Preface

Golan, Romy

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Preface

Romy Golan

Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars

~In the minds of most art historians, France has remained a stronghold of modernism and even of avant-gardism up until World War II. The main premise of this book, however, is that far from inhabiting the margins of cultural and art-historical discourse in France, reactionary issues such as the return to the soil, anti-urbanism, the questioning of technology...

Author

Romy Golan

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23848

Preface

In the minds of most art historians, France has remained a stronghold of modernism and even of avant-gardism up until World War II. The main premise of this book, however, is that far from inhabiting the margins of cultural and art-historical discourse in France, reactionary issues such as the return to the soil, anti-urbanism, the questioning of technology — and their ideological corollaries such as agrarianism, regionalism, corporatism — had a profound impact on French modernism from 1918 all the way to Vichy. Some of these sentiments were not new and can be traced back to the nineteenth century, but a number of important factors infused them with particular urgency and renewed significance during the interwar years, the cumulative effect of which inexorably led, as I will argue, to a profound crisis of confidence.

In 1918, the French emerged victorious from, yet also deeply traumatized by, a conflict and destruction that took place almost entirely on their own soil, leaving its natural and built environment an oppressive site (and sight) of memory. Yet while the Germans — facing the humiliation of defeat and living on the brink of civil war during the early years of the Weimar Republic — had no choice but to confront the consequences of war, victory gave France the luxury of a rappel à l’ordre (call to order) whose political and cultural agenda was largely aimed at repressing the trauma of war. As a result, instead of the tabula rasa predicated by high modernism, or even the celebration of the rowdy atmosphere of the famously Roaring Twenties with Paris as Hemingway’s Moveable Feast, we find a collective ethos driven toward the restoration of what had been before the war: a world stilled, and a vision infused — from the paintings of ex-fauves and cubists-turned-naturalists, to those of the so-called naïfs, all the way to the surrealists — by nostalgia and memory.

Exacerbated by the disenchantment with technology that accompanied the Great Depression (an economic crisis that, while weaker, nevertheless lasted in France for longer than in all the other major industrial nations), the turn to the rural and, in more general terms, to the organic became ever more pervasive in French art during the 1930s. Unable, and in fact unwilling, to reach the threshold of a second Machine Age that would solve the problems of the first industrial revolution, the French launched into myriad plans whose ultimate effect was to postpone their entry into the second industrial revolution until the 1950s and 1960s. Predicated on the concept of a retour à l’homme (return to man) which was much more problematic than the retour à l’ordre of the preceding decade, the 1930s were marked by the surfacing of a whole array of ideological constructs such as neo-corporatism, biotypes, and a neo-Darwinian concept of the New Man, whose feudalizing and racial implications ran dangerously close to those elaborated in France’s neighboring fascist states. This process of “rusticization of the modern” continued unabated throughout the years of the Popular Front, from 1936 to 1938. Functioning as a much needed ideological foil to consolidate support from a peasantry that tended to lean to the Right, it affected the political Left in ways often almost indistinguishable from the Right.

The interwar years were, for France as for most other western nations, a period of increasing political, economic, and cultural retrenchment. Whether it began with atavistic fear of industrial Germany, with growing anxiety at almighty America (or more precisely at Americanism) and disbelief in its own huge colonial empire, or with sympathy for a feudal Spain onto which it projected its own past, France’s self-image vis-à-vis the “other” was invariably that of a rural, feudalized, “feminized,” and victimized nation. Indeed, this weakened self-image protracted itself in France’s craving for self-infantilization during the years of Vichy.

Political and economic in nature, the narratives retraced in this book, however, not only affected cultural production, but were actually importantly defined and even preceded by this production. In fact, considering that what we are talking about here is not so much realpolitik as France’s imaginaire, the notion of “self-image” may well be taken literally as a visual metaphor.

With the exception of neo-plasticism after Mondrian’s arrival in Paris, and its French avatars such as Cercle et Carre and Abstraction-Creation — movements that remained almost impervious to contemporary events — organic retrenchment deeply affected all of the major modernists working in France. By the late 1920s, even hardliners like Fernand Léger, Le Corbusier, and Amédée Ozenfant would shift towards organicism, distancing themselves from the unconditional embrace of the stark geometries of the machine aesthetic that had previously informed their work. The same is true of other major modernists like Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and a number of surrealists. Ultimately, however, the exemplars of this retrenchment in French art were former modernists-turned-naturalists or terriens (sons of the national soil): painters like André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, and Auguste Herbin. It is they who would be cast as the true followers of France’s centuries-old artistic tradition. It is they who, in the xenophobic climate that inevitably accompanies the phenomenon of retrenchment, would be cast by art critics as the paragons of the Ecole Française, to be emulated by foreign artists of the so-called Ecole de Paris working in France.

Indeed, it is the reception even more than the production and intention of artists that will concern us here, thus allowing the rhetoric of art critics like Louis Vauxcelles, Waldemar George, Florent Fels, Camille Mauclair, André Lhote, and their colleagues to play a paramount role in this book. Art criticism in France during the interwar years was not blessed by the interventions of men of letters of the stature of an Emile Zola, a Charles Baudelaire, a Joris-Karl Huysmans, or even a professional critic like Félix Fénéon. With Apollinaire dead in 1919, and figures like André Breton and Georges Bataille confined to a small coterie of readers by what amounts to a conspiracy of silence on the part of the art community during those years, it is precisely the mediocrity of the art-critical discourse of such middle-of-the-road magazines as L’Amour de l’Art, L’Art vivant, and Art et Décoration that is so revealing. For it is in these “average” texts, rather than in the pages of the contemporaneous La Revolution Surréaliste or Documents, that one detects the ideological context of the times. They provide the tools for my attempts at a revisionist reading of other major modernist works of art in the course of this book. A journal like Cahiers d’art, commonly identified with surrealism, was in fact deeply implicated in such mainstream concerns of this period as the retour à l’homme cited earlier. The three world fairs staged in Paris during the interwar years offer another invaluable instance of the self-projection of the French imaginaire to its masses.

No doubt one must beware an overly deterministic view of history and, more specifically, the history of art. Painting the French countryside and its denizens after World War I, questioning the benefits of technology by favoring organic forms after the end of reconstruction in 1927, dabbling with corporatism and depicting the colonies during the 1930s, writing ruralist novels throughout the twenties and thirties; none of these tendencies necessarily predisposes one towards collaboration with Pétain’s fascist regime in 1940. There is no straight line from Verdun to Vichy. Yet if one of the main functions of ideology is to naturalize representation — to make things appear unproblematic, innocuous and even naive — I would argue that it is in France, a bastion of democracy from 1918 to 1939, that one finds the most compelling demonstration of the covert interaction between art and politics. For while in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany the glorification of the national soil and of racial purity became almost immediately integral to totalitarian rhetoric and to the art produced in the service of these regimes, in France these same issues would remain hidden under a veneer of cultural pluralism, tolerance, and liberalism: until Vichy. What the visual artifacts and the literary and critical texts to be examined in this book did create is a cultural landscape that allowed the archaizing, infantilizing, and racist tropes of Pétain’s Revolution Nationale to seem benign and similar (or indifferent) enough to what preceded them as to be acceptable (that is again indifferent) to the French nation at large by 1940.

By weaving together the various narratives that inform this book, I have obviously been indebted to a number of studies. Historians — starting, in the interwar period, with Marc Bloch’s Les Caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (1931) — have long recognized that such issues as nostalgia, historical resilience, and outright resistance to progress, what the French call passéisme, are central to the historical process. Most importantly, they have recognized the intrinsic link in contemporary history between the disintegration of the rural world and the growing obsession with “sites of memory.”

Most relevant to my work in this respect have been historians such as Charles S. Maier in Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany and Italy in the Decade After World War I (1975); Gordon Wright in Rural Revolution in France: The Peasantry in the 20th Century (1964); Jean-Jacques Becker and Serge Bernstein’s Victoires et Frustrations 1914–1929 (1990); David Strauss’ Menace in the West: The Rise of Anti-Americanism in Modern Times (1978); the contributors to Pierre Nora’s monumental project Les Lieux de mémoire (1984, 1986, and 1992); and, more recently, those of Histoire des droites en France (1992), edited by Jean-François Sirinelli. The complex and confused history of 1930s plannistes in France, be they neo-syndicalists or neo-corporatists, remained a virtual no man’s land until quite recently, with the exception of Jean Loubet de Bayle’s pioneering study Les Non-conformistes des années trente (1969). Tangential to this lapse is the still bitterly debated definition of fascism à la française, as evidenced from the heated debate stirred by Zeev Sternhell’s Ni Droite, ni gauche: l’idéologie fasciste en France (1983) at the time of its publication in France. Sternhell’s overzealous drive to see fascism as a totally French grassroots phenomenon was somewhat rectified by Pierre Milza in his Fascisme français: Passé et Présent (1987), and extended to the history of ideas by Alice Yaeger Kaplan in Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature and French Intellectual Life (1986), and by Daniel Lindenberg in Les Années souterraines 1937—1947 (1990). As an art historian, however, I repeatedly sensed that Sternhell’s, Kaplan’s, and Lindenberg’s narrow critical links between writers and France’s constellation of small fascistoid movements were impossible to translate to the often obdurately “silent” field of visual representation — namely painting, sculpture, and architecture. Other, more metaphorical operations were at work here. Concerning Vichy per se, I am primarily indebted to Robert Paxton’s ground-breaking Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order (1972), and to the younger generation of French historians who, like Pascal Ory and Henri Rousseau, have subsequently attempted to cease looking at Vichy as an aberration in the history of their country, but in terms of continuity with the interwar years. Of great significance, since I found myself often confronted with blatantly ideological constructs, were the writings of Roland Barthes and of Pierre Bourdieu, both in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (English translation 1984) and in his comments on the recurrent hypostatization of the peasantry, as well as Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger in The Invention of Tradition (1983).

A reluctant child of history, and even of cultural history, art history has remained overwhelmingly driven by a teleological model, lining up a well-rehearsed succession of “isms,” each one more innovative, amnesiac, and iconoclastic than the next. This said, a number of studies on French art published in the last fifteen years have begun to stray from the master narrative of high modernism. It is Christopher Green who put the double predicate of French modernism of the 1920s — a machine aesthetic coupled with neo-classicism — on the map, first in his exhibition catalogue Léger and Purist Paris, co-curated with John Golding in 1971, then in his Léger and the Avant-Garde (1976), and more recently in his charting of the complex interplay of the many different art movements in wartime and 1920s France, in Cubism and its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928 (1987). Most probing and most inspirational for me, both in terms of content and approach, was Kenneth Silver’s Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War 1914–1925 (1989), a book I originally came to know in dissertation form in the early eighties. Collapsing the apparent dichotomy between avant-garde (or, to be more precise, modernism) and rearguard (or arrière-garde), Silver was the first to retrieve the French modalities of what may be called “reactionary modernism” during the war years and the postwar rappel à l’ordre. Thanks to Silver one came to perceive, for instance, how Picasso’s seemingly playful or else embarrassingly retrograde way of working in two alternative styles — late cubism and neo-classicism — starting in 1916, was inherently related to the psychological mindset of the home front. One came to understand how purism could be high modern, calling as it did for a tabula rasa, and yet also serve as well as the exemplary mouthpiece of the reactionary cultural politics of the retour à l’ordre. And, one recognized the degree to which art critics used time and again the very same rhetorical tropes as politicians. It was upon Silver’s invitation to co-curate the exhibition Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris 1905–1945 (1985), that I fully came to understand the importance of middle-of-the-road art in France, and to measure the critical pressure exerted on foreigners by the nationalistic model of the Ecole Française, which required them to conform and assimilate into French culture.

Although an architectural rather than art-historical study, Mary McLeod’s dissertation Urbanism and Utopia: Le Corbusier from Regional Syndicalism to Vichy (1985), in which she retraces Le Corbusier’s itinerary in the complex archipelagos of French politics — from Taylorism to plannisme, Americanism to colonialism, all the way to his involvement with Vichy — remains to my view the best analysis of the cultural politics of 1930s France to date. In a number of uncanny ways, the Depression years rehearsed the feminization of technology, the pathogenic view of the world, as well as the rampant xenophobia of the “first” crisis of the machine aesthetic: that of the 1890s. In this respect, I found in Debora L. Silverman’s Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (1989), a particularly revealing mirror image of 1930s France. The cultural policies of Vichy and the ever-thriving Parisian art scene under German occupation have received much attention in the past few years, namely in Christian Faure’s Le Projet Culturel de Vichy (1989), Michèle Cone’s Artists Under Vichy: A Case of Prejudice and Persecution (1992), and Laurence Bertrand Dorléac’s L’Art de la Défaite 1940–1944 (1993).

Four curators in the French museum world have, in a series of thought-provoking exhibitions, put French reactionary modernism, as well as lesser-known works of the 1930s on display: Jean Clair, Christian Dérouet, and Bernard Ceysson in, respectively, Les Réalismes at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1981), Fernand Léger: La Poésie de l’object 1928–34 (also at the Centre Pompidou in 1981), and L’Art dans les années 30 en France at the Musée de l’Art et de l’Industrie in Saint-Etiénne (1979). Lastly, in curating exhibitions devoted not to high art but to graphic arts and propaganda, Laurent Gervereau has succeeded — with exhibitions such as Images de 1917 (1987) and La Propagande sous Vichy 1940–1944 (1990) — in turning the Musée d’Histoire Contemporaine, tucked at the end of one of the long wings of the somewhat dreary military Musée National des Invalides, into a vital space.

While I have been indebted to all of the above, I still felt that many of the overarching issues of art and politics in France between the two world wars remained to be explored. For clearly enough, after having embodied and defined (for most of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth) the very parameters of art historical modernism, France suffered something drastic with its ethos, its culture, and its self-image in the wake of World War I. Indeed, in many ways the sea-change so often ascribed to the sudden shift of the avant-garde from Europe to America in 1945 began much earlier, at the outset of the interwar years.

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