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Description: Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris after War and Revolution
~Elizabeth Anne McCauley’s Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris 1848–1871, New Haven, 1994, contains a major chapter on the photographer Auguste Bruno Braquehais (pp. 149–194), where she notes that his 109 views of the Commune constitute “his largest body of work” dedicated to a single theme. She also observes...
PublisherPrinceton University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00021.011
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Elizabeth Anne McCauley’s Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris 1848–1871, New Haven, 1994, contains a major chapter on the photographer Auguste Bruno Braquehais (pp. 149–194), where she notes that his 109 views of the Commune constitute “his largest body of work” dedicated to a single theme. She also observes that whereas most of the other photographic images of the Commune by his competitors were taken after the defeat of the Communards and focus on death and destruction, Braquehais recorded the activities of the Communards during their short-lived control of the urban space. And she concludes: “Braquehais undoubtedly intended to sell these works as souvenirs to the Communards depicted; they certainly could have served as damning evidence after the Commune’s defeat” (pp. 187–191).
In 1994 a major retrospective of Caillebotte’s paintings was held at the Grand Palais (Gustave Caillebotte 1848–1894, Reunion des Musées Nationaux/Musée d’Orsay, Paris 1994). The show then traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago, where it opened in February 1995. It is intriguing to find that the American version of the catalogue (Gustave Caillebotte; Urban Impressionist, 1995) carries several references to the Commune in the excellent essay “The Street” by Julia Sagraves, some of whose ideas coincide with mine/see especially pp. 92–93, 96). This would suggest that the end of the Cold War has perhaps encouraged a younger generation of American art historians to explore this heretofore marginalized episode. Yet these references to the Commune are absent in the French version of her essay (“La Rue”). Evidently, the author was advised by the French organizers to delete these references which she subsequently restored in the American version. Although some French scholars feel that some Americans tend to overinterpret, and read too much into, French pictures, in this case I have no doubt that the real reason for the request of the removal of the references was strictly political, demonstrating, to me at least, that the Commune is still very much alive and unwelcome in the imaginations of the current crop of French conservatives.
Finally, as an addendum to the discussion of the influence of the Commune on American culture, I put forward my discovery of the source for the recoiling female companion of the patient in Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (Figs. 163164). Eakins’s quotation from an illustration in Harper’s Weekly of imprisoned pétroleuses connects his image of violence and gore to the Commune. Painted in 1875, in an atmosphere still charged with fears of a local Commune-style upheaval, when newspaper editorials continued to draw parallels between restless workers in New York and Chicago and Parisian insurgents, critical reaction to the picture was generally hostile to its ruthless realism and horrific imagery. Eakins, who arrived home in 1870 after years of study in Paris with Gérôme and Bonnat (the teacher of Caillebotte), continued to maintain contact with his friends abroad and must have observed the unfolding of the Commune with keen interest. Assuming that the middle-class female pétroleuse of the illustration who shields her eyes in shame in response to her child’s offer to play retains her symbolic station for Eakins when transferred to the painting, we may speculate on an allegorical intention. The commanding figure of the surgeon Gross then functions as a surrogate Thiers who carries out a surgical act necessary to heal the body politic, with the recoiling woman and working-class patient bearing the burden for the welfare of the larger society. Eakins inserts the Communard female into a context that renders her modest gesture monstrous and irrational, grieving over the fallen body of her male counterpart. Violence in the bourgeois social order is treated as an organic abnormality and is rectified through scientific mastery. For a recent study that connects this picture with the Commune, see E. M. Rosenberg, “. . . one of the most powerful, horrible, and yet fascinating pictures . . .’: Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic as History Painting,” in P. Burnham and L. Giese, eds., Redefining American History Painting, New York, 1995, Chapter 10.
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Description: Harper's Weekly by Unknown
Fig. 163. Harper’s Weekly.
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Description: Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic) by Eakins, Thomas
Fig. 164. Eakins’s The Cross Clinic.
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