Art and Monist Philosophy in Nineteenth Century France from Auteuil to Giverny by Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer

Since French Images from the Greek War of Independence, 1821–1830: Art and Politics under the Restoration (1989), Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer’s publications have established her as an outstanding scholar of nineteenth-century French art. Addressing, among other topics, politically-charged imagery under the Bourbon Restoration (1814–30) and Cézanne’s grounding in the culture of Provence, her research evidences the enduring vitality of the anti-formalist, contextual approach to late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art that gained momentum in the 1970s. Tracing a constellation of ideas across the long nineteenth-century, Art and Monist Philosophy in Nineteenth Century France from Auteuil to Giverny makes a significant contribution to the scholarly literature. For a specialized monograph, the chronological segment is uncommonly broad, encompassing the Enlightenment’s twilight and Monet’s work of the 1890s. The prose is characteristically lucid and jargon-free, and the argument refreshingly reticent about the author’s political convictions.

At issue is a philosophical tradition more familiar to specialists in the history of ideas than to art historians, monism—the insistence on unity and correspondence at the expense of division and diversity. The current addressed here originated in the late 1770s within a circle of elite intellectuals from various disciplines who conversed in a salon hosted by Anne Catherine de Ligniville-Helvétius, widow of the Enlightenment philosophe Claude Adrien Helvétius. The circle met at her villa in Auteuil, then a separate village and now an affluent part of Paris. Monism flowered within the Auteuil salon following the demise or departure (by 1789) of its first cohort, which included Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. Indebted to, yet deviating from, the intellectual culture represented by those Enlightenment stars, the second-generation Auteuil circle called themselves idéologues.

The name, derived from the term idéologie (the science of ideas), was coined in 1796 by the psychologist and sociologist Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy. Abandoning the sensualism of Condillac—according to which the mind passively receives sense impressions from the outside world—Destutt de Tracy viewed the intellect instead as an active interpreter of sensation. Bolstered by the medical prestige of idéologue physiologist Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, the group aspired to demolish the dualistic division of mind and body represented by the axiom of René Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.” In its place, the idéologues proclaimed pervasive unity:

They held that reality was a coherent organic totality, that matter and spirit were made of the same substance, and that man’s mind and body formed an indivisible whole. Their common goal was to rid human thought of old-fashioned prejudices and to get to know man and the universe through immediate empirical experience (14).

Monism, the book claims, informed the work of three major nineteenth-century French artists, as well as the ambient discourse in which their work is imbedded. Tracing the trajectory of this tenacious current, Athanassoglou-Kallmyer introduces some fascinating figures. François Pierre Gontier Maine de Biran maintained—in opposition to fellow idéologue Cabanis—that the mind is independent of physiology and has intuition and a sense intime (interior voice). Then there is Jean-Gaspard-Félix Laché Ravaisson-Mollien, author of De l’habitude (On Habit, 1838) and curator of antiquities at the Louvre (from 1870). Ravaisson-Mollien was transfixed by the unifying effect of the “flexuous” lines he perceived in ancient sculpture (85–86). Despite their differences, Maine de Biran and Ravaisson-Mollien were at the font of spiritualist positivism, which emerged in the 1860s, monism having assumed a transcendentalist orientation by midcentury.

Following the first chapter’s concise introduction to idéologue philosophy, the author traces the protean presence of monism in the art of Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, and Claude Monet. Chapter 2 opens with a possibly apocryphal account of the intrigued and unanesthetized Géricault observing his own spinal surgery reflected in a mirror. This provides an evocative opening to discussion of the “clinical” posture adopted by the artist, who unflinchingly represented a public beheading and a still life of severed heads. That physical, forensic orientation is also associated with portrayals of mentally ill individuals in well-known canvases owned by, and possibly painted for, Étienne-Jean Georget, an intern alienist who cared for and befriended the artist during an episode of depression following the exhibition of The Raft of the Medusa in the Salon of 1819 (1818/19; Musée du Louvre, Paris). There is discussion of Géricault’s portraits of the young son and daughter of two of his Napoleon-besotted friends, the imperial veteran Colonel Louis Bro and the no-less-patriotic painter Horace Vernet. Discerning gendered parity between, on the one hand, Bro’s sword-wielding boy, Olivier, and a fierce mastiff (1818–19, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA) and, on the other, Vernet’s décolleté girl, Louise, and an engorged, sentient cat (ca. 1817–18, Musée du Louvre, Paris), the author memorably augments the roster of Géricault’s solemn, and sometimes violent, human-animal encounters. Alerted to their subterranean sexuality, we can view the portraits as prepubescent postscripts to private, volcanically erotic, coital drawings from the artist’s Italian sojourn (1816–17).

Fig. 1, Eugène Delacroix, Lion Hunt, 1855. Oil on canvas. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Artwork in the public domain; image available from: Wikimedia Commons.

In counterpoint to the physicality of Géricault’s work, chapter 3 places the spiritualized monism of Delacroix’s art and Journal. Human animality is explored again, with interspecies melding suggested by Delacroix’s employment of unifying arabesque rhythms, as in a Lion Hunt invented long after the artist’s 1832 North African sojourn (fig. 1). Seconding the author’s argument, it could be emphasized that Delacroix’s reliance on the arabesque was integral to his idiosyncratic mode of expression. Having abandoned the conventional hyperbole of academic physiognomy after the early Barque of Dante (1822; Musée du Louvre, Paris), Delacroix tended to understate facial expression, relying instead on resonant chromatics and compositional rhyming of figures, animals, drapery, and surrounding elements, such as rocks and waves—a method emulated by Vincent van Gogh. Moreover, as his career advanced, Delacroix minimized detail and surface incident—sometimes submerging form in crepuscular atmosphere—to foster overall unity, such that a painting would be perceived as a whole.‍[1]

Few specialists in nineteenth-century art will be conversant with a novel savored by Delacroix and aptly included in chapter 3. Largely ignored when it appeared, Oberman (begun 1801, published 1804) by Étienne Pivert de Senancour was revised and reissued as Obermann in 1833 by the critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve; the preface to a subsequent edition (1844) was provided by Delacroix’s friend George Sand. Identifying ennui as the distinctive trait of its protagonist—a reclusive, alpine wanderer—Sainte-Beuve declared Obermann to be one of the most true and characteristic books of the century. Thick with philosophical rumination, the epistolary narrative is glacially paced. That it captivated a connoisseur of Sir Walter Scott’s thrilling tales lends support to Athanassoglou-Kallmyer’s contention that Delacroix shared his idéologue forebears’ passion for philosophy. And her monist reading of the novel is on point. Ever seeking landscape settings that correspond with his melancholy mood, Obermann undergoes a ritual separation from human society. Prior to ascending a perilous peak, he sends away his guide and leaves behind watch, money, and most of his clothing. He then experiences an exhilarating fusion with the cosmos: “There, man rediscovers his changeable yet indestructible form; he breathes uncivilized air far from society’s emanations; he owns his being at the same time that it belongs to the universe; he lives a real life within the sublime oneness.”‍[2]

In chapter 4, a brilliant analysis of paintings made in the 1880s at Belle-Ile-en-Mer, La Creuse, and, in the 1890s, at Rouen, sets into relief the monist convictions shared by Monet and his close friends Gustave Geffroy, Georges Clemenceau, and Octave Mirbeau. It is rewarding to read this strong, final chapter in parallel with an insightful book by Michael J. Call—a specialist in nineteenth-century French literature who has written on Senancour—published in the same year as the article from which chapter 4 was developed.‍[3] Both Call and Athanassoglou-Kallmyer argue that Monet’s atheist, materialist convictions were inseparable from a will toward transcendent unity with the visible world manifest in the post-1880 paintings. There is agreement that the artist’s outlook matched the views of his friends, especially Geffroy. And both authors note the impact on the Giverny circle of German zoologist and evolutionist Ernst Haeckel’s zoomorphic illustrations. Yet Call and Athanassoglou-Kallmyer propose different vectors acting on Monet. Identifying Monet’s orientation with that of Charles Darwin, Call mentions neither monism nor the idéologues. Occasionally referred to, Darwin remains marginal to Art and Monist Philosophy. I find Athanassoglou-Kallmyer’s monist reading, predicated on meticulous documentation, more persuasive than Call’s less historically specific linkage between painter and evolutionist. That a shared view of Monet’s concerns can lead to such divergent claims points to the philosophical richness of the ostensibly direct—but surprisingly elusive—creative process of a painter who claimed to be uninterested in theory.

Athanassoglou-Kallmyer’s ambitious study faces three daunting challenges. One of these is the difficulty of integrating a complex fabric of intellectual history with a particularized discussion of works of art. Reflecting the author’s dual training in art history and philosophy, Art and Monist Philosophy is steeped in the history of ideas. Such is the volume of nonvisual material that there is limited space to exercise the craft of which she is a master—contextualized visual analysis of artworks. Eager to encounter discussion of images, the reader must wait until page 28. Maintaining narrative flow in a configuration that is simultaneously chronological and transhistorical is also trying. Chapter 2, for example, alternates between an art-historical mode focusing on works by Géricault and a more abstract mode covering earlier philosophy. And it is questionable whether large claims regarding long-term patterns can be based on a sample comprising three artists, two of whom were imagination-fired Romantics who knew each other, and the other an Impressionist working in an era of positivism and materialism. The author impressively negotiates these hazards.

In accord with its monist theme, the book showcases affinity, identifying opportunities for transmission—whether through publications or social connections—and amassing evidence of continuity. The benefit is revelation of common ground among figures as diverse and widely separated in generation as Delacroix and Monet; the cost of this privileging of similarity is an upstaging of difference. The intellectual genealogy connecting Delacroix to Auteuil, for example, needs a caveat: the artist’s pessimism and, as he grew older, conservatism are distant from the heady optimism of the Enlightenment philosophes, whose ideas nurtured the second-generation Auteuil circle. Positive thinking was taken to giddy heights by the idéologue mathematician Nicolas de Condorcet, who envisioned humanity’s limitless perfectibility.‍[4] Geffroy, and apparently Monet, we learn, were much taken with the philosophy of Hippolyte Taine, whose rigorously positivist and determinist theories enjoyed prestige in the second half of the century. Here, political difference deserves mention. In contrast to the radical republicanism of the Giverny friends, Taine—a fierce critic of the French Revolution—discerned “daggers aimed at human society” in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.‍[5] These quibbles hardly detract from the overall success of the book.

Art and Monist Philosophy is more conceptually coherent and visually grounded than an intervention by which it was inspired: L’âme au corps: Arts et sciences, 1793–1993.‍[6] That monumental exhibition organized by Jean Clair offered a trove of evidence that scientific and pseudoscientific discourse on myriad topics—including physiology, evolution, mesmerism, phrenology, emotional expression, dreams, and insanity—occupied creative minds and skilled hands over the longue durée of two centuries. It celebrated the bicentennial of a grandiose revolutionary project that promoted the dissemination of universal knowledge in emulation of the Encyclopédie. In 1793, the Convention deliberated a proposal, first voiced in 1791, to establish a national museum devoted to the unity of the arts and sciences. The plan was not realized, and the areas of study were divided between the fledgling Louvre Museum and a new museum of natural history. Although some of the catalogue’s multiple essays address works of art (notably Degas’s Little Dancer of Fourteen Years [ca. 1880–81; Musée d’Orsay, Paris], examined by Anthea Callen), the hefty tome—a Wunderkammer of disparate, and in some cases bizarre, objects and images—passes over in silence much of the art reproduced; there are no catalogue entries.

Nor, despite reference to the soul in the exhibition’s title, does L’âme au corps make more than perfunctory reference to religion.‍[7] Art and Monist Philosophy more fully engages with spirituality, especially as it pertains to the legacy of Maine de Biran and Ravaisson-Mollien, inherited by Delacroix, and to the transcendentalism of Monet and Geffroy. Those cases remind us that nonbelief does not necessarily entail indifference toward the sacred.

The author’s convincing depiction of Delacroix’s spiritualized monism prompts further consideration of that nonbeliever’s relationship to Catholicism. As a youth, the artist drew ribald, anticlerical caricatures.‍[8] In his later career, he appreciated ecclesiastical music and frequently represented scriptural subjects. Conflating the sacred with the aesthetic, Delacroix professed a religious devotion to art colored by Chateaubriand’s defense of Catholicism on the basis of its superior beauty and sentiment in Génie du christianisme (1802). And the artist could be deeply moved by the spectacle of piety. In May 1854, while staying at the Augerville château of a cousin, the devout royalist lawyer and politician Pierre-Antoine Berryer, Delacroix witnessed a confirmation attended by local workers and officiated by another guest, whom he esteemed, the bishop of Orléans, Félix Antoine Philibert Dupanloup. Enthused, the artist noted: “Religion is beautiful when it is like this. The consolations and counsels the prelate gave in the church to these simple men, burnt by country labors and chained to harsh necessities, hit their true mark.”‍[9] This Journal entry documents Delacroix’s adherence to what Robert Rosenblum termed “spectator Christianity”—attraction to the colorful trappings of the Christian faith of others, especially if uneducated and rural.‍[10]

Delacroix’s sacred investiture of his vocation would have been endorsed by Geffroy, who later proclaimed art “the freest, the greatest, the truest of human religions.”‍[11] Like Delacroix, the anticlerical atheist Monet was susceptible to Catholicism’s aesthetic charm, writing from Rouen to his wife, Alice, of his delight in “a musical mass with three hundred performers from Paris” in the cathedral: “I had a great seat. It was marvelously beautiful and I saw some superb things to do on the inside that I regret not having seen earlier. In all, it was a very beautiful concert in a remarkable setting.”‍[12]

Notwithstanding its period flavor of bourgeois banality, Louis-Philippe’s regime (1830–48) commissioned Delacroix to provide the century’s most distinguished decorative ensembles. For the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais Bourbon and the Senate in the Palais du Luxembourg, he produced lofty images, such as Aristotle Describes the Animals (1841; Palais Bourbon Library, Paris), mentioned in chapter 3. The July Monarchy also saw a proliferation of dizzyingly eccentric cults, from Fourierism to Napoleonic messianism. Referring to D. G. Charlton’s Secular Religions in France, 1815–1870 (1963), Athanassoglou-Kallmyer views monism as one of the “secular substitutes and alternative creeds” that arose in the face of conventional Catholicism’s decline (6, 10n20). I would suggest that, by virtue of its longevity, mutability, and capaciousness, the philosophical tradition addressed by the book is larger in scope than the innovative dogmas of the 1830s and 1840s. In addition—and this lends support to the book’s thesis of monism’s ubiquity—some of the new theologies were monist.

In the belief system of Charles Fourier, for example, analogy between vastly disparate things is key to lifting the degraded society of the present into a blessed future in which all human passions, including sexuality, will be freely exercised in harmony. Accordingly, Fourier’s disciple Alphonse Toussenel—who hideously amplified the master’s anti-Semitism—viewed the living world as a collection of secretly-linked symbols decipherable through analogy. A specialist in human-animal pairings, he differentiated among beasts according to their traits of character and morality. Toussenel’s article with a jaw-dropping title, “On the Pretext of Ducks” (1844) is a visionary counterpart to the exploration by Géricault and Delacroix of the rapport between humans and animals. Of the utopian promise of analogy, Toussenel argued:

By virtue of the principle of unity, the tree, the bird, the quadruped, the insect are but hieroglyphs in which God has written his will, that is to say the revelation of human destinies. Mankind can do nothing better than apply its intelligence to interpret these enigmas, which must reveal the way to its happiness.‍[13]

No less peculiar was a marginal creed proselytized, beginning in 1838, by a self-appointed prophet, Simon Ganneau (alternately written Gannau or Gannot). Calling himself the Mapah (a portmanteau of maman [mom] and papa [dad]), Ganneau preached Napoleonic messianism and proclaimed the advent of the deity Évadah’s era. Combining the names of Eve and Adam, Évadah was hermaphroditic. Mapah Ganneau distributed bi-sexed plaster figurines, as well as pamphlets, one of which launches into a bewildering hybridization, multiplying historical and biblical counterparts to Adam, including “Jesus the Abel-Christ and Napoleon the Cain-Christ . . . sublime forms through which Humanity has transformed so it can return to the Adamic Unity, from which it primitively departed.”‍[14] At monism’s fringe, Fourierism and the cult of Évadah speak startlingly of the pervasiveness of a rage for unity in nineteenth-century France.

With her pioneering new book, Athanassoglou-Kallmyer opens space for the discovery of yet other, international examples of monism, some of which, like the discourse of Toussenel and Ganneau, are remote from idéologue insistence on fact. Examples include Étienne-Louis Boullée’s radically idealist architecture parlante (speaking architecture); William Blake’s prophetic book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–93); Philipp Otto Runge’s mystical Gesamptkunstwerk, The Times of Day (1803–09); Odilon Redon’s enigmatic blendings of human, arachnid, and plant life; and the twentieth-century assault by Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, and Happenings on the separation of art and life. For a living contribution to our discipline, thanks are due to the author of Art and Monist Philosophy.