Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars. - book reviews

Art in America, May, 1996 by Michele C. Cone

Romy Golan's ambitious and well-informed text on the artistic situation in France between the two world wars challenges the view that after World War I France remained the standard-bearer of modernity and of revolutionary ideals. Golan maintains that, in lieu of representing a new beginning or expressing a collective grief, most French art in the decade after World War I gave itself over to an all-consuming nostalgia. She further suggests that the subsequent response of French modernists to the onset of the economic Depression was also to look backwards. The modernist impulse that did survive both the postwar period and the Depression was, in Golan's eyes, politically suspect. Developing her thesis, the author introduces many unfamiliar works of art, analyzes their reception and confirms her interpretations through well-chosen period documents from literature, the social sciences, philosophy and scientific journals. In the process, she manages to weave art and history into a complex and fascinating tapestry.

It is Golan's daring contention that many of the ideas and values central to the Petain regime (1940-44) were covertly implanted in the French imaginaire during the interwar period by means of mainstream cultural productions and criticism. Thus, before the Marshal took over, the preconditions were already established in French society for tolerance of the nationalism, racism, (grand) paternalism and organicism that would prevail during the Vichy period. "What the visual artifacts and the literary and critical texts ... [created]," says Golan, "is a cultural landscape that allowed the archaizing, infantilizing, and racist tropes of Petain's Revolution Nationale to seem benign and similar (or indifferent) enough to what preceded them as to be acceptable ... to the French nation at large by 1940."

Golan begins her book by examining the "strikingly retrograde" landscape painting produced by many artists in France in the years immediately after World War I, and analyzing the connection between this work and the war. As evidenced in Richard Cork's A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War (and the 1994 Barbican exhibition of the same title), French artists memorialized World War I with unusual restraint. While a number of leading British artists felt compelled to render quite graphically the sites of devastation where so many of their compatriots had lost their lives, and German Neue Sachlichkeit artists transformed battlefield visions of horribly maimed bodies into images of self-pity (or sexual nightmares), in French art the experience of war tended to be sublimated or, as Golan writes, "repressed."(1)

Yet French suffering during World War I was immense. Not only did the population experience dramatic losses of relatives and friends, but since the war was fought in trenches on French soil, the northern "body of France" (to use a Golanesque expression) suffered deeply. As a result, landscape painting became a serviceable metaphor for the expression of repressed pain, and landscape as a motif was adopted by many of those same artists who, in 1913-14 under the influence of Cubism, had previously lost interest in naturalistic representation.

Linked to an older French tradition, these landscapes are subdued works, some by former Fauves who had now tamed the joyous colors that had been their prewar trademark. Golan, who describes the postwar paintings as "moralized," sees sublimated memories of the trenches informing their mud-color as well as their mournful light (for example, Roger de la Fresnaye's Landscape of Hauteville, 1992, and Auguste Herbin's Brante et le Mont Ventoux, 1924). Even Surrealist landscapes reveal hidden memories of the war. No one who reads Golan's interpretation of Andre Masson's Battle of the Fish (1926) along with the artist's own words about his battlefield experience will remain unmoved by her analysis. And the same is true for her reading of Yves Tanguy's Mama, Papa is Wounded (1927), in which the biomorphic forms of this landscape are seen as "reminiscent of the dolmen-shaped war memorials ... that now populated the Breton countryside." Both paintings, Golan shows, are about the "wounded body of France," albeit rendered in such a cryptic way as to suggest that those memories of war are unwanted and repressed.

The reappearance of so-called classicism in postwar French art has been associated with a general tendency to seek "order" as well as peace in the aftermath of chaos and war. The popularity of Courbet-influenced landscapes by Derain and others has been read in that context. Golan, however, interprets the structural orderliness of these works as part of the nostalgic reembrace of the French landscape tradition. She also reads the resurgence of interest in landscape painting as a manifestation of longing for a "return to the soil" (one of the main tropes of Petainism). But if that desire is widely expressed in rural images, it can also be discovered in pictures that rusticize the urban landscape (e.g., Marcel Gromaire's The Street, 1923, and Maurice Utrillo's Town Hall with Flag, 1924) as well as in portraits that rusticize the look of the sitter (Amedee Ozenfant's Self-Portrait, 1918, and Herbin's portraits of his mother and uncle, 1926).