The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art. - book reviews

Vigee-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 353 pp.; 45 b/w ills. $40.00

These three books share not only a common field of investigation - French visual culture and architecture of the 18th century (extending, in Siegfried's case, to the early 19th century) - but also a methodological ambition to reformulate the questions and revise the criteria that have helped shape this field so far. By focusing on the underprivileged, misconstrued, or otherwise inadequately appreciated aspects of artistic production in this period, the three authors seek to generate new ways of accounting for the period's cultural importance. Their work suggests that by considering, respectively, the woman artist, genre painting, and the rococo interior subjects that the discipline of art history has tended to disregard or view as irrelevant or even antithetical to modern art - we may actually get quite a different view of the fundamental issues on which the most recent discussions of modern visual culture have centered. These issues include the role of the institutional conditions of art production and, particularly, the way in which these conditions were altered by the French Revolution; the status of the visual representation of everyday life; and the relation between architectural style and society. Given the status of the 18th century in the dominant art-historical constructions of the modern paradigm, Sheriff, Siegfried, and Scott offer us three propositions to reimagine the genesis of modernism.

I will concentrate here specifically on the methodological dimension of the contribution that each of these books makes. While seeking to develop new approaches, each author works with and reformulates earlier interpretive paradigms: Sheriff mobilizes and develops the feminist model of cultural analysis; the approaches of both Siegfried and Scott belong with the procedures of social art history, which, however, both authors transform differently. Siegfried combines a focus on class with enhanced attention to issues of gender and sexuality, and Scott strives to nuance the model of discursive mediation developed in the scholarship on 18th-century painting by bringing it to bear on the architectural form.

Sheriff's innovative monograph on Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun not only offers a new, sophisticated account of one of the most gifted portraitists of her time but also explores the ways in which a focus on the work and career of a woman artist may transform our understanding of aesthetic practice in France in the second half of the 18th century. Rather than simply trying to fit her carefully researched account of Vigee-Lebrun's endeavor within the dominant art-historical narratives of the period, Sheriff's work puts pressure on the criteria behind the formulation of these standard narratives. Her book relentlessly exposes the gendered nature of the assumptions that shaped Vigee-Lebrun's image in the eyes of her contemporaries and of modern art historians as well.

Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842) was a talented and highly ambitious artist who had to carve a career for herself in a world that had difficulty imagining feminine creativity and that strove to keep women on the margins of the principal institutions of production and reception of art. A daughter of a guild painter and a hairdresser, Vigee-Lebrun quickly climbed the steps of the social and professional ladder, becoming the official painter to the queen and one of the very few female members of the Academy. A successful professional, Vigee-Lebrun was also a wife, a mother, and one of the most renowned hostesses in pre-Revolutionary Paris, famous for her trend-setting soupers a la grecque. Her brilliant Parisian career was, however, interrupted and complicated by the outburst of the Revolution. In 1789 the artist fled France, taking her daughter with her and leaving her husband, an art dealer, behind. She first settled in Italy and then traveled widely, developing an international career as an itinerant portraitist of the European aristocracy. She eventually came back to France and, in 1835, published her Souvenirs. This important text, more than a product of its aging author's impulse to reminisce, documents Vigee-Lebrun's astute recognition of the strategic importance for a woman artist to forge personal myths of her own.

How did it matter that this artist with a successful, if turbulent, career was a woman? What did it mean to be at once a woman and an artist in 18th-century France? And what may an art historian writing in the mid-1990s, after three decades of feminist scholarship, bring to the understanding of the "woman artist" as a category of historical inquiry?(1) Sheriff's book belongs with the effort of a new generation of feminist scholars to revisit the central notion of early feminist scholarship in order to formulate a more nuanced and complex notion of the woman as a creative subject.(2) Drawing on the most current feminist theory of gender and identity, the author distances herself from the essentializing views of "women as Woman, the eternal feminine," emphasizing the "multiple shifting and fictive identities assumed by the artist in representing herself and other women" (p. 7). She explores the ways in which Vigee-Lebrun's professional identity and career were informed by 18th-century notions of feminine creativity and achievement conceived largely as a matter of exception. What interests Sheriff in particular is Vigee-Lebrun's negotiation of her professional image as a thus-situated exceptional individual. On the one hand, Sheriff exposes the tensions and contradictions within the network of discourses - philosophical, moral, medical, and aesthetic - that contributed to the definition of the feminine creative subject, thereby locating the narrow gaps of possibility within which a specific woman could define her professional status and identity. On the other, she considers such sources as Vigee-Lebrun's own self-representations and her memoirs as the self-consciously deployed tools for creating her own artistic persona against the constrictions of the masculinist discourse. Far from heroicizing the artist - at one point the author openly distances herself from her subject's aristocratic leanings and her retrograde politics - Sheriff wishes to restore Vigee-Lebrun's image as a self-conscious and skillful player in the game that most often excluded women altogether. Vigee-Lebrun's strength and success as an artist relied, the author insists, on her ability to secure her own place in the artistic culture of male privilege by generating her own image and mythology through her art and writing.