H-France Review Vol. 2 (February 2002), No. 13
Neil McWilliam, Monumental Intolerance: Jean Baffier, A Nationalist
Sculpture in Fin-De-Siècle France. University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2000. lxvii+326pp. Bibliography and index. $70.00
U.S. (cl). ISBN 0-271-01965-4.
Review by William Hauptman, Independent Scholar, Lausanne, Switzerland.
It is doubtful that a substantial number of students of nineteenth-century
French art or political history would have had even scant contact with the
sculptor Jean Baffier (1851-1920). A contemporary of Rodin and other
fin-de-siècle sculptors, Baffier and his work has remained on the periphery
of the standard canon, neglected from both traditional art and political
histories of the period. So disembodied is his work and life that only
several lines are included in Bénézit's Dictionnaire critique et
documentaire des peintres,[1] as indeed is the case in Thieme-Becker's
larger and more complete Allgemeines Lexikon.[2] Curiously, nothing at
all is cited in the most authoritative compendium of nineteenth-century
sculptors' lives, Lami's Dictionnaire des sculpteurs de l'école française
au dix-neuvième siècle.[3] And even in the forty volumes of The Grove
Dictionary of Art, but one mention of his name can be found, associated not
with his extreme political radicalism but with his work in pewter, where
Baffier, along with Brateau and Larche, is noted as one of the most
distinguished craftsman of the late nineteenth century in the medium.[4]
The situation is no different in recent histories of nineteenth-century
sculpture, where his career is generally absent, just as his works are not
represented. If it survives in this context, it does so only as a minor
footnote and never as a particularly distinguished example of the
multifaceted dimensions of French sculpture of the period. One of the few
instances in recent times in which the historian might have had a chance to
peruse one of his works was in Anne Pingeot's exhibition, La Sculpture
française au XIXe siècle, in which a single work was shown--the P'tit Jean
le Greffeux, first exhibited in 1886.[5] But for practical purposes, the
name of Jean Baffier has all been erased from art history.
The present study, therefore, fills a significant gap and offers a tempting
array of works unknown by even the most tenacious specialist. One of the
first impressions when glancing at the work itself--divorced from the
text--is how singular and bizarre some of his creations appear to be. This
keys with his career, which was an equally odd one, even by the standards
of an age that seemed to have specialized in such oddities. But while
Baffier has barely survived historical scrutiny, it should be noted that
the milieu in which he worked, sculpture and the decorative arts, were
dominant forms, and many overlooked artists in this period can be found.
Some of these may deserve rehabilitation in the new interest in lesser
masters that has emerged in the past decades, but many as well who do not
merit that distinction because of the paucity of their creative imagination
or the simple, and frequently local, assimilation of other styles into
forms that exhibit little personal distinction. The author knows this well
enough and states outright that his aim is not "merely adding one more
'forgotten' artist to the roll" (p. 3) of lost masters in the hopes that
the magnificence of Baffier's work will make him a candidate for lost
honors. Rather, the approach here is to employ Baffier as a pivot "for
exploring a series of historical problems, artistic and ideological" by
which McWilliam means a perusal of historical and political events in which
Baffier the man was as much a player as Baffier the artist. The focus is
steadfastly on the ideological rather than the artistic; it is as much
political history as it is art history, and accordingly there is no attempt
to write a full life of Baffier, nor to catalogue his works. The book
therefore addresses the art historian less than it provokes the interests
of the historian, whom, I think, will benefit from the examination of the
material more.
Few art historians are more capable of veering into this area than Neil
McWilliam, a professor at the University of Warwick. Although known to
specialists in the field largely as the compiler of a valuable and often
consulted bibliography of salon criticism from the Ancien Régime to the
Second Empire,[6] he also has directed himself largely into the area of the
French social context that underlines the art of the period, a byproduct of
his revisionist aims. Beside public talks at colloquia with such
provocative titles as "Avant-Garde Anti-Modernism: Nationalism and the
Search for Nationhood in Fin-de-Siècle Montmartre," and "Black Cats, Mad
Cows and Golden Calves: Nationalism and Anti-Semitism in Fin-de-Siècle
Montmartre," McWilliam published an important study, Dreams of Happiness:
Social Art and the French Left 1830-1850, which enters squarely into the
direction of his study of Baffier and radical causes.[7] The publication of
the salon criticism sources and the radical situation of extremism in
France at the end of the century has served McWilliam exceedingly well in
the examination of Baffier: the former, because he has made extensive use
of documentation culled from the most obscure and often unimaginable
sources; the latter, because his basic understanding of French political
life and its vagaries in the nineteenth century provide the tenable
boundaries around which his examination is based.
There is no mistaking McWilliam's earnestness, his methodology, or his
expertise in the subject. Neither can we question the accuracy of the
intensive research he has brought over the years in his examination of the
subject and its important peripheries. The sheer amount of documentation he
utilizes and cites is itself staggering--an ocean of sources that other
studies of major artists does not often contain. In the body of an
introduction, seven chapters, and a conclusion, McWilliam employs no fewer
than 1,026 footnotes, a very substantial of these drawn from unpublished
archival sources that only the most intrepid researcher could track down,
digest, and employ with intelligence. His bibliography lists about 60
national and Parisian journals and almost 20 provincial dailies and
periodicals, most of which must have been exceedingly difficult to obtain
and which apparently offered aspects that he could hardly have imagined at
the outset of his work. In looking at McWilliam's lists of primary and
secondary published sources--these make up fourteen double-column pages of
bibliography--one wonders how that amount of material could have been kept
in order. The bibliography equally notes Baffier's own writings--letters,
manifestos, tracts, reviews, and other miscellany--as numbering almost a
hundred pieces, none coming from major journals, periodicals, or standard
sources. Given this torrent of information, it seems unlikely that anything
on Baffier or his entourage and period, no matter how remote or obscure,
could have eluded McWilliam's incredibly fervent eye.
What does this affluence of information yield? McWilliam weaves a
distasteful tale of political fanaticism, misplaced patriotism, sordid
hatred, and radical extremism in a long career that even included an
assassination attempt on the Parisian deputy Germain Casse for which
Baffier was exonerated. Most disagreeable is Baffier's fiery anti-Semitic
ravings, which have the tone of modern Hitlerism. There is little doubt
that Baffier's neurotic character became a dominant element in his life and
like other repulsive personalities or causes used his art as a platform for
these extremist ideals. But beyond the man, the art is what is most
important to consider, and here we do miss the monographic approach which
would have considered his sculpture as an aesthetic entity.
There is no doubt in looking over his works, and McWilliam's discussion of
these, that Baffier had specific artistic merit that, despite his politics,
should warrant the attention of the historian. In examining his
controversial statue of Marat--it was destroyed in 1942, but the plaster
cast, shown in 1883, is extant in Sancoins--the power of Baffier's image of
the sensitive subject is noteworthy and could bear comparison with the
treatments by David, Baudry, and others. McWilliam uses it to illustrate
how the Third Republic had difficulty in coming to terms with the
Revolution and how Baffier began to comprehend the latter event as a
Judeo-Masonic plot, a forerunner of Baffier's anti-Semitic notions, but
McWilliam spends less time on the abstract image itself. Also, his
remarkable statue of Louis XI, shown in 1884, a curious conception, shows
Baffier's imagination at work as it does his technical skills, both of
which can be favorably compared to more well known contemporaries.
McWilliam is especially rich in two distinct areas of his Baffier research:
(1) the public sculptural programs after the Franco-Prussian War and World
War I; and (2) Baffier's integration of crafts within his artistic credo.
As to the former, McWilliam draws out not only Baffier's work in elegizing
the heroes of battles, but also relies on those of many of his
contemporaries, making a compelling case for how sculpture was used in
France to elicit public-spirited ideals and sometimes in the process
evoking strong emotions of Aryan supremacy. Once again, the tale McWilliam
tells is sometimes repugnant, although the art itself saves it from dreary
and unsavory political polemic. The statue of Michael Servetus, the Spanish
doctor who was burned at the stake in Geneva in 1553 and who became an
anti-Protestant rallying point, is an example in which the art overrides
the political intention. In bold sculptural terms, not unlike Rodin's
Burghers of Calais, Baffier created a distinguished figure in chains
stoically awaiting his fate, a sculptural monument that seems to be as
interesting without the very long discussion of its political significance.
Also taken into account is Baffier's forays into the decorative arts,
inspired from his interest in medieval guilds. Central to McWilliam's
chapter is the monumental fireplace shown in the Salon of 1898, "Pour la
tradition celtique." It is a very odd work by any standards, showing the
family as the bedrock of rural life but intertwined with symbolic
caryatids, a vielleux berrichon at the top, and a strange relief of Vin
oddly incorporated in the scheme. More commodoius is Baffier's candelabras,
flower vases, salt cellar--a particularly sinewy and unexpected art nouveau
example--soup tureens, and wine coolers, works which in fact justified the
Grove Dictionary classification of Baffier as an important decorative
sculptor. These exhibit his craftsman spirit--as they do his revivalism in
past decorative traditions--but again they are seen more from a social base
than as works of art, considered as ideological statements rather than
works of art.
It is precisely this point that produces a certain deficiency in the book,
namely the importance of Baffier's art within the context of other
sculptors' works of the period. Where in fact do McWilliam and later
historians situate an art that moves between political proclamation,
flamboyant radicalism, pure decoration, and sometimes traditional formats?
The question is not easy to answer from McWilliam's text, partly because
his approach is so rooted in the ideological and historical and only
haplessly in the art historical in the traditional sense. McWilliam, for
example, does not introduce ready comparative examples with which to
examine aspects of the question of Baffier's artistic greatness or
originality. While some comparisons exist in the text, they are all
relegated to lesser artists (Cornu, Paris, Broquet, Pilet, Crauk, and
others), which, I suppose, were selected for the corresponding dimensions
of their subjects rather than as a forum to discuss style, technique, or
originality. Consequently, the aesthetic value of Baffier's work, his place
in the very complex picture of late nineteenth-century sculpture, and
whatever influences he absorbed or emitted are not discussed or only rarely
alluded to. What takes precedence, for better or worse, is the political
radicalism of a few in the service of a causean element that after the
events of September 11 take on a different perspective, even in the
rarefied atmosphere of art history. Nonetheless, we owe McWilliam a debt in
bringing out the curious aspects of this strange and sometimes squalid
personality in a study that is clear, engaging, and well done. But it
finally places itself in the domain of political history in which art takes
on a lesser role than perhaps should have been the case.
NOTES
[1] E. Bénézit, Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, Vol. 1
(Paris: Gründ, 1999), p. 632.
[2] Ulrich Thieme and Félix Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden
Künstler, Vol. XII (Leipzig: Veb. E. A. Seeman Verlag, 1908), p. 352.
[3] Stanislas Lami, Dictionnaire des sculpteurs de l'école française au
dix-neuvième siècle (Nendeln, Lichtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1970 [1914]).
[4] The Grove Dictionary of Art, General Editor Jan Turner. Vol. XI
(London and New York: Macmillan, 1996), p. 629.
[5] Anne Pingeot, La Sculpture française au XIXe siècle (Paris: Grand
Palais, 1986), catalogue 222.
[6] Neil McWilliam (with Vera Schuster, Richard Wrigley, and Pascale
Méker), A Bibliography of Salon Criticism in Paris From the Ancien Régime to
the Restoration, 1699-1827 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991); and Neil McWilliam, A Bibliography of Salon Criticism in
Paris From the July Monarchy to the Second Republic, 1831-1855 (New York
and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
[7] Neil McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness: Social Art and the French Left
1830-1850 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993).
William Hauptman
Independent Scholar, Lausanne, Switzerland
whauptman@bluewin.ch
Copyright © 2002 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. The Society for French Historical Studies permits the electronic distribution for nonprofit educational purposes, provided that full and accurate credit is given to the author, the date of publication, and its location on the H-France website. No republication or distribution by print media will be permitted without permission. For any other proposed uses, contact the Editor-in-Chief of H-France.
H-France Review Vol. 2 (February 2002), No. 13
ISSN 1553-9172
