From the end of XVIIIe century, a critical discourse emerged which soon established itself as an intermediary between the public and the works. The review Companies and Representations looks back at the progressive professionalization of the environment, and its feminization.
For its last delivery, Companies & Representations made a double blow. The issue exceptionally brings together two parts. One continues the thematic approach of the review, with a file devoted to the figure of the art critic in XIXe century ; to celebrate twenty years of the adventure launched in 1995, the other offers a reflective and retrospective pause to assess the progress made since then through a series of fascinating testimonies.
More than ever, this volume sticks to its primary ambition, that of questioning representations through the prism of the human and social sciences. Betting on “seriousness without academicism”, the journal proposes to shed light on social questions through a multidisciplinary approach which borrows its tools from sociology, political and cultural history and sensitivities, and the history of art and media or anthropology, and covers a wide period from the modern to the contemporary period. She wishes to “enable a play on the boundaries shared between disciplines” (p. 255) and cultivates an assumed taste for “DIY” that her refusal of compartmentalization presupposes.
Artistic fields
Faithful to this line, the file coordinated by I. Mayaud and S. Sofio aims to take stock of arts criticism as a field of study and, therefore, to remedy the atomization and isolation of researchers coming from different backgrounds (history, sociology, art history and musicology), as well as to offer new insights into arts criticism in XIXe century. More precisely, it offers a look at various artistic fields (painting, photography, lithography and music) in order to “promote the investment of criticism by the social sciences” (p. 21). Against sub-disciplinary specialization, the coordinators of the issue favored a plurality of approaches in order to bring different areas of art into dialogue.
At the crossroads of perspectives, the articles aim to “understand how critics proceed in order to assert the legitimacy of the expression of their point of view and to consolidate their position within the public space” (p. 21 ). Adopting a social perspective, they cover four major themes to participate “ of And At renewal of critical studies” (p. 14). They thus bear witness to the appearance of a specific and specialized discourse to underline the heterogeneity of the practices and profiles of those who constitute a necessary intermediary authority and to return to the creative aspect of the criticism then practiced.
For the sake of readability and to better highlight the interest of the work presented, I will retain these guiding threads that the studies interweave: thanks to virulent aesthetic debates, the art criticism of XIXe century brings about the emergence of a community of taste and begins to protect its interests; innovative and relatively open, it contributes to the appearance of critical women and accounts for the upheavals caused by certain technical innovations in the field of art.
A community of taste
As the introduction points out,
critical discourse becomes more homogeneous from the Empire onwards, as the practice of criticism becomes professionalized, legitimizes itself and becomes normalized in the context of the growth of the press and the expansion of the public for fine arts or music. (pg. 15)
However, S. Bakkali recalls that, from the end of the XVIIIe century, expert merchants, true connoisseursstand out from literary critics and artists to produce a discourse on art which they disseminate in sales catalogues. With a pictorial education, these merchants, most of them master painters, claimed to be able to judge the aesthetic value of paintings. Distributed to a wide audience, their catalogs prove to be real tools of knowledge and erudition which allow commercial discourse to establish its moral legitimacy in the public space.
In addition to this professional dimension, in the first years of XIXe century, a question of generation. Interested in forms of “aesthetic and moral dissidence” (p. 19), S. Hanselaar and S. Sofio return to the heated debates between ancients and moderns around the group of Meditators for one and the romantic battle for ‘other. Each time the critical discourse takes a position. That is, around 1800, he endeavored to construct “a negative image of thought Meditators” (p. 131) who contest the lack of modernity of their master, David; or, following the breakup of the French School after 1815, having become legitimate and prescriptive, it saw itself monopolized by the young generation of “children of the century” who imposed a romantic critical framework borrowed from the literary space.
Having become performative, critical discourse gradually holds a monopoly on discourse on works and in fact imposes itself as an essential intermediary between the public, on the one hand, and artists and their works, on the other.
Defense and illustration of criticism
With the homogenization and normalization of criticism between the end of the Ancien Régime and the middle of the XIXe century, art critics felt the need to produce a collective professional identity. I. Mayaud focuses on the creation, in 1877, of the Circle of Musical and Dramatic Criticism, a “family” collective which professionalized itself to become, in 1902, the Professional and Mutual Trade Union Association of Dramatic and Musical Criticism. A true “normative authority” (p. 92), this will shape the professional identity of critics, represent and defend the political, economic and social interests of the profession.
In connection with this “self-legitimation process”, which involves “discourses of justification and positioning” (p. 18), a “right to criticize” is put in place. Mr. Béra looks at the laws of 1819 and 1822 which, at the time, governed press law and from which “jurisprudence modeled a right (and) outlined the contours of a legitimate practice” ( p.59). In this context, the Van Beers-Solvay affair of 1882 confirms this recognition of an “incontestable right of criticism”, as well as the affirmation of a criticism that is “demanding, specialized and worthy of art”.
K. Dierckx reads in the victory of the critic L. Solvay the demand for autonomy and independence, which the Ghent Organ affair had undermined in 1856. Examining the problem of freedom of speech of complacent journalists, who depended on bankers and traders or institutions, R. Campos underlines the “mercantile aspect of most of the information disseminated by the press” at the time of the scandal. He analyzes a journalistic practice which stands out as “one of the forms of artistic commerce”. On the market for musical goods, “aesthetic ideas and opinions are monetized without qualms” (p. 245).
Critical women
With the consolidation of the status of the critic, the mid-century also witnessed the emergence of the female art critic and the concomitant feminization of critical discourse and thoughts on art. C. Foucher Zarmanian studies the “solidarity and fruitful dialogue between practitioners and art critics of the same sex” (p. 127) to highlight the advent of singular visions in an activist cultural and editorial context. Highlighting the skills and talent of women artists, women critics took “the opposite view of the dominant criticism which relegated (the former) to the rank of amiable dilettantes”. Making their femininity the origin of a privileged point of view, they capitalize on their “place ofoutsider » (p. 146) from the end of the XVIIIe century and, according to H. Jensen, invoke their sex to give sensitive and moral legitimacy to their rhetorical strategy.
The portrait of Camille Delaville that J. Rogers paints is welcome. Wanting to “exalt famous women artists and show their daily lives”, the critic, chronicler of “my contemporaries” at the end of the 1880s, claimed a “specifically feminine” point of view (p. 118) with the aim of negotiating a place and to articulate a discourse at a time when the right of women to enter the public sphere was not acquired.
Arts of reproducibility
Finally, the issue gives space to the birth of new visibilities: it is interested in the development of a critical discourse around technical innovations, here lithography and photography.
Returning to the critical indifference which greeted the beginnings of lithography in Europe, G. Brouwers notes that the press “signals a technical evolution”, but does not accompany it with “any aesthetic reflection” (p. 187). Deemed industrial, the process was despised because it was intended “for the common people and for Bonapartist propaganda”. The lack of critical interest then went against the customs of the time.
For its part, photography has been established as a scandalous counter-model to painting. As P.-L. Roubert, it has established itself as a true critical leitmotif for measuring the limits of art. Ousted from aesthetic debates, the “photographic fact” therefore stands out as an essential element of pictorial analyses. The diagnosis of the state of painting that it allows thus contributes to constructing photography as an “object of art criticism” (p. 20).