Featured White Papers
- Document Process Automation for customer orders: A new performance perspective (Esker)
- The missing link: Driving business results through pay-for-performance (SuccessFactors, Inc.)
- The secret to effective, no-hassle performance reviews (SuccessFactors, Inc.)
Content provided in partnership with
Charles Nicolas Cochin et l'art des Lumieres. - book reviews
Art Bulletin, The, June, 1995 by John Goodman
In the course of the 18th century the European cultural sphere was radically reconfigured, and the two volumes under review considerably advance our understanding of the relevant Habermassian dynamics as they played themselves out in Enlightenment Paris. They are profitably read together, for both treat the heated debates over the nature and status of the aesthetic that developed in tandem with the emergence of the public sphere in 18th-century France, and the confusing dilemmas with which first the royal administrators, then the public functionaries responsible for prestige visual culture, were faced as a result. McClellan's book approaches the consequent vicissitudes through a study of the overlapping histories of several museums; while Michel's work screens all of its materials through the lens of a single man's life and experience; but the messy problematics of practice are given pride of place by both authors, with salutary results.
Inventing the Louvre, characterized by McClellan as an examination of "the dawn of the museum age in France," is a social history of the celebrated Parisian museum from the reign of Louis XVI to that of Napoleon, framed by an introductory study of its predecessor, the Luxembourg Museum (1750-79), and a concluding chapter on Alexandre Lenoir's Musee des Monuments Francais (17931816), that touchstone of the French Romantic sensibility which left such a lasting impression on Michelet and his generation. In key respects this is a companion volume to Thomas Crow's influential history of the 18th-century Salon,(1) and it follows his general approach throughout, assuming that fine-arts policy decisions are best understood as tactics in a struggle for control of what Bourdieu would call the symbolic capital of the French nation.(2) Given his focus on the culture of art museums, McClellan's primary concern is with the national patrimony, a concept that dates from this period,(3) but he is aware of the larger implications of his material and explores them where appropriate. His work, while inflected with recent revisionist scholarship (he writes quite comfortably about the "ideological work" performed.by museums), is empirical in the best tradition of liberal historiography. He is a reliable, eminently reasonable guide through this museological landscape fraught with controversy and contention. I regretted his decision to stop short of giving a full account of the unabashedly triumphalist Music Napoleon (1803-14),(4) for this moment in the Louvre's history is the natural culmination of the trajectory he discusses. His book would also have been richer if he had had more to say about the broader context of the developing museum phenomenon, both in Paris and the rest of Europe; he discusses neither the ambitious independent museum and Salon project sponsored in 1776-77 by the Vauxhall establishment known as the Colisee, suppressed by the authorities,(5) nor the Musee de la Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, opened in Paris in 1794 at the instigation of the abbe Gregoire (not only the first European museum of science and industry but also the first "hands-on" museum).(6) The bearing on the nascent museum phenomenon of the democratic clubs suggestively known as musees, which began to appear in the French capital in the late 1770s, is not investigated.(7) Furthermore, although there is a succinct discussion of museums in Dusseldorf and Vienna, the parallel public institutions that sprang up all over the continent as well as in England in the second half of the century go largely unexplored, even for comparative purposes.(8) But the story McClellan does tell is important and topical, especially when considered in the light of the widespread view that the Louvre is the very model of the now much-maligned universal museum.(9) Given the absence of a synthetic account of how this paradigmatic institution came to be the way it is, I was all the more grateful for McClellan's temperate, thoughtful approach; and despite the extensive literature on the Louvre and Lenoir's museum, his book contains much that is new.
He is the first scholar, for example, to study the Luxembourg Museum seriously. He argues for its having a threefold importance: as the first public art gallery in France, "the first museum in Europe intended to represent (indeed to invent) and promote a national artistic tradition" (p. 44), and the first such institution specifically devised to serve as a pedagogic tool for young artists. Each of these claims is legitimate, and they make for a convenient starting point, but this emphasis on compounded "firsts" makes me uneasy, and it points to one of the book's limitations. Surely there is more continuity between the sociosymbolic functioning of the ceremonial apartments at Versailles, the Galerie des Ambassadeurs at the Tuileries, the early Salon, and the Luxembourg Museum than McClellan allows, and we should attend to it. The sacrality ofabsolutist space was not instantaneously dispersed by the penetration of the Salon and the museum into some of its holiest precincts; it lingered there long after the Revolution - indeed, some would say it lingers still. The special aura of these privileged sites reflected onto the art displayed in them, consolidating a reified notion of the aesthetic. But while the modern systeme des arts was not created out of whole cloth in the period,(10) there is no denying that in the years around mid-century the accessibility of prestige culture became loaded in a new way, not only in France but also throughout Europe. Nor can it be denied that this entailed a decisive shift - at first incrementally, then, after 1789, more abruptly - from programmatic modes of royal display intended to dazzle the viewer with sheer opulence to taxonomic schemes modeled after natural-history cabinets, a change that went hand-in-hand with the development of a new system of knowledge - scholarly connoisseurship - and a new genus of administrative professional: the museum man.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Business
- Academy of Marketing Science Review
- Accounting Historians Journal, The
- Accounting History
- AgExporter
- Agricultural Research
- Agricultural and Resource Economics Review
- Air Force Comptroller
- Air Safety Week
- Airline Industry Information
- American Demographics
- American Journal of Potato Research
- Architectural Review, The
- Asian Economic News
- Entrepreneur