the form of a real presence since the narrator insisted then on explaining his indifference to this domestic décor: Je n’avais jamais cherché […] à faire des ameublements artistiques, à composer des pièces, j’étais trop paresseux pour cela, trop indifférent à ce que j’avais l’habitude d’avoir sous les yeux.75 [I had never sought […] to furnish for aesthetic effect, to arrange rooms artistically. I was too lazy for that, too indifferent to the things that I was in the habit of seeing every day.]76

Yet with her disappearance and the anguish it caused, it is through the vision of these familiar objects, symbol of their intimacy, that the narrator physically feels the grief: Je n’avançais dans la chambre qu’avec une prudence infinie, je me plaçais de façon à ne pas apercevoir la chaise d’Albertine, le pianola sur les pédales duquel elle appuyait ses mules d’or, un seul des objets dont elle avait usé et qui tous, dans le langage particulier que leur avaient enseigné mes souvenirs, semblaient vouloir me donner une traduction, une version différente, m’annoncer une seconde fois la nouvelle de son départ.77 [I stepped across the room with infinite care, placing myself in such a way as not to see Albertine’s chair, the pianola on the pedals of which she used to press her golden slippers, or a single one of the things which she had used and all of which, in the secret language that my memories had taught them, seemed to be seeking to give me a translation, a different version, to break the news to me for a second time, of her departure.]78

The ability that the narrator always had to self-reflexively recall the outside world, even when physically separated from it, is effaced at a stroke. The dimension of intimacy has just opened up, and simultaneously, there is a realization that it is precisely what is lost. Unknown elements appear (a new language, spoken by the objects in the room), offering a ‘translation’, a new version of events, without any ‘remedial balm’.79 As Derrida explains about mourning: The movement of interiorization keeps within us the life, thought, body, voice, look or soul of the other, but in the form of those […] memoranda, signs or

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symbols, images or mnesic representations which are only lacunary fragments, detached and dispersed – only ‘parts’ of the departed other.

Partial, incomplete, yet endowed with a power to reconstitute a whole, the narrator’s bereaved memory has the capacity to conjure up his dead lover like ‘a sort of […] metonymy, where the parts stand for the whole and for more than the whole that it exceeds’.80 Je peux dire que toute cette année-là ma vie resta remplie par un amour, par une véritable liaison. Et celle qui en était l’objet était une morte. […] C’est peut-être de la même manière qu’une sorte de bouture prélevée sur un être et greffée au cœur d’un autre, continue à y poursuivre sa vie même quand l’être d’où elle avait été détachée a péri.81 [I may say that throughout the whole of that year my life remained fully occupied with a love affair, a veritable liaison. And she who was its object was dead. […] It is perhaps in the same way that a sort of cutting taken from one person and grafted on to the heart of another continues to carry on its existence even when the person from whom it had been detached has perished.]82

The botanical metaphor of a graft, foreign body transplanted into another one (Derrida speaks of ‘cryptic incorporation’) reflects the separateness of the deceased, her effective alterity as well as her continual omnipresence. These are all symptoms of impossible mourning, of the ‘melancholic fidelity to the strangeness and uniqueness of the lost loved one’83 he has been experiencing since her death. Proust is remarkably precise about this: The idea of her uniqueness was no longer a metaphysical a priori based upon what was individual in Albertine […] but an a posteriori created by the contingent and indissoluble overlapping of my memories.84

In this manner, the interior becomes a ‘crypt’ satisfying the demands of the ‘deuil impossible’, construing, as in Rodenbach, but in a humorous way, a ‘living-dead’: Parce que je le désirais, je crus qu’elle n’était pas morte; je me mis à lire des livres sur les tables tournantes, je commençai à croire possible l’immortalité de l’âme.85

Even when he is finally able to leave his apartment and travel to Venice – precisely undertaking the trip that Albertine was supposed to prevent him from doing when she was alive − apparently cured of his grief, a metaphoric crypt with all the attributes of a prison of mourning rises within himself: Parfois au crépuscule en rentrant à l’hôtel je sentais que l’Albertine d’autrefois, invisible à moi-même, était pourtant enfermée au fond de moi comme aux ‘plombs’ d’une Venise intérieure, dont parfois un incident faisait glisser le

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couvercle durci jusqu’à me donner une ouverture sur ce passé.86 [Sometimes at dusk on my return to the hotel I felt that the Albertine of former times, although invisible, was none the less locked deep inside me, as if in the lead-lined cells of some inner Venice, where from time to time an incident would shake the heavy lid enough to give me a glimpse into the past.]87

Her personality, made of unknown elements, generates hypotheses that unconsciously continue to feed his grief which, in turn, deepens and escapes from the inside to an infinite openness of possibilities. The place to grieve is now inside himself. Still, at the very heart of this mobility of grief, Proust also gives the first signs that however much pain there is, it is also ruled by the ‘intermittences du cœur’ and mourning itself is unstable. Significantly, he uses a psychologized space to start suggesting a certain oscillation between remembering and forgetting: Mais de temps en temps, je parvenais, en faisant passer tel ou tel courant d’idées au travers de mon chagrin, à renouveler, à aérer un peu l’atmosphère viciée de mon cœur.88 [From time to time I succeeded, by letting some current of other ideas flow through my grief, in freshening, in airing to some slight extent the vitiated atmosphere of my heart.]89

The vitiated air that fills his heart is caused both by the pain of Albertine’s death and her elusiveness, even in death. Here again, the metonymy between the heart ‘chamber’ and the bedroom is establishing a clear contiguity between space and emotions. The allusion to the household routine of ‘aérer’ as well as the terms ‘courant’ and ‘atmosphère’ all suggests a much needed physical crumbling of the walls, which only time will bring about. A day will come when she will not be so tightly associated with the space she occupied when she was alive: ‘Mais la pensée se fatigue, le souvenir se détruit: le jour viendrait où je donnerais volontiers à la première venue la chambre d’Albertine [But thought tires and memory is destroyed: the day would come when I would willingly give Albertine’s room to whoever wanted it’].90 If Bruges-la-Morte captures the late-nineteenth-century nostalgia for the past as a lost age of splendour and piety; Proust’s La Prisonnière and Albertine disparue, on the contrary, free the home from the stereotypes of sentimental nostalgia. In drawing us into the fictional world through a domestic perspective, these two writers deconstruct the myth of domestic stability and happiness which was supposed to be the great achievement of the bourgeoisie. Domestic space as a place of utter banality does not exist: there is

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no shared living space; the emphasis is entirely put on space91 that is haunted by loss. What used to bind these couples together is relegated in an even more private, unseen part of their lives. Thus in these novels, domestic space is more and more internalized and has become a site of antagonism and of hidden anxieties: it is intimate, personal, and sexualized. Paradoxically, domesticity is absent from the domestic interior; pushed in the margins, behind the scenes. At the centre are two absent bodies, inhabiting the space spectrally, simultaneously locked out of a signifying function in the domestic space, but omnipresent as male specularity and in male anguish. The inwardness of the domestic interior came to represent a destructive confinement that could not be accommodated. In Rodenbach’s novel, domestic space eventually appears disturbingly death-infected; in Proust’s novel, the interior is only saved in the end by the redemptive virtue of art and the regenerative force of the narrator finally putting himself to work.

Bibliography Benjamin, Walter, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso, 1973). Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations ([1968] London: Vintage, 2005). Derrida, Jacques, Béliers. Le dialogue ininterrompu: entre deux infinis, le poème (Paris: Galilée, 2003). Derrida, Jacques, ‘Fors: les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’. In Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cryptonymie: le verbier de l’homme aux loups (Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1976). Derrida, Jacques, ‘Foreword: Fors: the Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’. Translated by Barbara Johnson. In The Wolf ’s Man’s Magic Word: A cryptonomy, edited by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Translated by Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). Derrida, Jacques, Memories for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Derrida, Jacques, Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue−Between Two Infinities, the Poem. Translated by Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski. In Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). Freud, Sigmund, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ [1917]. Reprinted in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XIV, 1914-1916, On the History of the Psycho-analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1957).

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Marcus, Sharon, Apartment Stories Cities and Homes in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Poulet, Georges, Proustian Space (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). Proust, Marcel, La Prisonnière [1923], reprinted with notes and introduction (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). Proust, Marcel, The Captive [1923] (London: Penguin, 1986). Proust, Marcel, Albertine disparue [1925], reprinted with notes and introduction (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). Reed, Christopher, Not at home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996). Rodenbach, Georges, Bruges-la-Morte [1892]. Reprinted with notes and introduction (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1998). Rodenbach, Georges. Bruges-la-Morte [1892]. Translated by Mike Mitchell Sawtry (London: Dedalus, 2005). Rushworth, Jennifer, Discourses of Mourning, in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

6

‘Cromedeyre tout entier est une seule maison.’ The domestic interior in Jules Romains’s Cromedeyre-le-Vieil Dominique Bauer

Introduction Between 1911 and 1918 Jules Romains wrote his poetic drama Cromedeyrele-Vieil. The play was first performed in 1920 in Jacques Copeau’s Le vieux colombier in Paris. Although the play was received well by critics and writers, for example, by Roger Martin du Gard or François Mauriac, it did, however, not prove to be as successful as his other plays, in particular the immensely popular Knock (1923).1 Yet Cromedeyre-le-Vieil, which remains little read or studied, constitutes a highly interesting drama, especially from the perspective of spatial images and their connection with domesticity, society, the public and the private. Throughout a close reading of the play, it will be argued in this chapter, that, first, Romains radicalizes in Cromedeyre his original so-called ‘unanimism’: his intuition of collective beings (les unanimes) in which the individual consciousness breaks out of its confinement and isolation and merges with that of the group.2 In Cromedeyre, Romains’s original unanimist ideal is no longer a promise for a future society, but is represented as an actualized, sociopolitical reality. The original unanimist dynamic is accomplished in the here and now, thus abandoning its initially poetic and future dimension.3 It will be maintained, second, that spatial images of domesticity and interiority are deployed to represent this radical, actual collective unity. It will be shown that central to this development in the work of Romains, is the integration of the nineteenthcentury image of a timeless, ahistorical pre-modern society and privacy. In order to understand the cultural significance of domesticity in Cromedeyre, it is crucial

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to point out that this imagery of the pre-modern era gives rise to notions of privacy and interiority, of legitimate violence, of the soil, of concreteness and authenticity that oppose the abstract citoyenneté [citizenship] and public space of the modern world.

Cromedeyre-le-Vieil against the background of Romains’s initial unanimism Cromedeyre-le-Vieil, in which elements of Romains’s native Velay were combined with fantastic and supernatural elements, is an isolated mountain village, inhabited by an ancient, pure and proud race.4 Around the time that Cromedeyre finishes its pagan church, symbol of its complete inwardness and aversion of the world beyond, ‘without a church tower, without mass and without a priest’,5 also the young Emmanuel, who was unsuccessfully sent to the seminary, returns home and becomes the community’s charismatic leader. These events mark the re-enactment of the village’s mythical, land-based origins and its youthful regeneration. However, almost men only are born in Cromedeyre. In order to perpetuate the race, Emmanuel decides to exercise Cromedeyre’s ancient privilege to invade the nearby village of Laussonne and carry off the young women to Cromedeyre. When the enraged inhabitants of Laussonne march to Cromedeyre to claim their young women back, they are stopped by Emmanuel’s violent rhetoric and by the women themselves who have come to accept Cromedeyre’s intoxicating domesticity. Cromedeyre represents the introverted social entity par excellence. Outwardly, it revolves around limits and spatial compaction; inwardly, it displays an almost fantastic interconnectedness. Mentally and architecturally, the village turns its back on the outside world, while internally it functions as a single interior and as an ideally harmonious domestic space, acting as one person and one flesh. As Emmanuel says: ‘the whole of Cromedeyre is a single house.’6 Its separation from the exterior world is near complete: the sky is only a thin line in between the roofs, streets become hallways, houses are interconnected through doors and have only few and small windows. From one house to the next, one can hear people sleep or see them eat. Outside means outside the last wall of the village. The presentation of Cromedeyre very much resembles and also radicalizes the idea, expressed in Romains’s La Vie unanime, that once the individual has broken out of its isolation, the entire city becomes an interior space. In his 1906

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poem La Vie unanime, Jules Romains evokes how the ‘surrounding immensity’ (‘l’immensité d’alentour’) of the city; the city as a shared consciousness breaks through the seemingly impermeable walls of the room where the isolated individual hides.7 The latter becomes a consciousness that has ‘something total and ephemeral’ (‘quelque chose de total et d’éphémère’).8 His thoughts are interior to the passers-by as their thoughts are to him: ‘Nothing stops being interior.’9 In Romains’s unanimism, collective entities, like a theatre hall, a bar, a street, a Church or the city become unanimes, collective beings endowed with a consciousness. Freed from their solitary thoughts and the relative frontiers of their bodies, individuals are part and parcel of this immediate and simultaneous consciousness of a group, away from ‘my room where one is alone’.10 The individual fragments into a ubiquitous presence that opposes the singular, isolated and restricted point of view. This is nowhere clearer than in the epilogue of Romains’s novel Mort de quelqu’un. Overwhelmed by a sensation of unanimist ubiquity, the young man walking on the city edge at the end of the novel which, not unimportantly, starts and ends with a visual overview of Paris, realizes that his soul is not just ‘there where he said I’ (‘là où il disait ‘Moi’). It would not seem strange at all to him when someone were to tell him his soul is ‘there, in the boulevard’s cavity, between the road and the walls of the houses’.11 Romains’s almost forgotten unanimism remains an interesting witness to new spatial understanding of the modern city, its velocity, its global interconnections and its swarming masses of people and things. The term unanime itself was first used by the Flemish poet and playwright Emile Verhaeren in order to label the social collectivities that emerged in the age of industrialization and the big city. In this context he speaks about the ‘forces unanimes’ of the city, ‘les flux unanimes des choses’, or ‘les groupes [qui] agissent comme un seul personnage’.12 Romains embraces the modern city as an ever-moving organism in which the frontiers of the individual person’s body, consciousness and space become highly relative. So much different are the sleepy towns of la province, inert, lifeless, isolated from the rest of the world. Likewise, their inhabitants lead secluded, unnoticed lives behind the façades of their houses, in rooms that are reminiscent of the solitary room in La Vie unanime. They live completely disconnected and are unaware of the greater dynamics and the full, simultaneous consciousness that is taking shape in the modern world. These towns are, however, gradually integrated in Romains’s unanimist logic, in the same way the regional hinterland of modernity was gradually absorbed into its fold. Initially, the postal worker in Le Bourg régénéré, who one day arrives in the sleepy, inert provincial town, is like the isolated occupier in La Vie unanime, whose walls become in Le Bourg régénéré

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the ‘impenetrable membrane’ (‘membrane impénétrable’) that separates him from the town. The town itself is near but lifeless. The numbness of the town opposes the immediate sensation of the interconnection of all things in the town, described as ‘interior connections’ (‘rapports intérieurs’), like ‘invisible nerves’ (‘des nerfs invisibles’), connections between the embroiled curtains in a window, a pastry shop and a lamp post.13 As will be shown, in Cromedeyrele-Vieil this initial ‘membrane’ will become that of the unanime-community itself, whereas the internal connections between things, thoughts and people that constitute the life or the consciousness of the town will find their most radical expression in the interconnectedness of interior spaces that make up Cromedeyre. The setting and evolution of the unanime thus seems at first sight an exclusive product of the mentality of modernity, intimately tied up with the modern city and integral to the artistic movements and projects that fully embraced the new age. In her article on Léger and unanimism, Judy Sund underlines for example the connection between the porous and flexible spaces of unanimism and the same elusiveness and permeability that spaces display in Léger’s imagery of smoke.14 As I have explained elsewhere, the unanime functions as an interior space that incarnates the immediate presence of a simultaneous consciousness with all of reality, a consciousness that exemplifies the interconnectedness of modernity and the perspectival fragmentation that went with it.15 Romains shares this connection of immediate presence and perspectival fragmentation with Robert Delaunay’s simultaneity, and with futurism, in which ‘the moment is fixed in its current, present being (“actualité”), and at the same time eternalised.’16 From this angle, Romains takes further a pre-existing image of interior spaces as an absolute ‘here’, ‘without the architectural limit of “there” ’, as Didier Maleuvre termed it, and in which otherness and absence inherent in the ‘là-bas’ are banished.17 The interior in this context has no exterior, like in Huysmans’s À Rebours, and sets such a radical limit to anything beyond that the exterior simply vanishes into a space without places, as well as the very notion of limit itself, the architectural limit of the ‘over there’, as opposed to ‘here’. Absolute presence does not bear limits, because limits presuppose otherness and the notion of a ‘not being here’. Romains inflates this imagery. First, the unanimist dweller is endowed with an absolute consciousness. Second, the fundamental, unsolvable problem of the limit comes forward in the unanime’s conflicting dimensions of integration and permeability, on the one hand, versus secluded inwardness on the other. Whereas

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the first dimension connects the unanime as an ongoing process aspiring to a unanimist future, the second applies to the unanime as an established reality. It is precisely this temporal perspective that defines the diverging dimensions of the unanime at stake here, dimensions that will coincide in Cromedeyre-le-Vieil. On the one hand, the unanime moves, integrates new spaces and increasingly becomes an almost eschatological, future ideal of global proportions. From the initial embodiment of the immediate consciousness of the collective, the unanime gradually turns into a notion of totality, embracing entire humanity. On the other hand, the unanime also defines a limit between the exterior and the interior life it constitutes, between a faint and withering existence outside of the unanime and a strong existence within, between unnatural isolation and ontological and moral fulfillment.18 A tension thus exists between the exclusiveness and inwardness of the unanime, and its universalist aspirations towards a world beyond.

Cromedeyre-le-Vieil: The establishment of a mythical land Turning now to Cromedeyre, the aim of this chapter is to show, in the first instance, that the unanime Cromedeyre, ‘le plus vieux des villages’, re-enacts time immemorial, mythical time, and by doing so implements unanimism’s eschatological promise for the future in terms of a secluded, inwarded entity. The unanime turns into an established reality, into society. This becomes clear when comparing Cromedeyre’s pagan church with the ‘maison de culte’ in the 1910 Manuel de déification, in which the poet-prophet Romains formulates ways for the discontented individual to discover an unanimist existence. Second, Romains substantiates this conflation of mythical past and future by continuing the widespread nineteenth-century ahistorical imagery of the pre-modern village, with its traditions and customs that go back to time immemorial. By doing so, he presents Cromedeyre as the present of a mythical past, which was precisely typical of this kind of imagery. Through this strategy, myth enters the realm of the present through integrating notions of identity, violence and force as sources of justification, paternalism, the supernatural, the land and a notion of ‘qualitative’ race versus abstract citoyenneté, notions that were central to the imagery of the pre-modern.19 Some of these, like the notion of terroir, had a distinctively anti-modern tone, whereas others, like the notion of race, were of a much more complex and ambiguous nature vis-à-vis modernity. On the one hand, the abstract notion of citoyenneté rather clear-cut opposes the imagery of a

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terroir-bound pre-modern world that was negatively defined by it.20 This was, on the other hand, not the case for the much more ambiguous ‘race’ for example21 that was often mentioned together with terroir-based notions of ‘nation’, like in the context of regionalist ideologies. The imagery of the pre-modern domestic space with the poet and lexicographer Frédéric Mistral (1830–1914) and his Provençal Félibrige movement (1854) that will be dealt with in the course of this chapter are a case in point. Frédéric Mistral speaks in the same breath about the ‘people’ (‘pople’), ‘race’ (‘raço’) and ‘nation’ (‘nacioun’) in a qualitative and nonabstract way.22 Cromedeyre-le-Vieil begins, not in Cromedeyre itself, but in an inn, where outsiders, foreigners, ‘étrangers’, talk about Cromedeyre, a strategy that from the very outset underlines the distinction between the village and those that do not belong to it. According to them, Cromedeyre steals from outsiders, it does not care about property and prides itself on having a different blood. One would look in vain for bars or cabarets in Cromedeyre, for those things are ‘the house of the foreigner. Cromedeyre on its mountain has no roof for the foreigner’.23 What is, however, most shocking to the outside world is Cromedeyre’s unChristian church in which pagan and witchcraft like rituals take place. The pagan church of Cromedeyre plays a central role in the play. It is a direct reference to the so-called maison de culte in Romains’s Manuel de déification. In the Manuel, the first ‘gods’ or unanimes are only a present reality in the words of the prophetpoet, where they yet also exist ‘in a future and unfulfilled way’.24 It is stated that there is yet a difference between the unanime and society, and that one in that sense should not ‘respect public opinion or custom’.25 Whereas the Manuel itself thus points at various instances forward to the future dimension of the unanime, in Cromedeyre the church of unanimism is a reality. As to the ‘maison de culte’, the poet-prophet states ‘the time has not yet come to build it’, the church would remain empty were it to be built now, but ‘when that moment approaches, we will look for the stones, the frames and the builders.’26 In Cromedeyre the church has actually been built and the custom, society and public opinion are that of Cromedeyre. Eschatological time meets mythical time, both of which lay outside history, reflect each other and are joined together in the church building. As Didier, one of the elders of Cromedeyre, proclaims, the pine trees used for the construction of the Church built ‘against all’ (‘contre tous’) belong to Cromedeyre,27 not because of some purchase contract, but because their fathers have planted them in bygone days, ‘jadis’ in ‘a terroir that has never known any other owner than Cromedeyre’.28 Bygone times, ‘jadis’, refers elsewhere in the play to a lost

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golden age, another typical ingredient of a mythical era, when the village and its ancient race (ancient beings who were very significantly connected with being pure and unspoilt, unaffected in the course of history or by history) possessed the surrounding four valleys that were now taken by those who live below.29 On the other side of the ahistorical spectre, the builder of the village, Jacob, has used an old cement that will be more solid after one hundred lunations than after ten, more solid after one thousand then after one hundred. The time immemorial of the terroir thus joins a future immemorial. Finally, in order to celebrate the completion of the church, the elder Anselme wants to commemorate the event like people from ancient times would have done, for ‘since the times situated beyond memory, when Cromedeyre was born from this world on this very spot – because it is there where our feet are that it made the soil burst open, such solemn event has never occurred’.30 Anselme does not only underline the ahistorical origin of Cromedeyre, but connects its birth with opening the soil. Cromedeyre thus incarnates in a very direct, material way a yet ahistorical soil. Emmanuel is called back by Cromedeyre, by the scent of ‘the fire of his home, the scent of the earth itself ’,31 thus merging together domestic space and a palpable, materialized mythical origin.

The imagery of pre-modern society The ahistorical nature of a mythical terroir that is yet present in a very material and tangible way as if it were a historical reality is very central to an antimodernist vein in nineteenth-century French culture that acted against an abstract citoyenneté and its modern, bureaucratic public space, the ‘law of Paris’ that was, however, not as old as Cromedeyre’s traditions, as the play significantly mentions.32 This discourse of origin, affiliation and terroir was much present in various local and regionalist literary or ethnographical movements in France and elsewhere, some of which developed an idealized premodern universe against a public realm they opposed to a private, concrete, domestic space that was threatened with extinction by modernity.33 Romains himself engages in a similar discourse in Bourin’s Connaissance de Jules Romains, when talking about his native Velay and its influence as a source of inspiration for Cromedeyre-le-Vieil. The village-family as a model for the unanime-society, an idea central to advocates of regional culture, the shared mental and physiological tendencies and features of people pertaining

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to a same terroir and their past reaching back to the mist of time, prevail in his own account.34 The interconnection of mythical time and the soil comes forward in a variety of projects throughout the nineteenth century. To give one example, the ethnographical Museon Arlaten in Arles, established by Frédéric Mistral in 1899 was also meant to revive a sublimated, exhaustive image of a preindustrial Provencal domesticity that had never been. It was therefore endowed with a dimension of timelessness, saved from the contingency of time and at the same time also operated as a fascinating literary construct that transcended purely ethnographical concerns. The museum was part of a larger undertaking to protect and preserve the Provençal language and culture, organized by the socalled Félibrige that was created in 1854 by Mistral, together with 600 kindred spirits, among whom were the writers Joseph Roumanille (1818–1891) and Théodore Aubanel (1829–86).35 Like the words and linguistic heritage in his dictionary Le Trésor du Félibrige (Lou Tresor dóu Felibrige), or the overabundant lexicographic wealth of his poetry, exemplary in Mireille (Mirèio), the objects in the Museon Arlaten served the purpose of constituting a radical lieu de mémoire that would keep Provençal culture alive in the modern world.36 It was radical in the sense that the dictionary, the writings, the museum and its objects constituted an exhaustive, panoramic and tangible presence of all of Provençal culture and history.37 They functioned as an ahistorical time capsule that was yet alive here and now, and in which the present and the past constantly overlapped.38 Yet they were presented as witnesses to a contingent historical reality and a historical development that was shown in the museum.39 As Mistral wrote in the journal L’Aioli in 1896, the intention of the museum was to show a ‘panorama of farm life’ ‘un panorama de la vie du mas’ and of Arlésienne costume, with all its modifications from the eighteenth century to the present day.40 The same goes for people belonging to a ‘race’, a ‘pays’ or ‘nation’ and the diorama mannequins that were thought to be modelled after them in the Museon Arlaten or other musea.41 These mannequins had an individual and real-life dimension, and yet represented an ahistorical, ideal type. As Landrin stated in his article on popular French costumes on the Salle de France in the Trocadéro, ‘the mannequins were modeled after nature, while giving an exact idea of the type of the region.’42 They were representations ‘after life’ and racial types at the same time, being part and parcel of what Mistral called the museum as the entire living life of the Provence ‘that is here like in a reliquary’.43 The timeless essence of a culture thus resided, paradoxically, in tangible people, places and the material soil, with which beliefs and objects were intrinsically connected.

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Terroir and domesticity in Cromedeyre-le-Vieil In Cromedeyre, the prominent theme of the soil is perhaps nowhere more literally represented than by the fact that the village has no floors whatsoever, but is everywhere directly connected with the very rock it is built upon, the central square and in the interior home alike, ‘the floor is the rock itself.’44 The interior homes are part of the rock, sharing the same solidity with their walls made out of the mountain, the same strength and antiquity, like the people of ancient days (‘les hommes des jours antiques’),45 and the same atmosphere of austere abundance of the square, like the home of the elder Helier, where it is furthermore ‘the rock of the soil that sets the tone’.46 The homes of Cromedeyre embody the antiquity, purity and isolation of its proud, pure and unspoiled race, thriving on moral superiority against those ‘en bas’. The massive outside walls of the houses are those of Cromedeyre itself, the wall of the land, they are ‘the clothing of the people’ (‘le vêtement du peuple’), the ‘outside’.47 Together the houses constitute a compact, solid, impenetrable enclosure: ‘tout semble compact, inébranlable, impénétrable.’48 Yet at the same time the village is also ‘a porous stone’ (‘une pierre poreuse’),49 in which the fire of the elders moves along unstoppably, thus again connecting the domestic space with its mythical origins. Its permeability is that of a unanime. Everything is interconnected, ‘tout communique et se pénètre’,50 to the point that it becomes hard to distinguish the interior from the exterior within the enclosure. The exit of a small street may very well be the entrance of a house51 and the many internal doors of every house may give to the shed, another room or to the family ‘next door’.52 As has been mentioned, the whole of Cromedeyre is an interior space. The compactness of the village that determines its fortress like, defensive and hostile character seamlessly turns into a context of unanimist intimacy: being at home like this ‘is a soft and warm thing, … ; a thing like love’.53 In a section reminiscent of Le Manuel de déification or Mort de quelqu’un, winding passages worm under vaults. The passages become even more narrow and turn into a long hallway. There, through a door one hears somebody sleep, there are stairs one goes up with a bowed head, and suddenly there is a family eating their dinner around a ‘balanced light’ (‘une lumière balancée’).54 The notion of balance plays an important part in the life of the unanime that is always described in terms of an interior space consisting of a centre, of circular movement, duration, rhythm and balance.55 Balances can be broken by an external threat. In Mort de quelqu’un, a travel company in a coach constitutes

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a small universe in its own right. The opposition between the interior space and the exterior constitutes a mental connection between the members of the company inside. When the company becomes aware of the fact that there is also a passenger sitting on the roof of the coach, the equilibrium is disturbed, and a sense of threat starts changing the initially friendly atmosphere. The soul of the company soon weakens ‘by stretching out’ to the person on the roof (‘en s’étirant jusqu’à lui’).56 The balance starts breaking up because the spatial limits that define the reality of the company are literally pierced. As a result, the company no longer feels like ‘being a family gathered at the table’ (‘une famille à la table’).57 The soul is thrown out of balance like the ‘flame of a lantern when a window gets broken’.58 In Cromedeyre, the family gathered around the table, around ‘une lumière balancée’, finds itself, however, in perfect circular balance, like the unanimist company in the Manuel de déification that also gathers in a circle around the light of a lamp: ‘You will gather in a room … you will put a lamp in the middle … You will sit in a circle … And you will establish your group.’59 As a spatially and mentally tight unanimist community, almost claustrophobically crowded together, Cromedeyre not only differs from the shattered villages below, in their deficient and dispersed existence (‘mal existants et disséminés’).60 In Cromedeyre, Romains favours the solipsist isolation of an enduring entity that always remains equal to itself. Communication has completely been turned inward. The idea of a village as the space of an expanding network of stories, experiences or memories, is ridiculed by Emmanuel. Pierre Adam, the inn keeper, sees his inn as such network. A traditional topos of storytelling, the inn constitutes in fact an entire village, built on a crossroad of two rivers and two roads.61 Its community is however invisible, one can only see its trunk and its roots, while it consists of those who are under way, passed by and then left again.62 The idea of a limitless, spatially unconfined community seems ridiculous to Emmanuel. Cromedeyre is the entire opposite of such type of village. It has been already mentioned how the defensive compaction of Cromedeyre, with its narrowing hallways also defined its domestic intimacy. The unanimist society of Cromedeyre finds in fact its perfect counterpart in the image of domestic space and that domestic space is the only setting in which the unanimist individual can be alone in an adequate manner, ‘comme au fond de son meilleur sommeil’.63 Before settling into Cromedeyre, Emmanuel and his future wife Thérèse will first live in a remote farm where they will be as ‘one village, and a whole kingdom’ (‘un village, et tout un royaume’),64 as if to get acclimatized to Cromedeyre. No section in the play is so loaded with unanimist vocabulary and style. The farm lies

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hidden, completely isolated in a hollow in the moor, with no other possessions in sight, surrounded by the ‘soft thickness of felted heath’ (‘douce épaisseur de bruyère feutrée’).65 It constitutes a completely self-sufficient economy, hidden by walls of snow in winter, covered like a secret in the landscape where only the ‘internal fountain’ (‘la fontaine intérieure’) can be heard,66 ‘the soul rejoices between the kitchen and the shed’67 and ‘the beds are alcoves in a wooden wall that stretch out far, like the hole of an insect in the heart of an old tree’.68 This highly idealized domestic intimacy of perfect autarky strangely mixes with the austere abundance, sobriety and robustness of Cromedeyre’s, ‘strangely’, because clearly a tension remains, insolvable within the play, between domesticity and Cromedeyre. For, Cromedeyre, as a unanime-society, also includes the realm of the public, no matter how much it incarnates the image of a pre-modern society as one large interior space, directed against the abstract nation-state with its abstract citoyenneté that has become the new realm of public space.

Conclusion Thus, in the framework of Romains’s increasing political interest in the 1920s and the 1930s, Cromedeyre-le-Vieil seems to introduce the domestic as a peculiar, ambiguous image of the political. In the larger sociopolitical debate, the unanime, or now community, union or society, develops into a future sociopolitical ideal, the future dimension of which is very different from that in La Vie unanime or Manuel de déification. In the play, the unanime-society incarnates mythical and eschatological time. The nineteenth-century imagery of the pre-modern was about preserving things, social structures, landscapes from a supposed time immemorial. The initial unanime-interior was about absolute, immediate presence with reality. These tendencies of a radical presence are inflated into an eschatological presence established in society, in which the ambiguous domestic remains, however, torn between public and private, between a metaphysics of mythical time and terroir on the one hand and history on the other.

Bibliography Baudin, Gérard, Frédéric Mistral. Illustre et méconnu (Paris: HC Éditions, 2010). Bauer, Dominique, Beyond the Frame. Case Studies (Brussels: ASP, 2016). Bauer, Dominique, ‘Le présent et l’absence dans l’imaginaire des espaces intérieurs. Avec une attention particulière pour la Locanda Almayer dans Oceano mare

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d’Alessandro Baricco.’ In L’Espace, les phénomènes, l’existence, De l’architectonique phénoménologique à l’architecture, edited by Guy van Kerckhoven and Robert Alexander, 147–61 (Louvain: Peeters, 2017). Bauer, Dominique, ‘Text, Topos and the Awareness of History in Frédéric Mistral’s Poème du Rhône.’ Dix-Neuf 23, no. 3–4 (2019): 254–64. Bauer, Dominique and Michael J. Kelly, The Imagery of Interior Spaces (New York: Punctum Books, 2016). Boblet-Viart, Marie-Hélène and Viart, Dominique, ‘Esthétiques de la simultanéité.’ In Jules Romains et les écritures de la simultanéité, edited by Dominique Viart, 26–7 (Lille: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 1996). Bourin, André, Connaissance de Jules Romains discutée par Jules Romains de l’académie française (Paris: Flammarion, 1961). Bouvier, Jean-Claude, ‘Frédéric Mistral et l’ethnographie selon Lou Tresor dóu Felibrige.’ Folklore 39, no. 202–204 (1986): 5–17. Calamel, Simon and Javel, Dominique, La langue d’oc pour étendard. Les félibres (1854–2002) (Toulouse: Éditions Privat, 2002). Cardelli, Martina, ‘Introduzione’. In Cromedeyre-le-vieil. Commedia in cinque atti, edited by Jules Romains, ix–xxi (Macerata: Liberilibri, 2009). Degroff, Daniel, ‘Ethnographic Display and Political Narrative: The Salle de France of the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro.’ In Folklore and Nationalism in Europe during the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by David Hopkin and Timothy Baycroft, 113–35 (Brill: Leiden-Boston, 2012). Dymond, Anne, ‘Displaying the Arlésienne: Museums, Folklife and Regional Identity?’ In Folklore and Nationalism in Europe during the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by David Hopkin and Timothy Baycroft, 137–59 (Brill: Leiden-Boston, 2012). Favre, Yves-Alain, ‘Rythme et architecture dans la poésie de Jules Romains: Chants des dix années.’ In Cahiers Jules Romains, 3 (Paris: Flammarion, 1979). Galtier, Charles, La Provence et Frédéric Mistral au Museon Arlaten (France: Cuénot, 1977). Guyonnet, Marie-Hélène, ‘Une Provence éternelle: les musées félibréens.’ Ethnologie française, nouvelle série 33, no. 3 (2003): 391–7. Landrin, Armand, ‘Les musées d’ethnographie.’ Revue des traditions populaires 3, 3, 5 (1888): 241–6. Landrin, Armand and Sébillot, Paul, ‘Instructions sommaires relatives aux collections ethnographiques à recueiller dans les pays civilisés et essais de classification’. In La Tradition en Poitou et en Charente, 465–75 (Paris: Librairie de la tradition nationale, 1897). Landrin, Fernand, ‘Anciens costumes populaires français au palais du Trocadéro.’ La Nature: Revue des sciences et de leurs applications aux arts de l’industrie 17 (1889): 295–8. Maleuvre, Didier, ‘Philosopher dans le boudoir: l’intérieur dans l’espace du dixneuvième siècle.’ The French Review 68, no. 3 (1995): 431–44.

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Marignan, Emile, Instructions pour la récolte des objets d’ethnographie du Pays arlésien (Arles: Musée arlésien d’ethnographie, 1896). McMorran, Will, The Inn and the Traveler. Digressive Topographies in the Early Modern European Novel (Oxford: Legenda, 2002). Mistral, Frédéric, ‘Cansoun de la coupo.’ Armana Prouvençau 14 (1868): 16–18. Norrisch, Peter J, ‘Unanimist Elements in the Works of Durkheim and Verhaeren.’ French Studies XI, no. 1 (1957): 38–49. Norrisch, Peter J, Drama of the Group. A Study of Unanimism in the Plays of Jules Romains (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958). Pasquini, Pierre, ‘Le Félibrige et les traditions.’ Ethnologie française, nouvelle série 18, no. 3 (1988): 257–66. Romains, Jules, Le Poème du métropolitain (Paris: Mercure de France, 1910). Romains, Jules, Manuel de deification (Paris: Bibliothèque internationale d’Édition E. Sansot et Cie, 1910). Romains, Jules, Un être en marche. Poème (Paris: Mercure de France, 1910). Romains, Jules, Puissances de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1919). Romains, Jules, Le Bourg régénéré. Petite légende (Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle revue Française, 1920) Romains, Jules, Les Copains (Paris: Gallimard, 1922). Romains, Jules, Mort de quelqu’un (Paris: Gallimard, 1923). Romains, Jules, Cromedeyre-le-vieil (Paris: Gallimard, 1952). Romains, Jules, La Vie unanime (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). Saumade, Frédéric. ‘Race régionale, identité nationale. Pour une éthnologie des comportements électoraux.’ Terrain 27 (1996): 101–14. Séréna-Allier, Dominique. ‘Mistral et “la Renaissance de la Provence”: l’invention du Museon Arlaten.’ La pensée du Midi 1, no. 1 (2000): 32–9. Stocking, George W., Race, Culture and Evolution. Essays in the History of Anthropology (London: Collier-MacMillan, 1968). Sund, Judy, ‘Fernand Léger and Unanimism: When There’s Smoke.’ Oxford Art Journal 7, no. 1 (1984): 49–56.

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Gender and Domestic Space

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Impressionist interiors and modern womanhood: The representation of domestic space in the art of Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt Sinéad Furlong-Clancy

In 2008, the National Gallery of Ireland staged an exhibition, ‘Impressionist Interiors’, curated by Janet McLean, which highlighted a neglected aspect of Impressionist history, with its pre-eminent focus on plein-airisme, painting out of doors – the interior. It showcased both private interiors (domestic and work spaces: home, artist’s studio, office, laundry) and public interiors (spaces of leisure, entertainment, and consumption: bars, theatres, cafés, shops; which were, of course, also spaces of work, and in which public and private behaviour might overlap), while the in-between spaces of rehearsal rooms, dressing rooms, and theatre wings blended public and private in multiple ways.1 It presented the seasoned viewer of Impressionist shows with a shift in focus, with McLean identifying the oft-cited texts of Edmond Duranty and Stéphane Mallarmé (both texts published in 1876 at the time of the second Impressionist exhibition) as two helpful critical starting points in her catalogue introduction.2 Scholars of nineteenth-century Paris previously may have widely focused on Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin and the bourgeois interior in relation to the modern city, and to the crisis of modernity wrought by industrialization and the shift towards urban living, but it was another experience entirely to look at the interior as a core theme of Impressionism in the context of that exhibition.3 This chapter focuses on the domestic interior in the work of Impressionist artists Berthe Morisot (1841–95) and Mary Cassatt (1844–1926). Both were well-to-do artists, the former French, the latter American, who had the early approbation and financial support of their families. They both had had formal

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training, copying experience in the Louvre, and their work successfully exhibited at the annual official French Salon by the time they were involved with the other artists who – following the decision to stage group exhibitions away from the Salon, discussed as early as 1867 by Frédéric Bazille in a letter to his parents – collectively became known as the Independents, later the Impressionists, and who were to stage eight exhibitions, now known as the Impressionist exhibitions, between 1874 and 1886.4 Morisot was a founding member of the group – Edgar Degas having written to her mother to ask her to join their endeavour – and exhibited with them from the first exhibition in 1874, missing only one, in 1879, following the birth of her daughter.5 Cassatt, also invited by Degas, joined the group in 1877, first exhibiting with them for the fourth exhibition in 1879; she was also to become a key member. Morisot and Cassatt’s aesthetic representations of late-nineteenth-century Parisian homes, whether private spaces of bedrooms and bathing, or semiprivate reception rooms of leisure and dining, offer a unique insight into modern bourgeois womanhood. By the time of the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris, the spectacularization of the female body in public spaces through extravagant couturier or mass-produced fashion conflicted with social and cultural attempts (via discourses found within education, religion, family structures, fashion journals) to interiorize the ‘honest’ woman’s roles of wife and mother in the private sphere of the home, as opposed to the demi-mondain world of public women, women located anywhere on the spectrum of prostitution, from celebrated courtesans to impecunious soupeuses de restaurant de nuit.6 Married bourgeois women were viewed as passive (in opposition to demi-mondaine women) and as ‘the emblem of the man condemned to activity’ (a professional occupation).7 However, that nineteenth-century bourgeois homes opened themselves to the exterior through social events, and that mothers, children and nannies regularly relocated out-of-doors to the new Parisian parks, squares and gardens in every quarter, created situations where the private domestic sphere opened itself up, leading to possibilities for unexpected encounters and for transgression of social mores.8 The themes to be explored in this chapter encompass Morisot and Cassatt’s depictions of motherhood and domesticity; the female body, with rituals of the toilette, bathing and bodily intimacy; childcare, children and adolescent women; female domestic workers; the social ritual of taking tea; the home as socializing space. The chapter is grounded in discussions of the significance of the objects and ‘casings’ to be found in the home, following Duranty and Benjamin;9 of the natural light that floods in, light that characterizes modern paintings, as written

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about by Duranty and Mallarmé;10 of the frames within frames of windows and threshold spaces looking out on to the modern city, also written about by Duranty;11 of the psychological impact of the confinement of the interior and the potential escapism of dream worlds suggested by facture and brushwork, in canvases conveying more than a detailed account of the interior per se. To begin with, two early critical approaches: first French critic François Thiébault-Sisson’s summary, following Morisot’s 1896 posthumous retrospective, that Morisot’s work expressed ‘the poetry’ of modern womanhood from a female perspective, imagined and dreamed by a woman: ‘C’est le poème de la femme moderne imaginé et rêvé par une femme’ [It is the poem of the modern woman, imagined and dreamed by a woman].12 Alternatively, in the post-war period, the ease with which American art historian Edgar Richardson dismissively described Cassatt’s work as inherently focused on ‘tea, clothes and nursery; nursery, clothes and tea’.13 This oft-cited comment about Cassatt’s work, when compared with the work of her compatriots John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler, is found in an exhibition review (1954), in a text located within a regressive, constrictive period as regards traditional gender roles, and which highlights a simplistic reading of female aesthetic representation. These two opposing quotations highlight the disparity between early and post-war – pre-secondwave feminist – critical approaches to the work of Morisot and Cassatt, two Impressionist artists whose position at the centre of the group, one a founding member, the other a key member from 1877, are still not seen as significant as their male colleagues, even though early critics frequently praised what was described as their ‘femininity’, where their male colleagues were criticized for work that was not substantial enough.14 In spite of the path-breaking feminist art-historical approaches to Impressionist history in recent decades, which have sought to highlight the key positions of Morisot and Cassatt within the group, and the contribution of female artists to the painting of modern life – or ‘the new painting’ as Duranty called it – there is still a general tendency to leave Morisot and Cassatt somewhat in the background of Impressionist history.15 As early as 1987, in the landmark exhibition ‘Berthe Morisot – Impressionist’, this was commented on in the catalogue by Charles F. Stuckey.16 In terms of feminist art history, the seminal work of Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock in particular has assessed the conditions, constrictions, and tensions of their work within the public and private worlds of bourgeois women, as categorized by Pollock as ‘spaces of femininity’, those spaces to which they had access and to which they could pass as members of the bourgeoisie.17 In addition to the home and private gardens, Pollock notes the spaces of bourgeois

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recreation: ‘promenading, driving in the park, being at the theatre, boating’.18 Long considered almost as an ‘orthodoxy’,19 Pollock’s paradigm has begun to be opened up in relation to growing studies on female circulation in the modern city, particularly within the context of art, fashion and cultural history, such as in the essay collection edited by Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonagh, and in monographs by Ruth Iskin, Heidi Brevik-Zender and this writer.20 In relation to interior domestic spaces, Pollock’s ‘spaces of femininity’ paradigm, together with Hollis Clayson’s notion of ‘threshold space’, focuses on the particularities and restrictions of aspects of nineteenth-century bourgeois female experience.21 As this chapter demonstrates, Morisot and Cassatt’s work expressed not only ‘the poetry’ but the ambiguities in and possible tensions of female representation and modern womanhood, whether those ambiguities centred on the representation of social rituals and sustenance (‘tea’); body adornment, bathing and dressing rituals (‘clothes’); or childcare and relationships with children (‘nursery’). As has been well established, Impressionism as a movement was never unified or homegeneous; instead, it brought together artists whose focus was on painting modern life rather than history, myth, religion, the exoticized Orient; subjects all sanctioned by the official fine arts academy, the Académie des Beaux-Arts, in its annual exhibition, the Paris Salon, where a jury rejected works not deemed to be in keeping with its own notions of what constituted art, and which, prior to the dealer-gallerist system which was emerging at the same time as ‘the new painting’, had been the necessary forum for gaining critical and public attention and commissions. With the development of plein-air painting in the environs of Paris during the first half of the nineteenth century, and with the success of the Barbizon school and particularly Camille Corot (whose career spanned early, large-scale biblical works to tiny late-career landscapes via a series of beautifully rendered portraits in interiors), there was a precedent for exploring light, colour, tonality, the representation of landscape and, by extension, reality in new ways.22 In addition to the inspiration of older artists, the invention of ready-mixed paint in small tubes made painting sur le motif, on location, far easier than in previous decades.23 By the mid-1860s, Morisot was an enthusiastic adept of painting out of doors, with seascapes and landscapes, often with figures adding a human touch, echoing Corot; by 1864 both she and her equally talented sister Edma were admitted to the Salon, and were part of the artistic and social circles which brought together figures such as Édouard Manet (introduced to Morisot by Henri Fantin-Latour in the Louvre in 1868), in whose The Balcony she appeared at the 1869 Salon, the first of many portraits of her by Manet.24 She later married his brother Eugène,

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bringing closer their social and artistic circles, already familiar through the Tuesday evenings held by Mme Morisot in their home (at which Corot, Carolus Duran, Jules and Charles Ferry, and Alfred Stevens were regular visitors), and the Thursday evenings held by Mme Auguste Manet, into which Morisot had been introduced in 1868, and to which came the Manet brothers and Édouard’s wife Suzanne, who would play Chopin on the piano; other guests included Degas, Baudelaire, Charles Cros, Émile Zola, Zacharie Astruc and Stevens, in whose home Morisot later met Puvis de Chavannes.25 She was already witnessing the crossover of public and private within familiar domestic spaces at such gatherings. Cassatt, after training in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, travelled to Europe in 1866, where she moved between Paris and its environs, continuing her studies and first exhibiting at the Paris Salon in 1868.26 After further travels and studies in Europe, she settled in Paris in 1874, exhibiting at that year’s Salon a work admired by Degas, an artist then unknown to her.27 Cassatt’s early works (which she signed Mary Stevenson), inspired by genre painting, and with the influence of Rubens in terms of figure painting, echoed the realist tradition and tonal palette of Gustave Courbet, in contrast to Morisot’s early light-filled works depicting contemporary life, such as The Harbour at Lorient (1869); it was later that Cassatt began to experiment with a brighter palette and abandoned the genre costumes and accessories of her earlier period. Morisot’s early interest in painting landscapes with figures led her to focus on figure or portrait painting within interior and garden or park scenes, while the young Cassatt was interested in landscape only in so far as it created an interesting background for her figure painting.28 Morisot seems to have been inherently drawn to representing her family and domestic life, whereas Cassatt – whose focus was on selling her work and attracting commissions – was drawn to portrait painting and modern life as the necessary new building blocks of her career.29 By 1869, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir were painting bathers and women and men socializing at the Grenouillère, a fashionable bathing spot and restaurant outside Paris, thereby combining a new painting of landscape  and fashionable leisure, with touches of unmixed pigment placed side by side, in a series of canvases announcing the desire to capture changing light and atmospheric conditions, which would become one of the key subjects of Impressionism. As will be discussed below, Morisot and Cassatt frequently brought the light of outdoors, an aspect of plein-airisme, into their domestic interiors depicting contemporary Paris, through open windows and balconies.

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The younger generation of artists following in the wake of Corot and his colleagues were also inspired by the modernity of Courbet and Manet, both of whom had held independent exhibitions away from the Salon by the late 1860s, and both of whom had created a stir with their depictions of modern life; Courbet drawing on a realist tradition, and Manet playing with Old Master aesthetic precedents, in their contemporary, sometimes scandal-provoking, canvases, for example, Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (summer) (1857) by Courbet, and Manet’s Olympia and Luncheon on the Grass (1863).30 The younger generation moved between formal studies and copying at the Louvre, and painting out-of-doors, in the studio, and in interior settings. Their work emerged in the context of similar themes of modern life, portraiture and interiors in the work of artists such as their colleagues Fantin-Latour, Stevens and James Tissot, whose canvases also depicted Parisian modernity but with a more conventional technique and finish. During the course of the twelve years of the independent ‘Impressionist’ exhibitions, the group frequently changed form, with some of the artists returning to exhibit at the Salon (Morisot and Cassatt were not among them), or exhibiting with prominent gallerist-dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel and Georges Petit.31 Morisot and Cassatt developed a warm professional friendship, attested to by letters discussing artistic matters and visiting each other; indeed, it was Cassatt who wrote to Morisot in 1879, following the birth of Morisot’s daughter, to check if she was exhibiting with the group or not for the fourth exhibition; apparently there had been a suggestion that she would exhibit a fan, but it was withdrawn.32 Morisot and Cassatt’s representations of domestic interiors of late-nineteenthcentury Paris reflected the interior spaces of their own class, the haute bourgeoisie. The themes that this chapter explores focus on modern bourgeois women’s lives within domestic spaces in nineteenth-century Paris, a city that had recently been redeveloped and modernized during the Second Empire, under Napoleon III’s Prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. New bourgeois apartments lined the new straight grands boulevards, which linked points of power, transportation, commerce and the compass, and which were planted with trees and dotted with smaller public gardens and squares, as a part of a progressive green urban policy. The boulevards led to larger parks, department stores, the opera and theatres, restaurants and cafés, in short to the locations that constituted the modern city, and to which Parisians and tourists flocked. The critical commonplace – recently rendered more complex by the studies discussed above – that in contrast to the male flâneur (stroller) described by

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Baudelaire who could move around the city incognito, women could not be flâneuses (unless, like George Sand, they donned men’s attire, or, as Iskin suggests, by the late 1890s, that the strolling woman depicted in advertising posters could be classed as such) still holds in terms of the representation of the venues of entertainment and consumption, of bars, music halls, and café concerts; female artists did not have the same freedom of movement of their male colleagues.33 However, in terms of representing modern life outside of the home, Cassatt depicted women at leisure at the theatre and the opera, and Morisot depicted similar subjects, staged in her own home, such as in The Black Bodice (1878) and Young Woman in a Ball Gown (1879).34 Morisot frequently painted outdoors, in gardens and parks; the private garden can be seen as an extension of the domestic interior, whereas the park’s public quality makes it a different kind of space, as this writer has discussed elsewhere.35 Cassatt also painted her subjects outdoors: sitting in gardens, driving in the park, boating. In the following analysis of works, chosen to highlight some of the varied themes announced above (and painted in the medium of oil on canvas unless otherwise noted), Morisot and Cassatt thoughtfully reveal the intimacies and social conventions of the bourgeois domestic interior while also in some cases suggesting the tensions of modern womanhood. Within these scenes, the focus is frequently on relationships, between for the most part women – relationships between mothers, children, families, friends, domestic employees – and the viewer. The toilette scenes reveal women alone in the privacy of the domestic interior, depicting a relationship with the self, while viewed by the artist and viewer. Morisot also painted her husband and her nephew on several occasions, and Cassatt painted several portraits of the male members of her immediate family. For the most part however, their domestic interior scenes present a world of women and children. At times their work displays escapist flourishes through abstract and radical brushwork, a lack of reticence, a freedom of technique, apparently at odds with the subjects depicted, subjects too easily reduced to a description of bourgeois ‘femininity’. The moments of tension may signal interstices, threshold stories or simply aesthetic choices marking such moments of domestic privacy as aesthetic narrative. The viewer decides the significance of ‘tea’, ‘clothes’ and ‘nursery’, however without these images of private bourgeois life, Impressionist history would be deprived of the insights of these moments of modern women painting their peers, families and homes, with all the complexities that this might involve, through a female gaze, and the agency that this implies.36

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In March 1869, Morisot’s sister, closest confidant and painting colleague, Edma, married naval officer Adolphe Pontillon, and moved to Brittany.37 During that summer, Morisot visited the Pontillons in Lorient and painted her sister in Young Woman at a Window, also known as The Artist’s Sister at a Window (1869) (Plate 9). In this work we see Edma in profile, facing an open French window, but distracted by her fan, not looking out at the world of the street, nor the figures on the balconies opposite hers. The touches of bright green in the shutters of the building opposite recall the green of Manet’s The Balcony (1868–9), as Sylvie Patry notes,38 whereas the tones of the interior are more muted, and the diagonal of Edma’s dress is echoed in the patterned diamond wallpaper, and set off against a floral upholstered armchair. The comfort of her surroundings contrasts with the melancholy aspect of this young woman, confronted with a threshold space, through which the light from outdoors brightens the room, falling on Edma’s white dress, with its touches of white, yellow, pink, mauve and green. Edma is contained within the lines of the walls which converge behind her, and the table in the background. Exhibited at the Salon of 1870, the Revue internationale de l’art et de la curiosité noted ‘the very luminous and limpid sketch of Mlle Berthe Morisot, a Woman at her Window’.39 Edma returned to the family home in Paris during the winter of 1869–70, for the birth of her first child, a daughter, Jeanne. During this period, Morisot painted her pregnant sister sitting next to their mother, depicted reading a book, in their home in the Rue Franklin. The work, Reading, also known as The Mother and Sister of the Artist, was also admitted to the Salon of 1870. These Salon submissions announced Morisot’s intent to focus on figure paintings, having declared that landscapes bored her, ‘les paysages m’ennuient’.40 In both works, a tension is set up between the interior setting and the young woman depicted. In Reading, the mother figure seems quite at ease, reading, whereas Edma’s melancholy expression and fixed gaze is apparent and somewhat at odds with the setting: the cosy interior, the upholstered, mirrored, and gilt surfaces; the drapes and the ‘casings’; the suggestion of the world outdoors – from which the young woman has temporarily withdrawn – in the reflected light of the mirror. Edma’s lack of activity also contributes to the sense of her having withdrawn from habitual occupations in the home. Again, the diagonal plays an important part in the composition of Morisot’s canvas, here, Mme Morisot, in black, occupying the foreground, with an empty space of grey wall above her head, while Edma, in white again, and bathed in light, wearing a bright blue ribbon in her hair, occupies the middle ground, with the ornately upholstered sofa, brightly coloured cushions, and mirror in the background, and a decorative

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table in front of her, and on it, a vase with mauve flowers and a newspaper or journal. The table and all of the objects in a small space seem to hem Edma in somewhat; hands folded, she looks downwards, lost in thought. The lines of the surfaces of curved sofa back, rectangular mirror, curved table, and the dividing line between Mme Morisot and Edma’s skirts rhythm the work and draw the viewer’s eyes in all directions. The touches of bright blue pigment in Edma’s hair ribbon, the vivid colours of the cushions and the green leafy patterns of the upholstery echoing the leaves in the vase provide accents in a picture which otherwise is dominated by muted grey tones, flesh tones and a variety of black and white tones. From this work, the viewer can imagine the quiet moments, the stillness, the hours of contemplation or reading, in a family with grown-up children, and indeed the sense of anticipation or anxiety surrounding Edma’s confinement. In bourgeois households, women laboured and gave birth at home; however the sounds, images, and laundry occasioned by childbirth are far removed from this tranquil, comfortable, bourgeois interior.41 In contrast to the Lorient picture (43.5 x 73 cm), Reading is a large work (101 x 81.8 cm), and Manet, whom Morisot asked to critique it and who ‘found it very good, except for the lower part of the dress’ before her Salon submission, retouched the work in the figure of Mme Morisot, apparently starting with the skirt but then moving upwards, ending up with ‘the prettiest caricature that was ever seen’.42 The traces of Manet’s touch are evident in Mme Morisot’s eyes, face and hands. Morisot was upset to the point of wishing that it would be rejected by the Salon jury; it wasn’t and her mother was able to retrieve the painting, but in the end they decided to re-submit it. However, critics apparently did not comment on it, with one suggestion being that this was possibly due to the understanding that Manet had had a hand in retouching it.43 Two works by Cassatt echo these works by Morisot: firstly Reading Le Figaro (1877–8), a portrait of Cassatt’s mother, occupying a similar position to Mme Morisot, and reading a newspaper. In a light-filled interior, she is almost encased in a large armchair, with a curved back and abstract flourishes suggesting floralpatterned upholstery. The mirror behind her recalls the mirror on the wall behind Edma and her mother, although its position is quite different, the viewer only sees a vertical line of the right side of the frame, and the reflection in the glass; reflecting at an angle Mrs Cassatt’s hand and arm, and the newspaper. The vertical line of the mirror frame is cropped by the diagonal lines of the folded newspaper; these lines contrasting with the curves of the armchair, Mrs Cassatt’s head, shoulders and arms, and the suggestion of her legs under her

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white morning dress. Her legs – in addition to the mirror and the armchair – are boldly cropped in a nod to the distinctive framing of Japanese woodblock prints, the arrival of which on the Parisian art market in the 1860s had had a striking influence on the development of modern art.44 The tones used by Cassatt in this portrait of broad brushstrokes and confident lines centre on variations of white, gilt, grey and black, with flesh tones, to create an extremely luminous work, with careful use of shadow in the folds of the newspaper. There is an air of authority about Mrs Cassatt in this work, underlined by her reading a newspaper, and not a novel or fashion journal, while depicted as feminine and elegant, even while crossing over into the traditionally masculine realm of the outside world, of newspapers, politics and current affairs. The work necessarily recalls Paul Cézanne’s portrait, The Artist’s Father, Reading ‘L’Événement’ (1866), where the viewer also sees the title of the newspaper, folded over, upside down, and the limited palette of variations of white grey, black, ochre and flesh tones, but far less light and a more solid touch, leading to a sense of monumentality in Cézanne’s striking work. Mrs Cassatt’s high collar, her pince-nez, her concentrated expression, the details of frills on the bodice, skirt and cuffs of her dress underline the intellect and elegance of this household. Indeed this work was painted by Cassatt as a welcoming gesture to her well-travelled parents who had recently arrived in Paris with her elder sister Lydia, whose health was in decline. In the preceding years, Lydia had spent part of the year in Paris living with Cassatt, fulfilling the roles of friend, chaperone and frequent model for her sister’s paintings. Mrs Cassatt posed for her daughter in Cassatt’s studio.45 In Cassatt’s Susan on a Balcony (1883–6), the young woman, dressed as though she is out visiting, in fashionable summer gown, bonnet and gloves, is positioned within the threshold space of open window. Adelyn Dohme Breeskin notes that Susan ‘was a cousin of Mathilde Vallet, Cassatt’s housekeeper-maid’.46 She appears in other works, such as Susan Comforting the Baby and Susan in a Toque Trimmed with Two Roses (both c. 1881). In Susan on a Balcony, the rooftops of Paris occupy the skyline, while she looks down and – similarly to Edma in the Lorient picture – looks wistfully away from the viewer. The little dog on Susan’s lap also looks away from the viewer, and the lush green of the leaves on the trees outside the apartment window seem more appealing than the interior to them both. Nancy Mowll Mathews notes of Cassatt’s portrait painting of the mid-1870s: ‘Unlike Sargent, who made his sitters appears graceful and at ease with the world, she gave her sitters an air of abstraction and slight melancholy that pleased some but not all clients.’47 Mrs Cassatt’s focused look in Reading

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Le Figaro is possible due to her reading material, similarly to the pictures Cassatt painted of her sister Lydia engaged in an activity. The ‘air of abstraction and slight melancholy’, however, can be found throughout Cassatt’s work. Her painting of mothers and their children access both the joy and the difficulties of childcare, notably through such depiction of abstraction and melancholy; laced in many cases one assumes, by tiredness, when very small children are also pictured. A later portrait of her mother (c. 1889), having suffered from ill health – as had her father by that time (he died in 1891) – and having lost Lydia, who died in November 1882, conveys a sense of the grief and the poignancy of ageing, of quiet moments confined to the interior, the time passing, both as experienced by her mother, and by Cassatt as observer, family member and artist.48 In 1871, Morisot depicted Edma during her second pregnancy, which followed soon after her first, in the extraordinary pastel work Portrait of Mme Pontillon (1871), shown at the Salon of 1872. The portrait recalls the earlier Reading, but significantly, Edma is depicted alone, hands folded over her abdomen, in black this time, within a composition that leaves the top-left quarter of the canvas empty, in contrast to the patterned upholstery and drapes. Edma’s direct gaze has the benefit of her first-time experience of pregnancy and childbirth, indeed there is pathos and perhaps resignation in her look to her sister, in their family home. A year later, Morisot captured Edma as a mother watching over her second daughter, Blanche, who was born in December 1871, in one of her bestknown works, The Cradle (1872) (Plate 10).49 Celebrated as an enduring image of maternity, it is nonetheless complex and even presents much ambiguity in its honest depiction of a tired mother watching over her daughter’s cradle. Its intimacy and its truthful quality give it a relevance that contemporary images of fashionable, staged, motherhood, lack. It was exhibited at the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874, where critics, such as Jules Castagnary, noted its grace and delicate qualities.50 Morisot had apparently attempted to sell it since 1873, but it didn’t attract a buyer and was to stay within the family of the models, Edma and Blanche, until 1930, when it was acquired by the Louvre.51 In this work, the interior elements which at first strike the viewer are the drapes over the cradle, the drapes behind, and the long white, curved line to the far right, which is cropped by the frame, and then, further to the left, descends, becoming legible – if one compares it to a curved beech wood cradle (c. 1880) in the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs52 – as the hook on which the cradle drapes and pink ribbons are suspended; as discussed below, it is not immediately apparent as to what this line refers, but this does not concern Morisot, and her bold cropping, borrowing from the modernity of Japanese art,

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draws us in, places the viewer within the intimacy of the scene. Again the use of the diagonal rhythms the composition, both with the drape separating mother and child, and the diagonal of Edma’s pose, hand to head, elbow bent, repeating that of her daughter, asleep, connecting them. Edma’s solicitude is also seen in the way she holds the muslin drape between her fingers, while the familiarity expressed in the pose of sister (model) to sister (artist) allows us a look into the most private of areas of the bourgeois home, the bedroom. The societal and cultural expectation that bourgeois mothers devote themselves to their husband, children, and homes, while remaining elegant and receiving guests, is peripheral to this image of quiet stillness, contemplation, tiredness and lack of ostentation of dress. Edma’s hair is slightly messy, tendrils escaping around her face; but she is wearing a black ribbon choker and a ribbon in her hair, whether as an effort in keeping up appearances, or in keeping with her own sense of style, to make herself feel more herself, in the midst of the early childhood years of her daughters. Morisot’s luminous canvas presents sketch-like suggestive brushwork and areas of the background where the viewer is not certain of what is being represented, but which Morisot does not feel the need to clarify, particularly in the areas of black surrounding the cradle, and the radically cropped hook for the cradle drapes, a deceptively simple line of white pigment, Morisot’s brush curving and leaving a trail on a black background. The pink ribbon and trim of the muslin drapes are set off against Edma’s navy-and-black striped gown with its white frills, while pale blue and navy accents rhythm the drapes behind her, and the drapes of the cradle, predominantly white, cream and pink tones, suggesting a cocoon-like intimacy between mother and daughter, and the sisters, together again, the former artist, Edma, now portrayed as a mother, not in front of the window in Lorient, a new wife; her profile here facing the opposite way, looking into the cradle of her daughter, in Paris. When contrasted with the enclosed, cocoon-like maternal space of the bedroom, and the quiet windowless interior of for example the two watercolours of her sisters and their daughters discussed below, one can appreciate the significance of the window, terrace or balcony space in Morisot’s work, of these frames within frames, looking out to other worlds. The views out over Paris in two works, one in oil, the other in watercolour, both traditionally known as Woman and Child on a Balcony, also titled more recently as Lady and Child on the Terrace of the Morisots, Rue Franklin (1871–2), featuring either Edma or their elder sister Yves Gobillard, and Yves’s young daughter Paule, reveal the city beyond the domestic interior, the moment of looking out to the city.53

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A further work, Interior (c. 1871), takes a step back inside the house, with the open window to the left, and the similar figures of woman and little girl looking out to the balcony or terrace, but also depicting a young woman inside, fashionably dressed, sitting on an ornate chair (there is a further empty chair next to her), with a gilt and floral background – an enormous planter with flowers and foliage.54 The seated young woman does not turn to face the pair approaching the window and its drapes; she occupies a different plane, composed, hands folded, apparently lost in thought. The watercolour sketches of windowless interiors mentioned above, depicting Morisot’s sisters and nieces, firstly Edma and Jeanne (Edma once again holding a fan, and possibly pregnant with Blanche if the 1871 date is accurate, in Mme Pontillon and her Daughter, Jeanne), and Yves and her daughter, Paule (Mme Gobillard and her Daughter, Paule; both sketches dated 1871 by Stuckey)55 reveal the beautifully dressed mothers and daughters sitting or positioned in close proximity but not looking at each other, a nod to the many hours passed in each other’s company, and even the potential boredom of hours spent indoors. The echo of Edma in the Lorient picture is clear in the later watercolour: her profile, her slightly downturned head facing the same way, the fan, her fashionable yet informal white dress, an air of slight melancholy or a sense of preoccupation, in spite of the presence of her daughter, and in both cases the possibility that she was expecting; Jeanne in the first, Blanche in the second. Cassatt’s sister Lydia also featured regularly in her scenes of domestic life, occupied by reading, sewing, taking tea, as in The Reader (Lydia Cassatt) (c. 1878), The Cup of Tea (1880–1) and Lydia at a Tapestry Frame (c. 1881).56 The air of melancholy of Morisot’s portraits of her sisters in interior settings would appear to be absent in Lydia’s concentration on the object at hand, or her engagement with others out of frame, as in The Cup of Tea. However, even in the latter work, Lydia’s self-containment is perceptible. When exhibited at the sixth Impressionist exhibition of 1881, the critic Gustave Geffroy wrote of ‘the woman in the pink dress and bonnet who holds a cup of tea in her gloved hands. She is exquisitely Parisian’. He called ‘this Thé a delicious work’.57 Cassatt’s loose brushwork and handling of pigment create a luminous portrait of Lydia, viewed from a slightly raised perspective, and painted in predominantly pink, white, mauve, blue and purple tones. According to her sister-in-law Lois, Lydia was a ‘connoisseur’ when it came to clothes and finding dress-makers, and the attention to detail in her and Cassatt’s dress (in, for example, Cassatt’s self-portraits, or Degas’s portraits of Cassatt) is marked.58 As is also the case in Morisot’s interior scenes, these details of fashion combine with the settings

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to create an atmosphere of bourgeois comfort, affluence and taste; here Cassatt painting Lydia in a pink gown and bonnet, drinking tea from fine china, seated in a purple striped armchair, in front of a peacock blue planter bursting with greenery and white and blue blooms. The mauve shadows and white accents of Lydia’s lace ruffles, bodice, and cuffs; the tea cup and saucer with their gilt rim; the silver spoon; the light-filled blue-grey background sketchily painted; all create an atmosphere of the light of outdoors brought in to the interior. Cassatt’s brushstrokes create barely perceptible links between the different objects represented, with accents of deep purple and ochre revealing themselves along the rim of the cup, in Lydia’s bonnet and in the planter. There is a marked contrast between this work, its light-filled airy quality, and the sense of compression of the heavily furnished setting of The Tea (c. 1880) (Plate 11).59 Cassatt depicts two women in a drawing room, with its striped wallpaper, carved marble fireplace, gilt-framed mirror, porcelain vase, floral sofa and the table upon which the silver tea service is placed, drawn up in front of them. The dominant hues of mauve and red of the interior are lightened by the mirror and fireplace, and the tea service. The navy dress of the visiting woman, in bonnet and gloves, strikes a different note, chic and understated, within this somewhat garishly decorated interior. The silver tea service (dated c. 1813, several pieces of which are also conserved, together with the painting, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston60) takes pride of place, signifying the ceremony and ritual of daily life: of social visits, of fashion, of objects and of communication between families and acquaintances; a step beyond the purely private interior to the semi-private spaces of entertaining and sociability of the home. Indeed the ritual of tea, and the act of drinking, obscures the face of one of the two women portrayed, the guest, while the hostess sits in profile, with her hand to her face; both women caught in informal poses, as if in the frame of a photograph. Neither of them is visually or verbally communicating with each other in the moment which Cassatt has chosen to depict. The hostess appears to have finished her tea as her cup sits, empty, on the table. Indeed at this moment there seem to be a sense of disconnection between the women and the interior décor which brings them together, compresses them into a small space, while the tea service looms large, luxuriantly, on the table. A small hiatus in conversation or a social visit tinged with awkwardness? Cassatt lets the viewer decide. The Tea recalls Gustave Caillebotte’s Luncheon (1876), with its attention to detail of the silverware, glassware, dining and entertaining formalities characterizing each bourgeois household. Another notable example of a work depicting a tea service is Cassatt’s Lady at the Tea Table (1883–5), a portrait of

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Mary Dickinson Riddle, Cassatt’s mother’s first cousin, whose daughter had given the artist’s family the gilded blue-and-white Canton porcelain tea service.61 While painted in response to the gift, the sitter’s daughter did not like the depiction of her mother and the portrait remained in Cassatt’s possession until it entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a gift of the artist in 1923.62 Again, the attention to detail of fashion, objects and décor creates an atmosphere of bourgeois comfort and an intriguing sense of the sitter’s character and position within her family. Cassatt’s arrangement of colours and objects, in a palette of white, black and blue, with gilt accents, is arresting, and, once again, captures a moment of domestic life in the bourgeois interior. A child’s tea tray, with silver jug, bowl, china plate with gilt rim, and glass bowl with two peaches, in Cassatt’s Mother and Child (Baby Getting up from his Nap) (c. 1899) also points to the details of objects which characterize the domestic interior, and the daily rituals of looking after children, with feeding, dressing, bathing and bedtime routines. When Cassatt depicts childcare, she pinpoints moments which vary over a spectrum of intense closeness to ambiguity and detachment. The intimacy and closeness of moments of maternal embrace and childcare are seen in The Goodnight Hug (1880) and The Child’s Bath (1893), discussed below, and the majority of Cassatt’s works depicting mothers and their children; however, there is also at times an ambiguity or apparent tension in the works, for example, in Breakfast in Bed (1897), in which a young mother, in a bed of white pillowcases and sheets, props up her toddler, who is alert, while she looks preoccupied, disgruntled or perhaps simply tired. In The Goodnight Hug, the embrace is so private, the mother turns away from the viewer, and her profile meets that of her child, a closeness reinforced by their arms embracing each other. A work in pastel, the abstract, zig-zagged, touches on the patterned walls and the armchair convey a quality of the unknown; perhaps hinting at the unexplained connections and attachment of maternity, the intensity of childcare routines, and the heavily decorated domestic interior. Both Cassatt and Morisot depict children by themselves, and in one instance one can directly compare their treatment of little girls sitting in oversized armchairs, in Cassatt’s Little Girl in a Blue Armchair (1878) and Morisot’s Young Girl with a Doll (1884). Cassatt’s painting depicts an interior crammed with blue patterned armchairs and sofa, and the sense of the little girl’s perspective, of feeling so small in their midst. Looking at this work, one might think of Mallarmé and Duranty’s comments on perspective and vantage points, and the ways in which, ‘in real life views of things and people are manifested in a thousand unexpected ways’.63 A sense of realism with regard to the depiction of

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this young girl, beautifully dressed, but sprawled on a chair, a puppy on the chair beside her, combines with the heightened depiction of the blue interior, with its raised perspective, which is so effective in creating a sense of the small child somewhat trapped in this highly decorated interior, backlit by windows. The perspective together with the cropping of the chairs and the highly decorative surfaces all suggest the influence of Japanese prints. Degas made suggestions to Cassatt about the composition, and even worked on parts of the background, in an echo of Morisot’s earlier experience with Manet, but for Cassatt the result was a happier one.64 Morisot’s Young Girl with a Doll depicts her daughter Julie holding a doll, with a more rapidly executed rendering, suggesting nonetheless a similarly marooned child in the midst of a bourgeois interior, here a single armchair next to a large planter with foliage. Julie’s legs reach out over the edge of the chair, in to which she is firmly positioned, holding the doll so that its face faces the viewer. Together these works, in comparison with the works discussed above, highlight the distance that girls have to travel to assume the roles nineteenthcentury society expected them to take on; replicating and filling the domestic interior with taste, fashion, children, guests. However, these works also created the possibility for the girls depicted to become artists, women who did not necessarily follow bourgeois dictates, observing as they did Cassatt and Morisot at work. In Cassatt’s The Child’s Bath (1893) (Plate 12) the viewer is reminded of the routines and labour of looking after small children; taking a trope of Degas’s, Cassatt looks down on her subjects, and depicts the act of caretaking, bathing, the young child. The atmosphere of calm, quiet, careful washing and togetherness is apparent in the absorbed quality of the woman and child’s individual gazes focused on the child’s foot in the gilt-rimmed basin of water. The diagonals of the picture – of their gaze, of their legs and arms – combine to suggest this moment of stillness and attentiveness. The patterns of the interior décor and the woman’s striped dress offset and enhance the stillness, competing for attention but ultimately unable to distract from the careful depiction of the undressed child, wrapped simply in a white cloth around the middle, with legs, arms, and chest uncovered. Cassatt’s depiction of the wallpaper, chest of drawers and rug reveals complex patterns, rich colours, different forms of design and décor. Their presence in this work, along with the decorated gilt-rimmed pitcher, which is viewed at a different angle from the more simple lines of the basin, is a marked difference from the earlier, more impressionistic, suggested, interiors by Cassatt discussed above. The viewer observes but is removed from the scene. The white

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and flesh tones, the pinks and greens, and the dark hair of woman and child hold the light and the viewer’s attention in this work, whereas the red, orange, brown and sage green tones of the background create a setting to which the viewer’s eye passes, connecting the flowers on the chest of drawers with those on the rug, the gilt of the drawers with the rims of the basin and pitcher; a cropped, momentary image of an interior that the viewer can imagine and enlarge to create an entire domestic setting. Cassatt’s bathing and toilette scenes of adult women also recall Degas, but the Japonisant quality of her prints creates a linearity and a quality of reportage, setting them apart from her works where paint makes the surface sensuous. Cassatt was deeply inspired by the important exhibition of over seven hundred Ukiyo-e Japanese woodblock prints at the École des Beaux-Arts in the spring of 1890, and wrote enthusiastically to Morisot, telling her she must not miss it.65 In Cassatt’s prints Woman Bathing and The Coiffure (both 1890–91) there is a record of the daily routines of bathing, of preparing oneself not only for the private space of the domestic interior but for the in-between spaces of receiving visitors in the home and for public space. These prints set up a distance from the viewer in terms of both technique and composition: the women are depicted performing their private routines, in private spaces revealing patterned décor and the clean lines of furniture, their backs to the viewer, and their reflections in mirrors showing but not connecting them to the viewer. By contrast with Cassatt’s prints, Morisot’s toilette scenes frequently reveal young women at their least guarded: dressing, undressing, raising their arms aloft, facing the viewer, insouciant, as in The Bath (Girl Arranging her Hair) (1885–86) and Getting out of Bed (1886), both exhibited at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition of 1886, and depicting model Isabelle Lambert, then seventeen years old.66 Both works were a critical success.67 The first work presents a spare background, with abstract touches on the wall, of white, grey, blue, pink and ochre tones, elements of furniture in the middle ground and a closeup view of the young woman in the foreground, arms aloft, wearing a simple white sleeveless garment and with a gold bangle and ribbon choker, a hairbrush in her lap and the frame of the canvas cropping her at her knees. The second work presents a fully furnished bedroom, Morisot’s own, with its Louis XVI bed, patterned rug and chest of drawers, one of which is left open, in a further expression of apparent spontaneity (Morisot repeats this in a dining-room scene from the same time, The Little Servant (1885–6), with an open cupboard). The extraordinary brushwork suggests the early morning light, the moment of this young woman putting on her slippers, sitting on the bed, her simple white

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sleeveless gown falling off her left shoulder, set back into the picture depicting the bedroom, with its colours, surfaces, textures and objects. There is a sensuality in Morisot’s toilette images which combines with a sense of candour and intimacy and sets them apart. Cassatt’s oil painting, Girl Arranging her Hair (1886), also shown at the final Impressionist exhibition, greatly admired and once owned by Degas, shows an adolescent girl twisting her hair in front of a washstand with various objects of the toilette placed upon it and has more in common with Morisot’s The Bath (Girl Arranging her Hair) and other toilette pictures than the later prints by Cassatt, where the linearity of style and the focus on the graphic qualities of the print create a distancing feature. The depiction of young women looking at themselves in mirrors (as in the Cassatt prints discussed above and in Morisot’s Psyché/The Cheval Glass (1876) and other works, including Woman at her Toilette (1875/80), discussed below), has a long aesthetic tradition, but within the specifically bourgeois domestic interior, it was a radical gesture to depict real women, rather than the bathing nymphs favoured by Salon juries; to watch these modern women prepare themselves to bathe, arrange their hair, dress, undress. Morisot’s toilette scenes imply preparation both for everyday life and for special events, where public scrutiny was to be expected, as in The Black Bodice (1878) and Young Woman in a Ball Gown (1879), in which, by contrast with her toilette images of the private interior, a sense of guardedness characterizes the looks of the subjects represented, apparently on display in the public sphere, and having retreated to quiet corners. These are in contrast to Morisot’s private interior pictures of reclining women on daybeds in the home, such as Portrait of Mme Marie Hubbard (1874) and Young Woman in Grey Reclining (1879), a subject which one also sees in works by Manet (including two portraits of Morisot), Monet and Renoir, and which holds echoes of Francisco de Goya.68 In Morisot’s works, these women reclining inhabit a relaxed, informal space, where a sense of the privacy of the domestic interior, and of women relaxed from social constraints as regards deportment and decorum, is prevalent. Contrasting with the tensions and restrictions of interior pictures highlighted by Pollock and Clayson, as noted above, it is important not to overlook the sense of ease and relaxation of such pictures depicting bourgeois women in the domestic interior. Morisot’s Woman at her Toilette (1875/80) (Plate 13), shown in the fifth Impressionist exhibition in 1880, was purchased by Cassatt in 1896, having been re-acquired by Durand-Ruel from the collection of the American Impressionist William Merritt Chase (who had probably bought it in at Durand-Ruel’s New

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York exhibition of 1886).69 Cassatt’s acquisition reveals how linked the two women were artistically, and how connected in terms of their aesthetic ambitions. The work recalls Duranty’s declarations: ‘A back should reveal temperament, age and social position’ and: An atmosphere is created in every interior, along with a certain personal character that is taken on by the objects that fill it. The number, spacing, and arrangement of mirrors decorating an apartment and the number of objects hung on the walls – these things bring something to our homes, whether it is an air of mystery or a kind of brightness.70

Morisot leaves us guessing as to the event or ball that this young woman has dressed herself for; the blueish, rosy light perhaps suggesting the early hours of the morning, after the ball, rather than the preparation for a night to come. The rapid brushwork in the depiction of light, skin, fabric, mirror and bedroom décor leads to brushstrokes and pigment creating a play between different surfaces. The female gaze here in the private interior combines with Morisot’s lightness of touch at bringing the viewer into the bedroom, making this image sensuous, a nod towards the eroticism that Manet and Degas’s toilette views more blatantly propose. Inevitably one thinks of Manet’s Before the Mirror (1876), although in that work, the woman, with her back to the viewer, is unlacing her corset, nodding towards the unequivocal sexual overtones of Manet’s Nana, a courtesan, in a sumptuously decorated interior, with her waiting client, of 1877.71 Other interior scenes by Morisot show female employees – in the dining room, or taking care of her daughter Julie – and hint at the work involved in the home. Morisot’s pictures of Julie as a little girl playing (particularly in Children at a basin, 1886) and as an adolescent convey other aspects of the family home, including the activities of writing, reading, daydreaming, and playing musical instruments and with pets. Morisot also captured her own relationship with Julie in self-portraits, depicting herself drawing and Julie watching at her shoulder (1887). In these works, the interior details are frequently key to the composition. In Morisot’s 1893 series of Julie playing the violin, and sitting with her greyhound Laertes, the year after the death of her father, Morisot’s husband, Eugène Manet, this occurs in a particularly striking manner, with vibrant use of colour depicting the interior details of parquet floors, rugs, pictures, mirrors, vases, fireplaces, music stands, sofa, chairs, tables, and so on. Cassatt’s drypoint print of two girls looking at a map (The Map (The Lesson), 1890) is similarly striking but for opposite reasons; the details reduced to a suggestion of the interior, which the viewer is left to imagine.

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Morisot and Cassatt’s images of the home reveal in myriad ways the relationships between the artists and their family members and the friends who visited them, also in some cases, the women who worked for them, including models, and the fabric and settings of their lives. They reveal to us the ways in which bourgeois womanhood was modelled in the home and learned by girls; depicted through Morisot and Cassatt’s art and their presence observing, representing moments of quiet stillness and reflection, of reading, of reclining and relaxation, of the calm-before-the-storm of childbirth, of the joy, stress, and occasional exhaustion of raising children, of children playing, of music practice, of the home opened to the exterior, the sociability of visiting guests, where private space becomes semi-public. The toilette scenes reveal the relationship of women to their bodies, and the rituals of preparing themselves for the private spaces of the home, the in-between spaces and the public spaces of the modern city. The threshold spaces of windows, balconies and terraces in their work reveal moments where the interior is placed in an opposing relation to the world outside, which women entered into on different terms than men. Their work shows the viewer the ways in which bourgeois domestic interiors in late-nineteenth-century Paris made, and were made by, the women inside them. Morisot and Cassatt revel in the aesthetic possibilities that the contemporary bourgeois domestic interior affords them; the patterns, objects, and frames within the frames of their works; the textures, surfaces, and reflections from windows and mirrors, allowing them to bring an aspect of Impressionist pleinairisme into their interiors, the setting for their indoor depictions of modern life and modern womanhood, as they knew it. That viewers today recognize elements of their own contemporary experience within these pictures reveals how observant and insightful Morisot and Cassatt were. There is power, not just poetry, imagination, and dreams – ‘C’est le poème de la femme moderne imaginé et rêvé par une femme’ – or ‘tea, clothes and nursery’, here.

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Iskin, Ruth E., Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Ives, Colta, The Great Wave: The Influence of Japanese Woodcuts on French Prints (exhibition catalogue) (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974). Ives, Colta, ‘Japonisme’, in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004). , accessed 10 April 2018. Jones, Kimberly A., ‘Practice and Process in the Work of Frédéric Bazille.’ In Frédéric Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism (exhibition catalogue), edited by Michel Hilaire and Paul Perrin, 151–63 (Paris: Musée d’Orsay/Flammarion, 2016). Jones, Kimberly A. et al., Degas Cassatt (exhibition catalogue) (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art/Munich—London—New York: Prestel, DelMonico Books, 2014). Mallarmé, Stéphane, ‘The Impressionists and Édouard Manet’. In Moffett et al., The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874-1886 (San Francisco: The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1986), 27–35. Marchand, Bruno, Paris, Histoire d’une ville (XIXe – XXe siècle) (Paris: Seuil, 1993). Mathews, Nancy Mowll, Mary Cassatt: A Life (New Haven—London: Yale University Press, 1998 [1994]). Mathieu, Marianne, et al., Berthe Morisot (exhibition catalogue) (Paris: Musée Marmottan Monet—Académie des Beaux-Arts, Institut de France/Éditions Hazan, 2012). McLean, Janet (ed.), Impressionist Interiors (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2008). Moffett, Charles S., et al., The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886 (exhibition catalogue) (San Francisco: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986). Nochlin, Linda, ‘Morisot’s Wet Nurse: The Construction of Work and Leisure in Impressionist Painting’ [1988]. In Women, Art and Power and Other Essays, 37–56 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994 [1989]). Nochlin, Linda, ‘Mary Cassatt’s Modernity.’ In Representing Women, 180–215 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999). Patin, Sylvie, ‘Berthe Morisot et ses confrères les impressionnistes.’ In Berthe Morisot 1841–1895 (exhibition catalogue), 42–62 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2002). Patry, Sylvie, Hugues Wilhelm, and Sylvie Patin, Berthe Morisot 1841–1895 (exhibition catalogue) (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2002). Patry, Sylvie, ‘« Votre présence vivante et peinte »: Les portraits de Berthe Morisot par Édouard Manet’. In Berthe Morisot 1841–1895 (exhibition catalogue), 21–41 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2002). Patry, Sylvie, ‘“Catching a touch of the ephemeral”: Berthe Morisot and Impressionism’. In Women Impressionists: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, Marie Bracquemond (exhibition catalogue), edited by Ingrid Pfeiffer and Max Hollein, 68–75 (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle/Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008).

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Patry, Sylvie (ed.), Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market (exhibition catalogue) (London: National Gallery, 2015). Perrot, Michelle, Alain Corbin, Roger-Henri Guerrand, Catherine Hall, Lynn Hunt, and Anne Martin-Fugier, Histoire de la vie privée IV: De la Révolution à la Grande Guerre (Paris: Seuil, 1999 [1987]). Pfeiffer, Ingrid and Max Hollein (eds), Women Impressionists: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, Marie Bracquemond (exhibition catalogue) (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle/Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008). Pollock, Griselda, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity.’ In Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, 50–90 (London—New York: Routledge, 1994 [1988]). Pollock, Griselda, Mary Cassatt: Painter of Modern Women (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998). Prendergast, Christopher, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Oxford UK—Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1995 [1992]). Richardson, Edgar, ‘Sophisticates and Innocents Abroad’, Art News, April 1954. In Cassatt: A Retrospective, edited by, Nancy Mowll Mathews, 236–8.(USA: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 1996). Rouart, Denis (ed.), The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot with Her Family and Her Friends Manet, Puvis de Chavannes, Degas, Monet, Renoir and Mallarmé, translated by Betty W. Hubbard, with a new introduction and notes by Kathleen Adler and Tamar Garb (London: Camden Press, 1986). Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man (London—Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993 [1974]). Steele, Valerie, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (New York—Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Stuckey, Charles F., William Scott, and Suzanne G. Lindsay, Berthe Morisot: Impressionist (exhibition catalogue) (London: Sotheby’s Publications, 1987). Thiébault-Sisson, François, Le Temps (1896), in Berthe Morisot 1841–1895, (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2002), 87. Tinterow, Gary, ‘1859–75 – Le Père Corot: The Very Poet of Landscape’. In Corot, 256–73 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1996). Tinterow, Gary, Michael Pantazzi, and Vincent Pomarède, Corot (exhibition catalogue) (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1996). Tucker, Paul, ‘The First Impressionist Exhibition in Context.’ In Charles S. Moffett et al., The New Painting (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2002), 91–117. Wilhelm, Hughes, ‘La Fortune critique de Berthe Morisot: Des expositions impressionnistes à l’exposition posthume.’ In Berthe Morisot 1841–1895, (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2002), 63–87.

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Wilhelm, Hughes, ‘Seven unpublished letters from Mary Cassatt to Berthe Morisot and her daughter Julie Manet.’ In Women Impressionists: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, Marie Bracquemond (exhibition catalogue), edited by Ingrid Pfeiffer and Max Hollein, 122–5 (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle/Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008). Williams, Rosalind, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley—Los Angeles—London: University of California Press, 1982).

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Bricolage and the domestic interior in the French feminine press of the 1860s and 1870s, from La Ménagère to Stéphane Mallarmé’s La Dernière Mode Caroline Ardrey

In La Dernière Mode [The Last/Latest Fashion] Mallarmé’s short-lived fashion magazine of 1874, the fictitious fashion columnist Madame de Ponty declares that ‘decoration! Everything is in that word’.1 Applying to decoration both as process and as product, Madame de Ponty’s assertion sums up the emphasis placed on design and embellishment in fashion and interiors by the feminine press during the latter half of the nineteenth century. This chapter takes Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical idea of bricolage as a starting point from which to examine the relationship between the domestic interior and the act of reading in French fashion journals of the 1860s and 1870s. Appropriating the masculine figure of the bricoleur, I contend that this epoch can be seen as a turning point at which the readers of women’s fashion magazines became both literal and theoretical bricoleuses. To demonstrate this, the chapter will take as case studies three very different periodicals all from the late 1860s and early 1870s: La Ménagère [The Housewife], La Mode illustrée [Illustrated Fashion] and La Dernière Mode.2 La Ménagère was intended to be a weekly publication, consisting of between eight and sixteen pages, and was relatively inexpensive at 25 centimes per issue for Parisian readers and 35 centimes for subscribers outside the capital. The magazine describes itself in the strapline as a ‘journal of home economics and comfortable living’,3 and had a practical focus, discussing ways to make tasty, cost-effective meals as well as including features on family health and personal hygiene.4 This chapter considers only the prospectus for the magazine, which

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was also issued under the title, Le Confortable, in the same year. Aside from this prospectus, appearing under two names, no copies of the magazine can be found in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, or in other library collections, suggesting that the magazine was never formally launched in the proposed format. However, the prospectus for La Ménagère sets out the journal’s aims very clearly, with important implications for our understanding of the relationship between the press and women’s role within the home in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The cover of La Ménagère (Figure 8.1) promised readers ‘home and personal care’ (La Ménagère, p.1), suggesting that the woman reader and the home were inseparable from each other, with the implication that maintaining the domestic space was a fundamental part of the female identity in nineteenth-century France. The cover of La Ménagère also highlights the inclusion of ‘recipes for cooking, confectionary and the wine cellar’, ‘little personal grooming tricks’ and ‘[medical and surgical] first aid advice’, constructing an overall image of a woman reader with practical rather than aesthetic concerns. Although the prospectus states that ‘home economics is not a science in the proper sense of the term’ (La Ménagère, p. 1), the masthead shown below promises, in bold type, ‘new and innovative instruments, tools and utensils’ and beneath this, in small caps, the magazine claims to be ‘illustrated with drawings, patterns and vignettes by some of the top artists’. In combining discussion of innovative practical tools with drawings, patterns and vignettes, the magazine appears to be trying to appeal to a vast readership, with wide-ranging interests, but the masthead and the lack of images in this prospectus betray La Ménagère’s pragmatic focus. The second journal under consideration in this chapter, La Mode illustrée, was far more glamorous in its presentation and subject matter than La Ménagère;

Figure 8.1  Masthead of the prospectus issue of La Ménagère.

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subtitled a ‘journal de la famille’ [‘a family magazine’], the periodical was launched in 1859 and remained in circulation until well into the twentieth century, becoming a very well-known title in the nineteenth-century feminine press. In the early 1870s, La Mode illustrée was priced at 25 centimes for the magazine alone – the same price as La Ménagère, though for an additional 25 centimes, the journal also came with large colour fashion plates, showcasing the latest must-have attire for fashionable ladies. Sewing patterns, too, cost an extra 25 centimes meaning that the total cost of purchasing La Mode illustrée with all the supplements would be three times the price of a copy of the more basic La Ménagère. The cover of La Mode illustrée (Figure 8.2) reveals the magazine’s focus on aesthetic matters: while La Ménagère is full of recipes and first aid advice, La Mode illustrée promises ‘the most elegant fashion plates and needlework patterns’, as well as fine art, music, short stories, conversational articles and literature. The list of topics covered by La Mode illustrée is displayed in small print at the base of the masthead, but the ornate script of the journal’s title and the exquisite decorative image beneath highlight the journal’s emphasis on creative and aesthetic matters. Inside the magazine itself were small pictures showing garments, fashion accessories, handmade furniture and sewing and embroidery

Figure 8.2  Masthead of La Mode illustrée (issue from 1 June 1873).

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patterns, all of which combine to show that styling the home was as important as dressing fashionably. I shall focus on these smaller images in this chapter as they are particularly representative of the aspirational lifestyles of the upper-middle class in late-nineteenth-century France, offering an important insight into the role of women and, in particular, of women’s magazine reading in decorating the domestic space. The final magazine to be considered in this chapter is La Dernière Mode, a fashion periodical launched in September 1874, which ran for just eight issues before ceasing circulation due to financial difficulties. Although relatively similar in form and content to other female-oriented journals of the period, La Dernière Mode sets itself apart from rival fashion periodicals by the conditions of its production – the journal was written almost entirely by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, under a variety of pseudonyms, including Madame de Ponty, writing on fashion, and Ix, author of a regular feature on arts and books. La Dernière Mode was relatively expensive at 50 centimes for the text version of the magazine, including internal images, while a copy which included fashion plates was priced at 1F 25c, making Mallarmé’s journal a real luxury item in comparison with other contemporary women’s magazines. Referring to itself in the subtitle as a ‘gazette of [high] society and of the family’, La Dernière Mode was clearly aimed at upper-middle-class women, as demonstrated by its treatment of the practices of everyday life: while La Ménagère discussed basic cooking and cleaning, La Dernière Mode was more interested in decorating and entertaining. Alongside the regular columns on fashion and culture, Mallarmé’s magazine also contained a section entitled ‘Le Carnet d’Or’ [‘The Golden Notebook’], which comprised several ‘guest articles’ in each issue, supposedly offered by experts and artisans but all bearing the hallmarks of the mysterious Monsieur Stéphane Mallarmé. The special features in ‘Le Carnet d’Or’ covered an extensive range of topics relating to the home and family – from guidance on leather appliqué to recipes for exotic dishes like okra gumbo and coconut jam. Normally, there would be a different set of guest contributors each fortnight, though one figure crops up three times across the eight issues of the magazine – Marliani tapissierdécorateur [upholsterer and decorator] whose columns shall be the main focus in the final sections of this chapter. Taking these interior design articles, written under the soubriquet of Marliani, as case studies, I shall argue that, in contrast to other contemporary fashion magazines, in La Dernière Mode, Mallarmé exploits the reading process as a creative act in its own right, using the domestic space as a starting point for a process which transports the reader into a luxurious imaginary world, fuelled by a desire to reach the elusive dernière mode.

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Female creativity and domestic space: The bricoleuse Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage offers a relevant and innovative way of reading domestic space as it is presented in late-nineteenth-century French women’s magazines. The notion of bricolage is a theoretical approach to mythical thinking put forward by Lévi-Strauss in the opening chapter of his 1962 work The Savage Mind. Appropriating the concept from the DIY and home improvement boom which took hold in the West in the 1950s, Lévi-Strauss utilizes the term in a theoretical sense in order to explore and explain the mechanisms behind the creation of aesthetic and cultural products. The idea of bricolage has long had a link with leisure activities, and, as such, lends itself to being applied to the practices of reading and literary creation. In its old sense the verb ‘bricoler’ applied to ball games and billiards, to hunting, shooting and riding. It was however always used with reference to some extraneous movement: a ball rebounding, a dog straying or a horse swerving from its direct course to avoid an obstacle. And in our own time, the ‘bricoleur’ is still someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman. The characteristic feature of mythical thought is that it expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire which, even if extensive, is nevertheless limited. It has to use this repertoire, however, whatever the task in hand because it has nothing else at its disposal. Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual ‘bricolage’ – which explains the relation which can be perceived between the two.5

Intellectual bricolage, then, is a creative process, which involves drawing links between disparate entities and ideas, and combining fragments of diverging cultural practices in order to make meaning out of aesthetic and social experiences. In the citation above, Lévi-Strauss traces his theoretical notion of bricolage back to its historical roots, evoking key ideas which are particularly relevant to the practice of reading women’s magazines. First, he suggests that bricolage – both in its modern, literal sense as DIY and in its post-modern theoretical sense as an intellectual mode – is a non-standard, ‘roundabout’ way of tackling an activity, an aleatory mode of construction, which often leads to varied outcomes. Building on Michel de Certeau’s suggestion, put forward in The Practice of Everyday Life, that reading can be understood as a form of bricolage,6 I contend that women’s magazines, which present a range of different articles and genres of writing as well as various kinds of images within a single volume, are typically approached through this non-standard way of reading. After all, while some of the elements of

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a magazine may be linked by theme (e.g. a particular seasonal event such as Christmas), there is no predetermined structure for a magazine: relations may be spatial but a reader is not obliged to approach the articles in the order they appear. The unity of a magazine then, comes from the links which the reader draws between the various articles and, crucially to this study, between text and visual media, making the readers themselves intellectual bricoleurs or, for our purposes, bricoleuses. It is worth noting at this point that Jacques Derrida critiqued the idea put forward in The Savage Mind of the bricoleur being opposed to the engineer, arguing that Lévi-Strauss’s definition of bricolage could be applied to any type of discourse. The engineer, whom Lévi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur, should be the one to construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon. In this sense the engineer is a myth. A subject who supposedly would be the absolute origin of his own discourse and supposedly would construct it ‘out of nothing’, ‘out of whole cloth,’ would be the creator of the verb, the verb itself.7

Derrida’s view of bricolage does not, I suggest, undermine the argument that magazine reading can be seen as a form of bricolage, but rather reinforces the idea that the feminine press of the late nineteenth century exploits the fragmented nature of the journalistic form to promote a creative engagement on the part of the female readers. In the case of the three nineteenth-century women’s magazines considered in this chapter and, indeed, in the nineteenth-century feminine press more broadly, the domestic interior provides the backdrop in which spatial relations between articles, and between the reality of everyday life and the imaginary worlds of material aspiration and literary fiction are constructed. The very nature of the magazine format demands that the reader assimilate articles on various topics – in this case themes such as cooking, embroidery, dress-making and decorating the home – with the fictional tales and literary contributions which were central features of magazines such as La Mode illustrée and La Dernière mode, but were also due to feature in the more pragmatic La Ménagère. The notion of magazine reading as bricolage is reinforced by art and cultural historian Kathryn J. Brown, who contends that the female readership of fashion journals and newspapers ‘absorb and assemble a range of texts and images to produce their own versions of metropolitan experience’.8 I suggest that women’s magazines invite intellectual bricolage by encouraging female readers to reconcile the reality of the domestic environment, which was often limiting and oppressive,9 with the aesthetic possibilities of the fantasies opened up by

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reading fictional short stories, or aspirational articles about luxurious clothes and sumptuously decorated interiors. The second link between bricolage and magazine reading lies in LéviStrauss’s assertion that the bricoleur typically ‘makes do’ with the tools and materials he or she has to hand, rather than using specialist equipment as an artist might. The idea of making do with whatever is to hand has long been promoted by women’s magazines, from the culture of needlework and sewing in the nineteenth-century, to the practice of ‘making-do and mending’ endorsed by the British government during and in the aftermath of the Second World War or the vogue for ‘re-purposing’ and ‘upcycling’ in the 2010s. The specimen issue of La Ménagère emphasizes its own aesthetic of bricolage in the first issue, in a piece which explains the periodical’s aims and raison d’être. The editorial acknowledges that the subject matter, home economics, might seem ambitious, but we should stress straight away that, for us, home economics is not a science in the proper sense of the term, because its general principles must adapt to the climate, the social standing, the nature and the resources of those seeking the best way to manage a particular domestic space. (La Ménagère, p. 1)

Like Lévi-Strauss in his outlining of bricolage, La Ménagère, in setting out its own objectives, places the emphasis on process, rather than on product, helping readers find the best way to manage their home. As the above citation points out, home economics is not an exact science, and the act of homemaking as both a duty and a pastime for women hinges upon the ability to ‘make do’ and improvise, under diverse and shifting circumstances – therein lies its attraction as a subject for journalism. As Lévi-Strauss reminds us, ‘the “bricoleur” also, and indeed principally, derives his poetry from the fact that he does not confine himself to accomplishment and execution: he “speaks” not only with things, as we have already seen, but also through the medium of things.’10 The French feminine press of the 1870s establishes the status of its readers as bricoleuses not through the physical act of making a cushion cover, or choosing furniture, but rather by engaging them in the intellectual and aesthetic process of decorating the domestic space in the mind’s eye. Ranging from the most basic ways to ensure domestic hygiene put forward in La Ménagère, to the elaborate interior design projects dreamed up by Marliani in La Dernière Mode, the emphasis placed on the domestic interior by nineteenth-century fashion and lifestyle periodicals establishes magazine reading as a form of intellectual bricolage, carving out a creative role for women as readers.

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La Ménagère The act of magazine reading establishes what we might call an ‘economy of desire’.11 Nowadays, as in nineteenth-century France, fashion and lifestyle magazines present a carefully selected set of items; readers of the magazine then incorporate these objects into their own imagined lives, which are, by their very nature, better, more luxurious and more fashionable than the reality of their everyday existence. So it is that readers seek to realize the world presented to them in magazines by buying new clothes and home accessories, and embarking upon the sewing and handicraft projects suggested by the journals of the moment. Fashion magazines and department stores were mutually influential forces in the nineteenth century: upper-middle-class women would buy magazines like La Mode illustrée to learn more about the newest fashions, which were available to peruse and, indeed, to purchase in the department stores. After all, the content of women’s fashion magazines in the latter half of the nineteenth century reflected the marketing strategies and the trends set by department stores such as Le Bon Marché, which opened in Paris in 1852. Shops like Le Bon Marché – which stocked ready-to-wear garments, as well as an array of fabrics, bed-linen, upholstery supplies and haberdashery – also advertised their goods in fashion magazines, supporting the argument for seeing magazine reading in the nineteenth-century as a form of intellectual and aesthetic bricolage, which was rooted in the commercial environment of Parisian society.12 La Ménagère, with its practically minded articles, appears, on first glance, to be more concerned with real-life domestic tasks than with the imaginative intellectual bricolage which I argue is a principal driver in the practice of magazine reading. However, just like other women’s periodicals of the nineteenth century, the magazine participates in an ‘economy of desire’, showcasing new objects and ideas for maintaining, decorating and improving the home. Indeed, the opening lines of the prospectus for the journal allude specifically to the value of magazine reading as a creative and imaginative act, setting it apart from the practice of reading domestic manuals. There are countless theoretical tomes and practical manuals covering everything encompassed by the cenacles of the culinary arts, but we treat these special books like dictionaries: we open them to look something up, but seldom open them in search of inspiration or in order to excite our tastebuds. La Ménagère is not a new edition of La Cuisinière bourgeoise (The Bourgeois Cook) or Le Parfait Cuisinier (The Perfect Chef), but a publication which will be attractive to the

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reader because it promises to evoke that sense of curiosity which comes from magazines that arrive untouched and wrapped in a band, never opened before. (La Ménagère, p. 1)

The main selling point of La Ménagère and, indeed, of magazines in general, is their novelty and their ability to inspire their readers to try out new things – be these innovative ways to use up certain cuts of meat, as in La Ménagère, experimenting with different outfits, as suggested by La Mode illustrée, or dreaming up outrageous new interior designs, as in La Dernière Mode. The description of La Ménagère on the first page of the prospectus, cited above, reveals the magazine’s aims to excite the reader’s appetite for trying out new dishes and products, and to inspire creativity in daily tasks such as cooking. In contrast to the more banal domestic manuals of the period, which were regularly reprinted, as if dressing-up the same old content in a new cover, magazines are ephemeral and are oriented towards chasing the next innovation. Offsetting the magazine against the famous eighteenth-century cookery manual La Cuisinière bourgeoise [The Bourgeois Cook (feminine)] and Le Parfait Cuisinier [The Perfect Cook (masculine)] – first published in 1813 and reprinted throughout the nineteenth-century – La Ménagère does not merely promise women new tips for running the home, rather it proposes an alternative way of reading the domestic space; this, in turn paved the way for publications such as the famous women’s magazine, Femina, which was launched in 1901, branding itself as ‘the ideal magazine for women and young girls’ and thereby emphasizing the increasingly aspirational nature of the French feminine press in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.13

La Mode illustrée The aspirational nature of the presentation of the domestic sphere in the French feminine press in the second half of the nineteenth century is evident from copies of La Mode illustrée published during the 1870s. The journal makes particular use of the combination of text and image in order to establish this ‘economy of desire’ which is central to the understanding of magazine reading as a process of bricolage. As mentioned earlier, each issue of La Mode illustrée could be purchased on its own, or accompanied by coloured fashion plates and/or sewing patterns. Both of these supplementary items serve to fuel the reader’s desire to create or purchase new clothes and furnishings for the home, establishing the

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interplay of text and image as part of the mechanism which drives the bricolage of magazine reading In every issue, the front cover of La Mode illustrée includes a large central image, depicting one or two women in evening attire or visiting dress. The front cover of the magazine serves as a portal to the imaginary, showing elegant outfits and hinting at the equally glamorous lifestyles which accompany them. In an issue of La Mode illustrée dated 27 October 1878 (Figure 8.3), we see two women standing next to a pillar, ostensibly on a terrace or balcony outside a grand house.

Figure 8.3  Cover of La Mode illustrée from 27 October 1878.

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A sense of intimacy is established thanks to the attentive stance of the woman on the left, while the woman on the right looks over towards a point outside of the image. These pictures do more than simply show off outfits: we wonder what the woman on the right might be looking at, conjuring up a possible scene in our mind’s eye. In the background, we see a street light and an ornate railing, which seems to separate the two women from the outside world. It is worth noting that the decorative ironwork of the railings in the picture resembles the ornate lettering of the magazine’s masthead; this establishes a sense of continuity between the aesthetic of the magazine and the world depicted in the cover image, encouraging the reader to link together the content of the journal and the elegant lifestyle promised by the exquisite outfits portrayed on its cover. The large cover images and the pictures of fashion accessories and decorative objects in magazines such as La Mode illustrée offset the public and private spheres, giving, alternately, glimpses of product (e.g. an ideal outfit or a perfectly decorated home) and of process (e.g. the public ritual of shopping or the private pastime of embroidering a cushion cover). The cover images showcase a fashionable ‘look’ rather than the individual items which make up the ensemble. The practice of depicting full outfits on the cover of fashion magazines sets in motion an economy of desire as the reader is compelled to delve further into the world of the magazine, to see what garments and accessories are in fashion so that she can reconstruct the elegant lifestyle promised by the magazine in her imagination, through a process of intellectual bricolage. Inside, La Mode illustrée is richly illustrated, with many small images depicting fashion accessories, furniture and other knick-knacks for the home, as well as sewing, embroidery and craft patterns for making everything from gloves and slippers to cushion covers and lampshades. These images reinforce the understanding of the bricolage of magazine reading as a transmedial process, in which the reader is required to draw links between text and image.14 Just as the cover image of La Mode illustrée draws attention to the magazine’s liminal status, offsetting the elegant outfits of public life against the privacy of the domestic space, in the inner pages, too, the public and the private are merged, as descriptions of evening dresses and travel bags – items for public show – are portrayed alongside more intimate objects such as slippers, notebooks and furniture. The centrefold of the issue from 1 June 1873 (Figure 8.4) features an ebony bed, made by a Parisian carpenter, M. Hunsinger. A heavy and expensive piece of bespoke furniture crafted from exotic hardwood, this is hardly an accessible purchase for most, but its very position within the pages of La Mode illustrée,

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Figure 8.4  Inner pages of La Mode illustrée, 1 June 1873.

alongside embroidered cushions and footstool covers mean that the imaginary (e.g. prohibitively expensive objects) and the real (e.g. small-scale handicraft projects) are juxtaposed, co-existing in the ideal domestic space conjured up in the mind of the reader. This seems to be the desired effect: La Mode illustrée strikes a careful balance between examples of luxurious clothes and homewares, designed and made by specialist craftspeople, and projects to be completed at home which seem eminently accessible and full of possibilities for creative expression. On the double page spread (Figure 8.5), for example, also from 1 June 1873, is a pattern for making slippers; this is a realistic project which places the female reader in an active, creative role, allowing her to express her personality by making choices about the appropriate colour and fabric. However, the slippers also form part of an elegant imaginary world, and if the reader were to try to run up a pair, the decisions she made with regard to patterns, fabrics, etc. would translate her intellectual bricolage into material terms. Fashion magazines such as La Mode illustrée, then, occupy an in-between space, in which real objects and accessories serve as a starting point for constructing vivid imaginary lifestyles, and in which these imaginary lifestyles compel readers to embark upon physical creative projects in a bid to realize the fantasies evoked through the reading

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Figure 8.5  Inner pages of La Mode illustrée, 1 June 1873.

process. With its dual focus on fashion and interiors, and its emphasis on the art and aesthetics of living, La Mode illustrée represents an important point of convergence between the real and the imaginary, and between the aesthetics of the domestic space and the way in which one would wish to be perceived in the public arena. The interpenetration of public and private, and the coexistence of imaginary and real lifestyles mark a critical point, a point at which literal bricolage – the act of making with one’s hands – becomes an extension of intellectual bricolage – the act of making with the mind.

La Dernière Mode Stéphane Mallarmé’s fashion magazine, La Dernière Mode is particularly adept at shifting the boundaries between the imaginary and the real, seizing upon the mechanisms of bricolage which, as I have argued with reference to both La Ménagère and La Mode illustrée, were inherent in the process of reading latenineteenth-century women’s magazines. In this final section, I wish to put forward the argument that the carefully constructed interplay between fantasy

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and reality is central to the way in which Mallarmé appropriates the economy of desire which drives the bricolage of magazine reading. The frontispiece to La Dernière Mode (Figure 8.6) is highly decorative, featuring illustrations by the artist Edmond Morin. In the image shown above, the ornate gothic script of the magazine’s title is surrounded by six different pictures, one of a table and a plant, the others depicting women undertaking a range of activities including horse-riding, dressmaking, setting the table, attending the theatre and swimming in the sea. These images appear to be in

Figure 8.6  Frontispiece of La Dernière Mode, 18 October 1874.

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the orbit of the large and elaborate lettering of La Dernière Mode, with the title serving as an anchoring point. Already, then, from this cover image, it becomes clear that the magazine seeks to draw together the diverse aspects of female bourgeois lifestyles, considering matters pertaining to both the public and the private space and highlighting the growing possibilities for leisure activities open to the modern woman. The front page of La Dernière Mode (Figure 8.7) is relatively similar to that of La Mode illustrée, comprising an ornate masthead, with images of women

Figure 8.7  Cover of La Dernière Mode, 18 October 1874.

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reading or sewing, surrounding the title in a caliginous gothic script by Edmond Morin and a large cover image. By comparison with La Mode illustrée there are very few images inside the magazine itself. The periodical typically included two small lithographic illustrations signed by the illustrator and engraver F. Pecqueur, which depicted visiting dress and eveningwear and were positioned not next to the fashion column but in the middle of the regular ‘Chronicle of the Fortnight’ feature, which discussed arts, books and the theatre. The fact that these images are not placed alongside the ‘La Mode’ column, presented by fictitious fashion columnist Madame de Ponty, creates a sense of distance between text and image; the reader must bridge the gap between her own mental picture of the latest fashions, conjured up by Madame de Ponty’s discussions, and the physical images of elegant outfits, placed on the next double-page spread. The disparate layout of La Dernière Mode is further reinforced by the positioning of the ‘Maisons de Confiance’ [Trusted Establishments] section of the magazine, which occupies both sides of the back cover of each issue. The ‘Maisons de confiance’ section (Figure 8.8) includes details of fashionable retailers and service providers, from suppliers of exotic groceries and florists to dentists and even educational establishments. With the latest attire for social engagements displayed on the front cover, and the advertisements on the back cover, the fashion magazine plays into an economy of desire by encouraging readers to dream of ideal lifestyles in which they live in and entertain in exquisitely decorated houses, and go out in public wearing the latest trends. The ‘Maisons de confiance’ section encourages readers to turn their dreams into a reality, inspiring them to go out into the public domain and procure an array of luxurious goods and services. The magazine thus takes elements of public life – namely the need to be perceived as fashionable by wearing the latest trends, and to be seen attending the most talked-about plays and concerts – as a starting point to draw the reader into a process of intellectual bricolage, which takes place within the domestic space, before ‘releasing’ her, once again into the public domain, through these advertisements.15 One of the most prominent tradespeople to be advertised in the ‘Maisons de confiance’ section of the magazine was Marliani, tapissier-décorateur apparently found at 11, Rue de Provence in Paris. Marliani’s services are advertised in all but one of the eight issues of La Dernière Mode but, perhaps more pertinently to this chapter, he also features as an interior design guru who shares his expertise in articles in the ‘Carnet d’Or’ [‘The Golden Notebook’] section of the magazine in the second, fourth and seventh issues of the journal. It is unclear whether Marliani really existed and, if he did, whether he had

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any genuine input in writing these columns, which are deemed to be written ‘d’après Marliani’. The magazine supports the insinuation that Marliani is a real trader, a Parisian tapissier-décorateur, by featuring an advertisement for his services in the ‘Maisons de confiance’ section in all but one of the eight issues of the magazine. However, trade records for Paris show no sign of Marliani at the listed address on the Rue de Provence or, indeed, elsewhere in the capital during this period. Whether or not he really existed, the link between Marliani’s commercial presence in the ‘Maisons de confiance’ section of the journal and his role in the ‘Carnet d’Or’ as an expert on interior design shows the way in which La Dernière Mode blurs the boundaries between the public and the private, and between the real and the imaginary, fuelling the economy of desire which drives magazine reading. Through the links between the ‘Carnet d’Or’ and the ‘Maisons de confiance’ sections, Mallarmé exploits the dialogue between the articles, images and advertisements in his own fashion magazine, highlighting the dynamic role played by the feminine press within the context of nineteenth-century French consumer culture and drawing on this for aesthetic ends. The ‘Carnet d’Or’ section of La Dernière Mode (Figure 8.9) claims to deal with four broad themes – ‘culinary arts, furnishings made by women, gardening and games’.16 As mentioned earlier on, this particular section of the magazine was apparently written or inspired by guest contributors, including ‘Une Dame Créole’ [‘A Créole Woman’] who describes how to make Okra Gumbo and ‘Une Aïeul’ [‘An Elderly Lady’] who offers two old-wives’ remedies – a syrup to ease a cold and an ointment for chilblains. The articles of the ‘Carnet d’Or’ focus particularly on the domestic space, offering activities and ideas to entertain the bourgeois woman in the home, as well as tips to help her better fulfil her role as wife and mother. Placed directly below Ix’s ‘Paris Chronicle’, the space of the page juxtaposes public engagements such as theatre–going with the private sphere, reinforcing the sense that the reading process is dynamized by the interplay between the external, social world and the private, creative space of the home. Marliani’s articles on interior design offer a particularly rich example of how Mallarmé deliberately confuses the physical, typically masculine, act of bricolage with a process of imagining, akin to Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical bricolage, thus transporting the reader from the familiar space of the home to a fashionable utopia existing only in the mind’s eye. In his first contribution to the magazine Marliani discusses the merits of adapting Dutch-style Jewish lamps to make use of gas power. Appropriating

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Figure 8.8  ‘Les Maisons de Confiance’, back page of La Dernière Mode, 1 November 1874.

these seventeenth-century artefacts for the modern day was a common (if somewhat risky) practice at the time, combining the material objects of the past with modern technology, as cultural historian Manuel Charpy affirms. Throughout the second part of the [nineteenth] century, the bourgeoisie carefully decorated modern objects with details from the past. In the hands of upholsterers and antiquarians, Renaissance seats and prie-dieux (prayer seats) were given springs and padded or quilted, Dutch lamps from the seventeenth

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Figure 8.9  ‘Le Chronique de Paris’/‘Le Carnet d’Or’, 18 October 1874.

century became gas lamps and, from the 1880s onwards, pottery from Rouen or Delft from the eighteenth-century became bases for electric lamps.17

Charpy describes this desire to appropriate historical artefacts as a process of ‘bibelotisation’, a growing fascination with trinkets and decoration, which he asserts was a specifically bourgeois practice. While the physical act of bricolage – in this case, coupling modern technologies with the objects of a bygone era, might be seen as bourgeois, I contend that the intellectual bricolage of reading is based on a dynamic that transcends the boundaries of social class. Written under the guise of Marliani, these fantastical interior design columns show Mallarmé’s understanding of the intimate space of the home as inspiration for a creative process which transcends the material. Marliani notes that gas lighting is primarily used in municipal buildings, pointing to a key difference between the ambiance of public and private spaces: Gas must not penetrate further indoors than the stairs and landings: it should not cross the threshold of our apartments to light their anterooms unless softened and veiled by the transparent paper of a Chinese or Japanese lantern. (LDM, p. 61)

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Within the home, gas lighting is only used in transitional zones – stairways, vestibules and antechambers – rooms through which one passes to enter intimate spaces of living rooms, drawing rooms and bedrooms. Used in the main reception rooms, Marliani claims, gas ‘gives, in the intimacy of our own house, a reminder of public places’ (LDM, p. 62) Despite its utilitarian feel, gas lighting does, Marliani argues, have ‘very special characteristics’, but, unfortunately, these are not displayed to their full effect in the home, because ‘all the devices for dispensing this illumination – bronze, zinc, etc. – are hideous and associate it with the shoddy and the banal’ (LDM, p. 62). The article thus suggests simply altering the tube of a Dutch-style Jewish lamp to allow a constant flow of gas, and make the quality of light more suitable for the intimate space of the home. Marliani does not give further details on how this might be achieved, instead dwelling on its effect: ‘this object, six tongues of flame in a metal frame, hangs up a gay Pentecost: no, a star, for truly all ritual and Judaic association has disappeared’ (LDM, p. 62). The metonymical presentation of this converted lamp as a ‘gay Pentecost’ draws attention to the effect of the converted antique lamp which, fused with the modern commodity of gas, takes on an other-worldly quality. Although the article purports to be concerned with the physical act of making, encouraging readers to carry out such conversions is not the objective, for the article is not concerned with reallife homes and interiors, but with imaginary ones. In this way, the aesthetic of La Dernière Mode and, indeed, the bricolage of reading the magazine conforms to Mallarmé’s own poetic doctrine, described in a letter of 1866 to his friend Henri Cazalis, in which the poet declares his aim to ‘paint not the thing, but the effect that it produces’.18 Marliani’s subsequent two articles are closely linked to one another: in issue four he proposes a moveable ceiling panel, which can be installed to decorate rental properties. In the opening lines of the article, La Dernière Mode’s resident design guru concedes that: ‘Not everyone, even of those endowed with Taste, owns a town house, and we know of more than one condemned to the misery of flats.’ The comical tone of this opening sentence reinforces the implication that the reader is not intended to carry out this elaborate project, hinting, once again, that (for the female reader, at least) the task of bricolage is mental rather than physical. The ceiling takes on a metaphorical significance, presented as a barrier to creating the interior of one’s dreams – as Marliani notes: ‘In these places the obstacle to the realizing of many a dream is inevitably the ceiling, for the wall, with its wallpaper, is hidden, and doors can be painted’ (LDM, p. 107). By putting forward ideas

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for a relatively low-cost decorative ceiling panel, Mallarmé removes the obstacle standing in the way of his reader’s fantasies, not by presenting them with an achievable do-it-yourself task, but by using language in a way that encourages the reader to imagine the possible forms which this hypothetical installation might take. Placed in Mallarmé’s hands, this apparently cost-effective panel used to cover cracks and add some interest to a blank ceiling takes on fantastical characteristics. The reader learns, through the mouthpiece of Marliani, how the panel might be inlaid with rosewood and gold, or lacquered in black and vermilion to create an oriental effect. Mallarmé does not stop at the description of the ceiling panel – he goes on to suggest how this might be styled in a study with Moroccan leather-bound books, or in a dining room with a Dutch chandelier (echoing his previous article, in issue four), where the overall effect resembles the cabin of a ship: A dining-room, the stamped leather of its chairs harmonising with the gold and dark vermilion above; or, to complete the effect, a Study and a Library containing many books, their morocco spines stamped with gilt titles. Lit by a Dutch chandelier, the scene (thanks to the lowness of our rooms) is simple, handsome, enclosed and solitary, a little suggestive of a luxurious ship’s cabin. (LDM, p. 108)

Once again, as in his description of the Dutch-style Jewish lamp, Marliani places the emphasis on the light and the effect that it creates, reinforcing the argument put forward earlier that the magazine echoes Mallarmé’s own poetics of effect. As in his previous article on seizing the magical qualities of gas lighting by converting an oil lamp, in this short piece the emphasis is placed not on how to assemble or fit the ceiling panel, but rather on the range of different interior styles that such an installation might create. The physical construction of the ceiling panel is merely a pretext for a mental act of construction, in which the reader conjures up fantastical improvements to her own domestic space. The emphasis on travel, through the exotic designs on the ceiling panel and the comparison of the domestic space to a ship’s cabin, highlights the ability of the reader to make things, as Lévi-Strauss puts it, ‘out of nothing’, turning them into a vehicle into an imaginary space, beyond the limitations of the real. The aesthetic possibilities of the ceiling panel are emphasized by Marliani who, betraying the true identity of the column’s author, describes the undecorated ceiling in characteristically Mallarméan terms as being ‘white as a sheet of paper without a poem’ (LDM, p. 107).

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In issue seven, Marliani offers his final article, achieving a tour de force. Once again, opening on a slightly comic note of feigned indignance, Marliani explains that he has been reprimanded by the magazine’s editor, following complaints from well-to-do readers who deemed the portable ceiling panel to be undignified and inappropriate for their grand residences. The other day we described a ceiling-arrangement to disguise the bare plaster ceiling of rented lodgings, and people wrote to us from certain town-houses to recall us to our dignity. (LDM, p. 174)

To remedy the situation, Marliani suggests something rather more elaborate – a built-in side panel, housing an aquarium. It is clear in this article that, as ever, practicality is not of the essence, as the guest columnist reveals that this latest interior design project ‘applies to an owner-occupied house, and indeed, more or less, to one that is still under construction’ (LDM, p. 174). This is a clear deviation from the brief of the ‘Carnet d’Or’ which, as mentioned earlier, promised articles relating to ‘culinary arts, furnishings made by women, gardening and games’: the physical construction is clearly inaccessible to even the most well-heeled of Mallarmé’s female readership, though the process of reading is rather more democratic, open to any reader who can afford to get hold of a copy of the magazine. The proposed panel is designed to be installed in the empty wall space in the dining room, found between doors, windows and cupboards. Although such spaces are often adorned with paper screens or silk wall hangings, Marliani dismisses these as inadequate and even unpleasant, as the smells of food and cigars easily become engrained in their fabric. So it is that Marliani looks to the sea for inspiration: What wall coverings can give us the aquatic world, which – monstrous, frail, rich, obscure and diaphanous with weeds and fishes – is so decorative? Any picture, whether painted or embroidered, casts a sort of veil, an immobility, over the mysterious life of these riverine or oceanic landscapes. How shall we possess these watery depths in their reality? (LDM, p. 174)

The proliferation of adjectives used to describe marine life foregrounds the superior, almost mythical beauty of Marliani’s proposed installation. Once again, here, he turns to language associated with fantasy and mystery: terms like ‘monstrous’, ‘obscure’ and ‘diaphanous’, coupled with the use of rhetorical

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questions, encourage the reader to explore the aesthetic possibilities of aquatic life. These adjectives seem to sit at odds with the question of how to possess such a river- or seascape in reality, for the only way to bring such a fantastical scene into one’s own home is to imagine it – any real construction would inevitably fall far short of the possibilities offered up in Marliani’s description. Once the reader is well and truly immersed in the fantasy of bringing marine life into her own dining room, Marliani finally turns, albeit very briefly, to the matter of fitting the installation: An aquarium (lit simply by daylight or, in the evening, by gaslight): there is your panel! Magical, living, moving and extraordinary. It can have a shelf with drawers below, or merely a plain plinth; and it will attract to itself all the luxury of the room, multiplied in dark-framed mirrors. (LDM, p. 175)

The practicalities of a dining room aquarium seem to be very much an afterthought, intended to give a hint of verisimilitude to this outlandish home improvement idea. The above discussion of where to place the installation appears only in the penultimate paragraph, and even then is primarily concerned with the extraordinary effect of the built-in aquarium. Marliani does anticipate comments that some readers might find the piece unrealistic, implausible and extravagant: But how many letters, addressed from ‘Fifth floor with balcony’ or ‘Fourth floor above the entre-sol’ shall we not receive today, accusing the decoration scheme which follows of unreality, implausibility and extravagance! (LDM, p. 174)

Once again, here, Marliani uses the vocabulary of fantasy and magic, alluding to the impossibility of the project, which is also the source of its allure. Thanks to the vivid descriptions of this exquisite and fantastical wall feature, full of rare fish and exotic crustaceans, the reader cannot help but imagine how they might bring such a piece into their own home. The article ends by laying down the gauntlet: ‘What modern prince of taste will execute this magnificent and simple décor?’ (LDM, p. 175). This closing rhetorical question highlights the impossibly regal beauty of the installation, as well as reminding the reader of the fraudulent premise of ‘Le Carnet d’Or’ – this is an interior design idea for a daring ‘modern prince of taste’ and a far cry from the promised topic of ‘furnishings made by women’ – magnificent it may be, simple it is not. Beginning with the unlikely

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but not impossible task of changing the lighting in the home, the interior décor ideas put forward by Mallarmé under the guise of Marliani in La Dernière Mode become increasingly outlandish, confirming the fact that the periodical is driven by an economy of desire in which readers chase increasingly elaborate and, therefore increasingly impossible lifestyles. Throughout the eight issues of La Dernière Mode, Mallarmé encourages his readers to flit between fantasy and reality. Reading the magazine from the intimacy of their own homes, the journal provokes them to imagine impossibly elaborate interior designs, mentally embellishing their own space or even journeying in the mind’s eye to somewhere more extravagant and luxurious. The boundaries between the imaginary and the real are constantly blurred in La Dernière Mode, but the intellectual bricolage always falls short when it becomes a reality, as the latest trend in fashion or interior design will never live up to expectations.19 The bourgeois reader might purchase a dress, re-purpose a lamp or embroider a cushion cover, but the lifestyles promised in fashion magazines cannot be bought or made. The ‘economy of desire’ model which we see in both La Ménagère and La Mode illustrée with their depictions of real-life goods is exploited expertly by Mallarmé in his quasi-fictitious women’s magazine, La Dernière Mode. The elaborate interiors suggested by Marliani are so outlandish that they are not meant for readers to carry out; instead, the readership of La Dernière Mode is invited to participate in another, arguably more engaging process than interior design – that of intellectual bricolage. The beauty of the exquisite portable ceiling panel or the built-in dining room aquarium lies precisely in their ideal and unattainable status. From the most pragmatic periodicals, such as La Ménagère, to the exquisite and unconventional La Dernière Mode, the practice of magazine reading depends on an economy of desire which is based largely on fantasy. While the grand designs of Marliani’s interiors are deliberately unattainable, the sewing patterns and fashions in La Mode illustrée also offer potential projects, to be pursued, ignored or abandoned at will; even the pragmatic La Ménagère offers tips which only fuel a futile quest to become the perfect housewife. The domestic space, as it is presented in the three late-nineteenth-century French magazines discussed in this chapter, is an intimate space, which promotes one type of bricolage above all others – the creative act of reading. I contend that, in the nineteenth-century as in the present day, it is the fantasies provoked by the reading process that make magazines enjoyable and, indeed, commercially viable – the domestic interior, as the space of living and of reading, offers a particularly apt basis for provoking such imaginings. As Charles Baudelaire puts it in the preface to his translation

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of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1840 essay ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’; ‘Which of us has not spent many long leisurely hours indulging in the pleasure of building oneself an imaginary apartment, an ideal home, a dream space (rêvoir)?’20

Bibliography Barthes, Roland, Système de la mode (Paris: Seuil, 1967). Baudelaire, Charles, Œuvres complètes. 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, Éditions de la Pléiade, 1976). Bowlby, Rachel, ‘Modes of Modern Shopping: Mallarmé at the Bon Marché’, In The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, edited by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, 186–204 (New York: Methuen, 1987). Brown, Katherine J., Women Readers in French Painting 1870-1890 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). Catani, Damian, ‘Consumerism and the discourse of fashion in Mallarmé’s La Dernière Mode’, Mots pluriels, no. 10 (1999), accessed 31 August 2021 http://motspluriels.arts. uwa.edu.au/MP1099dc.html Catani, Damian, The Poet in Society (Oxford, Bern, New York: Peter Lang, 2003). Charpy, Manuel, ‘L’ordre des choses. Sur quelques traits de la culture matérielle bourgeoise parisienne, 1830-1914’, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 34 (2007): 105–28. Cosnier, Colette, Les dames de Femina: un féminisme mystifié (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009). Derrida, Jacques, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967). Furbank P.N. & A.M. Cain, Mallarmé on Fashion: A Translation of the Fashion Magazine La Dernière Mode, with Commentary (Oxford: Berg, 2004). La Ménagère/Le Confortable, Prospectus edition (Paris: A. Lemaire, 1867). La Mode illustrée, 22, 1 June 1873 (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1873). La Mode illustrée, 43, 27 October 1878 (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1878). Legouvé, Ernest, Histoire morale des femmes (Paris: Didier, 1864). Lévi-Strauss, Claude, La Pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon, 1962). Lordon, Frédéric, Capitalisme, désir et servitude – Marx et Spinoza (Paris: Éditions La Fabrique, 2010). Mallarmé, Stéphane, Œuvres complètes. 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, Éditions de la Pléaide, 1998/2003). Mallarmé, Stéphane, La Dernière Mode (reprint) (Paris: Editions Ramsay, 1972). Moses, Claire Goldberg, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1984). Pearson, Roger, ‘Mallarmé’s Interior Designs’, Romance Studies, 22, no. 1 (2004): 3–15.

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The bourgeoisie, their homes and sexualities in Colette’s Claudine Aina Marti

The series of Colette’s Claudine1 (1900–1903) tells the story of a French girl, Claudine, from her youth in the rural area of Montigny until she marries in Paris, leaves her husband and goes back to rural France. The series starts by describing her life in the school and house in Montigny during her adolescence. We will discuss, from a theoretical perspective, the interesting juxtaposition and complementarity of feminist approaches and Bachelard’s poetics in relation to the house in Montigny. Claudine is rich in representations of homes that break with the idea of a uniform and static bourgeois way of living in late-nineteenth-century France. Such polyvalent representations of home(s) are situated during a time of deregulation in ways of living and one that saw the decline of a homogeneous domestic discourse that had permeated the domestic imaginaire throughout the nineteenth century. However, the added value of Claudine to this polyvalence is the range of sexuality represented as an integral part of domesticity. Claudine shows how breaking with normative sexuality was embedded in a deregulation of lifestyle and a challenging of hegemonic discourses. The diversity of homes in Claudine responds to the many expressions of sexuality found in members of the middle class. This chapter thus addresses how domestic architecture and interiors unsettled mainstream domestic and sexual discourses of the time, as seen in Claudine. The term ‘perversion’, by which I refer to any non-normative sexual practice as defined by medico-sexual discourses of the time, can be discussed in relation to architecture. Denis Hollier’s words throw light upon the apparent contradiction between perversion and architecture: perversion informs a reality which ‘n’entre pas sous le concept, échappe à la taxinomie nosologique’.2 Hollier’s words seem contradictory in the light of the many sexological discourses produced in the

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late nineteenth century that in fact aimed at rationalizing perversions. However, the marginalized position of perversion resists its own architectural form when architecture is understood as the rationalization and expression of a concept within society. In this chapter, I understand nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury domestic architecture as a normative space envisaged amidst the regulatory and prescriptive approaches to domesticity of the nineteenth century. This prescriptiveness consisted in architectural designs in which the domestic ideal could be put into practice. This included, for example, creating privacy and seclusion by dividing spaces into separate rooms with their respective functions and using glass to protect and isolate the interior from the public sphere in order to conform to the domestic ideal. However, the representations of Parisian bourgeois homes in Claudine challenge, on the one hand, contemporary definitions of perversion by shaping them architecturally, while, on the other hand, domestic space is represented against its theoretical prescriptiveness by expressing perversion. This new relationship between architecture and perversion signifies the reconceptualization of the idea of the domestic itself. Moreover, the multiple forms of domesticity and sexuality are at the origin of contemporary concerns about the constitution of mono-parental or homosexual households that constantly redefine the concept of home and family. Thus, on the one hand, I show how representations of interiors in Claudine are engines of the modern in establishing a new domestic imaginaire that we can identify in twentieth-century and contemporary discussions of the home. On the other hand, we will see how interiors architecturally constructed modern sexualities and new relationships between genders.

Beyond the limits of domestic architecture When Claudine, after having lived in Paris for some years first with her father, and then with her husband, comes back to her childhood home in rural Montigny, she is filled with extreme joy to see the house again, together with its furniture, the arrangement of every room, and all its old objects. Claudine defines the space as ‘ma maison’,3 which she describes while she rediscovers and re-appropriates it after her Parisian experience: Je monte […] au grenier qui fut tant de fois mon refuge, pendant les pluies tenaces. Il est vaste et sombre, les draps de lessive pendent aux rouleaux de bois du séchoir; un amas de livres demi-rongés occupe tout un coin, une antique

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chaise percée, à qui un pied manque, attend, béante, le séant d’un fantôme … [I go up to […] the attic which was so often my refuge during strong rains. The attic is wide and dark, the laundry hangs from the wood rollers of the dryer; a pile of half-eaten books occupies a corner, an old commode with a missing leg waits, gapes, the seat of a ghost].4

The house’s interior is experienced as a Bachelardian space; it not only evokes a sense of protection through childhood memories but it is also, as Bachelard says, an ‘inhabited space [that] transcends geometrical space’.5 In Claudine we find this spatial transcendence in the dream-like representations of home that allow the works of the imagination. However, moving a step further, this transcendence acquires a more tangible form in locating the meaning of home in the natural surroundings of the house: ‘dans cette vallée, étroite comme un berceau, j’ai couché, pendant seize ans, tous mes rêves d’enfant solitaire’ [‘In this valley, narrow as a cradle, I placed for sixteen years all my dreams of a lonely child’].6 The valley echoes the attic by becoming a space for daydreaming, and thus, it is imbued with Bachelardian values. Through its oneiric function the valley relates to domestic space; and the extension of domestic values beyond the limits of the house’s walls continues until reaching the woods, which are described ‘comme une chambre ouverte sur un jardin …’ [‘like a room open onto a garden …’].7 The metaphorical use of architectural spaces to refer to what is outside the actual domestic space formulates a particular conceptualization of home where architectural limits and the static experience of the domestic are modified. This modification of the static should be read against late-nineteenth-century domestic discourses. These discourses represented home as a static space and with detailed norms of use, as illustrated, for example, in Baronne Staffe’s conduct books.8 Architects also highlighted the rigidity of boundaries: ‘ce ne serait pas exagéré que de définir la Maison: le vêtement de la famille. Elle est en effet destinée à lui servir d’enveloppe’ [‘It would not be an exaggeration to define the House as the clothing of the family. In fact, the house is meant to be like an envelope for the family’].9 Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc (1814–79) theorized the single and unique use of a room expressed through architectural form: ‘Donner aux matériaux la fonction et la puissance relatives à l’objet, les formes exprimant le plus exactement cette fonction et cette puissance [‘To give the materials the function and capacity of the designated object, with their forms expressing its function and capacity as precisely as possible’].10 Art historian Henry Havard (1838–1921) stated that in order to be habitable, a house should present clear material limits and be isolated: ‘Pour être habitable, [la maison] doit, […] être

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suffisamment vaste, saine et bien close’ [For [a house] to be habitable, it needs […] to be spacious enough, clean and completely closed’].11 These discourses were built upon, as well as contributed to, the theoretical opposition between interior and exterior spaces, which had constructed domesticity since the emergence of the middle classes.12 However, in Montigny home erases the sense of ‘clôture’ defined by Barthes as something that defines: ‘tracer des limites, des frontières […]. Définition du territoire, et donc de l’identité de son/ses occupants [‘To draw limits, borders […]. Definition of the territory, and, thus, definition of the occupant’s identity’].13 In Claudine, home problematizes the boundaries that construct the antithesis domestic/un-domestic, themselves based on the interior/exterior dichotomy: while, on the one hand, home becomes an undomesticated space through its extension into the woods, on the other hand, the category of the undomestic is turned into a domestic experience, an habitable space with a homelike meaning. Far from being a dualistic and exclusive problem, the categories of the domestic and un-domestic seem reversible and lead towards a new and hybrid configuration of the interior. The sense of refuge we have seen starting in the attic of the house in Montigny expands beyond the house’s material limits and, thus, it anticipates contemporary feminism that aims at breaking the limits of the domestic experience.14 In fact, Claudine illustrates the blurring difference between the terms ‘place’ and ‘space’ explored by feminist geographer Doreen Massey, who argues that a limited space can be approached as linkage to the outside rather than in opposition to it.15 Penetrable boundaries become part of the interior evoking the idea of a fluid reality that allows the exchange between inside and outside. In this fluid exchange of spatial positions, two important things take place: on the one hand, traditional gender roles are unsettled by the mobility of spaces that frame them. On the other hand, concerns regarding the contamination of space and the female body, i.e. adultery, prominent in the nineteenth century, are disempowered. In this context, in Claudine there is already a representation of what Amy C. Kulper identifies as an ‘ubiquitous domesticity’16 – a domesticity that takes over realities beyond itself – which initiates a process towards the assimilation of the undomestic perceived now as familiar. At the same time, the supposed theoretical opposition between Bachelard’s phenomenology of the domestic and discourses of feminism is undermined in the domestic aesthetics of Claudine. In the following sections, we will see how the experience of home in Montigny introduces a sense of mobility that ends with a static and normative construction of gender roles. In other words, if the different spaces of home framed gender roles,

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the alteration of the concept of ‘clôture’ in Claudine deforms the architectural shaping of such roles. This finds a further repercussion in the deconstruction of a normative, that is domesticated sexuality that conformed to the domestic ideal. Drawing on the theorization of the domestic in Montigny, the following sections will illustrate the ways in which different interiors construct different sexualities and gender performances.

Rézi’s room and the construction of androgyny The conceptual mobility represented in the house of Montigny is only a concrete example, although quite representative, within the wider map of homes in Claudine’s narrative. In this sense, the dynamic approach to home can be appreciated through the entire group of homes found in the text. It is the representation of the many domestic spaces in a single narrative that highlights the concept of domestic mobility and its relation to a non-static sexual reality, all within a mainstream discourse. In other words, the many forms of home and sexuality are not represented as marginalized, but as valid options for the middle classes, and it is in consideration of the whole that the dynamic and polymorphic experience of dwelling develops as concept. I will use the word ‘poly-discourse’ to signify the idea of a mobile and shifting domestic discourse that includes different possibilities of ways of living. In this context, the different sexualities included in the narrative also construct a sexual poly-discourse. Thus, every character expresses a different sexual form and has a different place, which at the same time constructs the subject’s own sexuality. This dynamic approach to home mobilizes what Giuliana Bruno calls ‘gender positions [through] a series of displacements’17 in what she refers to as ‘the architectonics of gender’.18 Claudine displaces domestic boundaries and in so doing, gender roles and sexuality are also deconstructed and displaced. Such displacement takes place not only through an aesthetic evocation of a new meaning of home, as seen in the previous section, but also through the creation of heterogeneous and absolute spaces that work as rooms, as defined by Barthes as ‘[une] structure soustraite à toute norme, à tout pouvoir’.19 In the narrative, however, these are also defined in relation to each other, hence building a domestic polydiscourse. Whether they are actual rooms or wider spaces, Claudine’s interiors are designed in such ways that incorporate a meaning different from that found in established discourses on home and sexuality. For that reason these interiors allow the construction of sexual perversions initiating a process towards their

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assimilation into mainstream discourse. These spaces, then, work in the same way as sexological discourses in articulating a new reality.20 One of the first rooms in Claudine to define a non-normative sexuality is Rézi’s boudoir. Rézi, wife of one of Renaud’s friends, has an affair with Claudine until the latter discovers that Rézi is also Renaud’s lover. Rézi’s boudoir is rich in eighteenth-century decoration, which, as I will explain, defines her as bisexual: Aujourd’hui comme toujours, Rézi m’attend dans sa chambre blanche et verte, lit peint de blanc mat, et grands fauteuils, d’un Louis XV finissant, tendus de soie couleur amande, où s’éploient de petits nœuds et de grands bouquets blancs. Dans ce vert doux, le teint et les cheveux de mon amie rayonnent. [Today, as usual, Rézi is waiting for me in her white and green room, with a bed painted matt white, and big almond-coloured silk armchairs with small bows and large white bouquets in a Louis XV style. Against this soft green, the complexion and hair of my friend radiate].21

This description is followed by the first quasi-sexual encounter between Rézi and Claudine in this same bed; hence, the erotic experience has first been framed by the room’s decoration, which is highly significant tin order to comprehend how bisexuality is been constructed in relation to androgyny. In the late nineteenth century, Louis XV, as well as Louis XIV furniture were considered both male and female, that is, sexually liminal and, hence, seen appropriate for liminal domestic spaces – not male rooms such as the study, nor female ones such as the boudoir, but an in-between room such as the living-room.22 As both men and women occupied in-between spaces, these were considered androgynous spaces. The idea of androgyny was constructed through furniture, and it referred to the presence of both sexes, which were seen as constituting the sexual nature of the room. This is altered in Rézi’s room, since androgyny does not refer to the fact that it hosts different sexes, but to Rézi herself. Rézi’s bedroom is not a female gendered space anymore; instead, it acquires feminine and masculine values that refer to Rézi’s sexuality as androgynous – we should note that the term ‘bisexuality’ was not commonly used, although being recently defined in contemporary terms by Kraft-Ebbing in Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). Rézi’s future relationship with Claudine’s husband also finds an explanation in the androgynous boudoir, which supports Rézi’s shifting body-forms in consonance with the boudoir’s ambiguous sex. In this case, the sense of mobility and dynamism is expressed through Rézi’s furniture and the construction of androgyny understood as the presence of both sexes in one being, which allows

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the acquisition of different sexual beings. Rézi’s sexuality is thus constantly de-formed and formed again, and the non-static representation of sexuality is brought to an extreme singularity into the subject’s very being. Although eclecticism was common in turn-of-the-century Paris, many art historians of the time strongly criticized the revival of this aristocratic style associated with debauchery. The setting for Rézi’s voluptuousness is a Louis XV bed. Louis XV was King of France from 1715 to 1774, and the architectural and decorative style associated with this period was the Rococo, which contrasted with the Neoclassical style introduced in late eighteenth century and associated with the French Enlightenment, a period of high importance for the consolidation of the French bourgeoisie. Leora Auslander explains this reception of prerevolutionary monarchies in the late nineteenth century: ‘In the eyes of the late nineteenth century […], the late eighteenth century [was] the period of corrupt, effeminate Kings’, outlining the ‘effeminacy of Louis XV and especially Louis XVI’.23 In 1883, French art historian Paul Mantz (1821-95) published an article for the Revue des Arts Décoratifs, ‘Les Meubles du XVIIIe Siècle’, commenting how in the eighteenth century ‘l’excentrique était toléré, applaudi peut-être [The eccentric was accepted, even admired]’, which saw ‘dans les âmes françaises un commencement de folie. [the beginning of madness in French souls]’.24 Mantz’s reading of eighteenth-century aesthetics is echoed in other late nineteenthcentury authors such as the brothers Goncourt, who defined life in Versailles during the Louis XV kingdom as ‘une civilisation […] à son terme dernier et excessif […], un monde [qui] est dans le plein épanouissement d’une corruption exquise. [A civilisation […] in its last and excessive moment […], a world fully developing an exquisite corruption]’25 Through the presence of Rococo furniture, Rézi’s room also points at Art Nouveau defined by Penny Sparke as ‘rooted in a commitment to the eighteenth-century ideal of woman […]. Its links with an elitist model of luxurious, aristocratic culture – the decorative ‘style moderne’ of the period of Louis XV, personified in the elegance and grace of Marie Antoinette’.26 The evocation of this historical character through the room’s layout suggests a historical justification of sexual relationships between women. Sheila Crane has analysed the meaning of including eighteenth-century architectural elements such as the picturesque garden and, in particular, an adaptation of Marie-Antoinette’s Temple de l’Amour (1777–8), built in the gardens of Versailles, in the homes of bisexual American women residing in Paris during the first decades of the twentieth century.27 Crane’s conclusions draw to a reading of the figure of Marie-Antoinette as an example of, or even heroine for female-female erotic experiences,28 which suggests a link to Rézi. The significance of associating

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Marie-Antoinette with Rézi resides in the fact that female libertinage had been displaced by the bourgeois woman. While libertinage was socially assumed and tolerated, part of the singularity of the middle-classes resided in their opposition to the court’s libertine behaviour. Morality was part of the domestic culture upon which the bourgeoisie was founded.

The construction of female sexuality in Renaud’s apartment Renaud’s apartment is represented as the place for Claudine’s married life, and it works as a signpost for the beginning and end of Claudine’s marriage and her role as wife. In this context, Renaud’s apartment configures a space that presents many challenges for Claudine’s experience of her own sexuality. Within Renaud’s apartment, Claudine is trapped in a normative space, where material limits can be felt, and it stands in strong opposition to Montigny: Je ne pouvais pas m’intéresser beaucoup à un mobilier que je ne connaissais pas, – pas encore. Le grand lit bas est devenu mon ami, et le cabinet de toilette aussi, et quelques vastes fauteuils en cabanon. Mais le reste continue à me regarder, si j’ose dire, d’un oeil ombrageux; l’armoire à glace louche quand je passe; la table du salon, à pieds galbés, cherche à me donner des crocs-en-jambe. [I couldn’t be interested in the furniture, so strange to me – at least not yet. The big low bed has become my friend, and also the bathroom, and some large wooden armchairs. But the rest of the furniture still continues to observe me in a suspicious way; the mirror cabinet squints at me; the table with curved legs in the dining room tries to trip me up.]29

In Renaud’s space furniture establishes limits for the expression of Claudine’s body. Compared to the openness of Montigny, in this apartment Claudine encounters the theoretical limits that, recovering the opposition of in/outside, construct and define her as wife. Claudine’s sudden constraint appears as a result of the contradiction found in the juxtaposition of two orders: Renaud’s space; and Montigny, which respects the forms of her body. The violence between Renaud’s space and Claudine is the consequence of a dis-adjustment among different orders. The uncanny produced by the architectural effect of the room is an expression of such violence. The similarities between Claudine’s experience in the above extract and that articulated by Freud nineteen years later in his description of the uncanny are striking. He writes: ‘one may be groping around in the dark in an unfamiliar room, searching for the door or the light-switch and repeatedly colliding with the same piece of furniture.’30 This again places Claudine as an

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anticipatory text that articulates aesthetic discussions on the domestic, not found only in feminism but also in psychoanalysis, and points to the pervasive domestic culture inherited by the twentieth century. Claudine experiences the uncanny when she becomes a wife, a status which in domestic terms is represented by moving out of her own place into that of her husband’s. Claudine’s resistance to marriage is already expressed during Renaud’s proposal where she shows preference for the role of lover over that of wife: – Non, vous ne m’épouserez pas! … […] – Je serai votre maîtresse, ou rien. – Ma femme, ou rien! […] Que faire? Je joins les mains; je supplie; je lui tends ma bouche, les yeux demifermés. Il répète encore, suffoque: – Non! ma femme, ou rien.31 – No, you won’t marry me! […] [– I’ll be your mistress or nothing. – My wife, or nothing! […] – What could I do? I clasped my hands; I implored; I offered him my mouth, my eyes half-closed. He repeated it again, almost as if he were suffocating: – No! My wife or nothing.]32

Lover or wife are the two different roles Claudine can assume for Renaud, and they are represented and supported in spatial terms by either Claudine’s home in Montigny, or Renaud’s apartment respectively. Being Renaud’s lover would have freed Claudine from an uncanny space and allowed her to inhabit her own place and dwell in her own way. In Montigny, Claudine’s sexuality would have been placed within an extra-marital relationship, a sexual role outside mainstream-discourse. The dissolution of boundaries between inside and outside seen in the conceptualization of home evoked by the representation of Montigny deconstructs the discursive limits found, for example, in Renaud’s place through the position of furniture. At Renaud’s, Claudine cannot just be a sexual partner; she needs to become a wife, and discipline her body as we have previously seen. In this context, Claudine’s sexual experiences with Renaud are as alienating as the space that frames them. In Renaud’s arms, Claudine’s body and sexuality serve him, and Claudine’s sexuality is constructed according to her husband,

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not to herself. This new sexuality brought about by the role of wife is strange to Claudine and to the relationship with her own body: [Renaud] m’y serre, si tendu que j’entends trembler ses muscles. Tout vêtu, il m’y embrasse, m’y maintient – mon Dieu, qu’attend-il donc pour se déshabiller, lui aussi? – et sa bouche et ses mains m’y retient, sans que son corps me touche, depuis ma révolte tressaillant jusqu’à mon consentement affolé, jusqu’au honteux gémissement de volupté que j’aurais voulu retenir par orgueil. Après, seulement après […] il rit, impitoyable. [Renaud] squeezes me so tensely that I can hear his muscles tremble. Fully clothed, he kisses me and doesn’t let me go – my God, what is he waiting for to get undressed too? His mouth and hands hold me, his body doesn’t touch me, from my shuddering revolt to my terrified consent and to the shameful groan of pleasure that I wanted to retain out of pride. After, only after, […] he laughs ruthlessly.]33

Renaud himself intends to make Claudine submit sexually. We find again an opposition among orders: two different bodies and types of sexualities that far from complement, oppose each other. The opposition between sexual and spatial forms progressively leads Claudine towards the un-recognition of herself, as if her body had finally submitted to the tyranny of space, and had been deformed by the apartment’s architecture. Claudine’s own unfamiliarity is expressed through the reflection in the mirror: ‘Renaud aime le bavardage des miroirs et leur lumière polissonne, tandis que je les fuis, dédaigneuse de leurs révélations, chercheuse d’obscurité’ [‘Renaud loves the prattle of the mirrors and their nasty light while I escape them, disdainful of their revelations, I search for darkness’].34 The mirror’s uncanny revelation is the revelation of Claudine’s own deformed body to herself; at the same time, the mirror amplifies the unsettling experience. This all leads to Claudine’s final question: ‘Je n’ai donc pas de demeure?’ [‘So, have I no home?’].35 In fact, Claudine cannot neither appropriate, nor recognize, that new space in which she is now placed, but cannot inhabit. Renaud’s apartment chases Claudine even in her relationship with Rézi. Claudine tries several attempts at consuming her love for Rézi at Renaud’s place, in their marital bedroom, but those attempts result in alienating experiences. In fact, the tyranny of space goes as far as challenging any attempt at transgression. Renaud’s apartment, embedded with normative discursivity, cancels any non-normative forms of sexual expression. The space itself is experienced as a living entity that struggles to preserve its own discourse, ultimately, itself. Again, it is the clash between different sexualities that takes

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place at Renaud’s. Thus, Claudine perceives her meetings with Rézi as notably contradictory: Quand c’est Rézi qui vient me voir, mon irritation croit encore. Je la tiens là, dans ma chambre, - qui n’est pas que notre chambre, à Renaud et à moi – un tour de clé, et nous serions seules … Mais je ne veux pas. Il me déplait, pardessus tout, que la femme de chambre de mon mari […] frappe et m’explique, mystérieuse, derrière la porte fermée: ‘C’est le corsage de Madame … on attend pour réchancrer les emmanchures. [When Rézi comes to see me I’m even more irritated. It is there, in my room, which is nothing more than our room, Renaud’s and mine – a turn of a key and we would be alone … but I don’t want to. Above all, it disgusts me that my husband’s maid […] knocks on the door to explain to me, mysteriously, behind the closed door: ‘It’s about Madame’s bodice … they need to take in the armholes again.]36

The passage reflects a contradictory space through Claudine’s confused use of possessive pronouns, that is ma, notre, la chambre de mon mari, la femme de chambre de mon mari, that show the impossibility of defining this room. It is her room and it is not at the same time, a fact that linguistically reflects Claudine’s impossibility of fully appropriating that space. Not even locking the room is enough to create an autonomous space within the whole apartment. ‘La femme de chambre’ is there to ensure the discourse is not violated, and she becomes Renaud’s presence in his absence. In contrast to Claudine’s old maid, Mélie, who serves her while Claudine is a single girl, Renaud’s ‘femme de chambre’ is anonymous and alien to Claudine. Mélie instead was a companion, and accomplice of Claudine’s desires, and she belonged to the house in Montigny, as well as to Claudine’s own room in her first apartment in Paris. Mélie followed different norms, those of an absolute female space set up by Claudine. The differences between Mélie and ‘la femme de chambre’ represent the heterogeneity in bourgeois ways of dwelling. Throughout her marriage, Claudine seems to be trapped in alien spaces ruled by Renaud. When the chance to own a place for her meetings with Rézi seems to appear, Renaud is still in charge of it, and Claudine’s hopes for her own space dissolve: ‘j’aurai voulu la clef, l’adresse de la chambre, la liberté …’ [‘I wanted the key, the address of the room, the freedom …’].37 Claudine cannot access Rézi without Renaud anymore. Renaud appears as the one in possession of women’s bodies and domestic spaces: he owns the key to their accessibility, as if regulating when the discourse can be, or not, transgressed. While on one hand, Renaud will allow Claudine to meet Rézi, on the other, he decides when and where.

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Renaud’s power over Claudine’s sexuality is shown again through the apartment he chooses for her meetings with Rézi: ‘[Rézi] rode comme moi dans le minuscule salon, où le goût maniaque d’un amateur de Louis XIII espagnol entassa les bois dorés et sculptés, les lourds cadres à gros ornements, les christs agonisants sur velours miteux’ [‘[Rézi] wanders through the small living room with me. The maniac taste of a Spanish Louis XIII amateur is everywhere in the gilded and carved woods, the heavy frames with large ornaments, the dying Christs on shabby pieces of velvet’].38 This space constructs a sinful sexuality – that of the female lovers – for which Claudine expresses her distaste. The combination between the obsessive, the religious and the agonising will be the framework for intimate encounters that will become as uncanny as those in Renaud’s apartment. It is impossible for Claudine to find a space of her own; instead, she is constantly struggling with rooms and apartments, and this fact is what characterizes her life as wife. For Claudine, to marry is to become a victim of space, as well to feel dispossessed of her own sexuality.

Shaping homosexuality Renaud’s place is very different from the place of his own son Marcel. In opposition to Renaud’s apartment, Marcel dwells outside the norms established by the common domestic discourse, especially in regard to his masculinity, which is constructed through the apartment’s layout. Marcel’s apartment is characterized by challenging what Hollier defines as ‘l’innommable’ [‘the unnameable’]39 ‘[ce qui] est exclu de la reproduction, qui est avant tout transmission du nom’ [‘[That which] is excluded from reproduction that is, above all, the transmission of the name’]40 Marcel’s homosexuality is taboo; it cannot be named, since reproduction is absent from this sexual form. Hollier relates ‘l’innommable’ to the ‘informe’, meaning that which does not possess a name, that is does not exist, cannot have a form and remains unidentified. Marcel’s homosexuality is placed outside common categories and norms: ‘Cet enfant me parlait d’une amusante étude psychologique consacrée par un de ses compatriotes aux Amizie di Colegio qui est ce Krafft-Ebing. [This child was telling me about an amusing psychological study one of his compatriots has devoted to the Amizie del Collegio which [is] Krafft-Ebing].41 This extract from the letter Marcel receives from his lover Charlie offers a medical framework to interpret the representation of Marcel’s sexuality in the context of 1900 Paris. Though only briefly mentioned, Krafft-Ebing’s study on sexuality and pathologies

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is presented as a common reference with which to approach homosexuality. In this context, Charlie continues in his letter, ‘pour me retremper dans ma foi et ma religion sexuelle, j’ai relu les brulants sonnets de Shakespeare […]. [To steep myself once more in my faith and my sexual religion, I have re-read Shakespeare’s burning sonnets […].42 Instead of following the sexologist’s moral imperatives, and abandoning his lover, Charlie seeks refuge and encouragement in literary representations of same-sex love. Charlie and Marcel’s refusal to categorize their own sexual inclination among a wide range of pathologies introduces a context of dissident and plural approaches to sexuality and gender. Claudine’s reaction to Marcel’s apartment, ‘cet appartement de poupée m’amuse déjà! [‘this doll’s apartment amuses me already!’],43 ‘reflects the queer masculinity it constructs through his layout: it is a man’s doll house. Queerness is constructed through different elements such as ‘le portrait de Marcel, en dame byzantine’ [‘the portrait of Marcel as a byzantine lady’].44 It is also seen in the many decorative objects with natural and colourful motifs that challenged established definitions of masculinity of the time: J’ai trouvé derrière un rideau de panne rose une façon d’alcôve étroite, un divan drapé de cette même panne rose […]. Je joue, le doigt pressant un bouton électrique, à répandre sur cet autel la lumière qui tombe d’une fleur de cristal renversée … Orchidée, va! [Behind a pink curtain, I’ve found a kind of small alcove, a divan draped with the same pink fabric […]. I play, pressing my finger on an electric switch in order to throw light upon this altar from an inverted crystal flower … Orchid, here we go!]45

The lamp, ‘une fleur de cristal renversée’, suggests an Art Nouveau style, which is also supported by the presence of the ‘rose’ colour. Claire Dehon mentions how pink, rose, and floral decoration are commonly used by Colette to represent Art Nouveau style in her narrative.46 The importance of this style and its unsettling aspect resides in the fact that it was still a bourgeois style which, like the Arts and Crafts movement, was associated with a revival of old bourgeois values rather than mechanical reproduction. However, the space Marcel inhabits challenges established definitions of masculinity of the time which, as Fae Brauer notes, focused on the re-building of the athletic and virile body to fight against effeminate and homosexual men that were seen as the cause of a decrease in population during the Third Republic.47 The paradoxes of Art Nouveau increase the complexities of defining middle-class ways of dwelling, and suggest the existence of various possibilities beyond a common domestic imaginaire. In this context, the early-twentieth-century bourgeoisie

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seemed to move in several directions, which dissolved the sense of homogeneity supposed to regulate domestic life. Both Marcel’s apartment and his sexuality stand outside mainstream discourses, and are located in the periphery of social conventions and ways of dwelling. However, it is representative of a process towards normalization: Marcel’s way of living will move from the periphery towards the centre, overcoming limits until homosexual households became part of the social discourse in the late twentieth century. However, Marcel’s apartment constructs this ‘innommable’, which thus, becomes ‘nommable’: the creation of space articulates, gives form and name to what was previously ‘informe’. In Colette’s text, the openness of sexual normativity and gender roles is intrinsic to new imagined forms of domestic space.

Conclusion: Towards twentieth-century homes The variety of homes in Claudine shows what Bonnie Honig proposes as a democratic approach to space through the acknowledgement of subjects shaped by multiple identities, and the constant renegotiation of spatial boundaries as a means to engage with subjective pluralities.48 In Claudine, this plurality is best articulated through heterogeneous homes and sexualities. By engaging with sexological discourse, Colette illustrates what Honig sees as a breaking down of the categorical ideas of space and home, and, relatedly, sexuality. Domestic spaces in Claudine construct a dynamic and fluid idea of home that contrasts with a static approach to domesticity conveyed by discourses in the late nineteenth century. This distance from established bourgeois discourses marked a point of inflection in domestic narratives whose aesthetics antedate late-twentieth-century feminism in proposing dynamic approaches to home and subjectivities. This dynamism consisted in formulating a poly-discourse that included a wide variety of definitions of home. Inherent to this is the mobility and flexibility in ideas of home that expand the theoretical boundaries of domesticity and include new forms of dwelling. Through representations of domestic spaces, Claudine introduces an aesthetic formulation of such discursive variety before it was actually theoretically articulated. Specific to Claudine’s domestic discourse is its link to a seemingly sexual discourse that depicts and includes sexual diversity. We have seen how each space relates to a subject that experiences sexuality in a unique and individual way, thus decisively interrelating domestic and sexual forms.

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Bibliography Auslander, Leora, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (London: University of California Press, 1996). Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, [1956] 1994). Baronne Staffe, Usages du monde: Règles du savoir-vivre dans la société moderne. 1891. Reprinted with notes and introduction (Paris: Tallandier, 2007). Barthes, Roland, Comment Vivre Ensemble. Cours et séminaires au Collège de France. 1976–1977. Reprinted with notes and introduction (Paris: Seuil Imec, 2002). Brauer, Fae, ‘Flaunting Manliness: Republican Masculinity, Virilised Homosexuality and the Desirable Male Body’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 6, no. 1 (2005): 23–41. Bruno, Giuliana, The Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2007). Colette, Claudine in Paris, Translated by Antonia White (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972). Colette, Claudine à l’école, [1900] (Reprinted. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1978). Colette. Claudine s’en va. [1903] (Reprinted. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1978). Colette, Claudine en ménage, [1902] (Reprinted. Paris: Folio, 2005). Colette, Clauinde à Paris, [1901] (Reprinted. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2011). Crane, Sheila, ‘Elsie de Wolfe, Natalie Clifford Barney, and the Lure de Versailles: Picturesque Spectres and Conservative Aesthetics of Female Homoeroticism’. In Lesbian Inscriptions in Francophone Society and Culture, edited by Renate Günther and Wendy Michallat, 205–36 (Durham: Durham Modern Languages Series, Durham University Press, 2007). Dehon, Claire, ‘Colette and Art Nouveau’. In Colette: The Woman, The Writer, edited by Erica Mendelson Eisinger and Mari Ward McCarty, 104–15 (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981). Freud, Sigmund, The Uncanny, [1919] (Reprinted with notes and introduction, London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2003). Goncourt, Edmond and Goncourt, Jules, Madame de Pompadour (Paris: Librarie de Firmin-Didot, 1883). Hollier, Denis, La prise de la Concorde. Essais sur Georges Bataille (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). Honig, Bonnie, ‘Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home’, Social Research 6, no. 3 (1994): 563–92. Irigaray, Luce, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (London: Continuum, 2004). Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, Psychopathia Sexualis – Aberrations of Sexual Life: A MedicoLegal Study for Doctors and Lawyers Brought Up to Date ([Place of publication not identified]: Staples, 1951). Kulper, Amy Catania, ‘Private House, Public House: Victor Horta’s Ubiquitous Domesticity’. In Intimate Metropolis, edited by Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri, 110–31 (Oxon: Routledge, 2009).

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Mantz, Paul, ‘Les meubles du XVIII siècle’. Revue des arts décoratifs 4 (1883): 312–25. Massey, Doreen, Space, Place and Gender (Oxford: Polity Press, 2007). Oosterhuis, Harry, ‘Sexual Modernity in the Works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll’. Medical History 56, no. 2 (2012): 133–55. Rybczynski, Witold, Home: A Short History of an Idea (London: Heinemann, 1998). Sparke, Penny, As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (London: Pandora, 1995). Young, Iris M., Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Vernon, A. Rosario, The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own, [1927] (Reprinted. London: Penguin, 2000).

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Missing affinities? Brussels Art Nouveau and Belgian Symbolism Aniel Guxholli

Introduction Art Nouveau and Symbolism emerged as modern forms of expression in letters, painting, decorative arts and architecture marking Belgian artistic life over the last two decades of the nineteenth century. However, in the history of modernity, the relationship between Art Nouveau and Symbolism remains ambiguous. It is often assumed that they shared key themes and sources. This chapter seeks to clarify the links or, more significantly, the lack thereof between these two pivotal movements in Belgium, focusing on key figures within them such as the architects Victor Horta and Paul Hankar, the poet Emile Verhaeren and the painter Fernand Khnopff. Although direct exchanges are rare and sometimes altogether absent, their paths crossed in several events and there are common areas in the pursuits of Symbolism and Art Nouveau, such as the concepts of interior and urban space, abstract form, and the new daily object. It appears that defining features of Horta’s and Hankar’s design, and peculiarities of Belgian Symbolism including a strong attachment to Medieval and English art resulted in artistic pursuits that ran in opposite directions in those areas where affinities between the two movements would have emerged. Following the relations between the two movements, it is possible to trace what may be considered as one of the most fundamental aspects of the history of modern art and architecture in Belgium at the end of the century. The 1880s saw the transition from Decadent to Symbolist tendencies among young poets who, in the following decade, dominated the Belgian literary scene between Brussels and Paris. In the visual arts, Symbolism is recognized in the 1890 salon of Les XX as a distinct artistic trend. Madeleine Maus, actively

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involved in the organization of the salons, wrote of the group of the painters who ‘sought to translate in the plastic arts emotions, dreams, symbols, and literary reminiscences’.1 The latter were derived from Symbolist literature and were translated in the paintings of Fernand Khnopff, Avec Verhaeren, Un ange, [With Verhaeren, an Angel] or the entry of the previous year, Avec Grégoire Le Roy, Mon cœur pleure d’autrefois [With Grégoire Le Roy, My Heart cries for the Past]; in Odilon Redon’s composition of ‘mysterious forms’2 based on Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, and Willy Schlobach’s epigraphs of verses by Baudelaire and Emile Verhaeren. The guest speakers of that year’s conferences – part of the regular activities that accompanied the annual salon – were Stephane Mallarmé, and Edmond Picard who lectured on three exceptional Belgian poets: Maurice Maeterlinck, Charles Van Lerberghe and Emile Verhaeren. The decorative arts made their first appearance in the early 1890s salons of Les XX in a number of small objects, exhibited alongside painting and sculpture. These were initially the modest work of painters and illustrators exploring new media, but, they became gradually a major contribution to the salons of Les XX, and its successor from 1894, La Libre Esthétique, pursuing a new concept of the daily object and a modern style of design. In architecture, the modern style appeared fully fledged in Victor Horta’s Hôtel Tassel, beginning in 1893, and spread over the following decade to his other projects throughout Brussels (Figure 10.1). Paul Hankar is another architect who joined the endeavour, becoming a key figure in the development of the modern style. His experiments began with his own house at rue Defacqz (Figure 10.2), built at about the same time as the Hôtel Tassel, and he was recognized by contemporary critics to have played a central role in the architectural innovations of the 1890s. The term ‘modern style’ was commonly used at the time to refer to the distinct manifestations of a new architecture such as Horta’s and Hankar’s, and it was only in the later historiography that the term ‘Art Nouveau’ was introduced to include architecture along items from the field of decorative design that shared similar stylistic features. In contrast, ‘Symbolism’ was already in use as a term by the contemporary critique to refer to tendencies that they saw in the art of their time, dating back to the 1880s. Questions arise about the historical relations between the two currents that dominated the modern artistic scene in Brussels. Part of the interpretative difficulty lies in the ambivalence of the terms, which do not refer to organized movements or schools, but to boarder tendencies that included divergent programs and individuals, at times contradictory ones. Georges Fabry, in his short 1972 essay on the Symbolist painter Jean-Jacques Gailliard, called the world

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Figure 10.1  Victor Horta, Hôtel Tassel, rue Janson no. 6, Brussels (1893–4). Author's photograph.

of ‘modern style’ – Art Nouveau – a ‘cousin’ of the world of literary symbolism, noting that they both remained dear to the painter who admired Maeterlinck in his early high school days, had often conversed with Khnopff on English and 1900 Viennese art, and continued to take a special delight in returning to the refined art of those times.3 However, Gailliard was born in 1890, so his Symbolist painting belongs to the twentieth century, and although he grew up in a family of painters with an extensive network of artistic connections, his career started

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Figure 10.2  Paul Hankar’s house at rue Defacqz no. 71, Brussels (1893). Author’s photograph.

after the heyday of Art Nouveau and Symbolism in Brussels. When he immersed himself in the two worlds, as he did in the 1971 series of town house drawings Jean-Jacques Gailliard raconte l’architecture [architecture according to JeanJacques Gailliard] at the Horta Museum, it was a voyage into the past. Seen retrospectively, the worlds of Art Nouveau and of Symbolism appear indeed to be closely related, stemming from and enmeshed in the fin-desiècle mental climate. The links with painting and literary Symbolism are

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often founded when Art Nouveau refers to the decorative arts, encompassing flat illustrations and book-binding, daily and art objects, furniture and sets of interiors. Many of the designers such as Henry Van de Velde, George Lemmen or Willy Finch were, or had been painters; the exchanges between fields and individuals were dense as the example of Les XX and La Libre Esthétique show. Others drew their inspiration explicitly from Symbolist poets or dedicated their works to them. Because Symbolism clearly precedes Art Nouveau, sources of Art Nouveau design are often sought in the pictorial research of the Symbolists and related groups, such as the Nabis. Robert Goldwater, for instance, observes that the swirling line of Art Nouveau was an element of style in many Symbolist artists, although he decides to leave the question of precedence unresolved.4 In the case of architecture, drawing historical links between the emergence of Art Nouveau in Horta’s houses and the world of artistic and literary Symbolism proves problematic.

Art Nouveau and Symbolism: The difference between France and Belgium France offers the advantage of showing clear links between the two artistic worlds in the form of visible affinities. They appear in the most obvious way in the works of Emile Gallé and the Nancy school, one of the main centres in the rise of French Art Nouveau. For several years Gallé maintained close relations with the poet Robert de Montesquiou, whom he had met at the 1889 Universal Exposition. In an 1893 exchange over a gift to the poet, a glass flacon named Raisins mystétrieux [Mysterious Grapes] with four verses by Montesquiou engraved on it, Gallé wrote that his words ‘donne à [s]es outils des rêves’ [‘gave dreams to his tools’]. De Montesquiou replied with a dedicated ‘crystal poem’.5 It was common for Gallé to draw from Symbolist art by inscribing verses and naming his art objects after literary pieces that they were intended to represent: his 1889 furniture contained verses by Leconte de Lisle; Georges Rodenbach’s verses appeared on his vases; a later model was named Les 7 Princesses [The Seven Princesses], after Maeterlinck’s play. His 1900 desk Forêt Lorraine featured verses from Baudelaire’s poem ‘L’invitation au voyage’, ‘Tout y parlerait A l’âme en secret Sa douce langue natale.’6

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[All would whisper there Secretly to the soul In its soft, native language.]7

The desk drew from several sources of the French tradition, but prominent in this case is the reinterpretation of nature: it had always been a major source in the Nancy school, and it is here brought to the décor of the furnished interior conjointly with poetry, in the form of the ‘forest of symbols’, in Baudelaire’s words, that would engage the imagination of the viewer. Gallé formulated his intentions in a talk that he gave at the Académie Stanislas in May 1900, and was significantly entitled Le décor symbolique [The Symbolic Décor]. Art Nouveau architecture in France emerged through and alongside other developments. As with the decorative arts, there were several artistic centres and architects who turned to the new style under different circumstances. Hector Guimard’s Castel Béranger (Figure 10.4) occupies a central place in its history because it introduced Art Nouveau into Paris, occasionally called Style Guimard, and it attracted great public attention through the promotional campaign, orchestrated by the architect himself. In 1899, the apartment building won the municipal prize for the façades, so Guimard took the opportunity to give interviews to the press, publish a lavish album and organize an exhibition with his project drawings in the salons of Le Figaro. It is interesting to note that the same newspaper had published the scathing attack by Arsène Alexandre on Siegfried Bing’s Maison de l’Art Nouveau, the day after its opening on 27 December 1895, calling the whole venture of the decorative arts a mix of poison.8 Guimard drew his share of criticism too, but the general reception in the press and in the specialized architectural journals was for the most part positive, and, significantly, he attracted the ‘clan of Symbolist aesthetes’ who flocked to celebrate the Castel Béranger. The French art historian Roger-Henry Guerrand, in his L’Art Nouveau en Europe (1965), refers to this group who consecrated Guimard as ‘priest of eternal beauty’.9 It is a well-known fact that Guimard altered the conventional plans for the Castel Béranger after visiting Brussels in 1895, and that he derived his style from Horta.10 He openly acknowledged his debt to the Belgian master in interviews and in the opening speech of the 1899 exhibition at Le Figaro. The French critic Octave Uzanne, after visiting Brussels, wished in Echo de Paris in 1898 that ‘Guimard may soon become our French Horta.’11 As this lineage takes us back to Horta’s Brussels, the birthplace of Art Nouveau architecture, and to the original problem of its relationship to Belgian Symbolism, the question arises

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Figure 10.3  Fernand Khnopff’s former house at rue Saint-Bernard no. 3, Brussels. A typical Flemish neo-Renaissance town-house, designed by Edouard Parys (1886). Author’s photograph.

whether similar links existed in Belgium: links between architecture and the world of literary and visual Symbolism, in the form of sources, exchanges or stated affinities, such as those that are seen in France. The architectural historian David Dernie argues that Horta’s architecture is rooted in the Symbolist culture of his time, embodies its themes and can be decoded through a Symbolist reading. Thus, Horta’s interiors appear as a

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retreat from everyday reality, underlain by a sense of withdrawal, introspection and reverie. The interior winter gardens of the hôtels Tassel and Van Eetvelde suggest the ‘stillness the aquarium’ of Rodenbach’s Aquarium mental and Les vies encloses, and the artificial atmospheres of Maeterlinck’s Serres chaudes and Cloches de verre. Dernie’s argument continues that Horta builds a world of analogies behind material appearances, which reflects elements of Baudelaire’s doctrine of ‘correspondences’ and synaesthesia, Albert Mockel’s theory of the symbol, and Maurice Denis’s synthetist theory. A similar, recurring analogy that has appeared in books on Horta compares his interiors, as artificial paradises, to Des Esseintes’s house in Joris-Karl Huysmans novel À rebours (1884) (Figures 10.5 and 10.6).

Figure 10.4  Hector Guimard, Castel Béranger, Paris (1896). Main entrance. © Susane Havelka.

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Figure 10.5  Victor Horta’s house at rue Américaine no. 23–25, Brussels (1898– 1901). View of main stairwell in the interior. Author’s photograph.

The question remains whether beyond these analogies the relationship between Symbolism and Art Nouveau is rooted in an historical reality. If the links between Art Nouveau architecture and Symbolism were as powerful as they appear in Dernie’s contemporary perspective, then one would expect to find some form of awareness among Horta and his contemporaries. But, looking into the reality of 1890s Brussels, we find no manifestations of sympathies or inspiration such as those in France: no engraved verses on objects that Horta

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designed, no groups of aesthetes making pilgrimages to his new town houses in order to consecrate him as the priest of eternal beauty. No one saw a fountain of youth in his interior winter gardens as they did in the courtyard of Castel Béranger, nor in Horta’s Maison du Peuple and Magasins d’Innovations, or the numerous Art Nouveau designs by other architects in minor works throughout the city. In stark contrast to France, such literary figures are absent in accounts of Belgian Art Nouveau architecture and moreover, in the case of Horta, most of them came not from art circles but from professional architectural periodicals. The prominent links that tied the rise of French Art Nouveau to the world of letters are not to be found be in Brussels. But, even at a deeper level of interaction, traces of strong affinities between Horta’s architecture and Belgian Symbolists are missing. It is important to focus on Horta’s architecture in this respect because his Art Nouveau houses were conceived in their entirety, and often as total works of art, whereas for most other architects the elements in the modern style were limited to architectural details, usually on the façades, and they did not radically transform the environment of the house.

Horta and Symbolism Whether Horta read Symbolist authors in his early career, whether he maintained close personal relations and most importantly, what his understanding of their works would have been, is a question that cannot be answered definitively. In what remains of the family library, there are books by Grégoire Le Roy, Max Elskamp, Franz Hellens and Jean de Bosschère, but it is unknown under what circumstances these books entered Horta’s home and survived in his archives. The contact with the latter author, for example, is likely due to their work in the Fine Arts Academy in Brussels, after the turn of the century. Grégoire Le Roy’s book mon cœur pleure d’autrefois, for which Khnopff had made the eponymous drawing in 1889, contains a dedication to Mme Horta. Le Roy and the Hortas were natives of Ghent, and he is also mentioned in a letter by Georges Khnopff, brother of the painter, as a mutual friend. Dumont-Wilden’s 1907 monograph on Fernand Khnopff is also in the library. However, such traces are too meagre to prove any particular interest in Symbolism and they appear among a multitude of authors and subjects. It is possible, for example, to point to the books of Georges Eekhoud in the library, yet we do not know if Horta was particularly fond of Naturalism, or if their presence is due to the fact that the two men were close colleagues at the Fine Art Academy, as was the case with de Bosschère and

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Jean Delville. When Jean Delville took Horta’s side in the squabbles with Van de Velde in the 1920s, this was more likely due to close connections fostered in the institution rather than affinities between his dogmatic Idealism and the Art Nouveau architecture of one of the two rivals. Horta had another opportunity to express his ideas on the art of this period during the talks that he gave throughout the United States in 1916–18. He covered multiple subjects in architectural and art history, and, in response to the great interest of the American public, a number of talks were dedicated to the Belgian school of painting. Horta singled out prominent contemporary artists, yet, all that can be related to his opinions on Symbolist art are a mention of George Minne, whom he associates with Gothic art, and one reference to Khnopff as ‘une figure enigmatique’ [‘an enigmatic figure’].12 If Symbolists saw affinities between their art and Horta’s new architecture, the question arises as to whether they were among his clients. Yet, even in this group, they are absent. Most of Horta’s well-off clientele came from fields such as engineering, law or commerce, and it was professors of descriptive geometry, rather than aesthetes like Robert de Montesquieu who lived in the Hôtels Tassel and Autrique. However, Horta discussed possible commissions and designed town houses for artists, too. George Khnopff, a writer and brother of the painter, enquired about renting a house and transforming its interior around rue SaintBernard in a series of letters to Horta in 1892, but this undertaking was never finalized, and, at this time, neither the Tassel nor the Autrique houses were built so that Khnopff ’s interest in Horta’s services could not have come from his fascination with Art Nouveau. In the later years, Horta’s residential work for artists included the interior of the hôtel of the painter Anna Boch at Toison d’Or (1895), the house for his sculptor friend Pierre Braecke in the North-East quarter (1901), and the house for the art critic Sander Pierron near the viaduct of Ixelles (1903). Braecke and Pierron were clients with more limited means so that their houses have neither ashlar façades nor artificial glass worlds in the interior, yet they are fully within Horta’s Art Nouveau architecture. None of these artists belonged to the Symbolist currents in Brussels. On the other hand, Anna Boch’s commission, Horta’s collaboration with the decorative painter Emile Fabry or the fact that Paul Signac lived in the Castel Béranger in Paris and wrote enthusiastically about it would all hint at affinities between Art Nouveau architecture and artists of another current if one were to pursue labels strictly: neo-impressionism. Part of the difficulty in seeking concrete links between Art Nouveau architecture and contemporary art circles lies in the fact that during the

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1890s, at the height of his work, Horta was reluctant to give interviews in the publications of the Brussels avant-garde platforms of the time, and to a certain extent, this disinterest might have been mutual. L’Art moderne, the most important art journal in Brussels which counted among its patrons Octave Maus, Edmond Picard and Emile Verhaeren, only mentioned his role in 1900, in a two-instalment article by Maus on modern houses by Hankar and Horta.13 In 1897, Horta participated in La Libre Esthétique with a complete dining room. The decorative arts and sets of interiors had been a regular feature of the annual exposition for a number of years. However, it seems that Horta’s contribution was solicited by the clients for whom he was working at the time and who had their furniture exhibited: the stained glass and the sideboard of the dining room were designed for the hôtel Van Eetvelde, the table and chairs for the hôtel Solvay. The carpet on the floor resembles the designs made for Anna Boch, a former member of Les XX, supporter of La Libre Esthétique, and, at the time, a client of Horta who is likely to have encouraged his only participation in the salons. So far, key moments of Horta’s activity show no significant connections to the Symbolists and reveal little of his opinion on their art. His exchanges with important circles such as La Libre Esthétique and l’Art moderne are scant. The case for affinities in his reception of the Symbolists’s literary work is, at best, inconclusive. Authors and enthusiasts of Symbolism do not appear among his clients, although architectural commissions are conditioned by many circumstances that go beyond mere artistic preferences. Moving to the other side of the inquiry, the reception of Art Nouveau architecture among Symbolists becomes even more significant in the light of silence and missing links on Horta’s side. To return to the previous formulation, if there were strong affinities between the two modes of artistic expression, one would expect Symbolist authors to see them in Horta’s architecture and reveal such impressions in one form or another. There is an advantage in tracing the reception of the architectural modern style in Brussels because the most renowned of Belgian Symbolist poets, Emile Verhaeren, and the most celebrated Symbolist painter, Fernand Khnopff, were also critics who contributed regularly on questions of modern art, including the reform of the decorative arts in daily objects and the renewal of architecture. Over the two decades at the turn of the century, there were numerous occasions for the Symbolists and Horta to know each other’s works and therefore avoid what Verhaeren called in 1891, ‘the curious filiations of artists who do not know each other but think in almost the same way, from the emotional point of view’.14

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Verhaeren, Khnopff and Art Nouveau Emile Verhaeren’s regular reviews of Les XX tackled the reform of the decorative arts from the early 1890s. The question was not merely stylistic: at its core lay a new conception of the daily object and man’s environment. His interest in what he called l’art mobilier et immoblier [furniture and architectural art] extended from the interior to the architecture and the landscape of the city. In 1890 he contrasted the stagnant state of architecture through the nineteenth century, where no modern style had emerged, except for the works of engineers, to a recent, emerging trend in the interiors, where ‘l’art s’empare des murs, des meubles, des étagères, des maples, des foyers, des fers, des lits, des dressoirs’ [‘art emerges from the walls, furniture, shelves, floors, hearths, ironwork, beds and dressers’].15 At the 1893 salon of Les XX he recognized a new conception of the daily object, ‘commode, artiste et moderne’ [‘useful, artistic and modern’] that was replacing the knick-knacks,16 and eventually led to the vigorous renewal of the applied arts in England.17 In the early exhibitions of Les XX, Verhaeren recognized pictorial motives such as those that would prefigure the Art Nouveau curve. He described Walter Crane’s ornamental design in 1891 with the ‘arabesque volutante et longuement déroulée, les linges capricieuses en continuité’ [‘spiralling, long arabesque, with capricious continuous lines’]18 and wrote in 1893 of ‘le double drame mélancolique et sculptural, la recherche des lignes expressives et sentimentales, les couleurs appropriées à la vision suprasensible de ses pensées’ [‘the dual melancholic and sculptural drama, the unusual expressive and sentimental lines with colours matching the supra-sensitive vision of his thought’] in Toorop’s paintings, and of similar intentions in Thorn Pikker.19 Verhaeren clearly saw two trends in separate fields: the rise of a new concept of the interior in the decorative arts, and, the suggestive power of lines and colour in contemporary pictorial research. In line with the later historiography of Art Nouveau, one would expect him to see these two movements converge and culminate in Horta’s interiors in Brussels. But he saw no such course of events, and made no mention of Horta at all in his reviews. The problem of the renewal of architecture, which he had addressed in the early 1890s, remained unsolved, and by 1896 he seems disappointed even with the results in the decorative arts: that year he commented on the salon of La Libre Esthétique, ‘cette renaissance des arts mineurs, qui passionne les esprits depuis cinq-six ans en Belgique et en France, n’as pas produit encore, semble-t-il, les résultats éspérés’ [‘this renaissance of the minor arts which has excited minds for over five years, has not yet produced, it seems, the anticipated results’].20 Indeed, such art objects, which were fully in

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vogue by the end of the 1890s, were absent in the décor of his own houses such as that of Saint-Cloud, which comprised contemporary painting and traditional furniture. His 1899 country house near the French border at Caillou-qui-brique, in the Hainaut, was a farm dwelling with rustic furniture and a library designed by Van Rysselberghe. When the local farmer proposed to build a new house, Verhaeren refused because ‘he needed the old walls.’ The story continues that he went buying furniture from farmers and antiquaries around Mons.21 Fernand Khnopff ’s art reviews were part of his dense activity and effort to play a central role in the artistic life of Brussels. He lectured at the art section of the Maison du Peuple and joined the discussion on the artistic embellishment of the city to criticize the ideas of the Société de l’art appliqué à la rue. Khnopff published regularly and after 1894 had his own column of ‘Studio-Talk: Brussels’ in the British design magazine Studio: International Art, intended to inform the public on the latest artistic developments in Belgium. It covered the fine arts, and the applied arts as an important subject, but the focus was also extended to architecture and other manifestations. Horta is mentioned a few times, and earns praise on two occasions for his innovations in design and the public success he had achieved: in the 1897 salon of La Libre Esthétique, where Horta’s dining room was much admired, in the new Maison du Peuple, inaugurated in 1899, and in his collaboration for the Congo colonial pavilion of 1900. On all of these occasions Khnopff was reporting on the activity of organizations with which he had many personal connections: he participated in the 1897 Libre Esthétique and Congo expositions himself. The notes on Horta’s innovative work are certainly positive, but they do not reveal what exactly Khnopff appreciated in his design. They are short, and appear only in reports on important events in Brussels, where Horta’s involvement was prominent. In contrast, the reviews on Paul Hankar are not only more frequent, but they also cover smaller works and praise specific aspects of his design solutions. The 1896 Studio Talk columns feature photographs of Hankar’s wrought iron candelabrum, shown at the Brussels Art Club, and of the Timmermans bakery in Ixelles, whose façade he had redesigned in collaboration with Adolphe Crespin (Figure 10.7). Khnopff praises the iron insignia on the façade, the sgraffito and in particular, the effect of the blue tones.22 A later report of 1897 praised the installation of a shop, whose scheme is tasteful and subdued, with the rare distinction of being novel and not yet altogether English. The warm tone of the mahogany is in perfect harmony with the bluish-greens and the pale yellow in the carpet, the ceiling and the frieze, the chestnut leaves in the latter forming the chief ornamental motif.23

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Figure 10.6  Victor Horta’s house at rue Américaine no. 23–25, Brussels (1898–1901). View of main stairwell in the interior. Author’s photograph.

Khnopff – the Symbolist link with Horta, Hankar and Hoffmann? It is reasonable to relate the focus on Hankar to social connections and to Khnopff ’s own preferences because throughout the 1890s, Horta’s architecture in Brussels drew no less attention than Hankar’s – it was rather the opposite case. It is true that most of Horta’s projects of that time consisted of houses for a restricted clientele. However, their presence as urban landmarks of Art Nouveau was stronger than Hankar’s interventions which, although more numerous in residential and commercial projects, limited Art Nouveau to smaller design details. We also know that Khnopff was interested and well acquainted with Horta’s architecture, including private interiors that were not accessible to the public. For example, Emile Tassel wrote to Horta in December 1898 that Khnopff and Paul Errera wanted to see the house, and asked him to accompany them instead since he would prefer not to be there during the visit. In Hankar’s case, Khnopff was not only well acquainted with his work, but they also had close relations. They were both members of artistic associations

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and participated in different exhibitions that brought together applied and fine arts, as it became customary at the time: at Liège in 1895, and at Tervueren in 1897, where Hankar’s furniture was exhibited alongside Khnopff ’s paintings. At Hankar’s funeral in 1901 it was Khnopff who read the eulogy on behalf of the Cercle artistique et littéraire, and the friendship between the two men had probably begun very early in their careers, before they were well-known. Another reason for the closer relations between the two artists is the tradition of Flemish architecture, particularly through the figure of Hendrik Beyaert, Hankar’s mentor, who had also collaborated in his projects with Xavier Mellery, Khnopff ’s teacher. Hankar remained loyal to his training in Beyaert’s office throughout his career. The Flemish Neo-Renaissance derivation and a medializing aspect remain clearly legible in his architecture after 1893, in which Art Nouveau appears in the forms of architectural details, reinterpreted in new motifs and added onto buildings which otherwise maintained a conventional distribution. The Timmermans bakery, praised in the Studio, is typical of this process: Adolphe Crespin’s lavish sgraffito and Hankar’s iron insignia are added onto a conventional façade. There are substantial innovations with regard to the employed materials and the articulation of the elevations in more ambitious projects, such as his own house in rue Defacqz (Figure 10.2). Yet, even here the new architectural language is not overwhelming. It blends with the traditional elements of Belgian architecture and the medieval overtones that dominate the façade: the heavy projecting eaves and the arched corbel-table below, the pronounced brackets and canopy above the main door, the rounded arches in the fenestration of the staircase bay, the asymmetry and the extensive brick facing. The interior distribution has new solutions in lighting and dimensions, but the general plan is typical of the Belgian house en enfilade. In fact, the Art Nouveau elements in Hankar’s work are far from shocking. By contrast, the classicist derivation and the Art Nouveau motives are prominent in the exterior of Horta’s Hotel Tassel (Figure 10.1). Classical rules of composition are clearly legible in the symmetry, the tripartite vertical and horizontal division, and the articulating cornices of the façade; the curved bow-window and the ashlar work follow another line of the classical tradition: the French hôtels particuliers. In Horta’s later houses the Art Nouveau elements become key features of the exterior stone and ironwork, whereas in the interior they dominate the décor: on the wall and floor surfaces, balustrades, furniture and fixtures that Horta designs by himself. Ornamental motives are one of the expedients employed to create atmospheres and radically transform the interior. Horta brings the winter garden to the centre of the house to merge two different typologies, the

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glasshouse and the dwelling. The extent of these transformations which lie at the core of Horta’s Art Nouveau architecture is absent in Hankar. Other differences separate the two: Hankar’s sgraffitti include naturalistic and allegorical representations – the façade of the Timmermans bakery features an allegorical female figure at the centre – designs that Horta always avoided. Both architects were acquainted with the Arts and Crafts design, and they employed English wallpapers and other items in their interiors. But, in the case of Hankar, English design played a much greater role in interior decoration– his own house had wallpapers by Walter Crane along Japanese objects – and as a source for the design his own furniture. As with the architect and cabinet-maker Gustave Serrurier-Bovy, his proximity to English design was clear, and considered to be a quality by many contemporaries who saw England leading the renewal of the decorative arts. Verhaeren shared this general opinion when he contrasted the quality of English craftsmanship to the state of affairs in Belgium, France and Germany, where furniture and decoration in the hand of the industrialists ‘had slid into the worst decadence’.24 He then listed the English items made in the best taste – furniture wallpapers, hangings, utensils – and designers, including Morris, Crane, Voysey and Sumner. Their superior quality was recognized by Khnopff too, the correspondent of the Studio, who praised Hankar’s work for being tasteful, novel and ‘not yet altogether English’. But, if the English school had re-enacted a tradition of medieval craftsmanship that accounted for its quality, it also yielded a medievalizing feeling in its furnished interiors. This sense is even stronger and ideologically deliberate in the design of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts, and it is one of the factors in the great difference with the French traditions which split public taste and artistic opinion at the time. A medievalizing, strong bond to a past that was free of classical language would inevitably transpire from Hankar’s architecture, founded on the Flemish traditional house, a revived medieval repertoire and the English Arts and Crafts. It is arguably this aspect that attracts a Symbolist author such as Khnopff to Hankar and not Horta’s Art Nouveau, besides their social relations. Not only because as a critic on the decorative arts Khnopff valued things English and medieval, but, because of a fundamental characteristic of Belgian Symbolist art: Belgian Symbolism is rooted in the poetics of a geographical place. It is a specificity that differentiates it, for example, from the artificial worlds in French writing.25 This place is the Flemish city, a misty space of empty alleys and meandering canals, where time has stopped, and very often ‘a dead city’ that reflects the psyche of the protagonist. This is the Symbolist city that appears in Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte, Franz Hellens’s En ville morte, in the backdrop

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of Khnopff ’s illustrations for Grégoire Le Roy, Rodenbach, and in his own paintings. Timeless Bruges conserved the memories of Khnopff ’s childhood, ‘des souvenirs lointains, mais très prècis’ [‘far-away but very precise memories’] as he stated to Schultze-Namburg in 1899.26 Une ville abandonnée [Abandoned city], painted in 1904 (Figure 10.8), was presented as an imaginary vision, but, as Robert Delevoy points out, the image is directly founded on a heliograph of the

Figure 10.7 Khnopff’s column on the Timmermans bakery in Ixelles by Paul Hankar and Adolphe Crespin in Studio: International Art, no. 40 (July 1896). Courtesy of McGill University Library, Rare Books.

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Place Memling in Bruges, showing a row of medieval gable-front houses.27 This environment is a construction that fuses inner and outer states, past and present, real and unreal, and architecture is an essential component: in Khnopff ’s Bruges, in the Symbolist ‘dead city’, architecture is necessarily medieval, as the nostalgia for the past fuses with the nostalgia for the Middle Ages. The dead city, with the example for Bruges, is one of the environments constructed as a paradigm of Symbolist pursuits. The double reality, the unreal and the unconscious, dreams, memory and mystery are among the key themes of Symbolist artists that can be translated into other spatial experiences, real and fictional ones. Yet Horta’s Art Nouveau architecture offered no analogies and no affinities with these themes. Three important events in Khnopff ’s relation with architecture occur at the turn of the century: the Viennese Secession participation at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900, Hankar’s death in 1901 and Khnopff ’s move to his new villa in 1902. The highly successful Secession rooms of the Austrian pavilion in 1900 inspired Khnopff ’s full article ‘Josef Hoffmann – Architect and Decorator’, published with ample illustrations in the Studio, in the following year. Khnopff praised Hoffmann’s interiors and his contribution to modern art, differentiating his work from French Art Nouveau, which was visible in the adjacent pavilions of the 1900 exposition. In 1902, Khnopff moved from his residence in Saint-Gilles, a conventional Flemish Neo-Renaissance house (Figure 10.3), to his new villa on the outskirts of Brussels, which he had designed with the architect Édouard Pelseneer.28 The villa included the studio and rooms designed for receiving guests, whose arrival was seen as a mystical ritual. Whereas Bruges and medieval architecture represented the nostalgia for the past and what Verhaeren described as the ‘formidable withdrawal of the modern imagination into the past’29 in his painting (Figure 10.8), Villa Khnopff was the final opportunity to see Symbolist themes translated into a built architecture of the present. An exterior, slender volume, crowned by a fronton of curved contours that are distantly reminiscent of the Art Nouveau line, projects from the main volume of the pitched-roof house: it is an abstraction in white of the Flemish gabled front. In the interior, spaces that were intended to show the public a sense of dream, mystery and silence are plain surfaces and whitewashed walls. The only other colours are blue and gold, and the surface divisions are strictly geometrical. Reminiscent of Hoffmann, Khnopff ’s Symbolist space is a far cry from the atmosphere of Horta’s interiors. It is perhaps in this long distance separating the two that the affinities between Belgian Symbolists and Art Nouveau architecture are lost. It therefore remains that while the relationship between Art Nouveau and Symbolism merits further

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Figure 10.8  Fernand Khnopff, Une ville abandonnée (1904). Pastel and pencil on paper mounted on canvas © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/photo: J. Geleyns Art Photography.

exploration, it is clear that figures such as Khnopff with his international links to Hoffmann and to English design, his involvement in letters and architecture are key to fully understanding not only the missing affinities between the two movements, but the broader development of modern art and architecture in Belgium.

Bibliography Aggeler, William, Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954). Alexandre, Arsène, ‘L’Art Nouveau’ in Le Figaro, 28 December 1895.

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Aubry, Françoise, ‘Hector Guimard et la Belgique’. In Guimard, colloque international, Musée d’Orsay, 1992, edited by Philippe Thiébault and Claude Frontisi (Paris: Spadem, 1994). Delevoy, Robert, Fernand Khnopff (Paris: La Bibliothèque des arts, 1987). Emond, Paul, ‘Emile Verhaeren’. In Belgique: des maisons et des hommes, edited by Georges-Henri Dumont and Hugues Boucher (Bruxelles: Vokaear, 1980). Fabry, Georges, Jean-Jacques Gailliard, le voyageur de la lumière fantastique (Ostende: Ed. Erel, 1972). Ferré, Felipe, Maurice Rheims and Geroges Vigne, Hector Guimard (New York: H. Abrams, 1985). Flanell Friedman, Donald, ‘Rodenbach, Hellens, Lemonnier: Paradisal and Infernal Modalities of Belgian Dead City in Prose’. In Georges Rodenbach: Critical Essays, edited by Philip Mosley (London: Associated University Presses, 1996). Goldwater, Robert, Symbolism (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). Guerrand, Roger-H, L’Art Nouveau en Europe (Paris: Plon, 1965). Maus, Madeleine Octave, Trente années de lutte pour l’art, Les XX, La Libre Esthétique, 1884–1914 (Brussels: Éditions Lebeer Hossmann, 1926). Maus, Octave, ‘Habitations modernes’, L’Art moderne (15 and 22 July 1900), 221–3 and 229–31. Naylor, Gillian, ‘Hector Guimard, Romantic Rationalist?’ In Hector Guimard, edited by Gillian Naylor and Yvonne Brunhammer (New York: Rizzoli, 1978). Verhaeren, Emile, Écrits sur l’art, vol. 1, edited by Paul Aaron (Bruxelles: Labor, 1997).

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Villa Khnopff: The home of an artist and the palace of art Maria Golovteeva

Introduction Fernand Khnopff (1858–1921) was a key figure of Belgian Symbolism. He started his independent career as an artist around 1880 and exhibited with the artistic society L’Essor in Brussels in 1881. In 1883 he was one of the founders of the avant-garde group Les Vingt, which brought together Symbolist poets and artists. While 1880s were still a period of self-definition and discovery for Khnopff, in 1890s he reached his international success. He exhibited in London (which he, as an anglophile, visited on numerous occasion), with the Salons de la Rose+Croix in Paris, at the Wiener Secession in Vienna, in Munich and Venice. At the turn of the century, Khnopff ’s mysterious idealized art represented the essence of the Symbolist movement. In early 1900s he continued to create a rather versatile output and enjoy the public acclaim. However, the most significant event of this period of Khnopff ’s life before the First World War that had a profound influence on his art was the construction of his villa in Brussels, where he attempted to merge life with art. Khnopff built his dwelling at number 41, Avenue des Courses, at its intersection with Avenue Jeanne, on the edge of the Bois de la Cambre in the early 1900s. His house corresponded with the fin-de-siècle idea of an artist’s home in itself representing a work of art, as well as providing a creative atmosphere and a stimulating environment. It was not only a living space for the artist; it was also a place, where he worked and created, kept his own works and his collection of art, and welcomed the chosen few, who were allowed to visit the dwelling. Just like the Goncourt’s ‘maison d’art’ at Auteuil, which its owners transformed into a proto-Symbolist work of art, the image of the Villa Khnopff extended into other media with its textual and photographic reproductions.1 In fact, Khnopff ’s

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beautiful and extravagant residence is only known nowadays from eyewitness accounts and photographs published in contemporary periodicals, as it was demolished in 1938–40 to build a block of flats.2 These sources serve as a basis for the analysis in this chapter. It is unknown who took the photographs depicting empty rooms and corridors of the Villa Khnopff (Figures 11.1–11.8) and one view of the dwelling

Figure 11.1  The antechamber in Villa Khnopff © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium.

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Figure 11.2  The corridor in Villa Khnopff © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium.

from the outside (Figure 11.9), but their reproductions first appeared as illustrations in the article ‘Das Heim eines Symbolisten’ by writer and journalist Wolfram Waldschmidt in the Dekorative Kunst in 1906. Some of these photographic evocations were reproduced in the artist’s first biography published by his friend Louis Dumont-Wilden in 1907, which provides an insight into the Villa Khnopff too. Several reproductions also appeared in

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Figure 11.3  The main studio of Villa Khnopff with the altar of Hypnos on the right © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium.

Hélène Laillet’s 1912 article ‘The Home of an Artist: M. Fernand Khnopff ’s Villa at Brussels’ for The Studio.3 A new view of the villa taken from the outside was published in a small article about the architecture of the house in Brussels architectural journal L’Emulation and two similar views (now in Archives de la Ville de Bruxelles) were taken in 1935, right before the villa was demolished in 1938–40 to build a block of flats.4 This chapter aims to recreate the Villa Khnopff, the process of its construction, its stylistic affiliation and its unique designs. It examines the Symbolist exploration of interiority in the decoration of the dwelling, as well as the reinvention of typical bourgeois interiors and their integration with Symbolist theory. This chapter addresses predominantly primary sources, both textual and photographic, but also acknowledges relatively recent scholarship, which is interested in the enigmatic and multi-faceted image of Khnopff ’s dwelling.5 It also looks into the role different sources, especially photographic, played in establishing the image of the dwelling. In this respect, metaphors for personal interiorization implemented in the photographs of Khnopff ’s residence are analysed.

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Figure 11.4  The passage from the main studio to the second studio with a smaller altar to Hypnos visible between the curtains © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium – or RMFAB, Brussels/ AACB.

The Symbolist house The first steps towards the construction of the villa were most likely taken in October 1899, the plans were drawn in March 1900 and the villa was finished in 1902.6 In the spirit of the cult of the artist, and the elusive nature of the Symbolist

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Figure 11.5  The altar to Imagination in the blue niche in Villa Khnopff © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium.

self, hiding behind the guise of legend, Khnopff created a myth supported by Dumont-Wilden that he had designed the villa himself.7 This myth of the sole execution was later reiterated in a 1967 article in the Apollo: ‘He [Khnopff] designed it [the villa] himself about 1900 – working out, and drawing every detail.’8 Khnopff did not work on his house alone, however. His villa was an

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Figure 11.6  The main studio with Franz von Stuck’s Amazon with the fountain in the background © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium.

example of a common late-nineteenth-century practice of collaboration between an artist and an architect. Numerous artists commissioned the designs of their houses: William Morris worked together with Philip Webb on his Red House (1859), Lord Frederic Leighton appointed George Aitcheson to build his dwelling in London (1864–6), Franz von Lenbach turned to Gabriel Seidl to erect his

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Figure 11.7  The Blue Room © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/ Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium.

Figure 11.8  The White Room (Dining Room) © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium.

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Figure 11.9  Facade of the Villa Khnopff © Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels/Archives of Contemporary Art in Belgium.

house in Munich (1887). Perhaps only Franz von Stuck created his Villa Stuck (1897–98) by himself. Khnopff collaborated with Belgian architect Edouard Pelseneer, whose signatures could be found on the plans of the Villa Khnopff. All these residences corresponded with the late-nineteenth-century idea of an artist’s home that was also partly supported by the Baudelairean theory of

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correspondences, which states that external objects have secret links with human senses and human character. These artistic dwellings, therefore, whose designs artists influenced at least to a certain extent, represented extensions of artists’s personalities and matched the style of their works. As Wolfram Waldschmidt stated in 1906, ‘the visit to his [Khnopff ’s] house in Brussels has given me a full understanding of his art.’9 In 1912 Hélène Laillet described Khnopff ’s residence after her visit there: ‘To speak of the “Villa Fernand Khnopff ” is to speak of one of the artist’s greatest works.’10 Thus, by constituting works of art within themselves, such houses also demonstrated not only that artists defined their environment, but also that the setting influenced them in turn. Such a creative effect, exerted in both directions, was rooted in the late-nineteenth-century idea of an artist’s house, which rested upon the Romantic and Symbolist emphasis on the interrelation between the subject and the environment.11 Artists’s homes were therefore supposed to contain collections of various valuable and rare artefacts that inspired their owners by providing a creative atmosphere and stimulating environment for them. In 1927, a Brussels architectural journal, L’Emulation, addressed the collaboration between Khnopff and Pelseneer. The architect had probably worked on the ‘constructive details and organisation of the interior space’, while the artist had designed the facades.12 Khnopff was known for carefully regulating every aspect and every detail when he cooperated with someone (e.g. when he worked with photographer Alexandre), and therefore, within his creative partnership with Pelseneer, he greatly contributed to planning and designing the villa. As L’Emulation pointed out, Khnopff was especially actively involved in designing the interiors, paying attention even to the smallest things: ‘the window bolts and doorknobs had been chosen by our colleague [Pelseneer] who accompanied his client [Khnopff] to the hardware store of Chouanard.’13 Such cautious consideration for every feature was rooted not only in Khnopff ’s controlling personality, or his intention to create a very specific image of his artistic self, but also in his interest in interior design, an interest that was in general en vogue during the Symbolist period. Like most Belgian Symbolists, Khnopff was a supporter of the Arts and Crafts movement, which ‘had as a primary goal the Symbolist objective of reinvigoration of the individual, specifically the modern individual in the city, by providing a private aesthetic environment’.14 Moreover, the members of Les XX, to which Khnopff belonged, supported Neo-Impressionist and Symbolist theory as well as social art (Khnopff was one of the directors of the Section d’Art of the Maison du Peuple), so ‘their involvement with decorative art was almost inevitable’.15

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The style of the villa Even though Khnopff chose to work with Pelseneer, two letters preserved in the Musée Horta in Brussels show that Khnopff ’s brother Georges had contacted Victor Horta regarding the principles of a house-studio, on which the architect was working around the same time.16 Khnopff did not follow his brother’s proposition, however; probably since his views differed from Horta’s designs. In this respect, Khnopff ’s choice of Pelseneer for his project seemed more reasonable: the young architect was a follower of Art Nouveau, which he reoriented in conformity with new rational requirements.17 Khnopff ’s housestudio presented almost an aesthetic reaction to Belgian Art Nouveau resembling more the Stoclet Palace built by architect of Josef Hoffmann in Brussels. In fact, in his 1901 review of Hoffmann’s works for The Studio, Khnopff called Art Nouveau (‘the new art’, ‘the modern style’) an ‘interesting experiment’ that ‘has produced many things which are quite inadmissible’.18 Hoffmann’s Secession buildings and galleries had already impressed Khnopff in 1898 while he was exhibiting in Vienna.19 Khnopff praised the Secessionist style and Viennese architects, and it is clear that he derived inspiration for his villa from their works, as can be seen in the geometrical severity of the white facades with their predominantly straight lines (Figure 11.9). This architectural preference was not coincidental on Khnopff ’s part, however: he must have been aware of the concepts of straight and curved lines, which had certain aesthetic and philosophical meaning for the intellectuals of that time. As Honoré de Balzac put it: the Curve is the law of the material worlds and the Straight line that of the Spiritual worlds; one is the theory of finite creations, the other the theory of the infinite. Man, who alone in this world has a knowledge of the Infinite, can alone know the straight line … A fondness for the creations of the curve would seem to be in certain men an indication of the impurity of their nature … ; and the love of great souls for the straight lines seems to show in them an intuition of heaven. Between these two lines there is a gulf fixed like that between the finite and the infinite, between matter and spirit, between man and the idea, between motion and the object moved, between the creature and God.20

Unsurprisingly, as with his idealistic and spiritual art, Khnopff preferred the supposed intellectualism and morality of straight lines to the sensuality and materiality of curved lines, as well as unelaborate ornamentation to heavy embellishment, both in the exterior and interior of the villa. Indeed, the facades were decorated only with black lines, golden circles and black monograms

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on a golden background, thus exhibiting Khnopff ’s typical ‘cold yet noble aestheticism’.21 The building exuded such an ‘air of reserve, almost of disdain’ that passers-by sometimes mistook the austere exterior of the villa for one of a chapel or a vault. Even after such a laconic exterior, visitors were still struck by the austerity of the interior. Khnopff emphasizes in his article about his house that, from the beginning, the dwelling was to be as uninviting as possible.22 This statement borders on self-criticism, but not for Khnopff: for him, as for an aesthete, the comfort and cosiness of his residence are not of a high priority. As a silent butler opened the black entry door, which had the words ‘Passé-Futur’ inscribed above it, visitors were let into a small antechamber with white walls of polished stucco (Figure 11.1). Already this little room showed the touch of the artist, as it was inhabited by several emblems of Khnopff ’s private symbolism. These were symbols important for the artist and his art: a small laurel tree in the corner, a stuffed Indian peacock, a small Greek statue on a blue column and the artist’s work Blanc, Noir et Or (1901) with the word ‘Soi’ (self) inscribed above it.23 Unsurprisingly, when describing the Villa Khnopff, Dumont-Wilden recalls the main character of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel A Rebours, Jean Floressas des Esseintes, who decorated his house with rare, strange and beautiful things to create an artificial environment to correspond with his overly sophisticated and idiosyncratic personality.24 Dumont-Wilden calls Khnopff ‘a methodical des Esseintes, much more enthralled with harmonious order than singularity’.25 Indeed, though similar in its eclecticism and idiosyncrasy, Khnopff ’s residence, in its austerity, did not share the opulence of des Esseintes’s dwelling. The artist preferred to follow ‘the new fashion of lighter open spaces’ with less heavy upholstery and drapes.26 Dumont-Wilden’s comparison is even more detailed: he dubs Khnopff ‘a des Esseintes who has not undergone the romantic education and has never attended the attic at Auteuil.’27 The biographer thus contrasts the Villa Khnopff not only with des Esseintes’s residence, but also with the Goncourts’s aestheticized house. Dumont-Wilden most likely implies the stylistic differences between the two dwellings, since in other aspects they shared certain similarities. The villa in Brussels represented a projection of the life of the artist into a lived environment and explored the potential of interior rearrangements of art objects and artificial settings to transform a domestic home into ‘an “artistic” retreat’ just like the house at Auteuil.28 While the Goncourts decorated their residence according to their main ‘collecting, literary, and aesthetic interests in French eighteenth-century art, Gavarni and Romantic literature, near and

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far-eastern “objets d’art”’, Khnopff, however, fashioned his villa in a completely different manner.29 He combined his preference for the laconic Secessionist architecture with his fascination with pre-Raphaelite art and the classical past. This was visible already in the antechamber as well as the long white corridor than ran through the villa (Figure 11.2). Among other paintings hanging on its walls was Khnopff ’s work Arum Lily (1895), which depicted his sister Marguerite with the strong features of a Pre-Raphaelite beauty, along with a portrait of Elisabeth of Austria executed by Khnopff. A copy of a Greek sculpture of Hope from the Munich Glyptothek was placed on a windowsill, corresponding with the motto written on the walls: ‘Everything comes to him who waits.’ The corridor continued the idea of steadily increasing immersion into the personality of the artist and his private symbols, his art and sources of his inspiration that had been introduced in the antechamber. In fact, Khnopff ’s collection of his own works and of the works of others constituted an important part of his villa. The corridor was lit with high windows glazed with Tiffany glass to control the light and reduce the distractions of the nature, just as many windows around the house were heavily draped to minimize outside noise and reduce the distractions of the city. Thus, like des Esseintes, Khnopff strived to maintain an artificial atmosphere in his dwelling. After all, he shared his reclusiveness and eccentricity with the fictional aesthete of Huysmans’s novel. The confrontation between the carefully constructed atmosphere of the villa and the outside world was noticed by visitors: Dumont-Wilden called the house ‘the temple of Self, […] the fortress of individuality in constant defence against the World and Life’ and Laillet described it as ‘the expression of his [Khnopff ’s] own personality which he [Khnopff] has built for his own satisfaction; it is his immutable “Self ” which he has raised in defiance of a troubled and changing world’.30 Khnopff ’s dwelling conveyed an impression that the artist fenced himself, his artistic ‘Soi’, from the world in this perpetual defence. This paralleled the Symbolist exploration of interiority. For many representatives of this artistic movement, which was dominated by the idea of a dangerous and sick (sometimes even dead) city with its unpleasant streets full of madness, nightmares and sufferings, the insides of urban dwellings and their interiors represented a shelter, gradually becoming ‘new symbols for the mental and spiritual interiority’ that they sought.31 Thus, Khnopff reinvented his bourgeois interiors within Symbolist theory; and by suggesting the interiority ‘through indirect discourse’, Symbolist created ‘an enduring zone of aesthetic experience distanced from the banality and materialism of society’.32

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The Symbolist world Khnopff explored the Symbolist interiority not only in his villa, but also in his works; many of these in fact resemble the designs of the artist’s house, even when they were created before the dwelling. The similarities between the décors of the villa and Khnopff ’s visionary works were also noticed by the visitors of the house: during his visit, Waldschmidt was astonished by how precisely the backdrop of Arum Lily captured the interiors, as if someone had taken a photograph of the artist’s studio.33 Francine-Claire Legrand points out that evidence of Khnopff ’s long-term and careful planning of his dwelling could be found in I Lock My Door Upon Myself (1891), as some of the objects present in the background of the painting resemble the interiors of the artist’s residence. Compared to French Symbolism, Belgian Symbolism is much more deeply rooted in a sense of place and determined by recurrent ‘spatial paradigms for the inner world’.34 Thus, the interiors in Arum Lily and I Lock My Door Upon Myself provide a key to decipher contemplative states of the Pre-Raphaelite women they surround just as the designs of the Villa Khnopff offered a peek into the inner world of the artist and his art. In addition to the fact that the main characters resemble the type of beauty favoured by the Brotherhood, Arum Lily and I Lock My Door Upon Myself share similarities in their spatial organization. I Lock My Door Upon Myself depicts the woman ‘locked’ in a room with a view down a narrow alleyway right behind her. This corresponds with the text of Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘Who Shall Deliver Me?’ (1876), from which Khnopff borrowed a line for the title of his painting: All others are outside myself, I lock my door and bar them out, The turmoil, tedium, gad-about. I lock my door upon myself, And start self-purged upon the race That all must run! Death runs apace.35

According to the poem, the woman in Khnopff ’s work locks herself up to avoid the turmoil of life and, inevitably, death. There is, therefore, a certain monumentality in her posture, which can also be found in Arum Lily. The latter in addition provides a glimpse of a vast indoor space behind a cloth decorated with patterns of peacock feathers, which also ‘locks’ the woman in a very narrow space separating her from the rest of the interior. Both women turning their

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backs on the open spaces suggest their willing presence in ‘locked’ interiors and thus represent the Symbolist angst of public spaces and life of the city streets. While the indoor space in the background of Arum Lily looks rather austere and empty, the space in front of the curtain, where the woman exists, is filled with various objects just like the interior of I Lock My Door upon Myself. Both Khnopff ’s works characterize the Symbolist search for interiority to convey the interior human world though arrangements of meaningful objects within domestic spaces. This Symbolist enrichment of domestic spaces with prized items created ‘a new metaphor for personal interiorisation’.36 Interestingly, analogous metaphors for personal interiorization are implemented in the photographs of Khnopff ’s residence. First, there are similarities between the interior designs depicted in the paintings and those presented at the villa; similarities noticed by visitors, and which also made their way into photographs of the dwelling. The construction crowned by the head of Hypnos in I Lock My Door upon Myself closely resembles the altar to Hypnos in Khnopff ’s studio (Figure 11.3, on the right). The foreground of Arum Lily, separated from the rest of the painting by the curtain, parallels the interiors of the villa which were divided by numerous curtains. The roundels at the top left of in I Lock My Door Upon Myself and the top right of Arum Lily recall the roundels around Khnopff ’s dwelling. The same prized objects thus ‘inhabit’ both Khnopff ’s house and art – flowers, often lilies, the head of Hypnos. In fact, Arum Lily becomes itself a cherished item when placed on the wall of the villa’s corridor (Figure 11.2 to the left) and I Lock My Door Upon Myself becomes one when put in the most visible place in the studio (Figure 11.3 behind Des Caresses). At the same time, the photographs seem to have borrowed the portrayal of spatial arrangements from the artist’s works. Like Arum Lily and I Lock My Door upon Myself, photographic depictions provide several vistas that unveil a suite of rooms and that contrast the defined (‘locked’) spaces in the foreground with the suggestions of open spaces in the background. The enfilade of rooms separated by draperies is visible in the photographic depiction of the corridor at the Villa Khnopff (Figure 11.4). The photograph of the studio (Figure 11.4) demonstrates the open area of the creative centre of the house parted by a curtain from a mysterious space in the background with a head of Hypnos on the pedestal under an elaborate hanging lamp. Both this layout of the Villa Khnopff and its metaphors for personal interiorization represent more than a structure – they represent ‘spiritual structure’. It seems that the plan of the dwelling is dictated by emotions, as it is supposed to make the viewers experience certain feelings, make them feel certain sentiments.

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One of the prized items that could be found in the villa, and a recurrent emblem of Khnopff ’s private symbolism from Arum Lily and I Lock My Door upon Myself, is the lily. Serving as a marker of nature indoors, lilies also possess a variety of meanings for the artist. First of all, they have strong links to his ideal women, whether it was his sister in Arum Lily or his idealized visions. In I Lock My Door upon Myself three lilies at various stages of openness represent different stages of the life of the woman depicted in the picture. Second, lilies symbolize the realm of the imaginary, where all Khnopff ’s Pre-Raphaelite beauties exist. Third, because of their intoxicating smell, lilies could invite one to the world of dreams and Hypnos, the god of sleep. Both in Arum Lily and I Lock My Door upon Myself lilies are combined with a head of Hypnos. This was another important symbol in Khnopff ’s art and life: not only did the artist explore it in painting, drawing and sculpture, but he also had two altars dedicated to this ancient deity erected in his studio (Figures 11.3–11.4). The state of sleep in fact represents the ultimate interiorization, as it completely eliminates the outside world of a physical existence. As Victor Remouchamps noted in the January issue of 1894 La Réveil: ‘We have everything within us. The mind is an ocean of sensations, a universe of visions; but it is necessary to know how to explore it.’37 This contributed to the interest in the inner world. Khnopff ’s altars to Hypnos corresponded with the Symbolist exploration of interiority, which granted to indoor spaces ‘a sense of spirituality that had formerly been reserved for churches, temples, and sites in unspoiled nature’, thus making them, together with the objects they contained, ‘the new signifiers of another world’.38 This paralleled the nineteenth-century idea of the artistic genius and the cult of the artist as a thinker, a priest of art, rather than a craftsman: ‘[t]he artist became a kind of prophet who was through his imagination and intuition in touch with a deeper, truer reality than ordinary’ people.39 In this spirit, Balzac described characteristics of a modern artist in his 1854 Traité de la vie élégante: ‘his idleness is work and his work is rest; […] he is not subjected to any laws: he imposes them. Whether he keeps himself busy doing nothing, or meditates on a masterpiece without looking busy; […] he is always the expression of a great thought and dominates society.’40 As if taking Balzac’s advice, Khnopff described his creative process as follows: ‘I always meditate on my subjects for a long before attempting to translate them [into visual form].’41 The sacred nature of artists’s work was especially promoted by the French novelist and esotericist Joséphin Péladan, who addressed artists with the following call: ‘Artist, you are a priest: Art is the great mystery and, if your effort results in a masterpiece, a ray of divinity will descend as on an altar.’42 Khnopff

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not only exhibited at Péladan’s Salon Rose+Croix in Paris, but also to a certain extent followed his dogmas. Indeed, Khnopff elevated his art and artistic process almost to a status of a cult. This was visible in several altars scattered around the house that were dedicated to the most important emblems in Khnopff ’s art. On the ground floor, opposite the staircase leading to the upper floors, was a blue niche containing the first altar one came across in the house. It was a shrine to Imagination and comprised Khnopff ’s sculpture of a winged mask executed in ivory, enamel and bronze on a thin blue column (Figure 11.5).43 The installation was placed against Japanese embroidery with a crane on a blue background. The winged mask was a recurrent emblem of the artist’s private symbolism: it existed in several versions, including a sculpture in a polychrome plaster, and appeared in Secret-Reflect (1902). Another altar, dedicated to Hypnos (Figure 11.3 on the right), was placed in the most important part of the house – the artist’s studio upstairs. It comprised a copy of the bronze head of Hypnos from the British Museum, which dates back to the fourth century BC, a Byzantine medallion, a case of clear glass, gilded bronze sphinxes and a base of Tiffany glass.44 The motto ‘On n’a que soi’ inscribed behind the altar again invited the exploration of the inner world of the self. There were in fact two studios separated by draperies, and the second, smaller, altar to Hypnos (Figure 11.4). One studio was for completed works, and the other one held works in progress and numerous costume and set designs for the Théâtre de la Monnaie. Only the main studio, with finished works, was ever photographed (Figures 11.3, 11.4, 11.6), although Maria Biermé and later Laillet provided evocations of the second studio in contemporary periodicals.45

The rooms of the villa Khnopff ’s main studio represents a so-called show studio – the term originally coined by Elizabeth W. Champney in her 1885 article ‘The Summer Haunts of American Artists’s.46 It was used to receive visitors, to demonstrate the ‘success, artistic autonomy and genius, to exhibit and possibly to sell […] work, while simultaneously keeping […] working process and failures carefully hidden from view’ in the working studio.47 Indeed, it is possible that Khnopff was rather reluctant to receive visitors into the working studio rather than the main one. This represents the hiding making/showing creation paradigm.48 This involves artists employing existing topoi to show certain aspects of their practice (in the first instance those related to the ideas of artistic genius and artistic autonomy),

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while meticulously hiding other from the eyes of the public (the idea of an artist as an craftsman, hard labour, routine, failures).49 In the case of Khnopff ’s studio, the photographs perfectly capture this paradigm: all the pictures are framed and placed on easels in full view, with the best known works, Des caresses (1896) and I Lock My Door upon Myself, greet the visitors immediately upon their entrance (Figure 11.3). In fact, they are located very low down so as to be seen from the stairs leading into the studio. This intention to exhibit, almost to show off, art was partly determined by the new social position of the artist. This had developed since the late eighteenth century, when the place of artists shifted significantly. Due to political and economic changes, artists lost their traditional sources of commissions from royal courts or the church. They therefore had to look for new clients for their art. As a result, they started to promote their works to the developing class of the bourgeoisie. At the same time, the emergence of art criticism had an increasing impact on public taste. Together with the idea of creative genius this resulted in a cult of the artist, which corresponded with the sacred nature of art emphasized by Péladan. Following the contemporary fashion, therefore, Khnopff created a cult of his own enigmatic artistic personality with his villa representing ‘the votive chapel of complicated personal aesthetics’.50 This meticulously created self was developed in the artist’s biography as well as supported by eyewitness accounts in popular press together with the photographic evocations of his dwelling. In tandem with the cult of the artist, the idea of the studio as his working space started to obtain certain mysterious connotations. For instance, within his private mythology of his artistic self, Khnopff was said to practice certain rituals in his ‘votive chapel’. Very much in the spirit of Balzac’s description, the artist was believed to stand in a golden circle inscribed on the mosaic floor of his studio underneath another circle on the ceiling with the constellation of Libra in the middle to find his inspiration.51 The effect of such meditation was enhanced by a whisper of a shallow fountain with rose petals floating on its surface placed in the studio.52 The description by Sparklet (Albert Flament) of ‘the studio, whose wooden floors are graced with a large golden circle, where the artist comes to place – excuse the modesty! – the painting that he has chosen to honour’ demonstrates that the artist treated this practice almost with a spiritual piety.53 During visits to his house by guests, Khnopff supported and developed the idea of himself as a mysterious artistic genius whose inspiration came straight from above. As the Viennese painter Josef Engelhart reported, to enter the main studio, the visitors had to participate in a special ritual.54 The artist would rush into his working space, while a butler would lower a thick bar in front of guests

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preventing them from entering the studio. It would be lifted up after some time, and the visitors would proceed inside greeted by the artist, his works resting on easels and the altar to Hypnos placed exactly opposite the entrance. According to Khnopff, this ritual was necessary for the guests to collect themselves before meeting with his art. Thus, like the Goncourt house, the Villa Khnopff received an additional extension to it aesthetics in the form of performances interacting with the interior spaces of the dwelling. At the same time, this description resembles the experience of the surgeon and zoologist Richard Owen and the journalist Theodor Hook during their visit to the studio of William Turner in 1830s. Upon their entrance they were directed into an absolutely dark room, where they spent some time so that their eyes would adjust to the complete darkness.55 According to Turner, this ritual was necessary for the visitors to experience the nuances of the colours with which he was working to the full.56 Besides Khnopff ’s finished works and the altar to Hypnos, the main studio also held works by other artists, including a bronze Amazon (1897) by Franz von Stuck (Figure 11.6), who might have introduced the concept of a studio altar to Khnopff. In any case, Khnopff was definitely aware of the Künstleraltars in Stuck’s villa in Munich. There are obvious resemblances between Khnopff ’s altar to Hypnos and Stuck’s shrine to Eros placed in his studio, as both artists ‘combined elements from the classical past in a pseudo-sacral ensemble and gave it a new, associative meaning’.57 While both Khnopff and Stuck strived to isolate themselves from the banality and materialism of the world, their ‘shelters’ shared certain similarities. Khnopff most likely derived his inspiration for his dwelling from the Villa Stuck. This could be seen even in small details, such as the constellation of Libra in Khnopff ’s studio possibly referencing the zodiac in Stuck’s Music Room. On a broader scale, Khnopff chose the Secessionist style over the Art Nouveau style popular in Brussels, just as Stuck dismissed Munich-defining Jugendstil and instead created his house in the style of a neoRenaissance palazzo. Also probably through Stuck, Khnopff got acquainted with Max Klinger’s idea of Raumkunst, which addressed painted interiors, the artistic unity of the space, and its relation to the works of art within the interior to create an overall aesthetic and spiritual effect. It also corresponded with the Wagnerian concept of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a unity of arts and a total work of art. Like Wagner, Klinger strived for unity, but even in physical spaces: ‘Nowadays we have the art of architecture and the art of sculpture, painting and the so-called reproductive arts, and further decorative art and crafts. What we are missing is a collective expression of our philosophy of life. We have arts, but no Art.’58 Thus,

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the luxurious Villa Khnopff, which embodied this ‘collective expression’ of the artist’s philosophy and was dedicated to merging life with art, could be called a Palace of Art. The Villa Khnopff embodied Wagnerian ideas almost with precision, as it brought together architecture, interior designs, sculpture, painting and even music, which all worked collectively to create a unified aesthetic experience. This was most evident in the Blue Room located above the studio (Figure 11.7). It contained works by other artists, including a drawing by Burne-Jones of a woman’s head personally inscribed to Khnopff and an engraving made after Gustave Moreau’s David.59 The names of these two artists, who influenced Khnopff ’s art and whom he held in a very high regard, were set in two gold rings on the wall separated by a small cast of Lord Leighton’s sculpture The Sluggard (1886). Khnopff ’s portrait of his sister Marguerite (1887), who was his favourite model and his muse, crowned an altar dedicated to her. This familial shrine included a vase with flowers and a tennis racquet that referenced Khnopff ’s first widely acknowledged work Memories (1889), which featured Marguerite in seven different poses. Khnopff would retire to this blue sanctuary at the end of the day to dream, contemplate and plan new works, surrounded by paintings and sculptures, while listening to the music coming through a large window from the studio downstairs.60 This granted him a wholesome aesthetic experience of the Gesamtkunstwerk and absolute interiorization. Like in other rooms of the house, the furnishing was rather sparse (represented only by a blue divan and a table in this case).61 This signifies that the artist preferred the theatricality and realization of his artistic vision to his own comfort. In this respect his villa again resembles the artificiality of des Esseintes’s dwelling, but is distinct from it in the austerity of its interiors. Similarly, almost no one could recognize a space on the ground floor, also called the White Room, as the dining room, since guests were always struck by its severity and coldness (Figure 11.8).62 The doorway was curtained with pale blue satin, the windows were glazed with blue and gold glass, which again demonstrated the artist’s intention to create a synthetic interior. The walls were decorated with Khnopff ’s most well-known works and a reproduction of Edward Burne-Jones’s Wheel of Fortune. The overall impression of the room was ‘vague and uneasy’, chairs did not ‘invite repose’, and a small table was ‘just big enough to hold a vase’.63 The miniature dining table would be brought in for every meal and quickly taken away afterwards. This again represents how the functionality and cosiness of the living space was sacrificed for the sake of decadent perfectionism and aesthetic unity, or as contemporaries put it, ‘the struggle between the ideal and the

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material’.64 At the same, by sacrificing the domestic the artist reaches his main goal – to bedazzle the public, as pointed out by Sparklet: ‘Oh, the interior of Khnopff ’s [house], its antechamber with white slabs, with white walls, its white corridor, its dining room – one and the same, with a table for two – and its little sofa as the only seating, triumph of glossiness; glazed sugar halls to amaze the snobs of la Cambre!’65

Conclusion: The remembrance of the villa Photographs of the villa play an important role in recreating its bedazzling appearance. They are of particular interest since they provide visual depictions of the dwelling and perhaps less subjective descriptions than written testimonials. They gave the artist, who carefully controlled their creation, an opportunity to construct, preserve and project not only his vision of his house, but also of his artistic identity. At the same time, these photographs demonstrate the documentary capacity of the medium, which Khnopff considered to be one of its most important and valuable qualities. This creates an interesting reciprocity between his life and photographs and a certain ambiguity of these photographic representations. On the one hand, they provide a supposedly objective view of the villa; on the other, they exude an air of constructed reality. None of the descriptions of the Villa Khnopff, whether textual or photographic, document the villa entirely however, as they exclude the sleeping quarters of the dwelling. Khnopff ’s avoidance of showing more utilitarian spaces in his house, whether it was common for that time or not, represents his meticulous control over his art as well as his personal image. The evocations address only several areas of the house chosen by the artist. Khnopff ’s avoidance of showing more utilitarian spaces in his house, whether it was common for that time or not, again represents ‘the struggle between the ideal and the material’ and his meticulous control over his art as well as his personal image. At the same time, the absence of photographs or even depictions of these spaces within the house might demonstrate their relative unimportance.66 Just like the villa, the photographs focus on Khnopff ’s collection of art, the emblems of his private symbolism and his pursuit of aesthetic pleasures even in small everyday domestic things. Villa Khnopff reflected the artist’s search for the ideal, which in Khnopff ’s art was based on some ideas of the Symbolist movement, the artist’s highly intellectual and refined style, his isolated and reserved personality defined by strong individualism and his interest for spiritualism and mysticism. In his

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house, just like in his art, Khnopff carefully and meticulously constructed the space ruled by the idealism. Since Khnopff ’s views were quite common among Symbolists and even anticipated certain aspects of the early-twentieth-century art, his house could be considered one of many examples of the artists’s dwellings of that time. At the same time, Khnopff ’s idealism was determined by his personal aesthetics and in his villa he managed to explore how closely art and life could come together, leaving a perfect architectural specimen of his art, which, even after being destroyed, grants an opportunity to decipher the personality and œuvre of Fernand Khnopff after over a century.

Bibliography Balzac, Honoré de, La comédie humaine of Honoré de Balzac. Seraphita. The Alkahest, translated Katharine Prescott Wormeley (London: The Athenaeum Press, 1896). Balzac, Honoré de, Traité de la vie élégante et théorie de la démarche (Paris: Michalon, 1908). Becker, Edwin, Franz von Stuck, 1863 – 1928. Eros and Pathos (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam: Waanders Uitgevers, Zwolle, 1995). Biermé, Maria, ‘Fernand Khnopff ’, La Belgique Artistique et Littéraire, July–September (1907): 96–113. Blühm, Andreas, et al., The Colour of Sculpture (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam: Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, Waanders, Zwolle, 1996). De Taeye, Edmond-Louis, Les Artistes Belges Contemporains (Brussels: Castaigne, 1894–1897). Dessy, Clément, ‘La maison d’artiste en portrait, manifeste et sanctuaire. L’exemple de Fernand Khnopff ’. In The Aesthetics of Matter: Modernism, Avant-garde and Material Exchange, European Avant-garde and Modernism Studies, Vol. 3 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013): 235–48. Draguet, Michel, Khnopff ou l’ambigu poétique (Ghent: Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon, 1995). Dumont-Wilden, Louis, Fernand Khnopff (Brussels: G. van Oest & Cie, 1907). Engelhart, Josef, Ein Wiener Maler erzählt … Mein Leben und meine Modelle (Wilhelm Andermann: Vienna, 1943). Esner, Rachel, Sandra Kisters, and Ann-Sophie Lehmann, eds., Hiding Making – Showing Creation. The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013). Goddard, Stephen H., (ed.), Les XX and the Belgian Avant-garde: Prints, Drawings, and Books ca. 1890 (Kansas: Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, 1992). Hirsh, Sharon L., Symbolism and Modern Urban Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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Howe, Jeffery W., The Symbolist Art of Fernand Khnopff (Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1979, 1982). Khnopff, Fernand, ‘Josef Hoffmann – Architect and Decorator’, The Studio 22 (1901): 261 –6. Khnopff, Fernand, ‘Mein Haus’, Die Zeit 37–38, no. 483 (2 December 1904): 9. Lacoste, Henri, ‘L’atelier Fernand Khnopff ’, L’Emulation (Brussels) 47 (1927): 39–40. Laillet, Hélène, ‘The Home of an Artist: M. Fernand Khnopff ’s Villa at Brussels’, The Studio LVII, no. 237 (1912): 201–7. Legrand, Francine-Claire, ‘Fernand Khnopff – Perfect Symbolist’, translated by Angus Malcolm, Apollo, 85 (1967): 278 –87. Les Trois Moustiquaires [LouisDumont-Wilden, George Garnir, Lon Souguenet], LAtelier de Fernand Khnopff,avenue des Courses, Pourquoi pas?, December 15 (1910), 545–6. Rossetti, Christina, The Poetic Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti (London: Macmillan and co., 1906). Silva, Jean da, Le Salon de la Rose+Croix: 1892-1897 (Paris: Syros-Alternatives, 1991). Simpson, Juliet, ‘Edmond de Goncourt’s Décors – Towards the Symbolist Maison d’art’, Romance Studies, 29, no. 1 (2011): 1–18. Sparklet [Albert Flament], ‘Le Trottoir roulant’, 1mardi Dé cembre’ L’écho de Paris, 6 December 1903, 1. Turner, Frank M., European Intellectual History: From Rousseau to Nietzsche (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014). Waldschmidt, Wolfram, ‘Das Heim eines Symbolisten’, Dekorative Kunst XIV (1906): 158–66.

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The bedroom as metonymic portrait: ekphrasis, Balzac and Impressionism in the nineteenth century Jill Owen

In both literature and visual art, the bedroom is not simply a metaphor, but also a form of metonymy through which the author exteriorizes the physical and psychological interior to reveal the personality of its inhabitant. Indeed, using Susan Sidlauskas’s definitions of interiority and the mise-ensemble1 [putting together]2 by which the inhabitant and the space are inseparable entities in a representational work, be it art or literature, it is in this way that the personalities of Honoré de Balzac’s abundance of characters are often reflected in the décor of their bedrooms. The intimate space, as it is revealed to the reader, effectively becomes a portrait of the inhabitant. Balzac’s descriptions of these interiors – also later represented by the Impressionists – then possess an ekphrastic quality, becoming what Philippe Hamon has called ‘images à lire’3 [images to read]. These ekphrases function on physical and psychological levels, since the bedroom can act as an extension of the physical body of the character as well as of his/her mind. The narrator and the reader observe a transference of the interior of the character to the objects within his/her room.4 Thus, Balzac’s static descriptions, set apart from the action of the narrative, become more dynamic pieces of the story that can justify or foreshadow a character’s actions. A brief study of Balzac’s ekphrases in Eugénie Grandet and Illusions perdues, as well as a comparison of these verbal spaces to Manet and Degas’s visual Impressionist representations of the bedroom will allow for further elaboration of the relationship between a character or figure and its domestic space within literature and art of nineteenthcentury France. To begin, it will be useful to touch on the relationship between the literary and the visual by expanding the classical definition of ekphrasis. Since the time

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of Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield in the Illiad, critics have agreed that, traditionally, ekphrasis is the poetic description of a visual work of art. However, it is clear that verbal descriptions of bedrooms also fit within Claus Clüver’s much broader definition of ekphrasis – that is, a ‘verbal representation of a real or fictitious text composed in a non-verbal sign system’.5 In the same way that an ekphrastic poem relies on the poet’s interpretation of a work of art, so the literary description of a bedroom – this ‘real or fictitious text composed in a non-verbal sign system’ – relies on the guidance of the narrator in order to interpret the meaning of the objects contained within it.6 Thus, prose descriptions of spaces can also be considered ekphrastic because they interpret the visual from the author’s point of view in much the same way as an ekphrastic poem interprets a visual work of art from the poet’s perspective. Indeed, as Susan Harrow discusses in her introduction to the French Studies special issue, New Ekphrastic Poetics,7 the latest research on ‘contemporary ekphrastics’ further broadens the definition of ekphrasis to include any texts influenced by or commenting on visual culture. Ekphrastic texts imply a twofold translation whereby the writer must adapt the visual to the verbal, then the reader must re-adapt the verbal to the visual.8 Writers of the bedroom also engage in this adaptation from visual to verbal, back to visual through the reader’s perception of the space. To take this interplay between verbal and visual one step further, whether represented visually or within a text, the bedroom’s décor and personal objects exteriorize the inhabitant’s thoughts, opinions, desires and the like through their representation, which means that the once private space becomes necessarily public for the reader. Especially in Balzac’s novels, bedrooms reveal the characteristics of his characters in a more powerful manner than that of the narration of their actions. The bedroom becomes a literary device, the ekphrasis of which represents a mode of communication between the author and the reader, as well as between the characters.9 Like the impressionist genre paintings of the 1870s, the Balzacian bedrooms of the 1830s and 1840s are marked by the subjectivity of the narrator who seeks to paint a portrait of the inhabitant. A brief tour of some of Balzac’s interior spaces will demonstrate these principles of ekphrasis within the novel. First, Monsieur Grandet’s hidden room, which is an extension of his bedroom, in the 1833 novel Eugénie Grandet reveals the private and greedy nature of its inhabitant. Grandet’s own family does not even recognize these qualities of their patriarch at the beginning of the novel; although it seems apparent to everyone else in small-town Saumur where the life of the Grandet family displays itself frequently through representations of the Grandet home. Through the description of his private space, the narrator

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reveals the true character of M Grandet to the reader who approaches his room. Our first encounter with this space is seen through the eyes of Charles, Grandet’s nephew, who has come to Saumur from Paris after the death of his father, Grandet’s brother. While M Grandet leads Charles to his guest room in the Grandet house, the narrator stops Charles – and the reader – in front of three different doors: Arrivé sur le premier palier, il aperçut trois portes peintes en rouge étrusque et sans chambranles, des portes perdues dans la muraille poudreuse et garnies de bandes en fer boulonnées, apparentes, terminées en façon de flammes comme l’était à chaque bout la longue entrée de la serrure. Celle de ces portes qui se trouvait en haut de l’escalier et qui donnait entrée dans la pièce située au-dessus de la cuisine, était évidemment murée. [Having arrived on the first landing, he saw three doors painted Etruscan red and without frames, doors lost in the powdery wall and embellished with iron bands screwed on, visible, finished in the style of flames as was the long keyhole at each end. Of these doors, the one which was located at the top of the stairs and allowed entry into the room situated above the kitchen, was obviously walled up.]10

The lack of door frames could mean two things: from a practical perspective, that the Grandet house is old and it never had or lost its frames over time; and from a more metaphorical perspective, that the house and its inhabitants have something to hide behind their ‘portes perdues’ [lost doors]. The mention of a lock and a walled door reinforce the sense of secrecy within the house. These few brief lines contain all the information that Charles could deduce from the exterior of the rooms. However, the narrator continues the description, leaving Charles for the moment and directing the reader to discover what is behind this last walled door: ‘On n’y pénétrait en effet que par la chambre de Grandet, à qui cette pièce servait de cabinet […] Personne, pas même madame Grandet, n’avait la permission d’y venir, le bonhomme voulait y rester seul comme un alchimiste à son fourneau’ [‘In fact, one only entered there through the bedroom of Grandet, for whom this room served as an office […] No one, not even Madame Grandet, had permission to come there; the chap wanted to remain there alone like an alchemist at his kiln’].11 This characterization of M Grandet as an alchemist demonstrates his avarice and the desire to literally and metaphorically transform everything into gold, even his relationship with his daughter who we learn has been raised with the same tendency to hoarding the money her father gives her every year on her birthday. This is precisely how M Grandet lives his life, with his cabinet serving as an oversized lockbox for his fortune.

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In effect, M Grandet has everything he needs in his little room to feed his vice during the hours when everyone sleeps: ‘Là, sans doute, quand Nanon ronflait à ébranler les planchers, que le chien-loup veillait et bâillait dans la cour, quand madame et mademoiselle Grandet étaient bien endormies, venait le vieux tonnelier choyer, caresser, couver, cuver, cercler son or’ [‘When Nanon snored so as to shake the floorboards, when the wolf-dog kept watch and yawned in the courtyard, when Madame and Mademoiselle Grandet were fast asleep, there, without a doubt, came the old cooper to pet, caress, coddle, ferment, bind his gold’].12 He takes care of his gold by petting it, caressing it and incubating it like an animal, or rather like a rare plant that he might make grow to produce more gold. The private quality of Grandet’s room, or laboratory, is further highlighted by ‘Les murs […] épais, les contrevents discrets’ [‘the walls […] thick, the shutters discreet’] and the fact that ‘“Lui [Grandet] seul avait la clef de ce laboratoire, où, dit-on, il consultait des plans sur lesquels ses arbres à fruits étaient désignés et où il chiffrait ses produits à un provin, à une bourrée près”’ [‘Only he (Grandet) had the key to this laboratory, where, they say, he consulted maps on which his fruit trees were designated and where he numbered his products to a vine, almost to a twig’].13 Just as Balzac does with nearly every other description of a personal space in his world,14 he compares this private interior to that of another character in the novel in order to underscore certain traits of both characters. In Eugénie Grandet, the narrator continues his tour of the Grandet house by juxtaposing M Grandet’s closed laboratory and the women’s bedrooms of the house. The narrator writes: ‘Madame Grandet avait une chambre contiguë à celle d’Eugénie, chez qui l’on entrait par une porte vitrée. La chambre du maître était séparée de celle de sa femme par une cloison, et du mystérieux cabinet par un gros mur’ [‘Madame Grandet had a bedroom adjacent to that of Eugénie, into which one entered by a glass door. The master’s bedroom was separated from that of his wife by a partition, and from the mysterious study by a thick wall’].15 Here, we notice the accessibility of the women’s rooms which are ‘adjacent’ (‘contiguës’), while the father’s room is separated ‘by a partition’ (‘par une cloison’) and his study ‘by a thick wall’ (‘par un gros mur’). Moreover, the ‘glazed or glass door’ (‘porte vitrée’) of Eugénie’s bedroom, which represents her own transparence and innocence – the fact that she has nothing to hide – contrasts neatly with the walled door of M Grandet’s study, signifying his desire to hide his wealth from the world, even from his family. The rooms thus represent the personalities of their inhabitants on physical and psychological levels. These character traits – especially M Grandet’s avarice juxtaposed with Eugénie’s openness and

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innocence – make up the central conflict in the story between the father and daughter which is already foreshadowed by these descriptions of their physical surroundings. Another example of Balzac’s metonymic bedrooms appears in the novel Illusions perdues. In this text, written as a roman feuilleton between 1837 and 1843, the bedroom of old Séchard, David’s father, reveals the old printer’s reticence near the beginning of the novel to change with the culture and technology of new printing techniques in the nineteenth century. The space of the house itself is hybrid, caught between the past and the present, which the décor demonstrates. On the one hand, the description of Séchard’s bedroom reveals his attachment to tradition and the printers that came before him: ‘La chambre à coucher […] était tendue de ces vieilles tapisseries que l’on voit en province de long des maisons au jour de la Fête-Dieu’ [‘The bedroom […] was covered with these old tapestries that one sees in the provinces along the houses on the day of the Feast of Corpus Christi’].16 In this space, we find ‘a large poster bed with curtains’ (‘un grand lit à colonnes garni de rideaux’), ‘two antiquated armchairs, two chairs of walnut and tapestry, an old secretary desk, and a decorative clock on the fireplace’ (‘deux fauteuils vermoulus, deux chaises en bois de noyer et en tapisserie, un vieux secrétaire, et sur la cheminée un cartel’).17 These are the traditional furnishings of an older house which belonged to Séchard’s predecessor and master, Monsieur Rouzeau.18 The bedroom is marked by the patriarchal tradition of the printers who lived there since the beginning of the printing shop. On the other hand, the décor of the bedroom directly contrasts that of the salon, which Séchard’s wife was in the process of updating and redecorating before her death. As opposed to the more somber ‘teintes brunes’ [‘shades of brown’] of the bedroom, the salon was painted in blue and white. In lieu of the ‘vieilles tapisseries’ [old tapestries] the salon is illustrated in color with ‘scènes orientales’ [‘Eastern scenes’], and possesses two windows, without curtains, from which one can admire the everchanging outside world. Because the influence of Eastern style was very much in fashion during the nineteenth century, this salon represents the present moment, the contemporary world which separates itself from the traditional world of old Séchard and his printing predecessors. However, his wife had died in the middle of her redecoration and old Séchard, seeing no practical use in finishing the job, abandoned the improvements.19 The reader thus discovers the image of a halfupdated room, but abandoned because Séchard understood the utility neither in modernization nor in the embellishment of the house. In this way, the literary bedroom – as well as the house, the salon and all other inhabitable space – is not merely a ‘[m]étaphore de l’intériorité, du cerveau, de la mémoire’ [‘metaphor

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of interiority, of the brain, of the memory’]20 as Michelle Perrot has written, but also a metonymic representation of the characters’s thought processes and actions. As with Grandet and his daughter, Séchard’s home reveals from the very beginning the central conflict between him and his son David and foreshadows the trouble Lucien will face as he encounters the printing industry of a new age. Through the description of M Grandet’s and old Séchard’s intimate spaces, the reader discovers the personality of each character and the reactions they will have to each narrative’s central conflict. By interpreting the construction and the décor of these spaces, we arrive at an understanding of M Grandet’s avarice and old Séchard’s intransigence. Understanding Balzac’s ekphrases can help the reader understand the psychological motivations behind the characters’s actions because the visual representation of space carries with it an overall portrait, or impression, of the character. It is not coincidental, then, that Impressionist painters also figure into this study of the bedroom as portrait. As indicated previously in our discussion on ekphrasis, the representation of bedrooms in the plastic arts functions quite differently from verbal representations of these spaces within the novel. There has been much written on ekphrasis and the differences between text and image.21 Without delving too deeply into the theory, I only seek to use Balzac, Manet and Degas to highlight one particular difference in the visual versus verbal representations of space: that is, while bedrooms in the novel can clarify a character’s nature, the bedroom represented by the Impressionists is filled with ambiguity as the artist represents this space outside of a narrative context. This ambiguity posed a problem for Impressionists like Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas whose paintings of contemporary Parisian life did not portray clearly historical or mythological events as did their Academic counterparts. Manet and Degas, like many other Impressionists of the time, met with much criticism from these Academic painters and critics who wanted to be able to clearly ‘read’ their works. Although the large corpus of scholarship on Olympia (1863–5) (Plate 14) and Interior (1868–9) (Plate 15) already situates the paintings within the evolution of modern art and comments on their ambiguity, I would like to add to this discussion by briefly exploring the controversy provoked by these two paintings, due in large part to their obvious lack of a clear narrative situated within a bedroom  – a close, interior space which provokes the voyeuristic, almost intrusive gaze of the viewer. Ultimately, both Manet and Degas utilize the space of the bedroom to break with traditional views of Academic art and to paint figures whose stories are only as embellished as the spaces they inhabit. Nothing of the figures’s psychological interiority can safely be surmised other

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than this initial impression; and the viewer must interpret the character of the inhabitant based solely on what surrounds him/her. In Manet’s Olympia, the scandal of the nude figure on the bed – assumed by many critics to be a prostitute – was certainly seen as shocking at the time because of the techniques Manet used to paint her. Critics characterized her body as bruised and even corpse-like in its rendering that broke with Academic Salon painting tradition.22 But more than that, if the bedroom is an ‘animate entity’, as Susan Sidlauskas proposes,23 Olympia’s scandal is supported and intensified by the space she inhabits. A closer, physiognomic reading of this interior setting illustrates the feeling of voyeurism and sexual scandal seen within the painting without providing further evidence of Olympia’s profession. The gold edging between the green curtains on the right and what seems to be the brown-toned patterned wallpaper on the left divides the painting almost in half and runs down the wall, drawing the gaze towards Olympia’s left hand, draped across the widely discussed24 hidden marker of her sexuality. The curtains to the left have been pulled back to reveal the wallpaper behind them, which also reflects that the curtains have been metaphorically pulled back for the viewer. They act as an invitation into the bedroom, to gaze upon Olympia whose contradictorily uninviting gaze stares back at the viewer. The fact that these green curtains line either side of the painting emphasizes the closed nature of the space into which we peer. This makes the painting somewhat more scandalous than Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) because the nude figures on the grass are out in nature, willingly revealing themselves to anyone’s gaze, especially that of the viewer. In contrast, the closed space of Olympia transforms the viewer into a voyeur because it is her private room into which we are looking. The colours Manet uses further emphasize Olympia’s sexual nature, which contributes to the scandal she provokes. The white linens on the bed contrast starkly with the wallpaper and curtains of the sombre boudoir and seem to wash out even further Olympia’s pale complexion. The folds in her sheets and pillows mirror the shading on her body, which many critics at the Salon of 1865 characterized as dirt or the bruising of a corpse. With regard to her body, Olympia is almost as white and pure as her bedding – and might have been had Manet used tradition glazes – but not quite, perhaps an allusion to her sexual nature, yet another sign of her possible profession as a prostitute, though it cannot be clearly determined from what surrounds her. In contrast to Degas’s Interior, there is no source of light in the room – the curtains only serve as decorations that cover parts of the wall instead of a window – so determining a time of day for Olympia is nearly impossible, which only adds to its resistance to a specific narrative.

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Between the closed space and the artistic techniques Manet uses in Olympia, the artist all but forces the viewer into a voyeuristic role, made that much more uncomfortable by the lack of clear narrative information in the painting. Following in Manet’s metaphorical footsteps, Degas further demonstrates the importance of the closed space within his aptly titled Interior (1868–9). Identified by critics as ‘the most important painting of an interior of the second half of the nineteenth century’,25 Interior separates itself from Degas’s other paintings as one of the only ones in which the private, domestic setting is given such a prominent role. In contrast to other Degas paintings in which setting is also important, like The Cotton Office (1873) or even his series of women bathers, for example, Interior leaves much to the imagination because the artist does not give any context through which we can situate his figures. Many critics and art historians have adopted the secondary title Le Viol, but this title was never used by Degas who only ever referred to the painting as ‘mon tableau de genre’.26 As a genre painting, Interior clearly depicts the notions of interiority and modernity inherent in nineteenth-century artistic representations without providing more specific information of its own figures. In this painting, two figures, one male and one female, occupy either side of the room, almost framing the space. The sewing box sits nearly at the centre of the canvas on the table, where the light from the lamp becomes a point of focus in the painting. In contrast to Olympia with no apparent light source, it is by the lamp that a time of day might be assigned to Interior, which could take place in the evening or at night. While there has been no general critical agreement on exactly who the figures are,27 the lamp light also seems to lend support to the figures’s identities as lovers who meet under the cover of night so as not to reveal their escapades. Of course the corset on the floor and the man’s coat draped over the bed, as well as the woman’s exposed back also seem to indicate that there is a sexual intimacy between the man and woman. That the scene takes place within a closed bedroom further highlights this possible hidden affair. No matter the situation between the two figures – whether they are married or having an affair – once again, the viewer has the feeling of a voyeur, interrupting an intimate scene within the private space depicted. It is easy to see, then, that Degas’s problematic lack of narrative is only exacerbated by the setting. In Interior, the ambiguity of the figures extends itself and is supported by the ambiguity of the bedroom. The bed is only large enough for one person, indicating it cannot belong to both the man and the woman in the painting. The man stands by the door, as if he is just entering or about to leave the room, perhaps indicating he is the intruder here. However, a man’s

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hat, which sits on the dresser across the room, and the map on the wall above it could be evidence to support this man – or a man – as habitually part of the space. In the same way that critics and art historians have commented on the gendered space of Olympia, they have also discussed in detail the gendered ambiguity of the bedroom in Interior. At a first glance, the flowered wallpaper, the rug, the sewing kit on the table, and the woman’s corset on the floor could signify a singularly feminine space. However, as mentioned above, the ‘male’ objects about the room – the hat, the map, the man’s coat – seem to penetrate into the room, making it unclear who in fact owns the space. This penetration – including the sexual connotations it evokes – could mean that the scene is either violent or conjugal. One critic, Felix Krämer, attempts to clarify this ambiguity by referring to it as many critics have by its alternate title, Le Viol [The Rape]. With this qualification of the painting as a rape scene, Krämer underscores his own view of the painting as ‘a representation of sexual violence’28 and even reads a dark line at the foot of the bed as ‘a small trail of blood’29 that, if in fact painted thus, would definitely contribute to the argument of violence. However, a closer look at the painting reveals that this ‘trail’ is likely only a fold in the sheets. It is doubtful that Degas would have painted such a graphic detail in an otherwise ambiguous work that he himself never titled Le Viol. Krämer’s assumptions represent those of many critics in wishing to assign a clear narrative to the intimate interior in order to accurately ‘read’ the scene. Despite their ambiguity, the bedrooms represented in Manet and Degas’s works reflect what we have seen in Balzac’s novels: that ‘reading’ the objects within a bedroom can lead the reader/viewer to conclusions about the people who inhabit these spaces. In both sets of examples, it is evident that the representation of a bedroom functions differently than a simple metaphor. It is, of course, a metaphor of interiority in the nineteenth century; but more than that, it is a metonymic portrait of the inhabitant, the ekphrasis of which functions on an intermedial level because the space is what Éric Méchoulan calls an ‘être-entre’ [‘a being in-between’]: ‘ce qui produit de la présence, des valeurs comparées entre les personnes ou les objets mis en présence, ainsi que des différences matérielles ou idéelles entre ces personnes ou ces objets présentés’ [‘that which produces presence, comparable values between the people or the present objects, as well as the material or conceptual differences between these people or these presented objects’].30 The description of the bedroom thus offers levels of comparison between characters and objects; and this ekphrasis acts as a medium in order to link the visual and the literary, the description and the action, and ultimately the narrator/artist, the character, and the reader/viewer of a work.

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Bibliography Armstrong, Carol, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Balzac, Honoré de, Illusions perdues [1837] (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). Balzac, Honoré de, Eugénie Grandet [1833] (Paris: Livre de poche, 2013). Bilman, Emily, Modern Ekphrasis (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013). Downey, Georgina, ed., Domestic Interiors: Representing Homes from the Victorians to the Moderns (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Hamon, Philippe, Imageries (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 2001). Harrow, Susan, ‘New Ekphrastic Poetics.’ French Studies: A Quarterly Review 64, no. 3 (2010): 255–64. Holsinger, Bruce, ‘Lollard Ekphrasis: Situated Aesthetics and Literary History’. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. 35, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 67–90. Krämer, Felix, ‘Mon tableau de genre’: Degas’s “Le Viol” and Gavarni’s “Lorette”’. The Burlington Magazine 149, no. 1250 (2007): 323–5. Lipton, Eunice, Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Lipton, Eunice, Alias Olympia: A Woman’s Search for Manet’s Notorious Model and Her Own Desire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGrawHill, 1964). Méchoulan, Éric. ‘Intermédialités: Le temps des illusions perdues’. Intermédialité 1 (Printemps 2003): 9–27. Perrot, Michelle, Histoire de chambres (Paris: La Librairie du XIXe Siècle, Éditions du Seuil, 2009). Schaefer, Christina, and Stefanie Rentsch, ‘Ekphrasis. Anmerkungen zur Begriffsbestimmung in der neueren Forschung.’ Zeitschrift für französische Sprache une Literatur 114, no. 2 (2004): 132–65. Sidlauskas, Susan, ‘Resisting Narrative: The Problem of Edgar Degas’s Interior’. The Art Bulletin 75, no. 4 (December 1993): 671–96. Sidlauskas, Susan, Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Zumthor, Paul. ‘Lieux et espaces au moyen âge’. Dalhousie French Studies 30 (Printemps 1995): 3–10.

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Private rooms of the Cubist still life Anna Jozefacka

Through the works of Pierre Bonnard, Edgar Degas, Gustave Caillebotte, Paul Cézanne, Édouard Manet, Édouard Vuillard, Henri Matisse and many others, art historians have scrutinized the attention given by nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century artists to the private interior as a powerful manifestation and site of modernity. The inventors of Cubism – Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, working in close artistic collaboration from 1907 to 1914 – have not only been left unconsidered by this scholarship, but even singled out as examples of modernist artists whose art operates outside of the domestic realm.1 This chapter presents the private interior as reference for the Cubist compositions, particularly favouring the nineteenth-century private interior. In this chapter, such an interior acts as the filter through which Picasso and Braque considered new modes of pictorial space and conditions of display. The chapter builds on the analysis of Picasso’s Cubism by T. J. Clark, a rare recognition of the private interior in its nineteenth-century iteration as an important underpinning of Cubism’s pictorial space. *** In 1909, Hamilton Easter Field (1873–1922), American artist, critic, collector, educator and champion of modern art in the United States, visited Picasso’s studio on one of his periodic trips to Paris, where the American had lived and studied art in the 1890s. Field’s visit resulted in a spontaneous commission for eleven decorative panels for his own home library in Brooklyn Heights.2 The formal commission and details about the room allocated for the project came the following year in a letter written by Field from his Brooklyn family home at 106 Columbia Heights.3 Within this illustrated text Field provided Picasso the details about the small space – a narrow, rectangular 7 by 3 metre room, lined with bookshelves reaching about a third of the walls’s height, accessible

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from three sides, and illuminated by a window. He also assured Picasso of complete freedom regarding colour scheme, technique and subject matter of the decorations. The sizes and formats of the panels were distinctive and underscored the site specificity of the project and Field’s vision for the paintings to occupy all available wall space. Considering the small size of the room in relation to the large scale and number of paintings, the Field library would have provided an immersive art experience. What Field envisioned for his Brooklyn dwelling was a Renaissance studiolo, an intimate interior intended for meditative up-close contemplation of art. Although clear and informative, Field left some basic details unmentioned. Would the panels be hung or adhered directly to the walls? Would they receive any kind of framing? Or could the installation follow a more informal route with the paintings hung unframed (naked) on unornamented walls? What is evident from the letter, however, is that Field perceived the project as a strictly decorative commission. In the letter, Field uses terminology frequently applied to art intended to be integrated into interior schemes regardless of medium and support. He refers to Picasso’s future compositions for the library as panneaux (panels) and décorations (decorations), avoiding altogether terms reserved for easel painting such as peintures (paintings) tableaux (easel paintings) or toiles (canvases).4 In Field’s reading, or rather misreading, of the radical mode of painting that he came face to face with for the very first time in Picasso’s studio in 1909, Cubism was abstract art and thus required control over architectural space to reach its full visual impact. In November 1919, ten years after his visit to Picasso’s studio, Field recalled in one of his regular columns for The Brooklyn Daily Eagle his conversation with the Cubist painter: I went to [Picasso] and told him that it seems to me that he made a mistake in merely painting easel pictures, for abstract art needed an entire room or better a house in which all furniture should be subordinated to the decorations which would cover the flat walls … I could not offer him a house to decorate, but I had a library with no pieces of furniture except the bookshelves and a few low chairs.5

Mistaking Cubist painting for a form of abstract art (when in fact it remained grounded in tangible reality), Field imagined the proposed panels as aesthetically suitable for a private domestic setting and, possibly, superior to the ornamentation and décor commonly found in the interiors of bourgeois homes both in Europe and the United States, including his own. Field’s views might have been coloured by the debates carried out in the French art press on the

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relation between interior décor and fine art painting during the 1890s, a decade dominated by symbolist championing of decorative painting over easel painting, and the years of Field’s residency in Paris. Members of the symbolist Nabis group, the artists Vuillard and Maurice Denis, for example, pursued a modernization of the decorative painting tradition by incorporating it into the domestic setting of the bourgeois home. Their impact was such that during the first decade of the twentieth century, modern decorative painting was an established feature of the annual Salon d’Automne and regularly reviewed by art critics. The 1910 Salon, for example, featured decorative panels by Bonnard, Denis and Matisse painted for private commissions contracted in years prior. The in situ unveilings of such undertakings were publicized cultural events.6 Judging from the tone of Field’s letter, Picasso had accepted the commission on the spot, mulling it over before Field’s official letter reached him. But Picasso would struggle with the panels for at least three years, and, receiving no further incentive from Field, in the end the project remained unrealized. Picasso started and stopped the work, left some canvases unfinished and destroyed or repainted others.7 Some panels are known only from period photographs and citations in Picasso’s correspondence. Together, they span the different phases of Picasso and Braque’s Cubism, their style ranging from a monochromatic and highly faceted analytic format to the more colourful and representational synthetic stage of the artists’s collaborative pictorial explorations. The subjects of the panels were also typical for Picasso and Braque’s Cubism: still lifes, standing or reclining figures, and possibly landscapes. For example, Nude Woman, 1910 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) and Pipe Rack and Still Life on a Table, 1911 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) are among the identified panels (Plates 16 and 17).8 While the Field commission offers a germane start point for exploring Cubist painting’s relationship with the private interior, it has received limited consideration from scholars. Treating the decorative commission as an anomaly, if not a misstep, in Picasso’s Cubist oeuvre, art historians have focused on the reasons as to why the artist accepted it, and kept at it. The most consistently cited explanation is Picasso’s rivalry with Matisse. In early 1909 Matisse received a commission for two decorative panels from the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin, which he completed the following year and publicly unveiled in Paris at the 1910 Salon d’Automne.9 Field made his request to Picasso sometime that very year. Without discarding the validity of the Picasso vs Matisse interpretation as an important motivator for Picasso, I would like to argue that the Field library decoration can also be conceived as the project that triggered

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questions for Picasso and Braque regarding the effect of any particular site on their revolutionary pictorial language and space. What new avenues of enquiry did the Field commission prompt for the artists engaged by the tension between fine art and decoration? What light does the interior, its architectural volume as well as its décor conventions and practices shed on the character of Cubist paintings? When considered from these lines of enquiry, the Field commission becomes central to Cubism. Issues of decorative arts and interior décor practices in relation to the Cubist approach to image making are deemed essential to its formal development and continuous evolution. Crucial for understanding Cubist formal principles of image construction has been gauging the influence of the nineteenth-century decorative arts theories and aesthetics, specifically their emphasis on the simplification of visual vocabulary.10 The formal elements that govern decorative design, among them flatness of support, deliberate simplification, stress on pattern and repetition of a single motif, each employed to avoid traditional forms of pictorial illusionism, are all found in Cubist pictures. Similarly essential have been the connections between Picasso and Braque’s experiments with the techniques of the interior decorating industry thanks to Braque’s practical knowledge of stencilling, faux bois and marbling techniques, skills which the artist obtained while an apprentice at a peintre-décorateur studio. Scholars identify the inclusion of these methods, frequently referred to as nonfine art ‘tricks’, as an additional strategy on the part of the two Cubists ‘to affirm the flatness of the picture plane’.11 The incorporation of these well-established forms of illusionism and mimicry practiced outside of the fine art painting tradition to render the architectural space helped Picasso and Braque unravel the traditional approach to constructing pictorial space. Mixing sand, cinders, saw dust, metal filings and coffee grounds with paint, skills that Braque acquired from the same source, allowed the painters to reinforce the physical materiality or thingliness of their pictures. Their incorporation of the commercial house paint Ripolin and fragments of real wallpaper and oilcloth into works executed on canvas and paper, the practice they initiated in 1912, furthered those pursuits in the most radical and direct fashion, to the point of challenging the definition of fine art. Focusing on the private interior and its décor conventions, what also reverberates through Picasso and Braque’s pictorial works is the deeply ingrained, but increasingly scrutinized nineteenth-century practice of devising the interior as a site of accumulated experience through complex ensembles of varied objects, whose challenging legibility is echoed in Cubist composition. The

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nineteenth-century interior as a concept had been the marriage of two practices, an interior design approach tailored to the custom of collecting.12 Both broadly defined, became intertwined in the most complex way, operating in response to an evolving historicism and ever-expanding commodity market centred on stylistic mimicry of the past through the means of modern technology. Comfort with complexity and a practice of devising idiosyncratic personal ensembles took root at all levels of society. Supporting theories offered justification and encouragement for new ways of creating links between the collected objects displayed. Over time, a growing sense of anxiety and discomfort with the prevailing lack of legibility of these interiors to guests unfamiliar with the hosts’s idiosyncratic narrative led to a steady critique of the cluttered and eclectic bourgeois home, and a succession of interior design reform movements. In one sense, Cubism’s devoted exploration of density in form and composition appears to embrace, rather than reject, these enduring, yet increasingly unfashionable complex living environments. The private interior and its ideal form – the urban bourgeois home – had constituted the centre of the modern dwelling since the early nineteenth century; its relevance was universal and its impact profound. Conceived to meet the domestic needs of the modern private individual, it demarcated and explained one’s private existence. With its origins in the society of post-revolutionary France, the domestic interior gradually grew in importance and significance. As a consequence, an industry arose to reproduce the conditions necessary for the facilitation of self-reflection and interiority or worldliness through collected and displayed objects. Walter Benjamin identified the private bourgeois interior as the embodiment of nineteenth-century modernity. Fascinated with the complexity, cultural implications and the aura of the interior created during its reign in the nineteenth century, Benjamin researched it extensively in the 1930s at a time when the nineteenth-century private interior confronted its most severe criticism and was roundly declared obsolete by Modernist architects and designers.13 The Modern Movement revolutionized the relationship between the interior and exterior by dismantling the barrier between, and shifted architecture’s focus from the individual to the collective. Throughout the nineteenth century, the proper articulation of private space became the topic of theories and formulas put forth by artists, critics, architects and designers, professionals and amateurs, men and women. Interior design was to communicate the owners’s current status, individuality, sophistication and ambitions, as well as act out their fantasies, and record past experiences. Design formulas and norms, couched in the nineteenth-century preoccupation with the

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historical past filtered through a modern lens, were circulated and continuously revised, accounting for and contributing to the changing shift in popular taste and aesthetics to fulfil these diverse requirements. Advice books and manuals provided guidelines for homeowners across the economic spectrum on how to compose an interior ensemble from disparate period objects in a single space, objects which often conflicted in form-sense and linear character. Such texts treated objects broadly and placed equal weight on art, decorative arts, utilitarian objects, mass-produced trinkets, authentic antiques and modern copies. All was available to the nineteenth-century collector-decorator, all deemed appropriate, so long as one adhered to the prescriptions for unified ensembles. The preoccupation with the private interior in the nineteenth century created, in a typically modern contradictory fashion, the demand for knowledge of how others organized, decorated and equipped their dwellings as well as the desire to publicly circulate the images of one’s own living space. The private home was as much a part of the public debate as any other issue preoccupying modern society. This uneasy, yet close, relationship between public and private, society and individual reverberates through the art of the period. As observed by many art historians, nineteenth-century artists turned with increased frequency to the modern private interior by painting and photographing it with or without its inhabitants. The period witnessed an attempt to make over the interior as a painting genre, as in the canvases of Walter Gay, the American painter active in France, who chose the refined historical room as his sole subject.14 The work of the French photographer Paul Cardon, active under the pseudonym Jules Dornac, offers an informative case study for present discussion. As researched and analysed by Pamela J. Warner, from 1880 to 1910, Dornac photographed one hundred and seventy French male celebrities, ranging from politicians to actors, posing for the camera in their home studies. Marketed under the series title, Nos contemporains chez eux, Dornac’s photographic portraits circulated as illustrations in magazines and newspapers, as well as collectible cards.15 Year after year, Dornac gained access to the homes of France’s male intellectual elite, among them the author and playwright Ludovic Halévy (1834–1908), and photographed them in their private rooms surrounded by the objects they had accumulated and arranged over a lengthy period of time in support of their professional and private pursuits (Figure 13.1). The photo portrays Halévy reading in a comfortable armchair, legs outstretched, an open book on his lap. The viewer needs time to scrutinize the black and white photograph to take in the room’s extended inventory. Variously sized mirrors and paintings in ornate three-dimensional frames scale the two visible walls. The side table and cabinet,

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Figure 13.1  Jules Dornac, ‘Ludovic Halévy’, Nos Contemporains chez aux, 1880– 1917, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

partially obscured by the seated Halévy, have their top surfaces covered by objects – books, framed photographs and a small bronze statue of a boy or cupid. The writer sits near and parallel to a large central fireplace, its mantelpiece crowded with overlapping objects. Among these, the candles, vases, framed miniature and sculpture bust of a girl are the most easily identifiable. The large mirror above the fireplace multiplies some of these objects while bringing into view artworks arranged on the opposite wall. As pointed out by Warner, during the time of their creation, Dornac’s photographs were interpreted as psychological portraits of the homeowner in which the interior and not the human figure channelled the information. A contemporaneous text of 1883 by Jules Hoche, Les Parisiens chez eux verbalizes this widely recognized role of the interior: ‘The minute study of the interior, the examination of the objects laying around, the humble science of domestic details combine to mathematically explain the Parisian through the milieu in which he’s plunged, to decode his character, his tastes, his passions in all the things with which he surrounds himself.’16 Dornac was not the only one who embraced this form of psychological portrait via the means of the interior.

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Contemporaneous painted male portraiture produced congruous results.17 Werner points out, however, that when viewed collectively Dornac’s photographic series brings to light, cultural and economic norms of the bourgeois class rather than underscoring the individuality of sitters. According to Warner, the so-called infinite variations of personal style and individuality seem to be effaced by broader class-based patterns and habits of interior decoration. The same types of rooms, the same types of objects arranged in much the same way, the same poses, the same clothing and often hairstyles: all reveal a degree of social, professional and class conformity in tension with the underlying desire for individuation in the literature.18

What Warner also detects in Dornac’s photographs is the anxiety on the part of the photographer (and possibly his sitters) to document the continuously changing variety of modern life, this character reflected most vividly in the interiors themselves. Traditionally interpreted as a modernist art practice leaping into the future ahead of its time, i.e. the avant-garde, some scholars focus on the importance of the past for Picasso and Braque’s Cubism. In 2014, the art historian T. J. Clark, whose scholarship is grounded in the nineteenth century, interpreted Cubism as ‘a style directed to a present understood primarily in relation to a past … Its true power derives not from its modernity, that is, if we mean by this a reaching toward an otherness ahead of time, but for its profound belonging to a modernity of that was passing away: the long modernity of the nineteenth century’.19 For Clark, the modernity of the nineteenth century was located in the interior, the room, which Clark connects with both the internal universe and the world at large. According to Clark, echoing Benjamin, ‘the world, for the bourgeois, is a room. Rooms, interiors, furnishings, covers, curlicues are the “individual” made flesh. And no style besides Cubism has ever dwelt so profoundly in these few square feet, this little space of possession and manipulation. The room was its premise – its model of beauty and subjectivity.’20 What is channelled in the nineteenth-century interior and what one savours in Picasso and Braque’s Cubist still lifes and figure compositions is a comfort with complexity and a willingness to indulge in a non-hierarchical exploration of the modern material world. Such qualities are embodied by the all-over format of Cubist composition and their challenging legibility, in which references to architectural space and objects contained within form the unifying composition. Picasso and Braque situated their still-lives and figure compositions within the daily existence of modern life filtered through their own experiences and

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surrounding personal everyday objects. They selected the quotidian of the modern world drawn from both private and public spheres, from friends’s and patrons’s homes, flea markets, streets, café-bars, concert halls or department stores to be the focus of the visual investigations of modernity carried out in their home studios, sites where daily life and art making overlapped, where outside world infiltrated one’s privacy. The depiction of recognizable shapes linked to real objects in a physical setting and the inclusion of non-fine art material such as newsprint, wallpaper or calling cards underscore Cubism’s tactile and optical pursuit of realism and undermine claims of abstraction. In the pictorial tradition, the situating of a still life or human figure within a particular interior has been indicated with varying degrees of discernibility from only the slightest hint, to fuller articulations offering clear distinctions between still life or figure foreground and interior background. Picasso and Braque collapsed the distinction by bringing background planes forward, and through axial tipping, intersecting the space of table objects or that of the human body. Negative space, reconceived as projecting planes, was rendered with equal levels of corporeality to the irregular volumes of still life objects or human figure, resulting in what Braque would term manual or tactile space. This approach echoes the nineteenth century’s democratic attitude towards object display, giving equal weight to antique copies and originals, fragments and wholes. This should not be read as a visual equivalence, but a shared mentality, a wilfulness towards complexity and pleasure taken in temporal play and the punning substitution of copy for original, part for whole. What Picasso and Braque still lifes and figure compositions convey is the sense of inhabited modern interior space. Studies of Picasso and Braque’s Cubist oeuvre explore issues of pictorial space, but rarely identify it as the interior space. In his 1990 essay ‘Braque and the Space of Still Life’, John Golding delves into Braque’s lifelong preoccupation with space.21 By Braque’s designation Cubism was research into space and by Golding’s account Braque was the inventor of the pictorial space in which Cubist objects could live and breathe.22 Portraying Braque as the painter of still lifes, Golding explains that the genre allowed Braque ‘to control and explore space that surround and separate the objects’, reiterating that the true object of Braque’s art were spatial sensations. Golding, however, avoids characterizing Braque’s space more concretely. When Braque himself identified the nature of his pictorial investigations he made the distinction between the interior and exterior space explicit: ‘In a still life space is tactile, even manual, while the space of a landscape is a visual space.’23 In differentiating, Braque identifies ‘a still life space’ with a room. Braque’s affinity with the room-space becomes evident in the

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artist’s paintings from the late 1930s in which the interiors became more legible than in compositions dating to the Cubist era. Golding describes these paintings of interiors as ‘extended still lifes’.24 Following the nineteenth-century tradition, but from an early-twentiethcentury bohemian outlook, Picasso and Braque embraced collecting and decorating, conducting both with a nonconformist and anti-bourgeois attitude that manifested little concern for propriety, fashion or good taste. Picasso’s passion for collecting all sorts of things was legendary. His indiscriminate taste and infinite capacity for all type of things led the art historian Elizabeth Cowling to identify him as ‘a great accumulator of objects’. His ‘appetite for things curious and vulgar was voracious’.25 His various studios have been consistently described with the adjectives chaotic and cluttered. Braque was also an uninhibited, if less, gluttonous collector. Period photographs of Picasso and Braque’s respective home-studios from the Cubist years present the artists in their bohemian cabinets de travail, rooms where their personal habits and professional pursuits overlapped, interiors disclosing the breadth of their collecting range within a liberal, all-over approach to display (Figure 13.2). Both studio-apartments are recognized by scholars as deeply reflective of those intellectual and aesthetic explorations feeding Cubism, but also offering insights into the artists’s personal daily lives. Picasso’s close friends, living companions and biographers have commented on Picasso’s hands-on involvement with furnishing and decorating his home, and the pleasure taken from the never-ending additive process. The description and analysis by Roland Penrose of how Picasso furnished the boulevard de Clichy studio-apartment, to which he moved with his companion Fernande Olivier in September 1909, and which Field probably visited not long after the move in date, is especially vivid: The furniture Picasso acquired was a mixture of any styles that took his fancy. Among heavy oak pieces with simple lines, an immense Louis-Philippe mahogany settee upholstered in plush, and a grand piano, there stood a delicate piece in Italian marquetry, a present from his father. To Picasso, ‘good taste’ and interior decoration are obstacles to his imagination, a stagnation of the spirit. On the walls of the dinning-room he had hung as a joke chromo-lithographs framed in straw which Fernande says were more worthy of a concierge’s parlour. In the studio … the usual splendid disorder was quickly established. It was added to daily by a collection of chosen pieces of junk such as glass, picked out because of the intensity of its blue, curiously shaped bottles, princely pieces of glass, fragments of old tapestries from Aubusson or Beauvais, musical instruments, old gilded frames, and above all, an ever-growing collection of African sculpture.26

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Figure 13.2  Anonymous, Pablo Picasso on a sofa in his studio at 11 boulevard de Clichy, Paris, December 1910. Gelatin silver print, 14.7 × 11.6 cm Musée national Picasso, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY; Repro-photo: Jean-Gilles Berizzi.

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Missing from Penrose’s description of Picasso’s bohemian approach to his bourgeois abode, but picked up on by Clark, are the governing qualities of the nineteenth-century interior, namely proximity, tactility and coziness.27 Turning to the Cubist still life collage, Clark identified it as the ‘triumph’ [Clark’s emphasis] of room-space: not for nothing was its key material wallpaper. The space it conjured was now literally put together from the little bourgeois belongings: his wallpaper, his sheet music, his matchbox, his daughter’s scrapbook, his friends’s or dealers’s calling cards. Never was painting more in love with nearness, touch, familiarity, the world on a table’.28 The relevance of the nineteenth-century interior for the Cubist pictures can be detected not only in the celebrity portraits of Dornac but also in the unpeopled photographs of Parisian households by Atget. The latter were executed just as Dornac series ended its run. In 1909–10 Atget turned his attention away from old Paris towards the modern city. To do so, he selected the domestic interior as one of the subjects through which to explore the diverse manifestations of modernity. The album Intérieurs parisiens début du XXe siècle: artistiques, pittoresques & bourgeois grouped together sixty photographs of domestic interiors with accompanying captions identifying the gender and occupation of the inhabitants, as well as the street location of their dwellings (Figure 13.3). In her in-depth research and analysis, Molly Nesbit compared Atget’s photographs to those of Picasso’s papier collés.29 For Nesbit, both artists drew out the uncanny qualities of modernity through their picture making techniques: Atget’s document of a hat maker’s bedroom used a wide lens on the corner with the bed and the mantelpiece; neither was given center stage. The angle of the shot, together with the angle of the lens, tipped the corner up; from this space objects flowed down, a hat poked up from a candelabra; there was a workbasket bursting with artificial leaves and flowers, a clinched lampshade, patterns of marble, fringe, stipe, and cornice. Then there was the white circular face of the clock. As the document decomposed these details disengaged from life of the modiste. Collage used scissors for the same purpose. Talking similar elements, wallpaper, a sheet music, a piece of the daily paper, literally clipped them from their usual place, and brought them to another plane where wine glasses projected a hyperspace of lines and guitars appeared in a botched silhouette. Then there was the white sound hole of the guitar. Both kinds of work took modernity as best they could but neither could dispel its strangeness. That strangeness was inherent. It fell to the technical sign to put it in perspective.30

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Figure 13.3  Eugène Atget, ‘No. 1 Petit Intérieur d’un artiste dramatique Monsieur R. Rue Vivan’, Intérieurs parisiens début du XXe siècle. Artistique pittoresque & bourgeois, 1909–10, Musée Carnavalet, Paris. © Eugène Atget/Musée Carnavalet/ Roger-Viollet.

The form and content of Atget’s interior photographs and Picasso and Braque’s still-life paintings and collages draw the viewer’s attention to the heterogeneity of the domestic ensemble and its idiosyncratic, visually rich qualities. Although (temporarily) emptied of their inhabitants, these are representations of lived-in modern rooms, gradually filled with material possessions of the residents who furnish their quarters with utilitarian, sentimental and pleasing objects arranged to meet as well as defy social norms and conventions. These are not ideal (model)

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rooms composed by following the guidelines of interior design or decorative arts manuals, but products of a modernity in constant flux operating on different temporal wavelengths, responding to and recording social and individual needs and aspirations of its residents, dated and up-to-date at the same time. In this respect, Nesbit’s evaluation of Atget’s photographs resonates with Picasso and Braque’s Cubist still lifes: The hearths, beds, tables, and the rest repeated themselves, comparisons were inevitable but there were too many competing objects of attention, too many small things like clocks, the Venus de Milo, potted plants, and sprays of thistles, too many styles. In practice the stylistic sameness amounted to stylistic confusion. Louis and Henris and modern extractions gathered together among an equally diverse range of terra cottas, heart-shaped pillows, salad baskets, and drapes. The modern room was a melting pot. Atget would sometimes move the furniture around to suit his picture better, but he did not try to edit the cacophony down.31

Many decipherable elements within the Cubist still life or figure compositions belong to the world of the interior, its ornamentation, decoration, as well as inhabitation, whether rendered illusionistically or schematically. They discourage the reading of these paintings one-dimensionally as still lifes, nudes or portraits. The artists conveyed the interior synecdochically, offering mostly fragments of the setting without imposing any hierarchy into the composition.32 According to Pepe Karmel, the role of these signs ‘[was] … to give a generalized sense of the concrete reality of the setting’.33 Fragments of plaster wall mouldings, wooded panelling, ornamental textiles, window draperies, tasselled curtain robes, wallpapers, stencilled letters, furniture, mirrors and picture frames disintegrate and coalesce in Cubist compositions. They are rendered with the same weight as snippets of pitchers, cups, glasses, bottles, cigarettes, smoking pipes, pages of newspapers and books, playing cards, sheet music and musical instruments. Together these elements constitute the interior of Cubist space perceived in real architectural terms. They allude to the room’s size, layout, accessibility and illumination. Like the everyday spaces referenced, the Cubist room-space, to use Clark’s term, is in constant flux, rearranged, shifted, redecorated and otherwise altered by the daily additions and subtractions of its assorted inventory. In Pipe Rack and Still Life on a Table, a Field commission panel intended as an overdoor and possibly left unfinished, an interior comes into focus through a series of fragmented three-dimensional objects. Of these, the most fully rendered are the three geometricized smoking pipes on the left-hand side of the composition. The two parallel straight diagonal lines that dissect them represent a string on

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Figure 13.4  Pablo Picasso, Guitar and Wine Glass, 1912, collage and charcoal on board, 47.9 x 37.5 cm, Bequest of Marion Koogler McNay, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX. © McNay Art Museum/ Art Resource, NY.

which the pipes are suspended. The trompe l’oeil nail or pin positioned at the right end of the string affixes the makeshift pipe rack to the wall or the painting’s canvas support. The network of lines and shaded planes occupying the centre of the painting hint at profiles of furniture, including a drop leaf table. The white

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handle of a cup, spout of a coffeepot, profile of a water carafe, folded sheets of paper with scribbled notes, book covers (among them La Dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils) and a long narrow cylindrical shape that could be read as a walking stick or roll of paper together provide the viewer with multiple reveals of a cavalierly arranged interior. Further scrutiny of these signs of the interior demarcates not only its physical spatial dimension but also the interior’s cultural and social aspects. In their typically open-ended approach, Picasso and Braque blurred the identity markers: feminine or masculine, bourgeois or working class, private or public, primary or secondary. Recent research on the wallpapers used by Picasso and Braque in their Cubist collages by Cowling uncovered the nuances behind the referenced interiors.34 Picasso was an aficionado of old-fashioned nineteenthcentury wallpapers (Figure 13.4). He scavenged outmoded interiors for pieces of obsolete wallpapers imitating historical textiles as well as referencing different periods: Baroque, Rococo, the French Empire; each design style carrying genre and class associations. In Cowling’s close scrutiny of Picasso and Braque’s wallpaper choices, period interior design manuals, and sale samples of wallpaper manufacturers she reveals Picasso’s preferences for wallpapers once appropriate for an earlier generation’s bourgeois study, family dining room, lady’s boudoir or servant’s quarters. While Picasso embraced patterned wall coverings referencing the primary spaces of the domestic interior, Braque displayed a penchant for the ‘styleless’ and thus, in Cowling’s interpretation, timeless design of the wood grain. The fragments of faux-bois wallpapers that made it into Braque’s works, and which could be categorized as masculine in character, referenced the secondary and utilitarian domestic interiors of hallways, corridors, staircases and pantries. It is important to keep in mind that Picasso and Braque explored these issues while executing works in a format that adhered to the requirements of the bourgeois clientele and their decorating conventions: framed small-scale paintings and works on paper for display on walls of private homes. As such, Cubist pictures belong to the décoration mobile category of the interior design, alongside furniture and decorative arts. Identifying Cubism as a hot commodity of its day, but with a subversive dimension, Nesbit interpreted Picasso as a savvy modern artist who ‘played the market …, making small, wicked pictures for the homes of enlightened trusting clients. But his collage only hinted at its own usefulness; it brought its own wallpaper to the drawing room wall and implied by means of its allusions to music that it could fit into the society of the room’.35 While projecting and guarding their artistic autonomy, the Cubist pictures sought also to engage with the interior. The nature of the engagement

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has been variously characterized. Also referencing Atget’s Intérieurs parisiens in her reading of Picasso’s collages, Cowling used the photographs to pinpoint the dimension of parody in Picasso’s art. Identifying Atget’s interiors not as examples of modern living conditions but rather as instances of passé decor, Cowling indicated that in his collages with wallpapers ‘Picasso was spoofing this type of old-fashioned,  unsophisticated decor, the butt of design pundits’s ridicule, where one would be dumbfounded to encounter a Cubist still life.’36 In their study of Cubism in its wider context, Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten proposed that by including the decorative theme in their compositions Picasso and Braque projected that idiom into the spaces in which their works were displayed in order to challenge the anti-decorative theories and practices.37 The context for Antliff and Leighten’s assertion of the artist’s contrarian gesture was the gallery of the Cubist dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. In 1907 with the aid of an interior designer, Kahnweiler converted a small Parisian storefront tailor shop on rue Vignon into a gallery in which he intended to showcase the latest avant-garde art. The textual records of the space – no images exist – describe it

Figure 13.5  La maison cubiste, salon d’automne 1912. Meubles d’André Mare. Moulures, cheminée, pendule de Roger De La Fresnaye. Verreries de Maurice Marinot. Peinture de Marie Laurencin, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger. Service à café de Jacqus Villon, Fonds André Mare/IMEC.

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as a small, austere, monochromatic environment devoid of any décor items or architectural ornamentation. The designer laid down carpeting, repainted the ceiling and upgraded the lighting system. The walls were clad with plain burlap. For Antliff and Leighten, Kahnweiler’s formally neutral gallery represented the dealer’s increasing ‘disdain for decorative accouterment’ and Picasso and Braque’s paintings frustrated Kahnweiler’s efforts to maintain his gallery decoration free and wryly remarked on Kahnweiler’s décor-free pretentions. Kahnweiler insisted on the anti-decorative nature of Cubist paintings in his own theoretical writings, a position that subsequent critics and historians equated with Picasso and Braque’s anti-domesticity and disconnect with the private interior.38 But it must be said, as Kahnweiler’s commercial gallery was only a transitional space for Picasso and Braque’s paintings, this discussion, however relative, glosses over their ultimate destination – the private domestic interior. To underscore her point about Picasso’s readiness to make fun of the fellow artists’s aspirations in the realm of the decorative, Cowling also incorporated into her discussion the Maison cubiste, the installation of an ideal bourgeois home created for the 1912 Salon d’Automne by a group of French designers and artists that include among its ranks Salon Cubists (Figure 13.5). In Maison cubiste, paintings by Fernand Léger, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger and Marcel Duchamp hung on walls papered with busy all-over pattern designed specifically for the project. In Cowling’s interpretation, Picasso read the interiors of the Maison cubiste against the opinion of some of the contemporary décor manuals that advised installation of paintings on neutral or plain backgrounds. To Cowling, Picasso’s 1912 still lifes that featured fragments of real outdated wallpaper critiqued the Maison cubiste and poked fun of Salon Cubists’s ‘modish aspirations’.39 In Cowling’s interpretation of the documentary photographs of the interior, the paintings struggled to compete with the busy background they were placed against. Her reading of Picasso’s art in relation to the Maison cubiste, however, should be read together with the project’s intentions as outlined by Nancy J. Troy in her analysis of the French decorative arts of this period.40 For Troy, the main objective behind the Maison cubiste was to present the domestic bourgeois interior and its eclectic décor as an appropriate form of dwelling for a modern person. She observed that in these modern interiors of a wilfully eclectic inventory, the Cubist paintings, and their fragmented and disjointed pictorial forms resonated with the heterogeneous character of the whole assembly. According to Troy, the Maison cubiste, envisioned as a response to the stylistically uniform Art Nouveau interior, promoted stylistic disjunction,

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an approach that would free homeowners (with middle-class incomes) to mix and match their new and old household items. In addition, by incorporating art into the whole, the Maison cubiste put forth the idea that easel painting (even as radical as Cubist) has a legitimate place alongside furniture, decorative arts, as well as older art objects found in the bourgeois home, with no compromises of autonomy. Returning to the decorations of Field’s home library, art historians who have considered the Field commission focused on its unrealized state and put forth theories as to why it failed. Without any textual information offered by Picasso, Field, or people familiar with the commission at that time, the answers are sought out in the paintings themselves. For William Rubin, the unusual proportions and large size of the panels were the main reasons Picasso struggled with the commission. The ‘pictorial limitations of the normally “iconic” Cubist subjects’, which Picasso and Braque were exploring at that time, did not work, according to Rubin, on such a scale.41 Picasso struggled to adjust the scale of his easel paintings, which resulted in compositional problems. The type of painting Picasso was immersed in at that time was ‘so chock-full of visual incident that [it] tended to break up into localized (and sometimes rather overly-busy) passages’, producing dissatisfying results when rendered on a large scale.42 Along similar lines, in her close comparison with Matisse’s Shchukin panels, Stephanie d’Alessandro identified the lack of large passages of colours and even a hint of a narrative in Picasso’s Cubist paintings as what made this pictorial approach unsuitable for a large-scale decorative project.43 Another aspect, pointed out by John Richardson, that may have made this commission difficult to fulfil, is the speed with which Picasso and Braque continuously edited their compositions. Cubist paintings were ‘ever-changing’.44 Having said that, although it remained unrealized, the commission contributed significantly to the development of Cubism by prompting Picasso to directly consider the aesthetics of the decorative. In the summer of 1910, spent in the Spanish fishing village of Cadequés, Picasso painted a group of near-abstract canvases. Some of these paintings are the earliest works executed for the Field commission, among them Nude Woman, a narrow vertical composition of line and shaded, overlapping planes which challenges the viewer to distinguish between the figure and ground. The letter that Field wrote to Picasso in 1910, postmarked in Brooklyn on July 12th, reached the artist in Spain in mid-August. Writing about Picasso’s art at that moment and identifying it as the ‘Cadequés crisis’, Yve-Alain Bois described Picasso’s painting process dated to this summer as the artist’s effort to abolish the figure-ground/flatness-depth distinction in

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his paintings, the experimentation that nearly caused for Picasso’s pictures to become abstract compositions.45 While it almost pushed him beyond the boundaries of the physical world it is plausible that the library commission also allowed the artist to address anew the tactile realm of the physical (interior) space and objects within. In his 1919 statement quoted early in this chapter, Field expressed enthusiasm for decorative painting over easel painting. His attitude could be linked to the position formulated during the last decade of the nineteenth century and carried over to the early twentieth century by the symbolists and their affiliates. For the Symbolists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Christine Poggi’s phrasing, ‘the term décoration had assumed a nearly mystical significance’.46 Grounding their theory and practice in the ongoing reformist debates centred on such issues as the abolishment of the barrier between fine and applied arts, the Symbolist Nabis critiqued traditional easel painting, identifying the format with the commercialization and commodification of art. For artists such as Vuillard, the period’s customary way of framing easel paintings with heavy ornate gold frames turned art into a ‘packaged commodity’.47 The Nabis’s alternative was large-scale painting commissioned for private interiors of the artists’s patrons. In their multi-panel undertakings, the artists rejected the concept that a picture’s objective is to serve as a ‘window onto nature’ and instead saturated their decorative paintings of contemporary landscape or genre scene with colour patterning and repetitions of forms. Pursuing the spiritual and emotional dimension of art, the Nabis charged their decorative paintings with creating a unifying, emotion-infused mood in the interiors of display. To this end, what the Nabis sought for their private decorative panels was total integration within their surroundings, the paintings advancing an overall cohesion of the interior space; their aim being an interior environment that could free its residents from the mundane of everyday life and transport them to a spiritual realm. In 1891 the symbolist critic Albert Aurier crystalized the intentions behind such projects when writing on symbolist decorative painting in relationship to easel painting, ‘Painting can only have been created to decorate the banal walls of human edifices with thoughts, dreams and ideas. Easel painting is nothing but an illogical refinement invented to satisfy the fantasy or the commercial spirit of decadent civilization.’48 In framing his first experience with Picasso’s Cubism against the backdrop of such theories and practices, it is easy to imagine how Field could misinterpret Picasso’s complex composition as abstraction and so wished to offer Picasso an opportunity to develop an immersive interior environment with his paintings as the sole aesthetic catalyst.

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To the contrary, however, by continuously expanding their formal vocabulary, Picasso and Braque applied Cubism’s pictorial language to punning, juxtaposing, prodding and otherwise engaging with contemporaneous approaches to interior décor, unafraid to introduce via their paintings and collages undesirable, subversive or congruous idioms. In doing so, they acknowledged the private interior as the powerful site of modernity and geared their radical art practice to be directly and actively engaged with it. It is therefore doubtful that Picasso shared Field’s attitude about the need to give Cubism a singular and dominant presence within the site of display in order for this new mode of painting to achieve its full potential. Note: I conducted the research and writing of this chapter during my 2015–17 postdoctoral fellowship at the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Thank you to the members of the Center’s advisory committee for their generous support. The chapter greatly benefitted from the feedback I received in 2016 during the Spring Fellows Colloquium at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the conference that culminates in the present volume.

Bibliography Antliff, Mark and Patricia Leighten, Cubism and Culture (New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2001). Aurier, Albert, ‘Le Symbolisme en peinture, Paul Gauguin’. Mercure de France 2, no. 15 (March 1891): 155–65. Balducci, Temma, ‘Matisse and Self, or the Persistent Interior’. In Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789–1914, edited by Temma Balducci, Heather Belnap Jensen, and Pamela J. Warner, 213–30 (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011). Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLauglin (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). Bois, Yves-Alain, ‘Pablo Picasso: The Cadaqués Experiment’. Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925. How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art. In Matthew Affron et al., 40–42 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art Distributed in the United States and Canada by Artbook/D.A.P., 2012). Clark, T. J., Picasso and Truth: from Cubism to Gurenica, The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Bollingen series 35: 58 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013). Cowling, Elizabeth, ‘Objects into Sculpture’. In Picasso: Sculptor/Painter, edited by Elizabeth Cowling and John Golding, 229–240 (London: Tate Gallery, 1994).

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Cowling, Elizabeth, ‘What the wallpapers say: Picasso’s papiers collés of 1912-14’, The Burlington Magazine, CLV (September 2013): 594–601. D’Alessandro, Stephanie, ‘Opportunity and Invention’. In Matisse: Radical Invention 1913-1917, edited by Stephanie D’Alessandro and John Elderfield, 76–86 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010). Field, Hamilton Easter, ‘Man Ray at the Daniel Gallery’, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (November 30 1919): 67. Golding, John, ‘Braque and the Space of Still Life’. In Braque. Still Lifes and Interiors, 9–26 (London: South Bank Centre, 1990). Groom, Gloria, Edouard Vuillard: Painter-Decorator. Patrons and Projects, 1892-1912 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993). Groom, Gloria, Beyond the Easel. Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890-1930 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). Hoche, Jules, Les Parisiens chez eux (Paris: Publisher unknown, 1883). Karmel, Pepe, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003). Lasc, Anca I., ‘“Le juste milieu”: Alexandre Sandier, theming, and Eclecticism in French Interiors of the Nineteenth Century’. Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture 2, no. 3 (2011): 277–305. Lasc, Anca I, ‘Interior Decorating in the Age of Historicism: Popular Advice Manuals and the Pattern Books of Édouard Bajot’, Journal of Design History 26, no. 1 (2013): 1–24. Nesbit, Molly, Atget’s Seven Albums (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). Penrose, Roland, Sir, Picasso His Life and Work. 1st U.S. edition (New York and elsewhere: Icon Editions, Harper & Row, 1973). Poggi, Christine, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). Rice, Charles, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). Richardson, John, with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully. A Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel, 1907-1916 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). Rubin, William, ‘Appendix: The Library of Hamilton Easter Field.’ In Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, 63–69 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1989). Taube, Isabel L., with contributions by Priscilla Vail Caldwell et al Impressions of Interiors. Gilded Age Painting by Walter Gay (Pittsburgh: Frick Art & Historical Center, in association with D Giles Limited, London, 2012). Troy, Nancy J., Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France. Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991). Warner, Pamela J., ‘The Competing Dialectics of the Cabinet de Travail: Masculinity at the Threshold.’ In Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789-1914, edited by Temma Balducci, Heather Belnap Jensen, and Pamela J. Warner, 159–76 (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011).

Notes Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz and trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986), 154. Mallarmé, ‘Edouard Manet and the Impressionists’, cited in C. Moffett et al., The New Painting: Impressionism (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), 17–37, 17. Edmond Duranty, La Nouvelle Peinture (Paris: Ed. du Boucher, [1876] 2011), 22 [my translation]. All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated. Hannah Arendt, cited in Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 5. Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ in Œuvres complètes II, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: La Pléiade, 1976), 694. Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 138. id. ibid., 138.

Chapter 1 1 2

3

4

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project [1927–1940] (Cambridge, MA: The Belkman Press, 1999), 220. ‘Se le strade sono dimore del collettivo, il passage è il suo salotto’: Vincenzo Mele, Walter Benjamin e l’esperienza della metropoli. Per una lettura sociologica dei Passages di Parigi (Pisa: PLUS, 2000), 66. Michelle Perrot, ‘At Home’, in A History of Private Life. Vol. 4: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. Michelle Perrot (Cambridge, MA: The Belkman Press, 1990), 342. Michelle Perrot, ‘Introduction. Les secrets de la maison’, in Architectures de la vie privée. Maison et mentalites XVIIe-XIXe siècles, ed. Monique Eleb-Vidal and Anne Debarre-Blanchard (Bruxelles: Archives d’architecture moderne, 1989), 5. Perrot suggests that it was around 1840, when greater attention was being paid to domestic life, that the word intérieur [interior] ‘cesse de signifier l’âme ou le corps intimes pour désigner l’habitation. [no longer meant the intimate soul or body but instead the dwelling]’ (ibid.) (all translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own). The

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word ‘comfort’ also entered the vocabulary at that moment, as well as the English word ‘home’ to designate the hearth. 5 See Perrot, ‘At Home’, 343–4. 6 See ibid., 354–5. 7 See, for example, Rudolph Koella, ‘Les Intérieurs des Nabis, un écrin pour l’homme’, in Nabis 1888–1900, Exh. Cat. (Zurigo, Kunsthaus - Parigi, Grand Palais, 1993–94), ed. Ursula Perucchi-Petri (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993), 91–103; Intime Welten: das Interieur bei den Nabis; Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Exh. Cat. (Winterthur, Villa Flora, 1999), ed. Ursula Perucchi-Petri (Bern: Benteli, 1999); Felix Krämer, Das unheimliche Heim: zur Interieurmalerei um 1900 (Köln: Böhlau, 2007). Possibly the most important study on the interior theme in painting is by Susan Sidlauskas, Body, Self, and Place in Nineteenth-Century Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For a panorama on the interior in the French painting, see also Francesca Berry, ‘Lived Perspectives: The Art of the French Nineteenth-Century Interior’, in Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Interior since the Renaissance, eds. Jeremy Aynsley and Charlotte Grant (London: V & A Publications, 2006), 160–83. 8 See Jean Clair, ‘The Self beyond Recovery’, in Lost Paradise: Symbolist Europe, Exh. Cat. (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1995), ed. Jean Clair and Pierre Théberge (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1995), 125–36; Vincent Vanhamme, Xavier Mellery: L’âme des choses (Zwolle: Waanders, 2000); Georges Le Brun: Maître de l’intime: 1873–1914, Exh. Cat. (Namur, Musée provincial Félicien Rops), ed. Denis Laoureux (Paris: LienArt, 2015). 9 Louis-Philippe, or the Interior is the title of the paragraph that Benjamin devoted to the dwelling in the two exposés of The Arcades Project: Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century (1935 and 1939, the latter being written by Benjamin in French). 10 Baudelaire spoke in positive terms about modern caricaturists and illustrators on many occasions. In the famous passage Of the Heroism of Modern Life (in The Salon of 1846), he stresses that Eugene Lami and Paul Gavarni had understood the value of beauty in the contemporary world, as they showed in choosing their themes. Later, Baudelaire devoted entire pieces of his writing to caricature (Le Salon caricatural, 1846; De l’essence du rire, 1855; Quelques caricaturistes français, 1857; Quelques caricaturistes étrangers, 1857). He also devoted a whole chapter of The Painter of Modern Life to those whom he called ‘artist-portrayers of manner’, because he saw Daumier and Gavarni as the prototypes of the ideal artist. See Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. E. Charvet (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), 106, 140–61, 209–43, 394. 11 In a letter to Gretel Adorno dated 10 September 1935, Benjamin stresses that the caricature of Daumier and Gavarni had been of fundamental importance for his study, due to its relevance to his research topic. In this context, his aim was to study extensively Eduard Fuchs’s text on caricature (Eduard Fuchs, Die Karikatur der

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europäischen Völker, 2 vols, München: Albert Langen, 1921). In his book, Fuchs considered Daumier and Gavarni, together with Monnier, to be responsible for introducing modernity and the bourgeoisie in the arts. See also Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Correspondence 1930–1940, eds. Henri Lonitz and Christoph Gödde, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), n. 104, and Benjamin, The Arcade Project, 740–3. 12 Ibid., 8. 13 See ibid. On the French apartments in the July Monarchy, see Adeline Daumard, La Bourgeoisie parisienne de 1815 à 1848 (Paris: S.E.V. E.N., 1963), 129–39. On the nineteenth-century Parisian housing situation, see Adeline Daumard, Maisons de Paris et propriétaires parisiens au xixe siècle, 1809–1880 (Paris: Cujas, 1965). 14 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 8. 15 See ibid., 213. 16 Ibid., 9. 17 See Perrot, ‘At Home’, 344. 18 See Mele, Walter Benjamin, 68. 19 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 12. 20 Ibid. 21 Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, 8 volumes. (Paris: Léon Curmer, 1840–2). On collectors, see Horace De Viel-castel, ‘Le Collectionneur,’ in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, vol. I (Paris: Curmer, 1840), 121–8. 22 See Giulio Schiavoni, Walter Benjamin, il figurelio della felicità. Un percorso biografico e concettuale (Torino: Einaudi, 2001), 341–6. 23 See Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 1999), 18–82. On representations of interiors in literature, among others, see Philippe Hamon and Alexandrine Viboud, Dictionnaire thématique du roman de mœurs, 1850–1914 (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2003), 54–7; Michelle Perrot, ‘Gli spazi del privato’, in Il Romanzo, ed. Franco Moretti (Torino: Einaudi, 2003), Vol. 4: Temi, luoghi, eroi, 495–519. 24 In 1840, in his encyclopaedic dictionary, Philippe Le Bas considered Balzac to be the most famous living writer. His merit was to have presented ‘des tableaux vrais et attachant de la vie intime […].’ His writing is compared to ‘la peinture minutitieuse, mais frappante, d’un intérieur bourgeois.’ See Philippe Le Bas, L’Univers: histoire et description de tous les peuples - France. Dictionnaire encyclopédique, vol. 2 (Paris: Firmin Didot freres, 1840), 54. For Balzac’s interiors, see Marcus, Apartment Stories, 51–82; Perrot, ‘Gli spazi del privato’, 503–7; Sabine Frommel and Paulina Spiechowicz, ‘Balzac et les intérieurs: autour d’une déclinaison romanesque de la chambre’, in Ein Dialog der Künste. Beschreibungen von Innenarchitektur und Interieurs in der Literatur von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart, ed. B. von Orelli-Messerl, vol. 2 (Petersberg: Imhof, 2014), 72–86.

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25 For an overview of Daumier’s art, see Daumier, 1808–1879, Exh. Cat. (Ottawa, Parigi, Washington 1999–2000), eds. Henri Loyrette et al. (Paris: Reunion des Musées Nationaux, 1999) and Ségolène Le Men, Pour rire! Daumier, Gavarni, Rops. L’invention de la silhouette (Paris: Somogy, 2010), passim. 26 ‘The true glory and true mission of Gavarni and of Daumier was to complete Balzac, who, for the matter, was well aware of it, and appreciated them both as his auxiliaries and commentators’ (Charles Baudelaire, Some French Caricaturists, 1857, in Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 228). Besides, in The Painter of Modern Life, on the ‘sketches of manners’ as a model of the depiction of bourgeois life: ‘The works of Gavarni and Daumier have been accurately described as complements to the Comédie humaine’ (ibid., 394). 27 The 9 September 1835 Law established censorship for political caricature, following an attack on the monarch. On these issues, see André Blum, ‘La Caricature politique sous la Monarchie de juillet’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 702 (1920), 257–77. 28 See Patricia Mainardi, Husbands, Wives, and Lovers: Marriage and Its Discontents in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2003). For conjugal literature and Balzac, see esp. 47–72. 29 Honoré De Balzac, Petites Misères de la Vie Conjugale, Illustrées par Bertall (Paris: Chéndowski, 1846). 30 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London, New York: Verso, 2005), 13. 31 Ibid., 15. 32 On the relationship between Balzac and Bertall, see Bertall [Charles-Albert D’Arnoux], ‘Souvenir intimes’, Figaro. Supplement litteraire, 20 August 1881; Thierry Bodin, ‘Petites misères d’une preface’, L’Année balzacienne 1, 1980, 163–8; Ségolène Le Men, ‘Balzac, Gavarni, Bertall et les Petites Misères de la vie conjugale’, Romantisme 43 (1984), 29–44; Anna Fierro, Ibridazioni balzachiane. ‘Meditazioni eclettiche’ su romanzo, teatro, illustrazione (Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2013), 91–102. 33 See Antonella Sbrilli, ‘Estranei nel salotto. Sogni, rebus, collages’, Engramma 100. Pensare per immagini, La Rivista di Engramma (ISSN 1826–901X) 100 (2012), http://www.engramma.it/eOS2/index.php?id_articolo=1159, accessed 24 October 2016. 34 See Vidal and Debarre-Blanchard, Architectures de la vie privée, 75–85. 35 For this, see Anne Martin-Fugier, ‘Bourgeois Rituals’, in A History of Private Life. Vol. 4: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. Michelle Perrot (Cambridge, MA: The Belkman Press, 1990), 306–21. For the modern family, see Daumard, La Bourgeoisie parisienne, 326–36. 36 For private chambers and bedrooms in French culture, see Michelle Perrot, Histoire des chambres (Paris: Seuil, 2009). 37 Balzac, Petites Misères, 352.

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38 See Vidal and Debarre-Blanchard, Architectures de la vie privée, 188–90. 39 See Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 20. 40 The etiquette manuals of the time codified the practice whereby women were expected to welcome their guests while sitting to the right of the fireplace while men would stand right next to them (cfr. Martin-Fugier, Bourgeoisie Rituals, 274). 41 See Sotheby’s Monaco, Tableaux et dessins anciens et du xixe siecle (Monte Carlo, 5 December 1992), 69, lot. 64. There is also a watercolour version of the same subject. See Sotheby’s, Nineteenth Century European Paintings, Drawings and Watercolours (London, June 12, 1996), 15, lot 11, dated 1840. See Paul-André Lemoisne, L’Œuvre d’Eugène Lami, 1800–1890. Lithographies, dessins, aquarelles, peintures. Essai d’un catalogue raisonné (Paris: Champion, 1914), 736–51. 42 Cfr. Jules Janin, ‘La Dévote’, in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, vol. 4 (Paris: Curmer, 1841), 134. 43 Jean-Jacques Grandville [Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gerard], Un Autre monde: transformations, visions, incarnations, ascensions (1844; Milan: Mazzotta, 1982), 250–1. 44 See Un amour d’un pantin et d’un étoile: ‘une femme admirablement belle prit place sur le devant. Aussitôt tous les yeux se tournèrent de son côté. [A beautiful woman took her place in the foreground. Immediately, all eyes turned to watch her.]’(ibid., 101–2). On this matter, see Antonello Negri, Grandville, in ibid., VII. On Grandville see also Anne Renonçiat, La Vie et l’œuvre de J.J. Grandville (Courbevoie: Vilo, 1985) and Philippe Kaenel, Le Métier d’illustrateur, 1830–1880: Rodolphe Töpffer, J.-J. Grandville, Gustave Doré (Genève: Droz, 2005). 45 See Paul-André Lemoisne, Gavarni. Peintre et lithographe, I: 1804–1847 (Paris: Floury, 1924), 152. On Gavarni see also Jules and Edmond De Goncourt, Gavarni: L’homme et l’œuvre (1870; Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, Eugène Fasquelle éditeur, 1912). 46 Ibid., 269. 47 On the ‘physiologies’, see Nathalie Preiss-Basset, ‘Les physiologies, un miroir en miettes’, in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes: panorama social du xixe siècle, eds. Ségolène Le Men and Luce Abélès (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993), 62–7. This kind of literature began to be published in the 1830s, for example, Paris ou le Livre des Cent-et-un (1832–34), and was inspired by Les Tableaux de Paris by Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1781). They were a typical product of the July Monarchy and were the popular equivalents of Balzac’s Comédie humaine. See Le Men, Pour rire!, 125–53. 48 On the relationship between image and text in these literary works, see Ségolène Le Men, ‘Peints par eux-mêmes’, in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes: panorama social du xixe siècle, eds. Ségolène Le Men, Luce Abélès (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993), 5–6.

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49 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 5; On panoramas, see Silvia Bordini, Storia del panorama. La visione totale nella pittura del XIX secolo (Rome: Officina, 1984) and Bernard Comment, The Panorama (London: Reaktion Books, 1999). 50 See Nathalie Preiss-Basset, ‘Le Type dans les Physiologies’, in L’illustration: Essais d’iconographie, eds. Maria Teresa Caracciolo and Segolene Le Men (Paris: Klincksieck, 1999), 331–8; Le Men, ‘Peints par eux-mêmes,’ 6–7. 51 Ibid., 9 52 Id ibid. 53 Jules Janin, ‘La Grisette’, in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, vol. 1 (Paris: Curmer, 1840), 9–16. 54 Elias Regnault, ‘La Chanoinesse’, in ibid., 193–6. 55 A. Delacroix, ‘La Femme de chambre’, in ibid., 225–52. 56 Eugene Guinot, ‘La Lionne’, in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, vol. 2 (Paris: Curmer, 1840), 9–16. 57 Several books published around those years express the centrality of the apartment as the realm of the private citizen and provide confirmation of the fact that the most common objects in these depictions were those of greatest importance to the middle class in 1830s and 1840s. Of these, Les Petits bonheurs by Jules Janin – published in 1857, but written fifteen years earlier – is one of the most interesting. In the chapters devoted to pleasures of the Maison, the clock, the lamp, the mirror, pictures on the walls and the objects that contribute to human well-being, even in their pointlessness as bibelots, are protagonists of the book. See Jules Janin, Les Petits bonheurs (Paris: Morizot, 1857), 355–65. Baudrillard notes that the mirror and the clock are the central objects in the nineteenth-century home, constituting ‘the most extraordinary symbolic résumé of bourgeois domesticity’ (see Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 22). 58 See Peter Szondi, ‘Tableau and Coup de Théâtre: On the Social Psychology of Diderot’s Bourgeois Tragedy’, New Literary History 11 (1980), 323–43. On the pivotal role of the salon in Diderot’s pieces, see ibid., 325, 327–8. 59 See for example the stage direction for the décor of Mariage d’argent (1827), ‘premier salon: porte au fond, et chaque coté deux portes a deux battants […]. A droite, un guéridon; à gauche, et sur le premier plan, une table et ce qu’il faut pour écrire. Sur un plan plus éloigné, une riche cheminée et une pendula’ [‘in the first salon, a door at the back and two double-doors to each side […]To the right, a desk and to left and in the foreground, a table and stationary. Further in the background there is a grand mantel-piece and a wall-clock’]. Eugene Scribe, Marriage d’argent (1827), I act, in Œuvres complètes de M. Eugène Scribe, vol. 1 (Paris: Furne et Cie, 1841), 57. 60 See Philippe Hamon, Imageries: Littérature et image au XIXe siècle (Paris: José Corti, 2007), 27–8.

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61 See Matteo Piccioni, ‘Le stanze di Flaubert. Intérieurs tra scrittura e immagine intorno alla metà dell’Ottocento’, in In corso d’opera. Ricerche dei dottorandi in Storia dell’Arte della Sapienza 1, eds. Michele Nicolaci, Matteo Piccioni and Lorenzo Riccardi (Rome: Campisano 2015), 241–9. On Flaubert and the July Monarchy imaginary, see also Takashi Kinouchi, ‘La mémoire des images dans L’Éducation sentimentale’, in Les pouvoirs de l’image (I), Flaubert. Revue critique et génétique, 11 (2014), , accessed 24 October 2016.

Chapter 2 1

2 3

4 5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Ralph Nicholson Wornum, ‘The Exhibition as a Lesson in Taste’, The Crystal Palace Exhibition. Illustrated Catalogue (1851), repub. (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), XIII. See Anne Green, Changing France. Literature and Material Culture in the Second Empire (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2011), 8–9. Gustave Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale, Œuvres complètes, edited by B. Masson (Paris: Seuil, 1964), II, 65. This and all other English translations in this chapter are by Anne Green. Emile Zola, La Curée (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1970), 57. Cf the symmetry, order and dazzle depicted in Charles Giraud’s 1859 painting of the Salon of Princess Mathilde. Similar configurations of exhibition attributes occur in descriptions of interiors in Théophile Gautier’s Avatar, in Romans et contes (Paris: Charpentier, 1880), e.g. 101–2. Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), 29. The destructive force of Zola’s Nana is already visible in L’Assommoir, when as a six-year-old she makes her whole apartment building shake by tearing through it with her gang of screaming friends. Emile Zola, L’Assommoir (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1997), 209. Ernest Feydeau, Du luxe, des femmes, des moeurs, de la littérature et de la vertu, nouvelle éd. (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1883), 159. Mme La Comtesse De Ségur, Les Petites filles modèles (Paris: Hachette, 1909), 156. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, OC, I, 644. L’Education sentimentale, OC, II, 53. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 113. Ibid., 113–14. A. Guénée, C. Potier and E. Mathieu, Dzing! Boum! Boum! Revue de l’exposition (Paris: Mifliez, 1855).

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16 Richard Terdiman, ‘The Mnemonics of Dispossession’, in Home and Its Dislocations in Nineteenth-Century France, edited by Suzanne Nash (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), 176. 17 Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal. Mémoires de la vie littéraire, edited by Robert Ricatte (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989), I, 632. 18 Goncourt, Journal, I, 632. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Goncourt, Journal, III, 1046–56. 22 L’Education sentimentale, OC, II, 130. 23 Earlier in L’Education sentimentale Sénécal disdainfully strikes a match on Frédéric’s new wallpaper, in a foretaste of the destruction to come. References to shredded paper – not only wallpaper fragments, or the writing-paper destroyed by the Comtesse de Ségur’s Sophie, or the book torn up by Ernest Feydeau’s threeyear-old, but many other examples – recur in the literature of this period with such frequency that they seem to point to the widespread fear that books, and literature itself, were under threat. 24 Zola, La Curée, 296. 25 Ibid., 298. 26 Victor Hugo, Les Travailleurs de la mer, edited by Yves Gohin (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 93. 27 Albert Angot, Nos ruines (Paris: Ch. Douniol et cie, 1871), 3. Cf. Victor Hugo’s description of the interior of La Jacressarde, another of the many shattered houses in Les Travailleurs de la mer (220), ‘Fallen plaster covered the floor. No one knew how the house remained standing. It moved in the wind.’ [‘Les plâtrages tombés couvraient le plancher. On ne savait comment tenait la maison. Le vent la remuait.’] 28 Anaïs Ségalas, ‘Paris nouveau’. Cit. in Pierre Citron, La Poésie de Paris dans la littérature française de Rousseau à Baudelaire (Paris: Editions de minuit, 1961), I, 336. 29 Maxime Du Camp, ‘La Maison démolie’, Les Chants modernes (Paris: M. Levy, 1855), 394. 30 Du Camp, ‘La Maison démolie’, Les Chants modernes, 394. 31 Ibid., 398. 32 Ibid., 398. 33 Zola, La Curée, 298. 34 Emile Zola, Thérèse Raquin (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1970), 233. 35 Flaubert, Madame Bovary, OC, I, 603. 36 Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, edited by Yves Gohin (Paris: 1973 & 1995), II, 543–44. 37 Emile Zola, Pot-Bouille (Paris: Charpentier, 1882), 248. 38 Zola, Pot-Bouille, 248.

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39 Flaubert, L’Education sentimentale, OC, II, 157. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Champfleury, L’Hôtel des commissaires-priseurs (Paris: Dentu, 1867), vii–viii. 45 Champfleury, L’Hôtel des commissaires-priseurs, 200.

Chapter 3 For example: Deborah Cohen, Household Gods. The British and Their Possessions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Stefan Muthesius, The Poetic Home. Designing the 19th-Century Domestic Interior (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2009). 2 See, for example, Allison Deutsch, ‘Good Taste. Metaphor and Materiality in Nineteenth-Century Art Criticism’, Object: Graduate Research and Reviews in the History of Art and Visual Culture 17 (2015), 9–32. 3 See the chapter by Matteo Piccioni in this volume. 4 Anne Martin-Fugier, La vie d’artiste au XIXe siècle (Paris: Louis Audibert, 2007), 321–417; Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class. Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 5 Muthesius, The Poetic Home, 106. 6 Kathryn Ferry, The Victorian Home (Oxford: Shire Books, 2010); Muthesius, The Poetic Home, 25. See also Frances Borzello, At Home. The Domestic Interior in Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006), including some nineteenth-century paintings of private picture galleries, and references to seventeenth-century Flemish paintings of art collections. 7 Maximiliaan Martens and Natasja Peeters, ‘Paintings in Antwerp Houses (1532– 1567)’, in Mapping Markets for Paintings in Europe, 1450–1750, ed. Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 35–53; Bruno Blondé and Veerle de Laet, ‘Owning Paintings and Changing Consumer Preferences in the Low Countries, Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries’, in Mapping Markets for Paintings in Europe, 1450–1750, ed. Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 68–84. 8 Martina Droth, ‘Sculptuur in Het Laatvictoriaanse Interieur’, De Witte Raaf 121 (May/June 2006), http://www.dewitteraaf.be/artikel/detail/nl/3081 (last accessed 2 August 2017). 9 Liesbet Nys, ‘Particulier bezit in het museumtijdperk. Bezoek aan privéverzamelingen in België, circa 1830–1914’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire/ Belgisch tijdschrift voor philologie en geschiedenis 83, no. 2 (2005), 453–78. 1

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10 In the historical-political context of the young Belgian nation state, founded in 1830 after decades of foreign domination, private collectors actively sought public engagement and campaigned for the preservation of national artistic and historical heritage in the country, whereas early-nineteenth-century collectors in France were considered ‘eccentric and monomaniac types leading a cloistered life’. Dominique Pety, ‘Le personnage du collectionneur au XIXe siècle. De l’excentrique à l’amateur distingué’, Romantisme 31, no. 112 (2001), 71–81. 11 See: Martin-Fugier, La vie d’artiste, 333. 12 Ulrike Müller, ‘The Amateur and the Public Sphere. Private Collectors in Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent through the Eyes of European Travellers in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Collections 29, no. 3 (2017), 423–38, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhw032. 13 See, for example, the collections of Théodore de Coninck de Merckem and Charles-Léon Cardon, discussed below. On mass media as a source, see e.g. Anca I. Lasc, Georgina Downey and Mark Taylor, eds., Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). 14 Johanna Schopenhauer, Ausflug an den Niederrhein und nach Belgien im Jahr 1828, 2 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1831), vol. 2, 210–14. Publishing her memoirs only 3 years after her actual travel to Ghent, Schopenhauer confused in her description of the local private collections the names of the collectors Jean d’Huyvetter (‘Herr Dewater’, 207) with Jean-Baptiste Delbecq (‘Herr Gelbeck’, 210). 15 Wilhelm Bürger (Théophile Thoré), Galerie d’Arenberg à Bruxelles. Avec le catalogue complet de la collection (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1859), 113. 16 In Belgium, little advice literature was published during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the international literature was widely read in Belgium. The Antwerp collector Fritz Mayer van den Bergh, for instance, kept a copy of Henry Havard’s L’art dans la maison in his library. See also Britt Denis, ‘Home, Sweet Home?! Publiek en privaat onder de loe in negentiende-eeuws Antwerpen (1880)’, Volkskunde. Tijdschrift over de Cultuur van Het Dagelijkse Leven 116, no. 2 (2015), 129–50. 17 According to Martin-Fugier, in France, only the richest collectors could afford special picture galleries, ideally with zenithal light (emulating museums or artist’s studios), whereas most collectors hung their paintings in their living rooms in a more ‘modest’ accrochage; see Martin-Fugier, La vie d’artiste, 328. 18 Charles L. Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details (London: Longmans, Green, 1868), 167. 19 Henry Havard, L’art dans la maison. Grammaire de l’ameublement (Paris: Édouard Rouveyre, 1884), 226.

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20 Ibid., 226–33. 21 Britt Denis, ‘In Search of Material Practices. The Nineteenth-Century European Domestic Interior Rehabilitated’, History of Retailing and Consumption, 2016, 1–16. 22 Private photographs, however, seldom show interiors as these were not considered worthy subjects for long, and people were difficult to photograph in their own interiors due to the lack of sufficient lighting. 23 See: Ulrike Müller, ‘A Private Collection in the Public Sphere. The Art Gallery of the Dukes of Arenberg in the Nineteenth Century’, in Arenberg. Portrait of a family, story of a collection, edited by Mark Derez, Soetkin Vanhauwaert and Anne Verbrugge (Turnhout: Brepols 2018), 332–39. 24 See: Sven Kuhrau, Der Kunstsammler im Kaiserreich. Kunst und Repräsentation in der Berliner Privatsammlerkultur (Kiel: Ludwig, 2005); Stefan Pucks, ‘Von Manet bis Matisse. Die Sammler der Französischen Moderne in Berlin um 1900’, in Manet bis Van Gogh. Hugo von Tschudi und der Kampf um die Moderne, eds., J. G. Prinz von Hohenzollern and Peter-Klaus Schuster (Berlin: Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/Munich: Bayrische Staatsgemäldesammlung, 1996), 386–90 (discussing female collectors of contemporary art in nineteenth-century Berlin who turned to contemporary art precisely because Old Master paintings were reserved for men). 25 See: Yves Schoonjans, ‘Au Bonheur des dames. Vrouw, smaak en het burgerlijk interieur in de negentiende eeuw’, Tijdschrift Voor Vrouwenstudies 18, no. 2 (1997), 136–52. 26 See: Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class. 27 Ulrike Müller, ‘Stained Glass and the (Re-) Creation of an Ideal Past. The Mayer van Den Bergh Collection in Antwerp around 1900’, Revista de História Da Arte. Série W 3 (2015), 59–75. 28 La Galerie Vandenschrieck (Leuven: Ickx, 1839), 58 (‘une oeuvre nationale par excellence’). 29 Schopenhauer, Ausflug an den Niederrhein, vol. 2, 290. 30 Sandra Janssens, ‘The Catalogue of Ridder Florent van Ertborn’, Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum Voor Schone Kunsten 5 (2002), 85–113. 31 Simone Martini, Annunciation, Calvary, Descent from the Cross (4 panels), Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, inv. nr. 256–60. 32 Anonymous Tuscan Master ~1400, Saint Paul and Saint Nicholas of Myrna (2 panels), Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, inv. nr. 176–7. 33 Schopenhauer, Ausflug an den Niederrhein, vol. 2, 289–95. 34 On the collection de Coninck, see, Catalogue des collections de tableaux … formant le cabinet de feu Mr le Chevalier de Coninck de Merckem (Ghent: De Busscher, 1856). 35 Bürger, Galerie d’Arenberg à Bruxelles, 113.

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36 Ibid., 110 (‘où l’on cherche et où l’on doit chercher l’expression d’une originalité quelconque en peinture’ and ‘tableaux qui peuvent plaire pour l’ammeublement […], mais qui n’existent pas dans le grand panorama artiste [sic]’). By such decorative pictures with little artistic value, Bürger meant specifically portraits and ‘pastiches’, i.e. eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings in the style of the Old Masters from the seventeenth century. 37 Anna Jameson, Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries of Art in London (London: Saunders and Otley, 1844), 384. 38 See: Gregor J. M. Weber, ‘Die Galerie als Kunstwerk. Die Hängung italienischer Gemälde in der Dresdner Galerie 1754’, in Elbflorenz. Italienische Präsenz in der Dresdner Galerie 1754, ed. Barbara Marx (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 2000), 229–42. The systematic hanging of paintings according to style and geographic origin, introduced in the gallery of Dresden (1747/48), was successively also implemented in Paris (1750), Potsdam (1768), Düsseldorf (1770) and Vienna (1773); see Robert Trautwein, Geschichte der Kunstbetrachtung. Von der Norm zur Freiheit des Blicks (Cologne: DuMont, 1997), 185–265. 39 See: Corina Meyer, Die Geburt des bürgerlichen Kunstmuseums. Johann Friedrich Städel und sein Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt am Main (Berlin: G+H Verlag, 2013), 107–30, 356–82. 40 Also Sulpice and Melchior Boisserée from Cologne, with whom Florent van Ertborn maintained close contacts and after whose important collection of early Northern art he had modelled his own, presented their collection in Heidelberg (1810–19) in a way that allowed ‘comparative style criticism’ and artistic reflection, which therefore functioned as a central place of romantic sociability. Friedrich Strack, ‘Die Sammlung Boisserée in Heidelberg. Künstleratelier und Bildungsanstalt’, in Kunst als Kulturgut. Band I. Die Sammlung Boisserée. Von privater Kunstbegeisterung zur kulturellen Akzeptation der Kunst, ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert (Munich: Fink, 2011), 165–82. 41 See: Marlise Rijks, Catalysts of Knowledge. Artists’ and Artisans’ Collections in Early Modern Antwerp, unpubl. PhD dissertation, Ghent University, 2016; Barbara Welzel, ‘Verhüllen und Inszenieren. Zur performativen Praxis in frühneuzeitlichen Sammlungen’, in Frühneuzeitliche Sammlungspraxis und Literatur, ed. Robert Felfe and Angelika Lozar (Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2006), 109–29. 42 The catalogue of the sale of the collection Scham in 1840 counted 250 in total, see: Ignatius Josephus van Regemorter, Catalogue des tableaux des écoles flamande, hollandaise, italienne, française et espagnole, qui composent la magnifique galerie délaissée par M. Scham d’Aveschoot … (Ghent: H. Hoste, 1840). 43 Schopenhauer, Ausflug an den Niederrhein, vol. 2, 202. 44 Karl Baedeker, Belgien. Handbuch für Reisende, nach eigener Anschauung und den besten Hülfsquellen bearbeitet (Koblenz: Baedeker, 1854), 60–1.

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45 Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste, 168. 46 Lewis Foreman Day, Every-Day Art. Short Essays on the Arts Not Fine (London: B. T. Batsford, 1882). 47 See Havard, L’art dans la maison, 227, Figure 101. 48 The art amateur, vol. 10, No. 2 (January 1884), 50. In the 1880s and 1890s, also the Belgian art press (especially the Brussels avant-garde journal L’Art Moderne) voiced similar criticism, attacking not only the dense mode of display of several public and private collections, but also the varying quality and good taste they represented. 49 Peter Thornton, Authentic Decor. The Domestic Interior, 1620–1920 (New York: Viking, 1984), 313, 320. 50 On this term, see Ingrid Goddeeris and Noémie Goldman, eds., The Animateur d’Art and His Multiple Roles. Pluridisciplinary Research of These Disregarded Cultural Mediators of the 19th and 20th Centuries (Brussels: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, 2015). 51 See: Madeleine Octave Maus, Trente années de lutte pour l’art 1884–1914. Les XX, La Libre Esthétique (1926; Brussels: Lebeer-Hossman, 1980), 18. See also: Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque, Les XX, La Libre Esthétique: cent ans après (Brussels: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, 1993), 21. This new display practice was possibly inspired by new hanging practices in modern Parisian and New York galleries, primarily of impressionist art, which favoured a more isolated presentation of the paintings; see Véronique Chagnon-Burke, ‘Rue Laffitte. Looking at and Buying Contemporary Art in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Paris’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 11, no. 2 (2012), http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/index.php/ summer12/veronique-chagnon-burke-looking-at-and-buying-contemporary-artin-mid-nineteenth-century-paris (last accessed 2 August 2017). 52 Paul Aron, ‘“La maison d’art” d’Edmond Picard: Ongesien kan geschien. Un avocat esthète et collectionneur’, in Genius, Grandeur & Gêne. Het Fin de Siècle rond het Justitiepaleis te Brussel en de controversiële figur van Edmond Picard, ed. Willy van Eeckhoutte and Bruno Maes (Brussels: Knops, 2014), 190–1; Paul Aron and Cécile Vanderpelen-Diagre, Edmond Picard (1836–1924), un bourgeois socialiste belge à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle. Essai d’histoire culturelle (Brussels: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, 2013), 226. 53 Aron and Vanderpelen-Diagre, Edmond Picard, 218. 54 Jane Block, ‘Bruxelles-Paris. La Maison d’Art d’Edmond Picard et la galerie L’Art nouveau de Siegfried Bing’, in Siegfried Bing & la Belgique/België, ed. Virginie Devillez (Brussels: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, 2010), 102, 108. 55 Gabriel Weisberg, ‘Siegfried Bing, Belgium and the global vision of La Maison moderne in the 1890s’, in: Virginie Devillez, ed, Siegfried Bing & La Belgique/ België (Brussels: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, 2010), 119–39. Bing’s harmonious rooms, gracious and refined but at the same time sober and functional,

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58 59

60

61 62 63

Notes were described by some as being representative of modern French interior decoration, but were actually much inspired and largely designed by Belgians, such as Picard, Henry Van de Velde and Georges Lemmen; see Jennifer Beauloye, ‘Siegfried Bing, de l’inauguration de la galerie L’Art nouveau (1895) au Pavillon Art nouveau Bing’ (1900), in: Virginie Devillez, ed, Siegfried Bing & La Belgique/België (Brussels: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, 2010), 141–54. Weisberg, ‘Siegfried Bing’, 126–7, 136–7. Meier-Graefe notably had his show interior designed by Henry Van de Velde. On de Goncourt, see Juliet Simpson, ‘Edmond de Goncourt’s Décors. Towards the Symbolist Maison d’Art’, Romance Studies 29, no. 1 (2011), 1–18. These new display modes were also demonstrated at the 1900 Paris World Fair in Bing’s ‘Pavillon de l’Art Nouveau’ (considered a Gesamtkunstwerk) and in the much applauded, larger German pavilion, showcasing ‘une decoration luxueuse d’un grand effet d’ensemble [ … qui] empêche la monotonie qui résulte de l’accumulation des objets de même nature dans un seul endroit’; see G. Moynet, ‘Palais des Invalides. Mobilier et Industries diverses (sections étrangères) (suite) II’, in: Encyclopédie du Siècle. L’Exposition de Paris (1900), vol. 3 (Paris: Montgrédien, 1900), 17–19; as cited in Werner Adriaenssens, ‘Art deco. Evolutie en beïnvloeding van de interieurkunsten in België na het uitdoven van de Art Nouveau tot de tentoonstelling van 1925’, in Art nouveau & design. Sierkunst van 1830 tot Expo 58, ed. Claire Leblanc (Tielt: Lannoo, 2005), 107. Louis Maeterlinck, ‘Nos musées des beaux-arts’, L’Art Moderne (1905), 313–4. Ibid., Maeterlinck was moreover inspired by similar new display strategies introduced into the Berlin State Museum in the 1880s and 1890s by Wilhelm Bode, who likewise relied greatly on the loans and donations of local private collectors; see Sven Kuhrau, ‘Die neuen Medici. Der Einfluss großbürgerlicher Mäzene auf die Museumsreform’, in Museumsinszenierungen. Zur Geschichte der Institution des Kunstmuseums, die Berliner Museumslandschaft 1830–1990, ed. Alexis Joachimides et al. (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1995), 157–70. Johan De Smet and Monique Tahon-Vanroose, De kunst van het schenken. Mecenaat, Schenkingen en schenkers in het Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent (1798–2012) (Ghent: Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent, 2012), 32–38; Monique Tahon-Vanroose, De vrienden van Scribe. De Europese smaak van een Gents mecenas (Antwerp: Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon, 1998), 29–30. Liesbet Nys, ‘Aspirations to Life. Pleas for New Forms of Display in Belgian Museums around 1900’, Journal of the History of Collections 20 (2008), 119–21. See: Simpson, ‘Edmond de Goncourt’s Décors’. According to Joseph Fiévez, ‘sa collection et lui-même, c’était tout un’; see Joseph Fievez, Collection Ch.-L. Cardon. Catalogue de tableaux anciens … (Brussels: Dewarichet, 1921), vol. 1, 1.

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64 While from a twenty-first-century perspective, Cardon’s interiors may still appear overabundantly decorated, they certainly represented a more sober display compared to the late-nineteenth-century standard of ‘picturesque chaos’. In 1896–97, Cardon had been moreover involved in designing a new, more sober and light arrangement of the old and modern paintings in the Brussels Museum of Fine Arts which was positively received in L’Art Moderne. On the new sobriety in the display of collections of old art around 1900, see Sven Kuhrau, ‘Alfred Messel als Architekt privater Kunstsammler’, in Alfred Messel (1853–1909). Visionär der Großstadt, Elke Blauert, Robert Habel, and Hans-Dieter Nägelke eds. (Berlin: Kunstbibliothek Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2009), 80. 65 After the collector’s death, the column was donated to the Royal Museum of Art and History by his heirs: Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Brussels, inv. nr. 5873. On the bequest: Archives KMKG-MRAH, Brussels, DL 16/666. 66 Louis Dumont-Wilden, ‘Collection de M. Ch.-L. Cardon (Bruxelles)’, Les Arts. Revue Mensuelle des Musées, Collections, Expositions 8, no. 94 (October 1909), 1–21. 67 Ibid., 10. 68 Ibid., 16–17. 69 Ibid., 17 (‘cette [douce] lumière des musées qui semble s’irradier des tableaux accrochés aux cimaises’). 70 Ibid. (‘M. Cardon s’est uniquement laissé guider par sa fantaisie’). 71 Ibid., 6 (‘ce flair spécial de l’amateur, ce sûr instinct du passionné de peinture’). 72 Ibid., 4 (‘des gens qui ont été amenés à la collection par la nécessité où se trouve un homme d’une certaine culture ou d’une certaine fortune, d’acheter des tableaux’). 73 Peter Noever, ed., Yearning for Beauty: The Wiener Werkstätte and the Stoclet House (Vienna: MAK, 2006), published a large number of early-twentieth-century photographs of the palace and its interiors. Suzanne Stoclet, born Stevens, was instrumental in the couple’s decisions regarding their collection and the palace’s architecture. Early on, Suzanne Stevens was introduced into the artistic and intellectual community in Brussels and Paris by her father, the art dealer Arthur Stevens, who had manifold contacts with French avant-garde artists and who had advised king Leopold II and other Brussels art collectors such as Jules Van Praet; see Ingrid Goddeeris, ‘De drie broers Stevens. Over twee tentoonstellingen in 1850 en 1880’, in Alfred Stevens, Brussel-Parijs 1823–1906, ed. Saskia De Bodt et al. (Brussels: Mercatorfonds), 177–97. 74 Foreman Day, Every-Day Art, 219. 75 Emanuelle Job et al., ‘De decoratieve interieurschildering (1908) van Ludwig Heinrich Jungnickel in een kinderkamer van het Stoclet Paleis’, Gentse bijdragen tot de interieurgeschiedenis 37 (2010–2011), 121–9. 76 Foreman Day, Every-Day Art, 229. 77 Noever, Yearning for Beauty, 364.

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78 Jules Pierre van Goidsenhoven, Collection Adolphe Stoclet (Brussels: Laconti, 1956), vii–viii. 79 Maurice Culot and Anne-Marie Pirlot, Le Musée Charlier et Victor Horta. L’Hôtel Van Cutsem 1890–1893, 16 Avenue Des Arts, Saint-Josse-Ten-Noode (Brussels: Archives d’architecture moderne, 2012), 10. 80 Max Rooses, ‘Préface’, in Catalogue des tableaux de maîtres anciens et modernes … composant la collection de feu M. Edmond Huybrechts … (Antwerp: J. E. Buschmann, 1902), ii (‘Les toiles et les panneaux, accueillis avec prévenance, abusant bientôt de l’hospitalité, des salons gagnant l’escalier, en couvrant les parois, inondant les appartements de l’étage, le fumoir et le boudoir, montant jusqu’au plafond, barrant les portes, bouchant les fenêtres’). 81 Collections Albert Loïcq de Melle, Gand, Madame B.-V. et de Divers Amateurs. Tableaux Des 19e et 20e Siècles Des Écoles Belge et Française … (Brussels: Galerie Georges Giroux, 1933), nr. 87. 82 Collections Albert Loïcq, nr. 80. Alfred Delaunois was a pupil of Constantin Meunier. 83 Krzysztof Pomian, ‘Collection. Une typologie historique’, Romantisme 31, no. 112 (2001), 9–22. 84 Leys was a collector himself who used his collection as a source of inspiration for his own work; see Jan Dirk Baetens, Henri Leys, of het verleden herdacht. Resurrectionisme als schepping en herschepping, unpubl. PhD dissertation, KU Leuven, 2011. 85 Aron, ‘La Maison d’Art d’Edmond Picard’. 86 Block, Bruxelles-Paris, 112. 87 See, for example, Willem van Haecht, The Cabinet of Cornelis van der Geest, 1628, oil on panel, Antwerp, Rubenshuis.

Chapter 4 1 2

3

For the most comprehensive discussion of European Symbolism, see Rodolphe Rapetti, Symbolism (Paris: Flammarion, [2005] 2016). Critical works by Francine-Claire Legrand, Le Symbolisme en Belgique (Paris: Laconti, 1971); Paul Gorceix, Fin-de-siècle et symbolisme en Belgique (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1998), Patrick McGuinness (ed.), Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin-de siecle (Exeter: University of Exteter Press, 2001) and Michel Draguet, Le Symbolisme en Belgique (Paris: Fond Mercator, 2010), in particular, have been instrumental in shaping and foregrounding the field of Belgian Symbolism. The interior is also neglected in defining studies of Symbolism, such as that by Edward Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972) and

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5

6 7

8

9

10

11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

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Robert L. Delevoy Symbolists and Symbolism (Paris: Skira, 1982) or later by Rapetti, Symbolism (2005). Nathalie Aubert, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture and Patrick McGuinness, ‘Introduction’, in From Art Nouveau to Surrealism: Belgian Modernity in the Making, ed. Nathalie Aubert, Jean-Phillippe Fraiture and Patrick McGuinness (1–8) (London: Legenda, 2007), 2. Patrick Laude, ‘Belgian Symbolism and Belgian Literary Identity’, in Patrick McGuinness (ed.) Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle (2000), 194–209 (194). Laude, ‘Belgian Symbolism and Belgian Literary Identity’, 195. In a letter to Jules Du Jardin, writing of the Pointillists, Ensor comments on the ‘absolute immpersonality of their work’ [‘l’impersonnalité absolue de leurs œuvres.’] (Letter to Jules Du Jardin, October 6 1899, in James Ensor Lettres, edited by Xavier Tricot (Brussels: Labor, 1999, 272). Patrick McGuinness, ‘Belgian Literature and the Symbolism of the Double’, in From Art Nouveau to Surrealism, edited by Nathalie Aubert, Jean-Phillippe Fraiture and Patrick McGuinness (8–22), 13. [‘L’antique élément gérmanique, digue puissante contre l’envahissement des tendances françaises.’] Cited in ibid, 10. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. For Laude, from the perspective of a national literature La Légende et les aventures héroïques, joyeuses et glorieuses d’Ulenspiegel et de Lamme Goedzak au pays de Flandre et ailleurs, is a ‘foundational epic’ and one which is linked to the birth of Belgian Symbolism. See: ‘Belgian Symbolism and Belgian Literary Identity’, 195. Patrick McGuinness, ‘Belgian Literature and the Symbolism of the Double’, 10 Laude, ‘Belgian Symbolism and Belgian Literary Identity’, 199. McGuinness, ‘Belgian Literature and the Symbolism of the Double’, 13. (Emphasis, McGuinness.) Maryanne Stevens has argued that ‘unlike its literary counterpart, pictorial Symbolism has traditionally been taken to cover a much wider temporal and geographical area’, The Burlington Magazine 118, no. 875 (February 1976), 120–4 (120). Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Enquête de Jules Huret’, in Igitur, Divagations,Un coup de dès (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 392. McGuinness, ‘Belgian Literature and the Symbolism of the Double’, 3. Cited in Paul Gorceix, ‘Introduction générale’, La Belgique artistique et littéraire (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1997) (13–54), 36. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 43. The literary style of Verhaeren is significant, since it was closely associated with his desire to find a means of expression reflecting his Flemish origins. It was seen as aberrant, as a contemporary critic’s description of Les Moines indicates: ‘It is an

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international congress of grammar mistakes, or baroque phrases, of false images and incomprehensible metaphors. […] It is a scal dance around grammar, logic and common sense. You would think the words were running about in bags.’ (Anonymous author), La Jeune Belgique, Brussels, May, 1886, 308–9. 21 (Anonymous author), cited in La Jeune Belgique, Brussels, September 1890, 352–3. 22 Picard, in particular was a key figure in the Belgian avant­garde. In 1881, he created the periodical, L’Art moderne, in 1901, he founded La Libre Académie en opposition à l’académie Royale de Belgique, while his home, known as ‘La Maison d’art’, was a meeting­-place for intellectuals and artists. 23 See Paul Aron’s Les Écrivains belges et le socialisme (Brussels: Labor, 1994), which discusses in detail the role of the political climate with regard to the Renaissance of Belgian literature. The importance of this movement, which included writers as diverse and historically influential as Verhaeren, Lemonnier, Rodenbach, Grégoire Le Roy, and Maurice Maeterlinck, is observed by Picard: ‘je ne crois pas, toute proportion gardée, qu’il y ait n’importe où un mouvement d’art aussi intense, aussi sincère que dans notre petite Belgique.’ Cited in ‘Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire’, in L’Art moderne, Brussels, June 14 1891, 188–9. 24 The practitioners of Art Nouveau drew upon the work of Ruskin and Morris and those of the Arts and Crafts movement and did not view their art as elitist. However, in practice, only very wealthy clients could afford their homes which were often luxurious and sumptuous in the materials used. 25 For a comprehensive overview of the style and its aesthetics, see Pierre Loze and Francois Loze, Art Nouveau in Belgium (Brussels: Snoeck-Ducaji & Zoon, 1993). 26 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Interior, The Trace’ in The Arcades Project, translated by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Harvard: The Belknap Press, 1999), 220. 27 Quoted in Les Concepts nationaux de la littérature, II, edited by Stefan Gross, Johannes Thomas (Berlin: Alano/Rader Publikationen, 1989), 79. 28 Quoted in Paul Aron (editor), La Belgique artistique et littéraire (Brussels: Labor, 1997), 86. 29 McGuinness, ‘Belgian Literature and the Symbolism of the Double’, 19. 30 Laude, ‘Belgian Symbolism and Belgian Literary Identity’, 205. 31 Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-morte [1892] (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 58. 32 Ibid., 121. 33 Ibid., 61. 34 It has echoes of the motif of the aquarium in Huysmans’ A Rebours, an artificial universe, defined by its closure; one which is emblematic of the narrator’s own retreat into his decadent private sphere. 35 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space ([1958], Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 84. 36 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-morte, 267. 37 Ibid., 269.

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38 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 85. 39 See Hannah Scott’s excellent study, Broken Glass, Broken World. Glass in French Culture in the Aftermath of 1870 (Oxford: Legenda, 2016). 40 Paul Gorceix, ‘Le Règne du silence: introduction’, in Paul Gorceix, Fin de siècle et Symbolisme en Belgique (Brussels: Labor), 380–7(382). 41 Georges Rodenbach, ‘La vie des Chambres’ in Paul Gorceix, Fin de siècle et Symbolisme en Belgique, 387–90. 42 Georges Rodenbach, ‘Aquarium mental’ in Paul Gorceix, Fin de siècle et Symbolisme en Belgique, 413. 43 Georges Rodenbach, ‘Le soir dans les vitres’, Paul Gorceix, Fin de siècle et Symbolisme en Belgique, 414 44 Paul Gorceix, ‘Le Règne du silence: introduction’, in Paul Gorceix, Fin de siècle et Symbolisme en Belgiqu, 403. 45 Andrea Del Lungo, La Fenêtre: Sémiologie et histoire de la representation littéraire (Paris: Seuil, 2014), 484. 46 Andrea Del Lungo, La Fenêtre, 12 47 Maurice Materlinck, ‘Hôpital’ in Paul Gorceix, Fin de siècle et Symbolisme en Belgique, 321–2. 48 Paul Gorceix, ‘Introduction générale’, in Fin de siècle et Symbolisme en Belgique (1998), 11–84 (43). 49 Maurice Maeterlinck, Carnets de travail, I, edited by Fabrice Van De Kerckhove (Brussels, Labor, 2002), 37. 50 Benjamin, ‘The Interior, the Trace’, 214. 51 Hollis Clayson, ‘Threshold Space: Parisian modernism betwixt and between (1869 to 1891)’ in Impressionist Interiors, edited by J. Mc Lean (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2008) (14-30), 15. 52 Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 61–2. 53 Andrea Del Lungo, La Fenêtre, 8. 54 Maurice Maeterlinck, Intérieur, in Œuvres II, edited by Paul Gorceix (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1999), 501–21 (503). 55 Maurice Maeterlinck, Intérieur, 503. 56 Fabrice Van De Kerckhove, ‘Introduction’ in Maeterlinck, Carnets de travail, I (7–142), 30. 57 Ibid., 30. 58 Maurice Materlinck, Intérieur, 519. 59 Ibid., 508. 60 McGuinness, ‘Belgian Literature and the Symbolism of the Double’, 10. 61 Paul Aron, ‘Du Divertissemement populaire au culte de l’art: Naissance de la scène moderne’, in La Belgique Artistique et Litteraire, edited by Paul Aron (Brussels: Editions complexe, 1997) (622–86), 627.

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62 L’Intruse, in Œuvres II, edited by Paul Gorceix, Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1999 (241–81), 243. 63 Patrick McGuinness, Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (London: Oxford University Press), 187. 64 Edward Lucie-Smith, Symbolist Art, 122. 65 Khnopff ’s works are difficult to categorize and as Dorothy Kosinski points out ‘[in] a body of work dominated by mirrors and mirroring, there are remarkably few actual portraits and a specifically noteworthy absence of self-portraits.’ In ‘The Gaze of Fernand Khnopff ’, in The Artist and the Camera, Degas to Picasso, edited by D. Kosinski (New Haven: Yale University Press), 142–56, 147. 66 The painting was the source of a very public dispute with James Ensor, who claimed it copied the theme of his 1881 painting Russian Music (Brussels: MRBAB). 67 Michel Draguet, Khnopff ou L’ambigu poétique (Paris: Crédit Communal, 1995), 81. 68 Ibid., 82. 69 Michel Draguet, Khnopff ou L’ambigu poétique, 82. 70 Kosinski, ‘The Gaze of Fernand Khnopff ’, 148. 71 Ibid., 106. 72 Kosinski, ‘The Gaze of Fernand Khnopff ’, 148. 73 Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance (1862–1871), edited by H. Mondor (Paris: 1959), 137. 74 ‘Les chambres, qu’on croirait d’inanimes decors/ Apparat de silence aux étoffe inertes / ont cependant une âme, une vie aussi certes / Une voix close aux influences du dehors/ Qui répand leur pensée en halos de soudines … ’ Rodenbach, ‘La vie des chambres’ in Le Règne du silence, in Fin de siècle et Symbolisme en Belgique, 387. 75 Francine-Claire Legrand, Le Symbolisme en Belgique (Brussels: Laconti, 1971), 46. 76 Odilon Redon, A Soi-Même notes sur la vie, l’art et les artistes ([1922] Paris: José Corti, 1989), 124–5. 77 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Salon de 1845’, in Œuvres complètes II, edited by C. Pichois (Paris; La Pléiade 1976) (351–407) 390. 78 Robert Hoozee, ‘Drawings and Etchings’ in Robert Hoozee and Catherine Ziegler, Between Street and Mirror: The Drawings of James Ensor (New York: The Drawing Centre and University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 19. 79 Marcel De Maeyer, ‘Mystic Death of a Theologian’, in Robert Hoozee and Catherine Ziegler, Between Street and Mirror: The Drawings of James Ensor, 193. 80 Susan M. Canning, ‘The Devil’s Mirror: Private Fantasy and Public Vision’, in Robert Hoozee and Catherine Ziegler, Between Street and Mirror: The Drawings of James Ensor, 61. 81 Emile Verhaeren, Sur James Ensor (Brussels: G. Van Oest & cie, 1908), 92–3. 82 The work was destroyed during the bombing of Ostend in 1940. 83 Diane Lesko, James Ensor: The Creative Years (Princeton, New Jersey: 1985), 91.

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84 Émile Verhaeren, Sur James Ensor, 83. 85 Elizabeth Clegg, ‘Léon Spilliart: Self-Portraits’, The Burlington Magazine 149, no. 1251 (June 2007), 427–8. 86 Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’, in Œuvres complètes, II, edited by C. Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 695. 87 Aubert, Fraiture and McGuinness, ‘Introduction’, 2.

Chapter 5 Christopher Reed, Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 7. 2 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: Verso, 1973), 167–8. 3 Benjamin, 168. 4 Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: Cities and Homes in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 141. 5 Marcus, Apartment Stories, 144. 6 Reed, Not at home, 19. 7 In Bruges-la-Morte, the main protagonist, Hugues Viane, has been widowed for some years; both of Proust’s volumes La Prisonnière and Albertine disparue recount the relationship, life and subsequent death of the narrator’s lover, Albertine in a riding accident. Both women died young. 8 Christopher Reed, Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 7. 9 In all aspects but one; for Freud, there is no ‘fall in self-esteem in grief ’, 153. 10 Traits which can be aggravated by self-reproaches and self-revilings and can culminate in a delusional expectation of punishment. Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XIV, 1914–1916, On the History of the Psycho-analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 153. 11 Although I am not going to address this question here, there is no doubt that the insertion of photographs (for the first time ever in a novel) of the deserted city reinforces this sense of continuity, not only between the desolate inside of the house and the outside but all over Bruges presented as a somnolent, ghostly place. 12 Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1998), 51–2. This edition will be referred to as (GF) after the short title in order to distinguish between the French version and the English translation. 1

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13 Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte translated by Mike Mitchell (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2005), 25. 14 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (GF), 66. 15 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, 30. 16 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (GF), 66. 17 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, 30. 18 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (GF), 291. 19 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (GF), 63. 20 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, 28–9. 21 In the late fifteenth century, Bruges fell into economic decline because of the silting u of the Zwyn channel, its access to the sea. 22 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Vintage, 2005), 208. 23 Marcus, Apartment Stories, 162. 24 Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 590. 25 Marcel Proust, The Captive (London: Penguin, 1986), 76–7. 26 Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 22. 27 Benjamin, Illuminations, 198. 28 ‘La ville est fière, et douce, et grande par la mort’ [‘The city is proud, and peaceful, and great by its death’] wrote Verhaeren after Rodenbach, ‘Aujourd’hui’, Poèmes légendaires de Flandre et de Brabant (Paris: Société littéraire de France, 1916), 78. 29 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (GF), 71. 30 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, 33. 31 Rushworth, Discourses of Mourning, 96. 32 Jennifer Rushworth, Discourses of Mourning, in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 91. 33 Jacques Derrida, Béliers. Le dialogue ininterrompu: entre deux infinis, le poème (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 74; ‘Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue−Between Two infinities, the Poem’, trans. by Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski, in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 135–63 (63) quoted by Rushworth, Discourses of Mourning, 96. 34 Rushworth, Discourses of Mourning, 98. 35 Ibid., 98. 36 Derrida, ‘Fors: les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’, in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cryptonymie: le verbier de l’homme aux loups (Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1976), 25; ‘Foreword: Fors: the Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, translated by Barbara Johnson, in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf ’s Man’s Magic Word: A cryptonomy, translated by Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xxi: Quoted by Rushworth, Discourses of Mourning, 98. 37 Derrida, ‘Fors’, 25; ‘Foreword: Fors’, xxi Quoted by Rushworth, Discourses of Mourning, 99.

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38 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (GF), 52. 39 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, 25. 40 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (GF), 57. 41 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, 26. 42 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (GF), 62. 43 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, 28. 44 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (GF), 58. 45 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, 27. 46 Derrida, ‘Fors: les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’ 25; ‘Foreword: Fors: the Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, translated by Barbara Johnson, in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf ’s Man’s Magic Word: A cryptonomy, trans. by Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xxi. 47 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (GF), 58–9. 48 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, 28. 49 Derrida, Chaque fois unique, 178; The Work of Mourning, 143. 50 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (GF), 58. 51 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, 28. 52 Later in the novel, when the fate of the house is nearly sealed, Rodenbach writes: ‘cette chevelure, d’où dépendait peut-être la vie de la maison’ (GF), 141. 53 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (GF), 259−60. 54 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, 123. 55 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (GF), 138. 56 Ibid. 57 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (GF), 58. 58 Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, 27. 59 Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 579. 60 Proust, La Prisonnière, 682. 61 Ibid., 681. 62 Proust, The Captive, 173–4. 63 By Ferdinand Barbedienne (1810–1892), a commercial bronze founder who specialized in the manufacturing of small replicas of statues by famous artists. 64 Proust, La Prisonnière, 682. 65 Ibid., 682. 66 Proust, The Captive, 174. 67 Georges Poulet, Proustian Space (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 59. 68 Marcel Proust, Albertine disparue (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 3. 69 Proust, The Fugitive, 425. 70 Proust, Albertine disparue, 75. 71 Proust, The Fugitive, 503.

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72 Proust, Albertine disparue, 77. 73 Proust, The Fugitive, 506. 74 It was John Ruskin who, in ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ (in Sesame and Lilies which Proust translated in 1906) described the domestic interior as a shelter, a ‘place of peace’ (New York: J. Wiley and Sons, 1887), 99. 75 Proust, La Prisonnière, 682. 76 Proust, The Captive, 174. 77 Proust, Albertine disparue, 13. 78 Proust, The Fugitive, 436−7. 79 Proust, The Fugitive, 545. 80 Jacques Derrida, Memories for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 37. 81 Proust, Albertine disparue, 105. 82 Proust, The Fugitive, 534. 83 Rushworth, Discourses of Mourning, 99. 84 Proust, The Fugitive, 567. 85 Proust, Albertine disparue, 93. 86 Proust, Albertine disparue, 218. Quoted by Rushworth, 99. 87 Proust, The Fugitive, 603−4. 88 Proust, Albertine disparue, 31. 89 Proust, The Fugitive, 456. 90 Proust, Albertine disparue, 138. 91 The focus is entirely on the bedrooms and, in the case of Bruges-la-Morte the two crypt-like rooms harbouring the ‘relic’ of Viane’s dead wife’s hair.

Chapter 6 1

2

3

For its performance and reception, please see Cardelli, Martina, ‘Introduzione.’ in Jules Romains. Cromedeyre-le-vieil. Commedia in cinque atti (Macerata: Liberilibri, 2009), ix–xxi. On the unanime as the spatial embodiment of an immediate presence with reality constructed of a simultaneity of points of view in the framework of other cases of spatial imageries in literature, see: Dominique Bauer, ‘Le présent et l’absence dans l’imaginaire des espaces intérieurs.’ in Guy Van Kerckhoven and Robert Alexander. L’Espace, les phénomènes, l’existence, De l’architectonique phénoménologique à l’architecture (Louvain: Peeters, 2017): 147–61. Peter J. Norrisch in this respect interestingly interprets Cromedeyre-le-vieil as ‘in part the continuation of a plea’ for the adoption of ‘la vie unanime’ in real life: Peter J. Norrisch. Drama of the group. A Study of Unanimism in the plays of Jules Romains (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 120.

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For example, the theme of villagers building their own church against the will of ecclesiastical authorities is based on real events that occurred in the village of Monedeyre (See: André Bourdin, Connaissance de Jules Romains discutée par Jules Romains de l’académie française (Paris: Flammarion, 45.)) Cromedeyre itself is an amalgam of various villages, whereas its internal structure is an obvious fiction. 5 Jules Romains, Cromedeyre-le-vieil (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 18: ‘ni clocher, ni prêtre, ni messe.’ 6 Romains, Cromedeyre, 85: ‘Cromedeyre tout entier est une seule maison’. 7 Romains, Jules, La Vie unanime (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 49. 8 Romains, La Vie unanime, 53. 9 Romains, La Vie unanime, 47: ‘Rien ne cesse d’être intérieur.’ 10 Romains, La Vie unanime, 48: ‘ma chambre où l’on est seul.’ 11 Romains, Jules, Mort de quelqu’un (Paris: Gallimard, 1923), 150–1: ‘Là-bas, dans ce creux que fait le boulevard, entre la chaussée et les murs des maisons.’ Another good example of the individual losing its monoscopic spatial demarcation can be found in Le Poème du Métropolitain, where the individual evaporates for an instant. Individuals are momentarily ‘not thinking anymore about themselves’. They all want the same thing, before they regain their ‘autonomy’ and ‘let the collective soul vanish’: Romains, Jules. Le Poème du métropolitain (Paris: Mercure de France, 1910), X. 12 Peter J. Norrisch, ‘Unanimist Elements in the Works of Durkheim and Verhaeren’, French Studies XI, 1 (1957), 38–49; 46–8. 13 Romains, Jules, Le Bourg régénéré. Petite légende (Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle revue Française, 1920), 20. 14 In her article on Léger and unanimism, Judy Lund underlines the connection between the porous and flexible spaces of unanimism and the same elusiveness and permeability that spaces display in Léger’s imagery of smoke: Judy Sund, ‘Fernand Léger and Unanimism: When there’s Smoke’ Oxford Art Journal 7, 1 (1984), 49–56. 15 Dominique Bauer, Beyond the Frame. Case Studies (Brussels: ASP, 2016), 35–46. 16 Marie-Hélène Boblet-Viant and Dominique Viart, ‘Esthétiques de la simultanéité.’ In Dominique Viart, ed., Jules Romains et les écritures de la simultanéité (Lille: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 1996), 26–7. On the radical present with Romains, see: Dominique Bauer, ‘From the Enclosed Individual to Spatial Notions of a Beyond: Spatial Imagery in the Work of Jules Romains.’ In Dominique Bauer and Michael J. Kelly. The Imagery of Interior Spaces (New York: Punctum, 2016), 41–52. 17 Didier Maleuvre, ‘Philosopher dans le boudoir: l’intérieur dans l’espace du dixneuvième siècle,’ The French Review 68, 3 (1995), 431–44; 434; 437; 439. As to the historical context and various examples of this pre-existing image, see: Bauer, Beyond the Frame, 48–137.

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18 In Puissances de Paris for example, the people in the Galeries de l’Odéon, absorbed into browsing through the volumes in front of them, constitutes an only ‘thin group’ … that ‘lives little’ and has no unity or center: Romains, Jules. Puissances de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1919), 113. Likewise, the Bibliothèque Nationale has an ‘inferior soul’ (‘une âme inférieure’) and its ‘discontinuous ... structure’, … only gives ‘the illusion of unity, but hides the insignificance of its life:’ (115: ‘une structure … discontinue … qui donne l’illusion de l’unité, mais qui cache l’insignifiance de sa vie.’) 19 The term race in this context, like in the example of the Provençal ‘raço’ with Mistral, cannot simply be translated as ‘race.’ In the case of Mistral it is first and foremost connected with language and through language with custom and history and does not necessarily have a distinctive biological connotation, apart from the case of the Arlésienne. In that sense, ‘raço’ is more concrete, particular, palpable, ‘private’ also than the notion of citoyenneté that pertains to the modern world and the modern public space. On ‘raço’ with Mistral, see: Frédéric Saumade, ‘Race régionale, identité nationale. Pour une ethnologie des comportements électoraux,’ Terrain 27 (1996), 101–14. The same also goes for ‘nacioun’ (nation) that also has a more concrete and private nature. 20 An important case that exemplifies this mechanism is the so-called Salle de France in the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro, a gallery dedicated to pre-industrial life in France and organized by the co-conservator of the museum Armand Landrin. In Landrin’s article on traditional costumes in the Trocadéro, the authenticity of pre-modern France is inextricably connected with the ‘regional type’ (‘type de la region’) and the ‘local housework’ (‘ménage local’), Fernand (sic) Landrin. ‘Anciens costumes populaires français au palais du Trocadéro,’ La Nature: Revue des sciences et de leurs applications aux arts de l’industrie 17 (1889), 295–8. Furthermore and in the framework of the major importance of origin and affiliation in sciences like ethnography, archeology or paleontology, not mentioning the locality (localité) from which an object originates is considered by Landrin to be ‘une lacune importante:’ Armand Landrin and Paul Sébillot. ‘Instructions sommaires relatives aux collections ethnographiques à recueillir dans les pays civilisés et essais de classification,’ La Tradition en Poitou et en Charente (Paris: Librairie de la tradition nationale, 1897), 465–75 (251). On the Salle de France and the way the gallery first and foremost represented ‘a French primitiveness being effaced by the progressive forces of modernity’, see: Daniel Degroff. ‘Ethnographic Display and Political Narrative: The Salle de France of the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro’; in David Hopkin and Timothy Baycroft, Folklore and Nationalism in Europe during the Long Nineteenth Century (Brill: Leiden-Boston, 2012), 113–35, especially 122–3. 21 The ambivalence of race between modernity and the imagery of the pre-modern is closely related to an idea expressed by George W. Stocking in his seminal

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work on race: whereas in the eighteenth-century context of the Enlightenment, civilization was thought to be a capacity inherent in all human beings, it was increasingly interpreted in racial terms in the nineteenth century, when ‘the idea of civilization was elaborated simultaneously with the social and material reality which it symbolized’, an evolution that would make the coexistence of primitivism, as it traditionally came forward in le bon sauvage, and progress in civilization increasingly difficult: George W. Stocking. Race, Culture and Evolution. Essays in the History of Anthropology (London: Collier-MacMillan, 1968), 35. 22 He does so, for example, in the Cansoun de la coupo (The song of the chalice), where he refers to the ‘old proud and free people’ (‘vièi pople fièr e libre’), proclaims that the (Provençal) nation will fall if the félibres do (‘E se toumbon li felibre, toumbara nosto nacioun’) and cheers ‘the race that regerminates’ (‘raço que regreio’), Frédéric Mistral. ‘Cansoun de la coupo’ Armana Prouvençau 14 (1868), 16–18, 16; see also note 18. 23 Romains, Jules. Cromedeyre-le-Vieil (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 18: ‘C’est la maison de l’étranger/Cromedeyre sur sa montagne/N’a pas de toit pour l’étranger.’ 24 Romains, Jules. Manuel de déification (Paris: Bibliothèque internationale d’Edition E. Sansot, 1910), 13: ‘Ils existent à l’heure où je parle, mais d’une manière future et inassouvie.’ 25 Romains, Manuel, 48: ‘N’allez pas respecter l’opinion publique ni la coutume. La société n’est pas l’unanime.’ 26 Romains, Manuel, 37–8: ‘Le temps n’est pas venu que nous bâtissions la maison du culte … Quand l’heure approchera, nous chercherons les pierres, les charpentes, les maçons.’ 27 Romains, Cromedeyre, 61. 28 Romains, Cromedeyre, 62: ‘Dans un terroir qui ne connut point/ D’autre tenancier que Cromedeyre.’ 29 At various instances throughout the play, the race of Cromedeyre is called pure and unspoiled, characteristics that connect with the harshness and austerity of the place that bear a dimension of superiority, hostility and violence. Thomas de Pibou, not of the village, has a dog from Cromedeyre, ‘of the antique race, without bastardy’: Romains, Cromedeyre, 22: ‘de la race antique, sans bâtardise.’ Thérèse, Emmanuel’s future wife and from Laussonne is ‘only a poor Laussonne, with the blood of the little race’: Cromedeyre, 90: ‘Je suis une pauvre Laussonne/ J’ai le sang de la petite race.’ The race of Cromedeyre is ‘la haute race’: Cromedeyre, 144. 30 Cromedeyre, 63: ‘Depuis le temps situé hors de toute mémoire/ Où Cromedeyre est né du monde en cet endroit même/ - Car c’est là où sont nos pieds qu’il a crevé le sol-/Je dis qu’il n’est rien arrivé de plus solennel.’ 31 Cromedeyre, 39: ‘La senteur du feu de chez moi/ La senteur de la terre même.’ 32 Cromedeyre, 144: ‘Bien avant qu’il y eût le peuple et la loi de Paris.’

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33 This does not mean that regional literature must be conceived as exclusively relevant for regional interests or that there is something like being clear-cut antimodern, quite to the contrary in fact. Anti-modern strands were very much part of modernity’s self-critical character and broadly shared concerns about time, history and society that carry a much more universal dimension. Mistral in this sense actually testifies to and explores in his work an historical awareness that was very typical of modern culture as such. See: Dominique Bauer, ‘Text, Topos and the Awareness of History in Frédéric Mistral’s Poème du Rhône’, Dix-Neuf 23, 3–4 (2019): 254–64. 34 Romains stated that his ‘compatriots’ of the Velay were not at all shocked by Cromedeyre. Romains was under the impression they found the plot ‘natural, following the characteristics of their terroir and race’: ‘Je veux dire qu’ils y ont retrouvé des tendances profondes de leur terroir et de leur race, … Bourdin, Connaissance de Jules Romains’, 46. The people of especially the haut Velay are, exactly like those from Cromedeyre, and old, isolated, independent race. The originality of the people of the Velay resides in their ‘race,’ in their physiology, a crucial aspect of the regionalist concept of individual people that are a ‘general type’ at the same time. Romains stresses that their physiology differs from that of the inhabitants of the neighboring Auvergne and Languedoc. The ‘type humaine’ of the Velay is very probably one of the ‘most antique’ of France: Bourdin, Connaissance de Jules Romains, 24. 35 On the Félibrige, its name, place in the revival of Provençal language and culture, its history and objectives, see: Simon Calamel and Dominique Javel, La langue d’oc pour étendard. Les Félibres (1854–2002) (Toulouse: Éditions Édisud, 2002), especially 29–162. 36 This side of Mistral’s work cannot be detached from a deep, modern awareness of the ephemerality of history on identitary, cultural and biographical levels that veined contemporary culture and his work, as were his responses to this modern challenge. As this topic cannot be treated in full within the scope of this chapter, it suffices here to point out that recent scholarship on Mistral has stressed the strong dynamic of absence in his work that surfaces in a literary imagery of problematic or unmentioned interior spaces and existentially ambiguous protagonists. These communicate the world of the ‘jadis’ also as a sublimated, constructive absence from which literature and the literary imagination itself spring. See: Dominique Bauer, ‘Text, Topos and the Awareness of History in Frédéric Mistral’s Poème du Rhône’, Dix-Neuf 23, 3–4 (2019): 254–64. 37 One can in this respect also refer to the use of diorama’s in the Museon Arlaten, and in the Provençal ‘mas’ (farm), with Mistral as ‘président d’honneur’ of its ‘comité de patronage’ at the 1906 Colonial Exhibition in Marseille. At this event, seven diaromas with panoramic views of iconic Provençal landscapes surrounded

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a central viewpoint in the shape of the interior of a Provençal ‘mas’; for its description and photographs, see: Gérard Baudin. Frédéric Mistral. Illustre et méconnu (Paris: HC Éditions, 2010), The same strategy is also applied in Mistral’s writings. As Rudolph Schenda mentions, in Mireille, one sees (supposedly) from the castle of Les Baux ‘the entire extent of the serene Provençal landscape’: Rudolph Schenda. ‘Frédéric Mistral’s Poem Mireille and Provençal Identity.’ In Lauri Honko, ed., Religion, Myth, and Folklore in the World’s Epics: The Kalevala and its Predecessors (New York- Berlin, 1990), 359–78, 371. Visual completeness thus matched the completeness of a universe made out of an object on display. Most of the literature and criticism on Mistral in ethnographical literature point to this distinctive characteristic of Mistral, the Félibrige, its projects and its connection with musea like the Trocadéro. Anne Dymond. ‘Displaying the Arlésienne: Museums, Folklife and Regional Identity in France?’ In David Hopkin and Timothy Baycroft, eds, Folklore and Nationalism in Europe during the Long Nineteenth Century (Brill: Leiden-Boston, 2012),137–59, 143, states in this respect that the Salle the France represented ‘an eternal and timeless provincial life’ and that Mistral intended the Museon Arlaten to be complete. In his critical evaluation of the Felibrige’s treatment of language and traditions, Pierre Pasquini. ‘Le Félibrige et les traditions,’ Ethnologie française, nouvelle série 18, 3 (1988), 257–66, 259, argues that ritual, rites and costumes were treated as being ‘immuables’ and that the Provençal language as the félibres established it, was ‘au dessus du temps.’ Through dioramas with stereographic effects, the palpable object, but also by tying in beliefs and traditions with concrete places in his Trésor du Félibrige, Mistral created a universe that was present in its entirety. On the case of the Trésor: JeanClaude Bouvier. ‘Frédéric Mistral et l’ethnographie selon Lou Tresor dóu Felibrige’ Folklore 39, no. 202–204 (1986), 5–17, 15: the Bas-Rhodanien Provençal served as an image of the ‘Occitanie tout entière’ and offered ‘une vision globale des choses.’ On Mistral’s native Pays arlésien as a pars pro toto in the musea of the Félibrige, also see: Marie-Hélène Guyonnet, ‘Une Provence éternelle: les musées félibréens’ Ethnologie française, nouvelle série, 33, 3 (2003), 391–7. Cited in Dominique Séréna-Allier, ‘Mistral et “la renaissance de la Provence”: l’invention du Museon Arlaten,’ La pensée du midi 1, 1 (2000), 32–9, 10. When Armand Landrin describes the well-accomplished mannequins and diorama settings of the museum of Quimper, he, for example, states that the ceramic heads and hands were painted after life: Armand Landrin, ‘Les musées d’ethnographie,’ Revue des traditions populaires 3, 3, 5 (1888), 241–6, 242. Following Landrin’s Collections d’objets ethnographiques des peuples civilisés, Mistral’s collaborator in the Museon Arlaten, Emile Marignan, wrote a similar manual for collecting objects, in which photographs, scale models and moldings of hand and heads, samples of hair, are explicitly mentioned: Emile Marignan. Instructions pour la récolte des objets

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d’ethnographie du Pays arlésien (Musée arlésien d’ethnographie. Arles, 1896), 5, 11, 13. 42 Landrin, ‘Anciens costumes’, 295: ‘ … des mannequins modelés d’après nature et donnant une idée exacte du type de la région, … ’ 43 ‘Toute la vie vivante de notre Provence des temps passés est ici, comme dans un reliquaire’, quoted from the Armana Prouvençau (1900) in: Pasquini, ‘Le Félibrige,’ 265. 44 Romains, Cromedeyre, 60. 45 Cromedeyre, 63. 46 Cromedeyre, 109: ‘C’est le rocher du sol qui donne le ton.’ 47 Cromedeyre, 116: ‘C’est le mur du pays, le vêtement du peuple/ Le dehors qu’il présente à la neige et au vent …’; see also: 85: ‘Un homme de chez nous ne se convainc d’être dehors/ Que lorsqu’il a franchi le dernier mur de Cromedeyre.’ … 48 Cromedeyre, 60. 49 Cromedeyre, 85. 50 Cromedeyre, 117. 51 Cromedeyre, 60: ‘ … quelque issue, dont on ne sait si elle est l’ouverture d’une maison ou l’embrasure d’une ruelle.’ 52 Cromedeyre, 117. Helier’s house, for example, has a door that leads to the stable, one that goes to the rooms upstairs, another one that goes to the Sabas, and finally one that goes to Agnan: ‘Celle-ci conduit à l’étable/ Celle-ci aux chambres d’en haut/ Celle-ci va chez les Sabas/ Et cet autre enfin chez Agnan’. 53 idem, 86: ‘C’est une chose douce et chaleureuse/ Thérèse; une chose comme l’amour.’ 54 idem, 85: ‘Des passages tortueux se faufilent sous des voûtes … Puis tout se resserre encore et devient un long couloir/ À travers une porte on entend quelqu’un dormir/ Il y a des degrés; tu montes en courbant la tête/ Et soudain dans le rond d’une lumière balancée/ Une famille est là qui mange le repas du soir.’ 55 Romains’s unanimist work is veined with this kind of terminology. To give a few examples: In Un être en marche (Romains, Jules. Un être en marche (Paris: Mercure de France, 1910)) a group of boarding school girls walks into the country side, their arms ‘rhythmically paddling’ (10: ‘les bras … rament en cadence’), while the group it holds ‘does not look for a center’ (‘ne cherche pas de centre’) and with their soul that has to come out, ‘when the rhythm enters it’ (‘Quand le rythme entrera’). On rhythm, through the case of Les chants des dix années: Yves-Alain Favre. ‘Rythme et architecture dans la poésie de Jules Romains: Chants des dix années.’ In Cahiers Jules Romains 3 (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 62–74. As to the importance of circles and globes, in Les Copains (Romains, Jules. Les Copains. Paris: Gallimard, 1922) the two friends Bénin and Broudier decide that ‘today is placed under the sign of the circle. The circle is the principle of our movement’ (74: ‘Le jour d’hui est placé sous le signe du cercle. Le cercle est le principe de notre mouvement’). The thought of

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the two friends takes the shape of a circle, the room that of a hollow ball, and the planet ‘had never had so much reasons to be a globe’ (74: ‘ la planète n’eut jamais autant de raisons d’être un globe.’) 56 Romains, Mort de quelqu’un, 65. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid.: ’L’âme vacillait comme la flamme d’une lanterne quand une vitre s’est cassée’ 59 Romains, Manuel, 19: ‘Vous vous réunirez dans une chambre … Vous mettrez la lampe au milieu … Vous vous asseoirez en cercle, … Et vous mettrez votre groupe au monde.’ 60 Romains, Cromedeyre, 95. 61 Cromedeyre, 38–9. On the inn as a historical topos of storytelling, a tradition in which the Inn in Cromedeyre continues to inscribe itself: Will McMorran, The Inn and the Traveler. Digressive Topographies in the Early Modern European Novel (Oxford: Legenda, 2002), esp. 12–38. 62 Ibid. 63 Romains, Cromedeyre, 120. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. As to ‘the soft thickness of heath’, unanimes take and fill space. Therefore things, actions, qualities, atmospheres and people seem to have weight and volume, like in a very representative and similar passage in Mort de quelqu’un, where a flock of sheep possesses a ‘thick warmth, where one would like to immerse his hands’: Romains, Mort de quelqu’un, 147: ‘On sentait qu’il avait une chaleur épaisse; on avait envie d’y tremper les mains.’ 66 Romains, Cromedeyre, 122. 67 Ibid.: ‘L’âme se plaît entre l’étable et la cuisine.’ This phrasing fits in with the spatial conception of the unanime’s soul, which, for example,’ comes forward in ‘the soul’ of the coach company in Mort de quelqu’un that ‘oscillates between the bodies opposing each other’: Romains, Mort de quelqu’un, 58: ‘L’âme oscillait entre les corps opposés.’ 68 Cromedeyre, 123: ‘Les lits sont enfoncés dans une muraille de bois/ Ils vont loin, comme des trous d’insecte au cœur d’un vieil arbre’.

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Heidi Brevik-Zender has called such spaces ‘dislocations’, see Heidi BrevikZender, Fashioning Spaces: Mode and Modernity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Paris (Toronto—Buffalo—London: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 6–7. See Janet McLean, ‘Impressionist Interiors: An Introduction’, in Impressionist Interiors, ed. Janet McLean (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland, 2008), 11–13.

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Notes See for example Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society (New Haven—London: Yale University Press, 1991 [1988]); Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Oxford UK—Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1995 [1992]); Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, USA—London, UK: The MIT Press, 1997 [1991]); Michelle Perrot, Alain Corbin, Roger-Henri Guerrand, Catherine Hall, Lynn Hunt, Anne Martin-Fugier, Histoire de la vie privée IV: De la Révolution à la Grande Guerre (Paris: Seuil, 1999 [1997]); Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London—Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993 [1974]); Jeanne Gaillard, Florence Bourillon and Jean-Luc Pinol (ed.), Paris la ville (1852–1870) (Paris—Montréal: L’Harmattan, 1997 [Paris: Champion, 1976]); David Harvey, ‘Paris 1850–1870’ in David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985); Bruno Marchand, Paris, Histoire d’une ville (XIXe – XXe siècle) (Paris: Seuil, 1993); Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley—Los Angeles—London: University of California Press, 1982). See Paul Tucker, ‘The First Impressionist Exhibition in Context’, in Charles S. Moffett et al., The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886 (exhibition catalogue) (San Francisco: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1986), 93. See also Kimberly A. Jones, ‘Practice and Process in the Work of Frédéric Bazille’ in Michel Hilaire and Paul Perrin (ed.), Frédéric Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism (exhibition catalogue) (Paris: Musée d’Orsay / Flammarion, 2016), 162. See Sylvie Patin, ‘Berthe Morisot et ses confrères les impressionnistes’, in Sylvie Patry, Hugues Wilhelm, and Sylvie Patin, Berthe Morisot 1841–1895 (exhibition catalogue) (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2002), 42, 48–9; Charles F. Stuckey, William Scott, and Suzanne G. Lindsay, Berthe Morisot: Impressionist (exhibition catalogue) (London: Sotheby’s Publications, 1987), 54. On the soupeuses de restaurant de nuit – women looking to secure a client in late-night restaurants – and femmes de café, see Alain Corbin, ‘Demi-mondaines, femmes galantes, femmes de théâtre et soupeuses de restaurant de nuit’, in Alain Corbin, Les Filles de noce: misère sexuelle et prostitution aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: Aubier Montagne, 1978), 197–203. On the spectrum of prostitution, see also Perrot et al., Histoire de la vie privée; Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (New York—Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Sinéad FurlongClancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body in French Art, Literature and Society: Women in the Parks of Paris, 1848–1900 (Lewiston, New York: Mellen Press, 2014); Sinéad Helena Furlong, ‘Women in the Parks of Paris: Painting and Writing the Female Body, 1848–1900’ (PhD diss., Dublin: University of Dublin,

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Trinity College, 2001) and ‘Negotiating Femininities: Petites Filles and Public Parks in Nineteenth-Century Paris’, in Little Girls; Les Petites filles, special edition of Tessera, Vol. 35, Fall/Automne 2003, 9–27. 7 ‘L’enseigne de l’homme condamné à l’activité’, see Perrot et al., Histoire de la vie privée, 413. 8 On the domestic interior relocating to Parisian parks, and the potentially transgressive quality of the park space, see Furlong, ‘Women in the Parks of Paris’ and ‘Negotiating Femininities’ and Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body, also Sinéad Furlong-Clancy, ‘Paintings, Parks, and Parasols: Models of fashionable femininity and female resistance of conventional gender expectations in the art of Édouard Manet and the Impressionists’ and ‘Fashion and the Painting of Parisian Modernity: New academic and curatorial perspectives’, in The DS Project: Image, Text, Space/Place, 1830–2015, website curated and edited by Sinéad Furlong-Clancy (Dublin: Trinity College Dublin, 2015), available at http:// thedsproject.com/portfolio/fashion-and-the-painting-of-parisian-modernitynew-academic-and-curatorial-perspectives/, accessed 10 April 2018. See Corbin on the ways in which the development of fashion, shopping, and of consumerism in general offered women opportunities to leave the home with an unverifiable alibi (‘alibi incontrôlable’), facilitating meetings of a non-compromising nature, and transforming places of circulation into places of anonymous encounters. ‘La visite au magasin lui fournit un alibi incontrôlable, facilite des rendez-vous peu compromettants; les lieux de circulation se trouvent transformés en lieux de rencontres anonymes.’ Corbin, Les Filles de noce, 309–10. 9 See Edmond Duranty, ‘The New Painting: Concerning the Group of Artists Exhibiting at the Durand-Ruel Galleries’, in Moffett et al., The New Painting, 44: ‘An atmosphere is created in every interior, along with a certain personal character that is taken on by the objects that fill it. (…) And, as we are solidly embracing nature, we will no longer separate the figure from the background of an apartment or the street. In actuality, a person never appears against neutral or vague backgrounds. Instead, surrounding him and behind him are the furniture, fireplaces, curtains, and walls that indicate his financial position, class, and profession.’ The idea of ‘casings’ is Walter Benjamin’s, see Walter Benjamin, ‘LouisPhilippe or the Interior’, in ‘Paris – Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, transl. Harry Zohn and Quintin Hoare (London: NLB, 1973), 167–9: ‘The interior was not only the private citizen’s universe, it was also his casing. Living means leaving traces. In the interior, these were stressed. Coverings and antimacassars, boxes and casings, were devised in abundance, in which the traces of everyday objects were moulded.’ 10 See Duranty, ‘The New Painting’, 45: ‘The new painters have tried to render the walk, movement, and hustle and bustle of passersby, just as they have tried to

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Notes render the trembling of leaves, the shimmer of water, and the vibration of sundrenched air (…)’. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘The Impressionists and Édouard Manet’, in Moffett et al., 30–31: ‘The natural light of day penetrating into and influencing all things (…)’; ‘Open air: – that is the beginning and end of the question we are now studying’; ‘As no artist has on his palette a transparent and neutral colour answering to open air, the desired effect can only be obtained by lightness or heaviness of touch, or by the regulation of tone. Now Manet and his school use simple colour, fresh, or lightly laid on, and their results appear to have been attained at the first stroke, that the ever-present light blends with and unifies all things. As to the details of the picture, nothing should be absolutely fixed in order that we may feel that the bright gleam which lights the picture, or the diaphanous shadow which veils it, are only seen in passing, and just when the spectator beholds the represented subject, which being composed of a harmony of reflected and everchanging lights, cannot be supposed always to look the same but palpitates with movement, light, and life.’ See Duranty, ‘The New Painting’, 45: ‘From indoors we communicate with the outside world through windows. A window is yet another frame that is continually with us during the time we spend at home, and that time is considerable.’ François Thiébault-Sisson, in Le Temps (1896), cited in Patry, Wilhelm, and Patin, Berthe Morisot 1841–1895, 87. See Edgar Richardson, ‘Sophisticates and Innocents Abroad’ in Art News, April 1954 [review of an exhibition of work by Cassatt, John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler, at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1954], in Cassatt: A Retrospective, ed. Nancy Mowll Mathews (USA: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 1996), 236–8. See also Nancy Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Life (New Haven—London: Yale University Press) 1998 [1994], 328 and Griselda Pollock, Mary Cassatt: Painter of Modern Women (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 29–30. On ‘femininity’, see Hughes Wilhelm, ‘La Fortune critique de Berthe Morisot: Des expositions impressionnistes à l’exposition posthume’, in Patry, Wilhelm, and Patin, Berthe Morisot 1841–1895, 63–87; Sylvie Patry, ‘ “Catching a touch of the ephemeral”: Berthe Morisot and Impressionism’ in Women Impressionists: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, Marie Bracquemond, ed. Ingrid Pfeiffer and Max Hollein (exhibition catalogue) (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle /Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008), 68–75; Stuckey, Scott, and Lindsay, Berthe Morisot: Impressionist, 54–5, 70, 88; Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Life, 158; Norma Broude, ‘Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman or the Cult of True Womanhood?’ in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (Berkeley—Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 265 and Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body, 17–26.

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15 In addition to Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock, the work of art historians including Anne Higonnet, Kathleen Adler, Tamar Garb, Adelyn Dohme Breeskin and Nancy Mowll Mathews has been essential in documenting their lives and work. More recently, the 1997 Morisot catalogue raisonné (see following note) and the exhibition catalogues referred to throughout these notes have enriched Morisot and Cassatt scholarship. The major Morisot retrospective of 2002, with its important catalogue (Patry, Wilhelm, and Patin, Berthe Morisot 1841–1895, cited above), was held away from Paris, the centre of the French art world, at the Palais des BeauxArts de Lille (with a second stage in Martigny at the Fondation Pierre Gianadda); it would take until 2019 for Morisot to be celebrated with a solo exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, also under the direction of Sylvie Patry; see Sylvie Patry et al., Berthe Morisot, Paris, Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie / Flammarion, 2019. (This essay, written in the spring of 2018, predates that exhibition, which had its first stages as ‘Berthe Morisot: Woman Impressionist’, at the Musée National des BeauxArts du Québec, The Barnes Foundation, Philadephia, and the Dallas Museum of Art, beginning in the summer of 2018.) 16 See Stuckey, Scott, and Lindsay, Berthe Morisot: Impressionist, 12, 16: ‘There are many reasons for the relative neglect of Morisot by collectors and historians since 1896, what we now call sexist attitudes chief among them’. As Stuckey notes, this exhibition took place in the context of a background of emerging Morisot scholars including Anne Higonnet, a catalogue raisonné in preparation by Alain Clairet, Delphine Montalant and Yves Rouart, Berthe Morisot 1841–1895: Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint (Paris: CNRS-Editions, 1997) and a new edition of the correspondence published by Kathleen Adler and Tamar Garb, see The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot with Her Family and Her Friends Manet, Puvis de Chavannes, Degas, Monet, Renoir and Mallarmé, ed. Denis Rouart, transl. Betty W. Hubbard, with a new introduction and notes by Kathleen Adler and Tamar Garb (London: Camden Press, 1986). 17 See Linda Nochlin, ‘Morisot’s Wet Nurse: the Construction of Work and Leisure in Impressionist Painting’ (1988), in Linda Nochlin, Women, Art and Power and Other Essays (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994 (1989) (USA, Harper and Row, 1988)) and ‘Mary Cassatt’s Modernity’ in Linda Nochlin, Representing Women (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999). Griselda Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’, in Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London—New York: Routledge, 1994 (1988)) and Pollock, Mary Cassatt. 18 Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’, 56. 19 See Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, ‘Introduction: Reclaiming Female Agency’, in Broude and Garrard, Reclaiming Female Agency, 12. 20 See Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough (eds), The Invisible Flâneuse? Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-century Paris (Manchester: Manchester

320

21

22

23

24

25 26

Notes University Press, 2006); Ruth E. Iskin, ‘The flâneuse in French fin-de-siècle posters: advertising images of modern women in Paris’ in D’Souza and McDonough, The Invisible Flâneuse?, 113–28; Ruth E. Iskin, Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Brevik-Zender, Fashioning Spaces; Furlong, ‘Women in the Parks of Paris’ and Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body. See Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’ and Hollis Clayson, ‘Threshold Space: Parisian modernism betwixt and between (1869 to 1891)’, in Janet McLean (ed.), Impressionist Interiors, 14–29. In the 1860s and 1870s, Morisot – having trained with Corot for a period – and Degas called him ‘Papa Corot’; Degas is noted to have said in 1883: ‘He is still the strongest, he anticipated everything,’ and Claude Monet, in 1897, to have remarked: ‘we are nothing, nothing next to him.’ See Gary Tinterow, Michael Pantazzi, Vincent Pomarède, Corot (exhibition catalogue) (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1996), xiv; Rouart, Adler and Garb (ed.), Correspondence of Berthe Morisot, 21, 25; Stuckey, Scott, and Lindsay, Berthe Morisot: Impressionist, 19–20. See Anthea Callen, The Art of Impressionism: Painting Technique and The Making of Modernity (New Haven—London: Yale University Press, 2000) and David Bomford, Jo Kirby, John Leighton and Ashok Roy, Art in the Making: Impressionism (exhibition catalogue) (London: National Gallery, in association with Yale University Press, 1990). See Patry, Wilhelm, and Patin, Berthe Morisot 1841–1895, 91; Sylvie Patry, ‘« Votre presence vivante et peinte »: Les portraits de Berthe Morisot par Édouard Manet’, in Patry, Wilhelm, and Patin, Berthe Morisot 1841–1895, 21–41; Rouart, Adler and Garb (ed.), Correspondence of Berthe Morisot, 19–21; Stuckey, Scott, and Lindsay, Berthe Morisot: Impressionist, 19–20; Marianne Mathieu et al., Berthe Morisot (exhibition catalogue) (Paris: Musée Marmottan Monet—Académie des BeauxArts, Institut de France / Éditions Hazan, 2012), 23. See Rouart, Adler and Garb (ed.), Correspondence of Berthe Morisot, 19–23; 30–1. As a girl, Cassatt had spent several years on an extended European Grand Tour with her family, and had become fluent in French and German. She returned briefly to her home country in 1870–1 at the time of the Franco-Prussian War and Commune, before making the voyage to Europe again, passing quickly through London and Paris before moving to Parma, where she worked on a commission of Correggio paintings for the bishop of Pittsburgh. In 1872 she travelled to Madrid and then spent six months in Seville, travelling back to Paris for the 1873 Salon, and spending the summer painting in Antwerp before travelling to Rome. See Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Life, 3–92.

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27 Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Life, 91. 28 Ibid., 46. 29 Ibid., 96. 30 Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862) prepared the way for the contemporary depiction of modern Parisian life, with a nod to the fête champêtre (pastoral festivity) of Antoine Watteau’s eighteenth-century paintings and a contemporary fashionable crowd listening to music in the Tuileries gardens; a crowd peopled with Manet’s friends, family, and colleagues, and including a selfportrait, far left, with a nod to a work then attributed to Velázquez, which Manet had copied in the Louvre, The Little Cavaliers (Réunion de treize personnages). The rapid brushwork and the outdoor scene with its lack of apparent finish in the centre, the traditional point of vanishing perspective of a carefully finished academic work, caused consternation as much as it drew admiring eyes, as in the case of the enthusiastic response of Zola, Bazille and Monet. See Sinéad FurlongClancy, ‘Painting Modern Paris with an eye on Past Masters: Hugh Lane’s choice of Édouard Manet’s La Musique aux Tuileries (1862)’, in Barbara Dawson and Jessica O’Donnell (ed.), Sir Hugh Lane: ‘That Great Pictured Song’ (Dublin: Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, 2017), 80–93 and Bomford, Kirby, Leighton and Roy, Art in the Making, 112. While frequently grouped with the Impressionists, Manet (born in 1832) never exhibited with the group, and, with Camille Pissarro and Degas, was slightly older than Morisot, Monet and Renoir (who were exact contemporaries, born in 1840 and 1841) and Cassatt (born in 1844). 31 The locations of the independent exhibitions changed, as did the organization of the shows, and those in charge. In 1880, for the fifth exhibition, Gustave Caillebotte – conflicting with Degas – insisted on a poster advertising in bold, upper case, the names of the artists exhibiting; significantly, Morisot and Cassatt (and Marie Braquemond, who also had joined in the group exhibitions by that stage), did not insist on having their names printed alongside their male colleagues. See Moffett et al., The New Painting, 261, 293; Sylvie Patry (ed.), Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market (exhibition catalogue) (London: National Gallery, 2015). 32 See Stuckey, Scott and Lindsay, Berthe Morisot: Impressionist, 76–7; Moffett et al., The New Painting, 249; Patry, Wilhelm, and Patin, Berthe Morisot 1841–1895, 50–1; Hughes Wilhelm, ‘Seven unpublished letters from Mary Cassatt to Berthe Morisot and her daughter Julie Manet’, in Pfeiffer and Hollein (ed.), Women Impressionists, 122–5. 33 See Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body, xxv, 130–4; Charles Baudelaire, Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863) in Œuvres complètes II (Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1976). On women in male dress, see Steele, Paris Fashion, 162–7. On George Sand, see Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, in Janet Wolff, Feminine Sentences: Essays on

322

34 35 36

37

38 39 40 41

42 43 44

45

Notes Women and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 41. On the strolling woman, see Iskin, ‘The flâneuse in French fin-de-siècle posters’, 113–28. See Patry, Wilhelm, and Patin, Berthe Morisot 1841–1895, 182. See Furlong-Clancy, ‘Women in the Parks of Paris’ and Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body. On the gaze, see Furlong-Clancy, The Depiction and Description of the Female Body, and ‘Paintings, Parks, and Parasols’, 8–10. On agency, see Broude and Garrard (ed.) Reclaiming Female Agency. As noted above, Morisot and her sister Edma first exhibited at the Salon in 1864. One of their earliest tutors, Joseph Guichard, had warned their mother that they would become professional painters, given their talent, while Corot noted that Edma was a more assiduous student than Berthe; they studied and painted together, their father having arranged to build a studio for the young women in the garden of their home in the Rue Franklin. After Edma married Adolphe Pontillon in March 1869 and moved to Lorient in Brittany, there was a marked change in circumstances for both sisters; they had never lived apart, and both keenly felt the separation, as their correspondence reveals. Having given up her professional painterly ambitions, Edma missed her former artistic life; however at times she still attempted to work at her painting, but was easily fatigued; indeed, she was soon expecting her first child. See Rouart, Adler and Garb (ed.), Correspondence of Berthe Morisot, 23, 31–41, 44–5; Stuckey, Scott, and Lindsay, Berthe Morisot: Impressionist, 17–18. Édouard Manet, Le Balcon, 1868–1869, oil on canvas, 170 x 124.5 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. See Patry, Wilhelm, and Patin, Berthe Morisot 1841–1895, 112. ‘La très lumineuse et limpide esquisse de Mlle Berthe Morisot, une Femme à sa fenêtre’. Quoted in Patry, Wilhelm, and Patin, Berthe Morisot 1841–1895, 112. Morisot to Edma Pontillon on the subject of the Salon of 1869, quoted in Patry, Wilhelm, and Patin, Berthe Morisot 1841–1895, 112. On pregnancy and childbirth in nineteenth-century Paris, see Rachel Fuchs, Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992). See also Perrot et al., Histoire de la vie privée and Furlong-Clancy, ‘Depiction and Description of the Female Body’, 155–157. Morisot to Edma Pontillon, quoted in Stuckey, Scott, and Lindsay, Berthe Morisot: Impressionist, 36. Stuckey, Scott, and Lindsay, Berthe Morisot: Impressionist, 36. See for example Colta Feller Ives, The Great Wave: The Influence of Japanese Woodcuts on French Prints (exhibition catalogue) (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974) and Colta Ives, ‘Japonisme’, in Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004). In 1877, Cassatt’s parents and Lydia, now forty years old, whose health was by then deteriorating, relocated to Paris from Philadelphia; proximity to the best doctors

Notes

46 47 48

49 50 51 52

53

54

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being one of the apparent reasons for the move, additionally their shared family history of European travel and perhaps the greater desire to chaperone their artist daughter now that she was involved with the independent group of artists rather than the official Salon. Though well off, there was inevitably an economy with having their two daughters under one roof, as Lydia had no income, and Cassatt was still not financially independent. It was a wrench, particularly in retrospect, to leave their family in Philadelphia; their two sons, who were financially successful and well-established, and their grandchildren, but there were visits, and Cassatt painted many family portraits, notably Mrs Katherine Cassatt Reading to her Grandchildren (1880), with her mother reading not Le Figaro, but fairy tales, to her grandchildren, during the first summer the Philadelphians spent in France (family visits became an annual occurrence) capturing a different aspect of her mother, and the rapt attention of her nieces Elsie and Katharine, and nephew Eddie. See Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Life, 127–32, 150–6. See Adelyn D. Breeskin, Mary Cassatt, 1844–1926 (exhibition catalogue) (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1970), 24. See Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Life, 98. Mary Cassatt, Mrs. Robert S. Cassatt, the Artist’s Mother [Katherine Kelso Johnston Cassatt], c. 1889, oil on canvas, 96.5 x 68.6 cm, Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco. On Lydia’s, and Cassatt’s parents’, decline, see Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Life, 161–4, 179, 201, 228, 234–6 and Depiction and Description of the Female Body, 155–157. Blanche Pontillon was born on 23 December 1871; see Stuckey, Scott and Lindsay, Berthe Morisot: Impressionist, 180, note 116. Jules Castagnary, Le Siècle, 29 April 1874, quoted in Patry, Wilhelm and Patin, Berthe Morisot 1841–1895, 128. Patry, Wilhelm, and Patin, Berthe Morisot 1841–1895, 128. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris conserves an example of a similarly shaped cradle in curved beech wood with a long curved hook to suspend drapes; see Jakob and Josef Kohn, Berceau, c. 1880, curved beech, 135 x 145 x 90 cm, 2005.9.1. Gift of Messieurs Guy and Gildas Gourlay in memory of Madame Andrée Gourlay, 2005. Femme et enfant au balcon / Dame et enfant sur la terrasse des Morisot, rue Franklin. For the 2002 exhibition, Patry, Wilhelm, and Patin returned to the title of Dame et enfant (given at the 1896 posthumous exhibition) and added the detail of the terrace at the Morisot’s home, rather than that of a balcony. See Patry, Wilhelm, and Patin, Berthe Morisot 1841–1895, 122–5. Although the identification is usually Edma and Paule (and remains so in Patry, Wilhelm, and Patin), Stuckey suggests the likelihood of Yves and Paule having modelled together for Morisot for these works. See Stuckey, Scott, and Lindsay, Berthe Morisot: Impressionist, 44–7. Berthe Morisot, Interior, c. 1871, oil on canvas, 60 x 73 cm, private collection. Illustrated in Stuckey, Scott and Lindsay, Berthe Morisot: Impressionist, figure 28.

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55 Berthe Morisot, Mme Pontillon and her Daughter, Jeanne, 1871, watercolour on paper, 25.1 x 25.9 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Mme Gobillard and her Daughter, Paule, 1871, watercolour on paper, 15 x 20 cm, private collection. Both watercolours are illustrated in Stuckey, Scott, and Lindsay, Berthe Morisot: Impressionist, 53, 55. The National Gallery of Art dates the first work to 1872. 56 Mary Cassatt, The Reader (Lydia Cassatt) c. 1878, oil on canvas, 81.3 x 65 cm, private collection; The Cup of Tea, 1880–81, oil on canvas, 92.4 x 65.4 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Lydia at a Tapestry Frame, c. 1881, oil on canvas, 65.1 x 92.4 cm, Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan. 57 G.G. [Gustave Geffroy], ‘L’exposition des artistes indépendants’, La Justice, 19 April 1881, quoted in Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Life, 159. 58 Lois Cassatt to her sister Annie Buchanan, 6 July 1880, quoted in Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Life, 152. 59 On spatial structure and compression in Morisot and Cassatt, see Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’, 63. 60 See Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Unidentified artist, Teapot (from a six-piece tea service), c. 1835, silver, 19 x 21.6 x 10.5 cm, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, 1982, 361. 61 Mary Cassatt, Lady at the Tea Table, 1883–85, oil on canvas, 73.7 x 61 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. See , accessed 10 April 2018. 62 See previous note. 63 See Duranty, ‘The New Painting’, 45: ‘In real life views of things and people are manifested in a thousand unexpected ways. Our vantage point is not always located in the center of a room whose two side walls converge toward the back wall; the lines of sight and angles of cornices do not always join with mathematical regularity and symmetry. (…) Sometimes our viewpoint is very high, sometimes very low; and as a result we lose sight of the ceiling, and everything crowds into our immediate field of vision, and furniture is abruptly cropped.’ See also Mallarmé, ‘The Impressionists and Édouard Manet’, 31: ‘If we turn to natural perspective (not that utterly and artificially classic science which makes our eyes the dupes of a civilized education, but rather that artistic perspective which we learn from the extreme East – Japan for example) – and look at these sea pieces of Manet, where the water at the horizon rises to the height of the frame, which alone interrupts it, we feel a new delight at the recovery of a long obliterated truth. The secret of this is found in an absolutely new science, and in the manner of cutting down the pictures, and which gives to the frame all the charm of a merely fanciful boundary, such as that which is embraced at one glance of a scene framed in by the hands, or at least all of it found worthy to preserve.’

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64 See Ann Hoenigswald and Kimberley A. Jones, ‘“All the Vocabularies of Painting”: Adaptation and Experimentation, 1878–1879’, in Kimberly A. Jones et al., Degas Cassatt (exhibition catalogue) (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art / Munich—London—New York: Prestel, DelMonico Books, 2014), 115. 65 See Mowll Mathews, Mary Cassatt: A Life, 194; Pollock, Mary Cassatt, 166–7. 66 See Stuckey, Scott, and Lindsay, Berthe Morisot: Impressionist, 116. 67 See Patry, Wilhelm, and Patin, Berthe Morisot 1841–1895, 318–27. 68 See for example Manet, Repose (Le Repos), c. 1871, oil on canvas, RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island and Berthe Morisot Reclining, 1873, oil on canvas, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris; Monet, Meditation, or Madame Monet on the Sofa, c. 1871, oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Renoir, Portrait of Madame Claude Monet, c. 1872–74, oil on canvas, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon and Young Woman in White Reading, 1873, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Clothed Maja, 1800–1808, oil on canvas, The Prado Museum, Madrid. 69 See Patry, Wilhelm and Patin, Berthe Morisot 1841–1895, 202–5. 70 Duranty, ‘The New Painting’, 44. 71 See Édouard Manet, Before the Mirror, 1876, oil on canvas, 92.1 x 71.4 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Nana, 1877, oil on canvas, 154 × 115 cm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

Chapter 8 N. Furbank & A.M. Cain, Mallarmé on Fashion: A Translation of the Fashion Magazine La Dernière Mode, with Commentary (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 22. Furbank and Cain’s translation is hereafter referred to in the text as LDM. 2 References to these three primary texts will be given within the body of the article, the third to the Furbank and Cain translation, cited above. 3 This translation, and all translations from La Menagère, are the author’s own. 4 Cf. La Ménagère / Le Confortable (Prospectus) (Paris: A. Lemaire, 1867). 5 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The Savage Mind (eds. Julian Pitt-Rivers & Ernest Gellner) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), first published as Claude LéviStrauss, La Pensée sauvage [1966], 16-17. 6 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (California, LA: University of California Press, 1984), first published as L’Invention du quotidien, I, Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 175. 7 Derrida, J., Writing and difference (translated byy Alan Bass) (London: Routledge, 2005), first published as Jacques Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du seuil, 1967), 360. 1

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Kathryn J. Brown, Women Readers in French Painting 1870-1890 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 61. 9 Although the revolution of 1848 brought with it opportunities for the expression of feminist ideas, patriarchal values still prevailed, with figures like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the 1850s and 1860s promoting profoundly misogynistic views. Even champions of female emancipation such as Ernest Legouvé did not fully challenge the oppression of women through domestic expectations and obligation to men; in his Histoire morale des femmes, Legouvé argues that ‘the purpose [of girls’ education] is to strengthen their minds by acquaintance with science, and to prepare them to participate in all the thoughts of their husbands, all the studies of their children.’ Ernest Legouvé, Histoire morale des femmes (Paris: Didier, 1864), 57, cited in English translation in Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1984), 138. 10 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 21. 11 The term ‘economy of desire’ has been appropriated in an economic context to explain mechanisms of a capitalist society. For a detailed philosophical reading (in French) of the economy of desire in the light of the theories of Baruch Spinoza and Karl Marx, see Frédéric Lordon, Capitalisme, désir et servitude – Marx et Spinoza (Paris: Éditions La Fabrique, 2010). 12 For a detailed reading of the idea of fashion, shopping and commodification in the late nineteenth century, see Michael Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 13 For an illuminating study of the history of the women’s magazine Femina and the shifting material and social aspirations the periodical promoted, see Collette Cosnier, Les dames de Femina: un féminisme mystifié (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009). 14 Although there is not scope to expand upon this in the present chapter, I suggest that I suggest that the process of bricolage set in motion by nineteenth-century fashion magazines appeals to all the senses, through the presentation of different themes and practices, from recipes and tactile projects such as dressmaking and embroidery to discussions of perfumes. 15 Rachel Bowlby offers a clear and insightful examination of Mallarmé’s engagement with the cult of shopping in her essay ‘Modes of Modern Shopping: Mallarmé at the Bon Marché’, 186-204, in The Ideology of Conduct: essays on literature and the history of sexuality, edited by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (New York: Methuen, 1987). For a detailed reading of Mallarmé’s œuvre in the light of capitalist society, with a particular focus on La Dernière Mode see Damian Catani, The Poet in Society (Oxford, Bern, New York: Peter Lang, 2003). 16 The original French subheading outlines thee key themes – ‘la table, l’ameublement fait par les dames, le jardin et les jeux’ – forming a sort of subheading for the feature, as seen in the bottom half of Figure 8. 8

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17 Manuel Charpy, ‘L’ordre des choses. Sur quelques traits de la culture matérielle bourgeoise parisienne, 1830-1914’, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, 34 (2007): 105–28, translation by the author. 18 Mallarmé, Stéphane, Œuvres complètes, vol. II (Paris: Gallimard, Éditions de la Pléaide, 1998/2003), 663, English translation by the author. 19 As Damian Catani notes, à propos of La Dernière Mode and with reference to Roland Barthes’s Système de la mode [The Fashion System], fashion is primarily driven by unattainability: ‘as soon as consumers buy a particular garment, another one comes along to replace it. They are thus caught in an endless cycle of consumption deliberately encouraged by a fashion discourse in which newness is presented as something indispensable, yet tantalisingly out of reach.’ Damien Catani, ‘Consumerism and the discourse of fashion in Mallarmé’s La Dernière Mode’, Mots pluriels, 10 (May 1999) http://motspluriels.arts.uwa.edu.au/mp1099dc. html#fn1 [accessed 16 september 2016]. 20 Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Éditions de la Pléiade, 1976) (vol. II), 290, translation, my own.

Chapter 9 This consists of Claudine à l’école (1900), Claudine à Paris (1901), Claudine en ménage (1902) and Claudine s’en va (1903). 2 Denis Hollier, La prise de la Concorde. Essais sur Georges Bataille (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 214. 3 Colette, Claudine en ménage (Paris: Folio, 2005), 229. 4 Colette, Claudine en ménage, 239. All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 5 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 47. 6 Colette, Claudine en ménage, 230. 7 Ibid., 231. 8 Known as Baronne Staffe, Blanche-Augustine-Angèle Soyer (1843-1911) was author of many ‘savoir vivre’ books in the late nineteenth century. Her bestseller Usages du monde: règles du savoir-vivre dans la société moderne (1889) was popular among the bourgeoisie. Usages du monde is a prescriptive book with instructions on how to behave in the private sphere as well as in social occasions. 9 Daly, César, L’Architecture privée au XIXe siècle sous Napoleon III, 3 vols (Paris: Morel, 1864), 10. 10 Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc, Entretiens sur l’architecture (1863–72) http://dx.doi. org/10.3931/e-rara-4694, 503. 11 Henry Havard, L’art dans la maison: grammaire de l’ameublement (Paris: Ed. Rouveyre et G. Blond, 1884), 244. 1

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12 See Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (London: Heinemann, 1998). 13 Roland Barthes, Comment Vivre Ensemble. Cours et séminaires au Collège de France, 1976–1977 (Paris: Seuil Imec, 2002), 95. 14 See Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (London: Continuum, 2004); Iris M. Young, Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 134–64. 15 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Oxford: Polity Press, 2007), 155. 16 Amy Catania Kulper, ‘Private House, Public House: Victor Horta’s Ubiquitous Domesticity’ in Intimate Metropolis, ed. Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton and Marina Lathouri (Oxon: Routledge, 2009), 122. 17 Giuliana Bruno, The Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2007), 7. 18 Bruno, The Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, 85. 19 Roland Barthes, Comment Vivre Ensemble. Cours et séminaires au Collège de France, 1976-1977, 90. 20 The paradoxical role of sexology in allowing the social and legal assimilation of non-standardized sexual practices has been noticed by Harry Oosterhuis. See: Harry Oosterhuis, ‘Sexual Modernity in the Works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll’, Medical History 56, no. 2 (2012), 133–55. 21 Colette, Claudine en ménage, 157. 22 Leonora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (London: University of California Press, 1996), 281. 23 Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France, 287. 24 Paul Mantz, ‘Les meubles du XVIII siècle’, Revue des arts decoratifs 4 (1883), 319. 25 Mantz, ‘Les meubles du XVIII siècle’, 38. 26 Penny Sparke, As Long As It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (London: Pandora, 1995), 121. 27 Sheila Crane, ‘Elsie de Wolfe, Natalie Clifford Barney, and the Lure de Versailles: Picturesque Spectres and Conservative Aesthetics of Female Homoeroticism’, in Lesbian Inscriptions in Francophone Society and Culture, ed. Renate Günther and Wendy Michallat (Durham: Durham Modern Languages Series, Durham University Press, 2007), 205–36. 28 Sheila Crane, ‘Elsie de Wolfe, Natalie Clifford Barney, and the Lure de Versailles: Picturesque Spectres and Conservative Aesthetics of Female Homoeroticism’, 230. 29 Colette, Claudine en ménage, 67. 30 Freud, Sigmund, The Uncanny (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2003), 144. 31 Colette, Claudine à Paris (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2011), 251–2. 32 Colette, Claudine in Paris, trans. by Antonia White (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972), 202.

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33 Colette, Claudine en ménage, 16. 34 Ibid., 84. 35 Ibid., 70. 36 Ibid., 168. 37 Ibid., 174. 38 Ibid., 177. 39 Hollier, La prise de la Concorde. Essais sur Georges Bataille, 64. 40 Ibid., 65. 41 Colette, Clainde à Paris, 137 (emphasis, Colette). 42 Ibid., 109 (emphasis, Colette). 43 Colette, Claudine en ménage, 196. 44 Ibid., 197. 45 Ibid., 108. 46 Claire Dehon, ‘Colette and Art Nouveau’ in Colette: The Woman, The Writer, ed. Erica Mendelson Eisinger and Mari Ward McCarty (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981), 111. 47 Fae Brauer, ‘Flaunting Manliness: Republican Masculinity, Virilised Homosexuality and the Desirable Male Body’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 6 no. 1 (2005), 23–41. 48 Bonnie Honig, ‘Difference, Dilemmas, and the Politics of Home’, Social Research, 61 no. 3 (1994), 2.

Chapter 10 See Madeleine Octave Maus, Trente années de lutte pour l’art, Les XX, La Libre Esthétique, 1884–1914 (Brussels: Éditions Lebeer Hossmann, 1926), 102. Madeleine Maus is the wife of Octave Maus, prominent art patron, secretary of Les XX and editor of L’Art moderne. She was also actively involved in the artistic activities of those years. 2 Ibid. 3 Georges Fabry, Jean-Jacques Gailliard, le voyageur de la lumière fantastique (Ostend: Ed. Erel, 1972), 50. 4 See Robert Goldwater, Symbolism (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 69. 5 See detailed commentary in ‘Emile Gallé, ‘Raisins Mystérieux’’, Musée d’Orsay online catalogue:http://www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/collections/catalogue-des-oeuvres/ notice.html?no_cache=1&nnumid=105244. 6 See detailed commentary in ‘Emile Gallé, ‘Fôret lorraine’’, Musée d’Orsay online catalogue: http://www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/collections/catalogue-des-oeuvres/notice. html?no_cache=1&zsz=5&lnum=&nnumid=133608. 1

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Notes English translation by William Aggeler, Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954), 178–9. See Arsène Alexandre’s article, ‘L’Art Nouveau’ in Le Figaro, 28 December 1895. Roger-H. Guerrand, L’Art Nouveau en Europe (Paris: Plon, 1965), 153. The original plans for the client, the widow Fournier, were prepared in 1895. Françoise Aubry dates the first building permit to 19 February 1895, before Guimard’s journey to Belgium, and the second, altered version to 27 June of the same year. In the spring of 1895 Guimard was invited at L’Œuvre artistique in Liège, organized by Gustave Serrurier-Bovy, and he also travelled to Brussels on that occasion, although this was not his first visit the city. Gillian Naylor dates the plans to 16 March 1895, adding that they were submitted by Mme. Fournier to the prefecture in the month of August of the same year. At this point the plans were unconventional, but did not yet have the details that would radically transform the aspect of the building. According to Philippe Thiébault, the prefectural authorization was granted on 16 September 1895, and by December 1896, a large part of the building was completed, whereas components of the interiors were still under study. Most of the apartments were rented in the following spring, 1987. See Françoise Aubry, ‘Hector Guimard et la Belgique’, in Guimard, colloque international, Musée d’Orsay, 1992, ed. Philippe Thiébault and Claude Frontisi (Paris: Spadem 1994); Gillian Naylor, ‘Hector Guimard, Romantic Rationalist?’, in Hector Guimard, ed. Gillian Naylor and Yvonne Brunhammer (New York: Rizzoli, 1978); and Philippe Thiébault, Guimard et l’Art Nouveau (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). Quoted in Felipe Ferré, Maurice Rheims and Geroges Vigne, Hector Guimard (New York: H. Abrams, 1985), 11. Horta draws an outline that divides contemporary painters in two groups: portraitistes and de genre. He places Khnopff, ‘figure enigmatique’, in the latter group. Unpublished manuscript in the Horta archives. See Octave Maus, ‘Habitations modernes’, L’Art moderne (15 and 22 July 1900), 221–3 and 229–31. Emile Verhaeren, review of ‘Les XX’ in La Nation (11, 14, 20 February 1891). Reprinted in Emile Verhaeren, Écrits sur l’art, vol. 1, ed. by Paul Aaron (Bruxelles: Labor, 1997), 400. Emile Verhaeren, ‘Histoire de l’Art’, opening lecture of the art history course given during 1890–1891 at the Palais des Académies. Reprinted in Verhaeren, Écrits sur l’art, 373–4. Verhaeren’s commentary regards the entries of that year from the decorative arts by Albert Besnard, Willy Finch, Alexandre Charpentier, Georges Lemmen, and Henry van de Velde. See Emile Verhaeren, ‘Exposition des XX’, La Nation (12 mars 1893), reprinted in Verhaeren, Écrits sur l’art, 575.

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17 Emile Verhaeren, ‘L’art appliqué’, L’Art moderne (18 March 1894). Reprinted in Verhaeren, Écrits sur l’art, 593. 18 Emile Verhaeren, ‘Les XX’, La Nation (10, 14, 20 February 1891). Reprinted in Verhaeren, Écrits sur l’art, 401. 19 Emile Verhaeren, ‘Exposition des XX’, La Nation (12 March 1893). Reprinted in Verhaeren, Écrits sur l’art, 576. 20 The section of the decorative arts of that year included Van de Velde’s Five o’Clock room, a carpet by Lemmen and pottery by Willy Finch that Verhaeren praises. See Emile Verhaeren, ‘Le salon de La Libre ésthétique’, L’Art moderne (1–29 March 1896). Reprinted in Emile Verhaeren, Écrits sur l’art, 695. 21 Paul Emond, ‘Emile Verhaeren’, in Belgique: des maisons et des hommes, ed. by Georges-Henri Dumont and Hugues Boucher (Bruxelles: Vokaear, 1980), 293. 22 Fernand Khnopff, ‘Studio Talk’, Studio: International Art, no. 40 (July 1896), 178. 23 Fernand Khnopff, ‘Studio Talk’, Studio: International Art, no. 44 (November 1897), 145. 24 See Emile Verhaeren, ‘L’art appliqué,’ L’Art moderne (18 Mars 1894). Reprinted in Emile Verhaeren, Écrits sur l’art, 593. 25 For a discussion of this difference and Belgian Symbolism as poetics of space, see Donald Flanell Friedman, ‘Rodenbach, Hellens, Lemonnier: Paradisal and Infernal Modalities of Belgian Dead City Prose’, in Georges Rodenbach: Critical Essays, ed. by Phili Mosley (London: Associated University Presses, 1996). 26 Quoted in Robert Delevoy, Fernand Khnopff (Paris: La Bibliothèque des arts, 1987), 25. 27 Ibid., 88. 28 Villa Khnopff was built between 1900 and 1902. The exact role of Édouard Pelsneer (1870–1947) is unclear, but it is generally assumed that it was Khnopff who led the design. Pelsneer’s earlier activity in Brussels reveals no precedents to the Villa Khnopff. His Maison des hiboux (1899) at avenue Brugmann 55 in Brussels is close to Hankar’s façades. The elder Pelseneer, specialized in cabinet-making, was regularly engaged by Horta to execute his furniture design. 29 Emile Verhaeren, ‘Silhouettes d’artistes: Fernand Khnopff ’, L’Art moderne (12 September 1886), 290.

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For more on the Goncourt’s ‘maison d’art’, see Juliet Simpson, ‘Edmond de Goncourt’s Décors – Towards the Symbolist Maison d’art’, Romance Studies, 29, No. 1 (2011), 1–18. Wolfram Waldschmidt, ‘Das Heim eines Symbolisten’, Dekorative Kunst, XIV (1906), 158–66; Maria Biermé, ‘Fernand Khnopff ’, La Belgique Artistique et Littéraire, July-September (1907), 96–113; ‘Les Trois Moustiquaires’ [Louis

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Dumont-Wilden, George Garnir, Léon Souguenet], ‘L’Atelier de Fernand Khnopff, avenue des Courses’, Pourquoi pas?, December 15 (1910), 545–6; Hélène Laillet, ‘The Home of an Artist: M. Fernand Khnopff ’s Villa at Brussels’, The Studio, LVII, No. 237 (1912), 201–7. 3 Laillet, ‘The Home of an Artist’. 4 Henri Lacoste, ‘L’atelier Fernand Khnopff ’, L’Emulation (Brussels), 47 (1927), 39–40; 5 Jeffery W. Howe, The Symbolist Art of Fernand Khnopff (Ann Arbor: UMI Research, 1979, 1982); Michel Draguet, Khnopff ou l’ambigu poétique (Ghent: Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon, 1995); Sharon L. Hirsh, Symbolism and Modern Urban Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 217–56; Clément Dessy, ‘La maison d’artiste en portrait, manifeste et sanctuaire. L’exemple de Fernand Khnopff ’, in The Aesthetics of Matter: Modernism, Avant-Garde and Material Exchange, European Avant-garde and Modernism Studies, Vol. 3 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 235–48. 6 Draguet, Khnopff ou l’ambigu poétique, 337. 7 Howe, The Symbolist Art, 143. Howe states that despite this myth, Khnopff most likely invited Edouard Pelseneer to work on the construction of the villa. 8 Francine-Claire Legrand, ‘Fernand Khnopff – Perfect Symbolist’, translated Angus Malcolm, Apollo, 85 (1967), 286. 9 Waldschmidt, ‘Das Heim eines Symbolisten’, 158-163: ‘die Besichtigung seines [Khnopff ’s] Hauses in Brüssel hat mir […] das volle Verständnis seiner Kunst erschlossen.’ All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 10 Laillet, ‘The Home of an Artist’, 201. 11 Howe, The Symbolist Art, 144. 12 Howe, The Symbolist Art, 143–4. 13 Henri Lacoste, ‘L’atelier Fernand Khnopff ’, L’Emulation (Brussels), 47 (1927), 39–40, quoted in translation in Howe, The Symbolist Art, 144. 14 Hirsh, Symbolism, 228. 15 Susan M. Canning, ‘’Soyons Nous’: Les XX and the Cultural Discourse of the Belgian Avant-Garde’, in Les XX and the Belgian Avant-Garde: Prints, Drawings, and Books ca. 1890, Stephen H. Goddard, ed. (Kansas: Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, 1992), 43. 16 Draguet, Khnopff, 337. 17 Ibid., 341. 18 Fernand Khnopff, ‘Josef Hoffmann – Architect and Decorator’, The Studio, 22 (1901), 264. 19 Draguet, Khnopff, 339–41. 20 Honoré de Balzac, La comédie humaine of Honoré de Balzac. Seraphita. The Alkahest, translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley (London: The Athenaeum Press, 1896), 142. 21 Laillet, ‘The Home of an Artist’, 201.

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22 Fernand Khnopff, ‘Mein Haus’, Die Zeit, 37–8 (2 December 1904), No. 483, 9. 23 Howe, The Symbolist Art, 147. Though most of these details could be found in contemporary descriptions of the villa, according to Howe, he has enriched his overview of the house with the information provided by Khnopff ’s former pupil from 1918-1920, M. Marcel Baugniet. 24 Louis Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff (Brussels: G. van Oest & Cie, 1907), 30. 25 Ibid.: ‘[…] un des Esseintes méthodique, épris, d’ordonnance harmonieuse beaucou plus que de singularité.’ 26 Hirsh, Symbolism, 251. 27 Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff, 30: ‘un des Esseintes qui n’a pas subi l’éducation romantique, et n’a jamais fréquenté le grenier d’Auteuil.’ 28 Simpson, ‘Edmond de Goncourt’s Décors’, 2. 29 Ibid. 30 Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff, 26: ‘le temple du Moi, […] la forteresse d’une individualité en perpétuelle défense contre le Monde et la Vie’; Laillet, ‘The Home of an Artist’, 201. 31 Hirsh, Symbolism, 218. 32 Donald Friedman, ‘Belgian Symbolism and a Poetics of Place’, in Les XX and the Belgian Avant-Garde, 126. 33 Waldschmidt, ‘Das Heim eines Symbolisten’, 163. 34 Friedman, ‘Belgian Symbolism and a Poetics of Place’, 126–7. 35 Christina Rossetti, ‘Who Shall Deliver Me?’, The Poetic Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti (London, 1906), 238. 36 Hirsh, Symbolism, 233. 37 Victor Remouchamps, ‘Le Monde Intérieur’, Le Réveil, January 1894, 25, quoted in translation in Donald Friedman, ‘Belgian Symbolism and a Poetics of Place’, in Les XX and the Belgian Avant-Garde, 126. 38 Hirsh, Symbolism, 218. 39 Frank M. Turner, European Intellectual History: From Rousseau to Nietzsche (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 154. 40 Honoré De Balzac, Traité de la vie élégante et théorie de la demarche (Paris: Michalon, 1908), 10–11: ‘son oisiveté est un travail, et son travail un repos; […] il ne subit pas de lois: il les impose. Qu’il s’occupe à ne rien faire, ou médite un chefd’œuvre, sans paraître occupé; […] il est toujours l’expression d’une grande pensée et domine la société.’ 41 Edmond-Louis De Taeye, Les Artistes Belges Contemporains (Brussels: Castaigne, 1894–1897), 744: ‘Je médite toujours longuement mes sujets avant de tenter de les traduire, […].’ 42 Sâr Péladan, ‘Préface au catalogue du pemier Salon de la Rose+Croix’, in Le Salon de la Rose+Croix: 1892–1897, Jean da Silva (Paris: Syros-Alternatives, 1991),

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117: ‘Artiste, tu es prêtre: l’Art est le grand mystère, et lorsque ton effort about it au chef-d’œuvre, un rayon du divin descend comme sur un autel.’ 43 Laillet, ‘The Home of an Artist’, 202. 44 Howe, The Symbolist Art, 148. 45 Biermé, ‘Fernand Khnopff ’, 103–4; Laillet, ‘The Home of an Artist’, 205. 46 Elizabeth (Lizzie) W. Champney, ‘The Summer Haunts of American Artists’, Century Illustrated Magazine, 30/6, October 1885, 845–60. 47 Sandra Kisters, ‘Old and New Studio Topoi in the Nineteenth Century’, in Hiding Making – Showing Creation. The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean, Rachel Esner, Sandra Kisters, and Ann-Sophie Lehmann, eds. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 25–6. 48 Rachel Esner, Sandra Kisters, and Ann-Sophie Lehmann, ‘Introduction’, in Hiding Making – Showing Creation. The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean, Esner, Kisters, and Lehmann, eds., 12. 49 Ibid., 10. 50 Dumont-Wilden, Fernand Khnopff, 26: ‘la chapelle votive d’une esthétique personnelle et compliquée.’ 51 Josef Engelhart, Ein Wiener Maler erzählt … Mein Leben und meine Modelle (Vienna, 1943), 89. 52 Howe, The Symbolist Art, 148. 53 Sparklet [Albert Flament], ‘Le Trottoir roulant’, 1: ‘l’atelier, dont le parquet s’ennoblit d’un grand cercle d’or, où l’artiste vient poser – excusez la modestie! – le tableau dont il veut faire les honneurs’, as identified by Dessy (2013). 54 Josef Engelhart, Ein Wiener Maler erzählt …, 88; Howe, The Symbolist Art, 148. 55 Monika Wagner, ‘Studio Matters: Materials, Instruments and Artistic Processes’, in Hiding Making – Showing Creation. The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean, Esner, Kisters, and Lehmann, eds., 34. 56 Ibid. 57 Edwin Becker, Franz von Stuck, 1863 – 1928. Eros and Pathos (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Waanders Uitgevers, Zwolle, 1995), 30. 58 Max Klinger, Malerei und Zeichnung: Tagebuchaufzeichnungen und Briefe (Leipzig, 1985), 27–8, cited in translation by Andreas Blühm, ‘In Living Colour’, in The Colour of Sculpture, 1840 – 1910, Blühm, et al. (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, Waanders, Zwolle, 1996), 143. 59 Howe, The Symbolist Art, 149. 60 Biermé, ‘Fernand Khnopff ’, 112: ‘ … sur l’atelier, de larges baies vitrées, car c’est dans cette chambre bleue que Fernand Khnopff se retire pour venir écouter religieusement la musique que des artistes exécutent dans son atelier’. 61 Howe, The Symbolist Art, 149. 62 Laillet, ‘The Home of an Artist’, 202.

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63 Ibid. 64 Ibid., 204. 65 Sparklet, ‘Le Trottoir roulant’, 1: ‘Ah! l’intérieur de M. Khnopff, son vestibule aux dalles blanches, aux murs blanches, sa galerie blanche, sa sale à manger pareille, avec sa table pour deux, et son petit canapé pour unique siege, triomphe du ripolin, couloirs de sucre vernissé où s’ébaubissent les snobs de la Cambre!’ 66 Hirsh, Symbolism, 252.

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Susan Sidlauskas, Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). All translations from French to English are my own. Philippe Hamon, Imageries (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 2001). Susan Sidlauskas (Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Painting) and Georgina Downey (Domestic Interiors, London: Bloomsbury, 2013) have written concisely on the subject of the psychological interior in literature and art of the nineteenth century. Though Downey writes primarily about ‘represented interiors’, or ‘room pictures’ (4), in visual art history, it is worth noting that descriptions of rooms – specifically bedrooms – within literary works also have the capacity to ‘reflect back to us the attitudes and material and bodily arrangements we call interiority’ (4). Bruce Holsinger, ‘Lollard Ekphrasis: Situated Aesthetics and Literary History’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35, no. 1 (Winter 2005), 78. As Downey mentions with regard to visual art, the represented space is necessarily only a slice of the reality it depicts. In the same way, a literary depiction of a bedroom must rely on its narrator’s subjective description. Susan Harrow, ‘New Ekphrastic Poetics’, French Studies: A Quarterly Review 64, no. 3 (2010), 255–64. Based on Elaine Scarry’s idea of ‘re-picturing’ in Dreaming by the Book (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), Harrow notes that in the contemporary studies of ekphrasis included in New Ekphrastic Poetics, ‘ekphrasis is not one process but two (at least), the writer’s translation from the perceptual (visualized) or remembered world into the verbal medium prompts the work of the reader, who must “re-translate” and turn the original act of perceiving (and its transformation) into an imagined act of perceiving’ (Harrow, 263). Again, as Downey has written, ‘representations of interiors are always already mediated, even as they document room appearances and suggest habitation practices’ (Domestic Interiors, 4).

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10 Balzac, Eugénie Grandet (1833; Livres de poche, 2013), 116. 11 Balzac, EG, 116. 12 Ibid., 117. 13 Ibid. 14 Bedrooms found in « Gobseck » and « Pierrette », as well as Le Père Goriot are comparable to one another within each work to contrast the characters inhabiting them. 15 Balzac, EG, 117. 16 Balzac, Illusions perdues (1837; Gallimard, 1992), 35–6. 17 Balzac, IP, 36. 18 ‘Cette chambre, où se respirait une bonhomie patriarcale et pleine de teintes brunes, avait été arrangée par le sieur Rouzeau, prédécesseur et maître de JérômeNicolas Séchard’ [‘This bedroom, where a patriarchal affability breathed, and full of shades of brown, had been arranged by the sire Rouzeau, predecessor and teacher of Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard’] (Balzac, IP, 36, translation mine). 19 ‘Mme Séchard était morte au milieu de ses projets d’embellissement, et [le vieux Séchard], ne devinant pas l’utilité d’améliorations qui ne rapportaient rien, les avait abandonnées’ [‘Madame Séchard had passed away in the middle of her decorating projects, and [Old Séchard’], who did not perceive the utility of improvements that yielded no profit, had abandoned them] (Balzac, IP, 36, translation mine). 20 Michelle Perrot, Histoire de chambres (Paris: La Librairie du XIXe Siècle, Éditions du Seuil, 2009), 10. 21 Cf. Étienne Souriau’s ‘Time in the Plastic Arts’ Reflections on Art: A Source Book of Writings by Artists, Critics, and Philosophers (edited by Susanne K. Langer, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1958), as well as W. J. T. Mitchell’s Picture Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1995) or Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 22 Cf. Clark, T. J. ’Olympia’s Choice’, The Painting of Modern Life (Chicago: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 79–146. 23 Sidlauskas, Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Painting, 3. 24 In ‘Olympia’s Choice’, T. J. Clark deconstructs the ‘lack of articulation’ of Olympia’s body parts and that ‘the body was not one thing; it was pulled out of shape, its knees dislocated and arms broken; it was cadaverous and decomposing […] it was simply incorrect’ (134). This use of paint to depict an ambiguous figure in an ambiguous scene, pulled out of a context with an identifiable narrative, is really what provokes scandal, regardless of Olympia’s historical context within the painting. 25 Felix Krämer, ‘“Mon tableau de genre”: Degas’s “Le Viol” and Gavarni’s “Lorette”’, The Burlington Magazine 149, no. 1250 (2007), 323. 26 Krämer, ‘“Mon tableau de genre”’, 323.

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27 Sidlauskas (‘Resisting Narrative: The Problem of Edgar Degas’s Interior’, The Art Bulletin 75, no. 4 (December 1993), 671–96) and Krämer both allude to the ambiguity of the gendered space in Degas’s Interior, citing that the objects around the room are not assigned to a particular space, but rather intermixed, revealing an ambiguity about to whom precisely the space belongs. 28 Krämer, ‘“Mon tableau de genre”’, 323. 29 Ibid., 323. 30 Éric Méchoulan, ‘Intermédialités: Le temps des illusions perdues’, Intermédialité 1 (Printemps 2003), 11.

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Symptomatic of this approach towards Picasso and Braque’s Cubist pictures is Temma Balducci’s essay on Matisse’s paintings of the interiors in which she juxtaposes Matisse with Picasso, identifying the latter’s bohemian lifestyle and focus on café life in his canvases as a better fit for the prevailing construct of male avantgarde artist than Matisse. In Balducci’s reading, Matisse’s paintings offer a diverse and persistent articulation of the private interior while in Picasso’s works these issues are non-existent. See Temma Balducci, ‘Matisse and Self, or the Persistent Interior’, in Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789-1914, eds. Temma Balducci, Heather Belna Jensen, and Pamela J. Warner (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 213–30, 215. The history of the Field commission has been reconstructed and analysed for the first time by William Rubin in 1989. See William Rubin, ‘Appendix: The Library of Hamilton Easter Field’, in William Rubin, Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, c. 1989), 63–9. The project is also discussed in the 1996 biography of Picasso by John Richardson, see John Richardson with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully, A Life of Picasso: The Cubist Rebel, 1907-1916 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 164–72. The letter and envelope survive and are preserved at Picasso archives, Musée national Picasso, Paris. For discussion of this terminology and methods of installing paintings in the context of Symbolist theory and practice see Gloria Groom, Beyond the Easel. Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890–1930 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), especially pages 34–6. Hamilton Easter Field, ‘Man Ray at the Daniel Gallery’, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Nov. 30, 1919), 67. For in-depth study of the patrons and projects, see Groom, Beyond the Easel.

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Notes The source for the accepted identification of the Field panels is Rubin’s essay cited above. The author used the dimensions of the panels listed in Field’s letter to identify the paintings. Other paintings linked to this commission by Rubin are: Woman on a Divan, 1910 (Private Collection), Still Life on a Piano, 1911-12 (Museum Berggruen, Berlin), Woman with a Fan, 1910/1918 (Private collection), Man with a Mandolin, 1911 (Musée national Picasso, Paris), and Man with a Guitar, 1911/1913 (Musée national Picasso, Paris) and Woman with a Guitar, 1915 (Gregory Callimanopulos, New York). At the 1910 Salon d’Automne, Matisse exhibited two decorative paintings, Dance II and Music, commissioned in February 1909 by the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin. The idea that Picasso’s motivation to accept the commission from Field was Matisse’s arrangement with Shchukin has been discussed by Rubin and Richardson in the texts cited above. For a similar assessment in literature on Matisse see, for example, Stephanie D’Alessandro, ‘Opportunity and Invention’, in Stephanie D’Alessandro and John Elderfield, Matisse: Radical Invention 1913–1917 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, c. 2010), 76–86. See, for example, Pepe Karmel, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 2–10. Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten, Cubism and Culture (New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2001), 142. For in-depth discussion of French nineteenth-century interior decorating practices see, for example, research by Anca I. Lasc. See Anca I. Lasc, ‘Interior Decorating in the Age of Historicism: Popular Advice Manuals and the Pattern Books of Édouard Bajot’, Journal of Design History, vol. 26, no. 1 (2013), 1–24 and Anca I. Lasc, ‘“Le juste milieu”: Alexandre Sandier, theming, and Eclecticism in French Interiors of the Nineteenth Century’, Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture, vol. 2, no. 3 (2011), 277–305. Benjamin observations on the nineteenth-century private bourgeois interior can be found throughout The Arcade Projects; see Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLauglin (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). Several scholars have analysed Benjamin’s writing on the interior. See, for example, Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (London and New York: Routledge, 2007). For information on Walter Gay’s paintings of interiors see, for example, Isabel L. Taube, with contributions by Priscilla Vail Caldwell et al., Impressions of Interiors. Gilded Age Painting by Walter Gay (London: D. Giles Limited, 2012). Pamela J. Warner, ‘The Competing Dialectics of the Cabinet de Travail: Masculinity at the Threshold’, in Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789–1914,

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edited by Temma Balducci, Heather Belna Jensen, and Pamela J. Warner (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 159–76. 16 Jules Hoche, Les Parisiens chez eux (1883), 7, as quoted and translated by Pamela J. Warner, Ibid., 166. 17 For example, Eduard Manet’s Portrait of Emile Zola (1868; Musée d’Orsay, Paris), Edgar Degas’s Portrait of Edmond Duranty (1879; Burrell Collection, Glasgow) and Paul Cézanne’s Gustave Geffroy (1895-96; Museé d’Orsay, Paris). In her essay Warner lists other examples and suggests that perhaps they inspired Dornac’s photographic series. Ibid., 161. 18 Ibid., 170. 19 T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth: from Cubism to Gurenica (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Bollingen series 35:58, 74. 20 Ibid., 77–9. 21 John Golding, ‘Braque and the Space of Still Life’, in Braque. Still Lifes and Interiors, exh. cat. (London: South Bank Centre, 1990), 9–26. 22 Ibid., 9–11. 23 As quoted by Golding. Ibid., 9. 24 Ibid., 19. 25 Elizabeth Cowling, ‘Objects into Sculpture’ in Elizabeth Cowling and John Golding, Picasso: Sculptor/Painter (London: Tate Gallery, 1994), 229–40, 229. 26 Roland Penrose, Sir, Picasso His Life and Work (New York and elsewhere: Icon Editions, Harper & Row, 1973), 161–2. 27 Clark, Picasso and Truth, 81. 28 Ibid., 82. 29 Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992). 30 Ibid., 116–17. In this passage, Nesbitt compares Atget’s photograph no. 15, captioned Intérieur de Mme C. Modiste Place St André des arts, from the album Intérieurs parisiens with Picasso’s collage, Guitar and Wine Glass, 1912 (McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX) (Plate 18). 31 Ibid., 120. 32 Karmel, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism, 124–30. 33 Ibid., 126. 34 Elizabeth Cowling, ‘What the wallpapers say: Picasso’s papiers collés of 1912–14’, The Burlington Magazine, CLV (Sept. 2013), 594–601. 35 Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums, 87. 36 Cowling, ‘What the wallpapers say’, 601. 37 Antliff and Leighten, Cubism and Culture, 142. The authors explored the topic of the decorative in Cubism by couching it in their discussion of the masculine

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and the feminine constructs within the aesthetic discourse of modernism. They identified Kahnweiler’s exhibition space as masculine. 38 Kahnweiler’s description of Cubism as anti-decorative has been pointed out by Antliff and Leighten as well as by Christine Poggi. For the latter, see Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 141. 39 Cowling, ‘What the wallpapers say’, 596. 40 Nancy J. Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France. Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), especially pages 79–97. 41 Rubin, ‘The Library of Hamilton Easter Field’, 63 42 Ibid., 64–6. 43 Stephanie D’Alessandro, ‘Opportunity and Invention’, 86. 44 Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 170. 45 Yves-Alain Bois, ‘Pablo Picasso: The Cadaqués Experiment’, in Leah Dickerman, with contributions from Matthew Affron et al. Inventing Abstraction 1910–1925. How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, c. 2012), 40–2. Many other scholars have discussed this crucial moment for Picasso’s art. See also, for example, Karmel, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism, 76–82. 46 Poggi, In Defiance of Painting, 137. 47 Groom, Beyond the Easel, 35. 48 Albert Aurier, ‘Le Symbolisme en peinture, Paul Gauguin’, Mercure de France, 2, no. 15 (March 1891), 155–65, 163, as quoted by Poggi. See Poggi, In Defiance of Painting, 138. Aurier and his text are also discussed by Gloria Groom. See Gloria Groom, Edouard Vuillard: Painter-Decorator. Patrons and Projects, 1892-1912 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 13–14.

Index Aitcheson, George 235 Alexandre, Arsène 212 Angot, Albert 42 Arendt, Hannah 2 Art Nouveau 5, 6, 7, 63, 83–5, 195, 201, 207–28, 239 Astruc, Zacherie 141 Atget, Eugène 274–6 Aubanel, Théodore 128 Bachelard, Gaston 85, 86, 189, 191, 192 Balzac, Honoré de 3, 4, 7, 16–17, 25, 35, 38, 239, 242, 246, 253–62 Baronne Staffe 191 Baudelaire, Charles 2, 14, 17, 38, 80, 87, 89, 97, 99, 101, 137, 141, 143, 186, 208, 211, 212, 214, 237 Bazille, Frédéric 138 Beardsley, Aubrey 80 Benjamin, Walter 1, 2, 13, 14, 15, 16, 26, 84, 90, 105, 267, 270 Bertall (Charles-Albert d’Arnoux) 17–23, 25, 26, 35 Bing, Siegfried 4, 63, 212 Blake, William 80 Boch, Anna 217, 218 Boëcklin, Arnold 80 Bonnard, Pierre 14, 81, 263, 265 bourgeoisie See also class 61, 73, 83, 105, 118, 139, 142, 180, 189–204, 246 Braecke, Pierre 217 Braque, Georges 263–83 Burne-Jones, Edward 248 Caillebotte, Gustave 150, 263 Cardon, Charles-Léon (Dornac) 268–70, 274 Cassatt, Mary 7, 137–63 Champfleury 49, 97 Chopin, Frédéric 141 class See also bourgeoisie 49, 52, 53, 74, 142, 166, 170, 181, 192, 193, 196, 201, 246, 270, 277, 280

Colette 189–205 Corot, Camille 140, 141, 142 Courbet, Gustave 141, 142 Crane, Walter 219, 223 Crespin, Adolphe 220, 222 Cubism 10, 263–84 Daudet, Léon 107 Daumier, Honoré 15, 17, 19, 22, 23, 25 De Chavannes, Puvis 141 decoration 6, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57, 55, 63, 74, 265, 267, 273, 276, 279–81 De Coster, Charles 81 Degas, Edgar 138, 141, 149, 152, 153, 154, 155, 258–62, 304 De Goncourt, brothers 23, 38, 39, 63, 229, 240, 245 Edmond 39, 63 Degouve de Nuncques, William 79 De Groux, Henri 81 Delaunay, Robert 124 De Maistre, Xavier 14 De Montesquiou, Robert 211 Denis, Maurice 214, 265 De Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri 81 Diderot, Denis 27 Du Camp, Maxime 41 Duran, Carolus 141 Durand-Ruel, Paul 142, 154 Duranty, Edmond de 1, 137, 138, 139, 155 ekphrasis 7, 253–61 Elskamp, Max 83, 216 Ensor, James 5, 6, 81, 83, 97–9, 100–3 expositions universelles See also world fair 33, 34, 37, 38, 47, 49, 64 Fantin-Latour, Henri 140, 142 Ferry, Jules and Charles 141 Finch, Willy 211 Flaubert, Gustave 33, 36, 37, 43, 47 Foreman Day, Lewis 61, 67, 68 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré 18, 67

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Freud, Sigmund 106, 110 Friedlich, Casper David 80 Gallé, Emile 211, 212 Gauguin, Paul 80, 81, 82 Gautier, Théophile 97 Gavarni, Paul 17, 18, 22, 23, 34, 240 Grandville, Jean-Jacques 21, 22 Guimard, Hector 212 Hankar, Paul 5, 6, 83, 208, 218, 220, 221, 222, 226 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène 4, 39, 105, 142 Hellens, Franz 216, 223 Hoffmann, Josef 68, 225, 239 Hogarth, William 18 Horta, Victor 7, 63, 207, 208, 211, 212, 214, 215, 216–21, 222, 223, 225 Hugo, Victor 40, 31, 46 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 5, 89, 214, 240, 241 impressionism 137–59, 253–63 interiority 6, 7, 14, 53, 79, 86, 88, 89, 94, 96, 113, 122, 232, 241, 242, 243, 244, 253, 258, 262, 261, 267 Khnopff, Fernand 7, 79, 81, 94–6, 98, 100, 207, 208, 209, 216, 217, 219, 219–26 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 101 Klimt, Gustav 68 Klinger, Max 247 Lami, Eugène 21 Le Brun, Georges 14 Leighton, Frederic Lord 235, 248 Lemmen, George 211 Leys, Henri 73 Maeterlinck, Maurice 79, 89, 94, 96, 98, 100, 208, 209, 211, 214 Manet, Edouard 4, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 152, 154, 155, 258–61, 263 Matisse, Henri 263, 265, 281 Maus, Madeleine 207 Maus, Octave 61, 80, 81, 218 Meier-Graefe, Julius 63, 65, 67 Meissonnier, Juste-Aurèle 23 Mellery, Xavier 53, 79, 81, 97, 98, 100, 222 Meunier, Constantin 73

Minne, Georges 81, 217 Mockel, Albert 83, 214 modernity 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 13, 39, 101, 123, 124, 137, 142, 147, 260, 263, 267, 270, 274, 275, 282 In Belgium 79–104 Monet, Claude 141, 154 Moreau, Gustave 82, 248 Morisot, Berthe 7, 137–62 Morris, William 63, 223, 235 Munch, Edvard 80, 101 Nabis, the 211, 265, 281, 282 Pelseneer, Edouard 225, 237, 238, 239 Petit, Georges 142 Photography 15 Picard, Edmond 53, 61, 62, 63, 73, 74, 81, 83, 208, 218 Picasso, Pablo 8, 263–82 Pikker, Thorn 219 Poe, Edgar Allan 187 Pre-Raphaelites, the 241, 242, 244 Proust, Marcel 6, 8, 105–20 Redon, Odilon 80, 81, 82, 97, 208 Rembrandt 67 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 80, 141, 154 Rimbaud, Arthur 80 Rodenbach, Georges 6, 79, 80, 84–94, 97, 100, 105–20, 214, 223, 224 Romain, Jules 6, 121–34 Rossetti, Christina 242 Rousseau, Ernest 98 Rubens, Peter-Paul 67, 141 Serrurier-Bovy, Gustave 61, 223 Seurat, Georges 81 Simmel, Georg 2 Singer-Sargent, John 139 Spilliart, Léon 79, 97, 100–1 Stevens, Alfred 5, 141, 142 Stoclet, Adolphe and Suzanne 67 Sumner, Heywood 223 Symbolism 7 In Belgium 79–104, 207–28, 239 Toorop, Yan 219 Turner, William 247

Index Vallotton, Félix 14 Vanderbilt, William 61 Van der Stappen, Charles 73 Van de Velde, Henry 5, 6, 83, 211, 217 Van Dyck, Yan 67 Van Gogh, Vincent 81 Van Lerberghe, Charles 79, 93, 100, 208 Van Rysselberhe, Théo 220 Verhaeren, Émile 7, 79, 80, 83, 84, 99, 100, 123, 207, 208, 218, 219–26 Verlaine, Paul 80, 81 Villiers d’Isle-d’Adam, Auguste 81

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Viollet-Le-Duc, Eugène 191 Von Stuck, Franz 237, 247 Voysey, C.F.A. 223 Vuillard, Edouard 14, 81, 263, 265, 281 Waller, Max 83 Webb, Philip 235 Whistler, James McNeill 80, 139 world fair See also expositions universelles 64 Zola, Emile 3, 4, 5, 36–49, 89, 141

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Plate 1  Fernand Khnopff, Portrait of Jeanne Kéfer, oil on canvas, 16 × 16 cm (1885, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles).

Plate 2  Fernand Khnopff, I lock this door upon myself, oil on canvas, 72.7 × 141 cm (Munich: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Neue Pinakothek).

Plate 3  Xavier Mellery, The Stairway, Light effect, black chalk on paper, 59 × 46 cm (1889, Antwerp: Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Collection KMSKA – Flemish Community).

Plate 4  James Ensor, Hippogriff, interior elements, drawing on paper, 17 cm × 22.5 cm × 28 cm (1880–5, Ghent: Museum voor Schone Kunsten).

Plate 5  James Ensor, The Flea, black chalk and pencil on paper, 22.6 × 16.8 cm (1886–8, Private Collection).

Plate 6  James Ensor, The Haunted Furniture. Destroyed in the Second World War (1940). (1885; reworked in 1890, previously held at Ostend, Museum of Fine Arts).

Plate 7  James Ensor, Skeletons trying to Warm themselves, oil on canvas, 74.8 × 60 cm (1889, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas ©2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Brussels).

Plate 8  Léon Spilliaert, Self-portrait with red pencil, Indian ink wash, brush, watercolour and coloured pencil on paper, 48.5 × 63.1 cm (1908, Copyright Mu.ZEE, Oostende ©SABAM Belgium 2016.).

Plate 9  Berthe Morisot, Young Woman at a Window, also known as The Artist’s Sister at a Window, oil on canvas, 54.8 × 46.4 cm (1869, Washington: National Gallery of Art).

Plate 10  Berthe Morisot, The Cradle, oil on canvas, 56 × 46.5 cm (1872, Paris: Musée d’Orsay) Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Michel Urtado.

Plate 11  Mary Cassatt, The Tea, oil on canvas, 64.77 × 92.07 cm (c. 1880, Boston: Museum of Fine Arts).

Plate 12  Mary Cassatt, The Child’s Bath, oil on canvas, 100 × 66 cm (1893, Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago).

Plate 13  Berthe Morisot, Woman at her Toilette, oil on canvas, 60 × 80 cm (1875/80, Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago).

Plate 14  Édouard Manet, Olympia, oil on canvas, 130.5 × 190 cm (1863, Paris: Musée d’Orsay).

Plate 15  Edgar Degas, Interior, oil on canvas, 81 × 114 cm (1868–9, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art).

Plate 16  Pablo Picasso, Nude Woman, 1910, oil on canvas, 187.3 × 61 cm, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. © 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 17  Pablo Picasso, Pipe Rack and Still Life on a Table, 1911, oil on canvas, 49.5 × 127 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Mr. and Mrs. Klaus G. Perls Collection, 1997. © 2017 Estate of Pablo Picasso /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 18  Pablo Picasso, Guitar and Wine Glass, 1912, collage and charcoal on board, 47.9 × 37.5 cm, Bequest of Marion Koogler McNay, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX. © McNay Art Museum/ Art Resource, NY.