Review: Stéphane Guégan and André Guyaux, eds, Joris-Karl Huysmans: De Degas à Grünewald (Paris: Gallimard, 2019)
Abstract
Joris-Karl Huysmans was unimpressed by the Salon of 1879:
Of the 3,040 paintings listed in the catalogue, there’s not a hundred that are worth looking at. The rest are certainly inferior to the advertising posters on the walls of our streets and on the pissoirs of our boulevards, those tableaux that represent little slices of Parisian life: ballet gymnastics, clown acts, English mimes, racetracks and circus arenas
Although he is best known now as a novelist, Huysmans was active as an art critic throughout his life. As well as writing for periodicals, he published three major essay collections and incorporated commentary on art and artists into his fiction. The recent exhibition, De Degas à Grünewald at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the accompanying catalogue and critical collection edited by Stéphane Guégan and André Guyaux testify to increasing interest in these activities and their relationship. His broad dismissal of the Salon is suggestive here, since he rejects the canvases on display in favour of street art. The implication is that this represents a more authentic mode of expression than the scenes from classical myth and Roman history that dominated work by the likes of Alexandre Cabanel and William-Adolphe Bougereau. As André Guyaux observes:
Il cherche dans la peinture ce qu’il cherche dans la littérature: le vivant, le vrai, un art qui ne ment pas, qui s’éloigne des clichés académiques, un art où il retrouve la vie, sa vie – la vie libre et même quelque peu débauchée qu’il mène à Paris. (p. 93)
[He seeks in painting what he seeks in literature: the living, the true, an art that does not lie, that moves away from academic clichés, an art where he finds life, his life – the free and even somewhat debauched life he leads in Paris.]
Just as Huysmans’s earliest novels, Marthe: Histoire d’une fille (1876) and Les Sœurs Vatard (1879) dwell on the lives of prostitutes and working girls, so his artistic tastes tended towards the realities of the street too.
