Work and the Image: Volume 1: Work, Craft and Labour - Visual Representations in Changing Histories [1° ed.] 113873036X, 9781138730366

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of contributors
List of figures
Introduction
1 A Greek vase-painting: comments on the nature of craftsmanship?
2 Aux armes et aux arts! Blacksmiths at the National Convention
3 'The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover': LaVille-Leroulx's Portrait de Negresse and the signs of misrecognition
4 Death and the worker: Rethel in 1849
5 Gender and the ideology of capitalism: William Bell Scott's Iron and Coal
6 Time and work-discipline in Pissarro
7 Mihaly Biro's Nepszava poster and the emergence of Tendenzkunst
8 A re-vision of Ukrainian identity: images of labouring peasant women in Tatiana Yablonskaia's Corn, 1949
9 Life and work in Silesia according to Kazimierz Kutz
10 This time next year we'll be farting through silk: aspiration and experience
Index

Citation preview

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

W ork and the Im age II W ork in M o d e m Tim es V isu al M ediations and So cial Processes

Edited by Valerie Mainz and Griselda Pollock Introduction Trauma and subjectivity in work and worklessness Valerie Mainz and Griselda Pollock 'Living tableaux of misery and oppression' Sweated labour on tour Kristina Huneault Facing horror Women's work, sculptural practice and the Great War Claudine Mitchell Colour, light and labour Futurism and the dissolution of work John C. Welchman The missing mecanicienne Gender, production and order in Leger's machine aesthetic Mo Price 'A progressive dematerialisation of labour power' A problem for visual representation in Germany in the 1920s Martin Ignatius Gaughan From cyborg to state worker Figures as/in technology Annie Gerin Realism and ideology in Andre Fougeron's Le Pays des Mines Vivian Rehberg Working images The representations of documentary film Elizabeth Cowie The pathos of the political Documentary, subjectivity and a forgotten moment of feminist avant-garde poetics in four films from the 1970s Griselda Pollock Teletales from the crypt Nancy Barton

Work and the Image I Work, Craft and Labour Visual Representations in Changing Histories

Edited by Valerie Mainz and Griselda Pollock

First published 2000 by Ashgate Publishing Reissued 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © The individual contributors, 2000 The authors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or oilier means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, wiiliout permission in writing from ilie publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation wiiliout intent to infringe. Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure ilie quality of this reprint but points out iliat some imperfections in ilie original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. Typeset in Palatino by Manton Typesetters, Louth, Lincolnshire, UK. A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 00040610 ISBN 13: 978-1-138-73036-6 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-315-18944-4 (ebk)

Contents

List of contributors List of figures Introduction Valerie Mainz and Griselda Pollock 1

A Greek vase-painting: comments on the nature of craftsmanship? Michael Duigan

2 Aux armes et aux arts! Blacksmiths at the National Convention Valerie Mainz 3

'The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover': LaVille-Leroulx's Portrait de Negresse and the signs of misrecognition Helen Weston

4 Death and the worker: Rethel in 1849 William Vaughan 3

Gender and the ideology of capitalism: William Bell Scott's Iron and Coal Jane Garnett

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ix 1 13 35

53 75

93

6 Time and work-discipline in Pissarro T. /. Clark

109

7 Mihaly Biro's Nepszava poster and the emergence of Tendenzkunst Sherwin Simmons

133

8 A re-vision of Ukrainian identity: images of labouring peasant women in Tatiana Yablonskaia's Corn, 1949 Pat Simpson

133

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WORK AND THE IMAGE I

9 Life and work in Silesia according to Kazimierz Kutz Ewa Mazierska 10

This time next year we'll be farting through silk: aspiration and experience Anonymous

Index

Contributors

has been employed as a Lecturer in Art and Design (at further education level) since January 1991, at the institution that is referred to in this text. As this situation is currently in progress, the writer needs to remain anonymous.

ano nym o us

. j. c l a r k is the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Art History at the University of California, Berkeley. His latest book is Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999).

t

d u i g a n is a PhD student at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He is researching the ancient Greek uses of imagery as a source for their views on the nature and making of art and teaches Greek Art History for the Birkbeck College Diploma in Art History.

m ic h a e l

g a r n e t t is Fellow and Tutor in Modem History at Wadham College, Oxford, and has recently published on nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury intellectual and cultural history.

ja n e

is a Lecturer in Art History and Jewish Studies at the University of Leeds. She curated the exhibition L'lmage du Travail et la Revolution frangaise for the Musee de la Revolution frangaise in Vizille, France, and has published widely on visual representation in the revolutionary period.

v a l e r ie m a in z

m a z i e r s k a is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Media Studies in the Department of History of Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan University. She lived in Poland until 1995 and she has published numerous articles in Polish about Polish and world cinema, as well as four books,

ew a

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including Czlowiek wobec kultury. James Ivory i jego filmy (Man and Culture. Cinema of James Ivory, 1999). g r i s e l d a p o l l o c k is Professor of Social and Cultural Histories of Art at the University of Leeds. She has published extensively on issues of class and gender in visual representation and on contemporary visual art, cinema and feminist cultural theory. Her latest book is Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art's Histories (1999).

Si m m o n s is an Associate Professor at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, where he teaches twentieth-century art and design history. He is currently completing a book entitled Kunst oder Kitsch: Art and Mass Culture in Germany 1900-1920. s h e r w in

S i m p s o n has a PhD from the University of Essex and is currently Lecturer in the History of Fine Art and Visual Culture in the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Hertfordshire. Her recent publications include articles on Soviet and contemporary Ukrainian art.

pat

v a u g h a n is Professor of the History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London. His books include German Romanticism and English Art (1979), German Romantic Painting (1980) and Art and the Natural World in Nineteenth-Century Britain (1997). He is currently preparing a book 'Painting in English': The Shaping of the British School. w il l ia m

is Professor in the History of Art at University College London. She is co-author and co-editor, with Professor William Vaughan, of David's 'The Death of Marat' and has published extensively on French eighteenthand nineteenth-century art, including articles on P. P. Prud'hon and C. Mayer, J.-L. David, A.-L. Girodet and G. G. Lethiere. He l e n w e s t o n

Figures

i A Greek vase-painting: comments on the nature of craftsmanship?

1.1 The Eucharides Painter or Nikoxenos Painter, A shoe-maker making sandals for a young man while observed by a third, An enigmatic image; a Satyr; holding a box sitting on a rock accompanied by a goat and a second Satyr dancing, the third figure wearing a hat and winged boots probably Hermes, early fifth century b c , pelike from Rhodes, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, G. 247 (V. 563) 1.2 The 'Foundry Painter', Hephaestus making arms for Achilles accompanied by Thetis (interior), Bronze sculptor's workshop (exterior detail), first quarter fifth century bc , red-figure cup from Vulci, Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Photo Jutta Tietz-Glagow, F2294 (ARV 400) 1.3 Makron, Judgement of Paris, the Trojan Prince playing a lyre while seated on a rock at the base of which there are a number of goats, Hermes brings the rival goddesses for a judgement of beauty, c. 490480 bc , red-figure cup from Vulci, Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Photo Jutta Tietz-Glagow, F2291 (ARV

459)

1.4 The 'Princeton painter', Musical Contest, a singer and double pipe player stand on a wooden table; on either side the audience or judges sit on folding stools, c. 540-530 bc , black-figure amphora. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Norbert Schimmel Trust, 1989 (1989.281.89) 2

Aux armes et aux arts!

Blacksmiths at the National Convention

2.1 Fulcran-Jean Harriet, Les forgerons a la Convention, lors de la fete du Salpetre, le 30 ventose an II (The Blacksmiths at the Convention on the Festival of Saltpetre, 30 ventose an II), 1794-95, Pen aRd brown wash drawing, 62.8 x 78.1 cm, Paris, Musee Carnavalet, © Phototheque des Musees de la Ville de Paris, Cliche Ladet 2.2 Francois Gerard, Le peuple frangais demandant la destitution du tyran a la journee du 10 aout (The French People Demanding the Overthrow of the Tyrant on the Tenth of August 1792), 1794-95, pen, graphite, sepia wash heightened with white drawing, 66.8 x 91.7 cm, Paris, Musee du Louvre, Departement des Arts Graphiques, © Photo R.M.N. Michele Bellot

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2.3 Jacques-Louis David, Le Serment du Jeu de Paume (The Tennis Court Oath), 1791, pen, graphite, sepia wash heightened with white drawing, 65 x 103 cm, Paris, Musee du Louvre, Departement des Arts Graphiques, © Photo R.M.N. 2.4 Fulcran-Jean Harriet, Les Sabines separant les armees ennemies (The Sabine Women separating the Enemy Armies), pen and graphite drawing, 62.8 x 78.1 cm, Paris, Musee Carnavalet, © Phototheque des Musees de la Ville de Paris, Cliche Ladet 3 'The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover': LaVille-Leroulx's Portrait de Negresse and the signs of misrecognition

3.1 Marie-Guillemine LaVilleLeroulx/Mme Benoist, Portrait of a Negress, exhib. Salon of 1800, oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm, Paris, Musee d'Orsay, © Photo R.M.N. 3.2 Portrait of a Negress, detail, Photo Helen Weston 3.3 Jacques-Louis David, Portrait of Mme de Verninac, dated l'an VII (1799), oil on canvas, 145 x 120 cm, Paris, Musee du Louvre © Photo R.M.N. 3.4 Jacques-Louis David, Self-Portrait, 1793, oil on canvas, 81 x 64 cm, Paris, Musee du Louvre © Photo R.M.N. 3.3 Jean-Jacques-Frangois Le Barbier the elder, Portrait of Charles-Andre Demoustier, 1794, oil on canvas, 63 x 34 cm, Vizille, Musee de la Revolution fran^aise, Photo Musee de la Revolution fran^aise, Vizille 4 Death and the worker: Rethel in 1849

4.1 Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Totentanz aus dem Jahren 1848 (Another Dance of Death, from the year 1848), wood engraving, 1849, plate 2

4.2 Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Totentanz aus dem Jahren 1848 (Another Dance of Death, from the year 1848), wood engraving, 1849, plate 3 4.3 Adolph Menzel, Die Aufbahrung der Marzgefallenen (The Honouring of the Insurgents Killed in March 1848), oil, 1848, Hamburg, Kunsthalle 4.4 Johann Peter Hasenclever, Ein Magistrat im Jahre 1848 (A Magistrate in 1848), oil sketch, 1849, Munster, Landesmuseum fur Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte 4.3 Alfred Rethel, Der Tod als Freund (Death the Friend), wood engraving, 1831 (engraving by J. Jungtow) 5 Gender and the ideology of capitalism: William Bell Scott's Iron

and Coal 3.1 William Bell Scott, Iron and Coal on Tyneside in the Nineteenth Century, c. 1836, Wallington Hall, Cumberland, National Trust Photographic Library/ Derrick E. Witty 3.2 William Bell Scott, Grace Darling rescuing the men of the Forfarshire, c. 1836, Wallington Hall, Cumberland, National Trust Photographic Library 3.3 PEACE: Mr Punch's Design for a Colossal Statue, which ought to have been placed in the International Exhibition, Punch, May 1862, p. 177; Bodleian Library, Oxford: N.2796.d.io. 3.4 Mneme, from William Bell Scott, The Year of the World; A Philosophical Poem on 'Redemption from the Fall', Edinburgh: William Tait, and London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1846, p. 93; Bodleian Library, Oxford: 46.433 6 Time and work-discipline in Pissarro

6.1 Camille Pissarro, Two Young Peasant Women, 1892, oil on canvas, 89.3 x 116.3 cm/ New York, The Metropolitan

Figures

Museum of Art, Gift of Mr and Mrs Charles Wrightsman, 1973 (1973.311.5) 6.2 Camille Pissarro, Peasant Woman Sitting and Peasant Woman Kneeling, 1893, oil on canvas, private collection 6.3 Jean Francois Millet, The Angelus, 1857, oil on canvas, Paris, Musee du Louvre, © Photo R.M.N. 6.4 Jean Francois Millet, Shepherd with his Flock at Evening, 1857-60, oil on canvas, 53.5 x 71 cm, present location unknown 6.5 Unknown photographer, The Studio of Pissarro at Eragny, c. 1903 6.6 Camille Pissarro, La Mere Presle, 1874, oil on canvas, private collection 7 Mihaly Biro's Nepszava poster and the emergence of Tendenzkunst

7.1 Mihaly Biro, Nepszava (The People's Voice), 19 11- 12 , colour lithograph, 95 x 63 cm 7.2 Manno Miltiades, Mosakodnak! (They Wash Themselves!), 1919, colour lithograph, 127 x 94 cm 7.3 Laszlo Peri, Lest das Volkshlatt. Die Kommunistische Tageszeitung (Read Volkshlatt. The Communist Daily Newspaper), 1924, colour lithograph, 90 x 59.5 cm 8 A re-vision of Ukrainian identity: images of labouring peasant women in Tatiana Yablonskaia's Com, 1949

8.1 Tatiana Yablonskaia, Corn, 1949, oil on canvas, 201 x 370 cm, State Tretiakovskii Gallery, Moscow (© T. N. Yablonskaia, photograph courtesy of Novosti Ltd) 8.2 Fedir Opanasovich Samusev, Harvest and Grain collection - Bolshevik speed, 1949, poster, gouache, 70 x 56 cm, whereabouts unknown. Source:

xi

Committee for Art Affairs, X Ukrainian Art Exhibition, Catalogue, Mistetstvo, Kiev, 1950 (photocopy courtesy of T. N. Yablonskaia) 8.3 Ivan Ivanovich Yukhno, News about the people, 1949, oil on canvas, 180.5 x 299 cnV whereabouts unknown. Source: Committee for Art Affairs, X Ukrainian Art Exhibition, Catalogue, Mistetstvo, Kiev, 1950 (photocopy courtesy of T. N. Yablonskaia) 8.4 Tatiana Yablonskaia, Tonia Nikolina. Study, 1948, oil on canvas, present location unknown. Source: il6JT0HCKa;i, T., 'Kaic x p a60T a/ia H aa KaPTHHOtf Xne6, M3 T60PHecKoro Onura, Issue 3, Moscow, 1957, p. 76 8.5 Oleksandr Oleksandrovich Koval'ov, Portrait of Hero of Socialist Labour O. S. Khobti, 1949, marble, 100 x 100 x 100 cm, whereabouts unknown. Source: Committee for Art Affairs, X Ukrainian Art Exhibition, Catalogue, Mistetstvo, Kiev, 1950 (photocopy courtesy of T. N. Yablonskaia) 10 This time next year w e'll be farting through silk: aspiration and experience

10 .1 Alison Marchant, Wall Paper History/Re-Visit, 1988 10.2 Alison Marchant, Tying the Threads, 1993 10.3 Alison Marchant, System Sustained Silence, 1990-97 10.4 Terry Dennett, The Crisis Project, 1991 10.5

Anonymous, Sign or Else, 1998

10.6 Anonymous, Presenting the Evidence, 1998

Introduction Valerie Mainz and Griselda Pollock

This volume and its companion, Work in Modern Times: Visual Mediations and Social Processes, originated in a project for an exhibition on representations of work at a specific and historic moment. The exhibition, curated by Valerie Mainz at the University of Leeds Art Gallery in 1998, assembled prints, paintings, and a variety of more ephemeral objects and documents that enabled a critical analysis of the image of labour inflected by gender during the French Revolution.1 For all its revolutionary character at the level of political and social thought, the moment of the French Revolution, when reviewed through the prism of the image archive collected for the exhibition, appeared much less radical in its representations of work and the worker, than the very figure who would gradually become so potent a symbol of social change in the major revolutionary struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the point that the image of a muscled male industrial worker complete with hammer and red flag has become the very emblem of revolutionary art. During the French Revolution the concepts of work and worker still remained fundamentally pre-modern. Yet the very absence of a highly visible discourse on work at this period allowed the posing of the question of work and its displaced, oblique, or remarkable because rare, direct representations to open a new perspective upon this significant period of transition that politically initiated some of the transformations into modem social forms and relations in which changes to the nature and condition of work would become a defining economic and cultural feature. Although the right to work was enshrined in the revolutionary Constitution of Year I, a constitution that was approved but never put into effect, work was still viewed primarily in terms of the property of an individual. Its organization and structures did not yet form the basis for creating the worker as privileged agent of social change nor was work the organizational site of

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collective consciousness and action within what would later become so marked as class struggle. An analysis of the visual archive around images of work, craft and labour in the revolutionary moment in France in the late eighteenth century functioned as a contribution to expanded studies of France and its revolutionary culture. It was, however, equally important as a hinge between pre-modem and pre-industrial concepts of work and those which are the legacy of industrialization and of political economy as well as of revolutionary upheaval. The research into this specific conjuncture between fundamental aspects of social life, historical process and labour, on the one hand, and visual inscription in a variety of cultural forms on the other, generated the idea for a conference on the theme of work and its visual representations. The conference was, however, conceived with a much extended historical scope that would aim to build up a larger picture of the transformations of the terms and experience of work, labour and craft by a mosaic of closely read, detailed and historically specific case studies. The conference and exhibition announced, therefore, another historic moment, the late twentieth century, which offered a post-modern point of review and retrospect upon the contemporary issues of work and the need for a range of historical analyses. Reviewing the annual yield of conference topics and publications titles, we would rapidly conclude that work was hardly one of the most current or fashionable topics for historical and cultural investigation in the later 1990s. Yet work, worklessness, the right to work, the conditions of work, the social meaning and personal value of work remain fundamental issues for all of us, despite the fact that cultural attention has migrated to other dimensions of social life and subjectivity, such as consumption, desire, sexuality, the body, cyberspace and so forth. The conference, convened to set the exhibition's remarkable archive within a broader historical and theoretical field, gratifyingly revealed how much interesting and challenging research was, in fact, being done on the theme of work in art history, film studies and artistic practice itself. This volume and its companion serve as a marker to the continuing importance of the meanings of work within the ever shifting configurations of social and economic life, and of cultural and artistic representation. Its selected and selective case studies will, we hope, encourage more research and more debate about an important subject so intermittently appearing as the object of cultural and historical analysis. Our project aims specifically to go beyond the still remarkably rare art historical treatments of the theme of work. Faced with such a topic, art historians have tended to undertake iconographical surveys in which compilations of images catalogue pictures according to national schools, and stylistic tendencies or close studies of types of task depicted, weavers,

Valerie Mainz and Griselda Pollock

3

ploughmen, ragpickers, and so forth.2 The effect of such cataloguing is to suggest, on the one hand, that work is a human constant - humans condemned to labour in the sweat of their brow by biblical injunction - and, on the other that its outward appearances or stylistic dress may alter only as an external index of large-scale social and economic transformations over time.3 In contrast to these surveys and catalogues, there have been some detailed analyses of work in direct relation to industrialization which so dramatically produced new economic and ultimately political conditions for work leading to the historic emergence of the modern concept of worker and the working class.4 Theoretically and methodologically, the two volumes of Work and the Image differ from the more usual surveys because neither labour nor work are perceived as given or fixed. The very concepts and definitions of what we are dealing with emerge as unstable and diverse. They require both rigorous historical study and astute semiotic analysis in order to discern the discontinuities and, at times, radical ruptures around both social practices and the meanings of terms across the social and imaginary fields in which work is performed and in which work serves to define the subjectivity of its performer. Never pretending to a comprehensive historical genealogy, this first volume marks its interest in specificity and diversity by starting with a study of craft as it is self-reflectively represented in Greek vase-painting, its own product, a study that resonates with current debates amongst artists about the function of craft in the artistic process under current conditions of commodification. The volume concludes with the specially prepared text of a performance in which a contemporary artist critically reviews her own history as a worker moving from supermarket to classroom and lecture hall, and who now struggles to negotiate the changing terms of professional work in the new managerial ethos dominant in institutions of further education. Both chapters ask what work means and how it defines the person who works in such conditions, but the answers reflect more about the precise situation of making. A second major difference from the traditions of iconographical study of work and its images, in which the image is taken to be a more or less transparent carrier of representation, lies in the consistent attention given here to the work process by which an image is itself produced. This is not to reduce art-making to work, or to render insignificant important distinctions between aesthetic practices and the often harsh realities of the labour process. The aim is to re­ establish historically variable but socially significant links between the material and symbolic status of the image as something made, worked over and through, produced in its own facticity as well as in relation to the wider framing of the relations of production. Representation itself forms a kind of working that involves both manual skills, craft and intellectual, cultural knowledges. What

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does it mean to speak of the work of art, or of the work that art does, when that work is applied to the domain of work itself? As both text and methodological field, this enquiry aims to explore the relation between the processes of visual representation, history and language. What we mean by work is not fixed and those changes which the term and its relatives have undergone inscribe linguistically, and embed in culture through image as well as language, the work of slowly forming and changing socio-economic arrangements we name society.5 In formulating a research proposal on work and its representations in 1980 the Marxist anthropologist, Maurice Godelier wrote: 'the words "work", "to work", and "worker" have a particular meaning in our language and appeared at a certain moment in the evolution of society. Their meaning has since changed over the course of our history'.6 As a preliminary move, Godelier rehearsed the perplexing linguistic history of the French words travailler (to work, whose origin lies in a Latin word for torture with a tripalium), labourer (to plough, originally from the Latin word for toil), ouvrier (worker, originally from the Latin word for a man of pain or affliction) and gagner (to earn, from a Frankish word for pillaging). Their historically changed meanings revealed a pattern of major linguistic shifts that could be related to deep-seated socio-economic transformations, such as the height of the feudal period in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries when towns and domestic forms of manufacture first developed, or the fifteenth century which witnessed the beginnings of international trade, colonial expansion, banking and the further expansion of urbanism, and, finally, the end of the eighteenth century when the modem meanings of these words were again reshaped by industrialization and major political changes.7 It was at that point that work acquired a generic meaning, as a collective noun that incorporated all kinds of labour and productive activity. Work was also philosophically redefined as the source of value in the great treatises on political economy written by Quesnay, Tableau economique de la France (1759) and by Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776), a point that the nineteenth-century political economist, Karl Marx was later to take up when he insisted on establishing a clear link between the idea of work as a general category of wealth production and the social and economic relations that produced a distinctly modern organization of working that does not apply to pre-capitalist societies. Marx wrote: work may seem to be a simple category ... however, when seen from an economic point of view, even this simple category is as historical a concept as the social relations that have given birth to it. It is only when work has become, not only at a theoretical level, but in reality, a means of creating wealth in general and has thus ceased to operate as a determination in its singular and particular forms that the abstraction 'work in general' becomes conceivable as a practical reality, as the point of departure for modern economics.8

Valerie Mainz and Griselda Pollock

5

Reviewing histories of work and its images from our moment in time, thus, involves being aware of the historical movement that made continuous, money rewarded, productive, socialized work radically different from the intermittent, non-profit oriented, localized, seasonal, task-bound work of non-capitalist societies. E. R Thompson's benchmark article on Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism', whose title is invoked in T. J. Clark's chapter, first attempted to map the nature of these changes in the temporality, the rhythm of work, pointing out how the demand for continuous productivity lies at the heart of the modem labour process. Work thus defines both the character of modem, capitalist society in ever more intrusive and comprehensive ways, while it also comes to define our sense of identity; we are identified socially, economically, culturally by the kind of work we do.9It is against the disciplining beat of modem work, that both leisure, time off work, and the rhythms of older work systems acquire new symbolic meaning, as T. J. Clark explores in an image of the respite from labour in an agricultural setting, painstakingly considered by the astute political painter Camille Pissarro. In work, out of work, off work, these prepositions in relation to the common noun indicate altered relations of historical importance. In his critical and historical dictionary that charts the impact of the modem industrial society upon every facet of social organization and social experience, Raymond Williams traced the meanings of the English word, work, in relation to a cluster of related terms, industry, culture, society, democracy.10 The old English word, work, is a general term for doing something, for activity and it stood in general distinction from the Latin-derived word, labour, which, like the French terms, had a strong sense of pain, often associated with toil, itself derived from a Latin word for crushing that only acquired its present meaning of arduous labour in the fourteenth century. With the coming of industrialization, however, Williams argues that the meaning of work became specialized, referring in most common parlance to paid employment.11 Thus work in a world reshaped by industrial capitalism signifies being in waged labour. It is on the basis of this historical revaluation that modem relations of both class and of gender emerge. Thus while 'working' unpaid for unregulated hours in home and family, women not engaged in waged employment outside the home are not considered to be working. Unemployment means being 'out of work'. Work, that once meant generally the expenditure of significant effort, now defines the social relations within which that effort is made. Thus any question of its representation cannot be limited to the isolated figure of the worker, performing some form of labour, or task, but must always refer beyond that exercise to the social relations within which work is carried out, valued, exploited or used to define its agent. Our conception of the conditions in which we work under capitalist economies, are already mediated by representations; for what is money, the

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commodity form, the wage, but already forms of representation that mystify the actual relations governing both the expenditure of our energies, skills and the value that is thereby created.12 Marx identified this historically specific mode of mystification in which the creative productivity of human labour is veiled by its own products, commodities, as the fetishism of commodities. He used this concept to characterize ideology in its modern forms as a system that concealed the underlying conditions that govern social and economic life. Under the form of the commodity as itself a representation, the human labour that creates useful things and gives them value by the investment of human skill and time, disappears into the image offered by its own product. Thus is created the illusion of an object that appears to have its own value by virtue of its intrinsic qualities, an object that circulates freely, spontaneously exhibiting its own inherent values to lure its potential consumer. What is erased from view by this trick of representation is the creativity of human labour and the exploitative relations in which it is put to work. Work as both necessary to survival and subsistence, and as expenditure of its human agent, is recast into relations in which the worker's labour becomes, as much as her or his product, yet another commodity that can be bought and sold, a situation represented through the wage. Such a process, that defines the transformations we variously define as modernity or industrial and post-industrial capitalism, indicates that the mere represent­ ation of someone 'at work' cannot satisfactorily signify the relations in which that labour is performed, valued, used or circulated. It is not enough to classify types of work, signified by a typical worker, which then only signify pre-modem notions of tasks, or seasonal labour, both indeed becoming popular in the nostalgic realism of nineteenth-century paintings of rural life and labour. Under the pressures of the modern, the space of artistic representation thus becomes less an index of a socially transparent process and more an attempt to make visible these occluded dimensions of the experience of our relations to the social practices in which labour is performed or skill is exercised as 'work'. Works of art, like the words we still use to write about them, construct modes of representation, sites of meaning and interpretation and, as such, they are predicated on the differences between our mental conceptions of the world and the material reality in which we live, work and struggle to make meaning. Interpretation must contend with discontinuities between intention and determining circumstance, between theory and practice, between the historical moment of production and a belated reading. While visual representation functions as a transmission of meaning that can be tracked across historical time to the present of our reading of it, it must also be viewed as always embedded in its own historical contingencies. In place of the illusion of continuity created by the art historical study of the

Valerie Mainz and Griselda Pollock

7

iconography of tasks or kinds of work over a lengthy period of historical change, the chapters presented here insist upon the difficult work of decipherment of any image as both a representation of, and a representation within, a historical matrix, whose interpretation, nonetheless, yields significant knowledge for the art historian or social historian situated in our present. The social history of art has never promised merely to deliver a socially accurate slice of historical time reconstructed through its visual culture. It struggles theoretically and practically at that difficult point of interface between, on the one hand, the historically embedded, shifting and contingent visual rhetoric that will be deployed and changed in the making of an image and, on the other, the social, cultural and historical determinations which are both its conditions of production and its referent. The chapter by Valerie Mainz, for instance, analyses the tensions between the codes and ambitions of academic history painting and the equivocal imperative to represent as historical agents and participants, blacksmiths, when they entered the privileged arena of political space to be honoured for their work for the revolutionary cause in producing armaments. How radically different is the image of the worker in prints in the course and aftermath of the Revolution of 1848 in Germany made by Rethel which are studied by William Vaughan in a careful reading of the artist's shifting attitudes to his own subject as the political situation altered. Sherwin Simmons provides a case study of the unstable political effectivity of a created socialist iconography that focused on the image of militant labour in the posters made by Mihaly Biro in the revolutionary decades of early twentieth-century Hungary whose legacy informed the later work of John Heartfield in Germany. The relation of the urban worker to the political sphere raises an array of questions. What of the sites of agricultural labour and their political significance? T. J. Clark's chapter addresses this question in France in 1891, in his analysis of the anarchist Pissarro's painting of two peasant women taking a break from work, while Pat Simpson focuses on the Ukraine during 1 949_5°/ an analysis of the treacherously shifting sands of Soviet policies on art and on the meaning of national identities represented or blunted by the gender of the workers. The need to view the problematic of work and its representations as a site of multiple redefinitions and negotiations puts into dialogue here case studies that expand the trends in dominant historical narratives and selective sites of significance. Thus although some chapters address Athens and Paris, others offer case studies of works from Hungary, pre-unification nineteenthcentury Germany, the Soviet Ukraine and Britain's industrial North. Questions of national identity and the major conflicts around class are complemented by arguments about the sexual division of labour. Bound up with changing definitions of public and private and the social division of separate spheres

8

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

for men and women, gender questions challenge the symbolic associations in the modern era between work and masculinity. The chapter by Helen Weston on the work of a post-Revolutionary woman artist in France raises further questions about free work signified by artistic practice, in an era of enslavement, which is then written across bodies marked by emerging racializing discourses. In a paper presented to the conference the historian of the abolitionist struggles against slavery, Robin Blackburn, revealed the profound importance of the terms that emerged in the abolitionist discourse for the possibility of enunciating rights around work. If, according to scripture and custom, some people were destined in the great chain of being to a life of labour without remission, the concept of having any rights in one's body's energies or rights to the disposition of one's labour and working time was unthinkable. Slavery had been justified by appeal to divine law as revealed in the Bible that offered a world view in which people were literally born to labour while others were equally born to the leisure that relied upon the labour of others. Yet, through the growing objections to the atrocities of slavery, we can trace the moment of discursive rupture through which the unthinkable could now be enunciated. The claim for freedom to labour could then be transferred from the struggle against slavery, to that of the struggle to delimit the time, conditions and rewards for freely expended labour in the relations between worker and employer, labour and capital. Thus Robin Blackburn quoted the powerful appeal of Mary Prince, a slave working in the West Indies and Britain who declared her willingness to work and to work hard, but only claimed the human right to do this freely, without whip, or chain or the disgrace of being treated as little more than a beast when one's strength to labour finally ran out. All slaves want to be free — to be free is very sweet. I will say the truth to the English people ... I have been a slave myself - 1 know what slaves fe e l... The man that says slave be quite happy in slavery - that they don't want to be free - that man is either an ignorant or a lying man ... We don't mind hard work, if we had proper treatment, and proper wages like English servants, and proper time in the week to keep up from breaking the Sabbath. But they won't give it; they will have work work - work, night and day, sick and well, till we are quite done up; and we must not speak up or look amiss, however much we be abused. And then when we are done up, who cares for us, more than for a lame horse? This is slavery.13

This text, written down as a close record of Mary Prince's own words, captures the intensity of her feelings as a person condemned to limitless work in which the human subject is negated by the alienation of her own will or desire in mere toil. The text thus introduces what we can call the question of the subject of work, the question of subjectivity in relation to the experience of work, that will develop into formally articulated campaigns about rights, as well as into politically and collectively expressed class

Valerie Mainz and Griselda Pollock

9

consciousness. With the conflict over slavery and its replacement by proletarianized wage labour, work, still painful toil and debilitating labour, could also become a site of self-definition and group identity. Its absence in the form of unemployment, would conversely not only mean lack of means of subsistence. It could threaten to unravel the subject. Thus, in her lecture at the conference on the anxiety generated around mass male unemployment in the 1930s, the feminist social historian Sally Alexander discussed what she named an 'emotional economy'. Here social historical analysis attends, with the aid of psychoanalysis, to the psychic and affective dimensions of work, worklessness and contemporary relations of gender which exacerbated the differences between men's and women's access to employment in a period of devastating economic crisis. Typically all these chapters explore interdisciplinary approaches to defy traditional disciplinary boundaries between history, economics, sociology and art. Such breadth of approach produces major realignments between fields of literary criticism, art history, socialist historiography and psycho­ analysis that allows us to view work in its historically complex relations both to social structures and to the individual subjects who, in the older sense of the words used of work, suffer its effects. In selecting the contributions to these volumes, certain common themes, occupations and activities have emerged, that cut across the historically specific case studies and give focus to the scope of the volume as a whole: the pastoral, rural and feminine, as opposed to the industrial, urban and masculine; the relation of workers to the political as well as the industrial or agricultural sites of labour; issues of power, represented around owners and slaves, subject and object, artist and model. Divisions between the high and the low in art and popular culture, the artisan or the artist, manual skills and intellectual concepts, these oppositions surface again and again. A final strand, that emerges particularly in the companion volume's studies of film and television, is the w ay in which technological advances change the represent­ ation of work both at the level of new technologies involved in the making processes and at the level of work itself being defined by technologies used in the labour process. What will strike most readers immediately is the fact, that apart from Jane Garnett's chapter on William Bell Scott's mid-nineteenth-century image of heavy industrial labour, Iron, Coal and Steel, there are almost no chapters on what might be confidently expected to be the core of this area of study, namely, the cult of work, sometimes even called 'the gospel of work', in nineteenthcentury Britain at the heart of the consolidation of industrial society.14 Perhaps the most obvious omission is any work on Ford Madox Brown's major painting on the theme, titled simply Work (1852-63, Manchester, Manchester City Art Gallery), itself a modern allegorical image whose cryptic title enacts all that

10

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

has been suggested above about the historical moment in which work acquired a generic meaning.15 Yet in this panoramic view of a street in Hampstead, London, there is no industrial work, no factory, and equally no toiling peasant. Filling its foreground are two kinds of masculine labour, one heavy and manual labour, and the other, reflective, intellectual labour. Divided by class and to some extent by nationality and culture, for the road-diggers are said to be Irish navvies, there is further comment in the additional figures in the painting on class-specific forms of wealth-related idleness and the affliction of worklessness. This painting, over whose complex visual field the philosopher Thomas Carlyle presides, underlines the omission in this volume of studies of the high bourgeois apologias for the moral value of work as a means of social discipline. Work in its proper place and regulated time formed a defence against bourgeois anxiety that focused on the twin 'evils' of poverty and unemployment. The major resources for a study of this ideology in the tradition of social investigation are equally absent. Chief amongst such potential texts would be the Victorian journalist Henry Mayhew's four volumes on London Labour and the London Poor, published between 1851 and 1862 that had begun as a series of articles on 'Labour and the Poor' for the Morning Chronicle between December 1849 and February 1850. Some of the volumes were partially illustrated with drawings based on early daguerreotypes, each capturing in a cameo portrait, a type who represented a whole class of casual trades, fixing the moral properties of such figures and rendering them decipherable and knowable amidst the terrifying complexity of the metropolitan crowd. Mayhew investigated the vast metropolitan territories of Victorian London's desperate poor, dividing his subjects into two major categories, the honest and the dishonest poor. Significantly, he later reconceived of his whole review of the metropolitan poor 'under three separate phases, according as they will work, they can't work, they won't work'.16 Thus they were all defined by a relation to work, to fixity, regularity, surveillance and lawful self-sufficiency. Despite the very real complexities of Mayhew's project as a work of social analysis and social anthropology, his texts function, on the one hand, as evidence of the deep bourgeois anxiety about the disordering dangers of those populations not disciplined by regular work. On the other, they offer a rare space in which the experience of modern work at the edges of subsistence was voiced by the workers themselves. Again work acquires not only a social placement but a social subjectivity. Yet for the very reason that Mayhew, Engels, Booth, Dickens, Brown and many other social investigators, writers or artists of the nineteenth century so encode the contradictions of work, class and representation in the high capitalist moment, it seemed important to expand the discussion by studies of less overdetermined instances of the relations of work and image. We

Valerie Mainz and Griselda Pollock

11

aimed to avoid the question of the morality of work so dangerously involved in the revival of so-called 'Victorian values' during the 1980s in Britain by inviting chapters that focused on difficulty and conflict within and between the what (the meaning) and the how (the formal processes) of representation through close readings of a historically specific instance of work and its image. This volume tracks a longer historical shift, that ranges from fifth-century b c Greece to the present. The majority of chapters, however, are concerned with the emerging modern definitions of work, craft, labour, and thus with the challenges those transformations posed to artists who were engaged at an overt political or a more private level with the meaning of such changes. Each chapter addresses its questions with different methodologies, using different kinds of archives, reading the image-texts according to varying strategies of interpretation. The collection aims to build up a complex picture of the meanings and effects of this primary activity of work. Always social, work is also symbolically significant as well as materially necessary. The artist's work and the images of the bodies, gestures, spaces, rhythms, relations and subjectivities associated with or dictated by work function in a productive dialectic and, in their historical diversity, provide insights into the real complexity of the underlying relations and processes of social production as they interface with the equally variable methods of representation. Thus conjoining these two complex terms, work and image, allows the study of visual culture, so advanced by recent intellectual revolutions, to work upon this deeply determining aspect of our condition and experience.

N otes 1.

The exhibition was a co-production with the Musee de la Revolution franchise. It was presented at the University Gallery in Leeds in April-M ay 1998 under the title Women at Work: Men in Labour: Work and Image in the French Revolution. At the Musee de la Revolution fran^aise, in Vizille, the exhibition was shown from July to September 1999 as L'Image du Travail et la Revolution frangaise. There are catalogues for both these exhibitions written by Valerie Mainz.

2.

An important example of a detailed case study of a form of labour, the ploughman, in the medieval period is to be found in Camille, M .,' Labouring for the Lord: The Ploughman and Social Order in the Luttrell Psalter', Art History, 10 (1987), pp. 423-54.

3.

One such example would be Lucie-Smith, E. and Dars, C., Work and Struggle: The Painter as Witness 18 7 0 -19 14 (London and New York: Paddington Press, 1977).

4.

Klingender, F. D., Art and the Industrial Revolution [1947] (London: Granada, 1972). Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollanz, 1963). No one studying this field could ignore the counter-force of Jacques Ranciere's La nuit des proletaires (Paris: Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1981), a study of workers' reclamation of time and image.

5.

For example see Sewell, W. H. jnr, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labour from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

6.

Godelier, M., 'Language and History: Work and its Representations: A Research Proposal', History Workshop, 10 (1980), pp. 164-74 (P -164).

12

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

7.

Ibid., 165.

8.

Cited in Godelier, 'Language and History', p. 166.

9.

Thompson, E. P., 'Time, Work-Discipline and Capitalism/ Past and Present, 38, December (1967).

10.

Williams, R., Keywords (Glasgow: Williams Collins, and Sons, 1976), pp. 281-4.

11.

See a detailed historical study of this transformation in Sonnenscher, M., Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics, and the Eighteenth Century French Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

12.

Clark, T. J., The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), p. 6.

13.

Prince, M., The History of Mary Prince A West Indian Slave Related by Herself, ed. M. Ferguson (Ann Arbor, MN: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 94.

14.

For a review of the historical literature on this area see Joyce, P., 'The Historical Meanings of Work: An Introduction', in P. Joyce (ed.), The Historical Meanings of Work, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987).

15.

Work was in fact used as the cover of the Paladin paperback edition of F. Klingender's Art and the Industrial Revolution.

16.

Mayhew, H., 'Labour and the Poor', The Morning Chronicle, letter 1 , 1 9 October 1849.

1

A Greek vase-painting: comments on the nature of craftsmanship?* Michael Duigan

Contemporary studies on the nature of creative work have attempted to understand this human activity in terms of its relationship to politics and power, commercial structures, urban and rural contexts, constructions of identity, conceptualizations of the body and notions of gender. It is therefore of considerable interest to discover a set of images placed on a crafted pot made in a culture very different from and more than 2000 years older than ours - which 'appears' to comment on the work of making in terms of these same issues. The image on this pot, now in Oxford, shows an artisan making sandals (Figure 1.1). Sitting on the left he cuts the leather using his young customer's foot as a template. Above the craftsman's head is a rack of specialist knives one of which resembles the one he is using. Under the table is a bowl containing water for softening the leather. An adult, who may be the boy's father, observes the process.1 The detail of this picture promises much but the imagery is more enigmatic than it appears at first sight and this makes its interpretation problematical. The interpretative difficulties become acute when we consider the relationship of the craftsmanship scene to the paired image on the other side of the pot. This shows a figure observing a seated satyr holding a casket and accom­ panied by a goat. A second satyr dances. A number of scholars have referred to the difficulty of understanding this scene. Both Robertson and Vickers describe it as 'unexplained'.2 The presence of satyrs, however, shows it to be from the world of myth and increases the likelihood that the standing figure wearing a hat and winged boots is Hermes.3 In most cases where the craftsmanship scene is discussed no references are made to this paired mythological image. But while there may not be a relationship between scenes on the two sides of a pot, the presence of Hermes4 here makes it possible to infer a link in this particular case. This is because some of the god's behaviour and functions (as we shall see) relate to sandals.

14

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

There is, furthermore, a close compositional similarity between the two images. In both pictures the viewer is shown three figures with one placed centrally and one on either side. The figure on the right is almost identical in both scenes; they are wreathed, and adopt the same pose and lean on a stick to observe what is occurring in front of them. In both pictures the central figure is raised above the other two, standing on a table and seated on a rock respectively. Finally, the third figure in each picture is engaged in a skill or techne. The craftsman is sandal-making and the satyr is dancing. The closeness of the symmetry between the two images suggests that this can only be intentional and that a link is being established between them.5 Consequently to 'read' the craft scene without reference to its pendant mythological image may well be to omit half of the visual communication or to misunderstand it altogether. The likelihood that the scene of craftsmanship is semantically linked to a world of myth brings home to us that it is not to be understood simply as an illustration of a craft. If we are to understand this imagery, to 'read' it as the original makers and viewers did, we have to enter into a 'mind frame' quite unfamiliar to us. As Harrison has noted, such an enterprise is, in principle, difficult6 and is compounded by the acknowledged interpretative problems in the case of this particular pot. In this chapter no attempt will be made to reconstruct particular historical 'readings' - indeed, the evidence no longer exists in the case of the Oxford pot. Rather the task will be to 'map out' the interpretative field in which viewings of the iconography took place describing the range of interpretative choices open to a viewer in fifth-century Athens. The criterion becomes 'is the proposed interpretation probable given the concepts, forms of logic and interpretative styles prevalent in the intellectual landscape of the time'? It follows that the craftsmanship scene on the Oxford pot must be perceived in a range of contexts which are specific to the culture in which it was made.7

The god Hermes and sandal-making

The prominence of the god Hermes in the mythological scene reminds us that a key viewing context for pottery in ancient Greece was the sanctuary. Seen as a ritual object the imagery on this pot can be interpreted in terms of the cult of Hermes. Dohan Morrow reminds us that 'divinities are sometimes represented with footwear intended to accent their divine role or iconography' and this could be happening here.8 Hermes, who is depicted wearing winged sandals, was the messenger of the gods and in both the Iliad and the Odyssey he puts on sandals which carry him over land and sea with the wind.9 The Homeric Hymn to Hermes refers to the making of footwear for a journey and

Michael Duigan

15

this is the subject represented in our paired scene of sandal-making.10 The depiction of a portable folding stool introduces another allusion to travel. Moreover, because the stool folded, it itself moved. This characteristic was enhanced by the addition of animal legs. A major significance of the journeying of Hermes for mortals was that he guided their souls to Hades. In addition Hoffman tells us that the pelike was characteristically used to contain the ashes of the dead.11 This creates a second - funerary - viewing context where Hermes functioned as psycho­ pomp or guide to souls on their journey. Allusion to this could also be made by the rocky landscape. Vermeule claims that the idea of equipping the dead with footwear for protection on their journey had Mycenaean precedents and that this notion reappeared in the Geometric period.12 In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes we are reminded that travellers needed sandals 'to lighten the toil of walking ... on an urgent long journey'.13 Consequently the craftsmanship scene includes a customer in the workshop who is awaiting completion of the footwear when he will purchase it. This suggests a third viewing context, namely the market where the pot could be perceived as a commercial object. The comic playwright Aristophanes claims in his comedy Plutus that what motivates the artisan is the desire for wealth rather than love for his craft.14 Viewed in the competitive commercial context of the shop, the iconography of the sandal-making pot can be read as a commentary on these transactions. Pottery-makers certainly used their iconography to reflect on the sale of their products15 and it is probable that this is also happening here. Significantly Hermes, like the sandal-maker, exchanged an object which he had made for material reward giving his lyre to Apollo for reciprocal gifts. Zeus made him responsible for overseeing deeds of trade among men.16 The 'trickiness' of such activities was appropriately the concern of the devious Hermes and gives a context for his presence in the Oxford pot imagery. The sandal-maker could also be seen as a devious trader of his products. The 'tricky' nature of this trading is exemplified by Aristophanes. In his comedy the Knights he describes the deceptive sale of shoes which looked to be of good craftsmanship but were not.17

The status of the artisan

Political and social developments at the time the pot was made also created a new social context for viewing this imagery. The artisan was no longer commissioned by aristocratic patrons as in the Archaic period and as represented by Homer. He was now the maker of artefacts to sell in the marketplace. Consequently the artisan was now conceptualized as the producer of artefacts to meet the needs of a user. This new form of patronage

l6

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

was seen as creating a relationship of dependence or service by the artisan to his client which could approach that of slavery. This altered his perceived status. Later when Aristotle is speaking of the making activity he characterizes craftsmen and tools in the same way - they both satisfy the user's needs.18 This development made the status of the artisan as a citizen in the new democratic city state or Polis both problematic and contentious. Only a few years before the making of this pot, the tyranny of Hippias had been replaced by a democracy under Cleisthenes. The aristocratic view was that the activities of the artisan and the citizen ruler were incompatible. Zeus as ruler is in a different category from the lower deities who were patrons of the crafts. Plato, too, wanted to restrict political power to the specialists.19 The democratic view, on the other hand, claimed parity for all male citizens. Protagoras argued that Athenians engaged in trade had a right to take part in the government of the state saying 'your fellow citizens are right to welcome the opinions of smiths and cobblers on public affairs'. Protagoras articulated his claim that artisans should have a share in government using the myth of Prometheus. The latter gave fire, the basis of technology, to mortals but man remained ignorant of the arts of politics and war. These characteristics, which were essential to lead the life of a citizen in a Polis, could only be given by Zeus. Therefore, according to this myth, Zeus sent Hermes to bring these 'citizen enabling' gifts to man and he was instructed to share them equally.20 It is, therefore, interesting that the iconography of the Oxford pot allows a 'reading' as a commentary on the eligibility of the artisan to be a citizen of the Polis. It suggests visual links can be made between Hermes, a casket (sometimes conceptualized as a container for valuable gifts) and a craftsman. If the imagery is read in a manner similar to the myth told by Protagoras it would yield the claim that every man - including artisans - through the good offices of Hermes, must have an equal share in the art of politics.21 Berard writes that Greek imagery was embedded in ideological considerations and Eisner reminds us that an artefact can have a 'complex ideological resonance'.22 This must have been as true for the makers of the images as for the viewers. Other elements in the iconography of the Oxford pot permit a reading that claimed status for the craftsman. The artist's choice of sandal-making may be significant in this context as sandals not only related to Hermes but conferred status on their owner.23 The presence of furniture in the sandal-making scene could also contribute to the craftsman's claim to status. Unlike the Near East, where artisans worked on the ground, Greek craftsmen were frequently (though not invariably) shown working on stools at benches.24 Now in Greek imagery 'body language' is a carrier of meaning and posture is a key indicator of status. The inclusion of a folding stool may also have evoked special considerations of status as it was associated with dignity. Furthermore the

Michael Duigan

17

presence of Hermes in the iconography may have recalled to the mind of a Greek viewer the role of that god in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes where Hermes complained to his mother that their status was not recognized. Hermes claimed greater esteem and won it as a consequence of his skill.25 These political and social developments, with their consequences for how the craftsman was perceived, also impacted on how the nature of his making activity was itself conceptualized. In Homer, the craftsman was characterized as inventive, magical and creating works which amaze. But Vemant argues that with the rise of the city the very conceptualization of the nature of his activity changed, that a break was made with the account of the artisan's work as given in the legendary past. The craftsman was no longer characterized as setting out to amaze or be inventive but merely as an artisan, a manual labourer exercising a routine craft.26 Plato and Aristotle later developed a theory along these lines on the nature of the craftsman's activity. These views were expressed in their reflections on the nature of action. A distinction was made between behaviour, which has an end external to itself, and that form of activity where the end is intrinsic to itself. Only the latter was held to be action in the strict sense. The making behaviour of the artisan had a goal which was external to it.27 The effect of such theorizing was, therefore, to diminish the importance of the workshop activity of the artisan and to characterize it as pure routine. We should not, however, assume that there was a consensus on this subject. Vemant describes a tension between this new civic theorizing on the nature of techne and the earlier magical conception of the work of the artisan. He suggests, for example, that there may not have been a Greek consensus on the nature of agricultural work.28 It is possible that this may also have been true for the work of making. Just as there was possibly not agreement on the status of the artisan, there was also not a consensus either on the nature of the craftsman's activity. The imagery provides interesting evidence that this was indeed the case. The scene does not depict a product - we do not see any sandals - but the creative activity only. It may be significant that 'our' craftsman chooses to represent his behaviour not in terms of its 'external' product but in terms of the process only implying that it had intrinsic significance or worth. The iconography can, therefore, be read as celebrating this activity and opposing the emerging view that it was unimportant and routine. It challenges the demarcations which, according to Vemant, developed with the Polis and which were elaborated by Plato and Aristotle.29 Now in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes there is also an emphasis on the making process. We are given a detailed account of this god making his lyre, where the full process is described including his acquisition and assembly of the materials.30 It could, therefore, be significant that the imagery of the sandal-making pot was chosen at a time when social changes had diminished the status of

l8

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

the maker and when the conceptualization of the nature of the craftsman and craftsmanship itself had become a matter of contention. The imagery could be read as offering an alternative account of making behaviour.

Hermes as a divine paradigm Given the Greek tradition of conceptualizing by using mythical analogies, Hermes could have functioned as a divine paradigm in an alternative - and more traditional - account of the making activity of the artisan.31 The nature of the Greek view of techne makes this claim more likely in the case of the Oxford pot imagery. This is because of the specificity of the Greek view of technology. Work is not conceptualized in the abstract.32 Crafts are understood not as a category, but in terms of their products - pottery in terms of pots and cobbling in terms of shoes. This would give a special relevance to the choice of Hermes for inclusion in an image linked to leather-work. This god displayed expertise in tanning when he skinned two cows. He used leather as well as a tortoise shell to create the earliest lyre. The link between Hermes and the techne in our paired image is particularly relevant as we are told that the god invented his own sandals.33 The conclusion that Hermes could function as a paradigm craftsman finds support in a Greek acceptance that Hermes teaches his skill to others.34 This possibility, that Hermes functions as an exemplar of creativity is also suggested by other examples of this practice. The painter of the 'Foundry Cup' combines, for example, scenes from the workshop of an Athenian sculptor with that of Hephaestus (Figure 1.2) to suggest by analogy that the Athenian artist, like his mythical prototype, exemplifies skill, cleverness and the power to amaze.35 If the iconography can be read as a commentary on the importance of the activity of making it can also be interpreted as commenting about the nature of this behaviour. The painter of the Oxford pot, like the decorator of the 'Foundry Cup', may have used a divine paradigm to give an account of the work of the craftsman in a number of its aspects. The creations of Hermes, as exemplified in the Homeric Hymn, required skill in, for example, making his lyre and his production of sandals required 'unimaginable skill'.36 The paired image of the Oxford pot depicts leather­ working which was one of the most important skills in contemporary Athens.37 The Homeric Hymn to Hermes emphasizes, furthermore, the struggle involved in the preparation of cowhides. We are informed that 'great was his strength' when he dragged the bellowing cows before stretching their skins on a rock.38 In Hesiod we are told that the need to work is the result of a conflict between Zeus and Prometheus. As a consequence land would only yield its fruits with effort and man must now labour to obtain wealth.39 Our

Michael Duigan

19

sandal-maker, too, strains over his work. Both the Homeric Hymn and our image describe the workman's shoulders as bent due to his labours. We are also told that Hermes employed a tool of 'grey iron' to make his lyre. The power of the implement is suggested by its use for scooping out the life of the turtle.40In the paired scene of craftsmanship on this pot there is, similarly, an iconographical emphasis on tools. Hermes employs cleverness in his creative actions. He saw a tortoise and immediately realized that its shell could be improvised to make a lyre. The very invention of sandals by Hermes was itself an exercise of cunning in that it was done to disguise his own footprints and to escape detection by pursuers.41 It is important to note that the sandals, invented by Hermes, were created by weaving and Detienne and Vernant have drawn attention to the close association made by the Greeks between weaving and cleverness.42 These scholars have also commented on the connection between change of direction and cunning, a theme also exemplified in the Homeric Hymn. When Hermes steals the cattle of Apollo he cunningly drives them backwards, their footprints pointing back to the meadow from which he had stolen them, in order to deceive and confuse pursuers.43 Now this cleverness of Hermes in his use of the outline of a foot is also exemplified in the sandal­ making scene. The craftsman discovers the correct size and shape by 'drawing' with his knife an outline around the foot. That the sandal-maker's strategy for obtaining the correct shape by cutting around the foot may have been conceptualized by the Greek observer as 'clever' is indicated by a story from Pliny. He gives an account of how the first drawing was made of the human body by tracing around its shadow.44 Other iconographical elements in the paired sandal-making scene could contribute to this debate on the cleverness of the craftsman. Beneath the table is a bowl for water which softens the leather prior to cutting. This is a trick of the cobbler's trade45 enabling success through cleverness rather than strength. Vernant makes some interesting suggestions on how the Greeks conceptualized the use of tools. Mechane are seen by Aristotle as tricks or expedients by men to gain the advantage over a superior natural force in a battle between techne and nature.46 This conceptual framework, in the Sophist tradition of the weaker argument overcoming the stronger, 'saw technical instruments as the means to dominate things in precisely the same way as the orator dominates the assembly'.47 The tools prominently displayed in scenes of craftsmanship were clever devices for triumphing over nature. A folding stool is prominently displayed adjacent to the bowl of water and its presence, likewise, may contribute to the argument on cunning crafts­ manship. Its significance here may be that it was viewed as a cleverly crafted object.48 The folding stool was the only object in contemporary Athens, that we know of, which was attributed to the 'cunning craftsman' Daedalus and

20

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

it was offered to Athena who prided herself on cunning.49That craftsmanship was associated with cleverness is indicated by the name of Prometheus which relates to 'prudent' or 'circumspect' in contrast to his brother Epimetheus the 'thoughtless' one. Finally Hermes uses magic.50 Significantly the sandals made by Hermes had magic powers; they carried him over land and sea with the wind. Given the discovery of a number of correspondences between the creative actions of Hermes (as detailed in the Homeric Hymn) and the making behaviour of the sandal-maker, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the sandalmaker's techne is being conceptualized with reference to the creative behaviour of Hermes. If this is so, what role can be assigned to the other iconographic elements in this imagery?

Sandal-making and music

The focal point of the mythological scene is the casket in the lap of the seated satyr. (It is the object of the gaze of Hermes.) Now this casket was also a product of craftsmanship and the composition encourages such a concept­ ualization by the viewer. The sandal-making is the focus in the paired scene and positioned so that the composition 'aligns' the casket with the making of the sandal. Casket and sandal occupy the same position in their respective compositions. Applying the principle identified by Connelly that shared 'compositional schemata' can create a transfer of meaning,51 this suggests that the casket, like the sandal, should be viewed as a product of making. The satyr sitting on a rock echoes the seated pose of the sandal-maker. The constructed visual equation makes possible a transfer of meaning from the satyr to the craftsman and from the sandal to the casket. The paired symmetrical compositions 'direct' the perception of the box as crafted object. Now in the Homeric Hymn Hermes is celebrated as both craftsman and musician. He makes sandals, a lyre and music. The imagery of the Oxford pot, made in a milieu informed by this hymn, also combines references to sandal-making and music. The allusion to music was made by placing a dancer in the left of the image. In Greek culture singing is frequently associated with dancing and dancing with singing.52 This evocation of music is reinforced by the placing of Hermes - inventor and player of the lyre - to the right. The composition finds parallels in other music-making scenes where a musician is observed by an attentive figure leaning on a stick.53 We should also note that the casket-holding satyr is seated on a rock. The poet Pindar referred to the 'stone of the Muses' and this position is occupied by a lyre-playing Muse in a pot-painting in Munich as well as by many other music-makers in Greek art.54 The seated satyr is also accompanied by a goat.

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21

Such iconographical details are conventionally associated with scenes of music-making. In a 'Judgement of Paris' scene the lyre-playing Trojan prince is seated on a rock at the base of which there are a number of goats (Figure 1.3). The seated music-maker, like the seated satyr of the Oxford pot, is again faced by an observer (Hermes) who leans on his stick. A further iconographic device to evoke the world of song could be the position adopted by the seated satyr's head which is held higher than that of his companion, the dancing satyr. This angle may indicate that he is singing as is suggested by comparison with an image of a singing symposiast analysed by Lissarrague.55 This combination of elements, therefore, could create in the mind of the Greek viewer an expectation that here is a scene of music-making. But we are given, unexpectedly, an image where the focus is a wooden casket. We are not shown a lyre (as the rest of the iconography would lead us to expect) but a casket. Now Greek vase-painting provides a number of examples of the artist playing with viewer expectations and subverting them to create a visual debate on the nature of the issues depicted. For example, the image of prostitutes on the exterior of a cup in Toledo creates an expectation of an image on the interior which relates to this theme. Instead the drinker is shown a woman making a ritual offering which obliges him to consider the relationship between them and, therefore, to reflect on the nature of women.56 The juxtaposition in the imagery of the Oxford pot uses a similar strategy where signs of music and craftsmanship are being associated to explain the nature of one with reference to the other. A further example of the explanation of a skill by juxtaposing it with another is provided by a pot in Boston, decorated with an almost identical image of sandal-making. The paired scene in this case is blacksmiths in a forge. This is a clear case of a conjunction - inviting a comparison - of two different techne.37 Greek poets also found analogies between creative activities and drew parallels between them so as to analyse their similarities and differences. Aristophanes, for example, uses such a metaphor to describe the composition of a drama by the tragic poet Agathon: [Agathon] is about to lay the keel of a new drama, yea, with mighty crossbeams shall it be builded, with new arches of words shall it be constructed. For behold, he turneth the verses upon the lathe and sticketh them together; maxim and metaphor doth he hammer out, yea, in melted wax doth he mould his creation: he rolleth it till it be round; he casteth it.58

Other poets, such as Pindar, made a conceptual link between the work of the craftsman and the poet.59 It would be appropriate if this conceptual link was exemplified by 'our' artist in the form of a casket which was not only crafted by a carpenter but which also had associations with the world of music. The casket contained music scrolls and is prominent in scenes of music-making.60

22

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

The box was an attribute of one of the Muses who gave man the gift of song. The casket, therefore, could visually evoke this conceptual link made by poets between poetry and carpentry. Steiner argues that in both the Homeric Hymn and in Pindar singers are conceptualized as craftsmen who fasten, or fit, their songs together.61 When Pindar was (self-reflectively) concerned with the poet's problem of 'fitting' content to form he used the term enarmoxai (to be fitted) to describe the 'fitting' of his verse to the subject of the athlete. It is of special interest, in the context of the Oxford pot, that he explained this process by using the metaphor of a sandal fitting a foot. 'Let the son of Sostratos know that to this sandal the gods have fitted his foot.'62 The combined scenes, therefore, have the potential to evoke the same pairing of ideas and make the same metaphor as Pindar. They could be read as a claim that success in poetry and sandal-making is a matter of 'fitting' it together rather than measurement. It is interesting that the sandal-maker, as we have seen, does not make his artefact by measurement but rather 'fits' it to the foot by cutting around the foot itself which he uses as a template. Xenephon in his Memorabilia also claimed that success in creating armour for the human body was more a matter of 'fitting' than measuring.63 Vernant writes about the gap between Greek logical theorizing on the nature of techne and its actual practice which, with its emphasis on reason, failed to acknowledge the importance of experience. Greek technology, unlike rational Greek theory about techne, had to deal with an irrational nature and to acknowledge experience 'on which it could not claim to impose its laws entirely'.64 The imagery on the Oxford pot, made by a practising craftsman, can be read as acknowledging this point Now - if the scenes here are comparing music, singing, dancing and craftsmanship - what role could satyrs be playing in the argument? Lissarrague claims that their role is to denote unconventionality as being operative in the context in which they are placed.65 If we recall that satyrs are sometimes associated with scenes of craftsmanship, music and song it would follow that their appearance may suggest that the 'technes' of music, poetry and craftsmanship do not involve a strict application of rules - or to raise the question whether this is so. The presence of satyrs may also allude to the use of cleverness in making behaviour. Satyrs are frequently represented as performing tricks and this is the case occasionally in the context of craftsmanship.66

Landscape and gender The casket-holding satyr sits on a rock. Now landscape is rarely depicted in Greek vase-painting but when it does it plays a meaningful part in the visual

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23

communication. The landscape was 'a liminal territory' and it had a close association with Hermes who was concerned with the boundary between country and Polis.67 A range of conclusions could be formed by the viewer of this landscape. The first of these claims is that in the absence of the city there is no skill. Xenophon does not see agriculture as a techne; farming which is linked to military activity is the antithesis of the work of the artisan.68But the rise of the city brings about a corresponding evolution of skills and craftsmanship. This argument is developed by Xenophon in his Cyropaedia when he specifically links the degree of specialization of sandal-making to the size of the city: In small towns the same workman makes wooden beds, doors, plough shares, tables; sometimes he even builds houses as w e ll... But in large cities where each man finds many buyers, a man needs only one trade to support himself. Sometimes one does not even need a complete trade: one man makes shoes for men while another makes them for women. One man cuts while the other simply sews the shoe.69

An opposing Greek view is that skill had its origin in nature. Techne was held to be an imitation of nature in the work of Democritus who believed that man learned the arts from nature by imitating the animals.70 The wild landscape is also linked with struggle and its association with craftsmanship, therefore, could import this idea into conceptualizations of the activity of making. The depiction of a natural landscape may have evoked a world without rules, in contrast to the rule-bound Polis, again alluding to the nature of making. Finally there is an association made in the Greek mind between the natural world and luck where the landscape evokes the element of chance in creation. When Hermes discovers 'a tortoise living on the mountains' he instantly recognizes it as a stroke of luck that he can exploit to make his lyre.71 Also in making his sandals Hermes uses wickerwork, once again opportunistically exploiting what he finds in nature.72 The creative opportunity provided by the natural landscape is acknowledged by Hesiod who describes the searching for and finding of suitable timber for making a plough.73 The sandal-maker imitated his divine prototype Hermes when he obtained leather as material for his creative purposes in the world of nature. The juxtaposition of the scenes of landscape and sandal-making may also have suggested a polarity to the Greek viewer yielding a gendered com­ mentary on the nature of craftsmanship and the identity of the artisan. The Greeks conceptualized men as working outdoors in contrast to women who exercised their skills indoors. This distinction informs the iconography of numerous vase-paintings contemporary with those on our pot.74 Later Xenephon specifically distinguishes the work of male and female in these terms. 'Right from the start the deity adapted the nature of women to the work and tasks of indoors and man's nature to those of outdoors.'75

24

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

He opposes manly agriculture, which he links with military activity, to the artisan who works indoors and whose body is debilitated and therefore unfit for the role of warrior. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes itself claims that work distorts the body76 and the sandal-making scene depicts the craftsman with a bent back as he applies pressure on his knife. The housebound role also destroys manly spirit. In times of danger 'the artisans decide not to fight'. The artisan, because he works indoors like the women, is without manly virtues.77 With the rise of the city the itinerant craftsman who was seen as disturbing but prestigious became a sedentary indoor worker. The sandals in the Oxford pot scene were made for the use of another. But the imagery on the Oxford pot can be read as opposing this denigration. The paradigm artisan as represented by strong Hermes 'slayer of Argos' would subvert this account of the unmanly craftsman.78 Therefore - viewed from the perspective of the Athenian workshop - the imagery of the Oxford pot seems to question whether craftsmanship can be adequately explained as the mere exercise of a routine craft. Conceivably the painter of our pot - like the poet in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes - is, by using Hermes as a divine paradigm, alluding to both the status of the artisan and the nature of his creative activity.

The appraisal of a successful process

Because the making activity of the craftsman has the qualities which are mythologically exemplified in this pot-painting his work is crowned by success. The presence of Hermes is peculiarly appropriate in this respect because the sandals he made are described in the Homeric Hymn as 'wondrous'.79 We are given the idea in the literature that sandals were seen as significant artworks.80In addition, if the mind of the viewer was informed by the Homeric Hymn to Hermes he would recollect that Apollo commented on the wondrous techne of music and song as performed by Hermes.81 The sandal-maker is crowned with ivy. Wreaths were used as a motif to demonstrate victory in many scenes of craftsmanship. Such a conception is characteristically Greek.82 'The artisan was seen as performing a deed that would ensure him victory in a technical competition.'83 An epitaph of a craftsman from Athens, where he claims that he never saw anyone better than himself, unambiguously proclaims this sentiment.84 A reference to competition in the creation of music and leather-work may further underpin the composition and iconography of the paired sandal­ making scene. The actual skill is being performed on the top of a centrally placed table with a stool placed on either side. The sandal-making scene in Boston also takes place on top of a table with flanking stools.85 Now this

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visual arrangement, with its central figure on a smaller scale standing on a table and with stools on either side, is closely echoed in a number of scenes depicting musical contests. An amphora decorated by the Princeton painter provides an example where a singer and double pipe player stand, once again, on a wooden table (Figure 14 ). On either side the audience or judges sit on folding stools like the one in the Oxford sandal-making scene.86 Once again a shared compositional device enables a transfer of meaning between images - in this case the competitiveness of music-making is imported to a scene of leather-working. Interestingly, as a consequence of changed perceptions of the artisan in the developing city, his eligibility to comment on the quality of his production seems also to have become a matter of contention. Aristotle said that the maker is inferior in the judgement of his product to the person who uses it. He argued that the man for whom the artefact is made is the best judge of its form because he knows its use.87 The presence of a waiting client in the sandal-making scene is consistent with this view, although here the pro­ spective user of the artefact evaluates, not the product, but the making process itself. The pose of the onlooker viewing the sandal-making closely mirrors that of Hermes, on the opposite side of the pot, gazing at the casket. The wreaths worn by these observers may, therefore, signal success in the judgement of quality, that is the quality of the process. In this context it may be significant that Hermes, the craftsman's divine exemplar, was celebrated in the Homeric Hymn as not only crafting artefacts but also making appraisals of their quality. In this hymn he sings the praises of art objects and characterizes the sandals worn by his mother as 'fair'.88 The imagery on the Oxford pot, with its use of morphological similarity, associates the divine and human viewers (client and artisan) in the single, successful, activity of contemplating good techne and fine creations. But why would such complex imagery be placed on a pot for containing wine? Given the significance of context for constructions of meaning the placing of this imagery on a wine pot is of central importance. It reminds us that another key viewing frame for a Greek pot was the drinking party or symposium. Lisserrague reminds us that the drinking party can frame the reading of images on the pots used in it.89 By selecting this iconography for his container the artist could be linking allusions to Hermes, music and wine. Such a grouping of ideas would not be exceptional and there are more explicit examples of it to be found elsewhere.90 But the artist of the Oxford pot is also adding leather-work to this cluster of ideas. It is interesting that the god Hermes in himself embodies this combination of ideas. This god, as a leather-worker, invented the wineskin and, therefore, it follows, that he and his mortal counterpart, the artisan pot-maker, both made receptacles for wine.91

26

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

The choice of figurative elements placed on the Oxford pot could therefore function as a commentary on the making of the pot itself (A number of vasepaintings depict the making of pots.)92 That is, such aspects of making as skill and cleverness which are claimed for the art of leather-work are applicable also to the craft of pottery-making. We know that reflections on the nature of skill and music could form part of symposium discussions and this would give point to the use of the imagery on this pot which makes a visual contribution to such a dialogue. Lisserrague, in his book Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet, reminds us that the discourse of the symposium was visual as well as aural.93 A final context for looking at this pot is to see it as the bearer of a visual communication which has to be understood by its viewer. That the Greeks conceptualized their imagery as a form of communication is demonstrated by the myth of Philomela. Deprived of her tongue she communicated the story of her rape by depicting it in a textile.94 Intriguingly Barber suggests that the decoration of much early Greek pottery derives from such 'storied textiles'.95 Now the Greeks reflected on the nature of interpretation and divinized this activity in the form of Hermes.96 Therefore his presence in this imagery takes on an additional significance in this viewing context. The object of his gaze is a casket and this could function as a sign that the casket, like the pot - another crafted artefact - is the object of our vision too and requires interpretation.

Notes *

I would like to thank Dr J. Eisner for reading this chapter and his many suggestions for improving it. I also wish to acknowledge the support of Dr S. Blundell with whom I have had many stimulating discussions on my ideas. Finally my thanks to A. Basu for her patient and generous proofreading of the text.

1.

Description of workshop scene. See Vickers, M., Greek Vases (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1988), p. 85.

2.

Unexplained mythological scene. See Vickers, Greek Vases, p. 85, See also Robertson, M., The Art of Vase-Painting in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 119.

3.

Hermes. See Thompson, D. B., T h e House of Simon the Shoemaker', Archaeology, Winter, 13, 4 (i960), pp. 234-40.

4.

Behaviour and functions of Hermes. See Gantz, T., Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 105 ff.

5.

For example of sharing a 'compositional schemata'. See Connelly, J. B., 'Narrative and Image in the Attic Vase Painting: Ajax and Cassandra at the Trojan Palladion', in P. J. Holliday (ed.), Narrative and Event in Ancient Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1993), p. 92.

6.

Difficulty in interpreting. See Harrison, E. B.,'The Web of History: A Conservative Reading of the Parthenon Frieze', in J. Neils (ed.), Worshipping Athena, Panathenaia and Parthenon (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), p. 200.

7.

Context specific to culture. See Eisner, J., Art and the Roman Viewer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 1-14 .

Michael Duigan

8. 9.

27

Dohan Morrow, K., Greek Footwear and the Dating of Sculpture (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 150. Hermes puts on sandals. Iliad, 24.339-45, Odyssey, 5.43-49.

10.

Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 79-86.

11.

Hoffman, H., Sotades, Symbols of Immortality on Greek Vases (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 81.

12.

Vermeule, E., Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles, C A , London: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 63-5.

13.

Sandals for travel. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 79-86.

14.

Aristophanes on the motivation of the artisan. Plutus, 160-67 and 510 -16.

15.

Pot-painters depict the sale of pots. See Berard, C., Bron, C., Durand, J.-L., Frontisi-Ducroux, F., Lissarrague, F., Schnapp, A. and Vernant, J.-P., A City of Images (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), fig. 10.

16.

Hermes trades with Apollo. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 490 ff. Hermes responsible for overseeing deeds of trade among men. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 5 16 -17 .

17.

Aristophanes. Knights, 3 15 -2 1.

18.

Altered status of craftsman. See Vernant, J. P., Myth and Thought among the Greeks (London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), pp. 292-3. Aristotle, Politics, 1.125431.

19.

Plato restricts political power to specialists. See Vernant, Myth and Thought, p. 242.

20.

Protagoras and myth of Prometheus. See Plato, Protagoras, 32od ff.

21.

The claim that honour and justice are essential to lead the life of a citizen. See Vernant, Myth and Thought, pp. 241 and 257. The container can be perceived as a container of precious gifts. See Lisserrague, F., 'Women, Boxes, Containers: Some Signs and Metaphors', in E. D. Reeder, Pandora, Women in Classical Greece (The Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, MD, Princeton, NJ: Maryland and Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 9 1-10 1.

22.

Berard et al., A City of Images, pp. 167-8. Eisner, J., 'From the Pyramids to Pausanias and Piglet: Monuments, Travel and Writing', in S. Goldhill, and R. Osborne (eds), Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 224.

23.

Sandals and status, Sophists derided as barefooted. Aristophanes, The Clouds, 93-140.

24.

Furniture in workshops. See Hodges, H., Technology in the Ancient World (London: Pelican Books, 1971), p. 163.

25.

Hermes claims status. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 16 7-75 and 456-9.

26.

Vernant, Myth and Thought, p. 293.

27.

Philosophers view of making. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1050a 30-5, and Politics, 7.1328a 29 ff. See also Vernant, Myth and Thought, pp. 274, 275 and 277 fn 13.

28.

Disagreement on the nature of agricultural work. See Vernant, Myth and Thought, pp. 254-55.

29.

See note 27.

30.

Making activity of Hermes. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 40-51.

31.

Hermes as a divine paradigm of the making activity of the artisan. See Brown, N. O., Hermes the Thief (Lindisfarne Press, 1947; reprint Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), especially pp. 20-23 and 75_6.

32.

Specificity of Greek view of techne. See Vernant, Myth and Thought, p. 272.

33.

Hermes makes sandals. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 79-86.

34.

Hermes teaches skills. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 475-7.

35.

Foundry Cup. Berlin F2294, See Morris, S. P., Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992) fig. 1 and 58. For literary example of conceptualizing techne through myth see Plato, Protagoras, 320c.

36.

Hermes creates lyre. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 40-51. Skill making sandals. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 79-86.

28

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

37.

Importance of leather-working. See White, K. D., Greek and Roman Technology (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), p. 237.

38.

Strength of Hermes. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 116 -26 and 405-7.

39.

Hesiod, work is a consequence of a conflict between Zeus and Prometheus. See Vernant, Myth and Thought, p. 238.

40.

Hermes uses tool. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 41-2.

41.

Hermes cleverly improvises using tortoise shell. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 24-5. For Greek use of tortoise shells to make a lyre see Pausanias, Bk.8.23.9.

42.

Association between weaving and cleverness. See Detienne, M. and Vernant, J.-P., Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society (London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley: Harvester Press, 1978), pp. 13 7 - 8 ,1 8 5 fn 33 and 239. Hermes weaves. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 79-86.

43.

Clever use of footprints by Hermes. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 75-8.

44.

Pliny, Natural History X XXV .151. For Homeric example of using foot as a template to make footwear see Odyssey, 14.23-4.

45.

Bowl of water used as a trick for softening leather. See Vickers, Greek Vases, p. 85.

46.

Aristotle's view on tools as tricks against nature. See Vernant, Myth and Thought, p. 286.

47.

See Vernant, Myth and Thought, p. 288.

48.

Folding stool. See Morris, Daidalos, pp. 264-5.

49.

Footstool in Athens. Pausanias, Bk. 1.27.1.

50.

Hermes uses magic. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 409-14.

51.

'Compositional schemata'. See Connelly, J. B., 'Narrative and Image in the Attic Vase Painting: Ajax and Cassandra at the Trojan Palladion', in P. J. Holliday (ed.), Narrative and Event in Ancient Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 92.

52.

Singing frequently associated with dancing. See Mullen, W., Choreia: Pindar and Dance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). See also Pindar, Pythian J.1-5.

53.

Listening to music while leaning on a stick. See painting on hydria by Phintias. Munich, Antikensammlunge, 2421. AR V 23,7.

54.

'Stone of the Muses'. Pindar, Nemeam VIII, 45-50. Muse seated on a rock. See Lekythos by Achilles painter, Munich Schoen 80. A R V 9 9 7 ' 1 5 5 - ^ee also the musician Paris seated on a rock shown in a red-figure cup painting by Makron. Berlin, Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen, Preussischer Kulturbesitz F 2291. AR V 459,4.

55.

Angle of head may indicate singing. See Lissarrague, F., The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet, Images of Wine and Ritual (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 1 3 1 - 2 fies 101 and 102. ' &

56.

Toledo cup. See Beard, M., 'Adopting an Approach 1 1 ', in T. Rasmussen and N. Spivey (eds), Looking at Greek Vases (Cambridge, N ew York, Port Chester, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1991), figs 7 and 8. For literary example of subverting expectations. See Morriso, J. V., Homeric Misdirection, False Predictions in the Iliad (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 1.

57.

Amphora in the Boston Museum of Fine Art. BOS MOI.8035. See Chamoux, F.,The Civilization of Greece (London: Allen and Unwin, 1965), figs 148 and 149.

58.

Aristophanes. Thesmophoriazusae, 46-100.

59.

Pindar, Pythian.7/L113-14.

60.

Caskets in music scenes. See Reeder, E. D., et al., Pandora, Women in Classical Greece (The Walters Art Gallery Baltimore, MD, Princeton, NJ: Maryland and Princeton University Press iqqO dd 209 ff, cat. no. 45. 7

61.

Singers conceptualized as craftsmen who fasten, or fit, their songs together. See Steiner, D., The Crown of Song, Metaphor in Pindar (London: Duckworth, 1986), p. 53. See also Pindar, Pythian.III. 1 1 3 - 1 4 .

62.

Pindar, Olympian VI.8 . 'Fitting' his verse to the subject of the athlete using the metaphor of a sandal fitting a foot. See Steiner, The Crown of Song, p. 53.

63.

Xenophon, Memorabilia, 3.10 .1-3 .11.3.

Michael Duigan

29

64.

Gap between 'logical' theory and actual practice. See Vernant, Myth and Thought, pp. 290-91 and 285.

65.

Role of satyrs. See Lissarrague, F., 'W hy Satyrs are Good to Represent', in J. J. Winkler and I. Zeitlin, I. (eds), Nothing to do with Dionysus? Athenian Drama in its Social Context (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 234-5.

66.

Satyrs associated with creation. See painting by Harrow painter in J. Boardman, Athenian Red Figure Vases: The Archaic Period (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988), fig. 174. For satyrs performing tricks. See a psykter by Douris. London E768, in Lisserrague, F., 'The Sexual Life of Satyrs', in D. M. Halperin, J. J. Winkler and F. I. Zeitlin (eds), Before Sexuality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 72, fig. 2.8.

67.

Significance of landscape. See Schefold, K., Gods and Heroes in Late Archaic Greek Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 313. Liminal territory. See Lissarrague, 'W hy Satyrs are Good to Represent', p. 235. Hermes and landscape. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 95-6.

68.

Agriculture not a techne. Xenephon, Oeconomicus, 19 .1 5 ,1 6 ,1 7 . Agriculture linked to military activity. Oeconomicus, 5.4 ff. See Vernant, Myth and Thought, p. 252.

69.

Specialization linked to the city. Xenophon, Cyropaedia, 8.2.5.

70.

Democritus. Fragm 154, in Plutarch, De Sollert.anim., 20(9743). See Lovejoy, A. O. and Boas, G., Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 207.

71.

Lucky discovery of tortoise. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 24-35.

72.

Hermes exploits material provided by nature. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 24-35 and 79-83.

73.

Hesiod, Works and Days, 427-36.

74.

Iconography of vase-paintings demarcating gender roles. See hydria by the 'Painter of London'. London. E 215 AR V 1082,1. The stick in the man's hand shows an outdoor life while the woman is seated indoors.

75.

Men working outdoors in contrast to women who worked indoors. Xenephon, Oeconomicus, 7.30. See also Blundell, S., Women in Ancient Greece (London: British Museum Press, 1995), pp.135 ff.

76.

Work distorts the body. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 90.

77.

'The artisans decide not to fight.' Xenephon, Oeconomicus, 6.7.

78.

'Strong Hermes slayer of Argos.' See Homer, Iliad, 16 .18 1 and 'giant-killer', Odyssey, 5.49.

79.

Sandals by Hermes are 'wondrous'. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 80.

80.

Richness and beauty of footwear 'have gone unnoticed'. See Dohan Morrow, Greek Footwear, p. xxiii. See Homer Iliad, 24.339-45 and Odyssey, 5.43-9 for two descriptions of the sandals of Hermes as 'golden'.

81.

'Wondrous song of Hermes.' Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 440-50.

82.

Craftsmen crowned with wreaths. See Berard et al., A City of Images, fig. 1. Milan, Tomo C0II.C278. Hydria, A R V 2 571,73. Association of wreaths and victory. See Kyle, D. G., 'Gifts and Glory, Panathenaic and Other Greek Athletic Prizes', in J. Neils (ed.), Worshipping Athena, Panathenaia and Parthenon (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), p. 11 1.

83.

Artisans sought victory in a technical competition. See Vernant, Myth and Thought, p. 293.

84.

Craftsman's epitaph. Inscriptiones Graecae, IG 12 1084. See Humphrey, J. W., Humphrey, J. W., Oleson, J. P. and Sherwood, A. N., Greek and Roman Technology: A Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 344.

85.

Sandal-making scene in Boston. Amphora in the Boston Museum of Fine Art. BOS MOI.8035

86.

Amphora attributed to the Princeton painter. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 1989.281.89.

87.

Claim that the man for whom the artefact is made is the best judge of its form. Aristotle, Politics, 3.1282314. Plato makes the same claim Republic, 601c ff. See Vernant, Myth and Thought, pp. 2 6 12.

88.

Hermes appraises sandals. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 57. Hermes appraises artefacts. Homeric Hymn to Hermes, 60-61.

89.

Symposium context frames viewing. See Lissarrague, F., The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet, Images of Wine and Ritual (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

30

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

90.

Hermes, music and wine. Amphora painting by Berlin Painter. Berlin, Staatliche Museen. 2160 AR V 196,1.

91.

Linking of craftsmanship, leather-work and wine. See Lissarrague, The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet, p. 43 and fig. 28a and 28b. Hermes was identified as the wine-pourer of the gods by Alkaios 447LP and possibly Sappho 141LP. See Gantz, Early Greek Myth, p. 11 1 .

92.

Pot-paintings sometimes depict the making of pots. See Berard et al., A City of Images, fig. 1. Milan, Torno C0II.C278. Hydria, AR V 2 571,73.

93.

Symposium discourse visual. See Lissarrague, The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet, especially pp. 124-5.

94.

Philomela myth. See Gantz, Early Greek Myth, pp. 240-241. But see alternative accounts which claim that Philomela used the new art of writing.

95.

The decoration of Greek pottery from 'storied textiles'. See Barber, E. J. W., Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 382.

96.

The activity of interpretation divinized as Hermes. See Padel, R., In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 3 and 7.

image; a Satyr, holding a box sitting on a rock accompanied by a goat and a second Satyr dancing, the third figure wearing a hat and winged boots probably Hermes (right), early fifth century bc

£s

indry Painter', Hephaestus making arms for Achilles accompanied by Thetis (interior), Bronze sculptor's workshop (exterior detail),

3

£ g. a S

Michael Duigan

33

1.3 Makron, Judgement of Paris, the Trojan Prince playing a lyre while seated on a rock at the base of which there are a number of goats, Hermes brings the rival goddesses for a judgement of beauty, c. 490-480 bc

i -4 The 'Princeton painter', Musical Contest, a smger and double pipe player stand on a wooden table; on either side the audience or judges sit on folding stools, c. 540-530 bc

2

A u x armes et aux arts! Blacksmiths at the National

Convention* Valerie Mainz

On 17 January 1794 (28 nivose an II), a delegation from the Societe populaire et republicaine des arts, the newly created representative body for artists, addressed the National Convention. In expressing support for the govern­ ment, the high-flown rhetoric of the address also requested state support for the arts, which were to be used to promote the causes of revolution: Decree also that the virtuous and heroic actions will be retraced everywhere, in the sections, popular assemblies, primary schools and departments: that the virtues are present in the public places; that the people sees itself represented with one hand overwhelming despotism; with the other unmasking prejudice, that it finds everywhere moral lessons which in forming its heart and its love of the fatherland, nourishes in it the sublime virtues to which it gives birth.1

In response to this appeal, the Committee of Public Safety set up an extensive series of art competitions for architects, sculptors, painters and medal engravers. Sculptors were to produce works for public instruction on subjects that related to the Revolution and painters were to execute new subjects selected from glorious events and heroic acts.2 The competitions of Year II were thus set up to promote the arts in the service of the Revolution and were, at the same time, to give financial support to artists, many of whom were in need at a time when traditional sources of art patronage - from the clergy and the nobility - had been brought to a halt. State support of the arts was being consciously directed to the recording of actions and events from the present and recent past rather than to the celebration of the exploits and moral dilemmas that had faced long-dead kings and the heroes of antiquity - topics that had been commemorated under the ancien regime. The Revolution was to be celebrated as an extra­ ordinary and unprecedented epoch, while Republican virtue was to be seen to replace despotism and prejudice.3 The importance of this series of initiatives has been well established in terms of the history of state funding for the arts.

36

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

The fact that this enterprise also demonstrates the increasingly interventionist role the State was taking on for itself in the domain of work has, however, received less attention. By examining a large drawing entitled Les forgerons a la Convention lors de la fete du Salpetre le 30 ventdse an II (Figure 2.1), attributed to Fulcran-Jean Harriet, this chapter will address some of the guises in which the State's role in the domain of work manifested itself,4 and even though relatively little is known about this pupil of Jacques-Louis David. In 1793 at the young age of 17, Harriet was awarded a prize for a Retour a Rome du cadavre de Brutus tombe dans la Bataille by the former royal Academie.5 The painting is now lost. Harriet exhibited portraits and paintings and drawings of subjects taken from antique history at the Paris Salons of 1796, 1799, 1800 and 1802 and, won first prize in the Grand Prix de Rome competition of 1798 with a painting of Le Combat des Horaces et des Curiaces (Paris, Ecole des BeauxArts). Harriet then died tragically early in Rome in 1805 a^d a large, now lost, canvas which he was in the midst of completing, was shown in a posthumous exhibition there.6 The leaders of the Revolution attempted to mobilize the entire nation, not just artists, to serve the causes of the Republic. In so doing, they had also to encourage and proclaim that the labour of manual workers was valuable. This went against traditional attitudes and hierarchies that, since antiquity, had downgraded manual work in favour of higher, intellectual achievement. Yet the promotion of the work of the manual labourer was also problematic during the Revolution when those in power were keen to maintain their positions and develop the intellectual concerns with which they had been engaged and on which they still continued to place a higher value. Indeed, and contrary to what the drawing attributed to Harriet may initially appear to promote, manual workers were generally and deliberately excluded from the official arenas of revolutionary representation. An analysis of this image, together with an examination of some of the circumstances that gave rise to it, will reveal just how ambivalent were the attitudes of those in authority towards matters of work, art and craft, at this time of momentous upheaval and revolutionary change. The festival of Saltpetre was held in Paris to honour the first student graduates of the State-run courses of special instruction in the manufacture of saltpetre, gunpowder and armaments. On the day in question an immense crowd, carrying saltpetre and some of the tools the students had made, processed through the National Convention to official acclaim.7 Harriet's drawing of the event is in an overtly declamatory and laudatory mode, but in so doing it also indicates the unease that had been created for the rulers of the French nation by the invasion of work and workers into the new public spaces of government.

Valerie Mainz

37

The event Following the declaration of war with Austria on 20 April 1792, the general proclamation of 'La Patrie en danger' on 1 1 July that year and the mass call to arms of 23 August the following year, a series of measures were taken by the French government to mobilize the nation's principal resources and make effective use of a wartime economy. The fact that the nation lacked armaments had become a matter of major concern for the authorities in Paris. On 1 February 1794 (12 pluviose an II), a Commission of Arms and Powders was set up to take charge of these provisions for the war effort.8 The commission was to become a virtual Armaments Ministry, employing several hundred administrators split into divisions, offices and sections in three different locations in Paris. At a time when almost a million men required some sort of weapon and when previous sources of supply - from England, Sweden and Germany for instance - were no longer accessible, extraordinary measures had to be taken to ensure that the domestic munitions industry could increase its production to meet the pressing demand. These measures included the requisitioning of armaments factories, the reorientating of existing metalworking enterprises and the 'protection' of metalworkers who were requisitioned to work in the factories and thus excluded from the mass conscriptions.9 There was even some commandeering of grain so as to ensure that the munitions workers would carry on production of what had become a protected industry within a wartime economy. It has been estimated that from the end of ventose an II to the beginning of vendemiaire an II - that is, in approximately six months - 1 331 cannon were made at a rate of production that was between double and treble that of the pre-war period.10 Alongside the supervision of existing facilities, new factories were installed, churches became foundries and church bells were melted down for their metal. Production was centralized on Paris and, by the end of Year II, nearly 700 guns a day were being made in the temporary forges that had been set up in the gardens and public spaces there.11 Alongside the production of weapons, there was also urgent demand for saltpetre, which was the principal constituent of gunpowder. France's reliance on imported saltpetre had been a matter of some concern even before the Revolution. One writer even suggested that new saltpetre factories should be opened near towns as a form of punitive job creation scheme to give employment to 'the idle, the vagabonds, the young unsettled and disobedient, all those who needed to be reined in and who merited some, not ignominious, punishment'.12 In contrast to this particular strain of Enlightenment thought, the pressing need for ever greater amounts of gunpowder during the Revolutionary wars transformed the activity of manufacturing saltpetre into a mobilization of the entire nation in the

38

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

principles of Republican government. A decree of 28 August 1793 (10 fructidor an II) claimed that all the saltpetre in the Republic belonged to the State; detailed instructions on how citizens were to find, extract and refine saltpetre on their properties were then sent out to all the municipal authorities.13 In December of the same year the scientists Gaspard Monge and Claude Berthollet were put in charge of the saltpetre refinery that had been set up in the former abbey church of Saint-Germain-des-Pres in Paris.14 On 20 February 1794 (30 pluviose an II), citizens from the Paris section of Gardes-Fran^aises entered the National Convention; some carried spades and shovels, others a cauldron filled with saltpetre. They sang a patriotic hymn to saltpetre: Tremble tyrants, here is the thunderbolt Which, penetrating your palaces, Will soon reduce to powder Those walls, witnesses to your heinous crimes. Quake, grow pale! neither your sceptres, nor your crowns, Will protect you from our blows, proud Potentates And up to the highest of your thrones, Monsters, we will reach you all. And you, that in the past was torn from the bowels of the earth, By the anger of these unworthy sovereigns, For the ruin of humans, Precious saltpetre, show yourself! For a juster purpose, Liberty calls you from the depths of the subterranean; To support the courage Of these Republican children. Go and purge French soil Of its perfidious enemies; May their insulting presence No longer defile our country. Minister of Death, go and inveigh against the despots, Deliver us from these bloodthirsty tigers! By the cannon of the sans-culottes May they be for ever crushed!15

This hymn was sung in the National Convention not by its deputies, but by a deputation of sans-culottes who had been specially admitted to the legislative forum for their own proclamations to be heard. After much applause, one of the anonymous citizens fervently offered up to the nation the saltpetre that had been culled from the ground for the defence of the land of liberty and for the overwhelming of its enemies. Then, in the name of the Committee of Public Safety, the deputy Barere announced that a new school would open the next day for the instruction of new makers of arms and powders; from each French district and Paris section two robust,

Valerie Mainz

39

intelligent citizens aged between 23 and 30, used to work and taken from the companies of gunners or from those most active in the National Guard, were to be called to Paris and lodged there, receiving a daily living allowance of 3 livres for up to 30 days. One of each pair had to be able to read and write. The students were to be taught by skilled men of science, such as Hassenfratz, Monge and Perrier, to refine saltpetre, make powder and cast cannon, and after a month they would return to workshops throughout the country to prepare the materials and instruments to strike against tyranny throughout Europe.16 Exactly one month later, after the first series of these courses had been completed, the first batch of graduate students paraded through the streets of Paris to the sound of martial music. The procession ended up at the National Convention where patriotic offerings were made in the form of the first of the cannons that had been cast and of a liberty bonnet and a bust of Marat, both out of saltpetre: Here saltpetre was carried on a lion skin; there it was piled into a pyramid, into a mountain; everywhere it was draped with national colours, it was topped with palms, branches, oak wreaths, flowers, garlands. In the hands of republicans, the saltpetre had taken on the forms of emblems of liberty; it was shaped into fasces, columns, bonnets, pikes, trees and foliage.17

The event was recorded in the official newspaper, he Moniteur Universel, with the observation that: 'One saw there for the first time each citizen gaining distinction from the attributes of his craft. They all carried, not in simulacrum and for a sham parade, but full size, the instruments with which they had made the powder, the saltpetre and the cannons.'18 After a member of the administration of arms, saltpetre and powders had presented the students to the forum in words that praised the students, the sage decrees of legislators and the respect for the laws and veneration of the French people for its representatives, two of the graduates addressed the assembly. The first promised to join, once sufficient cannon and powder had been produced, with brothers on the even more glorious battlefield and the second reiterated support for the decisions of the deputies: And you, virtuous Republicans, worthy representatives, continue to hold that firm and imposing countenance which characterises your courage, and which makes the tyrants tremble in the depths of their palaces; stay at your post until they are all exterminated. For us, always faithful to the National Convention, we swear to defend and die for it, carrying with us to the tomb hatred of tyrants and love of liberty.19

After the speech-making, the saltpetre, cannon and powder were successfully tested outside in the national garden in front of a delegation from the convention.20

40

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

The drawing

The drawing of the event has been considered as a virtual pendant to Gerard's Le peuple frangais demandant la destitution du tyran a la journee d ui o aout (Figure 2.2), which won first prize in the painting competition of Year II and the visual connections between the drawing by Gerard and that attributed to Harriet (Figure 2.1) are certainly striking.21 In both cases intervening outsiders raise hands and outstretched arms up towards the assembly's President who is seated high up and to one side; packed hordes of onlookers gesticulate and lean over from flanking balconies; isolated objects of still life placed in front and centre stage indicate the additional layers of meaning that can be attached to the surrounding and compelling political actions and human dramas. These drawings also follow on from the innovations of David's Le Serment du Jeu de Paume (Figure 2.3), in which David had inscribed for posterity a collective civic action as the founding moment of the modern French nation.22 The three designs show crowds of spectators witnessing and participating in the unprecedented civic processes of revolution; they incorporate important and intensely felt and experienced interventions and they are composed within similar architectural frame­ works. In each case attention has been focused on certain posed and arrested actions within the overall vertical and horizontal elements of the interior spaces, and key figures are carefully particularized via gesture, expression and functional role within the public settings and within the unfolding of the events being witnessed. Both Gerard and Harriet had been students in the studio of David and all three artists depend on the rhetoric of the high art of history painting for their articulation of scenes of public confrontation and contemporary history in the making. In so doing, each of the depictions presents us with additional layers of abstraction and allegorization. In the case of David, the oath-taking has been imbued with a special sacredness as Bailly, in the manner of a Risen Christ, makes a frontal and hieratic address to the spectator.23 In the case of Gerard, the intervention on 10 August 1792 of the people into the stables of the Tuileries Palace, where the Legislative Assembly had its meeting place, marks out the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy and its systems of absolute government. The central invasion by the people can be seen to be opposed to the king and the members of his family and entourage, who are to be glimpsed, squashed up and caged in behind the bars of the reporters' box at the side. In the drawing attributed to Harriet, the blacksmiths in their aprons, the portable forge and the tools and implements of the craft placed centre stage imply that France as a nation was now a workshop and that the manual workers in this workshop were eager to show their allegiance to and support of those who legislated on their behalf.

Valerie Mainz

41

The three drawings also contain elements of dissent or disassociation from the collective acts of will that are being captured. In the Serment du Jeu de Paume (Figure 2.3), Martin Dauch is shown seated in the left foreground comer of the composition, looking down and with hands crossed over his chest. Dauch was the sole deputy who opposed the oath made by the other 630 representatives present in the tennis court on 20 June 1789.24At this stage of the Revolution an individual's dissenting opinion could still be envisaged. By the time of the events depicted by Gerard and by Harriet, such dissension from the general will was held to be subversive and treacherous. In Gerard's composition some deputies grimace, twist and turn away from the insurgents - in the foreground one of these dissenters even grasps a piece of paper in the manner of Brutus and his holding of the evidence of his sons' treachery in David's history painting of 1789, Les Licteurs rapportent a Brutus les corps de ses fils (Paris, Louvre). Aligned below the forthright pose and incorruptible appearance of Robespierre, Vergniaud is seated, in seeming anguish, at a table hiding his face in his hands. The incorporation of these deputies showing negative reactions suggests that the alleged complicity of the Girondins with the court and their eventual downfall in June 1793 is already being implied here. In Harriet's composition other deputies similarly crouch and grimace in the left, rather than right, deliberately darkened foreground corner of the composition; just four days after the festival of saltpetre, the Hebertists were denounced and executed. Dissension within this public and political forum was then suddenly leading more directly to the guillotine.

Work, image and the Revolution

The speeches made at the National Convention on the day of the festival of saltpetre have to be understood in the light of the need to mobilize the entire nation not just against foreign enemies but also against traitors from within. The drawing of Lesforgerons a la Convention (Figure 2.1) is an overtly rhetorical response not just to enemy coalitions, but also in support of those legislative rulers who are seated on high. Far from being fervent supporters of the government, however, the armaments workers of Paris were unruly and insurrectional. These workers received specially high rates of pay but had been denounced on 28 December 1793 (7 nivose an II) for an uprising in one of the workshops in the place Maubert and they made constant demands for more pay.25 Just after the Festival of the Supreme Being and the day after the law of 22 prairial (10 June 1794) which established the categories of enemies of the Republic as anyone who slandered patriotism, depraved morals, corrupted public conscience or impaired the purity and energy of the revolutionary government, Frecine, the director

42

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

of the government's saltpetre factory, addressed the workers in his charge with barely concealed threats: I feel the greatest regret in being forced to leave off with you for one instant the language of fraternity so as to make you hear that of severe reason. I learn with surprise and sadness that there exists amongst you some individuals who stubbornly want to insist on gaining a daily pay rise, the charges of which would accrue to the Republic. What! citizens, the detestable spirit of cupidity which national justice wants to destroy - has it now crept into the pure soul of the sans­ culottes? Such a suspicion is too odious for me to believe in and you will not suffer it to be hanging over your heads.26

The imposition of a maximum on salaries caused much unrest amongst the artisans of Paris and contributed to the unpopularity of Robespierre.27 After Thermidor and the downfall of Robespierre, the State armaments workshops were soon privatized or dismantled; by 27 January 1795 (7 pluviose an III) just 1 146 out of a total workforce in excess of 5 000 were still being employed.28 In Harriet's drawing there is no evidence of the saltpetre, the powder or the cannon that had formed the centrepiece of the patriotic offering to the National Convention; rather attention is focused on the heavily muscled metalworkers and smithies in aprons who sport the costumes of sans-culottes and, here and there, liberty caps and revolutionary cockades. Their intrusion into the legislative arena to voice and make manifest their support for the legislators is clearly being envisaged as extraordinary and unaccustomed. They are easily to be distinguished from the deputies in their high collars, frock coats, wigs and tight-fitting trousers. At this juncture it is also worth noting that following the Loi d'Allarde that had suppressed all corporations, the Loi Le Chapelier of 14 June 1791 had also officially prohibited all workers' associations and strikes in a law that was to remain in force in France for almost a hundred years.29 Far from being granted greater official rights of representation, artisans were in some respects actually being deprived of power, political status and of the ways in which they had in the past controlled the terms and conditions of their labour. The drawing of Lesforgerons a la Convention (Figure 2.1) locates the place of the metalworkers within the new public space of representation, not in terms of realism or of accuracy, but within the academic codes, conventions and devices of high art. The artisans are shown to be expressing their fervent support for the legislative processes at work, although their presence within this political arena can still be viewed as anomalous. This intrusion is to be seen as an essentially alienating one both for the protagonists being depicted and for the spectators of such a scene. The furniture and decoration of the setting contain heavily classicizing figurative elements that have been combined with the deliberate constructs of contrast, comparison and juxtaposition. These, following on in the tradition

Valerie Mainz

43

and from the theory that had evolved out of antique treatises on drama and rhetoric, offered the viewer further layers of potential meaning through additional devices of variety.30 The body of painting theory, that stretches from Alberti in the fifteenth century to Reynolds and would survive well on into the nineteenth century had, typically, advocated a judicial selection from the best parts of approved models. Using conceptual processes of invention, the highest forms of art were to create a synthesis and this synthesis was to be based on principles of adaptation and imitation that also exceeded mere copying and plagiarization. The fervently upraised arms stretched out in unison to the patronal authority can, for instance, be obviously associated with David's Le Serment des Horaces (Paris, Louvre), whilst the seated, iconic sculpture placed behind the President can be linked back to the statue of Roma in the master's Brutus (Paris, Louvre). The additional attribute of a liberty bonnet, however, transforms the pagan divinity into an authority figure of the new and contemporary revolution. These obvious references back to the high art of history painting are neither gratuitous nor embedded. Rather they supply frames of reference that are ennobling and exceptional in preference to the egalitarian and commonplace. Past authority has been brought into play, not so as to be rejected, but so as overtly to serve the new strategies of government. Yet so many of these new strategies, which promoted radical breaks with the past but that relied on old, conventional and previously sanctioned ways of thinking, failed - at least in the short term. Despite the debates about whether the painting of contemporary event should take precedence over the depiction of antique history and the actions of dead kings and heroes, the subjects of very few oil paintings of the period overtly record contemporary events. The swiftly changing political fortunes, the overdetermined and polemical public rhetoric, the often horrifyingly immediate and spontaneous unfolding of many of the collective acts of will and the intensely felt and experienced emotions roused by such acts all militated against the treatment of these types of subject in the medium of oil paint. The studied labouring over time that the high art of history painting in oils on canvas required was not suited to the contemporary nature of its reception at this time of revolutionary moment and feverish change. It is not merely coincidence that paintings commissioned after the designs of David and Gerard shown here and that dealt with two key events of the Revolution were never completed. Although the circumstances surrounding the drawing by Harriet remain unknown, a print after the design may have initially been envisaged. Two prints engraved by Joseph-Frangois Tassaert after designs by Harriet, Journee du juin 1793 and La Nuit du 9 et 10 thermidor show two further and contrasting momentous political occasions of the Revolution. In the case of the festival

44

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

of saltpetre, however, the difficulties in representing a contemporary event may have been compounded by the actual lack of representation of those who, remaining anonymous, are shown to be intervening solely by demon­ strating their industry, brutal strength and fervent loyalty in the public sphere. Liberty, fraternity and equality are not being commemorated here in the modem sense of these words, but in terms that hark back to long-established hierarchies of work and of the worker. In looking at the drawing by Harriet, we need also to go back to Aristotle, who had categorized people into social classes according to the usefulness of the work that they did for the city state.31 For Aristotle, the works of the soul were less animalistic and therefore higher than those of the body, so those engaged in the administration of justice and in political debate were considered to be more essential to the city state than those who merely laboured to provide the necessities of life. Besides the imagery of the worker hero of modem times, these preceding distinctions between manual activity and cerebral engagement figure within the various political, social and cultural impacts of the French Revolution and need also to be accounted for.

Postscript On 8 February 1794 (20 pluviose an II) a Jury of Arts met in the newly opened museum of the Louvre to hear an address from its acting President, the engineer Louis-Pierre Defoumy, to the young artist Fulcran-Jean Harriet who, the previous day, had been awarded a second prize in the Grand Prix de Rome competition of 1793.32 Having embraced the aspiring history painter with a patriotic kiss, Defoumy declaimed: do not forget that every man can produce with work and obstinacy paintings for the eye of slaves, but only the virtuous man, only the man of genius, can speak the language of free men! So for the future be always the artist inspired by virtue, by liberty: make it pass into the soul of all those who will see your works and may your example serve to give patriotic impetus to all artists.33

The words of this oration demonstrate that, even when the Revolution was at its most intense, work was still being considered in negative ways as a necessary activity involving laborious effort and linked to slavery and in contrast to genius, which was being held up as the attribute of the inspired, virtuous and free. Similarly whilst the painting of contemporary history may have been promoted at this time, systems and values that had previously been attached to the high and noble art of history painting could not be decisively abandoned. On the verso of Lesforgerons a la Convention (Figure 2.1) there is a curious pen and lead outline drawing of Les Sabines separant les armees ennemies

Valerie Mainz

45

(Figure 2.4). In my opinion this drawing cannot be dated to 1796 as a preliminary to David's major history painting of the same subject (Paris, Louvre), that was first exhibited in public in 1799;34 rather the drawing is likely to have been done after the completed history painting and derives from it. In this drawing, as in D avid's painting, the leading soldier protagonists are naked. A fairly fully worked up compositional sketch (Paris, Louvre) for David's painting shows these soldiers clothed and thus indicates that the decision to unclothe these figures was a late one for David. The outline figures of Tatius and Romulus in the drawing attributed to Harriet are, furthermore, variations on those painted by David. In the drawing a dead soldier takes the place of a living child lying on the ground and glimpsed through the legs of Romulus in the painting by David. Romulus is also shown not posed and static in a moment of arrested action, as in the painting by David, but striding forward as if about to launch the spear he holds horizontally in one hand. Tatius has the sword and shield of David's version but, again, he is a far less static figure as he strides forward, still actively countering the enemy. The young artist, like his studio master, had ostensibly turned his back on the depiction of dramatic events from contemporary history but also so as to reaffirm and subvert the realms of high art in which he had been trained and which continued to form the basis of his oeuvre.

Notes *

I am grateful to the Musee de la Revolution frangaise, Vizille for allowing me to reproduce the parts of this essay which first appeared in the French catalogue of the exhibition VImage du Travail et la Revolution frangaise, Musee de la Revolution frangaise, Vizille, 1999.

1.

'Decretez encore, que les actions verueuses et heroiques seront retracees partout, dans les sections, assemblies populaires, ecoles primaires et les departements: que les vertus le soient dans les places publiques; que le peuple s'y voie representer d'une main terrassant le despotisme; de l'autre demasquant le prejuge, qu'il trouve partout des lemons de morale qui en formant son coeur et l'amour de la patrie, nourrissent en lui les vertus sublimes qu'il enfante.' Archives Parlementaires de 17 8 1 a i860 par ordre du Senat et de la Chambre des deputes (Paris, 1961), vol. 83, p. 423.

2.

See Olander, W., 'French Painting and Politics in 1794: The Great Concours de Van IV, in 1789: French Art during the Revolution (New York: Colnaghi, 1989), pp. 29-45, and Gallini, B., 'Concours et Prix d'Encouragement', in La Revolution Frangaise et VEurope 17 8 9 -17 9 9 (Paris: Grand Palais, 1989), vol. 3, pp. 830-62.

3.

For art theory during this period, see Pommier, E., L'art de la liberte. Doctrine et debats de la Revolution frangaise (Paris: Gallimard, 1991).

4.

The drawing has been convincingly attributed to Harriet by de la Vaissiere, P., 'Fulcran-Jean Harriet, un adolescent malleable durci par la Revolution', Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 10 1, April (1983), 14 1-4 .

5.

Bordes, P., ‘ La M ort de Brutus' de Pierre-Narcisse Guerin (Vizille: Musee de la Revolution frangaise, 1996), pp. 65-7.

6.

De David a Delacroix: la peinture frangaise de 1774 a 1830 (Exhibition Catalogue, Paris, Grand Palais; Detroit, The Detroit Museum of Art; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974), pp. 483-4.

46

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

7.

Proces-Verbal de la Convention Nationale. Imprime par son ordre (Paris, an II), vol. 33, pp. 486-90.

8.

Woronoff, D., L'Industrie siderurgique en France pendant la Revolution et YEmpire (Paris: Editions de l'Ecole des hautes etudes sciences sociales, 1984), p. 37.

9.

Ibid., p. 148.

10.

Ibid., p. 391.

11.

La Revolution Franqaise Le Premier Empire: Dessins du Musee Carnavalet (Alen^on: Les Amis du Musee Carnavalet 1988), p. 95.

12.

'Les faineans, les coureurs de nuit, les jeunes gens deregies & desobeissans, dans tous ceux qui doivent etre tenus en bride, & qui meritent quelque punition, qui ne soit pas infamante.' Enguel, M., 'De la plantation du Salpetre', Journal Oeconomique, May (1768), 203-10.

13.

Prieur, C. A., Rapport sur le Salpetre (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, an II).

14.

Dhombres, N., Les Savants en Revolution iy 8 q -iy g g (Paris: Payot, 1989), p. 57.

15.

Tremblez, tyrans, voici la foudre Qui, penetrant dans vos palais, Va bientot reduire en poudre Ces murs, temoins de vos forfaits. Fremissez, palissez! ni vos sceptres, ni vos couronnes Fiers potentats, ne vous garantiront de nos coups, Et jusqu'au plus haut de vos trones, Monstres, nous vous atteindrons tous. Et toi, que jadis la colere De ces indignes souverains Arrachait du sein de la terre, Pour la ruine des humains, Salpetre precieux, parais! Pour un plus juste usage, La Liberte t'appelle du fond des souterrains; C'est pour seconder le courage De ses enfants republicans. Va purger le sol de la France De ses perfides ennemis; Que leur insultante presence Ne souille plus notre pays. Ministre de la Mort, va tonner contre les despotes, Delivre-nous de ces tigres de sang alteres! Par le canon des sans-culottes Qu'ils soient a jamais terrasses! Reimpression de VAncien Moniteur (Paris: Henri Plon, 1861), vol. 19, pp. 508-9.

16.

Ibid. p. 509.

17.

'lei le salpetre etait porte sur une peau de lion; la il s'elevait en pyramide, en montagne; partout il portait les couleurs nationales, il etait surmonte de palmes, de branchages, de couronnes de chene, de fleurs, de guirlandes. Le salpetre lui-meme avait pris dans les mains de republicans les formes des emblemes de la liberte; il etait figure en faisceaux, en colonnes, en bonnets, en piques, en arbres et en feuillages.' Gazette Nationale ou le Moniteur Universel, no. 18 4,4 Germinal l'an 2e/Monday, 24 March 1794, 4.

18.

'On y voyait pour la premiere fois chaque citoyen s'honorer des attributs de son metier. Tous portaient, non pas en simulacre, et pour une vaine parade, mais en grand, les instruments avec lesquels ils avaient fabrique la poudre, le salpetre et les canons.' Ibid., p. 4.

19.

'Et vous, republicans vertueux, dignes representans, continuez a tenir cette contenance ferme & imposante, qui caracterise votre courage, & qui fait trembler les tyrans jusqu'au fond de leurs palais; restez a votre poste jusqu'a ce qu'ils soient tous extermines.' Proces-Verbal de la Convention Nationale, p. 492.

20.

Gazette Nationale ou Le Moniteur Universel, p. 4.

21.

La Revolution Frangaise. Le Premier Empire, p. 57.

22.

See Bordes, P., Le Serment du Jeu de Paume de Jacques-Louis David (Paris: Editions de la Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1983).

23.

Ibid., p. 60.

Valerie Mainz

47

24.

Ibid., pp. 14 -15 .

25.

See Burstin, H., Troblemes du Travail a Paris sous la Revolution', Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 44/4, October-December (1997), 650-82.

26.

'J'eprouve le plus penible regret de me voir force a quitter un seul instant avec vous le langage de la fraternite pour ne vous faire entendre que celui de la raison severe. J'apprends avec surprise et douleur que parmi nous il existe des individus qui s'opiniatrent a vouloir obtenir une augmentation de journee qui tomberait a la charge de la Republique. Eh quoi! citoyens, le detestable esprit de cupidite que la justice nationale veut d'aneantir chez les accapareurs se serait-il done glisse dans Tame pure des sans-culottes? Un pareil soup^on est trop odieux pour que je veuille y croire et vous ne souffrirez pas qu'il plane sur vos tetes.' Cited in Richard, C., Le Comite de Salut Public et les Fabrications de Guerre sous la Terreur (Paris: Rieder & C., 1921), p. 717 from Bibliotheque Nationale Lib 41 1120 Mort aux tyrans! Au nom du peuple frangais, Frecine, representant du peuple charge de Vetablissement de la raffinerie revolutionnaire des salpetres, aux citoyens employes a la construction du nouvel atelier, maison de VUnite et aux travaux de la raffinerie des salpetres, 23 prairial an II.

27.

See Soboul, A., 'Le Maximum des salaires parisiens et le 9 thermidor', Annales Historiques de la Revolution Frangaise, 1 (1954), 1-22. As Robespierre and his friends were being led to the scaffold, the words ' f .....maximum!' were heard.

28.

Burstin, 'Problemes du Travail'.

29.

See Sonnenscher, M., Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 35 1-2 .

30.

For this tradition, see, for instance, Lee, R. W., Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanist Theory of Painting (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1967).

31.

Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. E. Barker, revised by R. F. Stalley (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), iv .4 ,12 9 1s, p. 142. For more on negative approaches to craftsmen in Antiquity, see ch. 1, p. 17.

32.

For the judging of this competition, see Bordes, P .,'La Mort de Brutus'.

33.

'n'oublie pas que tout homme, avec du travail et de Topiniatrete, peut produire des tableaux pour l'oeil des esclaves, mais que le seul homme vertueux, le seul homme de genie, peut parler la langue des hommes libres! Sois done a l'avenir, sois toujours l'artiste inspire par la vertu, par la liberte; fais-la passer dans Tame de tous ceux qui verront tes ouvrages, et que ton exemple serve a donner Timpulsion patriotique a tous les artistes.' Cited in ibid. p. 13 7 from Supplement au proces-verbal de la seance du 19 pluviose, an II de la Republique.

34.

For this painting and its preliminary studies, see Schnapper, A. and Serullaz, A., Jacques-Louis David (Paris: Editions de la Reunion des Musees Nationaux, 1989-90), pp. 323-53.

2.1 Fulcran-Jean Harriet, Les forgerons a la Convention, lors de la fete du Salpetre, le 30 ventose an II (The Blacksmiths at the Convention on the Festival of Saltpetre, 30 ventose an II), 1794-95

2.2 Francois Gerard, Le peuple frangais demandant la destitution du tyran a la journee d u i o aout (The French People Demanding the Overthrow of the Tyrant on the Tenth of August 1792), 1794-95

2.3

Jacques-Louis David, Le Serment du Jeu de Paume (The Tennis Court Oath), 179 1

2.4

Fulcran-Jean Harriet, Les Sabines separant les armies ennemies (The Sabine Women separating the Enemy Armies)

3

'The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover': LaVille-Leroulx's Po rtra it de Negresse and the signs of misrecognition* Helen Weston

When Marie-Guillemine LaVille-Leroulx (better known as Madame or Comtesse Benoist) exhibited her Portrait of a Negress (Figure 3.1) in the Salon of 1800 it received a mixed reaction from the critics. For the most part, however, it was vilified and, significantly, deemed to be unlikely to help the artist with her career prospects. The reason was her choice of a black sitter. The critics, ranging from Baron Jean-Baptiste Boutard in the conservative Journal des Debats and Baron Tonnes-Chretien Bruun-Neergaard, the sophisticated Danish amateur, to the Vaudeville dialogues of Gilles and Harlequin, found much to deplore in the black woman - African faces were so uniformally and unequivocally ugly that it was not possible for art to redeem them and make them in any way beautiful.1 They would never appeal to colourists. It was impossible to make a black face harmonize with a light background or stand out against a dark one. In this instance the contrast of black against light background hurt the eyes. The more the face stood out against the background the more hideous it became.2 'Gilles' claimed to have seen the devil in this 'horreur', where a pretty white hand had created such a 'noirceur'.3 LaVille-Leroulx/Benoist had at least found a graceful pose for her sitter, which women of that colour were not usually able to adopt. The arms, breasts and drapery were well drawn and (as almost all commentators pointed out) the drawing and the purity of the design revealed her as a pupil of David.4 One critic doubted whether it was a portrait at all,5 and not one spoke of the sitter as an individual. For some, a portrait of the artist, 'the pretty white hand' would have been preferable.

Constructing social and racial identities in spaces of power

Such comments confirm my sense that, with the Portrait of the Negress LaVilleLeroulx's need for recognition of her own identity as a professional working

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artist did not go unheeded. But I suggest that her success was the result of a deliberate opposing of the two identities, artist and sitter, and of the exploiting of the sensational value of the figure's blackness and difference. Even in the overall view of the Salon, as represented by Monsaldy and Devisme's - View of the Salon of the year VIII (1800), it is possible to pick out this portrait immediately, as the starkness of the black figure makes its impact. It is unlikely that LaVille-Leroulx would have been so naive as not to have anticipated the reaction that the portrait prompted in the Salon. She seems to have chosen a model and a look for her that penetrated the exhibition space, in a way that functioned almost as a metaphor for LaVille-Leroulx's own artistic presence. While the artist affirms her own professional identity through the manipulation of a space where reputations were made or unmade, the space within the painting allows no anchoring of the sitter. Indeed it echoes the kind of experience of deracination, of a woman uprooted from her country of origin, wherever that may have been. We know almost nothing about the sitter or her origins, but it is thought that she was brought to France from the West Indies by the artist's brotherin-law, Monsieur Benoist-Cavay, who was a naval officer and who had travelled to Guadeloupe, Saint-Domingue and Guyana. Benoist-Cavay was in France in 1800 and LaVille-Leroulx painted his portrait in that year. It is believed that this woman was employed in his family as a domestic servant. She is 'the cook' of my title. LaVille-Leroulx would have painted her during visits to her brother-in-law's house. The status of black people and 'men of colour' was a complex issue in the colonies. We do not know whether this woman was a former slave, a freed slave, or a household servant brought to France to learn a trade. Once she set foot on French soil she was, at least in theory, not a slave anyway and, of course, slavery had also been abolished in the French colonies in February 1794 by Robespierre's Jacobin government. I am not automatically assuming slave status for her, even though I shall argue that the artist has included some of the trappings of slavery that might imply such status. The artist had exhibited portraits and history paintings in previous Salons and had received some favourable reviews. Yet it was this painting that made her name and established her as having been trained by David.6What it did for the sitter is hard to gauge. Hugh Honour sees an image where no suggestion of servitude is discernible, where the black woman is completely at her ease in this warmly humane and noble image. With perfect poise and self-confidence she looks at us with a gaze of reciprocal equality ... The painting must surely have been intended at least partly as a tribute to the French emancipation of slaves ... 7

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In other words, he suggests that the painting presented her as free and equal, nevertheless imputing a former slave status for her, and that the artist's image had conferred on her the dignity of allegorical status of bare­ breasted Liberty figure. I see a number of levels of misrecognition here; the first in Honour's assumption that the sitter is or was a slave, second, that she was given her freedom by the French rather than by the rebellious slaves of Saint-Domingue and, third, that the artist has given her a gaze of reciprocal equality with the audience. There is certainly nothing to confirm that the painting was perceived in this way at the time. Indeed, what we probably read in the hostile critiques quoted at the beginning is a displacement of the fear of the consequences of the abolition decree of 1794 - especially in the wake of the violent rebellions in Saint-Domingue - on to racial prejudice couched in terms of aesthetics, rather than anything like a 'tribute to the French emancipation of slaves'. At the turn of the century the same prejudice could be found in other areas, in Julien-Joseph Virey's Histoire naturelle du genre humain, for example. He reiterates the views of Lavater of the impossibility of a beautiful soul residing in the head and body of a black person. A black is automatically a slave for Virey and therefore under the yoke of servitude, and can thus only offer an abject bearing, and stupid, sulking expression.8 Arguing against such categorizing, however, Montesquieu had already stated that negative portrayal of the physiognomy and imputed character of black people was merely a rationale for enslaving them.9 The end of the eighteenth century would also see a number of sentimental novels with positive characterization of the dignity and generosity of black men and especially women.10 In LaVilleLeroulx's portrait the situation is confusing. By deciding that this woman was fit subject for a dignified portrait for display in the official Salon, the artist seemed to be resisting any categorization of her sitter as sulking slave. Since it is precisely this sort of resistance that engenders hatred in the white reaction, however, the artist also invested the sitter - or so I will try to argue - with such trappings as were necessary to locate her within the concept of enslavement and to enable herself to be exonerated from any association with abolition.

Locating the image in the power struggles of Saint-Domingue

In fact, unlike Hugh Honour, for whom the meaning of this work is only located with reference to 1794, six years earlier, I would want to see the image very specifically in relation to a changing attitude to the slavery issue in 1799-1800 under Napoleon and implicating many members of the Bonaparte family and LaVille-Leroulx herself through her close association

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with them. She was from a bourgeois family; her father an avowed royalist and Parisian administrative official, who had been unsuccessful in business. This is important. It compelled him to train his two daughters to respect the need to work and to earn their own living. He placed them with VigeeLeBrun in 1783. He was also a friend of David's and, when Vigee-LeBrun closed her studio in 1786 to have it refurbished, his daughters were accepted into David's studio.11 Despite all the references to David being her mentor in artistic matters, LaVille-Leroulx had no sympathy with his political position during the Terror. In marrying Pierre-Vincent Benoist in 1793, a man clearly above her own station, she was allying herself with the royalist cause. Her husband had helped Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette to escape to Varennes and had spent the months of the Terror persecuted by the Jacobins. By 1800 however, David and the Benoists were lined up on the same side, behind Napoleon. After the coup of 18 brumaire, when Napoleon came to power, he appointed his brother, Lucien, Minister of the Interior. M. Benoist was immediately given the post of Chef de Division de la Correspondance avec les Departements a l'lnterieur. In congratulating him on his appointment, his parents, formerly hostile to LaVille-Leroulx on account of her inferior social standing, recognized that she had been instrumental in gaining this post for him, through her contacts in literary circles.12 These included not only the powerful Lucien Bonaparte, but also Joseph-Etienne Esmenard, journalist, poet and editor of the Quotidienne and of the Mercure de France between 1797 and 1800, and the poet Charles-Albert Demoustier. It was thus her work and her contacts that set her husband on a career that would have devastating results for herself, since it would eventually rob her of her ability to work and of her sense of her own worth and identity in her professional capacity. M. Benoist, in this respect, will become the thief of my title. Although Napoleon did not formally reinstate slavery in the French colonies until 1802, the mechanisms had been put in place already by 1799, when he refused to negotiate with Toussaint-Louverture, leader of the slave rebellions on Saint-Domingue, as between equals and representatives of their respective free nations.13 Under Toussaint the colony was taken away from French rule by former slaves, a British invasion was driven back and even part of the Spanish side of the island was occupied by the rebels. By 1801 a new constitution had been adopted on the island, one which marked a complete break with France, and the huge military force that had been sent to restore French colonial rule had to turn back. Although Toussaint was not himself an advocate of violence against whites and mulattos, those serving under him, Jean-Jacques Dessalines in particular, did have that reputation and, indeed, Dessalines was often represented as unequivocally barbarous.14 Stories of the black backlash on the island that

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constructed black (male) rebels as figures of insensate brutality towards their French oppressors, were as pervasive as the tales of white brutality towards slaves, and they incited racial hatred. Toussaint and Dessalines were associated with the 'horrible crimes and atrocities of the principal black leaders'.15 In 1802 Napoleon sent an army under General Leclerc, husband of Napoleon's sister, Pauline, to reinstate slavery and bring Toussaint-Louverture to submission. Accompanying Leclerc to Saint-Domingue as his secretary, was Mme Benoist's friend, Josephe-Etienne Esmenard, former poet and journalist, who had in fact commented on the Portrait de Negresse in 1800.16 Napoleon achieved the capture of Toussaint, but Saint-Domingue went on to declare independence in 1804 under Dessalines and adopted its Indian name, Haiti.17 From 1799 Napoleon's objectives had been to stamp out the campaigns for liberty of blacks and to re-establish a colonial society. It is in this context that we should recognize that it was precisely not in LaVille-Leroulx's interests to be seen to be celebrating the decree of the abolition of slavery of six years earlier. This decree had been superseded by something more sinister that provided a different frame of reference for seeing a portrait of a black person in 1800. Indeed, it was in 1799, following a decree of Lucien Bonaparte, in his capacity as Minister of the Interior, that the jury made it clear that they would not accept any deliberately subversive work that made reference to the recent revolutionary past.18 In taking on his new appointment under Lucien, Benoist would have been expected to tow the line. So would his wife. She had much to gain as a portraitist at this point and acquired numerous official commissions to paint members of the Bonaparte family.19 It is out of the question that she would have exhibited or been allowed to exhibit a painting of a black woman which celebrated liberty and equality, when the men in power in the circles in which she and her husband moved were actively ordering the suppression of slave rebellions, and setting in motion the mechanisms to reintroduce slavery. We should in fact contrast what she was doing with Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Wollstonecraft, through more than 80 references to colonial slavery, and applauding the earlier (1791) slave rebellions on Saint-Domingue in particular, highlighted the subjugation of white, middleclass women and pleaded with them to take example from these rebellions. Her line was that all men enslave all women. Women should 'break their silken fetters'.20She refuted Jean-Jacques Rousseau's view that women should be given very restricted freedom on the grounds that they always indulged in excesses and were extremists. She equated women's indulgence in excesses with that of slaves when they overthrow oppression, and warned that: 'The bent bow recoils with violence, when the hand is relaxed that forcibly held it.'21 The Benoist couple knew Wollstonecraft's work, since M. Benoist was

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employed in 1798 as translator of Wollstonecraft's Maria or the Wrongs of Woman (1797) written shortly before Wollstonecraft died, and which Mme Benoist illustrated. We shall see whether or not Mme Benoist in her work as a professional artist, would come to share Wollstonecraft's views in time. In 1800, however, with this portrait of a negress, no parallels were drawn between the predicaments of an oppressed white middle-class woman and a black slave.

The language of slavery What was important for the artist's career was that the audience should not lose sight of the image of her as a beautiful woman and as a mother (she had two sons by this point and was pregnant with her daughter Augustine). Hence her double signature, which anchored her in her own royalist family history of the Le Roux DelaVilles and the Benoists (Figure 3.2). Since, as LaVille-Leroulx, she had been celebrated in the early poems of Demoustier and in the Salon criticisms, for her exceptional beauty, the inclusion of this first signature had the effect, as we have seen, of drawing attention to her beauty, by contrast with that of the sitter. Since she was also praised in the later poems as virtuous mother, the second signature was also important for the construction of her as Rousseauvian ideal of womanhood. The sitter, on the other hand, is clearly denied any identity other than a superficial one that is determined by her negritude, once she is reduced to 'portrait of a Negress'. LaVille-Leroulx must have known her sitter's name but considered it of no importance. The forms of equal recognition essential to a republican culture were not respected here. Any other portrait would have been of 'Mme Thelusson' or 'Mme de Verninac' or 'Citizen Belley'. The 'negress' is individualized by not being stereotyped in the representation of her but is denied individual identity by not being named. The artist also made of the painting something different from a portrait. Indeed, as I mentioned earlier, one critic questioned whether it was a portrait at all. By baring the breast nearest the spectator and by disallowing the sitter a real dress, draping her instead in white sheeting held under the breast by red ribbon, she has produced a conflation of portrait and female academie. This could be perceived as a strategic move in self-advertisement as both portraitist and figure-painter. In contrasting it with Portrait of Mme de Verninac (1799) (Figure 3.3) one of the portraits often used to indicate LaVille-Leroulx's indebtedness to David, the differences in costume, spatial arrangement, intersubjective encounter between artist and sitter are all very marked. Madame de Verninac is located on a patterned floor. It is her body and not the chair that is draped with an expensive shawl, and she wears a dress in the classical

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fashion of the period. She smiles and engages directly with the artist. Can we even talk of the 'meeting of two subjectivities', to use Linda Nochlin's phrase in characterizing portraiture as a genre, with this portrait of the negress? The making and sustaining of our identity is a dialogical activity and the space of the artist's studio is no exception for this.22 The critical comments quoted at the beginning of this chapter suggest that the only thing that concerned people then - and to some extent ever since, was the way that the blackness of the woman portrayed served to make people wish to see or to imagine the whiteness and the beauty of the portrayer. The painting's referant is not the actual body outside the picture, of the woman who sat for the portrait, but rather the artist and her individuality, beauty and talent. Before being a portrait of someone else, this painting is self-referential; it is a LaVille-Leroulx/femme Benoist.23 This brings into play the theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the discourse of recognition. Rousseau acknowleged the crucial importance of equal respect and of its necessity for a condition of freedom. For him there was either a condition of freedom-in-equality, in an ideal republican society, or a hierarchy of other-dependence as under the ancien regime. There honour had played a significant role in a system of distinctions, preferences and inequalities. In a condition of dependence, Rousseau claimed that master and slave were mutually corrupt. The other-dependent person, in their craving for esteem, was a slave to 'opinion', and indeed Rousseau saw this as a particular failing of women.24 LaVille-Leroulx's need for recognition, understandable in a climate where ambitious and talented women had a difficult time with men's perception of them as trangressive, makes her dependent on the 'Other's' inferiority for her own glory. There is at least a tension between representing something like dignity in the black woman and yet not acknowledging dignity in its universalist sense of the inherent dignity of human beings, the equal citizen's dignity. I would also contend that this portrait is more redolent of slavery than of liberty. There is, first, the experience of a certain discomfort of deracination and emptiness; there is no identifiable room, no floor, no skirting board. This in itself would not count for much and it was also David's practice in some of his portraits of women and, indeed, in his own Self-Portrait (1793) (Figure 3.4). Nevertheless, the combining of this uprootedness with the sitter's look is more persuasive of her unease. This look, rather than being one of reciprocality, is that type of ocular submission usually encountered in behaviour between men and women. Here the encounter is between women, but between the sitter of low birth and the artist of recently elevated social status. The black woman's expression is apprehensive, uncertain, unimposing, insecure. In this domestic servant LaVille-Leroulx would have found her own private life-class, a model unable to refuse to pose if this was required or demanded

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of her. The servant would have had no say in determining the pose, the expression, the degree to which her body would be exposed in public in this portrait of her. In this respect it differs from most women artists' portraits of women at this time, where, in addition to producing a likeness, the aim was often to flatter the sitter and to indicate some cordial or intimate, family relationship between artist and sitter.25 Then there are the decisions to expose the breast, to drape the black servant in a sheet implying a state of nakedness beneath, and to drape the chair, not the woman, with the fashionable luxury item of the shawl. The naked breast is disconcerting. Honour ignores it, yet breasts of black women played a significant role in various contemporary discourses - medical, aesthetic and in the discourse of slavery. Explanations for the use of black women as wet nurses in the colonies was reported to the Academie Royale des Sciences in Paris, detailing the differences between the milk of black and white women, the latter being too salty for babies to imbibe, because the lymphatic arteries of the mammae in European women become overdilated in hot climates, whereas those of black women are naturally of a firm texture and do not admit gross salts along with the lymph. 'Their milk is therefore always both pleasant and good.'26 A great deal of importance was laid on the appearance and the texture of black female slaves' breasts. Correspondence between a member of the Delaville family and a firm by the name of Deguer, that was located in Nantes in the 1770s, states clearly that Deguer's agents should be examining the black women's breasts carefully, for purposes of aesthetic and sexual pleasure for the client, to ensure that they were well-shaped - 'il lui faut des Venus noires'.27 The decision to drape the chair and not the sitter with the expensive, luxury item of a shawl is highly unusual, not unheard of, but very rare. These were elegant accessories introduced from India into Europe in the late eighteenth century and were thought to be chic because they could be arranged on the figure like the drapery of Greek statues. To drape the chair instead disallows this expected function and points to the inappropriateness of such a wearing by a black woman. Its function is to provide colour contrast, not to enhance the elegance of the sitter. As we follow the clear contouring of her head and neck against the light background and follow the angular line of the arm against the white drape, over to the right our attention is suddenly arrested by the extraordinary amputated hand, reduced to a cloven hoof, which must be one of the most inelegant and bestial representations of a hand in the history of portraiture (Figure 3.2) As a symbolic sign it stood for the punishment by amputation for slaves who tried to escape from their white masters' households. It is recalled in the words of Tonis Morrison's novel, Beloved, when Baby Suggs,

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one of the heroines and a wise elder, talks to a group of black women about the need to value themselves in all their body parts, and about their dignity as human beings: 'Here', she said, 'in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it, Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick 'em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them, put then together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love them either.'28

At the same time it seems as though this hand should be holding a pen or a brush, as if in a self-portrait, as we see in David's 1793 Self-Portrait (Figure 3.4). Yet, in a gesture of cruel irony, it is disempowered from exercising such activity. There are no such attributes for her. This hand does not even finger the folds of drapery, which would be a standard convention. This awkwardness cannot be ascribed to ineptness on the artist's part, as it contrasts forcefully with the painting of hands in her other portraits, especially her own self-portraits.29 It functions, it seems to me, to provide a poignant support for the signatures of the artist who did hold the brush for painting and who wrote the letters above it. The critics had clearly seen in this portrait the image of the artist confronting the sitter: the two were juxtaposed in the cultural space of the artist's studio, and conjured up in this w ay for the reader, always with a view to extolling the beauty and agency of the white woman at the expense of the black woman. In other words the 'pretty white hand' of the artist is set against the misshapen, ugly, black hand of the sitter. Throughout the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portraiture tradition of aristocratic women where black figures are included, the intent was always to show off whiteness as beauty in contrast with blackness. The perception of black as either ugly or dirty was a constant and repeated notion in this sort of portraiture.30

Madame Benoist in the public imaginary It was not as a professional working woman that Mme Benoist was made to appear in contemporary writing. By 1800 much ink had been spilled in public on the subject of LaVille-Leroulx's beauty as a young woman and virtue as a mother, none more so than in the writings of Charles-Albert Demoustier, lifelong friend of the family and besotted admirer of LaVilleLeroulx, whom he calls Emilie, as did members of her family. (He is the lover - or more accurately the would-be lover - of my title.) His six-volume Lettres a Emilie sur la mythologie, written between 1786 and 1799, and first published

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complete in 1801, the year of his death, were devoted to LaVille-Leroulx/ Benoist. The early parts were rehearsed in the private/public spaces of literary salons in Paris and were advertised in the Mercure de France.31 She painted Demoustier's portrait in 1785 and in letter LXXXIV he recalls the occasion in 1798. From an initial recollection of the disorderly state of the intimate studio he moves quickly to an appreciation of her figure, her hair, her neck and the rise and fall of her breasts beneath the majestic white folds of her dress.32 According to Paul Lacroix, LaVille-Leroulx illustrated a 1795 edition of Demoustier's works under the name of Buckingham, sometimes signing herself 'Fortier sculpt', preceded by a star. These were yet further names with which LaVille-Leroulx identified herself. Early in the Preface Demoustier made a pun on the name LaVille-Leroulx, which others would imitate: 'J'etais au sein de mes amis/Mais mon coeur etoit a la ville'. One edition of the Lettres a tmilie (1809) had 14 illustrations by JeanJacques Francois Le Barbier (the elder). This same Le Barbier painted the portrait, believed to be of Demoustier, in 1794, one year after LaVilleLeroulx's marriage (Figure 3.5). The bust in the top left-hand corner towards which the poet looks with longing and desire can only be (the now) Madame Benoist. Demoustier's feelings for her were well known in literary circles, since four parts of the Lettres had by now appeared. Le Barbier has translated those feelings of desire and nostalgia, and his idealization of her physical beauty, serene, with the perfect features of a Greek bust, a shawl draped over one shoulder, is in keeping with Demoustier's idealization of her in his text. Le Barbier is careful and deliberate in his construction of an image of sexual desire as well as of poetic inspiration by a distant muse. As in the portrait of the negress, she has one breast bared, for the aesthetic and erotic gratification of the possessor of the sculpture. In addition, the scene is set in that pictorial tradition of boudoir space, where the parting of blue curtains over a chaise longue or a bed, reveals, usually, a female figure, in a similar state of deshabille as we see the unbuttoned Demoustier here, sometimes reading or writing a letter from or to a lover. Demoustier is shown with legs parted and gaze held by the image of the beloved. He is oblivious to the spectator and his total absorption creates an intimate space for voyeuristic intrusion by the spectator.33 The text on the letter on the table appears not to relate to Emilie: Sois toujours pres de moi, Jouis de mon bonheur. Avec toi partage, je Sens mieux sa douceur34

Helen Weston

63

My purpose in bringing this work into focus is to indicate how LaVilleLeroulx was constructed as a desired object and thing of beauty by those near and dear to her as well as by those fictional characters of Salon discourse. Attention is constantly taken off her as a professional working woman and on to her looks, in a way that effectively masked or obscured the works she produced, and caused misrecognition of her professional status. She was not the only woman to be treated in this w ay and women found a number of different ways of getting people to take them seriously. An artist like Constance Mayer displayed herself in the 1801 Salon as dutiful daughter, attractive young woman, portraitist and genre painter with her self-portrait of that year, Portrait of the Artist with her father. He points to a Bust of Raphael (1801). She also shows herself with the ambitions and aspirations of a history painter, following the example of Raphael. It seems to me that with the portrait of the negress LaVille-Leroulx insisted on her active role of portrait and figure painter; she demanded to be noticed and, in my view, not so much as a pupil of David's but rather as an emulator of Raphael. Clearly the repeated references by Philippe Chery, Baron Jean-Baptiste Boutard and others to her obvious indebtedness to David was meant as a compliment and being thus labelled would have helped her career. David, however, never did a portrait of a woman in which either one or both breasts were revealed. He never painted a black person, unlike his rebellious pupil, Girodet, who had exhibited Portrait of Citizen Belley, ex-representative of the colonies in the 1798 Salon. David always named his sitters and, for the most part, it was they who would have commissioned their portraits from him. David's sitters smile and charm the painter and his audiences. The negress does not. Is this portrait not, rather, a gesture to assert some independence from David. The artist is doing something distinct from him and closer to Raphael's La Fornarina, c. 1518, which has the same status of portrait/study of a nude. The composition of The Negress reverses the direction of La Fornarina but, with the exception of the facial expressions, it is otherwise closer to this portrait than to any by David.

The artist's ambitions as a working woman - thwarted

With her Portrait de Negresse LaVille-Leroulx drew attention to herself as the beautiful woman and mother that Demoustier had celebrated, as figure painter and portraitist in an ambitious, Raphaelesque mode, as wife - femme Benoist. She was respectful of her sitter's dignity yet she was not, in the final analysis, applauding abolition, liberty and equality. There is an interesting precedent for this equivocation, in the person of Olympe de Gouges, the French equivalent of Mary Wollstonecraft, and who,

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WORK AND THE IMAGE I

in 179 1, drew up a Declaration of the Rights of Woman, a year before Wollstonecraft's Vindication. It is for this that she is best known. However, if asked in the 1780s and 1790s she would have defined her work as that of playwright. In 1783 she wrote Zamore et Mirza ou L'Heureux Naufrage. Drame Indien en 3 Actes et en prose, but was still campaigning to get it performed in 1793. In 1788 she produced a pamphlet, Reflexions sur les hommes negres. In 1793 she helped found the Societe des femmes revolutionnaires et republicaines. For supporting the monarchy she was condemned to death by guillotine in November that year, shortly after Marie-Antoinette and Mme Roland, all of them grouped together afterwards as hommes-femmes, transgressive in their wish to work in the public domain. In the following month the Societe populaire et republicaine des arts voted not to admit women to its ranks, since 'among Republicans, women must absolutely renounce all work destined for men'. What has to be retained from this is de Gouges's definition of herself as working woman in a public sphere of the arts, seeing the issues of slavery and women's rights yoked together as a common cause. Her play demanded humane treatment for slaves, a rational approach to the question of skin colour, but caution over giving slaves their freedom because of the revenge that they would exact on their white oppressors. When the Comedie Frangaise refused to perform her play,'cette noirceur', on the grounds that it offended the colonists who reserved boxes at the Comedie and who would withdraw their support, it was claimed that the play was incendiary and would incite insurrection in the colonies. She vehemently defended herself against the charge of being pro-abolition and insisted that her play would bring the slaves to submission.35 She insisted that the play was in fact rejected because of her sex.36 Like LaVille-Leroulx, what mattered to her most was having her identity as professional playwright recognized. They both drew attention to the need for dignified treatment of blacks. They both baulked at being identified with abolitionist lobbies or with support for slave insurrection. That her identity as a practising artist was important to LaVille-Leroulx is borne out by the distress she later experienced under the Bourbon Restoration government, when her husband was promoted by Louis XVIII to Conseiller d'Etat, for services rendered to the Crown during the Revolution. This meant that she would have to give up exhibiting in public. This was just at the point when the 1814 Salon was about to open and she had planned to exhibit. Her letter to her husband of 1 October 1814 is poignant for its changing tones of anger, apology and eventual submission to the system which now humiliated her.37 Her work and contacts had initially started him off on his career. Now these had to be sacrificed to his career. She speaks of a bleeding heart in making the sacrifice in the name of social prejudice concerning the proper conduct for the wife of a highly placed official, before which she had to bow. The humiliation she suffered was that of an artist

Helen Weston

65

whose whole working life had been hard and testing - 'une vie de dur travail' and was now deemed worthless. She is unable to talk about it for fear of the wound reopening ('car la plaie se rouvrirait'). This is the language of slavery and resonates with the metaphors used by Mary Wollstonecraft: prejudice; a system that leaves some bowed in submission to others; a life of hard toil that is disallowed from reaping the fruits of production - display and success in her case; bleeding hearts and open wounds. It was, in other words, at this point that she experienced the oppression of a system that left woman bowed in helpless obedience, that she perhaps felt something akin to the experience of the black servant of her portrait. At this point she would have seen the force of Wollstonecroft's arguments. Her children were devastated at their mother's humiliation in submission, and never lost the respect for work that she had instilled in them .'Pour nous, nous avons tous et toujours respecte cette vie de travail de ma mere ... et encore aujourd'hui, nous nous enfaisons honneur, elle nous a donne le gout du travail'.38 While Mile Ballot's biography of LaVille-Leroulx/Benoist is the most informative work on the artist, her title page indicates no recognition for her subject's professional life. She announces her as someone's pupil, 'Une Eleve de David', someone's wife 'La Comtesse Benoist', and the object of someone's fantasies 'L'Emilie de Demoustier', but nowhere recognizes her as a working artist in her own right. Ballot is wholly negative about this one painting that showed independence and distance from David. Yet it was the Portrait de Negresse which made the artist's reputation 200 years ago and which is still today her best known work.

Notes *

Only the title of this chapter is taken from Peter Greenaway's film title of 1980. I am grateful to the following colleagues and students for helpful comment when this paper was first delivered at the Leeds 'Work and Image' conference organized by Valerie Mainz and Griselda Pollock, and subsequently at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire and Purchase College, State University of N ew York: Robin Blackburn, Ada Cohen, Kathleen Corrigan, Carol Duncan, Elizabeth Guffey, Tony Halliday, Paul Kaplan, Jane Kromm, Melinda Lee, Elise Lemaire, Sophie Matthiesson, Carol Ockman, Angela Rosenthal. The chapter has already appeared in a slightly different form in French, in Valerie Mainz, Llm age du travail et la Revolution frangaise (Musee de la Revolution fran^aise, 1999), p p -1 1 - 3 1 . 1 am grateful to Alain Chevalier for permission to reproduce much of that essay here.

1.

'Madame la ville le roux Benoit n'a donne qu'un tableau. C'est le portrait d'une negresse, sujet qui peut plaire a celui pour qui il est fait; mais qui est tres peu propore au developpement du talent de son auteur. Ces visages africains sone, par la nature, si uniformement laids, qu'il est impossible a Tart de leur donner aucune espece de beaute; ils ne se pretent que faiblement a Tart du coloriste; une pareille figure ne peut ni se detacher d'un fond brun, ni se mettre en harminie avec un fond clair, il est impossible de faire circuler l'air autour, parce qu'elle ne se prete point a la degradation de couleur et de lumiere necessaire pour produire cet effet. L'artiste ne peut se faire valoir que par la pose de son modele et la correction de son desin, dans les parties qui presentent du moins des formes familieres a Tart, enfin par le choix des accessoires et Texecution generate. C'est ce qu'a fait madame Benoit; sa negresse est posee avec esprit, c.a.d. dans une attitude gracieuse et qui ne soit point de l'habitude des gens de sa couleur; le buste et

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WORK AND THE IMAGE I

surtout le bras sont bien dessines, la draperie qui entoure la tete, est disposee avec grace. On reconnait dans l'execution la maniere sage et le beau faire de son maitre [David]'. Boutard, Baron J.-B., 'Salon de Tan VIII', 1800, Journal des Debats, Collection Deloynes, 22, 632, 309. 2.

Mme LaVille-Leroux, femme Benoit, No. 238. Portrait de Negresse A ir: M. le Prevoot des marchands Je ne sais si c'est un talent De mettre du noir sur du blanc, On le voit dans cette peinture; Ce contraste blesse les yeux, Plus ilfait sortir la figure, Plus le portrait parait hideux. Collection Deloynes, 22, 623, La verite au museum ou Voeil trompe, 14.

3.

'Gilles: Mon ami, je ne veux plus rester ici; j'ai vu le diable. - Arlequin: Ou done? - Gilles: Regarde, Portrait d'une Negresse par une femme. - Arlequin: Air: Recitatif de Leonidas. A qui sefier dans la vie, Apres une pareille horreur! C'est une main blanche et jolie Qui nous a fait cette noirceur.' Collection Deloynes, 22,624, Le nouveau Arelquin et son ami Gilles, 9.

4.

See notes 1 and 6.

5.

'Ce tableau est d'un bon ton; la couleur en est bien entendue; mais le dessin est incorrect. La clavicule gauche est sentie d'une maniere beaucoup trop forte; peut-etre est-ce un portrait.' Collection Deloynes, 22, 623, Notice sur les ouvrages de peinture, de sculpture, d'architecture, etc., Paris, an VIII, 15.

6.

'e'etait un ouvrage qui, par la finesse et la purete du dessin rappelle l'ecole de David.' Esmenard, Joseph-Etienne. See also Bruun-Neergaard, Baron Tonnes-Chretien, 'Madame LavilleLeroux nous a donne le portait d'une Negresse. II est facile de voir, a la purete du dessin, qu'elle est eleve de David.' Lettre sur la situation des Beaux-Arts en France, ou lettres d'un Danois a son ami (Paris, 1801), p. 42: See also 'A u Salon de 1800, elle se classe definitivement parmi les eleves de David, avec son portrait de Negresse et maintenant toutes ses oeuvres resteront marquees de l'empreinte du maitre', in Ballot, M.-J.,Une Eleve de David. La Comtesse Benoist. L'tm ilie de Demoustier, iy 6 8 -i8 2 6 (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1914), p. 149.

7.

Honour, H., Black Models and White Myths: The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 4, pt 2 (Cambridge, M A: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 7.

8.

In his section on negresses, Virey has two observations: first that they are good nursing mothers, with better milk for white babies than white mothers have; they breed well, are ripe for marriage at the age of 12: and second, that they are extremely lascivious. V i r e y , Histoire naturelle du genre humain (1801), vol. 2 ,18 2 6 edn, p. 135.

9.

Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, L'Esprit des Lois (1748). At the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries for every Lavater or Virey there was also a liberal humanist such as Lichtenberg and his Uber Physiognomik wider die Physiognomen (1778) and Blumenbach, Betrdge zur Naturgeschichte (1801). For every pseudo-psychological theory about the innate stupidity of the black being akin to insanity, there was a Pinel to refute it in his Traite medicophilosophique sur I'alienation mentale (1801).

10.

See Pigault-LeBrun's Le Blanc et le Noir (1795) and the novels of J. B. Piquenard between 1797 and 1800, written in a mode of sensibilite akin to that of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. His Zoflora ou la Bonne Negresse tells of the generosity and dignity of a missing young black girl and of a young white man's search to restore her to her father's household.

11.

Instructing women in the Louvre was outlawed by a ruling of 1785. Friendship was given by Rene Leroulx-Delaville as the explanation to d'Angivillers for placing his daughters with David, at a time when such education for female artists was problematic: 'j'ai trouve dans l'amitie de M. et Mme David une resource tres importante et comme il n'etait pas possible que M. se depla^at, il m'a permis d'envoyer chez lui mes enfants: ce qu'il a fait par amitie pour moi, il 1 a fait par deference pour Mile DuchoseT cited in Ballot, pp. 257-8. For further discussion of women's art

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67

education at this time, see Cameron, V. P., 'Woman as Image and Image-maker in Paris during the French Revolution' (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1983) vol. 1, ch. 2. 12.

Letter dated i er frimaire an IX (22 November 1800) from his parents, 'L'affaire a ete arrangee par les soins de M meBenoist... cela t'est venu sans que tu y eusses songe le moins du monde'. Letter communicated to Ballot by M. Henri Cochin, (descendant of Madame Benoist). See Ballot, p. 148.

13.

See Cesaire, A., Toussaint Louverture. La Revolution frangaise et le probleme colonial (1981), Paris: Presence Africaine, p. 278.

14.

See, for example, Don Juan Lopez Cancelada, ed. de la Gazeta de Esta N.E., Vida de J.J.Dessalines, Gefe de los Negros de Santo Domingo; con notas muy circonstanciadas sobre el origen, caracter y atrocidades de los principals gefes de aquellos rebeldes desde el principio de la Insurreccion en 17 9 1. Translated from the original 1802 French pamphlet, published by Louis Dubroca and illustrated by Bonneville, by D.M.G.C., 1805 (Mexico: En la Oficina de D. Mariano de Zuniga y Ontiveros, ano de 1806).

13.

Rainsford, M., An Historical Account of the Black Empire ofH ayti: Comprehending a View of the principal Transactions in the Revolution of Saint-Domingo, with its Antient and Modern State (London, 1805), on Dessalines's decision to have gibbets erected from which large numbers of Napoleon's officers were hung in all directions. 'Such was the retaliation produced by this sanguinary measure'. Chateaubriand, Talleyrand and Benjamin Constant would all express disgust and horror at the black reaction. See Honour, Black Models, pt 1, p. 94, for details of positive responses to slave rebellions in Saint-Domingue and especially to the role of ToussaintLouverture praised in Wordsworth's sonnet in the Morning Post of February 1805, as former slave who had emancipated himself and others.

16.

See note 6. Esmenard went on to become French consul in Martinique and Saint Thomas island, and was made a member of the French Institute in 1810. He died in 18 11.

17.

A recently discovered painting by Guillaume (Guillon) Lethiere records the oath sworn by Dessalines and Alexandre Petion to uphold Haiti's new constitution and keep it free from slavery.

18.

'Les ouvrages dont la composition blesseroit les bonnes moeurs par l'expression ou Tintention manifeste de rappeler des souvenirs ou d'exciter des passions contraires aux pratiques du gouvernement et la tranquilite publique ne seront pas admis.' (5 August 1800) Collection Deloynes, 617, 22 cit. Aulanier, Histoire du Louvre, ii, Le Salon carre, 44. See Wrigley, R., The Origins of French Art Criticism: From the Ancien Regime to the Restoration, (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 45, n. 33.

19.

In 1809 LaVille-Leroulx was presented with a souvenir of Napoleon's appointment as First Consul in 1799, in the form of a bust of Napoleon after Canova's study for the statue now in Apsley House, London. It was given to her by Elisa Baciocchi Bonaparte, as indicated in the dedication on the plinth - 'Donne par son Altesse Imperiale Madame la Grande Duchesse de Toscane a Madame Benoist'.

20.

For an important discussion of Wollstonecraft and the Saint-Domingue Revolution, see Ferguson, M., 'Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery', Feminist Review, 42, Autumn (1992), 82-102.

21.

Wollstonecraft, M., A Vindication of the Rights of Women, (London: Joseph Johnson, 1792), pp. 144-5.

22.

On the issue of identity and recognition see Taylor, C., Multiculturalism and 'The Politics of Recognition' (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). On portraiture and the space of the artist's studio, see Rosenthal, A., 'Rather than a reproduction of a pre-existing self, the portait is seen as the production of sitter and artist, and of the relation between them determined by mobile factors such as class, race, age, and gender ... The portrait painter's studio is understood, moreover, as a cultural space for the discursive formation of sexual and social identities'. 'She's got the look! Eighteenth-century female portrait painters and the psychology of a potentially "dangerous employment'", in J. Woodall (ed.), Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 148.

23.

Through the similiarities with portraits of fashionable European women, the artist has created uncomfortable tensions here. There is an imposition on the black woman to, as it were, vivre blanchement. Yet her black skin functions as a shocking mask which precisely disallows this w ay of being. Homi Bhabha, in claiming an urgency for understanding the ideas of Frantz Fanon, reminds us of 'that crucial engagement between mask and identity, image and identification, from which comes our lasting impression of ourselves as others'. (Foreword to Fanon, F., Black Skin, White Mask (Editions de Seuil, 1952; London: Pluto Press, 1986), p. xxv.

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24.

A drawing by J. Barbier, engraved by Carl Gottlieb Gutenberg, representing a monument erected in Geneva to J. J. Rousseau, shows on the pedestal the distinction drawn by Rousseau between the attitudes to 'Opinion' or reputation by men and by women. Women seek it, men shun it.

25.

Ballot comments on this lack of cordial relations with the sitter: 'Nous sommes en presence d'une etude tres serree; ce modele n'a interesse l'artiste que par ses formes et sa couleur; aucune composition, aucune emotion; la toile est froide et sent l'etude; elle est peinte sous une discipline toute masculine et ne possede aucune des graces feminines.' Ballot, pp. 149-50.

26.

For this explanation for the use of negresses as wet nurses to the Academie Royale des Sciences in Paris in 1707, see Southwell, T., Medical Essays and Observations, Abridged, From the Memoirs of the Royal Academy (London: Vintage, 1734), iii, p. 73.

27.

See Mathorez, J., Histoire de la formation de la population frangaise. Les Strangers en France sous VAncien Regime, t. second (Paris: Librairie ancienne fidouard Champion, 1921), p. 400. Again we have here the notion of white European convention of beauty but contained within a skin of blackness.

28.

Morrison, T., Beloved (Thorndike, ME: Thorndike Press, 1987), pp. 88-9.

29.

See in particular the self-portrait of 1786 (Coll. Mme la Marquise de Lespinay) where she is working on a detail from David's Belisarius and where she has shown her dress falling off one shoulder, almost revealing the right breast. In most respects it differs totally from the Portrait of the Negress. She represents herself actively engaging with the spectator through her gaze and with her work through her hands holding palette and brush.

30.

It is also the subject of a miniature watercolour on ivory which, from the costume and hairstyles probably also dates from the turn of the century and was possibly by a member of the Peale family. The white girl (possibly the artist - this was a genre where women excelled) physically manipulates the black girl's face, making her grimace to reveal the gap in her teeth, compared with her own full set as she smiles at the spectator. While LaVille-Leroulx may not have forced the contrast in this crude way, it should not have been surprising to her that the critics would denegrate the portrayed woman through admiration of the beauty of the portrayer.

31.

Le Mercure de France, 21 October 1786, 'Lettres a tm ilie sur la Mythologie' par M. De Moustier, a Paris, chez Grange, imprimeur-libraire et chez les Marchands de Nouveaute. See Ballot, p. 22.

32.

'Rappelez-vous ce cabinet, asile d'etudes et des arts, ce desordre du genie, ces tableaux, ces dessins, ces pinceaux epars, et ce demi-jour dormant sur votre figure abattue et sur mon portrait commence. Je vois encore ce petit ruban jaune parseme d'etoiles d'azur, qui s'entrelace dans vos cheveux, autour de votre cou et noue, sur votre sein, une tunique blanche, dont les plis majestueux se soulevent par intervalle.' Demoustier, 'Lettres a Emilie sur la Mythologie'.

33.

As Philippe Bordes has pointed out, the bed 'sign of carnal love in so many scenes of this type from Boucher to Boilly, is here a solitary refuge, almost too small to serve its purpose'. P. Bordes and A. Chevalier, Catalogue des peintures, sculptures et dessins, Musee de la Revolution frangaise, Vizille, 1996, (Reunion des musees nationaux), pp. 82-5. For examples of this kind of boudoir painting see Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, La Crainte (Fear), 1769 and Jean-Frederic Schall, Portrait du Bien-Aime (Portrait of the Beloved), c. 1783, both reproduced in Rand, R., Intimate Encounters, Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp.167-9 and 180-81 respectively.

34.

Be always near me Enjoy my happiness If shared with you, I Feel its sweetness all the more I am grateful to Alain Chevalier for deciphering this. On the underside of the page held in Demoustier's left hand is written, 'Je reviens'. Given the boudoir space, the open shirt to cool an enflamed heart, the parted legs, the gaze of desire and longing and the positioning of the pen in place of penis, directed up towards the bust surmounting the tall column, I would like 'Je reviens' to translate into English as 'I'm coming again'. In fact the verb for that sexual expression is 'Jouir', which Le Barbier has therefore, perhaps, subtly displaced on to the letter on the table. 'Je reviens' probably refers rather to the pun by Antoine-Alexandre-Henri Poinsinet, a dramatist who composed La Bequille de Voltaire and L'ombre de Voltaire, in a refrain used in response to LaVille-Leroulx's 179 1 painting, Innocence between Vice and Virtue - where the repeated refrain was A la Ville on revient toujours, playing on LaVille-Leroulx's name. We have already seen that Demoustier himself made the same pun.

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69

Les Agremens de La Ville et de la Campagne A ux champs on goute quelques charmes; Repos s'y trouve sans alarmes; Mais quoiqu'ils ojfrent de beaux jours, A la V ille on revient toujours. (Bis) 35.

'Eh Messieurs, nous sommes a Paris; ce n'est pas devant les Negres que mon drame sera joue; je vous soutiens qu'il les porterait au contraire a la soumission; que tout y respire les bonnes moeurs, l'obeissance aux lois/ Olympe de Gouges, Les Comediens demasques ou Mme de Gouges ruinee par la Comedie pour se faire jouer (1790, De l'imprimerie de la Comedie Fran^aise), Adresse aux Representans de la Nation, p. 4.

36.

One bulletin, she claimed, had stated 'J'aime les jolies femmes; je les aime encore plus quand elles sont galantes; mais je n'aime a les voir que quand elles sont chez elles, et non sur le theatre. Je refuse cette piece.' Ibid., pp. 18-29.

37.

Letter communicated by M. Henry Cochin to Mme Ballot, and reproduced in Ballot, p. 212: 'J'aurais l'air de vous bouder, mon ami, si je ne vous ecrivais aujourd'hui; la pensee que je serais un obstacle k votre avancement dans votre carriere, serait pour moi un coup bien acere. Ne soyez pas fache contre moi si dans le premier moment mon coeur a saigne de ce parti a prendre, et enfin satisfaire a un prejuge du monde devant lequel il faut bien se plier apres tout. Mais tant d'etudes, de soins, une vie de dur travail, voir presque un objet d'humiliation, je n'ai pu supporter cette idee. Enfin, n'en parlons plus, je suis raisonnable, et il fallait d'abord frapper a cette porte et on a blesse mon amour-propre d'une maniere trop brusque. N'en parlons plus car la plaie se rouvrirait.'

38.

Note attached to his mother's letter by Denys Benoist. See Ballot, p. 213.

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3.1 Marie-Guillemine LaVille-Leroulx/Mme Benoist, Portrait of a Negress, exhib. Salon of 1800

Helen Weston

3.2

Portrait of a Negress, detail

71

72

3.3

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

Jacques-Louis David, Portrait ofMme de Verninac, dated Tan VII (1799)

Helen Weston

3.4

Jacques-Louis David, Self-Portrait, 1793

73

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WORK AND THE IMAGE I

3.5

Jean-Jacques-Frangois Le Barbier the elder, Portrait of Charles-Andre Demoustier,

1794

4

Death and the worker: Rethel in 1849 William Vaughan

Undoubtedly the most celebrated work of art to emerge from Germany as a result of the Uprisings of 1848 was Alfred Rethel's cycle of wood engravings, Auch ein Totentanz (Figures 4.1 and 4.2) - a title that can be variously translated as 'Another Dance of Death' or 'Also a Dance of Death'.1 Almost as soon as the cycle was published - in May 1849 *n Dresden (a city that was at the time experiencing a renewed bout of political unrest) - it became both a national and international best-seller. The original publication was published in three editions in as many weeks, and soon afterwards was issued as a special Volksausgabe (popular edition) of 10 000 copies.2 While the sheer imaginative power of the works, and the compelling use of narrative in them had much to do with their success, this was ultimately due more to the negative view of revolution that they conveyed. This led to them becoming used in schoolrooms throughout Prussia as a warning to the pupils of the dangers inherent in challenging political authority.3 Outside Germany, too, they were understood to be an anti-revolutionary tract. Baudelaire - one of their many French admirers - wrote with a due sense of bitterness and irony around 1857: 'What I find truly original about the poem is that it was produced at the moment when almost the whole population of Europe was infatuated with the follies of the revolution.'4 That someone of Baudelaire's complex political persuasion could admire the work can alert us to the fact, however, that this work is far from being a straightforward right-wing tract. In fact, as Peter Paret has argued in his book Art as History,5 Rethel's position was that of the disillusioned bourgeois liberal. He expressed not antipathy but sympathy for the workers in his narrative. He sees them as having been 'seduced' by the revolutionaries (personified in the figure of Death) into taking the wrong course of action in their struggle to achieve social justice. The worker is the victim, not the criminal. It was this sympathy that enabled a wide range of people to respond

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positively to the work - even such radicals as Champfleury in France and socialists like William Morris in Britain. Before going on to look in more detail at the representation of the worker in this cycle, I wish to consider further Rethel's own personal, artistic and political position. Brought up in the rapidly industrializing Rhineland in the 1830s, Rethel experienced that segment of German society most affected by the new economic order - precisely the area that Karl Marx addressed in the pre-revolutionary part of his career. Rethel's father was a casualty of the developing capitalist economy. The owner of a small chemical manufactory he was early driven out of business and forced to work for a larger rival the major industrialist Friedrich Harkort. One of Rethel's earliest known works - painted when he was about 17, around 1834 - was a view of the factory of his father's employer at Burg Wetter.6This severe, rectilinear view, shows the modern works engulfing the old castle, as though a living illustration of Harkort's own view that the railway was the 'funeral cortege of feudalism'.7 Like Rethel himself, Harkort was a liberal progressive who saw modem industry as the way towards political and social reform. Rethel studied at the Academy at Diisseldorf. This academy also reflected the conflict between medievalism and modernity so rife in the region. On the one hand it was run by a leading member of the revivalist group the Nazarenes - Wilhelm Schadow (1788-1862). On the other the younger painters there were influenced by the radical modem history painting then being promoted in nearby France and Belgium - by such figures as Delaroche and Wappers. Friedrich Lessing (1808-80) was one of the young radical painters. His Hussite Sermon8attracted attention and controversy when shown in Diisseldorf in 1836. Stylistically it combined the hierarchical manner of design of didactic Germanic history painting with the greater naturalism of effect associated with the French and Belgians. Its subject was uncompromisingly subversive. Showing the Bohemian religious rebel of the fifteenth century, Jan Hus, preaching in the open air to the people (while a church bums down in the background), it was taken as a direct comment about the secular authority of the bishops in the Rhineland during the period. Apart from its comment on conflicts of authority, it is worth noting that this picture makes an association between das Volk (the people) and nature that was to be a main force behind much radical and progressive argument at the time. This address to the people had a particular poignancy in the Germany of the period. Divided into a large number of states and different cultural centres, there was no centre to the country and no location in which the people might be addressed directly, as the French people could, for example, via Paris. This was particularly bemoaned in the visual arts, where it was felt that there was a lack of any single space in which the picture might reach the public. Only

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through the medium of engraving could this 'imagined' public be reached directly. From the start Rethel himself seems to have been concerned both with the issue of national unity and with a desire to address a public through a direct and simple form of art rather than by emulating the more 'showy' sensation­ alism of French and Belgian painters. Significantly he left Diisseldorf early in his career to study under a 'purer' Nazarene artist at Frankfurt, Phillip Veit (1 793~1 877). His hero remained the leading Nazarene muralist Peter Von Cornelius (1783-1867) , who had created vast didactic murals in Munich between 1820 and 1840 and was at the time planning similar ventures for the Prussian king in Berlin.9 Rethel himself became involved in a project that both addressed national consciousness and explored more archaic forms of representation when he provided designs for wood engravings for an illustrated edition of the Nibelungenlied in 1840.10 Deliberately archaic in style, these also suggest the power of simplification for providing strong decorative and didactic effect. Doubtless the sense of continuity with craftsmen working in wood (both sculptors and print makers) in the early sixteenth century was important. For this period was seen as a 'Golden Age' of German culture, the time of Diirer, Riemenschneider, Hans Sachs and Luther. It is important, too, to recall that this age was seen as golden by radicals as well as reactionaries. For while it was the time when the Holy Roman Empire was at its largest (if not at its strongest), it was also the heyday of the craftsman, the traditional burgher and of civic power and protest - the Reformation and the Peasants' Revolt. This year, 1840, was also the year in which Rethel won the competition for the project that was to preoccupy him during the rest of his working life. This was the scheme to decorate Aachen Town Hall with murals on the life of Charlemagne. Almost totally destroyed during the Second World War, these can now best be seen from oil sketches.11 One draws on the myth that Charlemagne's body was encased, seated below the imperial chapel at Aachen and that it was visited by subsequent emperors at the initiation of their reigns.12 In this ghoulish theme we can see the obsession with Death that also accompanied Rethel through his life. The subject also emphasizes Rethel's interpretation of the life of Charlemagne in terms of his achievement in establishing the empire that united Germany politically during the Middle Ages. For the artist was, like many in the 1840s, obsessed with the issue of German unification. Rethel came into conflict with his employers - Aachen Town Council - over this matter. The council wanted Charlemagne's local connections with Aachen emphasized and were unhappy with Rethel's broader political emphasis. Only after the king of Prussia had intervened on the artist's behalf did the commission go ahead, in 1846.13

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Rethel undoubtedly saw his presentation of Charlemagne's role in creating the basis for a politically unified Germany as being a public message to be delivered to the nation as a whole. It is also clear, however, that he is not using his art for developing class sympathies in the way that other painters of the Diisseldorf Academy were. Lessing's lead here was being followed by younger painters, such as Johann Peter Hasenclever(i8io~53) and Carl Wilhelm Hiibner (1806-79), who were producing a number of controversial historical and modern subjects. Hubner achieved notoriety in 1844 with Die Schlesischen Weber, an image praised by Friedrich Engels, that commented sympathetically on the condition of the Silesian weavers - one of the groups of traditional craftsmen then engaged in protest about the ways in which their livelihood had been undermined by industrialization.14 Perhaps part of the reason for Rethel's avoidance of topical issues was his belief in the more distanced position of high art, a faith in the healing and uplifting effect of 'disinterested' aesthetic pleasure which had underpinned German aesthetics since the days of Kant and Schiller. He wanted to lead, so to speak, by example rather than by criticism. Furthermore, while Rethel may have had liberal sympathies he was not among those members of the German bourgeoisie who thought that they might have common cause with the socialists in fighting for the twin goals of democracy and political unification. Rethel's letters make clear that the 'red revolution' was always anathema to him.15 When uprisings broke out throughout Germany in March 1848 and bourgeois and workers together mounted the barricades, Rethel stayed in the background. It was not too difficult for him to do this. Working on his frescos in the town hall in Aachen - he had no direct experience of uprisings. His position was very different, for example, from that of Adolph Menzel (1815-1905) in Berlin, who witnessed significant moments in the dramatic events at first hand. Rethel did not, in fact, have any direct experience of political unrest until 1849, when he was living in Dresden. He had moved to Dresden in the autumn of 1848 in order to make preparations over the winter for his next larger mural at Aachen (for technical reasons, the actual fresco painting took place in the warmer and dryer summer months). Even before he witnessed political unrest at first hand, Rethel found himself being brought into the political debate in Dresden. Unlike Aachen, Dresden was a centre of radical agitation. It was there that Wagner also received his initiation into revolutionary politics. By the autumn of 1848, moreover, splits were beginning to emerge between liberal and socialist positions. Once the barricades were down and the possibility of the establishment of a pan-German parliament at Frankfurt had been conceded, these parties developed different agendas. While the socialists wished to press further with demands for radical social change, the liberals planned to proceed through the slow processes of parliamentary debate and resolution. The liberals were increasingly afraid

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that the radicals were risking all that had already been achieved through the extreme nature of their demands. It was in this context that Rethel designed his Totentanz (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). It is important to remember this, as it is sometimes falsely claimed that they were designed in response to the second round of uprisings in May 1849 which were savagely suppressed by counter-revolutionary forces. The Totentanz designs were in fact published at the time of the May uprisings. But this occurrence was simply a consequence of the time that it had taken to engrave them and prepare them for publication. Rethel's part in the designs was over before the end of 1848. When they emerged from the engraver's studio in May 1849 the designs encountered a very different political situation from the one in which they had been conceived. At the time when they were conceived there was still hope of winning the workers away from the socialists to support the liberal democratic cause. Rethel's decision to mount the hustings, so to speak, and address a public through the 'popular' medium of the print was undoubtedly influenced by a number of factors. He must have felt the need for immediate action - for action more direct than the slow effect that could be achieved, perhaps over generations, by exemplary public murals. He was aware, too, of the huge amount of visual material that had emerged as a result of the uprisings, of both a journalistic and propagandist kind. Amongst the many technical revolutions of the 1840s was that which created a regular illustrated press. Popular imagery was not now confined to the broadsheet - with its relatively naive techniques and small local distribution. Since the invention of stereotyping around 1840s it could now be used in national newspapers. The revolution of 1848 was the first to receive detailed and continuous pictorial commentary. Rethel, like all other adults in Germany, must have been constantly barraged with these images of uprisings and heroic popular triumphs, as well as with the savage political commentaries of the pictorial satirists. It was this world that he now sought to challenge, drawing upon older traditions of folk imagery. The most famous of these was Holbein's Dance of Death series of woodcuts. Designed between 1523 and 1526, these were a product of the period of social unrest in Germany in the early sixteenth century. The theme of the dance of death itself was of earlier origin. To Rethel it may well seem to have had the timelessness of a universal truth. It was also constant in being used as a warning against greed and materialism, and a focusing of attention towards the spiritual. In one sense egalitarian - for death comes to all, great or small - it could also be used as argument for the status quo. Accept your lot; there are more important things to worry about. We must also remember that death and punishment were the most visible outcomes of revolution. Some - such as the radical poet Ferdinand Freiligrath - used the death of the

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revolutionaries as an invocation to the survivors to stay true to the principle fought for. In his celebrated poem 'Die Toten an die Lebenden', written in July 1848,16 the dead of the barricades speak to those still living to exhort them not to betray them by abandoning the struggle. It was possibly another poet - his friend, the poet and painter, Robert Reinick - who actually suggested the theme to Rethel. Reinick was later to provide the verse to accompany the cycle and they clearly debated the structure and theme very closely. Rightly they calculated that a visual narrative on the theme of death would have a more immediate and far-reaching impact than a poem on its own. The cycle begins with an allegory. Death is called into action by the new opportunity that is being offered - the binding of Justice (seen in the background of the first plate to the right) which allows such evil spirits as vanity, cunning and dishonesty (backed up by bloodlust and fury) to have their say. This abstract allegory has clear contemporary references. Vanity offers death the broad brimmed hat with cock's feather and revolutionary badge that was associated with radical agitators. This allegory might seem rather obscure and abstruse. But it must be remembered that such abstract allusions were commonly used in political satire at that time. One of the best known cartoons in the Rhineland during the period was that of Karl Marx as Prometheus.17 Occasioned by the closure of the paper that Marx edited, Rheinische Zeitung, in 1843, it showed him being punished by the 'God' of Prussia for having attempted to give the populace the 'fire' of information. Rethel's allegory plays on the theme of justice and empowerment in the opposite direction. He is usurping the symbols of power and justice in order to dispense an 'equality' of a quite different kind from that expected. The second plate - one of the best known in the series - shows Death riding into town to perform his bloody deeds (Figure 4.1). The power of Rethel's skill as a designer and draughtsman are nowhere more evident than here. So also, is his skilful blending of ancient and modern. The town to which he is riding is a modern ones. Smoking factory chimneys can be seen surrounding the ancient Gothic cathedral. This use of the 'cathedrals' of modem industry to oppose traditional values is one implicit in Rethel's own earlier representation of the Harkort factory. It is possible that Rethel was also aware of the most famous juxtapositions of this kind - that evident in Pugin's polemical book Contrasts (1836),18 in which a modern town replaces its ancient religious establishments with the factories and warehouses of the modern world. However, there was enough in Germany to suggest such a process of displacement to Rethel without his having to look across to England. For Rhinelanders, the completion, in the midst of industrial development, of Cologne Cathedral - as a symbol of national unification - must have made the contrast more poignant. Equally

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telling is the way in which two peasant girls rush off out of the picture at the sight of Death. Unlike the burghers and workers of the town, these traditional peasants know the image of death when they see it, however much this might be disguised with the trappings of justice. The notion that there was an older and wiser world of the 'folk' that persisted outside the reach of the modern city was an important part of Rethel's narrative. We might observe, too, that these figures have been at work - haymaking or gleaning. Labour is always shown by Rethel as a positive value. While appealing to a sense of tradition with its simulation of 'woodcut' graphic style, the pictorial language used in the work is not entirely archaic. The forms are drawn with a clear sense of modem conventions. There are also enlivening touches - such as the expressive lines that indicate the front right hoof of the horse striking the ground - which come from the contemporaneous cartoonist's armoury. Rethel was working when pioneers of the strip cartoon such as Rodolphe Topffer had already made their mark.19 Indeed, it is tempting to see Rethel's narrative itself as a kind of strip cartoon. Its narrative sequence is clearly one of the ways in which it differs markedly from the Dance of Death cycle of Holbein in which there is no such narrative continuity. Rethel himself, however, might have been thinking more directly of Hogarth. Hogarth was, after all, the celebrated artist who had innovated the narrative cycle in his 'modem moral subjects' such as the Harlot's Progress (1732). Hogarth was a highly influential figure for Diisseldorf artists working in the 1840s. One of the most radical of these, Hasenclever, had explicitly based a cycle (the Jobsiade) on the modern narratives of the English artist.20 As in the Harlot, Rethel's Totentanz tells its narrative in six scenes, beginning with seduction and ending in death. Even if Rethel was not paying a personal tribute to Hogarth by adopting a comparable narrative form, he would have been able to draw upon the common knowledge of Hogarth's narrative to enhance the power of his own modern morality. Yet there is one way in which Hogarth and Rethel's narratives differ. Like Rethel, Hogarth was 'exposing' the vices of the modem city. But the latter related this exposure to individual morality. It is the 'folly' of the main characters that is the cause of their downfall. They are victims of their own mistakes. Rethel's victims are 'the people' who remain broad and anonymous. His unifying character is the seducer, the figure of Death as a personification of revolution. One final visual point needs to be made. As with Hogarth, the narrative gains power by the formal continuities between the scenes. This is not simply a matter of iconography. It is also one of movement. Death moves in on the modern town in plate 2, approaching it from the left (Figure 4.1). The implication in the compositions is that it is 'somewhere on the left' that the allegorical scene in the first plate took place. Later, in the last scene, Death returns towards the left when he has completed his business. The factories

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implicitly collude with this. The smoke emerging from their chimneys blows leftwards. All this gives a sense of powerful movement, interspersed by the counterforce of the rightward direction in which the peasants flee. The next scene - the moment of deception - takes place in a calmer setting. Death is in town and tricking the workers into believing that they are equal to monarchs by weighing a crown against a clay pipe. What they do not see is that Death is holding the scales by the tongue so that it cannot show correctly the differing weights of the two objects. The revolutionary credentials of Death are even more conspicuous here. As well as his agitator's hat, he also has pasted up behind him a poster announcing Freiheit, Gleichheit, Briiderlichkeit (freedom, equality, brotherhood) - the German version of liberte egalite fraternite. In the response of the people we can see the same juxtaposition of ancient and modern. The old woman leads away a child instructing it in traditional virtues. Perhaps there is a point to be made too that it is women - the peasant girls in the former plate and the old woman here - who see the 'danger' in revolution; the idea that they are the repositories of traditional values, more to be associated with the rhythms of nature - as were children. Yet not all women and children were free from seduction. A younger woman and child are amongst those who listen to the doctrine of revolution. The male constitution of the crowd of workers needs to be noted too. For, as Paret has pointed out, these appear to be traditional rather than factory workers. Those figures whose activities can be recognized come from such trades as blacksmiths, tinsmiths and stonemasons. Perhaps this is a recognition that it was the craftsmen whose work was being undermined by modern industrialization - such as the Silesian weavers - who were at the forefront of agitation. This would also augment the horror at the effects of modern industrialization. For it was destroying the 'traditional' people. In the next scene Death has moved into a more public and inflammatory role. He has now moved from the backstreets to the hustings and with a further dynamic movement from the left is handing the sword of the people's justice to the enthusiastic crowd of workers. But as we can see from the agitated gesture of the worker beside him who is holding the banner of the Republic, retribution is going to be swift. Already soldiers are appearing from the background. The next scene is the cathartic moment of the whole cycle (Figure 4.2). The workers on the barricade meet their death - the only kind of 'equality' that Death has to offer. Death himself, in his moment of triumph, now lifts his cloak to reveal the true skeletal identity that he had until then been hiding. This image is the one that plays most directly and ironically on the triumphant barricade scenes that had been reported in the popular press.21 Like these, this picture shows danger and a mixture of triumph and failure, though with a greater emphasis on the latter. It is the dying workers who are

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more visible than those still fighting and resisting. Their powerful forms are still heroic - but tragically so. We can also see that the movement from the left has now been reversed. The fire that is killing them is coming from the right. Death, too, has altered his direction. One other feature about these workers is striking in comparison to the popular prints of barricades. This is that they are unaccompanied by any members of the bourgeoisie. The actual barricades had been manned by both, and it had been part of the propagandist point of the popular prints that this was a revolution involving both middle and working classes. Rethel, however, has only the workers being seduced by the wiles of death. He is focusing very deliberately on the predicament of the traditional Volk. This again would fit in with the position in the autumn of 1848 when the liberals were trying to distance themselves from the revolutionaries. It is equally striking that the destroying forces, the soldiers, are only shown as ghostly figures in the back. The powers of authority and the right are seen as an abstract, inevitable force, rather than the agents of individuals. The final scene shows death triumphant. He has now abandoned his revolutionary disguise and appears as he is traditionally recognized. But there are none left to recognize him, bar one dying insurgent who sees him with his final gasp. This is in fact the one moment in which a worker might be said to play an active or discerning role - when it is too late. His presence brings out another point. While individual workers might be recognized in particular plates, such as the blacksmith, the stonemason and so on, these are never repeated in other plates. There is no continuity between them as individuals. They simply stand generically for 'the people'. The only possible exception to this might be the weeping woman and child, who might be the same as the couple listening to Death's deceptive speech in plate 2. However the costumes are not the same and the hairstyle of the woman is different. While being the best known at the time, Rethel's Totentanz was far from being the only pictorial representation of the 1848 uprising by a German artist. In the twentieth century Adolf Menzel's contemporaneous commemoration of the fallen insurgents in Berlin, Die Aufbahrung der Mdrzgefallenen - showing them being honoured with a public funeral at the time when the king of Prussia had appeared to concede their demands - has become equally celebrated (Figure 4-3).22 Unlike Rethel's representation, Menzel's is pro­ revolutionary and the outcome of direct observation of events. He wrote about these with great excitement at the time and fully supported the burghers in their struggle. Not only does the picture honour the dead but, as has frequently been observed - the crowd that honours them includes people from all classes - workers, bourgeois and even court officials. Although it is possible to read different levels of engagement with the event - some appear

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to be walking away in disgust while others appear to be making ambivalent gestures - there is still a very different image of community given here to that of the exclusively proletarian protesters in Rethel's public scenes. However, it is worth remembering that Menzel's picture belongs to the most optimistic moment in the struggle, that which occurred immediately after the uprising, when concessions had been won, a pan-German parliament promised, and there had as yet been no dividing of interests between liberals and socialists, no Frankfurt Parliament meandering into ineptness, no counter­ revolutionary backlash. As these events began to unfold, Menzel abandoned the picture - as can be seen by the unfinished part on the left - later claiming he had done so because of his disillusionment with what had happened, with his recognition that the ceremony honouring the dead that he was commemorating was simply a pack of lies. It is perhaps revealing that he has signed and dated his unfinished canvas precisely at the point where the painting ceases, as though to emphasize that that is what he believed then, but not later. Because unfinished, his picture remained a private document which he refused to exhibit and only sold at the very end of his life, after 1900. Menzel suffered bourgeois disillusionment. At the same time as he was abandoning his work, however, a very different kind of image was being prepared by Johann Peter Hasenclever. Hasenclever was one of the most radical and critical of the Diisseldorf historical painters. In his Ein Magistrat im Jahr 1848 (A Magistrate in 1848) (Figure 4-4)23 he recorded - as Menzel had done - an actual event that took place. In this case it was the workers bursting into the chamber of the Diisseldorf town council in October 1848 with a list of the demands that they required the council to attend to. This event was one of the key moments at which it became clear that proletarian and bourgeois expectations of the new order were quite different. In the event the council declared that their powers of action were exhausted. Hasenclever came nearer than any other German painter to achieving a heroic portrayal of the workers. The finished picture was enthusiastically received in leftwing circles and toured in both England and the USA. When put on show in the Crystal Palace in New York it was commended by Karl Marx in an article in the New York newspaper, Daily Tribune, in which he described the work as vindicating his own observations about the development of the counter­ revolution in Germany and of the failure of the German bourgeoisie to play their part in the revolutionary struggle. 'The excellent painter has represented in its complete dramatic vitality that which the writer can only analyse.'24 Yet despite - or because of - such a recommendation, Hasenclever's heroic picture of proletarian protest rapidly fell into oblivion. Although the sketch for it was acquired by the Diisseldorf Kunstverein, the actual painting remained in private hands. The image of the uprising that remained in

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people's minds was not that of individualized protesters, but of an anonymous group of victims. Rethel must have begun to design his Totentanz at much the same time as Hasenclever began his painting. At that point they were clearly on opposite sides of the fence. But by the time the Totentanz had actually emerged, in May 1849, fhe situation was not so clear. By this time there had been a second uprising, caused by frustration at the lack of progress of the Frankfurt Parliament. Rethel was still in Dresden at the time of this second uprising and was deeply moved by its outcome. For while he might deplore the 'red revolution' he had no sympathy with the counter-revolutionaries, who had abandoned nationalistic as well as democratic objectives. Rethel now saw a popular movement in favour of a stronger national institution being suppressed in favour of the parochial interests of the existing monarchies. As though the scales had fallen from his eyes, Rethel wrote to his mother that he now saw that the revolution was the expression of the 'genuine enthusiasm of the people - in the most honourable sense - for the creation of a great and honourable Germany'.25 Now he had to suffer the consequences of his mistake, and see his powerful cycle created at the time of hope for the Frankfurt Parliament - used as an agent for counter-revolutionary propaganda, an image created in sympathy with the Volk being used to maintain them in a state of servitude. As though to eradicate or dilute this propaganda Rethel turned to designing woodcuts for other themes on the Dance of Death that moved away from the political. Of these the most popular was Death the Friend (Figure 4.5). Here Death appears as the reward for virtuous labour. The old man in the chair is being relieved of his duties by Death who tolls the bell for him - both literally doing his job and signalling the end of his life. Death here has changed the revolutionary's cloak for the habit of a monk, the insurgent's hat for that of a pilgrim, cock's feathers for a broom. Everything in the picture celebrates the traditional atmosphere of work and craft. It was the sight of this work - placed on show in the South Kensington Museum - that inspired both Morris and Bume Jones in their rediscovery of the world of the craftsman.26 The image of the artist working with the craftsman to produce the picture - Rethel had it engraved at a Dresden studio of wood engravers suggested a closeness of collaboration unlike that which had sprung up in the world of commercial publishing of the day. Rethel did indeed have plans at this time to set up his own engraving workshop, but these were cut short by the onset of madness. Thus, ironically, the artist who might be seen to have supported the counter-revolution in his iconography became in his practice the inspirer of those who were reaching back to an earlier image of work, to restore the craft context of art and the dignity of labour.

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Notes 1.

The cycle contains six pictures. For a reproduction and commentary on all these see Paret, P., Art as History: Episodes in the Culture and Politics of Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 104-30. For a discussion of the spread of Rethel's international influence see Vaughan, W., German Romantic Painting (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 2nd edn, pp. 235-8.

2.

Heuss, T., Alfred Rethel: Auch ein Totentanz (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1957), p. 14.

3.

Kunst der Burgerlichen Revolution 1830-184.8/9 (exhibition catalogue), Berlin, Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst, 1972, cat. no. 156, Beilage p. 18.

4.

'Ce que je trouve de vraiment original dans le poeme, c'est qu'il se produisit dans un instant ou presque toute l'humanite europeenne s'etait engouee avec bonne foi des sottises de la revolution/ Baudelaire, C., 'L'art philosophique', in H. Lemaitre (ed.), Curiosites esthetiques, L'Art romantique et autres Oeuvres critiques (Paris: Gamier Freres, 1962), p. 507.

5.

Paret, Art as History, pp. 11 4 -1 5 .

6.

A. Rethel, The Harkort Factory at Burg Wetter, c.1834, Oil, private collection, Duisburg. Reproduced in Vaughan, German Romantic Painting, pi. 8.

7.

Kunst der Burgerlichen Revolution 1830-1848/9, cat. no. 64, p. 8.

8.

Lessing, C. F., Hussite Sermon, 1836, oil, 230 x 290 cm, Diisseldorf, Kunstmuseum. Repr. Vaughan, German Romantic Painting, pi. 152.

9.

Andrews, K., The Nazarenes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 59-62.

10.

Vaughan, German Romantic Painting, pp. 2 31-3 .

11.

Particularly those preserved in the Kunstmuseum, Diisseldorf. See Hoffmann, D., 'Die Karlsfresken Alfred Rethels' (doctoral dissertation, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1968), pp. 45-8.

12.

Reproduced in Vaughan, German Romantic Painting, pi. 320.

13.

For an account of the history of this commission see Hoffmann, Die Karlsfresken Alfred Rethels, pp. 11-3 8 .

14.

Kunst der Burgerlichen Revolution 1830-1848/9, cat. no. 44, p. 6.

15.

Ponten, J., Alfred Rethels Briefe, (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1912), p. 152.

16.

Published in Neuere politische und soziale Gedichte (1849-51). See Kunst der Burgerlichen Revolution 1830-1848/9, p. 92.

17.

Kunst der Burgerlichen Revolution, cat. no. 43, Beilage p. 5. Repr. Vaughan, German Romantic Painting, pi. 153.

18.

Pugin, A. W., Contrasts; A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, and Similar Buildings of the Present Day; shewing the Present Decay of Taste; Accompanied by appropriate Text (Salisbury, 1836). The plate contrasting the state of a town in the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries occurs in the second edition (London: Dolman, 1841). This second edition was produced in facsimile with an introduction by H. R. Hitchcock, Leicester, 1969. See Stanton, P., Pugin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), pp. 85-93.

19.

Kunzle, D., History of the Comic Strip (Berkeley, C A: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 30 ff.

20.

Hiitt, W., Die Dusseldorfer Malerschule (Leipzig: 1964), p. 113.

21.

Examples of these are reproduced in Kunst der Burgerliche Revolution. See especially cat. nos. 84101, Beilage, pp. 12 -13 .

22.

Kaiser, K., Adolph Menzel (Berlin: 1956), pp. 56 ff.

23.

The original picture was destroyed during the Second World War. A version of it exists in Schlofi Burg an der Wupper. See Hiitt, Die Dusseldorfer Malerschule, p. 193.

24.

'Der hervorragende Maler hat das in seiner ganzen dramatischen Vitalitat wiedergegeben, was der Schriftsteller nur analysieren konnte/ Quoted in Hutt, Die Dusseldorfer Malerschule, p. 194.

25.

May 1849. Theodor Heuss, Alfred Rethel, p. 26.

26.

Vaughan, W., German Romanticism and English Art (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 176.

4-i

Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Totentanz aus dem Jahren 1848 (Another Dance of Death, from the year 1848), 1849, plate 2

4.2

Alfred Rethel, Auch ein Totentanz aus dem Jahren 184.8 (Another Dance of Death, from the year 1848), 1849, plate 5

4.3

Adolph Menzel, Die Aufbahrung der Mdrzgefallenen (The Honouring of the Insurgents Killed in March 1848), 1848

44

Johann Peter Hasenclever, Ein Magistrat im Jahre 1848 (A Magistrate in 1848), 1849

William Vaughan

JUcr ‘ioir ata Jreuitb. 4.5

Alfred Rethel, Der Tod als Freund (Death the Friend), 1851

91

5

Gender and the ideology of capitalism: William Bell Scott's Iron and C oal

Jane Garnett

To contribute to an exploration of 'Work and the Image', I focus on an image of nineteenth-century work which has acquired an iconic status: William Bell Scott's Iron and Coal on Tyneside in the Nineteenth Century, completed in 1861 (Figure 5.1). This painting was the culmination of a series commissioned by Pauline and Walter Trevelyan to decorate the central hall of their Northumbrian house, Wallington - and to illuminate the history and worthies of Northumbria.1 The eight large paintings in the lower register illustrate the history of the English border, starting with the building of the Roman wall. The series was exhibited in London and in Newcastle, and Gambart published a series of photographs for general subscription.2 The final painting makes a distinct break with pictorial convention, as an experiment in visual collage designed to make an image of the modem city of Newcastle through a mosaic of separable fragments. It was an attempt to synthesize a wide variety of particular detail selected to demonstrate the range of Newcastle's modernity: in the words of a contemporary exhibition guide, in the foreground was Labour, in the middle distance Commerce, and beyond, 'the scientific result in the shape of railway and telegraph'.3 It is a picture which raises important issues of legibility - both in its mid-Victorian context and for modern critics. I want to address in particular the issue of gender, and the significance of the little girl sitting on the gun, who is in many ways the most prominent feature. Her position is the more striking in situ. At Wallington the paintings extend almost to the ground, so that the gaze of anyone seated in the hall exactly meets that of the little girl. She is the only figure to look straight out at the viewer. In so far as the painting has been discussed in recent decades, it has been addressed largely outside the context of the whole pictorial scheme of which it was a part, and within a circumscribed conceptual framework. On the one hand, there has been a tendency to read the picture as a straightforward

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celebration of modern Newcastle, since critical engagement with the concept of modernity has been defined according to a limited set of signifiers. On the other the representation of work has been read according to a surprisingly reductionist model of separate spheres. In his 1989 essay for the Newcastle exhibition of Pre-Raphaelites in the North East, Paul Usherwood argued that Scott was concerned to construe modern Newcastle as emphatically masculine. The little girl's main role in the picture - 'an island of sweetness, light and domesticity in a dark sea of bustle' - is to affirm the essential masculinity of modern industrial work and at the same time, by implication, the essential masculinity of modern Newcastle. He sees her as an entirely passive presence: the work of the little g ir l... in the shape of the midday meal on her lap which she has prepared for her father ... is wrapped up in a bundle and therefore hidden from view ... this is not where she properly belongs. She wears outdoor clothes ... she alone is idle. She does not even watch the men at work. Instead, like a Renaissance festaiolo, she looks away from them, out of the picture.4

Joseph Kestner's Masculinities in Victorian Painting (1995) simply repeats Usherwood's reading.5 Paul Barlow's recent and in many respects stimulating essay on Ford Madox Brown's Manchester murals uses Scott's series as a foil to emphasize the allegedly superior subtlety of Brown's scheme. Scott is cast as operating within conventional academic norms to present an unproblematic 'document' of industrial modernity. 'The composition of the image affirms the interdependence of man and machine in the modern system of pro­ duction.' The little girl is not even mentioned. In Brown's case, 'the presentation of continual "local disturbances" of the pictorial field is seen as the condition for the representation of modern social experience: not an updated academicism, but a radical disordering of the very terms of history painting'. Brown's paintings 'do not illustrate, but stand for the experience of modernisation. The growth of the modern city is simultaneously centralising and diversifying, populist and alienating', whereas 'Scott's modern history painting had conformed to the rationalising agencies it depicted'.6 There is no scope here to pursue this particular comparison in detail, but I want to underline the terms in which, in this modernist reading of Brown, Scott's scheme is deemed unchallenging: the painting is described as the formal embodiment of rational, industrial, masculine rhythms - and this is seen as reflecting perfectly Scott's intentions in capturing modernity. In fact, I want to suggest, Scott's conception of this historical series as a whole, whilst coherent, was also complex. It embodied an attitude to the nineteenth century and to the future which was far from unchallenging, and the use of the feminine motif was integral to its representation. Scott worked on the Wallington commission between 1856 and 1867, when he finished the scenes from the border ballad Chevy Chase, which filled the upper spandrels.

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As well as the eight large paintings, Scott painted on the lower spandrels portrait medallions of famous Northumbrians from Hadrian to George Stephenson. The whole scheme was designed to demonstrate the progress of civilization, which could be read at one level as the subduing of the border, but which at a more fundamental level was to be read in terms of the development of Christian principles. Four of the main paintings - which Scott described in Carlylean terms as the 'Hero set'7 - acted as depictions of the beatitudes, whilst the other four characterized epochs of development signalled by mottoes.8 Scott's plan (abandoned after Lady Trevelyan's death) had been to gild the ceiling and to paint saints and angels on it - which would, of course, have underlined the religious framework.9 On the west wall was placed in 1867 a marble group originally called The Lord's Prayer (at some later point called Civilisation) by Thomas Woolner, who had also been commissioned in 1856. Scott and Woolner were close friends, and Scott clearly played a part in encouraging the commission, which was intended to act as the summation of Scott's scheme. In this sense its subject matter is of significance. A mother (in modem dress) teaches her son to pray. On the pedestal are carved scenes of pagan savagery, which the mother and child could be seen to surmount. Woolner chose a woman as teacher because 'the position of women in society always marks the degree to which the civilisation of the nation has reached'. The sculpture was seen to embody the 'most spiritual, and the most tender, point' in the progress of civilization. As such it represented the high point of progress, as well as being a pointer to the salient conditions of its future.10 An extensive correspondence between Scott and his patrons survives, from which it is clear how tenaciously Scott stuck to his ideas, which were themselves of long gestation. In all important respects he controlled the series, not necessarily explaining or discussing his rationale. As he put it in a letter to Pauline Trevelyan in October 1862, 'If the pictures had been designed and painted piecemeal and by discussion where would they have been at this moment?'11 Particularly controversial were the last two paintings in the main series: that of Grace Darling rowing out in the storm in 1838 to rescue the survivors of the wrecked Forfarshire, which Walter Trevelyan wanted to replace; and the depiction of modern industrial Newcastle, with which both Trevelyans were uneasy.12 Scott's choices thus become all the more telling. When Scott was working on the choice of heads for the portrait medallions on the south wall - above the scenes of Roman and Anglo-Saxon life - he exclaimed, 'What a pity it is that we can't get a female head in';13 and he clearly felt strongly about the appropriateness of Grace Darling to embody the beatitude 'Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy'.14 In this he was true to his concern to represent active, not simply contemplative heroes. Grace Darling was a local heroine, whose bravery had won her

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immediate national popularity. Her life (she died four years after the rescue) was immortalized by Wordsworth (who saw her as a spiritual redeemer in female form) and by many popular biographical accounts.15 Against the background of a flourishing genre of modern life depictions of suffering heroines (one thinks particularly of Redgrave's Seamstress, or the Poor Teacher with her exaggeratedly tiny pretty hands and feet, in which female delicacy, fragility, helplessness and resignation were the significant, albeit passive, indicators of social injustice), Scott's heroine was famous precisely because it was she who took the initiative. Her father had not wanted to get the lifeboat out, but she had insisted. Scott shows her actually doing the rowing: a small figure battling actively against towering elemental forces - and triumphing (Figure 5.2). In relation to the last picture in the series, which Scott hoped would be the best and which certainly incorporated the most complex range of reference, there was clearly much debate. But, again, except in one very important particular, Scott's own vision seems to have prevailed. It is clear that he needed to woo the Trevelyans to accept the depiction of industrial life, and Walter Trevelyan, who was an ardent pacifist, remained unhappy about the inclusion of the Armstrong gun and shells in the bottom left of the picture, even wanting them removed after the painting was complete and the series had been exhibited.16 Both the terms in which Scott justified the content of the picture and the ways in which he composed it are significant in terms of his philosophy of history. I want to suggest that the positioning of the little girl takes on a more multi-faceted significance when viewed both in this context and in that of the specific debates of 1860-61. Scott's response to Walter Trevelyan's query about the gun was to argue that one could not depict the manufacturing industry of the Tyne without including a reference to Armstrong's works. He went on: The united action of men in the shape of war is no doubt a legitimate outcoming of human nature, part of the necessary experience and education of Man in Time, which no doubt he will outlive and it is to be hoped he will not need many more centuries to do so. But to ignore anything is not to annul it, to ignore facts seems to me to be shutting one's eyes against so much more knowledge necessary to make up our judgment correctly.17

Thus Scott made clear his intention that the painting would not simply be a document, but such a representation of an epoch as could carry with it a moral and educational thrust. William Armstrong had been much in the local and national news; he had recently been knighted, and his new gun was the subject of much debate, which was to be especially focused in the run up to the International Exhibition in 1862. Scott did several preliminary drawings for this part of the painting; his first idea being clearly derived from Landseer's In Time of Peace (1846), engravings of which were extremely

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popular.18 In Landseer's work sheep and goats browse beside a rusty cannon on the Kentish coast, whilst a boy watches a little girl helping her sister to wind a skein of wool. Scott initially drew two children clambering around the end of the Armstrong gun. The shift to the much stronger figure of the little girl looking out in the final design is thus very deliberate, and finds its echo in a Punch cartoon of May 1862: PEACE: Mr Punch's Design for a Colossal Statue, which ought to have been placed in the International Exhibition (Figure 5.3). The formula of the necessary interrelationship of peace and commercial and general progress, which had been projected in the language of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and which was trumpeted afresh in the rhetoric surround­ ing the conclusion of the Cobden-Chevalier free trade treaty with France in January i860, was subjected to much ironic treatment in 1860-62. This was especially sharp in the light of the high level of government expenditure on armaments, and the number of jobs which the industry supported. An opportunity was offered for some hard-hitting attacks on the complacency of those who subscribed to the nostrums of a simplified political economy; and the need to balance male and female virtues was identified - for example by John Ruskin, in his Sesame and Lilies of 1865 - as necessary for the true progress of society. Moral transformation would imply the interpenetration of the values of home and marketplace, the domestic world and the State. The prominence given to the Whitworth and Armstrong guns in all their technical perfection at the 1862 Exhibition led one commentator to observe: 'No wonder the ghost of 1851 is so restless.' He called rather for another exhibition in 1872, in which would be shown 'all the latest improvements in the human h eart... the public should be particularly invited to send in their domestic virtues; these would afford a most useful field of comparison and improvement'.19 The resonances of this debate suggest the potential for a more complex reading of Scott's composition. It may be useful here to compare Landseer's earlier painting called variously The Stonebreaker and The Stonebreaker's Daughter (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum), painted by 1830 and engraved in 1844. Here the pretty girl bringing her father's lunch is very obviously an idealized reference to the virtues of hearth and home (the cottage with its smoking chimneys lies in the background) - and was read clearly as such.20 Another precedent might be the second version of Joseph Wright's A Blacksmith's Shop of 1771 or, more pertinently, because impressions of Richard Earlom's engraving were still being produced in the mid-nineteenth century, An Iron Forge of 1772.21 Here the presence of the mother and daughters, all of whom look out at the viewer, is less easy to read. Their dress and pose have elements of both idealization and sexuality, and it is not clear that they act simply to establish a relationship between labour and fulfilled family life, as some critics have suggested.22 Yet in their obvious elegance and attractiveness they strike a

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different note from Scott's little girl. Although one critic of Scott's series, Alexander Gilchrist, described her as 'a pretty domestic hint'/3 the girl in Iron and Coal is emphatically not so idealized, and her singularity and knowingness of expression distinguish her, as does the arithmetic book on her lap: she is not passive and idle, but is herself taking a break from her studies. The Athenaeum, indeed, observed: 'we should truly have liked a prettier child for this subject, which is unreasonably ugly and vulgar'.24 In the eyes of such a critic a feminine principle could be activated only in the presence of a conventionally pretty female subject. The tension between the metaphorical and the literal was so great that the image became entirely illegible. The overall historical and religious framework within which Scott intended his painting of the nineteenth century to be read is suggested by letters which he wrote to Pauline Trevelyan on the subject of the development of human nature. In the first (of December 1857) he expostulated at her denigration of the nineteenth century: As for myself I am an egotist on the subject of development or progression, of course, - have I not written a splendid poem to show how it all is? ... Change without growth or succession without progression is not found in nature at all - not to believe in the 19th century, one might as well disbelieve that a child grows into a man, or a sketch into a picture, that we get experience as we grow old or that the fruit falls when it is ripe. Without that Faith in Time what anchor have we in any secular speculation - or indeed in religion either, - why not knuckle down before St Januarius' bottle, or indeed keep a fetish at once? ... The savage and the 19th century Christian it is supposed are the same in species, but how different in the life, the consciousness? And then you know we celebrate every year an advent and we look for another - tho' we may fashion different images of that according to our training.25

He returned to the theme in an undated letter (from 1861) defending his decision to include some coins in the decorative surround for the description underneath the painting: Of course I mean that there was no time like the present for £.s.D, no age and no country in which so much and so long labour daily all the year was ever required to gain the amount of money necessary to live as at the present time. As for the fact of covetousness being the same tendency of human nature in the time of Moses, that is a truism which seems curiously wide of the question - you had better have gone on with the quotation - we don't now and in England covet our neighbour's wife, ass, camel or tentpole but his till and his silver. Do you think these men strike from 6 to 6 ... just for the game or as roystering borderers took to the heath? But besides the amount of money now necessary to be gained and the difficulty of gaining it that particular form of materialism that makes current coin the first thing is characteristic of the day.

He went on to reinforce his point by reference to a popular recent French print of a man on his knees before a table draped like an altar with a money bag placed on it between two lighted candles/6

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The reference to the 'splendid poem' in the first letter is one significant reference which needs to be pursued, and which w ill illuminate the philosophical basis of Scott's scheme. The other is indicated by an undated letter to Pauline Trevelyan about the motto for the painting. He had objected to her suggestion - 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might' - because it seemed to him to be simply 'an advise [sic] or injunction to those who are remiss or lazy'. His own proposal was from Browning: 'Knowledge it seemed and Power and Recompense'.27 This choice - in which he was overruled - indicates clearly his concern that the picture should not be read simply as a hymn to honest toil, but as a more complete evocation of the ultimate values of civilization, as a state not yet attained, but anticipated. For the culmination of his historical cycle, he wanted to signal the fundamental distinctions between true and false goals and between ends and means. Scott was regarded as much as a poet as a painter, brought up on Blake and Shelley, Dante and the Bible. It was in his 'splendid poem' The Year of the World, published in 1846 - when, as he was later to put it, he was 35 and at the mezzo cammino of his earthly pilgrimage - that he set out his philosophy of history and of life. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's admiration for this poem was the occasion of his first seeking Scott out.28 The poem was divided into five books, treating the different forms of religion underlying the periods of time occupied by the civilization of the world. The pilgrim is Lyremmos (Energy), who passes from the point at which there was no time or past or distance, through a process of consciousness and understanding, approximating to the eclectic philosophy of Victor Cousin (to whom Scott presented a copy of the poem).29 The feminine and masculine are conceived as the fundamental duality: Lyremmos is balanced by his sister Mneme (Memory), who also has characteristics of Eve. With the coming of Christ the feminine was sanctioned with a higher spiritual power; until that point Energy was made 'the error,/ Masculine power, a birth and death power only'.30 A crucial distinction is made between absolute truth and the partial truths which masquerade as perfection. The advent of Christ ushers in the final epoch of Cousin's scheme, in which the mind realizes that there is a higher power in the universe, and the finite and the infinite move towards a true correlation. Book Four - The Advent - culminates in an invocation of the beatitudes. Book Five - The Future - is entitled: 'The modern mind working under the authority of Revelation, discovers science. A true Beginning found at last. The near future. The distant future.' The poem ends with the reapparition of the spiritual Mneme (she whose memory has drawn him on) - the active intellect being now harmonized with it, when the vision collapses into perfection. Scott's frontispiece to this section shows Mneme floating forward holding a small male figure who is both 'science, the gleaner [who] brings into our hands

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earnest of harvest', but also Time (Figure 5.4). At the end Mneme herself as the spiritual principle is both memory and peace. The echoes sing: Sisterhood! let him behold Mneme; whom with sheltering arms We have clustered round so long: Lyremmos! Energy! behold The white flower, peace, thy sister, brings: Behold her now descend, she bends Her radiant face to thine.31

This imaginative conceptualization of his philosophy of history was to continue to inform both Scott's poetry and the framing of his most important artistic commission. His poetry of the intervening period feeds into the Wallington cycle, most notably his 'Bede in the Nineteenth Century', a response to the provocative appropriation of Bede by Cardinal Wiseman in the wake of the controversial re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England in 1850.32 The Death of Bede was the third painting in the Wallington cycle. The poem takes the form of a monologue, in which Bede records his responses to being reincarnated in the nineteenth century. The focus is on the ambiguities of knowledge: its power for evil as for good. Confidence in the progression of science is brought out, but God's word is the key point of illumination. Again, the sense is of forces held in creative tension, out of which resolution is to be anticipated, but in the future. In the painting, as one critic picked up, Bede looks out into the future at the moment of death; the focus of the picture is the window open to the sea and the blue sky into which Bede's soul flies. We can now return to the quotation from Browning which for Scott was the most appropriate motto for Iron and Coal: 'Knowledge it seemed, and power, and recompense'. The line is taken from 'Paracelsus', Browning's dramatic poem first published in 1835, which Scott may have read before he wrote his own Year of the World, although this particular line is not in the first edition, but was inserted in Browning's revisions for the collected edition of his Poems in 1849.33 One must presume that the version which Scott knew best was this one. It certainly reinforces many aspects of Scott's thought. The quotation comes at the point at which Paracelsus, the sixteenth-century alchemist and chemist, who famously cast aside inherited tradition and set off to investigate (among other things) the workings of mines, acknowledges the futility of his pursuit of scientific knowledge for its own sake. Encap­ sulated in this realization is the understanding that knowledge needs rather to be united with love - to balance the 'two halves of the dissevered world' the material and the spiritual. True knowledge - and power - are to be anticipated through a focus on the ultimate spiritual meaning which can be read through the corporeal. False knowledge is death. Festus and Michal,

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Paracelsus's male and female advisers, are types of past success, uniting a type of love to a type of knowledge. They suggest the proportion in which a superior knowledge and a superior love should unite to produce a still higher degree of happiness. Paracelsus, like Prometheus a type of Christ, can point to this future, only once he has realized the importance of the past, and he appeals for vindication to the 'child of after-days', the future readers of Browning's poem. I gazed on power till I grew blind - ... I saw no use in the past: only a scene Of degradation, imbecility The record of disgraces best forgotten ... I would have had one day, one moment's space, Change man's condition, push each slumbering claim To mastery o'er the elemental world At once to full maturity, then roll Oblivion o'er the tools, and hide from man What night had ushered morn. Not so, dear child Of after-days, wilt thou reject the Past Big with deep warnings of the proper tenure By which thou hast the earth: the Present for thee Shall have distinct and trembling beauty ... ... nor on thee yet Shall burst the Future ... But thou shalt painfully attain to joy, While hope, and fear, and love, shall keep thee man!34

Michal, like Mneme, acts as an enduring memory. Both Browning and Scott were fascinated by the idea of a future to which the present becomes a past and of a past whose future is the present.35 It is with this goal of stimulating the imagination that Scott seems consistently to have operated, in his poetry and in his painting. Both Browning and Scott conceptualized the malefemale relationship in terms of the necessary balancing of active forces, rather than reading the feminine as merely a foil to the masculine. It is within this conceptual frame that we should consider Scott's treatment of gender, and consider his female child looking out to the viewer - to the future.36 The most interesting discussion of Scott's series was provided by his friend William Michael Rossetti in a review of the London exhibitions of 1861.37 Otherwise, with the exception of Gilchrist's for the Critic, the notices, though on the whole positive, were disappointingly bland and descriptive. Perhaps the most strikingly unhelpful was the Literary Gazette's comment on the last painting as 'a respectable rendering of a difficult subject'.38 Both Gilchrist and Rossetti indicated why the critical response took such a form. Gilchrist observed that Scott's paintings, whilst conveying 'a clearer and rarer spiritual atmosphere than we can often climb to in modem art', were

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'not works captivating at first sight, or to the eye. Their appeal is to the mind', and went on to comment that there was too much detail: 'The attempt to make a picture tell us all that the printed page can tell is always futile.'39 Hardly surprisingly, Rossetti made the same point more positively: 'In point of mere painting they have great merit ... in intellect, however, the works stand quite exceptionally high; including in that term the general choice and range of subject and of thought.' For Rossetti, Scott's series was an example of the strength of conception which should inform modem art, but rarely did. He characterized the generally low level of art as analogous to the juvenile tale or the religious tract, and, in relation specifically to historical subjects, referred to Carlyle's Sartor Resartus on the need to look beyond the superficial to the inner form of man and the world. The public meanwhile were foolishly captivated by the pretty, the morally simplistic and the superficially clever.40 In his 1871 work on modern French art, Scott observed that French critics said that English art was always the same: 'the in­ dispensable pretty girl's face, and the little dog'.41 Did he think back wryly to his own not very pretty little girl and her dog behind the gun? Scott perpetually railed against the constraints of the exhibition system, and the low general level of critical engagement with art - the 'wholly exoteric nature of art-writing, treating the artist only from the point of view of taste and workmanship'. Even though 'art-writing' has developed beyond that point, the following comment of Scott's about a work of sculpture still has relevance for a modem understanding of his own work: 'The difference between a piece of sculpture representing a mental or bodily condition and an allegorical human creature flourishing a suggestive implement, or accompanied by a previously understood adjunct, is the difference between the natural and the artificial, between poetry and riddles.'42 The 'suggestive attributes' in Scott's Wallington series - especially Iron and Coal - have been read too often as an accumulation of particular, and often literalistic, iconographic detail. This has contributed to an enduring denial of that poetic and philosophical conception of the work as a whole which was so fundamental to its author.

Notes 1.

For details of the commission, see Minto, W. (ed.), Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, 2 vols (London: James R. Osgood, Mcllvaine and Co., 1892); Trevelyan, R., A Pre-Raphaelite Circle (London: Chatto and Windus, 1978); idem, Wallington, Northumberland (London: National Trust, 1994), pp. 56-63.

2.

The photographs were advertised plain £3.35, coloured £6.6s. University of Newcastle, Robinson Library, Trevelyan Papers W CT 75: W. B. Scott to Lady Trevelyan, 1 1 August 1861, p. 4 . 1 am most grateful to the Trustees of the Trevelyan Family Papers at the Robinson Library, University of Newcastle, for permission to quote from this collection. The photographs were commended in the Art Journal, n.s. 7 (1861), p. 186.

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3.

Trevelyan Papers, W CT Scrapbook W CT 296, p. 1 1 1 : admission ticket to Mr Hare's Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, 7 June 1861.

4.

Usherwood, P., 'William Bell Scott's Iron and Coal: Northern Readings', in J. Vickers (ed.), PreRaphaelites: Painters and Patrons in the North East (Newcastle: Tyne and Wear Museum Services, 1989)/ PP- 3 9 - 5 6 , at pp. 50-51.

5.

Kestner, J. A., Masculinities in Victorian Painting (Aldershot: Scolar, 1995), p. 148.

6.

Barlow, P., 'Local Disturbances: Ford Madox Brown and the Problem of the Manchester Murals', in E. Harding (ed.), Re-Framing the Pre-Raphaelites (Aldershot: Scolar, 1995), pp. 81-97, at PP- 88, 89, 9 5 -

7.

Trevelyan Papers W CT 73, Scott to Sir Walter Trevelyan, 13 February 1857, p. 3.

8.

On the south wall: The Building of the Roman Wall; King Egfrid and St Cuthbert; The Descent of the Danes; The Death of Bede. On the north wall: The Spur in the Dish; Bernard Gilpin; Grace Darling; Iron and Coal.

9.

Trevelyan Papers W CT 75, Scott to Sir Walter Trevelyan, 18 May 1862, p. 2.

10.

Trevelyan, Wallington, pp. 63-4; Athenaeum, 44, 2 0 5 1,16 February (1867), 228.

11.

Trevelyan Papers W CT 75, Scott to Lady Trevelyan, 16 October 1862, p. 4.

12.

Trevelyan Papers W CT 74, Scott to Lady Trevelyan, 3 1 May 1859, p. 4; W CT 73, Scott to Lady Trevelyan, 5 December 1857, pp. 2-4.

13.

Trevelyan Papers W CT 73, Scott to Lady Trevelyan, 1 February 1856, p. 3.

14.

Trevelyan Papers W CT 74, Scott to Lady Trevelyan, 3 1 May 1859, p. 4.

15.

[William Wordsworth], Grace Darling (Carlisle: Charles Thurnam, 1843); The Loss of the Steamship 'Forfarshire', Captain Humble, which had struck on the Fern Islands, On her Voyage to Dundee, on the night of the yth September, 1838, and the Heroic Conduct of Grace Darling, in Venturing her Life, and Rescuing the Survivors from Destruction (n.p., n.d. c. 1845); Grace Darling; or, the Heroine of the Fern islands (London: G. Henderson, c. 1839); Hope, E., Grace Darling, Heroine of the Fame Islands: Her Life, and its Lessons (London, 1873).

16.

Trevelyan Papers W CT 75, Scott to Sir Walter Trevelyan, 10 March 1862, p. 2.

17.

Trevelyan Papers W CT 74, Scott to Sir Walter Trevelyan, 28 March i860, pp. 5-7.

18.

The engraving was included in Monkhouse, W. C. (ed.), The Works of Sir Edwin Landseer, RA (London: Virtue and Co. Ltd, 1879).

19.

[Frederick Greenwood],'At the Great Exhibition', Cornhill, 5, June (1862), 677-81.

20.

See, e.g., review in Morning Post, 6 February 1830, cited by Hemingway, A., Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 114.

21.

Bemrose, W., Life and Works of Joseph Wright, A R A , commonly called 'Wright of Derby' (London: Bemrose and Sons, 1885), p. vi; Egerton, J. (ed.), Wright of Derby (London: Tate Gallery, 1990), p. 242.

22.

Fraser, D., 'Joseph Wright of Derby and the Lunar Society', in J. Egerton (ed.), Wright of Derby (London: Tate Gallery, 1990), pp. 15-24, at p. 21. For a much more developed and compelling interpretation, see Siegfried, S., 'Engaging the Audience: Sexual Economies of Vision in Joseph Wright', Representations, 68, Fall (1999).

23.

Trevelyan Papers, W CT Scrapbook W CT 296, p. 114: Critic, 23, 578, 3 August (1861), 132.

24.

Athenaeum, 3 4 ,1 7 5 9 ,1 3 July (1861), 54-5, at p. 55.

25.

Trevelyan Papers W CT 73, Scott to Lady Trevelyan, 5 December 1857, pp. 2-4.

26.

Trevelyan Papers W CT 80, Scott to Lady Trevelyan, undated, pp. 2-4.

27.

Trevelyan Papers W CT 80, Scott to Lady Trevelyan, undated.

28.

Minto, Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, vol. 1, pp. 235-8; 243-4.

29.

Scott, W. B., The Year of the World; A Philosophical Poem on 'Redemption from the Fall' (Edinburgh: William Tait, and London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1846), p. x.

30.

Ibid., p. 28.

31.

Ibid., pp. 95 and 113.

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32.

Scott, W. B., 'Bede in the Nineteenth Century. Being a Monologue of that Industrious Scholar, resuscitated at the call of Cardinal Wiseman, in his discourse on the opening of Hartlepool R.C. Church, August 18 5 1', in his Poems (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1875), pp. 147-58.

33.

Browning, R., Poems, 2 vols (London: Chapman and Hall, 1849), vol. 1, p. 39.

34.

Ibid., pp. 149-50. This reading of Browning's poem is indebted to Woolford, J. and Karlin, D. (eds), The Poems of Browning, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1991), vol. 1, pp. 103-9.

35.

Woolford, J. and Karlin, D., Robert Browning (London: Longman, 1996), p. 185.

36.

Such a reading is reinforced by the fact that the model for the workman to the left of the group was Charles Edward Trevelyan, heir to Wallington, to whom the future of the family itself was to be entrusted It is also suggestive that the figure of the little boy with the Davy lamp looks back out over the Tyne and beyond - towards the previous pictures.

37.

Rossetti, W. M., 'The London Exhibitions of 18 61', Fraser's Magazine, 64, July to December (1861), 580-92.

38.

W CT Scrapbook, W CT 296, p. 112 , cutting from Literary Gazette.

39.

Critic, 23, 578, 3 August (1861), 13 1- 3 .

40.

Rossetti, 'London Exhibitions', 582-3, 587-92.

41.

Scott, W. B., Gems of French Art: A Series of Carbon-Photographs from the Pictures of Eminent Modern Artists, with remarks on the works selected, and an Essay on the French School (London: Routledge and Sons, 1871), p. 10.

42.

Minto, Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, vol. 2, pp. 285, 284.

Jane Garnett

5.1

William Bell Scott, Iron and Coal on Tyneside in the Nineteenth Century, c. 1856

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William Bell Scott, Grace Darling rescuing the men of the Forfarshire, c. 1856

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PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.—Mat 3, 1862.

PEACE. MR. PUNCH’S DESIGN FOR A COLOSSAL STATUE, WHICH OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN PLACED IN TILE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION.

5.3 PEACE: Mr Punch's Design for a Colossal Statue, which ought to have been placed in the International Exhibition, Punch, May 1862

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5.4 Mneme, from William Bell Scott, The Year of the World; A Philosophical Poem on 'Redemption from the Fall', 1846

6

Time and work-discipline in Pissarro

T. /. Clark

The painting I am going to concentrate on in what follows is Camille Pissarro's Two Young Peasant Women (Figure 6.1). It is a picture I have looked at and thought about over many years.1 Some of the reasons for this will be no more than hinted at in the present chapter. The painting comes out of a special moment in Pissarro's career - a moment of abandonment of previous avant-garde commitments, and rueful accommodation to the market. It is done in a year, 1891, which is important in the history of socialism, and particularly in the history of socialism's relation to anarchism. Anarchist politics were on the agenda. This is the time of the earliest widespread May Day demonstrations in France, of the Fourmies massacre, and the Jerez uprising. It is also, for Pissarro, a grim and bewildering moment in artistic terms. For he could see that the avant-garde was deliberately reneging, in and around 1891, on its previous materialist and left-wing commitments. Symbolism and idealism were in the ascendant. Gauguin left for Tahiti in March. The Van Gogh cult was beginning. For all of these reasons and others, Pissarro decided to make a painting that would be grander, larger and more explicit about his commitments than any he had ever done. It would be explicit, above all, on the subject of peasant labour and leisure - about the kind of interest his painting had in the working class, and the texture of that class's sociability. And this would involve him in struggling, more directly (not to say desperately) than ever before with another kind of interest in the same subject, which had become a more or less official cultural arm of the bourgeois state. I mean the paintings of Millet, and the Third Republic's apotheosis of those paintings, and the scores of adaptations and imitations of them that appeared in the Salon each year. I believe this was truly a struggle over some of bourgeois society's basic terms, and deepest wishes. This is what my chapter is about.

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Two Young Peasant Women was first shown to the public in late January 1892. It is just over 89 cm high and just under 117 cm wide - one of the biggest pictures Pissarro ever did, double the size of his normal formats. It shows two women taking a rest from work, probably chatting. Two field-women. How exactly they are resting is not clear. There are problems of relative height and placement we shall come to later. My best guess is that the woman on the left is sitting on the ground, or on a grass bank, with knees splayed wide perhaps squatting. The woman on the right is kneeling, leaning on a shorthandled spade. Her right hand is steadied on her far right knee. (I say 'steadied', but there is something unstable, or maybe unconvincing, to the pose as a whole. It is as if the woman had just struck it, or was about to leave it behind.) An oil that Pissarro showed at Durand-Ruel's in 1894, called Peasant Woman Sitting and Peasant Woman Kneeling - the title is hard-working about posture makes a useful point of reference (Figure 6.2). The women are at the edge of an orchard. Over the kneeling woman's shoulder are the stakes of a vineyard, which is presumably what the women have been weeding. Finicky work, not easily mechanized. A long field put to grass stretches off to the horizon. Poplars. The distinctive shape of an apple tree in mid-distance. All of this is local and representative: Eragny was on the fringes of cider country, but in the 1890s still produced its own cheap wine. Like much of France in these decades of slumping wheat prices, more and more of its fields were turned over to stock-raising and dairy. Not that I am claiming Two Young Peasant Women is geared at all precisely to agriculture and topography. It is ornament not photography, drawn with a deliberately simplifying line. Above all it turns on a complex imagining of light, a reconstruction of it, in which the painter's distance from the facts he is remembering is admitted through and through. Here, I think, is the picture's central effect or proposal - but also its most elusive one. Only slowly, if my experience is typical, does it dawn on the viewer that the key to the picture's whole colour organization is the fact that its two peasants are taking their rest in a translucent foreground shade, with here and there a trace of sunlight coming through the leaves on to their fists or foreheads. Of course that is what they are doing! Rest seeks shadow, work usually cannot. The contrast between the one state of light and the other is what carries the picture's semantic charge. But it would not be like Pissarro to polarize the contrast, or offer it with a Monet-type flourish. The shade that surrounds the two actors has, in true modernist fashion, to come out of the overall texture of coloured marks within the rectangle - come out of it like a secretion or emanation, which can never be tied down to this or that painterly cue. Therefore the landscape in sunlight has somehow to participate in the shade, or be viewed through it, or be shot through with its qualities. The sky is white, and the air is charged with what seems like humid overcast. Light

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is diffused. The atmosphere is sultry, there is a muffled quality to it. Looked at close to, the paint is as dry as a bone, happily still unvarnished; from 6 metres, the same paint is muggy noon, full of moisture. Obviously there is more to Two Young Peasant Women than a pattern or balance of light and shade. The picture invites a literal reading. A viewer cannot stand long in front of it without falling to wondering what the two peasant protagonists are talking about, and how much more work they are likely to do before turning in. Answering the latter question would be easier if the picture gave a clue - of costume, maybe, or physiognomy - to the two women's relation to the means of production. Are they day laborers, or servants living in a household, or members of the family? How hard is the work they are taking a break from? Who is the cider and cheap wine for? Is it for sale or use? How strong are the women? How healthy? Are they married or single? 'The body's worth more than the dowry', as the peasant saying had it .'Fillejolie, miroir defou.' Idleness is ultimately a matter of place in the production process. And it also involves (or did in the nineteenth century) a view of what kinds of human activity different production processes make room for. Pastoral (if this is what we think Pissarro's painting ultimately amounts to) is always a dream of time - of leisure sewn into certain pattern of exertion, snatched from it easily, threaded through the rhythms of labour and insinuating other tempos and imperatives into the working day. I did say a dream. They are going to take the fields and harvests from you, they will take your very self from you, they will tie you to some machine of iron, smoking and strident, and, surrounded by coalsmoke, you will have to put your hand to a piston ten or twelve thousand times a day. That is what they will call agriculture. And don't expect to make love then when your heart tells you to take a woman; don't turn your head towards the young girl passing by: the foreman won't have you cheating the boss of his work ... Then, there will be no women and children coming to interrupt toil with a kiss or caress. The workers will be drawn up in squadrons, with sergeants and captains and the inevitable informer . . . 2

These sentences were written by one of Pissarro's anarchist friends, the geographer Elisee Reclus, in a little pamphlet often reprinted in the 1890s, A Mon frere, le paysan. I think that some such scheme of values, and possibly even some such foreboding of the century to come - of course neither Reclus nor Pissarro could imagine the true horrors of agribusiness - lay at the root of Two Young Peasant Women, and made its dream world worth realizing. 'Pastoral' is a hard word. I mean this chapter to be about the nature and grounds of a certain imaginative sympathy, on the part of a modernist artist, for the peasant working class; and about the pressure that sympathy put on the artist's technical assumptions. Inevitably I shall point to the limitations

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of the sympathy, and the amount of conventionality and evasion bound up in it. But I hope not to fall into the kind of academicism that thinks that once one has pointed out the exclusions and conventions, and invoked the horror or loss the picture does not show, one has solved the problem of sympathy altogether. It is shown to be a sham. There is no middle road here. Pissarro's sympathy is utterly exterior there is never a mention in his letters of harvests or prices or particular peasants living across the road - but in Two Young Peasant Women I believe it is real. Or as real as we shall get. That is, as much of a picture of a past way of life, and of why that way of life might be valued, as we are ever likely to be presented with. I think we should look at Pissarro's painting with two kinds of testimony in mind. First, the word of mouth of Leonard Thompson, farm labourer in a landscape not unlike the Eragny valley (and not far away), recalling very much the same time - starting from a memory of going off to enlist in the First World War. (Peasants as cannon-fodder, we shall see, are on governments' minds in the 1890s.) We walked to Ipswich and got the train to Colchester. We were soaked to the skin but very happy ... In my four months' training with the regiment I put on nearly a stone in weight and got a bit taller. They said it was the food but it was really because for the first time in my life there had been no strenuous work. I want to say this simply as a fact, that village people in Suffolk in my day were worked to death. It literally happened. It is not a figure of speech. I was worked mercilessly. I am not complaining about it. It is what happened to me. We were all delighted when war broke out on August 4th.3

Then this, from Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: Low and rustic life was generally chosen [he means in the poems that follow] because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that situation our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity and consequently may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and from the necessary character of rural occupations are more easily comprehended; and are more durable; and lastly, because in that situation the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.4

I know this conjunction of texts is intolerable. 'The necessary character of rural occupations ... ' 'It is not a figure of speech ... ' And the last thing I invite the listener to do, or think Pissarro ever did, is to square the circle of fact and value implied here. The facts are horrible, and the values based in wilful ignorance of them; but that does not mean the values are bogus. Leonard Thompson can be right, and Wordsworth (and Pissarro) can be right that 'in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and

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speak a plainer and more emphatic language'. Or perhaps what is ultimately at stake is that there could be (and can be) no picture of the qualities valued in Wordsworth's phrases - passion, maturity, plainness, emphasis, unrestraint - without a vision of them inhering in peasant life and work. It hardly needs saying that the qualities are those modernism saw as most under threat from modernity, and wished above all to make the qualities of art. Possibly because it thought art was a place in which they might be preserved for future use. The figures in Two Young Peasant Women are larger, as I said before, and larger in relation to the pictorial field, than any Pissarro had done previously, or was ever to do again. And not only are the two women massive, they are also incomplete. This is a key, and uncharacteristic, decision. Peasant figures in Pissarro, except for occasional portraits, are established four-square within the picture frame, making their separate claim on the rectangle. The decision to do the opposite in Two Young Peasant Women is partly the reason, I am sure, that the picture in general seems unresolved. At this level it is meant to. Incompleteness has to do above all with a fiction of closeness, of conversation overheard. Closeness but not exactly intimacy. Overhearing but not overseeing. (It is a nineteenth-century question - an Elisee Reclus type question - whether every kind of looking at the lower classes has to be intrusive and disciplinary.) The two women are meant to be monumental, but not overbearing or portentous. Portentousness is the enemy. 'Stiffness and solemnity' (above all the latter) are the two worst qualities Pissarro thinks his son Lucien may be catching in 1891 from his English surroundings. Think of the picture, then, in relation to Millet's The Angelus (Figure 6.3), or better still, to an exact contemporary like Jules Breton's June, shown in the Salon of 1892. These are the pictures Two Young Peasant Women is painted against. I promised to talk in more detail about relative height and placement in Two Young Peasant Women, and the issues of closeness and incompleteness clearly cannot be resolved without my doing so. But I warn you the talk will be inconclusive. Take the squatting woman, for example. Is she squatting? Meaning what, precisely? Sitting on her heels, or her hams, or her haunches? Sitting cross-legged or with knees splayed wide? Perhaps the best-case interpretation of her knees and arms is that the arm is resting on a knee we are not shown, just below and in front of the picture plane; and the knee we can see is a farther one, bearing no weight. (You will notice a glimpse of the woman's left hand, appearing under her elbow.) But then questions multiply. How on earth can the knee be spreading this far to the right? What is it we are looking at through the crook of the woman's arm? And so on. I am not saying these local discrepancies eat away at our acceptance of the figure as a whole. At least, not mine. I think the squatting figure is a triumph of drawing, and the improbabilities easily subsumed in the overall shape. As

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a shape of stolid reverie it has never been bettered. The face and fist are wonderful - clumsy, elliptical, aerated by light. The touches of pure blue line-drawing in between the fingers are perfectly, naively calculated. The fist is as three-dimensional a piece of painting as Pissarro ever did - a figure of uprightness, containment, firm support, like a Romanesque capital. How imperturbably it answers the hard slashing edge of the same woman's back and shoulders, squared and silhouetted against the orchard bank! How approximate the fingers of her other hand in comparison, or the hands of the woman kneeling opposite! This is where the aesthetic (as opposed to anatomical) difficulties begin, I think - once we look at the two figures comparatively, as answering and qualifying one another. Pissarro worked ferociously hard at the comparison; especially, by the looks of it, over the last few days of retouching in January. The green halos put in around the women's profiles, for instance, were meant to establish the silhouette of each face more strongly - by colour contrast of green against blue-purple - and thereby have them speak to one another more decisively across the gap. It is the staging of the conversation (the picture seems to have been called La Causette, or Chatting, by the Pissarro family) that is crucial, and that I reckon does not ultimately come off. Where do we begin here? Perhaps with the kneeling woman's face. 'Je sais bien que ma Paysanne est trop jolie ... '5 The face consists, by Pissarro's standards, of an awful lot of decorative short cuts: a wafer-flat continuous tracing of pale orange to establish the bridge of the nose and nostril, straws of pure green to make the red of the lips fizz, touches of thick cream on the upper lip and chin. These are marvellous close to, for sheer naivety. It is as if Pissarro had been looking at his beloved Corot again - at Corot's figure pieces. Or even at Renoir. But I am not sure that in the end the devices make enough of a counterpoint to the shadowed profile of the woman on the ground. The face has to be delicate to the other one's massiveness, multipartite and faceted to its partner's muffled single sphere, green and red to her pink and blue. The headscarf sets the tone. It almost works. There are parts of the face that hold up at a distance - the green shadow under the eyesocket, the jawline and cast shadow from the scarf. But the whole thing strikes me as just a little too brittle, too determined to be winning. Not so much pretty as prettified. 'Prettiness is a worse danger than the ugly or the grotesque' (Le joli est un danger pire que le laid et le grotesque)\l6 Yet the problem is not prettiness in itself. Prettiness has to be admitted. Not to do so is not to admit the grounds - or one of the grounds - of one's interest in the subject of peasant women. (In the letter where Pissarro says his peasant women in general are too pretty, the whole thought is that they regularly start off that way, and only become beautiful - that is, part of the pictures' beauty - through repeated work.) The downtrodden field-women

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of Millet, or the Joan-of-Arcs-in-the-making of Jules Breton, are far deadlier fictions of labour and the female body than the one Two Young Peasant Women works to resuscitate. Anti-pastoral was by Pissarro's time (and long, long before) as much of a cliche as pastoral, and more smug in its Realist certainties. So ultimately the issue with the kneeling woman is not her delicate face so much as the fit between face and body - particularly between face and arm. I am sure, once again, that the contrast here between massiveness and delicacy was what Pissarro intended. But this time, it seems to me, anatomy really is an aesthetic problem. The arm and shoulder are bad. The kneeling woman is too much an impossible object, a compound of incompatible modes. One can almost sense Pissarro gathering up her skirts behind - the flounces look to have been added late - in a last attempt to pin her together on to the surface and give the upper body support. The skirt is a kind of cantilever. The contrivance seems desperate to me. It may seem we have come a long way from Elisee Reclus and A mon Prere, le paysan. But perhaps not. Let me go back to the question of Two Young Peasant Women's subject matter. Why are its two women peasants? Why are its peasants both women? And so on. Pissarro knew very well that painting peasants in the 1890s meant inviting comparison with Millet and Breton, and a hundred other lesser imitators in the Salon. The magazine L'Art frangais, which gave the exhibition containing Two Young Peasant Women excellent coverage in March, reproduced Breton's June the following month. More than one critic in 1892 made the link with Millet explicitly, sometimes in order to put Pissarro in his place. What would Pissarro have made of this? How would he have responded to what Gustave Geffroy wrote of his paintings in La Justice (the organ, that is, of Clemenceau's Extreme Left)? The beings who live in these landscapes have been kept in their permanent places (maintenus a leurs places permanentes). There is an accord of line and colour between these people, these animals and the decor of this greenery and sky. An intimacy of earth, atmosphere, beast, man ... These are not personages put in on top, posing for the painter in attitudes struck on call. Really, these peasant men and women are part of this nature, they could not be imagined anywhere else, and these landscapes would not be thinkable without them.7

That humans belong to the landscape they cultivate is true: it is a proposition Pissarro spent his life rephrasing. But did Geffroy's other positives follow from it, necessarily - above all, the value he apparently puts on utter peasant permanence and untranslatability (even as far as the market town down the road)? Compare this, from Clement-Janin, a critic to whom Pissarro took the trouble to write in February - and with whose general line on his philosophy

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he said he had no quarrel. Again the paper that published Clement-Janin's review was firmly on the Left: Man disappears into nature [in Pissarro's art]. His peasants are bipeds who possibly have souls (des bipedes a I'dme incertaine), fruits of the soil that supports them, as apples are of the appletree. Their architecture harmonizes with the rocks of the neighbourhood, their large feet seem to root their toes in the earth. Evidently they feel no more than the rudimentary sensations of any organized being (lls n'eprouvent evidemment que les sensations rudimentaires de tout etre organise) . . . 8

'Because in that situation our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity ... ' Simplicity is one thing (it was a quality Pissarro valued in his peasant subjects, and went on trying to find form for), mindless bipedalism another. Oh! I know, painters just shrug their shoulders at stuff like this. It is what art critics are paid to produce. And Pissarro never had any illusions that a single painting, or display of his life's work, would serve to open a distance between his view of the peasantry and the figures of condescension and hero worship in the culture at large. But this did not mean Pissarro was simply unconcerned with the ideological risks he was taking. Far from it. Some of them worried him a lot. The Millet comparison, for instance, was regularly capable of setting his letters abuzz. He knew that Millet was a constant point of reference for him, an alter ego, without whom his painting would not have existed. He hated what the Third Republic had made of the master. He never forgave his painter neighbour at Eragny, a landscapist named Pozier, for bursting into tears in front of The Angelus at the Millet memorial exhibition. 'Idiot sentimentalism', he called it in a letter.9 He knew Millet was a tragedian, a fatalist, whose bipeds would truly never escape their condition. And he knew that many of those bipeds had never been bettered for peasant physiognomy and movement. He thought - he hoped - that what he did with the schema turned it ideologically inside out. But again, the special scale and subject matter of Two Young Peasant Women put some of this (possibly all of this) in danger. If it was necessary to push one's peasant painting a little further toward the monumental and anecdotal, then the very side of Millet one loathed might reassert its powers. Two Young Peasant Women seems to have started again with Millet - literally, naively. Its two figures were partly based on two Millet woodcuts, of a shepherdess and a man with a hoe, which Pissarro had owned since 1884. Millet's son-in-law had given them to him. I interpret this as I do many other aspects of Pissarro's art in 1891. The year - for all kinds of political and art-political reasons - would not allow the implicit. Beliefs and borrowings had to be acknowledged, or at least clarified. They had to be brought up to the surface. Perhaps in doing so it would be clearer what they meant.

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Part of the reason anarchism appealed to Pissarro, I am sure, is that the great anarchists were geographers (unlike leading socialists of other stripes, who tended to be lawyers and philosophers). We know, for instance, that Pissarro was a devoted reader of Jean Grave's newspaper La Revolte. Opening La Revolte in January and February 1891 he would have found a long series of unsigned articles called 'Agriculture', in which the old tragic view of the peasantry was disputed - and equally, the new socialist platitude that the future lay with large-scale holdings and the end of the petit proprietaire. The essays were by Kropotkin, and were rewritten in the course of the year to make up The Conquest of Bread. Pissarro would hardly have started them before he came on this: Each time there is talk of agriculture, there is always the image of the peasant bent over the plough, throwing any old grain at random onto the earth and waiting in agony for what a good or bad summer will give him in return. You see his family working sixteen to eighteen hours a day and living in rags for their pains, eating dry bread and a meagre ration of bad wine. In a word, you see La Bruyere's 'wild beast'. No one dare dream of a farmer standing up straight again at long last, having time for leisure and producing enough to live on, not only for his family but for a hundred others at least, with a few hours work per day. Even the socialists, in their wildest dreams of the future, dare go no further than the great farms of America, which in fact are no more than first steps. For us, these are dreams of the Middle Ages. For the tendency of agriculture in our own time and in the immediate future (we dare say nothing about the future beyond that) lies in a different direction altogether. On less than an acre, in the space that now is generally needed to raise a single cow, there will be twenty-five; the soil will be made by man, in defiance of seasons and climate; the air and soil around the seedling will be heated; in a word, a couple of acres will yield as much as used to be harvested from a hundred; and it will be done without wearing oneself out with labour, but with an immense reduction in the sum total of work - so that we shall be able to produce what is necessary on the basis of everyone farming the fields as much as they choose, for the pleasure of doing so. This is the direction of agriculture nowadays.10

A utopia, as Pissarro said later to Octave Mirbeau.11 But followed up, in the articles appearing in spring, by Kropotkin's characteristic barrage of facts and figures on the new market gardening, fertilizers, greenhouses, strains of wheat, crop rotations. With behind it all - naturally, with the readers of La Revolte in mind - a final vision of the regenerative power of the new agriculture vis-a-vis the working-class movement. The true utopian moment in The Conquest of Bread is its imagining of the new countryside as a pole of attraction after the revolution, reversing at last the drift to the town. Its language is typically anarchist: An end to frippery then! An end to dolls' clothes! We shall go back to the work of the fields and regain our strength and gaiety, seek out the joy of life again, the impressions of nature that we had forgotten in the dark mills of the faubourgs.

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That is how a free people will think. It was the Alpine pastures, not the arquebus, that gave the Swiss of the Middle Ages their freedom from kings and lords. Modern agriculture will let the revolutionary city do the same thing - free itself from the bourgeoisies of the world.12

The last phrase of Kropotkin's is 'des bourgeoisies coalisees'. It leads me from spring to summer 1891, and from La Revolte to the Chamber of Deputies. The year 1891 was a fateful one for French agriculture, and French capitalism in general. The papers were filled with reports of a long series of debates, first in the Chamber and then in the Senate, over whether finally to respond to German, Russian, English, American, even Indian competition - opinions differed as to who was really the enemy - by putting an end to free trade. In particular, from our point of view, politicians argued endlessly over whether to save the peasant, who most of them thought was in worse shape than Kropotkin did, by building a customs wall - duties at the border on grain and beet sugar, livestock and processed food. The Republic had essentially made up its mind on these matters. It wanted protectionism, and in February 1892 it got it. The story of the next century of French agriculture was thereby set in stone, with all that story's stubbornness and pathos. But the debates of 1891 were truly passionate and elaborate, partly because the peasant was at issue, and partly because any capitalist regime is always deeply in two minds about free trade versus protectionism. Like much else in the 1890s, this aspect of fin de siecle often has a familiar ring. I savour the moment (as did the socialist benches, apparently) when Leon Say, the eloquent defender of the free trade point of view, rounded on the Minister of the Interior with the verdict: 'Protectionism - it is the socialism of the rich.' To which the Minister replied: 'And free trade is the anarchism of millionaires.'13 'In Germany', said Paul Deschanel, President of the Ligue Republicaine de la Petite Propriety, towards the start of his speech in the Chamber on 9 May, the tariffs on cereals have been fixed by M. Bismarck for the benefit of the feudal proprietors, the landed aristocracy. Various members on the Left. Just the same as with us! (Protests on the Right and Centre.) M. Paul Deschanel. No! Not the same as with us! Here the soil is divided; it was put into the hands of our peasants by the French Revolution ... Yes, it is for the sake of the people of the countryside (la democratie rurale) that we have taken these measures. And the people of the countryside are not mistaken on that score ... Remember, gentlemen, the deep crisis of agriculture in 1881 to 1884 ... that long cry of distress, discontent and disaffection that arose from the heart of our countryside ... Well, we took the cause of the peasant in hand; he sensed that the Republic was on his side; he had hope again, confidence, courage; and so, when, in the name of who knows what ambitions and designs, there came an attempt to disturb this work of rebuilding [he means the moment of Boulangism in the late 1880s], when certain great cities went over to the enemy, the peasant rose up! He

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with his robust good sense and fine feelings - he smelt out charlatanism when he saw it! (Applause on the Left and Centre.) Let us render homage to this peasant of France, who rejected dictatorship and saved the fatherland!14

Jules Meline himself, the prime mover of the tariff proposals - 'the Torquemada of beetroot', one wag called him - put the matter in cold numerical terms. There had been 19 598 000 agriculteurs counted at the time of the 1866 census, and 17 698 000 20 years later. This is a grave phenomenon, he said, because not only does it have economic consequences, but national ones. If the Minister of War were here today, he would be the first to admit that everything that diminishes our agricultural population weakens our army ... Because the army recruits from them - 1 shall not call them its bravest fighters, for all our soldiers are equally brave - but the strongest, the most hardened, the most resistant.15

For an anarchist reader, then and now, the debates make a good counterpoint to The Conquest of Bread. Here was an argument about the nature of the capitalist nation state and state system, with classic expositions of the free trade and national security cases. Both sides inflected their arguments with May Day and social democracy in view. Several speakers thought Germany responsible for all the above. And never had it been so clear - this especially would have resonated with Reclus's and Kropotkin's readers - that the built form of the State was now very much more than a set of prisons, palais de justice, fortifs, zones and customs posts. The state was a landscape. It was a pattern of agriculture and subsidy and monopoly and communication, whose forms had less and less to do each year with the facts of climate, geology or regional specialization. These things were still in their infancy. Not even the gloomiest dystopian had an inkling of what was to come. The politics of water was still quite local and gentlemanly; the labyrinth of Farm Programmes and Common Agricultural Policies was just a bureaucrat's bad dream; there were only the bare beginnings of monoculture, hyperfertilization, genetic engineering and assembly-line meat production; few people had heard of scrapie and none of mad cow. But at least anarchists knew already in the 1890s that fighting the State meant thinking geographically and biologically. Mapping capitalism, that is, not just lapping up its statistics. An end to frippery, then! An end to dolls' clothes! The subject of Two Young Peasant Women is a form of sociability, and specifically of mental life, imagined as belonging to women. (Once or twice in Pissarro's work there crop up paintings with peasant men and women imagined in contact, but, by and large, it seems, the moment of work and sociability between the sexes was just over the horizon of the representable. This is all the more interesting because just that subject, as Martine Segalen has reminded us, was one Millet regularly took on.16) We know already that Pissarro was aware, acutely at just this moment, of the razor's edge on

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which his feminizing of the world of labour stood - the risk it ran of romance or prettiness. The risk had to be taken, as I understand it, if a way was to be found out of Millet's great version of anti-pastoral (Figure 64). The deadliest aspect of that myth - and in many ways one might fairly call it the myth of the nineteenth century - was its vision of working-class consciousness. Mental life in Millet was wholly defined by the fact of labour; and 'defined' here meant stultified, externalized and all but extinguished. If, as an alternative, one wished to picture some kind of to and fro (and being together in opposition) between labour and leisure, outwardness and inwardness, type and individual - and thus between the master terms Nature and sociability then they would have to be shown as women's business. Because the world of women could be imagined as standing just a little outside, or a little apart from, the struggle with the realm of necessity. What Two Young Peasant Women works hardest to figure, it seems to me, is a moment of uncertainty between people: one or both of them waiting for an answer, or thinking things over. Neither of them being quite sure - of their feelings, or of whether what one had said expressed them properly or what the other would make of them. Of course, putting the possible states of mind or forms of interaction here into words immediately hardens and trivializes them. The uncertainty is conveyed by pose, by spatial set-up, even by facial expression. Plotted more explicitly than Pissarro usually chose to, and perhaps not entirely successfully. But above all, as I have said, the uncertainty is embodied in an atmosphere, a state of light. This is the picture's triumph, I think: that it gets its metaphor of ease and inwardness into the air in the foreground, into a shade that is palpable but not localized. An atmosphere that is there in the totality of surface touches, but never anywhere in particular - never marked, never epitomized. These women are working and talking. They are outdoors with no house in sight. It has got too hot to hoe. So take a break. Leisure is available in the interstices of work; not somewhere else, not allotted its own time of day or day of the week or forms and equipment. There is never enough of it, this leisure. Leonard Thompson can speak to that. But when it comes, it is charged and intimate and human, seizing on the instant and filling it with the thought of the previous mute hours. It is narrative, this leisure. Anecdotal. The women are working and talking - the mere fact that the two words crop up in conjunction establishes the distance between Pissarro's imagining of labour and the nineteenth- (and twentieth-) century norm. They are talking, not gossiping; that is, their talk belongs to a community of two, intent on framing the particularity of an experience: it does not happen in a ring of women at the well or the washplace, or among a group at the market, exchanging barbs and commonplaces. Not that the latter kind of exchange was incidental to the building of community. Of course not. But the folklorists

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had fetishized it - made it out to be what the discourse of community essentially was. No one was saying the well and the washplace did not count. Pissarro chronicled both. It was just that such moments chimed in too easily with the notion of peasant society as all outward - all custom, proverb and moral economy; and with the corollary idea that it did not make room for - did not depend on - quite other moments, more concentrated and individual. Taken together, these ideas confirmed the century's founding myth. Its wish to have work be the true Nature of a class. Haunting this chapter (and maybe any discussion of class and labour after the fall of Communism) have been the following suspicions, which at this point had better be spelt out. First, that the strong form of the myth just outlined - and strong forms, verbal as well as visual, were never in short supply - had something truly monstrous and totalizing to it. For it made out work to be one class's identity: its invading and structuring reality, that is, as opposed to one among several conditions (no doubt the dominant one, and no doubt confining and malforming) of a necessarily more complex sociality. Work was what mattered. It put the working class in unique, transfiguring touch with the very stuff of existence. And therefore it made it the class of Nature, from whose terrible dealings with the realm of necessity a new human naturalness would in due course emerge. Second, that this myth was profoundly a product of bourgeois society, playing out that society's deepest fears and wishes. (The 'worker' was always ultimately a figure of the bourgeois's self-loss and self-transformation. Hence the centrality of Hegel's pages on lordship and bondage, which make the cognitive interdependence of the classes their explicit theme. Nothing after Hegel altered the myth's basic terms and teleology.) And third, that in inheriting and reworking the myth, Marxism and social democracy inherited too much. They found themselves subject to a pattern of imagery and wish-fulfilment that pulled the conceiving of new forms of sociality back and back toward a metaphorics of Nature, Scarcity, Fate, Brute Force and Species-Being. So maybe in retrospect it turns out - this is the worst suspicion - that Socialist Realism, in its very banality and duplicity, was the truth of the socialist imagining of the working class. For did not all efforts (even ones as sober and fanatical as Pissarro's) to put work and identity in a different relation to one another - more equivocal, more open to individual negotiation - necessarily find themselves struggling with a language, be it Millet's or Hegel's or Marx's, which had them saying again what they had set out not to say? Where did they end but tacking to and fro between a new version of La Bruyere's wild beast (or of Courbet's desolate, isolated Stonebreakers) and an answering, abstract, metaphysical model of solidarity? This brings me to the last piece in my 1891 jigsaw - a lecture delivered early in the year, to various audiences, by the Belgian artist Henry van de

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Velde. The title of his lecture was 'Du Paysan en peinture'. Pissarro and his work loomed large in it. Van de Velde was 27 years old. He was a painter and writer, and eventually became one of the prime movers of turn-of-thecentury architecture and design. His paintings had been pointillist since 1888, with peasant life as their main theme. He had fallen under Mallarme's spell, and counted himself a Symbolist. I suspect he already had passages of Nietzsche by heart - later he was chosen as designer of the Nietzsche archive. Certainly he knew the leaders of Belgian socialism, and was well read in anarchist and Marxist literature. He admired William Morris and Walter Crane, and in 1891 was reassessing his neo commitments. Out of that taking stock came his main entry to the 1892 les Vingt, done in tempera, called Project for ornamental embroidery. With it the peasant in painting took a characteristic fin de siecle turn. 'Du Paysan en peinture' is a piece of socialist Symbolism. I believe the text is best understood as a series of interconnected prose poems, in which the various appearances of the peasant in painting since Brueghel are passed in review. Partly these are meant to suggest (and they do so unanswerably, I think) that previous studies of the subject have failed to understand the stakes involved. The peasant, says van de Velde, is the very form of Reality in European culture - that culture which more and more saw itself, from the sixteenth century on, as defined by its wish, and ability, to stick to the world of things. The peasant is the Real, meaning Earth, Matter, Laughter, Scepticism, Bodily Renewal, Primitiveness, anti-Transcendence. So many pegs, essentially, for the bourgeois philosophy of life. All of this is preliminary to the lecture's last ten pages, which centre on Millet and Pissarro. The pages are climactic, and contradictory. I believe they are meant to play out the choices facing any painter of peasants at the end of the nineteenth century; and the further one goes in reading them, the more impossible the choices become. Of course on the face of it van de Velde is on Pissarro's side. He strikes a Kropotkin note. It is time for the tragic theatricality of Millet to be put to death. Modernity has arrived in the village, and agriculture is no longer a life-and-death struggle with the seasons. Railways, fertilizers and cheap insurance policies have changed all that. What had to be done was to bring the Peasant closer to ourselves, and take him away from the factitious atmosphere of the theatre. That stage on which the exaggeration of his gestures, and the visual heaviness of his poses, wore him out more than hard labour itself! So Camille Pissarro sought him o u t... His field-hands no longer stand tall like heroes, and they make one suspect that the beauty of form belonging to their ancestors must have been a lie, or at any rate an exception; they make do with new, more complex shapes, more intricate and tortuous, in line with their diet of starches and scraps.

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They are inclined to simpler, more servile, more external attitudes (lls affectionnent des attitudes plus simples, plus serviles, plus en dehors), with real weather soaking into them at last, having them suffer its harsh cold and sunburn. ' - October, with its hoar frosts, chaps the flesh of the young girls who mind the cows in the Eragny meadows, and the women who do the Applepicking beat the trees and sweat in the real light of the sun/ This time, the Peasant evolves in the true humility of his work, bound close to a decor which is less episodic, less decorative, with the ring of truth to it, and so powerfully done that it holds the Being who moves within it in a savage embrace, ruling him inflexibly, with all the weight of correspondences set up between Peasant and surroundings - creating a Peasant who at last is truly himself!17

This passage is humane and suggestive, and obviously I had to quote it. But in the end what is most impressive in van de Velde's last ten pages is what happens before and after the evocation of Pissarro, and the way the before and after consume the body of painting they are meant to frame. Before is Millet. And Millet is the true hero of van de Velde's text, in spite of - or because of - his hyperbole and cant. The text knows that the nineteenth century has nowhere to go beyond the Man with a Hoe. 'The apparition of the Peasant in Millet is such an enormous fact, and such a work of excavation was needed to get back to the giant source of things through the rottenness that had invaded everything, that nowadays people like to say Millet "fumbled through episodes from the Bible".' This was a palpable hit. Pissarro was fond of calling Millet 'too Biblical', and shaking his head at the fact that he, a Jew, found that a fault. What Millet gave back the Peasant was space ... And for the first time in Painting, the Peasant was really bound to the Earth! ... Truly Hatred drives the Peasant on, making him punish the Earth interminably that great sow the Earth, as capacious and invincible as the sea! It is Hatred, this endless hand-to-hand combat; an eternal flurry of foul blows, dirtying the Earth in everything She has most beautiful: flowers, which the Peasant abominates, and trees, which are his worst enemy, and which slyly he chokes to death if he is denied the ultimate pleasure of setting on them directly with an axe ... If they love the Earth, these louts, it is in the way of monsters who love women for the living they get off them!18

You will gather I am translating freely, leaving too much out; and also that translation is a lost cause. But I hope the English gives at least an idea of the temper of these pages, and the way they veer between celebration and travesty. There are six long pages on Millet - struggling with avant-garde condescension towards him, trying for a rhetoric to match the master's, berating him, glorifying him, establishing him as a horizon beyond which the century cannot pass. Or not pass artistically. For here is the final message of 'Du Paysan en peinture', and surely the one Pissarro would have found the most truly discouraging. Of course Millet's peasant is a thing of the past, says van de

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Velde. The tragedy of labour is coming to an end. The countryside is being modernized. And modernity puts an end to the possibility of representing the peasant - for modernity in the village epitomizes (brings to a head) the true banality of the late nineteenth century. The tragedy of labour gives way to the farce of property-owning democracy. Nietzsche, in the lecture's last two pages, vies with the Flaubert of Bouvard et Pecuchet. For a new decor is arriving, which will bring in turn a whole fatal, unconscious change of life; the new insurance policies will have done more than our most brilliant theories, our most ferocious attacks, to destroy that most odious of rural society's aspects - the Picturesque! They will have brought modernity to the countryside without even trying to ... Do you not see it in the puerile new house that has just gone up, pink and cheery, fortune-teller of the village to come! That is where modernity lives. She is straightening up the undisciplined cottages of times gone by. She has put them in pitiless straight lines, and where once upon a time they were painted all the colours of the rainbow, now they are pink - new and pink! And in the midst of them rises the pompous new school... The imbecile enemy of legend and credulity, full of the vanity of the parvenu, giving itself the airs of a cathedral; fatting itself on the old blood-feuds of the countryside, so that its very sweat runs pink; huffing and puffing till it swells to the size of its rival the Church And out beyond the village square, along the dirt roads rise up new farms, with their precious pink bricks all carefully protected by little straw hats of cropped thatch; and all their openings correct and rectangular, with blinds and shutters to match ... Modernity has cut everything down to size!19

You see now, I hope, why 'Du Paysan en peinture' is the text that tells us most about Pissarro's situation as a painter in 1891, and why Pissarro passed over it in silence. For its version of modernism is unbearable. Everything we value in the past, it says - and that means all the dreams and duplicities the peasant was made to stand for over four centuries - is being destroyed by progress. Progress is odious and absurd; and yet we cannot argue that what we value in the past should survive, because it too was odious, even if not absurd; and because the price of it was some people (many people) being worked literally to death. There is a photograph of Pissarro's studio (Figure 6.5), taken soon after his death, which shows, hanging on the wall straight across from his easel, a mixture of old and new paintings. Pissarro would have seen them each day as he worked. Given pride of place are two from the 1870s, the years of action in common with Cezanne. A canvas from 1874 called La Mere Presle (Figure 6.6), of a peasant woman bringing buckets from a well. It is one of the first of Pissarro's pictures in which the peasant figure predominated. A small painting, but evidently treasured. And above it is the portrait Pissarro

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had done of Cezanne the same year, showing his friend in aggressively rustic uniform, posed against a strange (uncharacteristically up-to-the-minute) background of other images - mainly caricatures from the press. Courbet the beer-swilling Communard rampant top right. One of Pissarro's own studies of a village street - trust him to choose the most modest and throwaway! just visible past Cezanne's sleeve. The odious Thiers top left, midwife to the Third Republic - exulting in the bourgeoisie's ability to pay off the war debt to Germany. The room in the photograph is quiet. It all happened a long time ago. La Mere Presle is a dim shape - Courbet and Thiers barely visible. I forget what the anger was about. But the wall was a daily reminder, nonetheless, of what image-making was like under modem conditions. Out of what ideological confusion and violence it came, and on whose shoulders it might rest. So that 'our elementary feelings might be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated'. 'So as to make the work affirm', as Pissarro put it to an interviewer in 1892, 'what one is feeling within.'20 Obviously these latter wishes and identifications are naive. It is open to anyone to call them manipulative, or self-deceiving, or bogus or bourgeois. I see why. Part of me is on van de Velde's side, or Leonard Thompson's. But part, as will be obvious, is with Wordsworth and Reclus. The photograph is my image of what a bourgeois artist's empathy with the working class made possible. No doubt van de Velde announces an era - shall we call it the era of Left Nietzscheanism? - in which such sympathies and identifications are laughed to scorn. 'In his art', as Nietzsche said of Wagner, 'all that the modem world requires most urgently is mixed in the most seductive manner: the three great stimulantia of the exhausted - the brutal, the artificial, and the innocent (idiotic).'21 Does this apply to Millet, or to Pissarro, or to the one just as much as the other? Is the whole nineteenth century outlawed in the same breath? Is Millet the brutal, idiotic truth of the bourgeois myth of labour, and Pissarro just its innocent, artificial apologist? Better the farce of property-owning democracy, in other words, than the pseudo-tragedy of the hammer and sickle? I do not believe so, but I see Nietzsche's and van de Velde's point.

Notes 1.

A fuller treatment of the picture and its circumstances can be found in Clark, T. J., Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press,

2.

Reclus, £., A M onfrere, le paysan, new edn (Netherlands, 1894), pp. 55-6 and 54 (I have reversed the order of the paragraphs).

3.

Blythe, R., Akenfield, Portrait of an English Village, new edn (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 39 40. Thompson later became an activist in the Agricultural Labourers' Union.

1 9 9 9 )/ PP- 5 5 - 1 3 7 -

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4.

Wordsworth, W., 'Preface', Lyrical Ballads (Bristol, 1800), quoted from Barrell, J. and Bull, J., The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 452.

5.

Camille Pissarro to Lucien Pissarro, 22 November 1894, in Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, 5 vols, ed. J. Bailly-Herzberg (Paris: Valhermeil, 1980-91), vol. 3, pp. 5 12 -13 . (Hereafter cited as CP.)

6.

Pissarro to Lucien, 18 June 1891, CP, vol. 3, p. 95.

7.

Geffroy, G., 'Chronique Artistique. L'Exposition de Camille Pissarro', La Justice, 2 February 1892, p. 1.

8.

Clement-Janin, 'Chronique: Camille Pissarro', L'Estafette, 18 February 1892, p. 1.

9.

Pissarro to Lucien, 16 May 1887, CP, vol. 2, p. 169.

10.

Anonymous (Kropotkin), 'L'Agriculture', La Revolte, 12 -19 December 1890, pp. 1-2.

11.

Pissarro to Mirbeau, 21 April 1892, CP, vol. 3, p. 217. Perhaps 'one day these things will be possible, unless mankind founders and returns to utter barbarism'. The last was far from being an empty qualification.

12.

Anonymous, 'L'Agriculture', La Revolte, 27 December 1890-2 January 1891, pp. 1-2.

13.

See Auge-Laribe, M., La Politique agricole de la France de 1880 a 1940 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), p. 218, and compare ibid., pp. 241-6 on the 18 91-92 debates.

14.

Journal Officiel de la republique frangaise (Chambre des deputes, 1891), p. 832, quoted in part in Pierre Barral, Les Agrariens frangais de Meline a Pisani (Paris: Colin, 1968), p. 87.

15.

Journal Officiel (1891), p. 855 (11 May 1891).

16.

Martine Segalen, Love and Power in the Peasant Family, trans. S. Matthews (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983). Segalen repeatedly uses Millet's pictures to back up other evidence of male-female co-operation in the peasant household and farm.

17.

Henry van de Velde, 'Du Paysan en Peinture', V A rt moderne de Bruxelles, 22 February 1891, p. 61, quoted in Canning, S., Henry van de Velde (186 3-19 57), exhibition catalogue (Antwerp and Otterlo, 1988), p. 237. The later published version of the lecture, 'Du Paysan en peinture', V A ven ir social, August, September and October 1899, omits some of the detail of the original description of Pissarro.

18.

Van de Velde, L'Avenir social, September 1899, pp. 332-3.

19.

Van de Velde, L'A rt moderne, pp. 61-2.

20.

See Gsell, P., 'La Tradition Artistique Frangaise, 1, LTmpressionisme', La Revue politique et litteraire, 49, 26 March (1892), 404.

21.

Nietzsche, F., 'The Case of Wagner', in W. Kaufmann (ed.), Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 1968), p. 622. Nietzsche's pamphlet was published in French translation by the socialist journal La Societe nouvelle in January 1892.

6 .i

Camille Pissarro, Two Young Peasant Women, 1892

6.2

Camille Pissarro, Peasant Woman Sitting and Peasant Woman Kneeling, 1893

6.3

Jean Francois Millet, The Angelus, 1857

6.4

Jean Francois Millet, Shepherd with his Flock at Everting, 1857-60

6.5

Unknown photographer, The Studio of Pissarro at Eragny, c. 1903

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6.6 Camille Pissarro, La Mere Presle, 1874

7

Mihaly Biro's N ep sza va poster and the emergence of Tendenzkunst*

Sherwin Simmons

In 19 17 Lajos Kassak, the Hungarian activist artist and poet, wrote the following lines in a poem entitled 'With a Poster Column': and here even on the city's stirring hysterical body only you and I torchlight our age we sing and fight against blood and black boredom to the death and so up up on the spreading simple rhythms of labour brother on the formidable hills and dales of grief let us sing anew the democracy of free competition the buy and sell phrases of preaching fools and rabbit skinned scoundrels amidst unholy scents for oh by tomorrow perhaps yesterday will devour all1

The lines play out a self-identification with a poster column drawn in the poem's earlier lines: I have columnified next to you like the brother with a fine, cylindrical chest, lit eyes with an ample, raw voice

The poem images the labour behind lustrous images of commodities on the columns, labour's weary repetition as slow death, while it also hints at an alternative role for the poster, its participation in the struggle for labour's liberation through the brotherhood of socialist revolution.

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Kassak's poem is unique in the connection drawn between the poster and avant-garde artistic and political aspirations. His perception was linked both to the historical circumstances of Hungary's socialist movement and to the presence therein of Mihaly Biro, an artist whose poster (Figure 7.1) for Nepszava (The People's Voice), the newspaper of the Hungarian Social Democratic Party, had become the most famous socialist representation of labour in the years just before the First World War. They also envision an increasing role of art in public and political space, an anticipation of the next decade's development. This chapter responds to issues raised by Kassak's poem and is structured in two sections. The first explores why Biro's political posters provoked such initial controversy in Hungary and how they intersected with a debate in Germany about art's place within socialist political and cultural life. The second examines the continued development of Biro's art during the war and revolution and how those events created a context for a more positive reception of his work in Austria and Germany, eventually making him a model for leading artists such as Laszlo Peri and John Heartfield who were associated with the communist parties in those countries. While Biro's work was well known earlier in the century, his name is not familiar today.2 Born in 1886 into a Jewish family that ran a spice business in a provincial town, Biro moved with his family to Budapest in 1899 and studied sculpture at the Applied Art School from 1903 to 1908. Following graduation he received a travel grant and spent 1909 in Munich, Berlin and Brussels, before travelling to England in the autumn where he worked for ten months in C. R. Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft in Chipping Camden. His decision to study with Ashbee, who attempted to realize the artistic and social ideals propagated by William Morris, was influenced by his relationship with his older half-brother, who was Nepszava's editor. During the century's first decade the newspaper had informed the public about artistic develop­ ments that were seen as sympathetic to socialism. For instance, when Lajos Kassak travelled to Brussels in 1909, he visited Victor Horta's Maison du Peuple and sought out the sculpture of Constantine Meunier because Nepszava had acquainted him with Vart social.3 Upon his return to Budapest in autumn 1910, Biro began to provide illustrations for Nepszava. His first posters were done that same autumn for a socialist demonstration that protested Hungary's suffrage system which gave large agrarian landowners inordinate legislative power.4 Only 6 per cent of the population was eligible to vote under the most restrictive system in Europe which allowed the landed gentry to comprise 50 per cent of the legislature while urban workers had no representation.5 The Social Democrats had organized demonstrations in support of universal suffrage in 1905 and 1907 and during 1910 these actions quickened and became more militant after a corrupt election replaced a

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coalition government with one totally under the control of the agrarians.6 Simultaneously, rising tensions in the Balkans caused the monarchy in Vienna to demand new taxes to support increased military spending. These two issues - election reform and opposition to military spending - were the topics of Biro's early political posters for the Social Democratic Party. From the beginning his posters were different from previous political posters, finding their models in caricature rather than in allegorical painting.7 His poster of 1912 for an anti-military demonstration depicts death as a military officer shovelling bodies into a cannon breach, literalizing the term 'cannon fodder/ a technique typical of caricature.8Similarly, while his image of the Red Man with the Hammer had a distant relationship to paintings of mythological figures such as Vulcan and allegorical representations of labour, the motif had long become the subject of caricature in satire magazine illustrations, to which his gestural treatment was also linked. Biro later contrasted this drawing style to traditional political posters, noting that 'powerful, lightning-like strokes have a greater impact on the masses than beautifully executed posters'.9 Biro opposed his work to the technically adept lithography of the 1880s and 1890s which translated oil painting's illusionistic effects into posters and illustrations for special May Day newspapers.10 During the late 1890s in Germany the style of the German Social Democrat Party's (SPD's) May Day illustrations changed under the influence of Eduard Fuchs. As editor of Siiddeutsche Postilion, a socialist satire magazine, Fuchs had developed into a scholar of caricature, collecting and publishing examples of the visual art created during the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune. In 1901 he was made editor of the Vorwarts Verlag's May Day newspaper and began to utilize the work of earlier artists such as Honore Daumier as well as contemporary artists such as Walter Crane, Theophile Steinlen and Kathe Kollwitz, who were part of a developing activist art with close ties to leftist political organizations.11 Given his brother's role in the socialist press, Biro was certainly aware of these developments, for his posters grow from the concept of Tendenzkunst which Fuchs discussed in an essay for the May Day paper of 1907 and related to Ilse Schiitze-Schurr's title-page illustration. Fuchs wrote: The title page shows a young worker. The young powerful form stands monumental before a typical background. It has a personal character in the drawing as in the bearing; however, it at the same time possesses something typical, general. And thereby the representation transcends casual reproduction of an individual person. The form becomes a symbol, a symbol of socialism which like it is powerful and young and likewise looks into the future.12

Fuchs's views reflected those of the party's left-wing theorists, such as Anton Pannekoek who contributed brief essays to the paper; and Fuchs's satirical jabs at revisionists and party functionaries eventually led to his dismissal in 1908. He responded by self-publishing a satire about the 1909 Party Day in

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Leipzig which mocked the party's increasingly bureaucratic concerns that focused on legislative reform rather than revolution. One drawing, which distantly recalled Delacroix's Liberty on the Barricades, showed a right-wing delegate mounting a barricade of consumer goods and waving a flag which bore the legend 'Consumer Association: Bread or Death' in one hand and carrying an oil can in the other whose legend read 'Consumer Association Gasoline of a Devoutly Conceptual Type'.13 The party's cultural policies were dismissed by announcement of a seven-step art appreciation course whose tedious focus on teaching workers how to properly see and value canonical works of art was satirized by a final lesson that consisted of 'choosing the nail most effective for the picture's effect and correctly driving it into the wall'.14 Biro's poster for Nepszava encouraged a relationship to art quite different from passive aesthetic consumption. It strove to be Tendenzkunst, which Fuchs described as 'a combining of artistic form so completely with content that a unity is reached that is objectively perfect and personally unique. It is clear in this that anyone who wants to offer something new and personal must have connected himself with the material'.15 The Red Man first appeared on the cover of a special issue of the newspaper that was published on 8 July 19 11 and asserted the paper's continued agitation, even in the face of press censorship, on behalf of the party's goals.16 Its image of a hammerwielding worker was traditional, sanctioned by classical myth, and updated in recent social art by Steinlen and others. Radically new, however, was its engagement with the media of newspaper and poster. Printed in semi­ transparent red ink, it united text and image in a new way, materializing the paper's role as the people's and party's voice. Appearing to step off the page, the figure modelled an active agency in public space, taking the advancing images of earlier social art a step further. Also new were its fiery redness, the gestural strokes of the crayon, the pose which refuses to resolve tension through contraposto, and the naked body modelled on the physique of Hungary's heavyweight boxing champion.17 Ultimately, the image's newness revolves around the open question about the ultimate focus of the massive hammer. Directed into public space rather than onto an anvil's surface, it and the other signs suggests that impulsive destructive action could be productive. The significance of this is found in the context of political events in June and July 19 11 when an effort by the small liberal faction in Parliament to block the defence bill until progress was made on suffrage reform collapsed.18 The socialists organized street demonstrations, for which Biro designed a poster which showed a red giant ramming the door in a wall surrounding the Parliament building.19 In spring 1912 the Nepszava image was printed in larger scale as a poster and also projected as an advertisement in cinemas.20

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Around the same time Biro created another poster which called for workers to gather before Parliament on 4 March 1912 to 'ask the gentlemen how things stand on suffrage reform'.21 It visualized this event from above, with streams of workers carrying red flags moving from factories to gather around the Parliament building. Out of the mass rises a giant red fist, an image of collective worker power erupting in public space, recalling perhaps the heroic martyrdom of those executed in the Paris Commune.22 Tensions continued to build in Budapest until 23 May 1912 when a general strike called by the party shut down Budapest even though three issues of Nepszava were confiscated during the days before.23 Putting down their tools at 8 a.m. on what became known as Red Thursday, columns of workers converged on Parliament from outlying factory districts pushing back police units that were charged with preventing the marches. By 10 a.m. Parliament was completely surrounded and exchanges of gunfire with the police broke out as workers attempted to force their w ay into the building. By noon the entire garrison of 9 000 soldiers was called onto the streets and reinforcements requested from surrounding districts. Retreating from the city centre, workers held the suburbs through the night until the party leadership decided not to extend the strike, believing that their point had been forcefully made. The event stirred interest in socialist circles worldwide, but particularly in Germany where the tactic of the mass strike had been vigorously supported by Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek and others in the SPD's left-wing following its successful employment in Russia during 1905. Although party moderates managed to quiet the debate between 1906 and 1909, it broke out in 1910 when spontaneous mass demonstrations in Prussia about election reform caused such fears among the SPD leadership that in March they banned any discussion of the mass strike in the party press.24 Luxemburg and Pannekoek eventually forced an airing of their ideas in Die Neue Zeit, the party's main theoretical journal which was edited by Karl Kautsky. Beginning in May 1910 and continuing through early 1913 there was a vigorous and often personally painful exchange of articles as Kautsky rejected the present use of the mass strike against Luxemburg's and Pannekoek's belief in its value in contemporary conditions as a means of revolutionizing workingclass consciousness and creating organizational structures outside the control of SPD functionaries. Commentary about developments in Hungary was interspersed with these articles about the mass strike and when its use on Red Thursday was reported in an article entitled 'The Proletarian Fist', the author expressed amazement that a party as small as the Social Democrats in a country as backward as Hungary could make effective use of the radical tactic. He quickly, however, distanced this from conditions in Germany, where the SPD had recently won a third of the Reichstag's seats, and said that the tactic was of no use to the

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SPD.25 Just as the article's title indicates that notice was quickly taken in Germany of Biro's posters, similar indication is also given by a drawing that appeared in Der Wahre Jacob, the SPD satire magazine, on 18 July 19 11.26 Entitled 'Vulcan and his Victims,' it shows a giant, his hammer tucked in the waist band of his loincloth, standing over a destroyed factory and saying to the devastated workers: 'Don't grumble, it's better to be smashed by the machine than to starve.' This is undoubtedly a response by the SPD to Biro's initial image of the Red Man, warning German workers not to follow the Hungarian by associating the image with the machine-breaking tactics of the Luddites in England during the 1810s. One wonders, however, if such an association also occurred to Biro, only as a positive image of an early spontaneous collective action by workers, an important moment and tactic in the development of proletarian consciousness. Also instructive is a poster produced by the SPD for the 1912 election for the Bavarian state legislature in which an image originally created in 1899 was reused, possibly to counter the growing infamy of Biro's image.27 Conservative in style and propriety, the representative of socialism is here modelled on Prometheus who steals fire from the gods and raises the torch of truth on the right side, while on the left the gesture of his fist consigns fanaticism and dogmatism, symbolized by the thistle, snake, skull and book, to the darkness of the past. This may have well been an effort by the SPD in Bavaria, which stood to the Right within the national party, to visually declare its association with revisionist socialism against the continued calls for revolutionary tactics by the Left. An additional image in Germany that was possibly informed by Biro's image stood more distant from party politics. George Grosz did three drawings dated 20 and 26 January 1912 and entitled 'The Modem Gulliver' in the sketchbook where he developed ideas for drawings that he hoped to sell to satire magazines. While no similar drawing appeared in any of the satire magazines where Grosz's work was regularly published, the drawings appear to comment on the SPD's recent stunning success in the Reichstag election in which the socialists received more votes than any other party.28A giant stands on the outskirts of a city calmly smoking a pipe and looks down with amusement at tiny figures who take his photograph and gawk. A soft cap sits on his head and his hands are casually thrust into pockets of an elegant suit whose blue colour only distantly recalls the typical worker's Montageanzug. Grosz's image contradicts the standard socialist embodiment of labour as a resolute masculine hero and also stands at an ironic distance from a drawing entitled 'Worries of the Employer' which had been published in Der Wahre Jacob previously.29 There a top-hatted capitalist climbing a ladder leaned against the leg of a giant worker dressed in stereotypical clothes complains: 'If the lout grows any more, soon I will no longer be able to reach into his pocket.' Several years later Grosz wrote to a friend that the

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SPD's bureaucratic wrangling contributed to his disillusion with party politics and here one sees that disillusion's impact on his image of a modern worker who spends his wages on elegant shoes to look sharp on Saturday night and thus stands at odds with both the comfortable satire in Wahre Jacob and the militant activism of Biro's poster. It is likely that Grosz and other German artists soon became aware of Biro's work because references to his posters appeared not only in social democratic newspapers and satire magazines, but also in Das Plakat, the main German advertising journal which used the term 'proletarian artist' to describe Biro in its first major article about him.30 Daniel Vamai, the article's author, had employed this term previously while reviewing a Budapest exhibition of over 130 posters by Biro, but its use in Germany positioned Biro within an ongoing debate about art's relationship to the proletariat.31 The SPD's right-wing largely viewed art and politics as separate realms, while the centre was strongly effected by Franz Mehring's aesthetic position that saw art as socially determined, but continued to value the classical aesthetic principles developed by the bourgeoisie during their struggle for self-definition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.32 Fuchs had raised the issue of Tendenzkunst through his publication of Aus dem Klassenkampf in 1894 and had written in 1898: 'We are therefore of the opinion that our party art has become the beautiful bough on the tree of proletarian art, that art, to which the future belongs.'33 While Mehring and the centre controlled the debate during the century's first decade, calls for an activist art created by members of the working class emerged after 1910 as the party's left-wing attempted to radicalize the party in various ways.34 Between 1910 and 1912 Herman Heijermans, a Dutch poet writing as Heinz Sperber, published a series of articles in Vorwdrts which claimed a long heritage for tendentious art and called for the proletariat to develop its own forms of art in opposition to those of the bourgeoisie.35 Criticism from Mehring and others vigorously opposed proletarian art, with an entire issue of Die Neue Zeit devoted to the debate in 1912, but the idea found support within the SPD's left-wing, as reflected in Klara Zetkin's statement: 'The proletariat cannot rattle the gates of the capitalist citadel, it cannot rise above the darkness and poverty of the factories, without grappling with its artistic vision and the art of our time.'36 In Austria and Germany it was mainly political writers who mentioned Biro's work, while art critics remained silent. For instance, while articles in the Arbeiter Zeitung, Vienna's social democratic paper, addressed the role played by Biro's posters in political events in Budapest, there was no mention of his 1912 exhibition in the art column written by Arthur Roefiler.37 Roefiler had no interest in a redefinition of art's relationship to politics, rather he focused on modernist groups and exhibitions, such as the Secession and Hagenbund, which had emerged in the bourgeois culture of fin-de-siecle

I 40

WORK AND THE IMAGE I

Vienna. By 1912 he had become the major critical supporter of expressionist artists like Egon Schiele who, Roefiler wrote, had 'no moralistic intent, did not want to horrify with the repulsiveness' found in his early depictions of proletarian children, but only wished 'to capture the new for art'.38 While art critics outside Hungary did not respond to Biro's art, the situation was different inside the country. Lajos Kassak, in an article entitled 'The Poster and the New Painting' that was written in 1916 for the radical cultural journal Ma (Today), foresaw a new alliance between avant-garde art and politics.39 He believed that the poster helped artists find the path beyond Naturalism and Impressionism. The good poster is always bom in the spirit of radicalism - its creator wishes to make it break through a sluggish mass or a hostile current - and for this reason it leaps on to the stage as an absolute force on its own, and never as part of a mass simply to record something. By its very nature it has the properties of an agitator, but in its essence it is never forced within limits ... Without losing its real mission, it may carry in itself all the values hitherto seen in painting, indeed it may add new values to it much more easily than any 'artistically' created picture.40

While Kassak wrote that he did not know if Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism and Simultanism had taken note of the poster, he believe that they were gravitating towards its style and its ability to herald 'mighty social reform'. The poster's growing role as propaganda after events of August 1914 must have helped Kassak come to this understanding about the future association of the poster with politics.41 Biro applied his advertising talent to the war effort, creating posters for aid societies and war bond campaigns.42 Like the worker members of Social Democratic parties, Biro's Red Man put on a uniform and picked up a rifle. In an article entitled 'Politics/Art/ Advertising' published in Das Plakat, Paul Westheim argued that Biro had anticipated the close relationship that developed during the war between politics and advertising.43 German intellectuals, many of whom had con­ demned and distanced advertising from cultural expression, were forced by the expressive power of Allied propaganda posters to rethink a relationship between art, advertising, and politics which was becoming important in a society increasing dominated by mass communications. Biro was a model of a new type artist, a point also made by Jozsef Pogany in an article that responded to Westheim's discussion.44 Pogany described Biro as the first to create advertising which served both mass production and mass political movements, phenomena that were interconnected and equally served by the poster. Exhibitions, such as the one in May 1912 at which 30 political and over 100 commercial posters were shown, made the range of his work clear and demonstrated the various uses to which his Red Man image could be put in the emerging economy of signs, its signification ranging across voting rights, advertisement for his own exhibition, a call for donations to purchase

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a new plane for a famous Hungarian aviator and the promotion of paper products.45 The difficulties faced by an artist who used posters to oppose the government had also been made clear when Biro was prosecuted in June 1914 on sedition charges for posters which protested a new press censorship law by portraying Nepszava's Red Man as Gulliver enchained by the police.46 As the war persisted Biro returned to a political position that challenged the government. Beginning in March 1918 he worked for a series of radical journals and newspapers, leading to a poster in early November that showed the Red Man overturning the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and demanding a republic.47 Following Count Mikaly Karolyi's proclamation of a liberal republic on 16 November 1918, Biro reused the original Red Man image in a poster printed on the Nepszava front page that announced the political change.48 This poster may have stimulated the following lines in Kassak's poem 'Poster. At daybreak from the fifth floor' of 1918: Some wild blacksmith now beats out the Marseillaise on his anvil and while my hairy, hot chest breathlessly shines in the light: there is nothing at all: only I and the hot-headed blacksmith, the blacksmith who went wild and I who literally had bathed, I, I, I and the city's sensual morning mood, like a rattle, throws a red cap into space.49

Biro continued to work for the new Socialist Party that was formed after the Karolyi government lost support during March 1919 and the social democrats and the communists led by Bela Kun joined forces for planned elections. Biro did election posters for the new party, one of which pictured the Red Man painting the Parliament building red.50 Before the election was held, however, Karolyi resigned and the Hungarian Soviet Republic was formed on 21 March with Bela Kun as its nominal leader. Avant-garde artists took over important positions in the art schools and on administrative boards, with Biro placed in charge of state poster production. Shortly after the Soviet Republic's formation, he created a poster that showed a giant red fist smashing the table at the Paris peace conference.51 Its text, which read 'You Scoundrels! Had You Wanted That?', alluded to the demands made by victorious Allied countries for Hungarian territory. Das Plakat reported that versions of his Red Man with the Hammer up to 12 metres in height were posted throughout Budapest on 1 May 1919 and soon became the image most closely identified with the Soviet Republic.52 Many artists, such as Robert Bereny, Geza Farago, Bertalan Por, and Bela Uitz, followed Biro's lead and created powerful revolutionary posters.53 In an article about those posters Ivan Hevesy pointed out the spatial dynamism in Biro's May Day poster which continued to exemplify the visual force necessary for effective posters, even to eyes familiar with it.54 Over the summer and autumn of 1919, while the Soviet Republic collapsed and Admiral Miklos Horthy installed a military dictatorship, Biro's work

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continued to be a focus of attention as large sums of money were expended on producing and distributing posters that transformed the Red Man for the purposes of the new regime. Manno Miltiades created at least three images that expressed regret for the revolution or exploited anti-Semitism to incite revenge of alleged atrocities.55 One, which bears the legend 'They Wash Themselves!' (Figure 7.2), responded to the Socialist Party poster that Biro designed for the aborted March 1919 election. Blood pours from the red Parliament building into the Danube, while the Red Man bathes, a knife clinched in his teeth to make the point that he was responsible for the sanguineous flood. As in other posters, Miltiades gave the Red Man a stereotyped hooked nose to suggest that Jews were responsible for the revolutionary violence. It was not only the extreme right, however, who appropriated Biro's work in the post-war period. When the German Communist Party (KPD) decided to participate in the May 1920 Reichstag election, they based one of the few posters employed in their campaign on Biro's image of the red fist smashing the table at the Paris peace conference.56 Their fist, which is associated with the legend 'Vote Spartakus,' shatters the speaker's podium in the Reichstag and scatters the frightened legislators. Following Biro's emigration to Vienna in 1919, he designed election posters for the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPO) and advertised its newspaper, the Arbeiter Zeitung.57 These activities and his 1920 series of lithographs that treated atrocities committed by the Horthy regime made his work widely known in Germany where it was seen in various left-wing art exhibitions.58 During 1919-20 many of the artists who had worked on behalf of the Hungarian Soviet Republic emigrated to Vienna and Berlin where they published journals such as Ma, Egyseg (Unity), Akasztott Ember (Hanged Man), and £k (Wedge), constantly redefining their concepts of the relationship between art and politics.59 Bela Uitz, who had designed powerful posters for the Soviet Republic and established contact with Russian constructivists in Moscow when he represented the Hungarian Communist Party (KMP) at the Third Comintern Congress during Summer 1921, continued to work with Biro's Red Man image in Vienna when the Austrian Communist Party (KPO) commissioned him to publish The Luddite Movement, an edition of 14 etchings.60 The theme was suggested by Ernst Toller's play The Machine Wreckers which opened on 30 June 1922 under the direction of Karl-Heinz Martin at the Grofies Schauspielhaus in Berlin. Toller began writing the play in the winter of 1920-21 while in prison for his participation in the Munich Soviet Republic. Shortly after the play's premier he wrote that the play arose from the desire 'to give artistic form to: the first awakening of the people to revolutionary awareness'. This awareness grew from the introduction of

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steam-powered spinning mules into England's weaving industry during the early nineteenth century and the factory owners' lack of concern with the plight of the hundreds of worker displaced by each machine. In response the workers organized strikes and then took the direct action of machine­ breaking.61 Toller sought information and analysis of the Luddite struggles in Marx's Das Kapital, Engels's Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, and Max Beer's Die Geschichte des Sozialismus in England, sources that gave the play a documentary and highly ideological character.62 However, the play's montage structure, which ruptured its narrative flow, broke with the organic unity of naturalist theatre. The new structure was similar to Vsevolod Meyerhold's experiments in the Soviet Union and anticipated elements of Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre. John Heartfield, who designed the sets, also turned to Russian constructivism for elements of his staging, such as the 20foot (6-metre) high steam engine that appeared in the final scene.63 Actors performed on steel platforms and stairs amidst working pistons, wheels and belts. Gigantic patterns of the factory's windows were projected on a cyclorama behind the construction, while children worked at looms to each side. Although the engine was attacked and broken with hammers at the play's end, its physical and symbolic presence continued to dominate the stage after the machine-breakers' arrests, remaining an economic and technological reality that could only be addressed through collective political action by the working class. Shortly after the play's premiere, Aladar Komjat, a friend of Uitz, translated the text into Hungarian, which stimulated the KPO's commission to Uitz. When Uitz described the theme's attraction, saying that it 'symbolized the collective action of the militant masses on the basis of historical facts', he expressed an interest similar to Toller's.64 Uitz's etchings, which he studied through abstract compositional designs and freely calligraphic figurative sketches, traced the rebellion's stages and significant moments. Grimaces and muscular tensions, knotted lines and splatters convey the workers' increasing frustrations that culminated in a frenzied fury of destruction followed by executions. The title 'White Terror,' which Uitz gave to the final print in the series, linked the Luddite struggle to the Horthy government's repression of revolution in Hungary. This effort to create a revolutionary rhetoric of imagery that extended through time is also seen in a design that Uitz created during the following year for a poster that demanded amnesty for Hungarian political prisoners.65 It repeats the image of the bare-chested, hammer-swinging worker found in the etchings and uses a similarly contorted pose and expressionist marks to suggest the figure's vehement attack on the iron bars that confine the prisoners. Laszlo Peri, another Hungarian refugee, created a poster in Berlin that also sought to 'Compel Amnesty!'66As with Uitz's design, Peri's work appears

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to have been inspired by a poster that Biro had designed for the political journal Az Ember (The Human Being) in which the Red Man pushed at a bared window, expressing a desire for political freedom.67 Peri's prisoner glowers from a dark cell whose bars he grips in his fists. The amnesty poster was one of several that Peri did in 1924 for communist organizations, which marked a change of artistic direction. He had emigrated to Berlin as a member of the Ma group and showed constructivist works at Der Sturm Gallery during the early 1920s.68 However, in 1924 he abandoned autonomous abstraction for architectural design, exhibiting designs for a Lenin monument that took the form of a giant hammer and sickle and was planned to house a museum and mausoleum as well as serve as a speaker's tribune.69 The drawings and a coloured relief activate space though the illusion of projected relief in a manner similar to his previous constructivist paintings which were planned to be executed in coloured concrete as large-scale architectural decoration. The posters that followed his joining the Rote Gruppe, an organization of communist artists, were also spatially dynamic. One (Figure 7.3), which bore the text 'Read the Volksblatt, the Communist Daily Newspaper,' clothed Biro's Red Man in angular form, giving him a mechanical quality that possibly addressed the emerging debate about the rationalization of labour.70 An exchange of articles by Adolf Behne and John Heartfield in Die Weltbuhne during March 1926 recapitulated much of the SPD's pre-war debate about Tendenzkunst. Behne criticized an exhibition of left-wing art in Berlin's Wedding district in the following way: 'To arrange red and green so that both quantities of colour contain their greatest amount of power, dignity and independence is much more revolutionary than to paint hand grenades or "Victory of the Barricade".'71 Heartfield responded on behalf of the Rote Gruppe with the retort - '"Liberty Leads the People on the Barricade", the painting by Delacroix, is not a revolutionary work of art only because of its qualities of colour, but also because of its content'. Content, Heartfield declared, meant 'to declare one's colour: Red - or Green!'72 Mihaly Biro had made that choice earlier and provided a model for Tendenzkunst as practised by the Rote Gruppe. His poster for Nepszava and subsequent use of the Red Man transformed labour's image by making the hammer's swing ambiguous, raising the possibility of revolutionary violence and destruction by the masses. Memory of the Luddite revolt gave a sense of historical identity and solidarity to the working class, while confirming a constant fear within the bourgeoisie. The goal of Tendenzkunst, however, was to continually update and apply that image of labour's militancy to changing historical conditions, whether they were a campaign for voting rights before the First World War, the revolution of 19 18-19 and resistance to the white terror that followed, or the struggle against the rationalization of labour after 1924.73

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Motes *

I thank Oliver Botar for the translation of Lajos Kassak's poem 'With a Poster Column' and Gabriella Ayres for the translation of 'Poster. At daybreak from the fifth floor' and assistance in reviewing materials from Nepszava. All other translations are my own, except where indicated. Appreciation also goes to Blake Stimson for his responses to several drafts of the article.

1.

Kassak, L., 'Hirdetooszloppal/ Ma, 2 ,1 5 October (1917), 182.

2.

Reproductions of posters mentioned in this article can be found in Horn, E., Mihaly Biro (Hannover: PlakatKonzepte, 1996), and that source has provided much of the factual information about Biro's life and career found in this article.

3.

Kassak, L., Als Vagabund unterwegs, Corvina Kiado, pp. 158-62. Translated by Friderika Schag from the original Hungarian which was published as Csavagdsok (Budapest: Magveto Konyvkiado, 1976).

4.

Horn, Mihaly Biro, cat. nos 1 and 2.

5.

Janos, A., The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary, 18 2 5 -19 4 5 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982).

6.

Varga, E., 'Die ungarischen Wahlen', Die Neue Zeit, 2 8 ,1 7 June (1910), 874-81.

7.

For the development of the political poster, see Zeller, R., Die Friihzeit des politischen Bildplakats in Deutschland (18 4 8 -19 18 ) (Stuttgart: Ed.Co., Ed. Cordeliers, Ed. Cadre, 1987).

8.

Horn, Mihaly Biro, cat. no. 35.

9.

H. K. Frenzel, 'Michael Biro, "Kunst" oder politische Plakate/ Gebrauchsgraphik, 9, 7 (1932), 64.

10.

The important role of the May Day papers is treated in the following: Achten, U., Zum Lichte empor: Mai-Festzeitungen der Sozialdemokratie (Berlin: Dietz, 1980); and Guttsman, W. L., A rt for the Workers: Ideology and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany (Manchester and N ew York: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 21-54.

11.

For an excellent discussion of Fuchs's impact on German art and politics, see Weitz, U., Salonkultur und Proletariat: Eduard Fuchs - Sammler, Sittengeschichtler, Sozialist (Stuttgart: Verlag Bemd Stoffler and Dieter Schiitz, 1991).

12.

Fuchs, E., 'Der erste Mai und die Kunst (zu unsern Bildem), Mai-Feier 1907', as reprinted in Achten, U., Zum Lichte empor: Mai-Festzeitungen der Sozialdemokratie (Berlin: Dietz, 1980), p. 158.

13.

Engert, M. R., 'Peus auf der Konsumvereinsbarrikade', in Dr J. Blech (ed.), Der Auch sozialistische Monatscircus (Leipzig, 1909), p. 5.

14.

Blech, Dr J., Der Auch sozialistische Monatscircus (Leipzig, 1909) p. 18.

15.

Fuchs, 'Der erste Mai und die Kunst,' p. 158.

16.

Horn, Mihaly Biro, p. 23. For information about the censorship of Biro's posters, see 'A szekesfovaros hirdetesi vallalta', Nepszava, 23 November 19 13, p. 11.

17.

Horn, Mihaly Biro, p. 23.

18.

'Die Wahlrechtskampf in Ungam', Vorwdrts, 15 July 19 11.

19.

Horn, Mihaly Biro, cat. no. 6.

20.

The projection of slides of Bird's posters as slides in cinemas is mentioned in Nepszava, 23 May 1914. The Social Democratic Party's publication of his posters as postcard sets is discussed in 'A Nepszava-konyvkereskedes levelezolapja', Nepszava, 1 June 19 13, p. 19-

21.

'Biro Mihaly. A marcius 4—iki folvonulas plak&tja', Nepszava, 29 February 19 12, p. 7. Horn, Mihaly Biro, cat. no. 29.

22.

After the burial of executed Communards in shallow graves, there were reports of strange noises from underground and limbs forcing their w ay through the earth as bodies swelled and decomposed. Jellinek, F., The Paris Commune of i 8 j i (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965), pp. 369-70. In socialist memory of the Commune, however, this gruesome reality was idealized as a defiant fist thrusting from the earth. Theophile Steinlen portrayed bodies rising from the ground in 'The Cry of the Paving Stones', he Chambard socialiste, 3 February 1894, where they ask for their struggle to be remembered and continued. For a grotesque image, critical of the Commune, produced shortly after the event, see the engraving by Admond Morin, 'Apres la tourmente', Le

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Monde illustre, 3 June 18 71, as reproduced in Boime, A., Art and the French Commune (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 27. 23.

The strike was widely reported in the German socialist press, see: Kusterlitz, F., 'Die proletarische Faust', Die Neue Zeit, 30, 7 June (1912), 33 7-4 1; and Varga, E., 'Die Mairevolte des ungarischen Proletariats und ihre Folgen', Die Neue Zeit, 30, 21 June (1912), 433-41.

24.

For the debate about the mass strike, see the following: Bricianer, S., Pannekoek and the Workers' Councils (Saint Louis: Telos Press, 1978); Goodstein, P. H., The Theory of the General Strike from the French Revolution to Poland (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); and Pierson, S., Marxist Intellectuals and the Working-Class Mentality in Germany, 18 8 7 -19 12 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

25.

Kusterlitz, 'Die proletarische Faust', p. 341. Nepszava was also published as Volksstimme, a version for the German-speaking audience in Hungary. Thus its ideas and images were easily accessible in Germany and Austria. Ernst Collin later commented that the aggressive imagery would have been unsuitable to Germany during the years before the First World War. Collin, E., 'Vom politischen Plakat', Das Plakat, 12, 2 (1921), 116 -18 .

26.

Jentzsch, H. G., 'Vulkan und seine Opfer', Der Wahre Jakob, 6 5 2 ,18 July (1911), 7136.

27.

Zeller, 'Die Friihzeit des politischen Bildplakats in Deutschland', p. 132.

28.

Peter Nisbet connected these drawings to the election in, 'Marks of a New Beginning: Allegory and Observation in Sketchbook 1 9 1 2 / 1 ', in P. Nisbet (ed.), The Sketchbooks of George Grosz (Cambridge: Busch-Reisinger Museum, 1993), p. 17. The drawings which appear in 'Sketchbook 1 9 1 2 / 1 ' (pp. 8v, 9V and n r ) are reproduced on pages 27 and 28 of the Busch-Reisinger catalogue.

29.

Wolf, R., 'Unternehmersorgen', Der Wahre Jacob, 649, 6 June (1911), 7091.

30.

Varnai, D., 'Ein Proletarierkunstler', Das Plakat, 5, 2 (1914), 82-5. At this time, when both Grosz and John Heartfield were attempting to earn their livings a illustrators and advertising artists, they would have been very aware of such articles in the advertising press. For more about the importance of advertising to the early practices of both Grosz and John Heartfield, see Simmons, S., '"Advertising Seizes Control of Life": Berlin Dada and the Power of Advertising', Oxford Art Journal, 2 2 ,1 (1999), 119-46.

31.

Varnai, D., 'Biro Mihaly kiallitasa', Nepszava, 29 May 1912, pp. 1-2.

32.

For discussion of this, see Lidtke, V. L., The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 14 3-5.

33.

Fuchs, E., Kaiser, K. and Klaar, E. (eds), Aus dem Klassenkampf. Soziale Gedichte, Munich 1894; and Fuchs, E., 'Der Erste Mai im Bilde', Suddeutscher Postilion, 10 (1898), 79.

34.

For a fuller discussion of this, see Fiilberth, G., Proletarische Partei und biirgerliche Literatur (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1972).

35.

The debate was launched by the following essays: Sperber, H., 'Kunst und Industrie', Vorwdrts, 7 and 14 August 1910; and 'Tendenziose Kunst', Vorwdrts, 4 September 1910.

36.

Zetkin, K., 'Kunst und Proletariat', Die Gleichheit, 21, 8 (19 10 -11), reprinted in Zetkin, K., Uber Literature und Kunst (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1955), p. 104.

37.

'Die Wahlrechtsdemonstration der Budapester Arbeiterschaft', Arbeiter Zeitung, 4 March 1912, noon edn; and 'Der Massenstreik in Budapest', Arbeiter Zeitung, 24 May 1912, morning edn.

38.

A. R[oefile]r, 'Hagenbund', Arbeiter Zeitung, 14 May 1912, morning edn.

39.

Kassak, L., 'A plakat es az uj festeszet', Ma, 1 , 1 (1916), 2-4.

40.

Ibid., p. 3.

41.

For posters during the First World War, see discusssion and bibliography in Simmons, S. 'Grimaces on the Walls: Anti-Bolshevist Posters and the Debate about Kitsch', Design Issues, 14, 2 (1998), 16-40. For Hungarian war posters, see Gondos, I., 'Das moderne ungarische Plakat', Das Plakat, 6, 2 (1915), pp. 65-72; and Nadai, S., 'Ungarische Kriegsplakate', Das Plakat, 8 ,1 (1917), 30-36.

42.

Horn, Mihaly Biro, cat. nos 54, 56, 57, 60 and 68-74.

43.

Westheim, P., 'Politik/Kunst/Reklame', Das Plakat, 7, 3 (1916), 129-39.

44.

Jozsef Pogany, 'A politikai plakat', Nepszava, 4 June 1916, p. 9.

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45.

147

Varnai, 'Biro Mihaly kiallitasa', pp. 1—2. The commercial posters advertised cultural journals, dress shops, rubber shoe heels, cafeteria, stationary stores, baby food, films, typewriters and vacation resort. Horn, Mihaly Biro, cat. nos 25, 30, 81.

46.

'A z elso plakat-por', Nepszava, 19 June 1914, pp. 7-8. Horn, Mihaly Biro, cat. no. 47.

47.

Horn, Mihaly Biro, cat. no. 88.

48.

Ibid., cat. no. 89.

49.

'Plakat. Hajnalban az otodik emeletroT, in Kassak, L., Poesie, ed. R. Ruspanti (Messina: Rubbettino, 1994), p. 50. Kassak likely had Arthur Rimbaud's 'Le Forgeron', a poem of 1870 about the French Revolution, in mind while writing this poem.

50.

Horn, Mihaly Biro, cat. no. 98.

51.

Ibid., cat. no. 99.

52.

Tobler, C., 'Das ungarische Plakat der Revolutionszeit', Das Plakat, 1 1 , 1 1920, 2 1-2 . Tobler also reports that Biro's image was the model for plaster figures included on parade floats. The May Day poster is reporduced in Horn, Mihaly Bird, cat. no. 100. For photographs of Biro's and other artists' posters in situ, see Dautry, C. and Guerlain, J.-C., L'activisme hongrois (Montrouge: Goutal-Darly, 1979), pp. 69,177, 289, 294, 301 and 315.

53.

Cseh, M., Plakatok (Budapest: Nepmuvelsesi Propaganda Iroda, 1980).

54.

Hevesy, I., 'A z uj plakat,' Ma, 4 ,1 5 May 1919, p. 107.

55.

Sachs, H., 'Die Plakate der ungarischen Reaktion', Das Plakat, 1 1 , 1 2 (1920), 585-92. For image appropriation in German right-wing posters, see Simmons, 'Grimaces on the Wall'. Hungarian distribution of the issue of Das Plakat that contained Sachs's article was prohibited by the Horty regime. 'Beschlagnahme des 'Plakats',' Das Plakat, 12 ,6 (1921), 373.

56.

'Die Werbearbeit fur die Reichstagswahlen in Berlin', Das Plakat, 1 1 , 7 (1920), 339. This poster, which measures 75 x 95 cm, is reproduced in Rademacher, H. and Grohert, R. (eds), Kunst! Kommerzi! Visionen! Deutsche Plakate 18 8 8 -19 33, exhibition catalogue, Deutsche Historisches Museum, Berlin, 1992, pp. 154 and 245.

57.

Horn, Mihaly Biro, cat. nos 10 5 -11.

58.

See mention of his Horthy lithographs in a review of the Arbeiter-Kunst Ausstellung that opened on 5 December 1920 in the Jugendheim at Petersburger Strafie 39 in Berlin. 'Nie wieder Krieg!' Rate Zeitung, 2, 43 (1920).

59.

For discussion of these changing concepts and alliances of artists, see Botar, O. A. I., 'From Avant-Garde to "Proletkult" in Hungarian Emigre Politico-Cultural Journals, 19 22-1924', in V. H. Marquardt (ed.), Art and Journals on the Political Front, 19 10 -19 4 0 (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997), pp. 10 0-141.

60.

Uitz, B., Die Ludditenbewegung, intro, by E. Bettelheim (Vienna: The artist's edition, 1923).

61.

Toller, E., The Machine Wreckers, trans. A. Dukes (London: Nick Hern Books, 1995), pp. 14 -15 . More recent accounts paint a more complex picture, with the introduction of steam-looms, gigmills, and shearing-frames being but one factor in the causes of Luddism. Thomis, M. I., The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1970).

62.

For the fullest discussion of the play and its staging, see Davies, C., The Plays of Ernst Toller: A Revaluation (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996), pp. 160-210.

63.

A photograph of this set is reproduced in Kreuzberg, K., Weimarer Republik (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1977), p. 774.

64.

Bajkay, E., Bela Uitz (Budapest: Kepzomuveeszeti Kiado, 1987), pp. 58-60, and Bela Uitz: Arbeiten auf Papier aus den Jahren 19 13 -19 2 3 (Budapest: Uj Miiveszet Alapitvany, 1991).

65.

The poster, which was to be printed by the Verlag der Arbeiterbuchhandlung in Vienna, was not issued.

66.

The fullest treatment of Peri's work before his move to England in the 1930s is Fietzek, G., 'Studien zum konstruktivistischen Werk von Laszlo Peri' (MA thesis, Technische Universitat, Berlin, 1989).

67.

Biro first designed the poster for Az Ember in Budapest during September 1918 and then reworked it for use in Vienna during 1919-20. Horn, Michali Biro, cat. nos 86 and 104.

68.

Grabowski, J., (ed.), Wdhlt Links! Das politische Plakat in Deutschland 19 18 -19 3 3 , exhibition catalogue, Otto Nagel Haus, Berlin, 1985, cat. no. 42.

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69.

Kamen, M., 'Neue Versuche in der Architektur - Ausstellung von Hilberseimer und Peri in "Sturm "', Die Rote Fahne, 2 November 1924.

70.

For a recent discussion of German economic restructuring during the 1920s, see Nolan, M., Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). The other two posters called for enrolment in the Rote Frontkampfer Bund and support of the KPD in the Reichstag election of December 1924. Grabowski, Wdhlt Links, cat. nos 43 and 45.

71.

Behne, A., 'Kunstausstellung Wedding', Die Weltbiihne, 22, 9, 2 March (1926), 347.

72.

Heartfield, ]., 'Grim oder - Rot?' Die Weltbiihne, 2 2 , 1 1 , 1 6 March (1926), 434-5.

73.

Some saw parallels between the early industrial revolution and a crisis of industrial competitiveness which Germany faced following the stabilization of the mark in 1924. Preller, L., 'Fliefiarbeit und Planwirtschaft', Sozialistische Monatsheft, 33 (1927), 200. Preller, an SPD member who enthusiastically accepted rationalization, praised workers for being scientific socialists who did not adopt Luddite tactics towards technological innovations. Between 1925 and 1927 the Rote Gruppe organized resistance to rationalization. Martin Gaughan's paper at the 'Work and the Image' conference addressed the role of John Heartfield's photomontage 'Rationalization is on the March' in this campaign. Heartfield's image can be understood as a further development of the image of labour found in Mihaly Biro's Nepszava poster.

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Mihaly Biro, Nepszava (The People's Voice), 19 11 - 12

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150

7.2

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Manno Miltiades, Mosakodnak! (They Wash Themselves!), 1919

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7.3 Laszlo Peri, Lest das Volksblatt. Die Kommunistische Tageszeitung (Read Volksblatt. The Communist Daily Newspaper), 1924

8

A re-vision of Ukrainian identity: images of labouring peasant women in Tatiana Yablonskaia's C om , 1949 Pat Simpson

In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), a state nominally dedicated to the empowerment of the working classes, images of labour held an important cultural position as embodiments of Soviet identity. What was perceived by the Communist Party (hereafter Party) and State to constitute legitimate images, however, tended to shift in relation to contingent historical and geographical circumstances. At the peak of the so-called Zhdanovshchina period, in 1950, Tatiana Yablonskaia's monumental painting Corn (1949) (Figure 8.1) was singled out by legitimating authorities as especially significant and awarded a second-class Stalin Prize of 50 000 roubles - five times more than a museum director would earn in a year.1 She was also paid a further 20 000 roubles to paint a copy of the work to hang in the State Museum of Ukrainian Art in Kiev.2 The original was sent to the Tretiakov Gallery Moscow where it retained iconic status in the Socialist Realist canon until the fall of the USSR in 1991. According to Aleksandr Gerasimov, Director of the Academy of Arts USSR 1947-57, the painting's salient virtue was its 'typical' representation of Ukrainian identity through its images of labouring peasant women.3 In contemporary Socialist Realist discourse the term 'typicality' had a special resonance. It referred to a notion that realistic art should generalize from the totality of social relations by imaging 'types', set in appropriate contexts, in order to represent a reality that was conceived of as describable in generic blocks tied to class and occupation. From 1934 onwards the origins of this notion were claimed to lie in the writings of Friedrich Engels, but it is likely, as Vaughn James and Culleme Bown have argued, that the Socialist Realist construct of typicality owed more to ideas developed from the writings of Nikolai Chemyshevskii by Lunacharsky, that had been current in the 1920s.4 Certainly, an important factor shared by Lunacharsky's construct of typicality, and that used authoritatively by Gerasimov in 1950, was an

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identification of 'type' as the embodiment of an ideal, heroic, New Man.5 In effect, within Socialist Realist criticism, to characterize images as 'typical' was to connect them with some currently projected ideal of Soviet life. Thus, Gerasimov's usage of the term 'typicality' in relation to Yablonskaia's Corn was more indicative of the images' 'political correctness' than of any possible relationship to a lived-in Ukrainian reality. What did it signify to represent Ukrainian identity via sunlit visions of heroically cheerful peasant women, ankle-deep in golden grain, assisting the men from the Motorized Tractor Section in the grain-requisitioning pro­ gramme? Why should it be particularly politically correct to do so in 1949-50? Was the evaluation of political correctness linked in some way to the perceived identity of the artist? In exploring these questions, this chapter begins by considering the pressure to conform laid on Yablonskaia by the circumstances in which Corn was produced. It then looks at the possible contemporary significance of the theme, treatment and imagery. The argument offers a possible feminist reading of Yablonskaia's painting as, for her, a politically expedient, mythologized re­ visioning of Ukrainian regional identity as subordinate to Soviet national identity. I will suggest that such subordinacy was signified through the implications of theme, and the gender and class connotations of the imagery, in relation to a contingently intersecting web of political and cultural discourses on revisions in the Socialist Realist canon, on the Ukraine, and on women during the late 1940s. I will also suggest that the special political correctness of Corn in 1949-50 lay in the complicated relationships of both painting and artist with the historical and political realities of contemporary Ukraine. My approach is informed partly by the methods of a social history of art and partly by aspects of poststructuralist linguistic theory in so far as I choose to look at art objects, their content and facture as contingent historical and geographical intersections of a multiplicity of contemporary discourses. It is also partly informed by pluralist rather than totalitarian historical models of Stalinist power structures, since the latter, by their patriarchal nature, not only tend to close off examinations of issues regarding women but also tend to offer simplistic, cold-war style pictures of the relationships between elements of the Soviet power apparatus.6 A further significant element underpinning the argument is a trajectory of late twentieth-century feminist interventions into the histories of Soviet Socialist Realism. This trajectory, pioneered mainly in relation to literature by writers such as Lynne Attwood and Vera Dunham, has attempted to engage critically with the constructs of gender imbricated in the apparently gender neutral concept of the New Man - a vision of humanity renovated in the light of socialism which, from 1934 onwards became the duty of all Soviet cultural producers to project as an aspirational model of Soviet identity for the people.7

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My current project, of which this chapter is a part, is to investigate speculatively the specific gendered inscriptions of New Woman in Socialist Realist art which may be veiled by this generalized and often formulaic Soviet discourse on the New Man. These have been further occluded by tendencies to marginalize issues to do with imaging women in the recent spate of histories of Socialist Realist art including the Art in Power catalogue (Hayward Gallery 1995/96) and Boris Groys's The Total Art of Stalin (1988/ 92). Of prime interest to me, in pursuit of this project, are moments of transition or crisis where shifts of representation may reveal the operation of unvoiced parameters for the representation of women. Yablonskaia's painting Corn, may embody one such moment. Arguably, it constituted a successful Stakhanovite effort by the artist to recoup a career threatened by the sudden delegitimation of a previously lauded work, Before the Start (1947), by the production of a painting which offered a significantly different vision of Soviet/Ukrainian identity. In Corn the technique shifts from Impressionism to more finish and delineation. The theme moves from (implicitly) industrial leisure to agricultural work. The images of young Ukrainian women change from slender, trousered and modem-looking, to stocky and traditionally dressed. I have argued elsewhere that these shifts respond to and participate in changes to Soviet discursive practices relating to the imaging of female beauty.8In this chapter however, I want to focus in more depth on the issue of Ukrainianness raised by the images of work in Corn. Corn was produced under difficult circumstances. The initial reception of Yablonskaia's previous painting, Before the Start, seemed to launch her en route to a promising professional career. In the November 1947 proceedings of the new Academy of Arts USSR, she was named by the Director, Aleksandr Gerasimov, as a talented Ukrainian genre painter, representative of a new generation of Soviet painters enabled by their education in Socialist Realism to produce successful pictures on contemporary themes.9On 2 August 1948 Before the Start was purchased by the Ukrainian Committee for Artistic Affairs, for 20 000 roubles and given to the State Museum of Ukrainian Art, Kiev.10 On 3 1 October 1949 however, it was delegitimated - ostensibly for the 'formalism' of its Impressionist style - in the pages of the new cultural organ of the Party Central Committee, Culture and Life. The critic, A. Kisilev, asserted that 'realism is sacrificed to so-called painterliness' and 'Faces and figures of people are represented coarsely in a deformed way' to produce a 'distortion of our reality'.11 Such accusations arguably cast a sudden, career-threatening level of doubt on Yablonskaia's patriotism and partiinost' (orientation to the concerns of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - CPSU), currently two of the most important criteria for defining both the credibility of artists and the legitimacy of their works.12

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In a formal letter of so-called self-criticism, published in Culture and Life on 1 1 February 1950, Yablonskaia responded in a suitably humble manner to the accusation of formalism. In offering Corn in atonement for her errors, however, she seemed to concentrate mainly on apologizing for incorrect choices of subject matter and interpretation. Through specific decisions about imagery and composition, Yablonskaia asserted her intention to render in Corn 'the joyfulness of the collective work of our beautiful people, the richness and strength of the collective farm, the triumph of the ideas of Lenin-Stalin in the socialist alteration of the village'. Having given public assurance of her partiinost', she also demonstrated her patriotism, partly by an unfavourable reference to the hollowness of American technological advancement and partly by declaring that the most important thing for artists to address was the beauty of the 'best examples' of 'our socialist reality': 'the new man, his new socialist relationship with labour, [and] with the government'.13 Yablonskaia's careful language exemplifies the extent to which the genderneutral construct of the New Man seems to have become sacrosanct within Stalinist critical and theoretical artistic discourse, virtually making taboo the discussion of representations of women as distinct from men by using the masculine word 'chelovek' as neutral to denote 'person'.14 Implicitly veiled by the neutral word was a certain assertive confidence in the current political correctness of her attempt to link signs of Ukrainianness and images of physically strong-looking, traditionally dressed peasant women engaged in agricultural labour. The confidence is understandable in the sense that by the time her letter was published, the work had passed the initial selection processes for exhibition in the All-Union exhibition and the annual Ukrainian Artists Union exhibition of spring 1950.15 She may even have known that it was in line for a Stalin Prize, a prize that was awarded in spring 1950. The painting's legitimacy gained further confirmation in 1951 by Aleksandr Gerasimov, in an article reflecting upon the All-Union Exhibition of 1950. Gerasimov defined Corn as a work presenting a typical Ukrainian scene in a way that was 'deep in content and high in professional mastery' being in 'the first rank' of works dealing with collective farm life in representing the kolkhozniki - a masculine word used as a gender-neutral term for collective farm workers - the 'best people of the Ukrainian village'.16 Thus in the eyes of the primary audience, the legitimating authorities of Party, Artist's Union and Academy, Yablonskaia apparently 'got it right', not just in terms of painting technique but, more importantly, in terms of theme and imagery. Yablonskaia has repeatedly, and perhaps somewhat disingenuously claimed in public and private statements made between 1950 and 1997 that her choice of theme had resulted from a species of 'road to Damascus' revelation at a collective farm, to which she took a group of her students on placement from the Kiev Art Institute from May to August 1948. The Letava

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village kolkhoz named after Lenin, Chemerovetsky region, KamenetsPodolksy district of Ukraine, was clearly a very special place, a model community packed with Heroes of Soviet Labour and excellent facilities including its own electricity plant.17 That is to say, amongst Ukrainian kolkhozes Letava was not typical, in the familiar Western sense of being a representative example of contemporary kolkhozes, but could be legitimately used as a model for a Socialist Realist 'type' of ideal kolkhoz. Letava's splendours may have owed much to its proximity to the old border with Polish Western Ukraine, only 18 kilometres away. In 1939 this area had been incorporated into Soviet Ukraine and, in the years after 1945 it was subject to agricultural collectivization - a fact which puts an interesting gloss on Yablonskaia's 1950 references to the triumph of the Party in 'the socialist alteration of the village' and new relations to labour and government. According to Yablonskaia the workers were paid at especially high rates in order to encourage the return of Ukrainians living abroad. Nevertheless, despite her awareness that Letava was, in effect a showplace, for Yablonskaia, who had spent the war living and working on a squalid and unmotivated kolkhoz at Kamyshina in the Volga German region of Ukraine, the experience of Letava was, she claimed, inspirational. In 1997 she asserted that Corn was painted 'from the heart ... I painted it sincerely without any calculation about possible awards'. It was apparently a monument to the cleanliness, productivity, enthusiasm and good humour of the workforce. She even inscribed on the com pile 'dedicated to the women workers of Letava'.18 This was eventually painted out, but it could be argued that an element of commemoration remained in the name of the kolkhoz, partly visible on the representations of filled sacks. Yablonskaia's accounts of the motivation underlying Corn imply not only that its perceived political correctness was accidental but also that its content was closely related to an experienced reality. While these may have been for the artist personal truths, necessary to the maintenance of a sense of artistic integrity, they also need to be seen in relation to her position after the death of Stalin, as a means to stave off accusations of complicity with Stalinism. Her position in 1949, as a lone mother with a small child, her career, possibly even her life, threatened by the denunciation of Before the Start, suggests that there were probably other, political, factors which affected her choices regarding the content and appearance of Corn. One of these factors may have been the current construct of 'realism' embedded in Socialist Realism. The terms 'realism' and 'reality', used in relation to Socialist Realist aesthetics, had mutable and complex connotations. Socialist Realism, defined at the Writers Union Congress of 1934 by Zhdanov as 'reality in its revolutionary development', was not about representing things as they were in actuality but how they should be.19 This was not to exclude the possibility

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of depicting contemporary events or instances but rather to insist that such depictions should be made in ways which presented the instances as exemplars of more widespread future behaviours. While Socialist Realism was not a form of critical realism, its manifestations sometimes embodied quasi-critical relationships to Soviet actuality in the sense of being targeted on areas of social life which were in need of renovation. What counted as relevant - and thus 'realistic' - visions both in terms of content and mode of representation, however, depended on the current concerns of Party and State. It was the artist's responsibility to keep abreast of these - a point made by Zhdanov in 1934, reiterated in statements made by Aleksandr Gerasimov at each session of the newly reformed Academy of Arts USSR between 1947 and 1950, and also in Kisilev's denunciatory article in Culture and Life.20 Materials from this period in the Ukrainian Artists Union archive attest to the membership's awareness of this duty, and of the importance of Zhdanov's Decrees, Party statements in Pravda and Culture and Life, and the proceedings of the academy as guides to politically correct art practices.21 It is likely, therefore, that Yablonskaia responded to aspects of the speech made at the third session of the Academy of Arts USSR by Piotr Sysoev editor of the session proceedings and also of Art (Iskusstvo) the highbrow art magazine produced by Moscow Union of Artists for national consumption. In castigating the entire Ukrainian Artists' Union for 'formalism' and lack of partiinost', Sysoev had defined the path to redemption for Ukrainian artists as being engagement with themes of agricultural work with particular reference to grain requisitioning.22 It seems more than coincidental that this was the precise theme of Yablonskaia's Corn, and indeed of other artists' works chosen for illustration in the catalogue of the Tenth Ukrainian Artists' Union exhibition, Kiev 1950. Among these were Fedir Opanasovich Samusev's poster Harvest and Grain collection - Bolshevik Speed (1949) (Figure 8.2), used as the catalogue frontispiece, and a large genre painting by Yablonskaia's student (and co-painter of the Kiev copy of Corn) Ivan Ivanovich Yukhno (b. 1918) News about the People (1949) (Figure 8.3). Sysoev's exhortation might be seen to relate, on the one hand to a recent general concern of the Party Central Committee with a need for visual images more focused on strengthening Soviet kolkhoz discipline - expressed in a Central Committee Decree of November 1948, criticizing poster publishing houses.23 On the other hand, Sysoev's demand also seemed to relate more specifically to contemporary Party and State concerns with curbing Ukrainian republican nationalist dissidence and encouraging increased grain production. Within Ukraine, there was a tradition of nationalism that had been given some encouragement in the early years of the revolution by Leninist policies which promoted the development of Ukrainian culture and language, in

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particular stipulating that only Ukrainian speakers should be employed by the Party. These concessions were reversed under Stalin who, as early as 1926 is recorded as criticizing Shumskii, the Ukrainian Commissar for Education and advocate of Ukrainian autonomy, for policies which constituted 'a struggle for the alienation of Ukrainian culture and society from under Soviet culture and society ... a struggle against Moscow in general, against Russians in general, against Russian culture and its highest achievement Leninism'.24 In the 1930s, enforced collectivization of agriculture was followed by the abolition of compulsory use of the Ukrainian language in government and Party offices. Russian became a compulsory second language from primary education onwards and the main language for career advancement in Ukraine, as in other 'fraternal republics'. Aspects of Ukrainian history were rewritten to emphasize the connections with Russia. For example the status of Bogdan Khmel'nitskii, a seventeenth-century Cossack leader was changed from that of traitor to national hero for his role in the transference of Ukraine from Polish to Russian hands. Autonomous cultural developments, such as Boichukism - a mode of painting based on Ukrainian folk art and motifs were suppressed, and the Ukrainian Communist Party was savagely purged between 1937 and 1939.25 Some elements of Ukrainian nationalism, however, not only survived all this suppression but also survived successive occupations by German and Russian troops with the attendant deportations and massacres, and the re­ enforcement of collectivization in 1946. It continued to survive despite eight resolutions passed by the CPSU between 1946 and 1948 to combat 'Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism', resulting in more purges of the Ukrainian Communist Party organization.26 In 1949 there was still a nominal challenge to Soviet power from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and from a guerrilla army - the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) - which continued to operate into the 1950s.27The main problem area for the Moscow government however was agriculture. Ukraine was perceived as the Soviet Union's main grain source. The requisitioning of grain, however, had always been a site of struggle. After the war, Moscow's refusal to lower the requisition targets in relation to the drought of 1946 contributed to the great famine of 1947 in a Ukraine that had not yet recovered from being a battlefield, and was being subjected to a brutal re-collectivization programme. From 1947 onwards - according to Soviet statistics - the harvests improved. The position of the kolkhoz workers, however, remained near starvation levels due to both new legislation in 1948 forcing kolkhozes to set aside part of their allocation of the grain for seed corn, and the increase of heavy taxation on the private plots of land upon which the workers depended for subsistence. In these circumstances Party

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demands for Ukrainian co-operation and identification with the interests of the Soviet government were often met with indifference and sometimes violent opposition by agricultural workers, expressed through failure to co­ operate with the Party-based Motorized Tractor Section in charge of the requisitioning process.28 The majority of post-war kolkhoz workers were women. This was not just due to the wartime reduction of the male population. Soviet changes to women's legal status and relation to social production had disrupted but not eradicated pre-Revolutionary patriarchal traditions regarding the gendered division of skilled (masculine) and unskilled (feminine) labour. In rural areas these traditions informed a steady post-war drift of surviving younger men either towards towns and more lucrative industrial employment, or, at least, to the Motorized Tractor Section.29 Thus, the main resistance to the almost exclusively male grain-requisitioning gangs of the Motorized Tractor Section had largely been staged by peasant women. These women were commonly referred to by the insulting term of babii buntii - which translates roughly as 'mutinous old bags'.30 Sysoev's speech effectively called for educational models for a possible, revised Ukrainian actuality, based on the heroization of instances of Stakhanovite co-operation. Yablonskaia's Corn, in so far as it was carefully defined in her letter to Culture and Life as based on a specific Ukrainian collective farm full of decorated Heroes of Soviet Labour, seems to offer a positive vision of such an instance. Corn, viewed as a Socialist Realist depiction of the future, while naturalizing contemporary gendered labour divisions as politically correct, projected a vision of politically strong peasant women transmuted by the light of socialism from starving, rebellious hags into healthy, strong and noble pillars of the Soviet economy. Moreover, the painting offered reinforcement of Party and State assumptions about the function of Soviet Ukraine not just through its subject matter but also through both its Russian title Khleb, which means corn and bread, and the current Party slogan 'Bread/Corn is the Might and the Pride of our nation' represented on the side of one of the lorries.31 It might almost be an assertion of the power and primacy of the Ukraine within the Soviet system, but I would argue that however celebratory the picture might seem, the connotations of the visual language in which it was couched ensured that it was not misread in this way by the legitimators. The signifiers of Ukrainianness were subtly managed, in the first instance by inference and association. That is to say - this is a painting of an agricultural scene by a member of the Ukrainian Artists' Union, and so the scene is likely to be Ukrainian. Although Yablonskaia insisted in her letter to Culture and Life that the location was a real one, the address is only partly legible on the sacks in a way which excludes uniquely Ukrainian spellings. The physiognomy of

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the central heroine - based on portrait studies of kolkhoz worker Tonia Nikolina (Figure 8.4) - does not seem to be particularly characteristic of the women she sketched at Letava.32 Indeed it is not unlike that of the artist herself, who is actually a Russian, bom in Smolensk. The physiognomy appears to have been specifically chosen to project an ethnic stereotype that excluded the erstwhile large Jewish and Germanic populations of the enlarged post-war Soviet Ukraine - already decimated by war, exodus and deportation. The chosen physiognomy might be understood in context as being Ukrainian but otherwise it might be read, in relation to canonical Russian realist paintings of young peasant women, for example by Avram Archipov, as generically 'peasanty'. The signification of ethnic identity through embroidered clothing, however, was deliberately played down - as Yablonskaia admitted in her 1957 memoir. Recalling her decision not to make a focal feature of a combined repre­ sentation of embroidered Ukrainian chemise and blouse, she asserted: 'One did not want tactlessly to overemphasize a blouse, especially as in the contemporary village they were not often worn.33 Her definition of what could be regarded as typical apparently referred, not to politicized artistic convention but to her memory of Ukrainian actuality in 1948. While the memory may be perfectly accurate, her account needs to be understood somewhat sceptically. By date - 1957, the year after Khruschev sanctioned critiques of Stalinism - and by tone, her memoir seems to have been a form of self-defence against accusations of supporting Stalinism in her painting Corn. Yablonskaia's nuanced - rather than assertive - approach to representing unique characteristics of regional identity arguably relates to the political sensitivity of this issue in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Critics and theorists of the period repeated ad nauseam Stalin's statement to the Sixteenth Party Congress 1930, that Soviet art should be 'national in form and socialist in content'. Yet, the increasing Russian chauvinism to be seen in many aspects of Party statements and policy within the republics, indicated that the republican national element could not go much beyond a vague indication of regionally.34Too much of this sort of local colour, often conveyed through representations of decorative embroidery, could render artists open to accusations of supporting republican nationalism, as Mikhail Khmel'ko found in the early 1950s when his otherwise thematically correct painting Eternal Unity (Eternally with Moscow. Eternally with the Russian People) (1951-4) was refused a Stalin prize.35 In attempting to steer through this political minefield, it is highly probable that Yablonskaia, as an active member of the Ukrainian Artists' Union, paid heed to contemporary revisions of the Socialist Realist canon. Whether by Party or Academic voices, these revisions were articulated - in minuted speeches and published articles - in terms of denunciations embedded in

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repetitive, judgemental listings of, on the one hand, good/bad contemporary works and artists, and on the other hand, models of good/bad art practices from the Soviet and pre-Soviet past. Although there was a level of variation in who or what got mentioned and a greater emphasis in Academic statements on approved models of recent Soviet practice in the various genres and disciplines of Socialist Realist art, there was overall a certain uniformity, particularly regarding praise of recent Stalin Prize winners. At the time Yablonskaia was working on Corn (1948-49), the two 1948 Stalin Prize winning works by Ukrainian artists that featured prominently in academic discourse as models of partiinyi and patriotic Ukrainian art practice, were Georgii Melikhov's, The Young Taras Shevshenko in the Studio of Briullov (1947) and Mikhail Khmel'ko's, To the Great Russian People (i947).36The first of these offered a narrative that not only repositioned the famous Ukrainian poet and painter Taras Shevshenko (1814-59) from nationalist hero37to disciple of the nineteenth-century Russian classical painter Karl Briullov (1799-1852), but also thus endorsed Academic and Party emphasis on the need for artists in the 'fraternal republics' to look primarily to Russian classical and realist traditions.38This injunction, deriving from Zhdanov's 1948 Decree on A Great Friendship, had been taken very seriously by both Melikhov and Khmel'ko, as evidenced by the construction, finish and legibility of the works. Khmel'ko, Deputy Head of the Ukrainian Artists' Union, took the expression of an orientation towards Russia further through a celebration of Stalin's chauvinist victory toast of 1945 which had conflated Soviet and Russian national identities. Both of these prize winning works thus clearly expressed the subordinacy of Ukrainian identity to that of Russia. That this subordinacy was an element of contemporary discourse is attested to by aspects of the stenogramme of the judging of the Ninth Ukrainian Artists' Union Exhibition, 28-30 March 1948. While Yablonskaia's Before the Start was admired by the art critic, Comrade Parkhomenko, as a work by one of a group of young artists 'who are able to create a genuine picture of Ukrainian nature', such faint nationalism was not evident in the evaluations of the prizewinning works by Khmel'ko and Melikhov.39 A. S. Pashenko, Deputy President of the Committee for Art Affairs, spoke, for instance of Melikhov's painting as an 'assertion of the commonality of interests of the fraternal Russian and Ukrainian peoples'.40 These were the sort of terms which dominated the proceedings. The keynote speech by Comrade V. I. Kasiian emphasized Ukrainian artists' solidarity with the 'historic decrees' of the Central Committees of the Soviet and Ukrainian Communist Parties on literature and art. In pledging support for the principle of partiinost' Kasiian also declared the exhibition organizers' dedication to 'decisive uprooting of lingering elements of bourgeois ideology - the recidivists of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism', pledging instead their subordinacy to the

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rulings of the Academy of Arts USSR and orientation towards the 'high traditions of the Russian realist school of painting'.41 It is perhaps indicative of the extreme sensitivity of the nationality issue by 1949 that the other Ukrainian works which won Stalin Prizes at the same time as Corn, shown at the Tenth Ukrainian Artists' Union exhibition, offered strong emphases on patriotic and Party themes with few specifically Ukrainian elements. Winner of the 100 ooo-rouble prize, Khmel'ko's huge history painting, The Triumph of the Victorious Fatherland (1949), for instance, depicted German soldiers throwing down their standards in front of Lenin's tomb in Red Square, Moscow before an audience of Soviet army leaders. Sergei Oleksiiovich Grigor'ev (b. 1910), Honoured Art Worker and Union stalwart, received a 30 ooo-rouble prize for a big picture Admittance to the KomSoMol (1949) and a smaller genre work, Goalkeeper (1949), both of which could easily have been set anywhere within the Slavonic areas of the USSR. Meanwhile the 25 ooo-rouble prize went to Viktor Grigoriiovich Puzyrkov (b. 1918) for a safely patriotic rendition of Stalin on the Cruiser 'Molotov' (1949). Only the winner of the sculpture prize of 50 000 roubles, Oleksandr Oleksandrovich Koval'ov (b. 1903) had an implicitly Ukrainian theme for his marble bust Portrait of Hero of Socialist Labour O. S. Khobti (1949) (Figure 8.5). Khobti, who was presumably Ukrainian, is represented as a middle-aged woman worker wearing a headscarf and a baggy, man's jacket liberally hung with medals. She might well have been a kolkhoznitsa, but her occupation and regional nationality seem immaterial. The image which emerges out of roughly chiselled stone presents a celebration of a generic sort of stoic, Soviet fortitude and focuses on the fine detail of the rewards for such partisan and patriotic behaviour. In this company, Yablonskaia's Corn stood out as being thematically the most Ukrainian. This was convolutedly acknowledged by A. I. Zamoshkin in the stenogramme of his commentary on the All-Union Exhibition, 1949. Here, Zamoshkin began with a generalized identification of kolkhoz labour as 'a militant theme of our day', redolent with partiinost', through which Soviet artists were striving to show the rural masses a renovated socialist vision of countryside and peasantry. He then noted that in her painting, 'full of the joy of patriotic labour, cheerfulness and activity ... Yablonskaia achieves a national distinctiveness in painting' - by implication, Ukrainian painting. This achievement was, however, 'Thanks to the teachings of Russian realist painting' exemplified by the early works of Avram Arkhipov, thus establishing a politically correct gloss on his use of the term 'national' to fit with current interpretations of the Stalin line on 'national in form, socialist in content' which he dutifully cited at the beginning of his speech.42 While the previous year's prizewinning Ukrainian works may have served Yablonskaia as object lessons, her approach to representing the subordinacy

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of Ukrainian identity seems very subtle, pivoting on the class and gender inflections and associations of the visual language. In terms of ethnicity it was quite correct to represent Ukraine through images of peasants for, historically, the urban and land-owning classes had largely consisted of Jews, Poles and Russians, whereas the native Ukrainians had largely been rural dwellers.43 In Soviet political terms, however, to characterize Ukraine as exclusively agrarian was to imbue it with an implicitly secondary class identity within a class system where the industrial proletariat were defined by Marxism-Leninism as the most progressive and primary social class.44 In terms of gender, to characterize this identity via images of female peasants was to redouble the implications of secondariness. Within the Socialist Realist canon a convention had been established for symbolizing Soviet national identity through the representation of the two mythologized labouring classes - the industrial proletariat and the peasantry - which were the pivots and ostensible beneficiaries of the Soviet economy. The example of this convention most heroized in the revised post-war canon was Vera Mukhina's sculpture, The Industrial Worker and the Collective Farm Girl (1935), a massive version of which had surmounted the Soviet pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris 1937. This work showed the proletarian figure slightly bigger and slightly in advance of the peasant girl, as befits the representative of the most progressive class. Such treatment, whether it was the product of accident or design, might be seen to hint at the real inequality of perception and treatment of these classes embedded in Bolshevik ideology and in state policy.45 Kolkhoz workers commonly earned less than one-sixth of the industrial worker's wage, had little purchasing power because they were largely paid in kind rather than cash, and tended to be disadvantaged by the emphasis of the Stalin regime on industrial expansion.46 The gendering of the images in Mukhina's sculpture - the industrial worker as masculine and the peasantry as feminine - perhaps referred less to the economic reality that in 1935 more women worked in agriculture than in industry, than to a web of enduring patriarchal traditions linking women and peasants to constructs of sub­ ordination. The survival of pre-Revolutionary patriarchal attitudes to women in the USSR seems to have been encouraged by the way that official pronouncements on equality were delivered in a context of a potentially conflicting legislative emphasis on motherhood within a traditional family - a gender role once identified by Marx, Engels and Lenin as the site of women's oppression.47 The legislation, which began in 1936 with the abolition of abortion, in part constituted an acknowledgement of the falling birth rate. Raising the public status of motherhood - for instance, by offering state subsidies to mothers of seven children to produce more (1936), introducing first a commemorative

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postage stamp (1938), then the State decoration The Glory of Motherhood (1940) - did nothing to resolve the contradictions women experienced in combining paid work with motherhood. State legislation on the family, culminating in the new family laws of 1944, tended to reinforce traditional gender divisions of labour at home. Although creche and daycare facilities for children expanded, working women remained tied to the extra burdens of housework and childcare - burdens which in the 1920s had been targeted not only by Lenin but also by delegates to the 1927 Congress of Women Workers and Peasants as a major hurdle to women's full participation in social economic and political life of the State.48 Certainly, in the late 1940s while women constituted 56 per cent of the employed workforce, they did not have a similar majority in leading positions. The legitimation of contemporary literary works which criticized women's prioritization of work ambitions over childbearing and husband, and encouraged women collective farm leaders to step down in favour of the menfolk, suggests the extent to which the naturalization of women as having secondary significance to men was acceptable to Party cultural legitimators.49 Early compositional sketches for Corn, executed during late 1948 and early 1949, indicate that Yablonskaia initially considered including a potentially strategic associative reference to state concerns with motherhood per se, by incorporating an image of a little boy offering water to the women in the foreground. The elimination of this image was explained by Yablonskaia posthoc (1957) as rooted in a desire to enhance the monumentality of the theme by weeding out an anecdotal element more suited to a 'genre' picture, thereby leaving a clear focus on the 'beautiful labour' of the heroic women.50 Her statement makes a perfectly valid technical point but could also be read as an acknowledgement that, despite state propaganda, physical motherhood was not the stuff of monumental contemporary Soviet art. Removing the anecdote left the spectators to read the central images of women - by their dress, physique and their close proximity to the productiveness of the land - as signs of a weightier, more abstract construct of motherhood, the 'motherland'. During the Second World War special propagandist significance was placed on images of the female peasant as representations of the motherland. This was construed as a particular aspect of Soviet identity in whose defence the Great Patriotic (literally 'Fatherland') war was being fought. In the revised post-war canon, with its focal value of patriotism, such images continued to be treated as important. Ieraklii Toidze's 1941 recruiting poster, Mother Motherland Calls to You, for instance, was awarded a Stalin Prize in 1946 and continued to be singled out for praise and emulation throughout the late 1940s. Indeed Koval'ov's 1949 prizewinning Portrait of Hero of Socialist Labour O. S. Khobti bears a close resemblance to Toidze's poster. Sergei Gerasimov's Mother of a Partisan (1943), was another wartime image of the motherland

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WORK AND THE IMAGE I

which continued to be regarded as thematically correct. Although briefly delegitimated in 1949 for its distortion of the mother's face, it was reinstated to the canon in 1950 when this had been repainted in a more serene and less impressionistic manner more in keeping with the images by Toidze and by a newcomer to the canon, Aleksandr Laktionov. Laktionov's Letter from the Front (1947), featuring a peasant mother, received a Stalin Prize in 1947.51 The canonical trajectory of representations of the motherland seemed to entrench certain conventions for representing the feminine aspect of Soviet identity - sturdy physique and traditional peasant dress. The sturdiness perhaps symbolized strength, power of endurance - essential qualities of Soviet woman emphasized in Women in the Land of Socialism, a 1949 foreign language propaganda text - as well as the physical consequences of motherhood.52 The emphasis on traditional dress seems, on the one hand, to have been connected with older ideas of Mother Russia as organic and eternal, which during the war became embedded in the concept of motherland.53 On the other hand, such clothing might also be construed as relating to assumptions about the less 'progressive' character of the peasant class, conventionally feminized to underscore its subordinacy to the protective, masculinized State. It was to these conventions that Yablonskaia seems to have referred in constructing her images of peasant women, particularly the main heroine at the centre of the painting. Her memoir suggests that the physique - especially of the central heroine - and the traditional dress were the result of deliberate choices. For instance, although the face of the central figure was based on that of Tonia Nikolina, the general physical model was a certain Galia Nevchas who posed for her in a stance adapted from a harvest propaganda poster by the Leningrad artist and Party member, Iosif Serebriyanyi (1907-79).54 It is possible that the almost sexually provocative glance and gesture of invitation to the spectator also derive from this poster, to appeal to the covert patriarchal view of women as sexual objects which may underpin the contemporary propaganda vision of Soviet woman as a combination of 'majestic simplicity and warmheartedness'.55 That the choice and depiction of traditional-style clothing was a deliberate and carefully controlled fiction is suggested by Yablonskaia's 1957 admission that the real collective farm women actually wore 'ugly' modern 'town skirts' and that she persuaded them to dress up in more traditional clothing to pose for her. In response to contemporary, post-Stalinist criticism of her representation of 'old-fashioned' costume Yablonskaia's explanation of these choices emphasized her desire to create images of a 'typical Ukrainian collective farm' and, in the central figure, 'a generalised image of a contemporary Ukrainian collective farm worker'.56 Yablonskaia's self-defensive, 1957 argument used the term 'typical' in a way that appeared to relate to a lived-in reality, as part of a tacit acknow­

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ledgement of the unusualness of Letava, its existence as an over-subsidized propaganda exercise which still could not be spelled out. She implied that to dress women in more traditional costume was to make the images more truthful to the general run of experienced kolkhoz life and thus more engaging to the peasant audience. In justification for this she cited the enthusiastic and nostalgic response to Corn made by an ex-kolkhoznitsa working as a cleaning woman at the Kiev Art Institute in 1949.57 Her argument, however, while possibly having some experiential validity, deliberately distances her account of the decision-making process from the Stalinist context of late 1940S-1950S Socialist Realist discourse, in particular, from the peculiar parameters of regional 'typicality' embedded in that discourse. This is not to marginalize Yablonskaia's post-hoc statements about Corn, but rather to suggest that they weave an intricate dance between forms of political expediency relating to different historical contexts. In relation to my initial questions, what I have attempted to argue regarding Yablonskaia's Corn is that its legitimacy in 1950 as a piece of Ukrainian art seems to rest on the contingent relevance of its overall expression of the subordinacy of Ukrainian republican identity to chauvinistically Russian, Moscow-based constructs of Soviet national identity at both artistic and political levels. The choice of theme - agricultural work - and technique can be argued to signify Yablonskaia's accord with Moscow-based Academic constructs of patriotic and partiinyi art practice for Ukrainian artists, both as an individual and as a representative of the Ukrainian Artist's Union. In this sense, Corn's apparent function as the peace offering of a prodigal daughter may have contributed to legitimating authorities' perceptions of its special, prizewinning level of political correctness. Corn's images of new Ukrainian woman at work - noble, heroic and affirmatory - can be argued to offer a subtle symbolic unification of Ukrainian identity with the feminine aspect of Soviet national identity through the combination of Ukrainian physiognomies and hints at regional style embroidery, with physique and dress relating to contemporary canonical images of the motherland. This in itself can be seen to have connotations of subordinacy to the masculinized construct of the single-party state. In a broader sense, to characterize an ideal of renovated Ukrainian agricultural identity through images of peasant women was to connect to many other layers of contemporary, patriarchal Soviet artistic and political discourse on peasants and women where these class and gender constructs seem to have had mutually reinforcing connotations of subordinacy. In being legitimated for its 'typicality' - that is to say, its affirmation of the Moscow view of the Ukraine - Yablonskaia's Corn arguably contributed to the continued entrenchment of these class and gender connotations within Soviet

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culture. To investigate this construct of 'typicality', is to become aware of the complex and problematical relationships between Socialist Realist imagery and the historical conditions under which it was produced.

Notes 1.

KoMHTeT b cnpaBax mmctciitb YKPai'HCbKOi PCP, 73 nocraHOBM Pahm MmicTPiB C 0 10 3Y PCP7, X YKPaiHCbKa x y m o t k h x BMCTaBKa. J K h b o i m c , CKYJibnTYPa, rpatpixa. KaTa;ior, M mctciitbo, Kiev, 19 5°, p. 7; Cullerne Bown, M v A r t U n d e r S ta lin (Oxford: Phaidon, 1991), pp. 136-7.

2.

Data on copy of

3.

TepacMMOB, A., 'IIpaBiMBO n xpko H306PaxcaTb xoi3Hb coBeTCKoro Hapoaa7 {IIpaBna, no. 179, 1951), 3 a coimaxMCTMecKm peanmM (Moscow: AxaiieMMtf XYnoxcecTB CCCP, 1952), pp. 2 17-18 .

4.

Stetsky, A. I., 'Under the Flag of the Soviets, under the Flag of Socialism7, in H. G. Scott (ed.), S o v ie t W rit e rs C o n g r e s s 1 9 3 4 : T h e D eba te on S o cia list R e a lism a n d M o d e r n is m (London: Lawrence and Wishart, [1935] 1977), p- 267; Vaughn James, C., S o v ie t S o cia list R e a lism : O r ig in s a n d T h e o ry (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 23; Cullerne Bown, M., S o cia list R e a list P a in t in g (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 166.

5.

TepacuMOB, A., 70 6 m o r a x nepecTPOtfKM

C orn

held by State Museum of Ukrainian Art.

m

aaJibHenuiHX 3aaaqax XYnoxcecTBeHHoro 06Pa30BaHHX7

(Fourth session of the Academy of Arts USSR, 1950), 3 a

c o im a n H c n n e c K K ft pea n m M ,

pp. 289-90.

6.

Examples of pluralist historical models include: Bettelheim, C., C la s s S t ru g g le s in the U S S R . F ir s t P e r io d : 1 9 1 7 - 1 9 2 3 , trans. B. Pearce (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1977), pp. 9,26, 39, S e co n d P erio d : 1 9 2 3 - 1 9 3 0 (1978), pp. 14,500-508, 538-9, 592; Dunmore, T., S o v ie t P o litic s 1 9 4 3 - 3 3 (London, Macmillan, 1984), pp. 6,8-9. Dunmore, however, favours the totalitarian model regarding cultural policy. For a critique of the totalitarian model as a cold war manifestation see also: Gleason, A., T o ta lita ria n ism , the I n n e r H is t o r y o f the C o ld W a r (New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 123-6 . Recent examples of art historical approaches based on the totalitarian model include: Groys, B., T h e T o ta l A r t o f S ta lin is m (1988), (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 53; Golomstock, I., T o ta lita ria n A r t (London, Glasgow, Sydney, Auckland and Johannesburg: Collins/Harvill, 1990), pp. x-xv, 254; T yccb , B., Tae sajibiub n rue ncTMHa7, in K. Kopanski (ed.), A r m a w n 3a cva c rb e (Dusseldorf/Bremen: Edition Temmen, 1994), p. 18; TioHTep, T., TepoPt b tot a jimt a phom KYJibTYPe7, ibid., pp. 71-6 ; Elliott, D., "The Battle for Art7, 'M oscow7, in D. Ades, T. Benton, D. Elliott and I. Boyd White (eds), A r t a n d P o w e r (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), pp. 33, 3 5 ,18 6 -7 .

7.

MoraHCOH, 5 ., 70 Mepax YJiYHweHprx YHe6HO-MeToaoJiomHecKOtf pa60Tbi b YHe6Hbix 3aBeneHMXX aKaaeMHfl XYnoxcecTB7, A x a n e M P in X y u o t k c c t b C C C P . Ile P B a n m B r n p a n CeccM M , Academic Session 2, 20-27 May 1948, p. 106; TepacMMOB, A., 'II ytk pa3BMTKX coBeTcicofl xcmboiiwch7 (O coBeTCKOtt COUMaJiMCTMHeCKO# KYJibTYPe, Moscow, 1948), 3 a couMaJlMCTMHeCKMX peanmM, p. 116; Attwood, L., T h e N e w S o v ie t M a n a n d W o m a n (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 1, 8, 20,47, 6 36 ,1 2 0 ,1 3 3 , 1 5 1 - 3 ; Dunham, V., In S t a lin 's T im e : M id d le c la s s V a lu e s in S o v ie t F ic tio n (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 214-23.

8.

Simpson, P., 'On the Margins of Discourse? Visions of New Socialist Woman in Soviet Art 1949507, A r t H is t o r y , 21, 2, June (1998), pp. 247-67.

9.

TepacKMOB, A., 'CoBeTCKoe M306Pa3HTeJibH0e hckycctbo h 3an aw aicaaeMHPi XYiioxceCTB CCCP7 in CbicoeB, II., & K y 3Hciiob, A. (eds), A K a n eM P in X Y n o x c e c T B C C C P , Ile P B a n m B r n p a n CeccM tt (Moscow, 1949), Academic Session 1,2 2 -2 4 November 1947, pp. 233, 237.

10.

Ibid .; data on purchase of B efore

11.

7 ... T .-JlbiiOHCKOft - nepen CraPTOM - m

B 3TMX KapraHax peajimM nPMHeceH b xccptby Tax Ha3biBaeMOfl “xcHBonucHOCTH” - coqeTaHHio UBeTHbix nxTeH. Jlm ia, 4>nrYPbi jnoaett m o6PaxceHbi rPY6MMbi m YPOflJiMBWMM.7 'B ojiuimhctbo ero pa60T ... M a n IIaPTM3aHa h ap. - nocTPoeHO Ha PemeHHPi HMCTO BHeiUHMX, “xCHBOIIHCHblx” , 3>0PMaJlHHX 3aiiaH ... nOZIMeHXIOmblX CaMOe TJiaBHOe pfnePlHoe, 06Pa3H0e pemeHMe TeMbi ... nepexcMTKOB hmiipeccMOHH3Ma, KOTOPbie iiphbozixt ero k ouiM6KaM, a HepenKO m k iipxmomy HCKaxceHHio Harney a eP?CTBHTeJibHOCTH.' K picm^cb , A., 73 a couMajiMCTprqecKMPl peajiM3M b xcHBonkc W , KYnbTYPa m XCM3Hb, no. 30 , 3 1 October (1949), p. 5 .

12.

Simpson, P., 'On the Margins of Discourse7, pp. 253-4.

the S ta rt

held by State Museum of Ukrainian Art, Kiev.

up .

169

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Z h d a n o v , A . , 'S o v i e t L i t e r a t u r e . T h e R ic h e s t in I d e a s . T h e M o s t A d v a n c e d L i t e r a t u r e ', in H . G . S c o t t (e d .) , S o v ie t W rit e rs C o n g r e s s 1 9 3 4 : T h e D eb a te on S o cia list R e a lism a n d M o d e r n is m ( L o n d o n : L a w r e n c e a n d W is h a rt, [ 1 9 3 5 ] 1 9 7 7 ) , p . 2 1 .

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A r c h i v e M u s e u m o f U k r a i n i a n L i t e r a t u r e a n d A r t s , K i e v ,