After the
Revolution: Antoine-Jean Gros. Painting
and Propaganda Under Napoleon
by David OBrien
The Pennsylvania University Press, Pittsburgh,
PA, 2006
344 pp. illus. 157 b/w. Trade, $65.00
ISBN: 0-271-02305-8
Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg, Ph.D.
jonathanzilberg@gmail.com
In this lucid and lavishly illustrated
book about art and politics in revolutionary
France at the close of the 18th Century,
OBrien describes how artists typically
believed that artistic and political liberty
were linked. In addition, he revisits
how the focus in the all important history
genre shifted from classical antiquity
to the Revolution itself and how artists
began to draw their imagery from contemporary
historic events rather than from mythology.
It is an intriguing study for anyone interested
in the nexus of art and politics and the
subject of Orientalism unfettered by excessive
theory.
After the elimination of the Royal Academy
of Painting and Sculpture through which
the monarchy had controlled state commissions
and thus the reputations and fates of
artists, the reformists decided that the
public should judge for themselves. Though
they believed that this process would
lead to a resurgence of creativity in
the arts, patronage declined drastically
until 1804 when Napoleon Bonaparte became
Emperor and artists were enlisted into
the service of Empire. Subsequently, form
and content became more strongly dictated
by the state than ever before as the history
genre came into its own in Napoleonic
guise. OBrien deftly relates how
though Napoleon was not a connoisseur
of the arts, he was adept at combining
a dictatorial patronage system with severe
censorship in order to use the arts to
influence public perception of the regime.
The Napoleonic regime achieved this to
great effect through commissions for history
paintings of the Egyptian military campaign
in effect setting back the 18th Century
Republic of the Arts which had celebrated
liberty and reason in opposition to interests
of the monarchy and the Old Regime. From
1737 onwards, large-scale paintings had
been presented to the public for debate
at the biannual salons in Paris which,
at the turn of the 19th Century, drew
up to 100 000 people out of a total population
of 650 000. These art shows both stimulated
and provided the contexts for intense
public discussions on art and politics,
of imperial conquest and defeat, and change.
OBrien makes the important point
that large-scale history painting was
not allegorical, esoteric or elite as
much as popular and explicitly political.
Indeed, these biannual exhibitions were
crucial contexts for the emergence of
the bourgeois public sphere in which civil
society debated cultural production and
through which the regime sought to control
artistic expression and public opinion.
Most important of all, he reveals how
the birth of the modernist idea that art
is inherently subversive and autonomous
needs to be historically situated in the
context of the shift away from large scale
history painting before and after the
French Revolution. Therein, the notion
of art as an autonomous field of cultural
production crystallized as a reaction
to the propagandistic function of art
in the Napoleonic era.
Though much of the art produced in that
period is marked by a dispassionate and
calculated nature, some of it is politically
and emotionally charged, none more so
than the work by Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835),
the pre-eminent Napoleonic painter, student
of the exiled classicist Jaques-Louis
David. Fortunately for historys
sake, OBrien is able to produce
such a detailed account of this artists
work and his motivations because of the
fact that the artists correspondence
has survived intact. This has allowed
OBrien to situate the artists
experience firmly within a historical
context so as to reveal an inside view
of the shifting politics and culture of
the time and how one artist was able to
engage the emerging opportunities for
patronage. The resulting study is a fine
grained and complex account of a man whose
powerful work belied his insecurity. At
the same time, the study provides considerable
insight into the workings of the Napoleonic
arts administration.
One of the most interesting aspects of
this study is the compelling account of
the artists early years in Italy,
of how his career was intimately linked
to conquest and subsequently state commissions
documenting the violent and ultimately
unsuccessful expansion of Empire. In fact,
it was in Italy that Gros first met Bonaparte
through his wife after receiving the commission
to paint her portrait. This led to his
first history painting of Napoleon
"Bonaparte on the Bridge at Arcole"(1796)
and subsequently to his position on the
commission responsible for selecting and
transporting Italian artistic treasures
as war booty to be removed to Paris after
the French conquest as part of the conditions
of surrender. The experience gave him
the time and opportunity to study a range
of Italian art that would have been impossible
otherwise. At the same time, he acquired
skills in drafting military maps and drawings
of battles and battle grounds all of which
would become critical for his work in
later years. In essence, while Napoleonic
painting was largely a sycophantic tradition,
Gross nevertheless created dramatically
compelling works. These were particularly
unusual in that they did not involve the
careful planning typical in such paintings.
Moreover, they were rapidly created, highly
idiosyncratic and deeply expressive. In
capturing and evoking psychic ambiguity,
Gross depicted Napoleons imperialist
project and its brutal execution so as
to depict the brutality of war while serving
the interests of the state.
Though Gros inspired Gericault, Eugene
Delacroix and Vernet amongst others, he
eventually turned his back on the Revolution
and returned to Italy and the Classical
sources which had originally inspired
him. From the brooding anacreonic nocturnal
imagery of "Sapho at Leucadio"
(completed for the Salon in 1801, the
year after the French capitulation at
the siege of Genoa) to his hyper-masculine
celebration of war which swept the last
vestiges of classicism aside, to his return
to Classicism, the story of Jean Gros
presents an extraordinary story of how
art and artists change with time.