BY MELVILLE HOLMES

While doing research recently for an article I began last year , I came upon a website that didn ’ t exist then . The idea was to discuss some of Denis Diderot ’ s insightful and influential criticism of the art in the 18th-century Paris Salons . That proved a bit of a challenge because he was talking about paintings that were not easy to locate today . But now what I found is a complete history of the Salon , year by year , from its inception in 1673 under the aegis of the French Academy until 1881 1 , along with other sources such as the complete Salon catalogues 2 , and photographs in the French National Archives of works from the Salon purchased by the state from 1864 to 1900 . 3

All this brought back recollections from when I was an art student in the ‘ 70s . The only thing we ever heard about the “ Salon ” was that it was bad because they wouldn ’ t let Monet show his early work there and because two paintings by Édouard Manet created a public uproar : his Luncheon on the Grass , rejected by the official jury but exhibited at the Salon des Refusés of 1863 , and his notorious Olympia that appeared in the Salon of 1865 . As for the Salon itself and the officially accepted artists , we were largely left in the dark . If they were mentioned at all it was to say their work was superficial and dead . They were just out .

Just how “ out ” they were can be illustrated by the coverage of 19 th -century French art in one of the most widely trusted survey texts , H . W . Janson ’ s History of Art . The author describes what individual artists ( e . g . Manet , Monet , etc .) were doing , but his thought was essentially framed in their roles as precursors to Modern Art . He offers nary a word concerning the artists in the Salons , who were receiving critical acclaim favor at the time , when the early Impressionists were out in the cold . Janson ( 1977 ) had edited the Catalogues of the Paris Salon 1673 to 1881 , so he was surely familiar with what was in the Salons . Yet they effectively found no place in his history of art at all , and this became the norm throughout the 20 th century ; 19t h century academic art was irrelevant to the progress of modernity .

But something began to break through about the time when book publisher H . N . Abrams somewhat boldly published a coffee table book in 1974 titled Some Call it Kitsch which did illustrate some of those “ forbidden ” Salon artists ’ works . Around that time a Bouguereau exhibition was mounted in the museum in San Francisco . One piece memorably struck me there , for its clarity , dignified serenity , and pathos , his Virgin of Consolation , illustrated here . I felt uncannily that I was in the presence of greatness . Was I ? Or not . . . ?

The proverbial pendulum has swung back . Nineteenth-century academic art has become a hot item of late on the prestigious auction blocks . A two-volume book on Bouguereau with catalogue raisonné appearerd in 2010 . The Musee d ’ Orsay , which houses much of France ’ s 19 th -century art , has been in the process of restoring and displaying works by significant academic artists that have not been on view for over a century . 4

Why did the Salon juries reject works by upcoming artists like Claude Monet , why were the officially recognized artists relegated to the dustbin of art history , and should they have been ? H . W . Janson offers an oblique answer to the second question in a short but insightful philosophical essay introducing the fourth and last section of his volume : “ The Modern World .” The word “ modern ,” he explains most simply means what is present , the way things are now in contrast to the way they used to be . In the previous age , the Renaissance was the “ rebirth of antiquity ,” when the “ ancients ,” that is to say the classical Greek and Roman and biblical writers and church fathers , were the revered authorities . But with the Enlightenment , the Industrial Revolution , and the rise of democracy , the old certainties were being challenged . To oversimplify it , modernity or modern consciousness looks not to the past but to the future .

Writer and critic Charles Baudelaire , in “ The Painter of Modern Life ” ( 1859 ), defines modernity in a somewhat different way that has everything to do with the present subject , “ The aim for him [ the artist ] is to extract from fashion the poetry that resides in its historical envelope , to distill the eternal from the transitory . Modernity is the transitory , the fugitive , the contingent , which make up one half of art , the other being the eternal and the immutable . . . ” and goes on to say that , “ There was a form of modernity for every painter of the past . . .”

38 ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE