Aisthesis. Jacques Ranciere
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or landscapes, or history … nature having told no-one that a village dance was out of place in the gallery of a people who imposed upon itself the duty to honour the values of the countryside, and to prefer its pleasures; nature having told no-one that it only breathes under Alexander’s tent and ceases to revel in the nooks of an enchanting site.8
It remained unclear how the potential for freedom could be recognized on a canvas, and how what could be seen in the works of patrimony could incite the virtues of a free people. The revolutionary redactor emphasized this: even if nature did not know genres, one still needed to distinguish between its products. This is where the break from the ancient hierarchy quickly posed a dilemma: what education of a republican people could one expect from the tavern scenes preferred by genre painters? At first, Northern painters were only admitted for some edifying paintings. Thus the redactor of the Décade philosophique was able to oppose the ‘historical flatteries’ and ‘the lies eternalized by Rubens and Lebrun’ to the ‘works of mercy’ symbolized by the Return of the Prodigal Child by Teniers or The Dropsical Woman by Gérard Dou.9 For the most part, popular Dutch or Flemish scenes offered no legible instruction to the republican people. The task thus fell upon great painting, upon the painting of great subjects, to provide this education. But what were these great subjects? What did the works of the great masters represent if not biblical episodes, mythological scenes, portraits of sovereigns and their royal favourites? In short, their subjects bore testimony only to religious superstition and oppression. The same report emphasizes that ‘long centuries of slavery and shame’ had turned art away from its ‘celestial origins’. All of its works were ‘stamped with superstition, flattery and libertinage’ to the extent that one was ‘tempted to destroy all these baubles of delirium and deceit’.10 Winckelmann could still sigh like a grief-stricken lover before the freedom withdrawn from the world and preserved in antique stones. The curators of the republican museum had to confront this paradox brutally: the patrimony of freedom was there, in their crates, in the heart of the capital of the republican world, but this patrimony was composed of works that were the product and the consecration of servitude. Was it necessary to destroy all these ‘baubles’ and cover the walls of the Louvre only with paintings celebrating the great scenes of antique history and the heroism of revolutionary armies? But even when the subject of the action would not give rise to controversy, a deeper split affected the edifying value that could be given to painting. One now presumed to know: painting could not find perfection by representing an action. It only truly excelled at representing movement at standstill. This is the reason history painting with a message was perfected in The Intervention of the Sabine Women by David: the painting of an action interrupting military action. The positive message of peace could be identified through the calm lines, but not without a strange feeling summed up by a commentator: for him the most beautiful figure of the painting was a squire whose ‘juvenile and admirable forms breathed the ideal’.11 But this ideal figure seemed indifferent to the action. The squire was turning his back to the warriors as well as the women who were separating them.
It was thus impossible to base the education of freedom on the subject of the painting. Only one solution was available to those drawing testimonies of ‘long centuries of slavery and shame’ out of the crates: to nullify the content of the paintings by installing them in art’s own space. It was the placement of the paintings on the walls, the ‘air of grandeur and simplicity’ of the whole, and the ‘severe choice’ of the works that had to ‘draw respect’.12 The arrangement of art’s place and the singular potential of artists would have to teach free people what represented subjects could not be expected to teach them. The republican display of educational painting had the paradoxical yet logical consequence of training a gaze detached from the meaning of the works. How was one to expose the cycle painted by Rubens to the glory of Marie de Medicis, the scheming widow of the ‘tyrant’ Henri IV to the republican people? The chosen solution was to extract the two paintings that were the least immediately legible, the most allegorical: two paintings devoted to the reconciliation of the queen mother with her son, the young Louis XIII. These paintings became pure representations of general concord. The queen, seen in profile in the background, was partially masked by Mercury and by two figures of Peace that left the foreground to an enigmatic character, partially nude with bulging muscles. These detached fragments became unintelligible as historical scenes, and forcefully solicited a ‘disinterested’ gaze on the pictorial idealness of the figures: ‘Removed from their narrative sequence, the dense allegories of the scenes rendered them illegible except as figurative paintings and as examples of Rubens’s brush; the nude foreground figures became all the more prominent as signifiers of the Ideal.’13
The revolutionary declaration of the equality of subjects and the institution of the museum alone could thus not suffice to ensure the overthrow of the hierarchy. The addition of a supplementary but also a contradictory element was necessary. It was thus the revival of the art market, corresponding to the decline of the Revolution, which consecrated the little Flemish and Dutch works by opposing the ‘immortality of sales’ to the ‘immortality of biographies’.14 Prices from sales around 1800 for The Willows by Potter, or A Village Fête by Teniers, or The Ham Eater by the same artist, bear witness to this evolution. Later it was romantic travellers who transposed Winckelmann’s logic to works by painters from the Netherlands. Winckelmann had celebrated the perfection of the Greek and the Italian climate that gave an air of noblesse to the most destitute folk. Lacking sun, soft breezes and a clear blue sky, these travellers found paintings at every street corner and became exalted like Thoré in Ghent, ‘where the daughters of common people walk like princesses’ and where ‘Rubens found the type for his saintly women and the noble ladies in waiting of Marie de Medicis’.15 In 1824 the editor of the Globe had already dubbed Raphael and Adrian Brouwer as belonging to the same art: ‘Everything that belongs to the universe, from the highest to the lowest object, from the heavenly Sistine Madonna to Flemish drunkards, is worthy of being depicted in his works.’16 Here they founded a certain sociological republicanism of art, marking the conjunction between the life animating the pictorial surface and the equality of all subjects, which would be embodied in France by one man: Etienne Joseph Théophile Thoré, revolutionary deputy of the Second Republic, who, under the penname of Wilhelm Bürger, contributed to the glory of two artists still obscure in Hegel’s time: Franz Hals and Jan Vermeer. For Thoré, the equal attention that the older masters, Van Eyck, Memling or Roger Van der Weyden paid to ‘the landscape and its thousand accidents, to the blade of grass and rose branch or oak boughs, to the bird and the lion, to the cottage and the finest architecture’, was the sign of ‘a kind of pantheism, a naturalism, a realism, if you will’, characteristic of the Flemish or Dutch schools: ‘All classes of people, all the particularities of domestic life, all the manifestations of nature are accepted and glorified there.’17 In favour of the art of their time, the French contributing editors of L’Artiste began to develop this alliance between the freedom of art and the equality of subjects that makes genre painting the true historical painting. In the vibrations of the coloured surface it expressed the larger and deeper history of mores, the chronicle of ordinary people and everyday life that followed the hollow grandeurs of yesteryear. Nonetheless, this art would not be the art of the Second Republic in 1848. Instead, Joseph Chenavard was ordered to decorate the Panthéon with grand humanitarian frescoes. The rapid return of reactionary forces to power blocked the execution of these frescoes, but Chenavard’s sketches at least allowed the person who remains the French literature textbook inventor of l’art pour l’art, Théophile Gautier, to reveal himself as the most eloquent champion of programmatic humanitarian art.18
Hegel, for one, was invested in thinking exactly what art for art’s sake and art as the expression of a society had in common. He takes up the problem where revolutionary museographers set it aside: How is one to think through this ‘ideal’ that defines the excellence of painting, once it has been separated from criteria of academic excellence, from social grandeurs, or from its value as moral illustration? For the museographers of the new Louvre, the organization of the exhibition itself had to manifest the paintings’ belonging to the patrimony of freedom. Hegel wants to make this belonging appear on the very surface of the paintings, and especially on the prosaic works of genre painters scorned in the name