The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism. - book reviews

If painting suggested its patrilineage with a return to a patently French naturalism, exemplified notably in Corot but found as well in painters from Poussin to Courbet, through the practice of "revisionist redemption," sculpture took a different path. Beginning with laments over the loss of Romanesque and Gothic churches and cathedrals, medieval monuments victimized by German barbarism, neomedievalism deeply influenced sculptural practice, as is epitomized in the revival of taille directe (direct carving). Writes Golan:

In comparison to the feminization of nineteenth-century modeling a la Rodin, with its use of soft wax models allowing for smooth surfaces and mellow forms in its transfer to bronze, direct carving was more typically "male": a labor-intensive practice producing works whose blockish quality stood as the perfect response to the postwar builder. (p. 33)

Central to this "rusticizing" of the modern was the figure of the hardworking French peasant, the backbone of the nation to whom victory at Verdun was attributed. A frequent subject in interwar painting and literature, the peasant became a moral paradigm:

So intense was the conjunction of the peasantry and the moralizing climate of the rappel a l'ordre, that it was no longer enough for artists to celebrate the French countryside and its inhabitants in their work alone. Life had to imitate art: to be a peintre de terroir in the fullest sense one had to belong to the land as an autochthone, that is indigenous, native. In sum, one had to be enracine (rooted) in the Barresian sense of being indelibly marked by one's place of origin. The issue was one of artistic probity: one could no longer lay claim to the landscape by jumping on a train and commuting to the countryside for the day as the impressionists had done. Sidestepping questions of both politics and class, most contemporary artists' biographies hence revolved around the new triad of artist/peasant/landed aristocrat. (p. 45)

The peasant thus comes to function for Golan as a rhetorical and ideological figure, endlessly stereotyped and objectified, a Bourdieuian classe-objet, which exists exclusively for its metaphoric potential. In other words, despite the very real decrease in a peasant population, the peasant and his agrarian life become the central trope for both artistic self-identification and pictorial expression. Even Paris looked less urban in its cultural representations, no longer Leger's 1919 The City, but celebrated instead in the nostalgic street scenes of little enclosed neighborhoods that typify the work of Vlaminck, Utrillo, and Gromaire.

In Golan's account, even such modernists as Leger, Le Corbusier, and Ozenfant distanced themselves from the machine, moving toward a more organic aesthetic. While this shift has been explained largely as a purist response to Surrealist biomorphism, Golan points out the fundamental philosophical and political incompatibilities of the Surrealists and the Purists. Instead, she looks to the broader context of the socioeconomic situation of France in the late 1920s, a time when economic prosperity was tempered by France's diminished role as a major industrial and cultural power. Although the Depression did not fully affect France until 1931, the economic retrenchment that it inspired gave new force to the agrarian ideologies of the 1920s, to a France of the village, the family, and the soil. Certainly Leger, Le Corbusier, and Ozenfant did not create images of a pastoral romanticism typical of their conservative colleagues. But they adapted their iconography to the natural landscape, as is evidenced for Golan in such images as Ozenfant's Source/Woman at the Spring of 1926-27, Le Corbusier's Arcachon Fisherwoman of 1929, and Leger's Composition with Three Figures of 1931. Further, if the sheltered, bourgeois childhood of Leger was critically transformed into that of the Norman peasant, Le Corbusier himself enacted a certain return to nature, spending long periods of time along the Atlantic coast, an experience with the land which Golan interprets as deeply informing The Woodcutter of 1931, the Villa de Mandrot of 1929-32, and the emergent organicism embodied in the town plan of La Ville Radieuse. Such organicism and regionalism emerge as well in furniture design, where wood and its working by hand were privileged over metal and the machine.