zola's painters.pdf

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Zola's Painters

Gatan Picon; J. L. Logan

Yale French Studies, No. 42, Zola. (1969), pp. 126-142.

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Are his eyes his own? Is his vision really only Ctzanne's or thegroup's? (It is often said that Apollinaire saw only with the eyes ofBraque and Picasso.) Had he not known Cdanne, would he havebeen able to free himself of his high op inion of Greuz e, Ary Scheffer,Dort? But at this time Ctzanne himself appreciated not only thesepainters, but even Gtrome, Cabanel and Meissonier. Furthermore, sogreat was the misunderstanding between Ctz an ne and Zola that I don'tthink we c an point to any real influence. Manet's influence was g reater,fo r there a real comm unication existed, if only for a sh ort time. N eed-less to say the pain ters whom h e frequented helped fo rm his sensibility,but he frequented them only because he was interested in what theywere doing and appreciated their work. You choose your influences,and no-one sees anything with borrowed vision.

Zola sees immediately a nd clearly that which takes fire and gleamsin the brief flash of the artistic moment. H e sees it at once, he antici-pates the future: Our fathers laughed at Courbet, and here we are inecstasy about him; we laugh at Manet, but our sons will be ecstaticabou t him. As soon as he sees a canvas of Monet's, without evenknowing its creator, he singles it ou t: I do n't know M . M onet, in factI don't believe that I've ever seen one of his paintings before. But itseems to me that I a m one of his old friends. A nd the sam e quickjudgment takes the measure of Pissarro ( an unknown painter, ofwhom no-one will say a word, no doub t ), of Jongkind ( an artist whopaints like tha t is a ma ster ), and of Boudin, Degas, Renoir a nd Sisely.At the same time he makes appropriate comments about Miessonier(whom he treats more severely than Baudelaire had), about Cabanel,about Gt rom e. H e is doubtless rather too generous to Carolus Du ran,Detaille, Bonnat, Bastien-Le Page and others we have completely for-gotten. Bu t these errors of judgm ent are rar e and insignificant, and inany event Zola never confuses the painters whom we have forgotteno r relegated to the storage-rooms of museum s with those w hose great-ness he recognized from the first.The eye perceives, discerns and transmits the specific reality ofpainting. It is the intermediary between this reality and its verbal ex-pression. A nd the simplicity, the m onotony, the limitations of the


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Yale French Studies

language of art criticism bear witness to the resistance it meets at itsorigin. Somewhat awkward, somewhat limited; the words that describethe new light are inadequate to it, but as far as we can tell, this lighthas been seen. The sudden brightness of the new day fades works thatwere colorless to begin with, like the paintings of Cabanel and Gtrome.But it is also so blinding that it obscures another light equally brightbut not so new. So Pissarro and Jongkind put Courbet and Corot inthe shade, and Zola is surely unfair to them. Not to mention his inbornor willful blindness to ancient art: I like neither the Egyptians nor theGreeks . . . His eye is what it is, but it is after all his eye that sees, sothat when an intellectual or emotional prejudice comes to the foresay his liking for great decorative compositions -his eye intervenes,limiting the degree of error. Thus though he likes Puvis de Chevanneshe is not led to admire Jean-Paul Laurens. For Laurens paints poorlyand coldly, but Purvis shows strength and grandeur even though hewas wrong to paint Radegonde. Zola could properly say that his judg-ments are those of an artist, while Proudhon's are those of a moralist.

When he writes in praise of Manet, the argument he offers is theonly unprovable one, the only irrefutable one: Look at the nearbypaintings, and see what a sorry figure they cut in comparison to thiswindow open on nature. Is nature a subject, is it the privilegedobject of attention? Might a general intellectual appreciation replacethe eye's exact reaction to and perception of nature? But what Zolacalls nature is in fact a dazzle of light that has nothing to do withoptical laws and calls for no intellectual judgments. It is as thoughnature were painting left to itself, to its own spontaneity. He praisesMonet for having painted that nature which men have put in moderndress, adding, of course I should scarcely admire these works ifClaude Monet were not a real painter; I simply wanted to note hisattraction to modern subjects. Explicitly, Zola distinguishes betweenthe order of painting and the order of subjects. He sets admiration(which alone is appropriate to the order of painting) against knownfacts and cognitive judgments (which are unrelated to matters of tasteand appropriate to the order of subjects). Implicitly, modernity likenature itself becomes equivalent to pure presence, pure optical imma-


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Gaetan Piconthrough the works and the opinions of others. Una ffected by ideasand subjects, the quality of painting depends upon a frankness and acloseness of vision. Th e abs tract and general term naturalism, as it isused in these strange words abo ut M onet, describes this vision: If Iapprov e of his decision to look fo r his points of view n the milieu nwhich he lives. I congratu late him even m ore for know ing how to pa int,for having an accurate and a frank eye, for belonging to the greatschool of naturalists. But th e words realist and naturalist bothe rZola.

In the same pages, he speaks again of M onet: Here is a tempera-ment, he re you have m ore tha n a realist, you have a delicate and force-ful interpreter. A s he talks abou t the works he likes, Zola constantlyjuxtaposes epith ets like truthful and living an d energetic. If itwere simply a question of creating a scientific work, truthful wou ldsuffice. Bu t if it is tem pera ment th at is essential, we a re fa r from apositivistic aesthetic, and Zola realizes it: I suppo rt my own side, theside of life and truth , that's all. I am som ewhat like Diogenes who waslooking for a man. In art, I also look for men, for new and powerfultemperaments.

I scoff at realism because this word has no precise meaningfor me. If you mean by this term the necessity for artists tostudy and render true nature, it is unquestionable that allartists must be realists. Men must paint realities. They takenature and they render it, they render it as it is seen throughtheir particular temperaments. Each artist thus gives us a dif-feren t world, and I shall willingly accept all of these va riousworlds, provided th at eac h be the living expression of a hum anheart. I admire the worlds of Delacroix and of Courbet. Inview of this decla ration, you could n ot pu t m e with any school.

o n the presence of reality, of truth, the personal touch is whatcounts. The work of a rt is a pa rt of crea tion seen throu gh a tempera-


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Gae tan PiconThese are remarkable lines. Because reality is more varied than

temperam ent one cannot conceive of an a rt which could go beyondthe real. Here reality appears not as a common standard but rather asan agent of diversification, a principle of individuation.

It is the sudden flash of personal vision, a flash which not onlystands out against a background of reality, but also finds its nourish-ment and its source in reality: it is this special mark th at Zola sees andlikes n the work of M anet, M onet, Jongkind and Pissarro du ring theseyears of discovery in which his admiration reaches its highest point.Why then does his enthusiasm begin to wane? After a few years ofsilence, why does he express his doubts in the articles sent off to theMessager de 1 Europe between 1875 and 1880, doubts no-one couldhave foreseen? Why the disappointment plainly admitted in the Salonof 18 96 and the self-searching it inspires not to mention a novellike L Oeuvre whose historical significance as we know is even moreambiguous?

In the Salon of 18 96 , he writes complainingly of the trium ph ofthe kind of painting h e had backed when it was the doub tful battle ofonly a few artists. Bright painting, ou tdoor painting, painting by taches,of reflections. "Nothing now but M anets, M onets, Pissarros " The kindof painting he had championed no longer allows its contrary to exist.H e misses it; he would like to see a coal-black black again T o be nos-talgic for battle at victory, to reject uniformity, to be annoyed with aninvention become the object of imitation these reactions ar e con-sistent with th e logic of Zola's polemical psychology and his plura listicand "anarchistic" aesthetic. Bu t his condem nation of "multicoloredwomen," of "violet landscapes" and of "orange horses" brings intoplay a more complex and more equivocal change of heart. And thissends us back to ou r examination of th e notion of reality:

If one goes beyond academy figures painted in the artificiallight of the studio, if one dea ls with changing an d imm ensenature, light, ceaselessly varying, becomes th e soul of the work.Nothing however is more difficult to catch and to render than


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Yale Fren ch StudiesZola sets the variety of th e real against the monotony of the imaginary.F or when he refers to the subject as a pretext for painting he seemsto admit and to understand what the painting of Manet implies: theliberation from the object, the process by which'a work creates itself.But in connection with Dort, he warns that a painter cannot departfrom the real without falling into repetition, emptiness, exaggeration.If the complaints about impressionism are not without equivocation,they are all based a t bottom on the primacy accorded to the object, inso far as it is the principle of a c ommunicable diversity, that is to sayin so far as it is a common standard

In a youthful letter to Ctz ann e, Zola writes:

Without form, one ca n be a great painter for oneself, but n otfor others. Ea ch genius is bo rn with his view of life andwith his original form: these are things which cannot be sepa-rated w ithout causing, at least in appeara nce, a complete emp-tiness in a man. This is especially noticeable when thoughtalone rules: the poor great man is put with all misunderstoodpeople; much as his soul dreams, it cannot communicate withothers; this ma n is ridiculous an d unh appy.

We will have a clue to the com plaints and the equivocal judgmentsif we compare this youthful warning (and that it is addressed to Ct-zanne is revealing) first with a ll of the texts in which he gloomily men-tions what the works he likes leave to be desired, then with the pagesof condemnation, and finally with the pages of ome (in chapter 6that he devotes to Michelangelo. H e has just mentioned form ; else-where, he blames his painters for their lack of technique. I n 1879Zola writes that M anet, despite his perspicatious vision so able todiscern the right tonalities, nevertheless finds it difficult to realize hisvision: his ha nd is not equal to his eye. Bu t the notion of form isclosely related to the notion of technique, as this judgment of 1880seems to indicate: For the impressionists are at fault because of their


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Gaetan Piconkind of painting can be an object of immediate communication, ofunequivocal, final completeness. In that which exists he does not seethe forces which work to keep it from being its own end, from beingsomething completely and immediately understandable as it is.

Zola has seen in that w hich is a state of things both unquestionab leand harm onious; he does not see the active forces that this state impliesand that it sets in motion. Several years la ter he finds the sta te of thingsvisibly transformed by these forces; to the wearing away of things heis sensitive, but he is blind to the meaning of their transform ation .So it happ ens that Zola, who had stood up fo r the new a rt in its infancy,now asks the past to p rovide impossible finalities, finalities which w ouldreplace those he cannot now perceive. And it could be said that Zolathe novelist (and certainly a great one) found himself in a rathersimilar situation. He did not understand himself any better than heunderstood Manet. His own art is inextricably related to everythingwhich begins with the painters he liked: a great wave of the real andthe immediate subordinates retrospective exposition to the presentimmediacy of scene and dialogue, as indeed in painting the model issubordinated to sheer painting. Consider for example the openingscene of La Cure e: odors of foliage and horses, noises of clogs andaxles, gleamings of copper and leather these sensations come to usin a confused rush before they are organized in to a n intelligible scene.We could say of this what Zola says of the Olympia: What does allthis mean? You hardly know , nor do I. A nd as in painting, so in litera-ture : the de struction of old models is conducive to the creation of newmatter, of unwritten and undefined substances. Take that silk, forexample, with the perfume, th e texture a nd the w hiteness of a woman'sflesh, stretched between all the words of Nana, that silk which Mal-larmt admired and praised. But Zola does not allow his works to findtheir own shape, to create their own form. He wants them to conformto a ce rtain idea of the novel; he wants them to express themselves interms of this idea, without reservations, without circumlocutions. So,wanting to write for his own time, he actually writes for a past er a, a ndthe Rougon-Macquart series ends up as an inferior Comkdie humaine-tho ugh in Zola's work we catch the gleam of metals found only n


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