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Chasseriau, in paint and in print: an ambitious and prolific painter until his death at 37, Theodore Chasseriau became a footnote to the history of 19th-century Orientalism. A Franco-American retrospective, the first in almost 70 years, brought the wider range of his work back into view

Art in America, Jan, 2003 by Todd Porterfield

With "Theodore Chasseriau (1819-1856): The Unknown Romantic," museums in Paris, Strasbourg and New York have staged the first retrospective since 1933 of one of the least known artists of the French canon. Precocious, at the age of 10 Chasseriau entered Ingres's studio, where legend has it that his teacher proclaimed him destined to be "the Napoleon of painting." (1) A painter of religious, historical and mythological scenes as well as portraits, Chasseriau embarked on a public career, exhibiting (in 1836) in his first Salon at the age of 16, executing official commissions for mural cycles in church and governmental buildings from the age of 21 and receiving the Legion of Honor at 29. By the time of his death at 37, his friends and most stalwart supporters recognized him as a modern exemplar of the long tradition of French history painting, a critical link between ancien-regime and modern practices. Within his lifetime, he inspired the young Symbolist-to-be, Gustave Moreau.

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Despite the evident importance of Chasseriau's work, Chasseriau studies have been stunted by critical and historiographical vicissitudes. At the Salon of 1845, where Chasseriau showed his portrait of the Caliph of Constantine and Delacroix his portrait of the Sultan of Morocco, Baudelaire lodged a harsh critique that has continued to sting. He took the side of his hero, Delacroix, deeming Chasseriau immaturely slavish to the dual pillars of the French school: "the position that he [Chasseriau] wants to create for himself between Ingres, whose pupil he was, and Delacroix, whom he seeks to rob, has something equivocal about it for everybody and embarrassing for himself." (2) For a century and a half, a reductive formula of artistic influence, Ingres + Delacroix = Chasseriau, has burdened the artist's reputation and limited the depth of our inquiry.

Decades after the artist's death, his younger cousin, Arthur Chasseriau, gave the work an interpretive spin that has informed and constrained its posthumous standing. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Arthur avidly acquired his relative's art; the donation of that collection formed the core of the Louvre's holdings, ensuring that the Louvre dominates the artist's museological presentation. It was also Arthur's cooperation with art historians that facilitated the first monographs and retrospective exhibitions in the 1890s. And it was his generation that determined Chasseriau's classification as preeminently an Orientalist painter, in contradistinction to his achievements as a history painter, which the artist's friends and contemporary critics, such as Theophile Gautier and Paul de Saint-Victor, considered foremost. Fin de siecle exhibitions, like the 1897 "Les Peintres orientalistes francais," helped cement the categorization, which was underscored in the 1933 retrospective.

Contemporary art-historical practice can shed new light on Chasseriau in at least three ways. It is time, for example, to reconsider his history painting and public work within the broader context of visual culture. Interpretive strategies developed in studies of fashion beg to be applied to Chasseriau's designs for theatrical sets and costumes for the Paris Opera, as well as to the costumes and jewelry worn by his Biblical and Classical protagonists (Esther, Suzanne, Andromeda, Cleopatra and the bathers at the Roman Tepidarium), who are exoticized, sensualized and sometimes strapped into bondage by their painted accessories. Judging by the papers presented at a conference held at the Louvre to coincide with the exhibition's debut at the Grand Palais, such an investigation has begun. (3)

Secondly, race and empire plainly figure in the artist's production, but they have not received a thoroughgoing analysis. Critics and scholars have routinely noted the artist's birth in Samana, on the island of Saint Domingue (present-day Dominican Republic), to Benoit Chasseriau, a white Frenchman, and Marie-Madeleine Couret de la Blaquiere, the 14-year-old mixed-race daughter of a local planter. Typically, the painter's ethnicity has been figured as automatically determining his personality (hot-tempered) and his creative tendency to fashion potpourris of different ethnic physiognomies.

We might begin a flesh analysis by observing that Chasseriau was also a painter of whiteness. No less than his figures of color, the white-hot flesh of his female nudes connote specific ideas of race, ethnicity, nationalism and civilization. Research could begin at his studio door, where Chasseriau announced his affiliation with the Classical European tradition by exhibiting his Venus Anadyomene (1838), all white flesh, blond hair and pearly seascape, which was paired with a view of Athens painted by Prosper Marilhat and complemented by a life-size plaster cast of the Venus de Milo. (4)

Finally, gender studies will no doubt broaden our perceptions of Chasseriau. (5) With pictures like the Venus Anadyomene and Bather Sleeving. Near a Stream (1850), he has long been credited with contributing a new type of female nude to the French tradition, an elongated and sensual titan that links the Renaissance School of Fontainebleau to Renoir and Leger. (6) But formal analysis alone does not account for how frequently his female and male figures are sexually charged and, at the same time, ambiguously gendered. Moreover, Chasseriau is not just a painter of the classical female nude. With figures such as the eunuch baptized by Saint Philip in the Saint Roch painting cycle (1852-53) and a later drawing, the servant, Hegai, who attends to Esther's toilette (1841) and, as I have argued, the Dominican priest Lacordaire (1840), Chasseriau is also a consistent painter of eunuchs. (7) If in 1845 Baudelaire found Chasseriau too divided in his artistic alliances, today such classificatory distress is less acutely felt. Indeed, the very heterogeneity of other aspects of the work, such as the variant codings of race and sex, may prove to be one of the most productive areas for scholarly research.

Chasseriau, in paint and in print: an ambitious and prolific painter until his death at 37, Theodore Chasseriau became a footnote to the history of 19th-century Orientalism. A Franco-American retrospective, the first in almost 70 years, brought the wider range of his work back into view

Art in America, Jan, 2003 by Todd Porterfield

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