from civic to ethnic classicism the cult of the greek body in late nineteenthcentury french

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From Civic to Ethnic Classicism: The Cult of the Greek Body in Late Nineteenthcentury FrenchSociety and Art Author(s): Athena S. Leoussi Source: International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 16, No. 3/4 (Sep. - Dec., 2009), pp.

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DOI 10.1007/ S12138-009-0137-Z

From civic to ethnic classicism: the cult of the Greek body in late nineteenth- century French society and art*

ATHENA S.LEOUSSI

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

The ancient Greek cult of the body became the focus of a classical revival in France during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Classical civilisation, whose gravita- tional centre was perceived, during the 1880s, as the perfection of the body in a Mediterranean climate, was re-claimed in France as a French "golden age", an inheritance from Greek ancestors. This ethno-classicism which called for national regeneration through return to the "authentic" French self and its Mediterranean home, was combined with a Catholic revival under conditions of military defeat. The essay sets the work of Cézanne and Renoir in the context of the two revivals, classical and Catholic, and shows the ways in which their "classicism" gave Impressionism order and solidity and re-moulded the modern body into a strong, healthy, and, at the same time, pious body.

Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 transformed the earlier, universalist, individualist and civic classicism of the French Enlightenment and the Revolution, into a particularism collectivism naturalist and ethno-racial

classicism. The new French attachment to principles originating in Greek and Roman antiquity rejected the city and turned to a different motif from the clas-

* I would like to thank Professor Wolfgang Haase for being even more than an excellent editor - an outstanding teacher. I will remain grateful to him for making the work on my submission to this journal a remarkable educational experience. With- out his meticulous reading and painstaking advice over a long time, this article would be much poorer. I also want to thank the late Professor Vojtech Jirat-Wasi- utynski for his substantial contribution to the development of my knowledge, understanding and ideas. I remain indebted to Professor Irving Louis Horowitz's appreciation of my work. Finally, as always, I thank Professor David Marsland.

Athena S. Leoussi, School of Languages and European Studies, University of Read- ing, Whiteknights, Reading RG6 6AA, UNITED KINGDOM

International Journal of the Classical Tradition, Vol. 16, No. 3/4, September/ December 2009, pp. 393-442.



394 International Journal of the Classical Tradition I September /December 2009

sical repertoire: the Greek cult of the strong and healthy body. It was a return to yet another theme from the ancient Greek and Roman worlds whose close links and exemplary qualities for the Western world have caused them to be termed, jointly, "classical civilisation". * The desire to look Greek through return to the Greek physical ideal and the institutions that had realised it - ath- letics and physical exercise in the open air - was justified with scientific arguments: ethnic /genealogical and racial. These arguments were produced by and taken from the new life-science: physical anthropology.

In my book, Nationalism and Classicism: The Classical body as National Sym- bol in Nineteenth-Century England and France, I have considered the details of the rise of the idea of race in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, and especially England and France: the ways in which the ancient Greeks were idealised as the fullest embodiment of the superior white race to which the Europeans belonged, and, indeed, of humanity as such. In that book I also examined the implications of these ideas for national identity, educational institutions and general patterns of artistic practice in these countries.2 In the present essay I re-visit some of these ideas, summarising them and adding additional material regarding cultural and institutional change in France after the Franco-Prussian war, in order to introduce the term "ethno-classicism" or "ethnic classicism". This new term offers a more specific way of describing and thereby understanding a distinct type of "classicism", i.e., orientation to and appropriation of aspects of ancient Greek and Roman civilisation, which marked not only French, but also English and German societies and their art in the late nineteenth-century and beyond.

I have termed attachment to the ancient Greek physical ideals and institutions of strength and health "ethno-classicism", because the imitation of the ancient Greek cult of the body that this new classicism advocated was justified by descent, that is, by belief in genealogical-cum-physical/ racial continuity of the modern French with the ancient Greeks.3

Ethno-classicism was one of many classicisms and classicising doctrines that marked the turn-of-the century French search for a specifically national culture. Some of these classicisms have been identified and examined in greater or lesser depth by the contributors to the volume edited by Hargrove and McWilliam, Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 1870-1914* As Neil McWilliam shows in that volume, the term classicism acquired such a wide

1. On the European fascination with the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, which is evident in much of post-antique European art, see, for example, Michael Green- halgh, The Classical Tradition in Art (London: Duckworth, 1978), "Introduction."

2. Athena S. Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism: The Classical Body as National Sym- bol in Nineteenth-Century England and France (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1998).

3. This term is based on the distinction between 'ethnic' and civic' nations implied in Hans Kohn's analysis of the difference between 'Western' and 'Eastern' nations in Europe. See Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1944). See Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism (as in n. 2), for a detailed history of the development of physical anthropology in Europe as it applies to the body of the ancient Greeks.

4 . The essays by Neil McWilliam, "Action française, Classicism, and the Dilemmas of Traditionalism in France, 1900-1914" (esp. p. 270), and Gaetano DeLeonibus, "The Quarrel over Classicism: A Quest for Uniqueness", both in Hargrove and



Leoussi 395

variety of meanings that the critic Gaston Sauvebois would refer, in 1911, to "l'équivoque du classicisme".5 Nevertheless, what is important about what I have termed "ethno-classicism", a classicism which is not considered in that volume, is that it was a condition for most if not all of the other attempts to revive this or that aspect of ancient Greek and Roman civilisation. For at a time when racial determinism, the belief that race or biological inheritance influ- enced everything, was a dominant doctrine, a people could justify "classical" inclinations or aspirations only on the basis of Greek ethnicity (i.e., blood relation), and possession of a healthy and strong body, that is to say, a Greek body.6

In our effort to understand the classical tradition or reception in all its various guises and selections from among the principles that ruled the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, it is important to identify and distinguish ter- minologically and substantively different types of "classicism". The term "classicism" by itself is not always sufficient. I offer here, in addition to the term "ethno-classicism", its distinction from "civic classicism" which it suc- ceeded. This distinction is an adaptation of Hans Kohn's insightful analysis of different types of modern nation formation in Europe that scholars now refer to as "civic" and "ethnic".7

In this essay, I also show the relevance to the understanding of the more general characteristics and causes of what I have termed French "ethno-clas-

McWilliam (eds.) Nationalism and French Visual Culture (as in n. 5), illustrate most

clearly the proliferation of 'classicisms' and the confusion over the meaning of 'classicism' in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

5. June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam (eds.) Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 1870-1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 270.

6. See, for example, Jennifer Shaw's observation in her essay ' Frenchness, memory,

and abstraction", in Hargrove and McWilliam (eds.), Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 1870-1914 (as in n. 5), that "the issue of race haunts the discussion of the Frenchness of Puvis' art" (p. 156). In the same book, DeLeonibus, in his essay "The Quarrel over Classicism", also confirms the importance of the belief, ex-

pressed by Louis Bertrand and inspired by Hippolyte Taine, that cultural pro- duction, and especially "all classical art", depended on the health of a race: "la santé de la race est la condition première et nécesaire de tout art classique, c'est à dire vraiment social et vraiment humain" (p. 296-97). Shaw further remarks in the essay cited above, that we find the same belief that the ideas, tastes, and attitudes of classical antiquity were constitutive of full humanity, in the thought of Charles Maurras

(p. 160). As I show below, the claim that classical civilisation embodied full hu-

manity, was also made by the Enlightenment. But for the philosophes that human-

ity could be accessed by all nations, not only by specific groups. 7. The term 'nationalist classicism' which Neil McWilliam uses to describe the clas-

sicism of early twentieth-century French culture is rather inadequate. See McWilliam's essay "Action française, classicism and the dilemmas of traditionalism in France, 1900-1914", in Hargrove and McWilliam (eds.), Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 1870-1914 (as in n. 5), 269. For Enlightenment classicism also had nationalist implications, such as, for example, the belief that France had a

unique role to spread the Enlightenment principles of the 1789 Revolution to all

humanity, that was one of the motives of the Napoleonic wars. On this, see, for ex-

ample, Aviel Roshwald, The Endurance of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 2006), 181.



396 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / September/December 2009

sicism" of the work of Anthony D. Smith and John Hutchinson on modern, post-1789, national revival movements. According to Smith, national revivals recover earlier periods of greatness of a community. Triggered off by sudden socio-cultural change or political trauma, revivals of past "golden ages" re- veal to the community its "authentic" (usually pre-industrial and rural) self; stimulate a regeneration of the community by bidding it to realise this perfect self under modern conditions; suggest "potential through filiation": they stress the inherent capacity of the descendants, through blood relationship, to re-create the golden age that their ancestors had achieved; and give the community a sense of collective destiny.8 Smith and Hutchinson have stressed that revivals of "golden ages" do not simply imitate the earlier periods, but are innovative, transmuting selected aspects of the "golden" past into novel cre- ations, adapted to modern problems.

Adopting the Smith-Hutchinson hypotheses, this essay considers: • firstly, French identification with the ancient Greeks and the ancient Greek

culture of the body as a movement of national revival in two senses: a) as an attempt to regenerate the French nation physically and morally by imitating the ancient Greeks; and b) as a revival of a "golden age" from the French national past. As a French "golden age", ancient Greece showed modern French men and women, humiliated and demoralised by defeat, their "authentic" self. The revival of this "golden age", i.e., the imitation of the old ancestral ways, and, most crucially, of Greek positive evalua- tion of the body as a central cultural value, and care for it through physical exercise in the open air, promised the recovery of an essential part of French collective identity. The belief in Greek ancestry gave French people a sense of unity and of great common destiny through the determinism of racial-biological inheritance and the proven effectiveness of the old ways.

• secondly, the association of this classical revival with a Catholic revival. The essay shows how different "golden ages", here the classical and Catholic, selectively re-defined under particular historico-cultural conditions, were reconciled and combined into new visions of the collective, national self.

• And thirdly, the classical re-orientations of the art of Cézanne and Renoir. This essay is an attempt to widen and deepen the contextual and theo- retical fields within which to look at the later nudes and bather scenes of the two artists. The essay thus sets the art of Cézanne and Renoir, from the 1880s-onwards, in the context of France's revival of her "golden pasts": it shows the innovative ways in which the revived ancient Greek ideal of physical health and strength was incorporated, re-imagined, re-vived and projected in the work of two of the most modern of French artists. It ex- plores the ways in which the two artists, by returning to and reworking an ideal which had been the central motif of ancient Greek art and which had been so much part of European artistic tradition since the Renais-

8. Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 263-4; John Hutchinson, Nations as Zones of Conflict (London: Sage, 2005), 74.



Leoussi 397

sance, created new styles which reconciled modernity (with its striving for the new) with tradition and strove to renew this tradition. It examines, finally, how the two artists, by participating, each in his own way, in the two cultural impulses of their time, the classical and the Catholic, contributed to their reconciliation and the creation, in French art, of a new "golden age" - a new Renaissance which, like the Italian Renaissance of Raphael and Michelangelo, affirmed both Christian and pagan sentiments.9

From neo-classicism and the city to ethno-classicism and the body

After the Renaissance the most important European classical revival was eighteenth-century Neo-classicism.10 Its importance lay largely in its association with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution which revived the classical (Athenian and Roman Republican) values of "liberty", "reason" and "pa- triotism". As Isaiah Berlin has stressed, to proponents of the Enlightenment, like Voltaire, these values and the classical forms and styles in which they were expressed were timeless and universal - "the finest hours of mankind";11 hence the apparent backward glance. These primarily political values were the values which had governed the ancient Greek city-states, the poleis. They made the city the centre of the new political life ushered in by the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. In their modern adaptations, they produced representatives of the will of the demos. And they gave rise, in both the new and the old worlds, to new, public buildings, which housed them. These buildings, like the Palais Bourbon in Paris and the Capitol in Washington, became the central sites where the classical ideals of self-gov- ernment and law-making by means of rational debate, which constitute what we now call liberal democracy, were revived. And the architectural style of

9. There were several attempts in France at that time to combine Christianity with classicism, each taking a different form. See, for example, Mark Antliff 's analysis of Georges Sorel's "embrace of classical culture and Neo-Catholic aesthetics" (p. 307) in Hargrove and McWilliam (eds.), Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 1870- 1914 (as in n. 5), as well as the essay by Shaw, cited above (n. 6), and that by Laura Morowitz, "Mediaevalism, classicism and nationalism", in the same volume. The desire to reconcile pagan and Christian sentiments was also felt in England in the second half of the nineteenth century. We find it, for example, in art, visually expressed in the works of the late Pre-Raphaelites, and in literature, in Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and Matthew Arnold's essay, "Pagan and Christian Religious Sentiment", first published in Cornhill Magazine, vol. IX (April 1864). Arnold's essay can also be found in R. H. Super, ed., Lectures and Es- says in Criticism, vol. 3 of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), pp. 212-31.

10. Hugh Honour, Neo-classicism (1968), rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1991); Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press,1982).

11. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: Montana Fress, IWUj, b¿; see also Ian Jenkins, "Ideas of anitiquity: classical and other ancient civilizations in the age of Enlightenment," in: Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eigh- teenth Century, ed. by Kim Sloan with Andrew Burnett (London: The British Mu- seum Press, 2003), pp. 168-177.



398 International Journal of the Classical Tradition / September/ December 2009

the debating houses of the representatives of the people was, fittingly, the "Greek Style".

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries built states like mag- nified classical cities, in both the old and the new worlds. The second half of the nineteenth century abandoned the city and turned to another side of classical civilisation: its cult of the strong and healthy body.

Through its association with anthropological theories of race, which made the mind depend on the body, the cult of the body conferred on the body and, above all others, on the Greek body, a power which it had never before attained. It turned it into a racial attribute - an inherited, permanent, all- determining, group-specific, and therefore divisive trait. Thus, mankind was no longer born free and equal, as civic classicism had imagined, but once again became limited and unequal by birth.12

"[H]ereditary peculiarities of conformation", as the great French naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) had described human physical variation, divided mankind into races which were unequal in all respects, in both mind and body. The superior race was the white race, also called the European, Indo-Atlantic, Indo-European or Aryan race.13 As Arthur de Gobineau, the "father of racist ideology", observed in his Essai sur l'Inégalité des Races Hu- maines of 1853-55, the white race possessed "le monopole de la beauté, de l'intelligence et de la force" }* The best exemplar of the white race was taken to be the body of the young athletes of ancient Greece.

According to racial theorists, the body of the ancient Greeks was muscular, symmetrical, regularly proportioned and healthy. Indeed, its underlying mathematical harmony was seen as a justification of the superior aesthetic value of the ancient Greek physique. This physique was made possible not only by biological inheritance, but also by life in the gymnasia, the open air and the sun.15 Thus, through carefully considered physical education, Greece, and especially Athens, in her "golden age", the fifth century BC, had further moulded the natural beauty of the race to absolute aesthetic perfection.16 It was a physical perfection which embodied the culture of that age: reason and order. The Mediterranean climate had also played its part in the formation of this physique, an idea which went back to Johann Joachim Winckelmann.

Physical anthropologists and, more generally, racial theorists, claimed that the physical type of the ancient Greeks had been recorded in ancient Greek sculpture. For Gobineau, for example, the ancient Greeks "ont eu la gioire

12. Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism (as in n. 2); Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

13. Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism (as in n. 2), 3-24. 14. Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l'Inégalité des Races Humaines (Paris: Pierre

Belfond, 1967). 15. See Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism (as in n. 2), on nineteenth-century meas-

urements of the anatomical characteristics of the ancient Greeks and of antique figurai sculpture, 3-24 and 35-55. On the making of the Greek body see also ibid., 3-24.

16. Athena S. Leoussi, "Pheidias and 'l'esprit moderne': the study of human anatomy in nineteenth-century English and French education", European Review of History, vol. 7, no. 2, 2000, 167-188.



Leoussi 399

Fig. 1. Polycletus, Diadoumenos, Roman copy of about 100 BQ of a bronze original of about 430 BC

de fournir les modèles admirables de la Vénus, de V Apollon et de l'Hercule Farnese".17 The indeterminacy that surrounded the exact dating of antiquities in the nineteenth century as well as their status as either originals or copies, was not a problem for racial theorists as it was for the archaeologists. Nevertheless, by the middle of the nineteenth century a consensus had been established that the most accurate records of the Greek physique in its fullest development could be found in fifth-century BC Athenian-based figurai sculpture, in the works of Polycletus, Myron, and, above all, Phidias (in the so-called "Elgin Marbles" from the Parthenon in Athens), works which displayed a high degree of naturalism (fig. I).18 This sculpture represented "the highest form of classical art"

17. Gobineau, Essai sur l'Inégalité des Races Humaines (as in n. 14), 124. 18. On the indeterminacy of dating antiquities in the nineteenth century, and espe-

cially the Venus de Milo, see Caroline Arscott's and Katie Scotf s introduction to




and the model of human physical perfection.19 It embodied what Gobineau and others called "la Grèce classique": the highest peak of ancient Greek civilization.20

As Holt, Pick, Leoussi, Garb and others have shown, physical activity in the open air and sunshine in imitation of the ancient Greek example became an object of public concern and state educational policy in many parts of Eu- rope.21 This was a reaction against what was seen as the physically degener- ative nature of modern industrial civilisation, whose centres were the northern European cities. Physical education and, more generally, physical activity in the open air took many forms in Europe. And it was combined with competition of one European nation to be more "Greek" than the other, both genealogically and physically. 22

Ethno-classicism and the French body

In France, the site of national regeneration through the imitation of the Greek cult of the body became, most fittingly, its Mediterranean coast.23 For as Hob- sbawm has observed, under the impact of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nationalisms "the heritage of sections, regions and localities of what had become 'the nation' could be combined into an all-national heritage".24 In this

Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott (eds.), Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), esp. 9-11. On Winckelmann's classifications of antique sculpture, see Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 160. On art and science more generally, see also, Timothy F. Mitchell, Art and Science in German Landscape Painting 1770-1840 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 134-5.

19. Ian Jenkins Archaeologists and Aesthetes (London: British Museum Press, 1992), 28; see also Athena S. Leoussi "Myths of ancestry", Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 7, Issue 4, October 2001, pp. 467-486; and also Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism (as in n. 2), 3-24 and 35-55.

20. Gobineau quoted in Jean Boissel, Gobineau, l'Orient et l'Iran, Vol. 1:1816- 1860: pro- légomènes et essai d'analyse (Paris: Klincksieck, 1973), 118.

21. Richard Holt, Sport and Society in Modem France (London: Macmillan, 1981), Daniel Pick Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press, 1989); Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity: figure and flesh in fin-de-siècle France (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998). For France and Germany see also Edmond Demolins, Anglo-Saxon Superiority: to what it is due (first pubi, in French, 1897), rev. ed. translated from the tenth French edition (London: The Lead- enhall Press, 1899); for Britain, see Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); see also Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism (as in n. 2), on the development of physical education in nineteenth- century England and France, esp. 108-130.

22. On this, see Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism (as in n. 2), and also Leoussi, "Phei- dias and 'l'esprit moderne"' (as in n. 16), and Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth (Lon- don: Sussex University Press, 1974).

23. André Rauch, Vacances en France de 1830 à nos jours, ser. La vie quotidienne. L'histoire en marche (Paris : Hachette, 2001).

24. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1990), 90. See also, Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).



Leoussi 401

way, la région would contribute to la patrie.25 However, unlike elsewhere in Eu- rope, especially in England and Germany, the French conscious and Greek- inspired re-orientation towards physical education and life in natural surroundings came late, and almost as an afterthought: an attempt to correct a fatal mistake. The change in life-style was triggered by the devastating national experience of defeat in war and by the desire for national survival and revenge. The revanchiste spirit intensified from the 1880s onwards. It was the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 and the explanation of this defeat in terms of French physical degeneration and low fertility, that changed French opinion, and with it French life, under the Third Republic. Before 1871, and despite efforts by both the state, especially by Napoleon Ill's minister of education, Victor Duruy (1811-94), and individuals like Hippolyte Taine (1828-93), a positivist, an advocate of the idea of race and the arch-cham- pion of classical Athenian notions of physical strength - "la force" - French opinion had resisted the idea of race and the care for the body which it im-

plied.26 French Catholic opinion had been either indifferent to modern science or opposed to its rationalism and secularism - "la religion et la science en désac- cord"}7 And it had generally been held that gymnastics were "unseemly or

degrading activities/' especially by middle and upper-class Parisian Salon so-

ciety, devoted to "mind gymnastics".28 After 1871 there was "broad agreement" that "the country must work to outstrip the Germans in the very areas in which Germany excelled: warfare, science, and the education of its citizens" which emphasized gymnastics.29 It was then that Taine became influential. And it was thus that the cult of the body was introduced into French schools and, more generally, into French life.30 Indeed, as Tamar Garb has shown, jour- nals such as La Revue Athlétique, founded in 1890, or La Culture Physique, founded in 1904, with their illustrations of statues of ancient Greek athletes, indicate not only the spread of the cult of the body in France after the Franco-

25. For French state-sponsored and grass-roots, amateur efforts, from the 1830s onwards, to cultivate local and regional sentiments and memories, in order to pro- mote both local pride and national unity, see Stéphane Gerson, The Pride of Place: Local Memories and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cor- nell University Press, 2003); see also Jennifer L. Shaw, Dream States: Puvis de Cha- vannes, Modernism, and the Fantasy of France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 69.

26. For a more detailed analysis see Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism (as in n. 2), 87- 107, 108-130.

27. This was Taine's diagnosis of the condition of modern French society, "le régime moderne", in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. See Paul Lacombe, Taine, historien et sociologue, Bibliothèque Sociologique Internationale XXXVIII (Paris: Giard et Brière, 1909), book II, chapter 3, "La religion et la science en désaccord", 240-62.

28. Richard Holt, Sport and Society in Modem France (as in n. 21), 42; see also Demolins, AnvlO'Saxon Superiority (as in n. 21), 26.

29. Jacques Revel, "Introduction" in Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt (eds.), Histories: French Constructions of the Past, vol. 1, Postwar French Thought (New York: New Press, 1995), 5.

30. For a fuller discussion of the introduction of physical education in France, see Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism (as in n. 2) and also Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France (as in n. 21).




Prussian war, but also its Greek models.31 The proliferation of voluntary gym- nastic associations during this period was another manifestation of the new physical concerns of the French which Flaubert satirized in his Bouvard et Pécuchet.32 And in 1898 we find the French anatomists, Mathias Du val and Edouard Cuyer, who championed the ideas of Taine at the École des Beaux- Arts through their manuals of artistic anatomy, advocating this classicism in the following terms:

... au lieu de réaliser l'antique et classique formule qui demande une intelligence saine dans un corps robuste (mens sana in corpore sano), nous voyons trop souvent Vhumanité dite civilisée tendre comme type vers un corps débile ... ... instead of realising the ancient and classical formula that requires a healthy mind in a healthy body (mens sana in corpore sano), we see, too often, so-called civilised humanity, tend towards a weak physical type ...33

Ethnic identification with Greece had already been promoted by Napoleon III during the 1850s and 1860s. He took a personal interest in the archaeological and ethnographic reconstruction of the passé national. And this Greek pedi- gree of the French nation had been incorporated in the idea, first made popular by the abbé Sieyès during the French Revolution in his pamphlet Qu'est-ce que le Tiers-État?, of the Gallic or Celtic ancestry of the mass of the French nation. The Gallic and Gallo-Greek (and Roman) identity of ordinary French people was opposed to the Frankish or Germanic identity of the French aris- tocracy34 These ideas were disseminated through the arts by state commis- sions, competitions and purchases of works of art portraying eminent Gauls, such as Vercingétorix, or narrating la fondation de Marseille?5 TTie latter became the subject of the 1865 competition for the prix de Rome. Taken from Laureau, the author of Histoire de France avant Clovis, of 1789, the subject proclaimed the Greek ancestry of the French through intermarriage of Gauls with Greeks who settled in Provence from the 6th century B.C. onwards.36 In the same vein,

31. Garb, Bodies of Modernity (as in n. 21), 55-57. 32. Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France (as in n. 21). 33. Mathias Duval and Edouard Cuyer, Histoire de l'Anatomie Plastique: les Maîtres, les

Livres et les Écorchés, ser. Bibliothèque de l'Enseignement des Beaux-Arts (Paris: Société Française d'Éditions d'Art, 1898 ), 9.

34. Napoleon III took a personal interest in the archaeological and ethnographic reconstruction of the "passé national", and especially the Gallic past. In 1862 he laun- ched the excavation of Alesia, the Gallic fortress which Caesar besieged and where he captured Vercingétorix in 52 B.C. He also founded a "musée des Antiquités nationales" in the château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which opened on 12 May 1867. See Anne Pingeot (ed.), La Sculpture Française au XIXe siècle, exh. cat., Grand Palais, Paris, 1986 (Paris : Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1982), 374. On Latinity, i.e., the French identification with the Romans, see, for example, Jennifer Shaw's essay, "Frenchness, memory, and abstraction", in Hargrove and McWilliam (eds.), Nationalism and French Visual Culture (as in n. 5), 156.

35. Pineeot, La sculpture Française au XIXe siècle (as in n. 34), 50. 36. Fernand Braudel, Memory and the Mediterranean (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001),

223.



Leoussi 403

Puvis de Chavannes, the leading French mural painter of the time, in his decorative cycle for the Musée des Beaux- Arts of Marseille (1865-69), affirmed the Greek connection of the place, with the painting, Marseille, Greek Colony (1869).

Of course, French ethno-racial identification with ancient Greece was not surprising, given the long tradition of cultural identification of European elites more widely with the ancient Greeks and Romans. Ethno-racial identification with them only deepened, strengthened, and even justified this spiritual sympathy and attachment to classical civilisation as a framework within which experience could be understood. Victor Hugo, for example, would interpret the fall of Paris under German siege in 1870 as akin to the fall of Troy in his poem Vannée terrible, published in 1872.37

Official and elite identification of modern France with ancient Greece gained wider appeal after the Franco-Prussian war. It posited the Mediter- ranean South, and especially Provence (rather than, for example, Languedoc), as the place which linked France with Greece not only genealogically, but also from the point of view of affinities of topography and climate. For example, Paul Vidal de la Blache, appointed in 1898 chair in geography at the Sorbonne, referred, in his Tableau de la Géographie de la France of 1903, to the "affinités" of Provence with "la Grèce"?* Furthermore, according to Louis de Laincel, since the seventeenth century Aix had borne the sobriquet of "Athènes du Midi" for the clarity of its light.39 After the mid-nineteenth century, the appreciation of the sunlight of Provence "morphed into a mythology of sun-kissed salubrity", and was contrasted, as a "new Attica" and a "Grèce azurée" with a muddy Paris without sun.40

Thus, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century Provence had come to be regarded as the true homeland of the French: the place where there were still French men and women who lived on the site and in the manner of their Greek ancestors; and the place to which French men and women had to return and live in the old ways, thereby regaining their vitality, like the mythical figure of Antaeus, who was strong only as long as he was in contact with his mother Earth (Gaia) - as long as he touched the ground. We may trace the origin of the summer waves of French men and women to the Mediterranean coast that we still witness today, 'la saison balnéaire', to this mentality - even though the motivation has changed.

37. Victor Hugo, Oeuvres Complètes 6 = Poésies 3 (Paris: Laffont, 1986); cf. Albert Py, Les mythes grecs dans la poésie de Victor Hugo (Genève & Paris: Librairie Droz, 1963), 75.

38. Quoted by Christopher Green in his essay, "A denationalized landscape", in Har-

grove and McWilliam (eds.), Nationalism and French Visual Culture (as in n. 5), 264, n.45.

39. Louis de Laincel, La Provence, suite au voyage humouristique dans le Midi (Avignon: Seguin frères, and Paris: Oudin frères, 1881), 26, quoted by Benedict Leca , "Sites of Forgetting: Cézanne and the Provençal Landscape Tradition" in Philip Conis- bee and Denis Coutagne (eds.), Cézanne in Provence, exh. cat. Washington: National Gallery of Art; Aix-en Provence: Musée Granet (Paris: Réunion des muses nationaux; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 56.

40. Leca in ibid, and quotation in French by J.Adam taken from Françoise Cachm, "C'est l'èden retrouveée", in Françoise Cachin (ed.), Méditerranée de Courbet à Ma- tisse (Paris: Réunion des Muses nationaux, 2000), 18.




The geo-cultural relocation of French life and the change in life-style which it implied to make France whole again, affected both men and women. However, it was the women who had to change most profoundly. Their mores of cupidity, their "soif du plaisir", their abandonment of motherhood, of "mother love",41 were held responsible for French degeneration, for the small size of the French population in relation to the German, and ultimately for French defeat. Numerous books encouraged motherhood and good parent- ing.42 The motto of the revanchiste Union des Sociétés Françaises de Gymnas- tique, founded in 1873, was: "Faites-moi des hommes nous en ferons des soldats!"43 This period also witnessed a Catholic revival. It also demanded virginity and motherhood of young French women. The Neo-Catholic movement, which began in 1850, was intensified after the Franco-Prussian war. Centred on the veneration of the Virgin Mary, "la Vierge et la Mère", it made her a "national unifying symbol". Indeed, the period 1850 to 1950 has been described as the "Marian Age".44

There were also Catholic arguments in favour of the Greek cult of the healthy and strong body. These Catholic attempts to combine classical with Christian ideals are exemplified in the ideas of Charles Rochet (1815-1900). Rochet was an ardent nationalist, Catholic, and anti-Darwinian artist-cum- anthropologist. He was another supporter of Taine and taught at the École des Beaux- Arts. In his books and in his very popular public lectures at the Sorbonne between 1869 and 1872 he advocated that:

Tout Être humain doit avoir un beau corps, comme il doit avoir une bonne santé; le Créateur ne reconnaît comme étant son oeuvre que l'Être beau et en bonne santé45

Every human being must have a beautiful body, as well as good health; the Creator does not recognise as being His Creation other than beautiful and healthy beings.

To this end he advocated the imitation of "la vie naturelle" of "la belle race des Hellènes" who, in this way, had preserved the strength and beauty of the original mankind, as well as the colour of its skin, "rouge" or "cuivré" - bronzed by the sun. For, according to Rochet, "les hommes du beau soleil" were the "vrais enfants de Dieu".46 For Rochet, statues such as the Discobolus or the "beau torse de Ilissus de Phidias" exemplified the physically perfect Greek male adult, and the Venus de Milo and the Crouching Venus the female (fig. 2). Moreover, he claimed that the undisputed beauty of the Venus de Milo was due to her virginity, evident in her hips which he saw as narrow: "La Femme n'est parfaite-

41. Neil McWilliam, "Race, Remembrance and 'Revanche': Commemorating the Franco-Prussian War in the Third Republic", Art History 19, no. 4 (1996): 487.

42. Tamar Garb, "Renoir and the Natural Woman," The Oxford Art Journal 8, no. 2 (1985): 11.

43. Quoted in Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France (as in n. 21), 191. 44. Barbara Corrado Pope, "Immaculate and Powerful: The Marian Revival in the

Nineteenth Century" in Clarissa W. Atkinson et al., Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality (Boston. MA: Beacon Press. 1985Ì. 184. 173.

45. Charles Rochet, Traité d'Anatomie d'Anthropologie et d'Ethnographie appliquées aux Beaux-Arts (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1886), 262.

46. Ibid. 246, 232.



Leoussi 405

Fig. 2. Venus de Milo, c.lOO BC

ment belle qu'à l'état de vierge .... La Vénus de Milo est vierge: c'est la Vierge physique des anciens".47

Rochet went on to identify the French with the ancient Greeks by virtue of their dark hair, and to contrast both with the Germans: "Le blond est avant tout Allemand, Scandinave, Anglo-Saxon". The French were thus similar to the Greeks in that both nations were southern - "Bruns méridionaux". And as original mankind had also had "les cheveux d'un beau noir", the French were superior to the Germans because the latter's blond hair was a deviation from original perfection: "le Brun ... est l'homme supérieur".48

47. Ibidv 197, 265. 48. Ibid., 222, 223, 222, 235.




Ethno-classidstn and the return of French modern art to classical art

The national transformation, the disenchantment with modern life, and the return to French "national" traditions, one classical, the other Catholic, correspond to the so-called "crisis of Impressionism" of the 1880s.49 This "crisis" led to radical changes in the work of the leading Impressionist artists.

By 1880 artistic reaction to the traditionalism, conservatism, and ossified classicism of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which had begun with neo-classicism and culminated with the Salon des Refusés of 1863, was complete. It was this reaction that had given birth to the independent exhibitions of the "Impressionists" that began in 1874 in final protest against official taste and exhibition practice. And it was this reaction that had produced a variety of in- novations, in both style and subject-matter, some distinctly oriented to cap- turing modern life. These modernist reactions which by mid-century the term Realism came to encompass ensured the most decisive break with tradition.50 They partook of this new, "modern age" which began blushingly with the En- lightenment and came to be associated with a condition of "permanent revolution" - an optimistic and progressive embrace of constant innovation, spontaneity and direct observation of the world as it really is, stripped of traditional conventions.51

As the new ambition to be peintre de la vie moderne - to show ever-changing modern life in ever-changing "modern" styles, and in so doing break free from as many bonds with tradition as were conceivable - touched the nude: indeed, it changed it, often beyond recognition. It modernised it by placing it in emphatically modern urban and suburban settings in the bath, the boudoir, the brothel or the picnic, and painting it in either academic style, as did Courbet, or the new styles associated with Manet and the Impressionists.52 Manet's oeuvre, his Musique aux Tuileries (1862), his Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863),

49. Joel Isaacson, The Crisis oflmpresionism (1878-1882), exh. cat., Museum of Art, Uni- versity of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980).

50. For the intentions and politics underlying the "Impressionist" exhibitions, see Jane Mayo Roos, Early Impressionism and the French State (1866-1874) (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1996), 204. For a more recent general account of the civil war that took place in Paris in the 1860s and 1870s between official Salon artists ("the finishers"), approved by the Académie des Beaux- Arts, and those dismis- sively labelled "Impressionist" artists (also called, again derogatorily, "the sketch- ers") see also, Ross King, The Judgement of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that gave the World Impressionism (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006). For earlier reactions

against the academy, see, for example, Anita Brookner, Jacques-Louis David (Lon- don: Chatto & Windus, 1987) and Linda Nochlin, Realism, ser. Style and Civiliza- tion (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971).

51. The bibliography on modern culture is massive. For some distinguished socio-

logical accounts, see Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribners, 1976) = Die protestantische Ethik, und der Geist des Kapitalis- mus (Tübingen: Mohr, 1934), Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), Talcott Parsons, The System of Modern Societies (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971).

52. Anthea Callen, The Art of Impressionism: painting technique and the making of moder-

nity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).



Leoussi 407

his Olympia (1863), his Nana (1877), painted increasingly "sans référence au passé", is iconic of the impulse to change, to rebel.53

However, after 1880 many of the révoltés, painters of "la vie moderne", became painters who revived "la vie ancienne" in a variety of ways, and without entirely abandoning modern practices. They removed the body from the city and placed it in sunny Mediterranean landscapes, on riversides and coast- lines, bathing, wrestling, running or resting after physical activity. These new, idyllic Mediterranean paintings echoed the shift in geo-cultural focus from the grey, sterile and disfiguring industrial and urban Parisian north to the natural Mediterranean South.54 They were imaginings of a new France.

Among these avant-garde artists who included Seurat, Signac, Cross, Denis and Matisse, were also Cézanne and Renoir.55 Through them, the earlier, future-oriented modernism returned to the past. Their alignment with classical principles incorporated these two artists, along with other members of the avant-garde, into the central, national tradition of French classicism, which they re-vitalised and modernised, not in reaction against it, but in sympathy and reconciliation with it.56 As Robert Herbert has observed, by the early twentieth century artists and critics would group Renoir with Cézanne and Seurat as "'classical' artists".57 Their interest in tradition, in this case the classical tradition which linked French art with ancient Greece through Poussin and the Italian students of the Greeks, and, at the same time, in innovation, also aligned them with Puvis de Chavannes.58 Puvis' attachment to primitivist flat and simplified designs was seen as innovative and thus "modern" and re- juvenated academic visions of classical "idealism" without him ever abandoning the academy. In 1890, Maurice Denis called such tendencies "Neotraditionism".59 In what follows I shall try to show, after Smith and Hutchinson, that it is possible for revivals of tradition not to be retardataires but rather to include moments of astonishing creativity, innovation and resolu- tion of the problems of modernity; and that our understanding of modernism

53. Françoise Cachin et al., Manet, exh. cat., Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art & Abrams, 1983), 392

54. See Anne Dymond, "A politicised pastoral: Signac and the cultural geography of Mediterranean France", Art Bulletin LXXXV, no. 2 (2003): 353-70; and Margaret Werth, The Joy of Life: The Idyllic in French Art, circa 1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

55. John House, "That Magical Light: Impressionists and Post-Impressionists on the Riviera", in Kenneth Wayne et al., Impressions of the Riviera: Monet, Renoir, Matisse and Their Contemporaries, exh. cat., Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME (Port- land, ME: Portland Museum of Art; Seattle: Distributed by University of Wash-

ington Press, 1998), 10-25. 56. Athena S. Leoussi, "The ethno-cultural roots of national art", Nattons and Nation-

alism 10, nos. 1-2 (2004): 141-157. 57. Robert L. Herbert, Nature's Workshop: Renoir's Writings on the Decorative Arts (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 83. 58. See Shaw, "Frenchness, memory, and abstraction", in Hargrove and McWilliam

(eds.), Nationalism and French Visual Culture (as in n. 5), 161. For an excellent discussion of Renoir's more general return to tradition, and the centrality that this ac-

quires in his work, especially around 1910, see Herbert, Nature's Workshop (as in n. 57).

59. Shaw, Dream States (as in n. 25), 3-8.




is greatly enriched if we realise its debt to the revival and re-working of tradition.

The so-called "crisis of Impressionism" was a rebellion against rebellion and a return to tradition. It generated a new style which, while maintaining the visual truth and colourism of Impressionist plein-air painting, rejected freedom and spontaneity in favour of pattern and a search for order in life, nature and art. It also involved a change in subject-matter. A new imagery of Mediterranean landscapes and coasts with bathing nudes appears in the work of the two artists from the 1880s until the end of their lives. The figures, both male and female in Cézanne, and exclusively female in Renoir, either derive from specific figurai prototypes in Graeco-Roman art, such as statues of the Venus; or are generically classical - nudes in landscapes.

These nudes are not the academic female nudes of the Salon, pale, listless, coquettish and lascivious that we find in Cabanel, Baudry and Bouguereau.60 Neither are they the male and female nudes of neo-classicism. They are not those figures of unattainable, ideal beauty, with little or no muscle, bone or blood, of the later period of classical art which the Apollo Belvedere exemplified, and which Winckelmann had preferred. Rather, they go back, through the muscular and substantial nudes of the Italian High Renaissance, to naturalist Greek art: to Praxiteles' tradition of firm and robust female nudes, of which the Venus de Milo in the Louvre was supposed to be an example, and to the 5th c. BC statues of athletes and heroes described by Winckelmann as "grand and square". Furthermore, Cézanne and Renoir transformed the traditional image of the nude in a landscape into more naturalist images where the nude is fused with the landscape through colour. It was this naturalist classicism which constituted their Post-Impressionism. And, more than showing simply figures in landscapes, these Post-Impressionist works were in fact essays in French re-attachment to nature. In what follows, I shall explore how Cézanne and Renoir classicised the Impressionist landscape and re-moulded the modern body into a healthy and strong body along classical lines. 61

60. Academic images of Venus abound in the Salon throughout the nineteenth century, increasing considerably from the middle of the century onwards, and even more after 1870. See Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism (as in n. 2), 133-42. See also, Jen- nifer Shaw, "The figure of Venus: rhetoric of the ideal and the Salon of 1863", in Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott (eds.), Manifestations of Venus: Art and Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 90-108.

61. Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy (eds.) On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910-1930, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London (London: Tate Gallery, 1990). See esp. J. Mundy's comments in entry for cat. no. 38, p. 82, on De Chirico's Roman Women. According to Mundy, De Chirico's Roman Women of 1926, have "a fleshiness familiar from later nineteenth-century French painting." See also p. 18 in the same volume; for a connection between De Chirico and Cézanne, involving the latter's Still Life with Plaster Cupid (ca. 1895), and in an in- terpretative context see Rosemary Barrow, "From Praxiteles to De Chirico: Art and reception," International Journal of the Classical Tradition 11 (2004/05), 346-48. More generally see Kenneth Clark, The Nude (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980).



Leoussi 409

Naturalist classicism and the revival of the body in Cezanne's Bathers

a.) Reviving the body "en terre provençale" The classical character of Provence, which became after the Franco-Prussian war the leading centre of French national revival, found its most original and intensely classical expression in Cezanne's art from the 1880s until the end of his life in 1906. Cezanne's luminous and serene bathing nudes of the last twenty years of his life, set in the Provençal, Mediterranean countryside where he was also born, and to which he finally retreated in the mid-1880s, returning only occasionally to Paris, were a new subject in his art. 62 As Lawrence Gowing has observed, Cezanne's later bather compositions contrasted sharply with his earlier Romantic, thickly painted, dark, passionate and embattled male and female nudes engaged in La Lutte d'Amour (c.1875-6).63 These end in the mid-1870s when Cézanne began painting a different kind of nude, the bather, which was to become a constant preoccupation, giving rise to a whole series of bathing scenes.64 In this series, the two sexes tend to be separated in alternate images of Baigneurs and Baigneuses, ending in Baigneuses.65

Often sexually indeterminate and thus without sexual motive, these later young bodies of bathers show a more innocent, brighter and calmer image of human life and of the human body which almost echoes Winckelmann's classical ideal of "edle Einfalt und stille Grosse" (noble simplicity and calm grandeur). Through this series, culminating in Les Grandes Baigneuses of 1906 in Philadelphia, his final statement, Cézanne finally came to "worship at a classic shrine" (fig. 3).60 Specifically Greek formal references abound in this last painting, with reproductions of Greek statues of Venus - the muscular torso and draped lower parts of the Venus de Mito, the folded figure of the Crouching Venus, the Vénus à la coquille and the Vénus de Vienne - and of L'Her- maphrodite endormi, itself an offspring of Venus. The Diane chasseresse in the Louvre can also be recognised in the striding figure on the left.67

The classicism of Cezanne's later work expressed his regionalism. This classical interpretation of Provence was amplified by his intimate knowledge of certain ancient Greek and Latin writers whom he had read and with whom he had identified in his youth. His memories of this experience were revived

62. Cowling and Mundy (eds.), On Classic Ground (as in n. 61), 68. 63. Lawrence Gowing, "The Early Work of Paul Cézanne", in Lawrence Gowing (ed.),

Cézanne: The Early Years 1859 -1872, exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London (Lon- don: Royal Academy of Arts, In association with Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1998), 18.

64. See Mary Louise Krumrine's essay in Gowing (ed.), Cézanne: The Early Years (as in n. 63), "Parisian writers and the early work of Cézanne", 27.

65. Mary Louise Krumrine, Paul Cézanne: The Bathers (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 33.

66. Gowing, "The Early Work of Paul Cézanne" in Gowing (ed.), Cezanne: The Early Years (as in n. 63), 17-8. For a study exploring the possibility that Cézanne, in his

paintings of bathers, may have transposed the erotic implications of his subjects from their bodies to the formal and material qualities of the paintings, see Aruna D'Souza, Cezanne's Bathers: Biography and the Erotics of Paint, Refiguring Modernism 8 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).

67. Krumrine, Paul Cézanne: The Bathers (as in n. 65), 214.




Fig. 3. Paul Cézanne, Les Grandes Baigneuses, 1906

by his friendship with the young Joachim Gasquet and his literary circle, the "Symposiasts".68 Thus the classical characteristics of his later paintings were an artistic expression of enracinement, of ethnic attachment to the native land that was Provence. Indeed, Cézanne called himself a "man of the South".69 It was this love for Provence which also motivated his resistance to death as he approached his sixtieth year and his health and vigour began to decline: "... were it not that I am deeply in love with the landscape of my country, I should not be here".70 And as Provence was believed to be the cradle of French civilisation, indeed the site of French national regeneration, the regionalism of Cezanne's later work had national implications.

68. See Paul Smith's article, "Joachim Gasquet, Virgil and Cezanne's landscape 'My beloved Golden Age'", Apollo (Oct. 1998): 11-23, and his essay, "Cezanne's Late Landscapes" in Conisbee and Coutagne (eds.), Cézanne in Provence (as in n. 39), 59- 74 and also 69 on the "Symposiasts".

69. Krumrine, Paul Cézanne: The Bathers (as in n. 65), 35. 70. Richard Kendall (ed.), Cézanne by himself (London: The Folio Society, 1989), 12. His

health further deteriorated by diabetes, diagnosed in 1890. See Conisbee' s essay, "Cezanne's Provence" in Conisbee and Coutagne (eds.), Cézanne in Provence (as in n. 39), 16-17.



Leoussi 411

According to Gowing, the "passionate involvement in nature and the loyalty to a native countryside were incorporated in Cezanne's later attitude to painting and [became] increasingly essential to it in his last years".71 Cezanne's regionalism was recognised and praised by Joachim Gasquet, whom he met in Aix in April 1896 and who became his friend. Gasquet, much younger than Cézanne, was then studying philosophy at the University of Aix.72 Cézanne was to give some of his major "Provençal" works to his young friend.73 Gas- quet became an influential source on Cezanne's thoughts, through his book about the artist, called Cézanne, of 1921. According to Theodore Reff, John Re- wald, Richard Shiff and others, Gasquet's account of Cézanne is not entirely reliable, consisting of "a very liberal reconstruction of Cezanne's thinking" with the consequence that "no particular 'fact' in the account can be accepted without corrobora tion".74 Nevertheless, "Gasquet's Cézanne" remains valid and particularly illuminating regarding, at least, the reception of Cezanne's work by his contemporaries, and especially by nationalist circles, such as Ac- tion française which Gasquet supported.75 Action française, founded by Charles Maurras in 1898, was a nationalist movement which advocated the restoration in France of the classical spirit, i.e., the civilisation of ancient Greece and Rome, which it defined as reason, clarity, beauty and discipline. Maurras presented this spirit as a specifically French cultural and, to an extent, ethnic heritage. This cultural tradition, he believed, was lost with the En- lightenment and the 1789 Revolution and had to be revived for the revitalisa- tion of France defeated by Germany.76 In this spirit, Gasquet, himself a Provençal poet, tried to revive in his poetry the region's classical tradition as well as its folk, peasant culture and saw Cezanne's art as expressing the spirit of Provence.

It is important to consider more closely Cezanne's association with the regionalist and nationalist movements of the Third Republic. Nina Maria

71. Gowing, "The Early Work of Paul Cézanne" in Gowing (ed.), Cézanne: The Early Years (as in n. 63), (as in n. 63), 5.

72. Ibid., 217. See also Nina Maria Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence: The Painter in His Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 179.

73. See Conisbee's essay, "Cezanne's Provence", in Conisbee and Coutagne (eds.), Cézanne in Provence (as in n. 39), 21.

74. Shiff reporting the scholarly debate regarding the reliability of Gasquet's account of Cézanne in his introduction to Christopher Pemberton (ed.), Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 16, 23; see also, John Rewald, Cézanne, Geffroy et Gasquet (Paris: Quatre-Chemins- Editart, 1959), and Theodore Reff, "Cézanne and Poussin", Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1960, 23, no. 1/2, 1960, 150-74.

75. See Shiff in Pemberton (ed.), Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne (as in n. 74), as above, 15- 24.

76. See McWilliam's essay ("Action française, Classicism, and the Dilemmas of Tra- ditionalism in France, 1900-1914") on Maurras and L'Action française in Hargrove and McWilliam (eds.), Nationalism and French Visual Culture (as in n. 5), 269-291. For the intellectual sources of Maurras' own "classicism", and especially the influence of Charles- Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a leading theoretician and propagator of "classicism" in literature and the arts, with strong political associations, see, Christo- pher Prendergast, The Classic: Sainte-Beuve and the nineteenth-century culture wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).




Athanassoglou-Kallmyer has traced Cezanne's regionalist sympathies and their expression in his art in her award-winning book, Cézanne and Provence: The Painter in His Culture. According to Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne shared with Gasquet, and other prominent Méridional regionalists like Frédéric Mistral and the Félibres, their belief in the Greco-Latin ethnic and cultural roots of modern Provence. As Gasquet poetically put it

Les hommes de ma race à leur sang sont liés. Dans la Provence d'or flotte l'air de l'Hellade ....

The men of my race are linked to their blood. In the golden Provence floats the air of Hellas ...,77

As Athanassoglou-Kallmyer also observes, the Méridional regionalists regarded a "historically Greco-Roman Provence as the region (and the race) des- tined to spearhead a cultural and national renewal for France".78 And she locates the origins of this new and ethnically-justified classical revival in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, becoming especially potent in the 1890s. In the context of mounting national resentment against German Imperialism, the Greco-Latin ideal posited French supremacy over "inferior" and "barbaric" Anglo-Germanic cultures.79

According to Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne further shared the ideals of another classically-inclined literary movement that was based in Paris, Na- turism, founded in 1894.80 Naturism's spiritual leader was Emile Zola who was made an honorary member. Naturists were united in their common nationalist, classical and Latin creed and praised the regional periphery and especially Provence as the repository of authentic French traditions.81 Zola, himself a Provençal and Cezanne's childhood friend, explicitly described, in the 1890s, the town of Aix-en-Provence where they both grew up as Greece: "It was Greece, with its pure sun and the majesty of its horizons".82

The aesthetic ideals of Naturism consisted essentially of a rejection of Ro- manticism and symbolism as foreign, Anglo-Germanic imports: "L'esprit ger- manique ne nous séduit plus'' [The Germanie spirit does not seduce us anymore].83 Instead, the Naturists advocated classicism, "La Renaissance classique", whose sense of order they viewed as the essence of Frenchness, "l'esprit

77. Gasquet, quoted in Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence (as in n. 72), from his poem, "Chant filial" of 1899, in French in n. 100, 292 and in transi., 216.

78. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence (as in n. 72), 216. 79. Ibid. 80. For a summary of Naturism, see ibid. 216-220, and ibid, for a bibliography on Na-

turism, 292 n. 101. As Athanassoglou-Kallmyer observes, Richard Shiff was first to relate the Naturist movement to Cézanne and Gasquet, ibid., 293 n. 114. Joachim Gasquet also wrote a brief history of Naturism in his "Notes pour servir à l'histoire du Naturisme", La plume 9 (1897): 674.

81. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence (as in n. 72), 217. 82. Quoted in The Independent, Saturday 6th October 1990 in an article by Gillian Tin-

dall. See also Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence (as in n. 72), 201-2. 83. Saint-Georges de Bouhélier, quoted in Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and

Provence (as in n. 72), in n. 112, p. 293, in French, and p. 217 in transi, and first published in "Un Manifeste", in La Revue Naturiste (March 1897).



Leoussi 413

national"** Belief in the specifically ethnic connection between the French nation and the classical spirit was clearly expressed by the Naturist Louis Bertrand in his important preface to Gasquet's collection of poems, Les Chants séculaires of 1903:

Cette discipline classique n'est pas une fantaisie éclose dans la cervelle d'un bel esprit. Elle fut l'expression de réalités historiques, ethniques, physiolo- giques. Une nation, une race, des tempéraments et des individus ont été né- cessaires pour qu'elle put produire des œuvres viables.

This classical discipline is not a fantasy born of the brain of some bright intellect. It expresses historical, ethnic, and physiological re- alities. A nation, a race, temperaments and individuals have been necessary so that it [i.e., classical discipline] could produce viable works.85

As Paul Smith has discovered, in a letter to Gasquet of 25 June 1903 Cézanne admitted his sympathy for what Smith calls, Bertrand's "racist preface."86 Bertrand's emphasis on race is absolutely clear. Indeed, his preface continues in the same vein, stressing the fixity and continuity of biologically inherited physical and intellectual characteristics. He urges the French to rise against barbarity, meaning Germany, and to be proud of themselves because, as direct heirs of Rome and Athens, they are carriers of civilisation. He finally points to the importance of healthy Provence for the recovery of ailing France. Thus:

les dispositions innées et héréditaires ... ne sont pas seulement physiques, elles sont encore intellectuelles .... Affirmons-nous encore une fois en face de l'univers, car il est trop sûr que nous Latins, héritiers directs de Rome et Athènes, nous sommes la civilisation! En ce moment, le Barbare, qui en est le pire ennemi, est dressé contre elle .... Si le corps de la patrie est gangrené, quelques membres sont restés sains ... en terre provençale, -je le sais ! - il est encore de beaux fils de France ... qui sont avides de continuer la vie des ancêtres selon son idéal de gloire, justice et raison.87

innate and hereditary inclinations ... are not only physical, but also intellectual .... Let us assert ourselves, one more time before the world, for it is absolutely certain that we, Latins, direct inheritors of Rome and Athens, represent civilisation! At this moment, the Bar- barian, who is the worst enemy of civilisation, has risen against it .... If the body of (our) homeland is gangrenous, some parts of it have remained healthy ... in the land of Provence, - 1 know it! - there are still some beautiful sons of France ... who are eager to continue the life of their ancestors according to its ideal of glory, justice and reason.

84. Bouhélier, quoted in Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence (as in n. 72), from the same source, La Revue Naturiste, in n. 120, p. 294, in French, and p. 219 in transi.

85. Bertrand, quoted in Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence (as in n. 72), 218.

86. Smith, "Joachim Gasquet" (as in n. 68), 19. 87. Ibid., 23 n. 69.



414 International Journal of the Classical Tradition I September/December 2009

The classicism which the Naturists advocated was not the cold, stereotyped and conventional classicism of the academic art schools, but rather a naturalist classicism. This fusion of naturalism and classicism was promoted by the Naturists as modern. It took a number of forms. For example,

désormais un moderne pourra peindre un site entier de rocs, de bois, de près et de fleurs, et y parsemer des théories d'éphèbes ou de canéphores. from now on a modem (painter) will be able to paint a whole landscape of rocks, of meadows and of flowers, and spread in them pro- cessions of ephebes or canephores (classical maidens bearing baskets of fruit and flowers).88

I shall show below how Cézanne interpreted Naturismi how he combined classical principles and motifs with the direct, outdoor experience of nature, his "sensations".89

Gasquet's support of the Naturists led them to invite him, in 1898, to become the leader of the Provençal branch of the movement. According to Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, it was through Gasquet that Cezanne's regional loy- alties were strengthened. The two men's enthusiasm for Provence and their mutual admiration in this enthusiasm are evident in their correspondence. For example, in a letter to Gasquet and his wife of January 1897 Cézanne praised the couple for their own loyalty to Provence, ending the letter with a triumphant "Long live Provence!" In another letter of 22 June 1898, in response to Gasquet's praise of his paintings of Provençal peasants in the journal Pays de France, Cézanne wrote back "having read your superb lines exalting the race of Provence ...."90 And it was through Gasquet that Cézanne embraced Naturism. In turn, Naturism saw in Cezanne's art, in his peasants, his landscapes and his bathers, its visual, artistic expression. Athanassoglou- Kallmyer makes a telling comparison between Gasquet's writings and Cezanne's scenes of bathers. She quotes the following passage by Gasquet which alludes to Naturism's yearning for man's physical fusion with his native natural environment, in which he is organically rooted and which has shaped him as a racial and historical being:

Vivre harmonieusement à la façon des arbres et des fleuves, favoriser le libre épanouissement de tous les instincts qui vagissent obscurément en toi, être un bel animal aux yeux irradiés de soleil, au front baigné d'azur ... To live harmoniously in the manner of the trees and the rivers, to favor the free efflorescence of all the instincts which mutter confus-

88. Edgar Baes, quoted in English translation on p. 220 of Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence (as in n. 72), from Baes' article "Le Paysage du Naturisme" in la Plume, no. 205 (1 November 1897), p. 677.

89. On Cezanne's practice of outdoor painting, see, for example, the essays by Philip Conisbee, "Cezanne's Provence" (esp. p. 12) and "The Atelier des Lauves" (pp. 230-42), in Conisbee and Coutagne (eds.), Cézanne in Provence (as in n. 39).

90. Quotations from Cezanne's letters cited in Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence (as in n. 72), 220, 221and taken from John Rewald, Paul Cézanne: letters (New, NY: Hacker Art Books, 1984).



Leoussi 415

edly within you, to be a beautiful animal with eyes radiating with sun, with a forehead bathed in the blue of the sky ....91

Such passages match Cezanne's later scenes of bathers, such as his Hermitage Baigneurs (c.1890-91) and the London Grandes Baigneuses (1894-05). As in Gas- quet's passage, through a uniform treatment of figures and landscape, whose shapes echo and parallel one another and are built up with short blocks of colour, Cézanne immerses the figures in the surrounding landscape and makes the landscape subsume the figures whose foreheads are bathed in the blue of the sky.92 The recognition of Cézanne as a Naturist is also evident in the fact that in 1900 his name featured among those of the honorary members of the Collège d'esthétique moderne, the art school of the Naturists.93

b.) Naturalist classicism and Poussin Cezanne's desire to revive the classical world in Provence as well as to express the classical qualities of the region, order and reason, led him to Poussin, the founder of French classicism, as is well known. Richard Verdi has described Cezanne's relationship to Poussin not as one of mentor and pupil, but as one of kinship: the two masters shared the same artistic sensibility.94 There was no creative dependence of Cézanne on Poussin. It was rather their common orientation towards order and reason that made Cézanne regard Poussin as "an important precursor of his own approach to landscape painting" and led him to revive Poussin.95 But if Poussin found order and reason in nature as a whole, Cézanne found them in Provence. To these he added the colour- fulness that was his own and Impressionism's response to the observation of natural light out of doors.

According to Emile Bernard, Cezanne's intention in the bather series was to re-do Poussin entirely after nature: "Imaginez Poussin refait entièrement sur nature".96 Cézanne saw in the work of this artist who had been one of the archi- tects of the French classical tradition, a way of rendering the Provençal landscape in all its orderliness, and of combining this with his own direct ob- servations without losing his Impressionist attachment to light and colour, his

91. Gasquet quoted in Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence (as in n. 72), in n. 167, p. 296 in French and p. 227 in translation.

92. See also ibid., 225. 93. Ibid., 221. 94. Richard Verdi, Cézanne and Poussin: The Classical Vision of Landscape (Edinburgh:

National Galleries of Scotland in association with Lund Humphries, London, 1990), 58.

95. Ibid., 44, 58. On the most recent scholarship examining Poussin's landscapes, including some reflections on the links with Cézanne, see Pierre Rosenberg and Keith Christiansen (eds.), Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, Catalogue of the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 12-May 11, 2008 and at the Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao, October 8, 2007-January 12, 2008 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

96. Kendall (ed.), Cézanne by himself (as in n. 70), 225. And P. M. Doran (ed.), Conver- sations avec Cézanne (Paris: Collection Macula, 1978), 80.




"sensation". By re-doing Poussin "sur nature", Cézanne produced his own form of naturalist classicism.

According to Richard Shiff, this famous statement to Bernard, which "ex- ists in many variations, has never been definitively attributed to Cézanne himself'.97 Nevertheless, there is no doubt, first, as Shiff remarks, that Cézanne was viewed by many of his contemporaries, including his critics, such as Camille Mauclair,98 as "a new Poussin, even a new Greek, and certainly classical";99 and second, as Theodore Reff finally admitted in that early and fiercely critical article on that statement, "Cézanne and Poussin", of 1960, that through a purely stylistic examination of Cezanne's art "Cezanne's stylistic affinities with Poussin can of course be observed".100 Furthermore, what emerges from Reffs article and is consistent with the concerns of the present study which are the identification and interpretation of the classical orientations in Cezanne's later work, is that Poussin becomes important in precisely that later phase of his work. As Reff put it, "Cézanne became interested in Poussin only rather late in his career".101 And Cezanne's Poussinisme constituted, at least partly, Cezanne's classicism.

According to Reff, Cezanne's interest in Poussin is evident, firstly, in his copies of figures from Poussin paintings, most notably, Et in Arcadia Ego and The Concert, both in the Louvre.102 On the basis of their style, Reff dated these copies to the years 1890-95. However, Cézanne is first recorded studying Poussin's art in the Louvre earlier, in 1864.103 Secondly, it is evident in the Philadelphia Baigneuses of c. 1906, which reproduce the symmetries and highly formalised groupings of Poussin. The crossed trees and the echoing of the shapes of figures in the shapes of trees or other elements of the landscape are compositional devices also derived from Poussin, for whom, as Pierre Rosenberg has observed, landscape was transformed, especially in his mature work, from mere background to figurai compositions, to "a direct and active participant in the painting".104 These devices serve to integrate figures and landscape into an orderly and harmonious whole. Cézanne explicitly stated his desire for a formal and thereby intellectual and emotional merging of man with nature in the manner of Poussin, as follows: "I would like, as in the Tri- umph of Flora, to join the curves of the women to the shoulders of the hills. ... Like Poussin, I would like to put reason in the grass and tears in the sky." 105

97. Shiff in his introduction to Pemberton (ed.), Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne (as in n. 74), 24n.22.

98. As Shiff notes, in 1919, Mauclair wrote that Cézanne had "aspired in his confusion to give impressionism a kind of classical stylization", but in the end he produced little more than paintings of "brutal, barbaric gaudiness". See ibid, 19.

99. Ibid., 20. 100. Reff , "Cézanne and Poussin"(as in n. 74). 173. 101. Ibid., 171. 102. Ibid. 103. Reff cited in Richard Verdi, Cézanne anà Poussin (as in n. 94), 44, from a later arti-

cle Reff published in 1964. 104. Reff, "Cézanne and Poussin" (as in n. 74),171-72, and Pierre Rosenberg, "Encoun-

tering Poussin", in Rosenberg and Christiansen (eds.), 2008 (as in n. 95), 5. 105. Cézanne quoted in Rosenberg and Christiansen (eds. j, Poussin and Nature (as in n.

95), 7.



Leoussi 417

According to Reff, the Philadelphia Baigneuses, this much-discussed painting, "is in fact almost unique in Cezanne's oeuvre". Nevertheless, it is a central work in this oeuvre. The centrality of the Philadelphia Baigneuses in Cezanne's oeuvre is due to the fact, explicitly admitted by Reff himself, that it was his "largest and most ambitious undertaking, on which he worked throughout the last decade of his life, attempting to achieve a monumental summation of his earlier bather pictures".106 We may thus conclude that if the phrase "Poussin refait entièrement sur nature", does not correspond to Cezanne's actual words, it does correspond to his actual practice. As an affirmation of his naturalist classicism, this statement is further corroborated by and consistent with that other and similarly famous passage quoted in Gasquet: "What I want is to be a true classic and rediscover a classic path by means of nature, by sensation".107 As Shiff has observed in relation to the latter statement, if "these are not Cezanne's actual words, he did, at least, express related thoughts in several of his letters (and so did his old mentor, Camille Pis- sarro)".108

For Cézanne, doing Poussin over again from nature meant combining his "sensation", or direct observation of nature, translated into bright, primary colours, which he learnt from Pissarro's Impressionism during the early 1870s, with Poussin's rational organisation of the sensory data. This approach, this "shift from the perceptual to the conceptual", as Rubin has described it, yielded an increasingly formal construction of the surface of the canvas, painted with small, separate and disciplined rhythmical brushstrokes and, eventually, an underlying geometrical rendering of nature that recalls the cubes and pyramids of Euclidean geometry.109 However, contrary to his practice, Cézanne, in his much-quoted letter to Emile Bernard of 15 April 1904, advocated the rendering of nature according to curved geometrical solids: "Traitez la nature par le cylindre, la sphère, le cône ...." [Treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone].110

Nevertheless, the geometrical understanding and rendering of nature was central to Cezanne's thinking in his later years, an understanding which, as Michael Doran has observed, he shared with the youthful circle that had formed around him and included Gasquet, Bernard and Maurice Denis.111

106. Reff, "Cézanne and Poussin" (as in n. 74), 171-73. 107. Translation by Shiff in his introduction to Pemberton (ed.), Joachim Gasquet's

Cézanne (as in n. 74), 21. According to Bernard, Cézanne used the term "classical" also to mean, more generally, belonging to tradition and being close to the old masters whose greatness derived from their knowledge of nature. See also, P. M. Doran (ed.), Conversations avec Cézanne (as in n. 96), 80.

108. Shiff (as inn. 74), 21. 109. William Rubin, "Cézannisme and the Beginnings of Cubism", in William Rubin

(ed.), Cézanne: The Late Work, exh. Cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: Museum of Modern Art; Boston: distributed by New York Graphic Society, 1977), 161. On the cerebral qualities of Poussin's landscapes, see also Rosenberg and Christiansen (eds.), Poussin and Nature (as in n. 95), especially Philippe de Montebello's and Javier Viar's "Directors' Foreword", pp.vii-x.

110. P. M. Doran (ed.), Conversations avec Cézanne (as in n. 96), 27. 111. Ibid., 208, n. 17.




Moreover, its connection with ancient Greek thought, "[L]es anciens", was made by members of this circle, and most notably by Emile Bernard.112

In the same letter to Emile Bernard of 15 April 1904, we find further evi- dence of Cezanne's conscious attachment to those principles which, since the Renaissance, were seen as characteristic of ancient Greek civilisation at its peak. These were the principles of reflection and calculation and orientation to a single centre. Cézanne advised Bernard to render the various objects observed in nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone, and to arrange them "in perspective so that each side of an object or of a plane is di- rected toward a central point". In the original French: "Traitez la nature par le cylindre, la sphère, le cône, le tout mis en perspective, soit que chaque côté d'un objet, d'un plan, se dirige vers un point central". m

This need for reflection, this use of logical procedure in art as opposed to the earlier Romantic and Impressionist expressiveness and spontaneity, is also specifically addressed by Cézanne in a later letter to Bernard, dated 21 Sep- tember 1906, just before his sudden death from a chill in October 1906:

je crois au développement logique de ce que nous voyons et ressentons par l'étude sur nature .... Les grands que nous admirons ne doivent avoir fait que ça. I believe in the logical development of what we see and feel when we study nature .... The great [artists] whom we admire cannot have done anything other than this. 114

As Jennifer Shaw has elucidated in her study of Puvis de Chavannes, the practice of logical elaboration, simplification and abstraction from the careful observation of nature in search of the underlying patterns, the laws of nature -

"je tâche de savoir LA LOI" [I try to discover THE LAW] - which Puvis also fol- lowed, was seen by nationalist circles, including Maurras, as a specifically classical, i.e., Greek, and thus French intellectual and artistic procedure.115 This procedure was diametrically opposed to that of Nordic nations, such as the English, whose art expressed a search for the particular in nature, as typified in the art of the Pre-Raphaelites.116

Cezanne's classical, i.e., logical and specifically geometrical approach to nature is most clearly evident in his landscapes of Mont Sainte- Victoire, culminating in or centred on the great pyramidal re-construction of the mountain, as in La Montagne Sainte-Victoire of c.1886-8 in the Courtauld Galleries, London (fig. 4). Indeed, according to Richard Verdi, Cezanne's magnificent views of the Gulf of Marseilles and of the Mont Sainte- Victoire completed between

112. See Bernard's conversation with Cézanne that was published in the Mercure de France of 1 June 1921, and reproduced in Doran (ed.), Conversations avec Cézanne (as in n. 96), esp. p. 163.

113. The English translation is from Michael Doran (ed.), Conversations with Cézanne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 29. The French version is from the French edition of Doran's, Conversations avec Cézanne (as in n. 96), p. 27. On basic concepts of the Renaissance see, for example, Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York: Penguin Classics, 1990).

114. Cézanne Quoted in Reff. "Cézanne and Poussin" ias in n. 74V 1.52 115. Shaw, "Frenchness, memory, and abstraction" (as in n. 6), 169, n. 21. 116. Ibid., 162.



Leoussi 419

Fig. 4. Paul Cézanne, Montagne Sainte-Victoire, c.1886-8

1885-90, constitute "by general agreement the most austere and classical phase of his art".117 This classicism, this attachment to geometry, is also evident in that great triangle, suggested by the soaring bare trunks of the arching trees and the ground, which measures and encompasses the Philadelphia baigneuses.118 This compositional device is also classical in its intended association with classical philosophy which connected man with nature and defined human perfection as a harmonisation wdth and integration in nature.119 This harmony between man and nature was most tellingly symbolised in Leonardo's Vitruvian man, similarly measured and encompassed by the natural and regular shapes of the circle, the square and the triangle. Finally, the crossed trees in the Philadelphia Baigneuses seem to form a classical and, as Paul Smith has observed more generally in relation to Cezanne's provençal landscapes, specifically Virgilian locus antoenus, an enclosed and pleasant place to be. Cezanne's Virgilian loci amoeni recall Poussin's mythical landscapes, such as Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice, of c.1650, in the Louvre, in which trees gather round the singing Orpheus to create such a pleasant place.120 In-

117. Richard Verdi, Cézanne and Poussin (as in n. 94). 118. John Rewald, The Paintings of Paul Cézanne: A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1 (London:

Thames and Hudson, 1996), 509-10. 119. For an analysis of nineteenth-century views of Greek philosophical ideas regard-

ing the harmony of man and nature, see Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism (as in n. 2), 35-55.

120. Smith and Athanassoglou-Kallmyer have shown the early personal identification of Cézanne and his friends, including Emile Zola, with characters taken from Vir-



420 International Journal of the Classical Tradition I September ¡December 2009

deed, Poussin himself had found his most important sources of inspiration (e.g., for The Arcadian Shepherds, also known as Et in Arcadia Ego, in the Lou- vre) in the poetry of Virgil, as well as Ovid.

Through their Poussinesque formal analogies between the figures and the trees whose shapes and lines parallel each other, the Philadelphia Baigneuses epitomise the national desire for order and regeneration through a return to nature and re-rooting in the soil of the native countryside, and especially Provence. In fact, all the evocations of Poussin in the Philadelphia Baigneuses and in the two other large compositions of female bathers, the one in the Na- tional Gallery in London, of 1894-1905, and the other in the Barnes Founda- tion, Merion, PA, of 1895-1906, on which Cézanne worked more or less simultaneously, would seem to reinforce the messages of fertility and retreat to the countryside so closely associated with Poussin's landscapes, and so urgent in France at that time. Indeed, we may recognise the idea of fertility in Cezanne's baigneuses, if we consider them as the real-life equivalents of Poussin's mythical nymphs, symbols of nature's fecundity.

Poussin's later landscapes, those produced after 1640, are idealisations of the Roman Campagna. In them, he emphasised the order and permanence of nature through, for example, the use of vertical and horizontal elements, like trees and a placid lake, the cubic forms of buildings, and by arranging the clouds in sequential planes. It is thus important to note that Poussin's classical landscapes are poetic: they are not topographical views, of which, in any case, he produced only a few. For Cézanne, however, the Provençal countryside was itself pre-eminently and naturally classical. Indeed, Cézanne recognised in the Provençal landscape a classical landscape, an orderly landscape of cubes and pyramids, and therefore a landscape which had to be understood and painted by working with both the mind and the eye. Thus:

The great classical landscapes, our Provence and Greece and Italy as I imagine them, are those where light is spiritualized, where a landscape is a smile flickering with keen intelligence.121

By reviving and modernising Poussin, Cézanne was attaching himself to the

long French and European classical tradition, that arcadian tradition of painting landscapes with figures. This time, however, both the landscapes and the figures were real, i.e., observed - not mythical, imaginary or historical.122 They were also national

gil whom they read as young men. See in particular Smith, "Joachim Gasquet, Vir-

gil and Cezanne's landscape 'My beloved Golden Age'" (as in n. 68), 17. On Poussin's own interest in classical literary sources, especially Virgil, see Claire Pace's essay, "'Peace and tranquillity of mind': The theme of retreat and Poussin's

landscapes", in Rosenberg and Christiansen (eds.), Poussin and Nature (as in n. 95), pp.73-89.

121. Quoted in English in Marcel Brion, Cézanne: The Great Impressionists (New Jersey: Chartwell Books, 1973), 23. On Poussin's construction of his "classical" landscapes, see Philippe de Montebello's and Javier Viar's "Directors' Foreword", in Rosen-

berg and Christiansen (eds.), Poussin and Nature (as in n. 95), p.viii. 122. House, "That Magical Light: Impressionists and Post-Impressionists on the Riv-

iera" (as in n. 55), 25. On the problem of interpreting Cezanne's statement about remaking Poussin, Reff, "Cézanne and Poussin" (as in n. 74), 156, notes that the



Leoussi 421

c.) Classicism and Catholicism It should be noted here that Cezanne's classical landscapes, with or without figures, were not pagan. Rather, they fused classical with Christian motifs and ideas. Cezanne's Catholicism was re-awakened in 1891. 123 In the same letter of 15 April 1904 mentioned above (pp. 417-18), he told Bernard, also a believer, of the divine origin of nature and how to suggest it in painting:

[L]ines parallel to the horizon give breadth, that expanse of nature - or if you prefer, of the landscape - that the Pater omnipotens, oeterne (sic) Deus, spreads out before our eyes.124

In the context of Cezanne's intensified Catholicism, the crossed trees in the Philadelphia Baigneuses may also be read as forming a Gothic arch, thereby creating a divine home for the figures, reminiscent of a church.125 According to Krumrine, in the Philadelphia Baigneuses Cézanne "seems to construct his church out of elements provided by nature".126 And she quotes from Zola's novel La Faute de l'abbé Mouret, of 1875, a passage which indicates the currency of the belief in the natural origins of Gothic architecture:

Ils entrèrent enfin sous les futaies, religieusement, avec une pointe de ter- reur sacrée, comme on entre sous la voûte d'une église. Les troncs, droits, blanchis de lichens, d'un gris blafard de vieille pierre, montaient démesuré- ment, alignaient à l'infini des enfoncements de colonnes. Au loin des nefs se creusaient avec leurs bas-côtés, plus étouffés ; des nefs étrangement har- dies, portées pas des piliers très minces, dentelées, ouvragées, si finement fouillées, qu'elles laissaient passer de toutes parts le bleu du ciel

They finally entered the forest, religiously, with a twinge of sacred fear, as one enters under the vault of a church. The straight trunks, whitened by lichen, the pale grey of old stone, rose immeasurably, deeply rooted columns aligned infinitely. Far away, naves were dug

term "vivifier" appears in one of the versions of this statement: "Vivifier Poussin

d'après nature". This term has seemed to later commentators to be more authentic than "refaire". This term also seems to me clearer and more revealing, for, as ap- plied to the painting of the landscape of Provence, it suggests that doing so was like painting Poussin's visions of the classical world from direct observation, instead of from imagination; and, by implication, that modern Provence, with its classical features, was a tableau vivant of Poussin's paintings. See also Conisbee's

essay, "The Atelier des Lauves", in Conisbee and Coutagne (eds.), Cézanne in Provence (as in n. 39), 233, on the European tradition of depicting landscapes with

figures. 123. See Gowing, "The Easrly Work of Paul Cézanne" (as in n. 63), 1988, 217. 124. See Doran, Conversations with Cézanne (as in n. 113), 29. 125. The Christian meaning of the arching trees can also be found in English Roman-

tic and mediaevalist art, and particularly in Constable's Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds (exhibited at the Royal Academy 1823). In this painting. Con- stable suggests the natural origins of Gothic architecture, as well as the unity between God and nature, by creating a rhythm of pointed arches made up of the Cathedral's rising pointed spire in the background and the pointed arch of the trees in the foreground.

126. Krumrine, Paul Cézanne: The Bathers (as in n. 65), 241.




out, as were their more stifling side aisles; strangely audacious naves supported by the slenderest pillars, as delicately ornamented as lace that they everywhere let in the blue of the sky.127

Furthermore, the steeple of an actual church, which we find in the centre of the painting's background, eliminates any remaining doubt about the Christian significance of the painting. The Gothic vaulting of the Philadelphia Baigneuses may also be associated with Frenchness in two ways: firstly, through the French claim, strongly held at the time, as Paul Hayes Tucker and Laura Mo- rowitz have shown, that the Gothic style was a specifically French architectural achievement, not a German one;128 and secondly, through the identification of the Gothic style with French Catholicism. Catholicism was thrust into high relief at that time as an attribute of France - traditionally considered la fille aînée de l'Église - not only because of the military confrontation with, and French defeat by, the Protestant Prussians, but also because of the anti-Catholicism of the Prussian-led Kulturkampf.

Krumrine has recognised the combination of pagan with Christian ritu- als in Cezanne's monumental paintings of male and female bathers from his late years. She has pointed to Cezanne's tendency, from 1880 onwards, "to paint pictures in which male and female nudes take part in what appears to be the pagan ritual of bathing ... often with suggestions of the Christian ritual of baptism".129 A good example of the baptismal gesture can be found in the Saint Louis Baigneurs of 1892-94. Krumrine goes on to recall the meaning of water in the two traditions and the significance of both for Cézanne: "in the Christian tradition it [water] represents the spiritual cleansing through Bap- tism; in the pagan tradition it is associated with the Fountain of Youth and physical rejuvenation. Cézanne makes use of both traditions".130 And she con- cludes that the underlying theme of the bather compositions is "the washing away of guilt and the renewal of life", concerns which had a wider cultural resonance.131

Finally, Cézanne can be associated with the desire for a synthesis of classicism with Christianity through Gasquet. Such a cultural synthesis is suggested in Gasquef s book of verse, UEnfant, of 1900. This book, which Gasquet dedicated to Cézanne, was the product of the summer of 1897 part of which the two men spent together in a farmhouse near the village of Le Tholonet.132 In UEnfant, as Paul Smith has shown, the Child is associated with both the Christ-Child and the divine child in Virgil's famous story of the "golden age"

127. Quotation from Zola's novel in Krumrine, Paul Cézanne: The Bathers (as in n. 65), p. 267, n. 36 in French and p. 241, in transi.

128. Paul Hayes Tucker, Monet in the "90s: The Series Paintings, exh. cat. Boston: Mu- seum of Fine Arts (Boston: Museum of Fines Arts; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 192-99. Laura Morowitz, "Medievalism, Classicism, and National- ism: The Appropriation of the French Primitifs in Turn-of-the-Century France", in Hargrove and McWilliam (eds.), Nationalism and French Visual Culture (as in n. 5), 225.

129. Krumrine, Paul Cézanne: The Bathers (as in n. 65), 33. 130. Ibid., 241. 131. Ibid., 240. 132. Smith, "Joachim Gasquet, Virgil and Cezanne's landscape 'My beloved Golden

Age'" (as in n. 68), 11-12.



Leoussi 423

in his Fourth Eclogue. In Virgil's story, which the Christian fathers and the mediaeval Church interpreted as prefiguring the birth of Christ, the "golden age", an age of plenty without labour or wickedness, returns, with the birth of a child through which a new and better, "golden" (aurea) race of men is born to replace the iron race.133 The same synthesis of pagan with Christian sentiment and expectation can be found again in Gasquet's other book of verse, L'Arbre et les vents, of 1901. It describes how St Peter, while on his way to Rome, sits under a tree where Virgil sat, thereby affirming the spiritual affinities of Christianity with the Latin race. 134

At a time of great national trauma and upheaval, Cezanne's later sunny Provençal landscapes and sous-bois, from the 1880s onwards, are animated in messianic expectation of a dual revival: classical and Christian. They herald and bear witness to the birth on their soil of a new France, a France re-born, which is both vigorous and pious. It is this new breed of French men and women that they harbour and nurture.

d.) Baigneurs and the Greek ideal In his book on Cézanne, Gasquet also associated the artist with Hippolyte Taine, quoting him as saying: "I like muscle, beautiful tones, blood. I'm like Taine ...."135 The link between Cézanne and Taine may help us to understand another aspect of Cezanne's bathers, especially his series of male bathers which includes, Les Baigneurs au repos of 1875-76, in The Barnes Foundation, Le Grand Baigneur of 1885 in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Baigneurs of cl890-91 in the Hermitage, and those of 1895-1900 in Baltimore (fig. 5). Gasquet's Cézanne makes frequent and positive references to Taine as an authority and a guide in both social and artistic matters.136

Hippolyte Taine, appointed Professor of the History of Art and Aesthet- ics at the École des Beaux- Arts in 1864, was widely and enormously influential during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As noted above (p. 401), Taine accepted racial theory and advocated "la culture musculaire" in imitation

133. Ibid.,18. For Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, see Virgil, The eclogues, trans, by Guy Lee (Har- mondsworth: Penguin, 1984), and The Works of Virgil, with a commentary by John Conington and Henry Nettleship, vol. 1: Eclogues and Georgics, rev. by F. Haverfield (London: G. Bell, 1898; repr. Hildesheim & New York: Georg Olms, 1979), 55-63, repr. of Eclogues with a new general introduction by Philip Hardie and an introduction to the Eclogues by Brian W. Breed (Exeter, Devon: Bristol Phoenix Press, 2007), XXXIV-XXXIX ("Bibliography"). For the Early history of its Christian re-

ception see (missed by Breed) Stephen Benko, "Virgil's Fourth Eclogue in Chris- tian Interpretation", in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung, vol. II 31. 1, ed. Wolf gang Haase (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), 646-705.

134. Smith, "Joachim Gasquet, Virgil and Cézanne s landscape 'My beloved Golden Age'"(asinn.68),18.

135. Kendall (ed.), Cézanne by Himself (as in n. 70), 306. On the classical interpretation of Cezanne's art see also Emile Bernard's "Opinions" in L'Occident of July 1904 and also, Cowling and Mundy (eds.), On Classic Ground (as in n. 61), 68-69.

136. Christopher Pemberton (ed.), Joachim Gasquet s Cezanne: A Memoir with Conversa- tions (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991). See for example, pages 62, 86, 95, 124, 176, 183.




Fig. 5. Paul Cézanne, Le Grand Baigneur, 1885

of the ancient Greeks for French national regeneration.137 In his Notes sur V An- gleterre of 1872, he also praised modern English public school and University education for turning young English men (but not yet women) into young Greek athletes.138 For Taine, as indeed for most of his contemporaries, French physical regeneration had become vitally urgent after the Franco-Prussian War.139 And it was seen as possible because the French belonged to the same Indo-European or Aryan race as the Greeks, an identification which Taine ar- dently advocated.140 Taine explained the beauty of Greek naturalist art by the beauty of Greek youth. Greek physical education - "la culture musculaire" - further developed and perfected the innate, inherited characteristics of the race. Thus, Greek teachers,

137. Hippolyte Taine, Notes sur l'Angleterre (Paris: Hachette, 1872), 163. 138. Ibid., 148. 139. For a further analysis of this, see Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism (as in. n. 2),

119. 140. Hippolyte Taine, Sa Vie et sa Correspondance (Paris: Hachette, 1905), 385.



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en véritables artistes, exerçaient le corps pour lui donner non seulement la vigueur, la résistance et la vitesse, mais aussi la symétrie et Vélégance. like real artists, exerdsed the body in order to give it not only vigour, resistance and speed, but also symmetry and elegance. 141

Cezanne's modern Provençal young male bathers, with their broken contours, lack of naturalist beauty and, increasingly, their tension between realism and abstraction, do not exactly achieve the classical physical ideals of wholeness, symmetry and elegance. Nevertheless, in their statuesque grandeur and simplicity, their healthy nudity, swelling with muscle, and their warm Mediter- ranean flesh-tones, these bathers are the modern descendants of the Greek ancestors of the region. Furthermore, the massive square chest of the male bather facing the spectator in Les Baigneurs au repos of 1875-76, in The Barnes Foundation, repeated in Le Grand Baigneur of 1885 in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, also conforms with Taine's campaign for strong, square chests for French men, and reproduces the "grand and square" style of 5thc BC Greek art. In fact, we find a variety of physical types among Cezanne's baigneurs: not only the "grand and square", but also the still muscular and naturalist but more elongated and slender type of Lysippus' athletes, as in the three bathers on this side of the river in the Hermitage Baigneurs (c.1890-91). The standing figure on the right also seems to replicate the attitude of Michelangelo's Dying Slave.142 In contrast, the deeply-tanned figure seated facing us on the opposite bank of the river has a more compact body with a massive square chest. Ac- cording to Conisbee, Cezanne's reliance on second-hand images for his bathers instead of models increased towards the last years of his life. These included "his drawings after old master paintings and especially sculptures in the Louvre, from antiquity through Michelangelo to the Provençal Pierre Puget".143 Conisbee further emphasises the personal significance of the bathing theme for Cézanne as a nostalgic recollection of the artisf s youth as well as "a key expression of his own experience of, attachment to, and vision of, Provence".144 The Greek associations of Cezanne's bathers, and especially their links with Greece's golden, "classical" age of the grand and calm images of gods, heroes and athletes were recognised early on by the critic Georges Rivière. Rivière commented on Les Baigneurs au repos of 1875-76, shown at the second impressionist exhibition of 1877, as follows:

M. Cézanne est, dans ses œuvres, un grec de la belle époque; ses toiles ont le calme, la sérénité héroïque des peintures et des terres cuites antiques, et les ignorants qui rient devant les Baigneurs, par exemple, me font l'effet de barbares critiquant le Parthenon ....

M. Cézanne is, in his works, a Greek of the great period; his canvases have the calm and heroic serenity of the paintings and terra-cottas of

Hl.Taine quoted in Duval and Cuyer (eds.) , Histoire de l'Anatomie Plastique (as in n. 33),15.

142. Krumrine, Paul Cézanne: The Bathers (as in n. 65), 168. 143. See Conisbee's essay, "The Atelier des Lauves" in Conisbee and Coutagne (eds.),

Cézanne in Provence (as in n. 39), 238. 144. Ibid., 233.




antiquity, and the ignorant who laugh at the Bathers, for example, impress me like barbarians criticizing the Parthenon ...,145

In addition to the bathing motif, it is important to note in the case of the Bal- timore Baigneurs another Greek athletic motif, that of wrestling, in the two crossing figures on the right. Sometimes, Cézanne emphasises the contemporaneity of his baigneurs by showing this or that male bather wearing trunks, as in Le Grand Baigneur of 1885 or the Baigneurs of 1890-94. These young men of Provence who had preserved their Greek ethnic and cultural inheritance are the few remaining healthy men of France, whom the Naturists praised and expected to lead the regeneration of the body of France, temporarily "gan- grené". Cezanne's baigneuses also present the solid and muscular bodies of the images of their Greek ancestors. However, as Garb has observed, they tend to be presented in more static attitudes, while the baigneurs "seem poised in frozen movement".146

Naturalist classicism and the revival of the body in Renoir's Bathers

This section examines the re-moulding of Renoir's Impressionism into a distinctly Southern classicism of strong and sun-tanned young female nudes im- mersed in Mediterranean landscapes; his synthesis of classicism with Catholicism; and his association with the Naturists and with Provençal regionalist circles, including Cézanne.

a) The Chaste Bather As mentioned above, after the Franco-Prussian war the idea that French physical regeneration could not be achieved without moral regeneration became widely accepted. Thus, the war caused a cultural transformation in French mores from the sensualism of the Second Empire to the neo-Catholicism of the Third Republic. Religious commentators called upon women to return to the moral teachings of Catholicism which would also increase the French population: the virtues of the Virgin Mary, "la Vierge et la Mère" - chastity and motherhood.147

Renoir's art changed along with the wider cultural change, in content, figurai ideals, and style. It became a personal synthesis of Impressionism, classicism and Catholicism.148 It must be emphasised here that, in changing thus,

145. Rivière quoted in Conisbee, "The Atelier des Lauves" in Conisbee and Coutagne (eds.), Cézanne in Provence (as in n. 39), p. 233, and taken from Ruth Berson The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874-1886. 2 vols. (San Francisco, CA: Fine Arts Mu- seum of San Francisco; Seattle: Distributed by the University of Washington Press, 1996), 1:182.

146. Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity (as in n. 21), 211. 147. Pingeot (ed.), La Sculpture Française au XIXe siècle (as in n. 34), 213. 148. It is worth noting that during the 1860s, Catholic opinion had rejected the female

type of 5th c. BC classical sculpture from the Parthenon as figurai models for Chris- tian subjects because of their "formes grossièrement matérielles" and their "volupté charnelle", accentuated by their draperies mouillées, favouring leaner, more ethe- real figurai types whose bodies would disappear under draperies. See Pingeot (ed.), La Sculpture Française au XIXe siècle (as in n. 34), 205-6. This changed after



Leoussi 427

his art did not escape, as Tamar Garb has claimed, but rather came to embrace the new, contemporary, cultural concerns.149 Renoir's classicism manifested itself most unequivocally in his subject-matter. For Renoir classical subject- matter involved the representation of the female nude set in nature. Renoir's female nudes are either genetically classical, as bathers, a typical motif in the classical artistic tradition, which begins to appear in his art in 1881, or specifically classical, as images of mythological personages, and especially the Venus, which emerge at the end of his life, after 1900.150 Renoir's classicism also manifested itself in some of his later, Southern landscapes, such as Vines at Cagues, of c.1908, which he painted after his move to Cagnes, on the Mediterranean coast, in 1908. Although Impressionist in their vibrant colour and sketchy brushwork, these landscapes are classical, first, in their representation of Mediterranean, and in this sense "classical" natural sites, and second, in their compositional structure reminiscent of Claude Lorrain.151 I consider below in some detail what John House has described as Renoir's "move towards a more classical conception of art, based on the primacy of the human form", in the context of French post-war ethno-classicism.152

As in Cezanne's work, the theme of the outdoor bather became a central preoccupation in Renoir's later work, from the 1880s until the end of his life. However, Renoir concentrated exclusively on the female nude. According to Herbert, "[O]ne of the notable changes in his [sc. Renoir's] work after about 1883 was the virtual disappearance of adult men except in a few portraits".153 Renoir's series of female bathers culminated in Les Baigneuses of c.1918-19,

the Franco-Prussian War, as noted above (pp. 404-05), and exemplified in the ideas of Rochet.

149. Garb, Bodies of Modernity (as in n. 21), 170. 150. See John House, Renoir, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 30 January-21 April

1985; Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 14 May-2 September 1985; Mu- seum of Fine Arts, Boston, 9 October-5 January 1986 (New York: Abrams; London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985), 278-9 and entry for cat. no. 63, 232.

151. Ibid., entry for cat. no. 123, 288. Renoir comes closer to Claude than to Poussin. Unlike Cézanne, who shared with Poussin a concern for the order, solidity and permanence of nature, Renoir, who was more drawn to the irregularities than the regularities of nature, has more affinities with Poussin's friend and fellow artist, Claude. Claude's leitmotif was light, and he rendered the movement and fluidity of nature in which he set the noble forms of a classical temple or Roman villa, Ás Philippe de Montebeüo and Javier Viar have observed in comparing Poussin with Claude, "Although the two artists [Poussin and Claude] were friends and made excursions together into the Roman Campagna to draw from nature, the spirit of their drawings and paintings could not be more different. ... Light ... is the leitmotif of Claude's art. His clouds hang in the sky like airy puffs; his trees are feath- ery, their leaves gently moving in the breeze." See de Montebello's and Viar's "Directors' Foreword", in Rosenberg and Christiansen (eds.), Poussin and Nature (as in n. 95), p.vii.

152. Ibid., 232. 153. Herbert, Nature's Worskshop (as in n. 57), 78. If male figures appear, nude or clothed,

in his subject pictures, they do so as spectators. Even Paris in both versions of The Judgment of Paris, appears as a rather secondary figure, with his back turned to the viewer.




which House has described as "a résumé of the most important theme of his career, the female nude in landscape/'154

The classical turn in Renoir's art can be clearly dated to 1881, the year of his trip to Italy and his exposure to the art of the Italian Renaissance, especially Raphael's decorations in the Villa Farnesina, and to the antique mural paintings from Pompeii which he saw in Naples.155 During this trip Renoir's new female ideal emerges which came to bear all the features of what was, in effect, a new national female ideal. He starts producing a long series of naked young girls who are innocent, healthy, strong, and, in the amplitude of their forms, especially their hips, fertile.156 These girls, shown alone or in the company of other girls, gradually become more and more distant from the pale co- quette girls of Paris flirting with young men, and more and more monumental and Southern as all references to modernity are eliminated and their bodies become increasingly pink, red or copper-red. These warm colours are sug- gestive of exposure to the Mediterranean sun, and they echo Rochet's description of the French as a Southern race, "rouge" or "cuivré" (see above, p. 404). Indeed, Renoir's girls live as he mistakenly thought the young girls of ancient Athens lived - bathing freely, naked, in the sea and rivers. In fact, it was the young girls of ancient Sparta who would appear naked out of doors, as they engaged in sports-like activity. Nevertheless, the Greek association of Renoir's women bathing out of doors is important for the purposes of this article. And it is evident in Renoir's remark, upon observing the crowds of men and women bathing among the rocks, during his trip to the island of Guernsey in autumn 1883, that it was

comme à Athènes les femmes ne craignent nullement le voisinage d'hommes sur les rochers voisins.

Just as in Athens, the women are not at all afraid of the proximity of men on the nearby rocks.157

But there are no men near Renoir's women. The Baigneuse blonde I of 1881 marks the beginning of Renoir's break with

the earlier work of the 1870s.158 The fashionably dressed, sterile and promiscuous young city girls of Montmartre with their pale bodies deformed and squeezed by their tight dresses which had attracted him from the 1870s to the mid-1880s in works like La Parisienne (1874), La Balançoire (1876) or Les Para- pluies (c.1881 and c.1885), have now been replaced by chaste, ample-shaped female nudes, set in nature, touched by the sun, and uncorrupted by modernity (fig. 6). Their sexual purity and restraint are often suggested by the presence of wedding rings, as in Baigneuse (known as Baigneuse blonde II) of c.1882 and

154. House, Renoir (as in n. 150), 288. 155. Ibid., 220. 156. Their "innocence" was recognised by critics like Geffroy. See House, Renoir (as in

n. 150), 252. 157. Letter from Renoir to Durand-Ruel from Guernsey, dated 27 September 1883 and

published in Lionello Venturi, Les Archives de l'Impressionnisme, vol. 1 (Paris: Du- rand-Ruel, 1939), 126.

158. House, Renoir (as in n. 150), entry for cat. no. 63, 232.



Leoussi 429

Fig. 6. Pierre- Auguste Renoir, La Parisienne, 1874

Baigneuse (known as La Coiffure), of 1885.159 Renoir's new classical and emphatically athletic female type is clearly evident in that striking Baigneuse in the Musée Marmottan in Paris, who, seated in contrapposto and cross-legged on a rock, supporting her chin with one hand, fuses Michelangelo's seated male athletes and muscular ignudi in the Sistine Chapel with Raphael's

159. John House, "Renoir's 'Baigneuses' of 1887 and the politics of escapism", Burling- ton Magazine 134 (September 1992): 584-5. See also Herbert, Nature's Workshop (as in n. 57), 79, quoting Garb's view that for Renoir "Woman, a creature corrupted by modernity" should return to her perfect prototype of "fecund, free femininity". However, I differ from House as well as Garb: Renoir's bathers are not personal escapist fantasies, but projections of a new female cultural ideal. I also argue, contrary to Garb, that the wedding rings, far from making Renoir's bathers tantaliz- ingly real and accessible, make them inaccessible. Garb, Bodies of Modernity (as in n. 21),170.




nereids. As Garb has pointed out, Renoir "placed a high premium on exercise". And she quotes Renoir: "the best exercise for a woman is to kneel down and scrub floors, light fires or do the washing, their bellies need movement of that sort".160 Hence, his series of women washing by rivers. Inevitably, these paintings also recall woman's intimate association with the sea, as her symbolic essence. As Jennifer Shaw has shown, in the nineteenth century the classical myth of Venus, "born from the sea", was thought to embody the essence of womanhood: women's emotional instability and the female fluids, especially menstruation, associated with it.161

Renoir's new female ideal, healthy and muscular, was recognised by his contemporaries. For example, in 1903, the Naturist writer Camille Mauclair described Renoir's later type of female nude as "a luxuriant, firm, healthy ... woman with a powerful body, a small head, her eyes wide open, thoughtless, brilliant and ignorant". Mauclair even went as far as describing Renoir's unintellectual female nude, "Son type de femme, sans aucune cérëbralité", as an animal - "C'est un animal buvant le soleil ..."162 It is worth noting that the description of the heads of Renoir's girls as "small" - "petites têtes" - matches contemporary anthropological analyses of the head of the Venus de Medici as small. This makes Renoir's girls even more "classical", a quality, however, that Mauclair did not observe in them. Nevertheless, the small heads of Renoir's women as signs of ignorance as well as innocence, reinforce what Garb has noted as the artist's preference for unintellectual women.163

According to House, the change in Renoir's art corresponds to Parisian debates about north and south and a "widely shared disenchantment with urban modernism", centred in the north.164 Renoir's rejection of the Parisian

young woman in favour of her southern, Mediterranean counterpart, can further be understood by reference to the writings of Renoir's friend, Teodor de

Wyzewa. Writing in 1895, when he was closely associated with the Provençal cultural revival, de Wyzewa referred to the South as the repository of eternal values.165 The South was the proper home of young men, who, sooner or later, with nerves exhausted by the city, lose their taste for the "fairies of the north, [who] have such charming voices but no body, no soul", and are "daughters of the night", and give themselves to the "daughters of the sun", who, al-

though they cannot sing like them, are "charitable and tender".166 Renoir him-

160. Garb, "Renoir and the Natural Woman" (as in n. 42), 7-8. 161. Shaw, "The Figure of Venus" (as in n. 60), 90-4. 162. House, Renoir (as in n. 150), 273; see also Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Lezanne ana

Provence (as in n. 72), 216, and C. Mauclair, L'Impressionnisme: son histoire, son es-

thétique, ses maîtres, 2nd ed. (Paris: Librairie de l'Art Ancien et Moderne, 1904), 124, 123.

163. Garb, "Renoir and the Natural Woman (as in n. 42), 3-15. 164. House, Renoir (as in n. 150), 17. 165. Ibid., 18 n. 76.

- . . ^_ _ « * -•« « • mm poti •^ é* 1

166. De Wyzewa quoted in John House, "Renoir and the earthly paradise", i ne uxjora Art Journal 8, no. 2 (1985): 23. Here, again, we find the fusion of classical with Chris- tian themes, in this combination of the classical body with a Christian inner life, and especially charity, one of the cardinal Christian virtues.



Leoussi 431

self would sometimes call his later nudes "nymphs", which further indicates their Southern, classical status.167

The change in Renoir's art from the 1880s onwards was not only thematic, a turn away from images of modern urban life towards more classical themes, but also stylistic. The stylistic change was itself classical, in both its artistic prototypes (the art of Renaissance Italy and antique sculpture) and in its search for what Renoir described as the "grandeur and simplicity of the an- cients", that "noble simplicity and calm grandeur" of which Winckelmann had also written.168 The difference from Winckelmann's ideal was that Renoir's grandeur was massive. Renoir's search for clarity and solidity in structure and form was a reaction against Impressionist technique. As he famously wrote to Vollard, in relation to this artistic "crisis", "J'étais allé jusqu'au bout de V 'impressionnisme' et j'arrivais à cette constatation queje ne savais ni peindre, ni dessiner" ["I had reached the end of Impressionism and had reached the conclusion that I could neither paint nor draw"]. According to Vollard, this "crisis" took place around 1883. However, Vollard's dates are not always reliable.169 His Baigneuses of 1887 embody Renoir's most extreme and rigorous attempt to introduce into his art, instead of the qualities of the avant-garde, those of the art des musées. As House has remarked, with its sharp frontal light- ing, its matt, fresco-like colouring containing as little oil as possible, forms outlined clearly and meticulously, and modelled internally with nuances of colour (not chiaroscuro), numerous preparatory drawings and watercolour studies, and a careful arrangement of the elements of the scene, the Baigneuses combine the two great artistic traditions of representing form in paint: "by form and tone, and by colour".170 These attributes which epitomise Renoir's post-Impressionist, although never entirely anti-Impressionist orientations from the 1880s onwards, earned the Baigneuses and works similar to them the characterisation of "Ingresque" and "Raphaelesque". They linked him to the artists of the museums - to tradition.

Like Cézanne, Renoir maintained his Impressionist interest in light and colour. But, unlike Cézanne, and despite the influence of Cezanne's "constructive stroke" on his own brushwork, Renoir still retained much of the looser, sketchier, Impressionist touch in his landscapes and the landscape backgrounds of his figures.171 As House has observed, by combining work in the studio and in the open-air, Renoir re-created classical themes "from direct

experience".172 This naturalist classicism brought him close to the Naturists, discussed above (p. 412-15), who, as Athanassoglou-Kallmyer has discovered, made him in 1900, along with Cézanne and Monet, an honorary member of

167. House, Renoir (as in n. 150), 250. Renoir was not alone in "seeing" nymphs in the French South; many other French artists of his time had the same visions and ex-

pectations. On this, see House, "The Magical Light" (as in n. 55), 25. 168. House, Renoir (as in n. 150), 232, quoting Kenoir. 169. For Renoir's account of his "crisis ' to Vollard, see A. Vollard, tn écoutant Cézanne,

Degas et Renoir (Paris: B. Grasset, 1938), 213-8. See also House, Renoir (as in n. 150), 241.

170. House, Renoir (as in n. 150), 242. 171. See for example, ibid., entries for cat. nos. 75, 246 and 77, 247. 172. Ibid., 240.




the board of their Collège d'esthétique moderne.173 The innovative way in which Renoir returned to the classical tradition, adapting Impressionism to his classical yearnings, was also recognised by Julius Meier-Graefe who wrote the first monograph that was published on the artist. Analysing in 1912 the Baigneuse (or La Coiffure) of 1885, Meier-Graefe praised Renoir for representing the primordial and natural link between woman and water (fluids), not in the traditional manner of imitating classical formal prototypes of a symbolic Venus, modelled in the studio, artificial, and detached from her natural place of birth, but, more credibly to modern ideas, by painting a real woman born from the waves:

Cette Vénus Anadyomène n'emprunte ses charmes à aucune sculpture antique. Elle prouve son origine d'une manière plus croyable à nos idées mo- dernes. Elle est vraiment la femme née de V écume.

And she is brilliantly coloured not by studio light, but by the atmosphere which surrounds her - "Renoir fait sortir son émail brillant du charme coloré de l'atmosphère" }7A This integration through colour of figures into their natural surroundings, was for Renoir his specific contribution to the classical tradition: "I'm trying to fuse the landscape with my figures," he declared in 1918, "the old masters never attempted this".175

Renoir's combination of classicism with Impressionist naturalism is also observable in his later Provençal landscapes. In these landscapes, too, the sim- ilarity with and influence of Cézanne are clear. First, where Cézanne did Poussin over again from nature, Renoir came closer to Claude, both artists drawing on the rich and long tradition of French classicism. Second, the cru- cial period of the 1880s, when Impressionism was transformed, was for Renoir a period of personal exploration of the Mediterranean landscape and study of Italian Renaissance art, as well as of landscape painting with Cézanne.176 In- deed, during this period he spent time with Cézanne on a number of occa- sions: in 1882, when he stayed at L'Estaque, and in 1883 during a trip with Monet along the Mediterranean coast. In 1888 Renoir stayed with Cézanne at Aix-en-Provence. He is also likely to have spent time at Aix either in 1886 or 1889.177 During his visits to Aix he painted subjects which Cézanne also painted, most notably the mountain of Sainte- Victoire, and used Cezanne's parallel strokes (fig. 7).178 However, Renoir never fully adopted Cezanne's brushwork. Sensitive to both the regularities and irregularities of nature, he combined in his art the contingent with the permanent and even contemplated founding, in 1884, a "société des irrégularistes" . This would be an association of "tous les artistes, peintres, décorateurs, architectes, orfèvres, brodeurs, etc, ayant l'ir- régularité pour esthétique". But this project never materialised.179

173. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence (as in n. 72), 221. 174. Julius Meier-Graefe, Auguste Renoir: Version française de A. S. Maillet (Paris: H.

Floury, 1912), 114 = Auguste Renoir (München: R. Piper & Co., 1911), 118. 175. House, Renoir (as in n. 150), 278, quoting Renoir. 176. Ibid., 233. 177. Ibid., 301-304. 178. Ibid., entry for cat. no. 82, 254. 179. See Venturi, Les Archives de l'impressionisme, vol. 1 (as in n. 157), 127-8.



Leoussi 433

Fig. 7. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Montagne Sainte-Victoire, c.1888-9

Renoir's connection with the Mediterranean South of France, his personal links with members of the Provençal cultural revival, both artists and writers, and his own ideas about the South deserve closer inspection. Unlike Cézanne, whose love of Provence and support of Provençal regionalism had deep family roots - the roots of the native - Renoir developed an attachment to the South that was associated with ideas of a much wider scope concern- ing French national identity. These ideas converged with Provençal regionalism reviving Provençal classical culture as a national culture. As House has observed, Renoir's travels to the Mediterranean South of France from 1882 onwards and his final re-location in Cagnes, in 1908, together with the changes in his art towards "the Classicism of the Mediterranean", were associated with mainstream French ideas about "the revival of Provençal culture".180 These ideas were part of the "collective cultural consciousness of late nineteenth- century France", which insisted "that France itself embodied a living part of classical antiquity".181 Robert Herbert, too, has seen in Renoir's move to Cagnes, where he bought an estate, Les Collettes, and had a house built, "no longer just the act of an aging artist" but his participation in "new attention

180. House, Renoir (as in n. 150), 268. 181. House, "That Magical Light: Impressionists and Post-Impressionists on the Riv-

iera" (as in n. 55), 25.



434 International Journal of the Classical Tradition I September ¡December 2009

to the Mediterranean as the resort of France's Greco-Roman origins".182 It was this "potent myth," as House has described it, which pulled to the South, along with masses of French men and women seeking regeneration, not only Renoir, but also Matisse, Signac, Seurat and many other non-native artists of the avant-garde who revived and renewed the image of the "golden age".183

Renoir himself recognised Greece and Italy in the South. In 1894, during his stay at Saint-Chamas "for health reasons", in a letter to Berthe Morisot, he described the region as "the most beautiful place in the world; a combination of Italy, Greece and Les Batignolles, with the sea too".184 Renoir saw the South as the earthly paradise, a place of happiness: "In this marvellous country, it seems as if misfortune cannot befall one; one is cosseted by the atmosphere".185 And, like Cézanne, he befriended the Provençal poet Joachim Gasquet who also saw Greece, as well as Rome, in Provence. It was to Gasquet that Renoir famously commented:

What admirable beings the Greeks were. Their existence was so happy that they imagined that the Gods came down to earth to find their paradise and to make love. Yes, the earth was the paradise of the Gods .... This is what I want to paint.

Consistently with his ideas, Renoir painted not only the Mediterranean paradise in his landscapes of the South, but also the gods descended on this earthly paradise, in the mythological subjects that he painted after his move to Cagnes. Believing, as he wrote in 1910, in his preface to the new French edition of Cennino Cennini's medieval treatise, Libro dell'arte, that France was the

daughter of Greece - "La France, fille de la Grèce" - and that the origins of French art were in Greece via Italy - "L'art français nous vient des Grecs en pas- sant par l'Italie" - he also came close to the Greek artists of antiquity whose

glorious works were inspired by what he called their "religion magique", by their superb gods. Renoir himself praised Greek artists' engagement with their

religion, for it was thanks to their works that Greece, despite its defeat and mutilation, remained "une belle étoile":

Leur religion pleine d'images merveilleuses a appelé à l'art. Ils ont créé

Jupiter cette figure majestueuse. Ils ont créé l'amour ....

Their religion full of marvellous images called upon art. They (the artists) created Jupiter, this majestic figure. They created love .... (meaning Venus)186

Renoir's mythological subjects, set in real and Southern natural surroundings, also echo the artistic ideas of the Naturists, discussed above. One last connection may be established between Renoir, his art, and the various cultural

182. Herbert, Nature's Workshop (as in n. 57), 81. 183. House, "That Magical Light: Impressionists and Post-Impressionists on the Riv-

iera" (as in n. 55), 25; Herbert, Nature's Workshop (as in n. 57), 81. 184. House, Renoir (as in n. 150), 306. 185. Ibid., 268. 186. House, "That Magical Light: Impressionists and Post-Impressionists on the Riv-

iera" (as in n. 55), 25, quoting Renoir. And Renoir in Herbert, Nature's Workshop (as in n. 57), 246, 245, 246.



Leoussi 435

Fig. 8. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Les Baigneuses, 1918-19

movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, centred on Provence, both regional and national: Apart from Cézanne and his friendships with de Wyzewa and Gasquet, Renoir may also be linked to these movements through the decorative cover that he made for Paul Gallimard for a copy of Frédéric Mistral's Mirrio.187

b) The Fertile Bather and the Motherhood of Venus In Renoir's art we also find the other post-Franco-Prussian-war principle of French female life - motherhood. Under the Third Republic there was an ex- plosion of images representing the joys of motherhood. According to Garb, the role of the mother "was increasingly idealised in visual representations" which claimed the religious relationship between mother and child, and the image of the breast-feeding mother becîame very popular.188 After the First World War, maternity was again to engage the artists of the new avant-garde in both France and Italy, those artists who created yet another classical revival, largely inspired by later classicising Impressionist art, and especially Cézanne.189 Renoir painted the subject of motherhood in Maternité of 1886:190 In real life too he contributed to the new national culture by fathering his own children. In Maternité he painted his mistress, Aline Charigot, whom he was to marry in 1890, nursing their first son, Pierre, in a rural, natural setting.

In fact, the female nudes of Renoir's classical period, with their firm and ample bodies, their full breasts and bellies, their round hips, affirm the conditions and principle of motherhood. They culminate in Les Baigneuses of c.1918-19, his final pictorial statement (fig. 8).191 These earthbound, hugely in-

187. House, Renoir (as in n. 150), 18 n. 76. 188. Garb, "Renoir and the Natural Woman" (as in n. 42), 11. 189. Cowling and Mundy (eds.), On Classic Ground (as in n. 61), 11-12. 190. House, Renoir (as in n. 150), entry for cat. no. 79, 248. 191. Garb, Bodies of Modernity (as in n. 21),177.




Fig. 9. Pierre- Auguste Renoir, Jugement de Paris, c.1908

flated and warmly-coloured figures epitomise Renoir's personal interpretation of the French cult of motherhood. Their contemporaneity is clearly suggested by the modern sun-hat in the foreground.

Renoir's late mythological subjects centred on the Venus may also be connected with motherhood, and with his view of women as embodiments of joy, beauty and love, a view for which he found confirmation in Greek culture which, like Neo-Catholicism, made woman a religion.192 But Greek religion had no Pietàs, no sorrow. As Herbert has observed, after 1900, "except for portraits of family and friends, Renoir's art increasingly took on overtones of an ancient world of classical inspiration".193 To this mood belong works like the Jugement de Paris of 1908 (repeated in 1913-14 with the addition of a small Greek temple in the distance) and the bronze statue of Venus Victorious of 1914, one of several based on the Jugement de Paris (fig. 9).194

The importance of the subject-matter in the jugement de Paris must be stressed. The idea of choice which it implies may be understood as an expression and propagation in French minds of the type of woman whom

192. Herbert, Nature's Workshop (as in n. 57), 51. 193. Ibid., 80. 194. Ibid.



Leoussi 437

Frenchmen liked, or should like. This was the Venus Naturalis, the "natural", generating woman, whom Renoir, along with many of his contemporaries, preferred to the modern feminist, intellectual and political woman.195 Indeed, the three goddesses in the Jugement de Paris, Venus, Juno and Minerva, may be taken to represent the three conceptions of womanhood which became available in fin-de-siècle Europe: the natural woman, the political woman and the intellectual woman. Nevertheless, all three goddesses have the same bodily type. This type, pink and copper-red from the Mediterranean sun, is strong and healthy and, as Marcia Pointon has remarked, "possesses the plenitude of the maternal form".196 This type is different from the much fleshier and flabby type that Rubens chose for his own Judgment which seems to be the primary iconographie source of Renoir's.197 Renoir's type affirms that the perfect, divine, body is firm and strong. The cultural recognition that an expanded female bodily form is an anatomical condition associated with pregnancy and fertility went back through Raphael's Mediterranean Virgin Marys and Greco- Roman sculpture to those prehistoric figurines of fertility with their exagger- ated breasts and belly.198 Indeed, Venus Victorious, although based on the painting, is also inspired by antique Venuses, possibly from the Louvre, but certainly not the Venus de Milo. Unlike Delacroix, Cézanne, Maillol, and other French artists, Renoir disliked the Venus de Milo, seeing her as a "big gen- darme".199 It is important to note here that Renoir, like Maillol, saw the antique statues of Venus as chaste, not sexually promiscuous. In 1910, again in his preface to Cennini's Libro dell'arte, Renoir wrote:

Quoi de flus chaste qu'une Vénus antique, qu'une oeuvre de Raphaël ou de Titien?

What is more chaste than an antique Venus, than a work by Raphael or Titian?200

This view can be associated with Renoir's religious beliefs. As Herbert has observed, Renoir was critical of Catholicism in the early

1880s, his belief intensifying in later life.201 In 1882-3, "his god was nominally Christian" but his conception of religion was "decidedly pantheistic and ec- umenical".202 By 1910 religion and especially the Catholic church had become

195. For a fuller discussion of nineteenth-century French ideals of womanhood, see House, "That Magical Light: Impressionists and Post-Impressionists on the Riv- iera" and Renoir (as in n. 55 and n. 150), and Garb, "Renoir and the Natural Woman" (as in n. 42).

196. Marcia Pointon, Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting, 1830-1908 (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 92.

197. House (as in n. 150) 276. 198. Clark, The Nude (as in n. 61), 64. See for a deeper religious perspective on those fig-

urines Ethelbert Stauffer, "Antike Madonnenreligion", in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt (as above, n. 133), vol. II. 17. 4, ed. Wolfgang Haase (1984), 1425- 1499.

199. Herbert, Nature's Workshop (as in n. 57), 80-1. 200. Renoir in Herbert, Nature's Workshop (as in n. 57), 242 for the French original. 201. Ibid., 20-21. 202. Ibid., 54.




more important in his thought.203 But he did not become a Catholic fanatic, his Catholicism remaining tempered by his love of Greek humanism and Greek religion which was, as Herbert observes, "at the heart" of his religious conception.204 As we saw, Greek humanism and Greek religion, which for Renoir was "la religion de la joie, de la beauté et de l'amour" ["a religion of joy, beauty and love"], were also at the heart of his artistic practice.205 Renoir's idea of combining and, indeed, reconciling Christianity with Hellenism was not unusual during the second half of the nineteenth century. It has already been addressed in its visual expression in relation to Cézanne (see section c.) "Classicism and Catholicism" [above, pp. 421-23]). We also find it in Pierre Puvis de Chavannes' 1884-86 decorative cycle for the Lyons Musée des Beaux- Arts. Here, as Jennifer L. Shaw has demonstrated, Ancient Vision and Chris- tian Inspiration are presented not just as the two main strands of the French patrimony, an official view since 1837, nor as contradictory, but as complementary.206 This impulse to reconcile and combine the classical with the Chris- tian traditions which the Italian Renaissance had first attempted, can also be found, passionately defended, among intellectuals across Europe. For example, it is present in Heinrich Heine's essays, Matthew Arnold's "Hebraism and Hellenism" in Culture and Anarchy (1869), and Walter Pater's Studies in the His- tory of the Renaissance (1873).

Renoir's desire in later life for a divine power and for a synthesis is clearly expressed in 1910, in the preface to Cennini's Libro dell'arte (see above, p. 434). There he congratulates the Catholic Church for reintroducing the invigorating humanism of Greece into art which resulted in the Italian Renaissance and in France's three centuries of great art.207 And it is this same desire for a synthesis that may explain how Renoir's Venuses became the carriers of the two ideals which were so mystically and inextricably associated with the Virgin Mary, virginity and motherhood; ideals which were also the battle-cry of the neo-Catholic movement.

Renoir's adoption of classical subjects and artistic principles from 1881 onwards, together with his eventual enracinement in the South of France in 1908, when he made his home there, transformed him into a specifically Southern artist. And by becoming "Southern", Renoir became essentially French. This "Southern" quality of Renoir's art was recognised by German artists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Writing in 1925, Kirchner saw Renoir's art as typical of the French, "Romanesque" artistic tradition:

How fundamentally different are the Germanic and Romanesque ap- proaches to artistic creation. The Romanesque artist takes his form from the object, from its form in nature. The Teuton creates his from imagination, from his inner vision, and the form of visible nature is for him a symbol. The model or young girl will always be recognis-

203. Ibid., 55. 204. Ibid. 205. Ibid., 241 for the original French and 51 for Herbert's English translation. This pas-

sage is from Renoir's "Long Draft for the Cennini Preface" that he wrote in 1910, and is reproduced bv Herbert.

206. Shaw, Dream States (as in n. 25), 69, 95; see also above, n. 9. 207. See Herbert, Nature's Worskshop (as in n. 57), 51.



Leoussi 439

able in a Madonna by Renoir. But his German contemporary, Hans von Marées, will produce a goddess from a tart. For the Southern artist, beauty lies in appearances, but the Teuton seeks out what lies beneath.208

Renoir's Frenchness and his attachment to France were also recognised by his French contemporaries. Thus, according to Camille Mauclair, writing in 1903,

M. Renoir est un peintre de la joie, un assembleur de bouquets ... et revenons-y, l'un des tempéraments les plus français que l'art national ait constatés depuis trente ou quarante années. M. Renoir is a painter of joy who puts together bouquets of flowers ... and let us say it again, he has one of the most French temperaments to be observed in national art for thirty or forty years.

For Mauclair, Renoir, in both his bad and good qualities, such as his light- heartedness ("léger"), his tendency to get carried away, but also his profound sincerity, scrupulousness, and great sense of colour, Renoir is French and the race speaks through him - "II est Français ... La race parle en lui". Another art critic, the celebrated novelist, Octave Mirbeau, in his preface to the catalogue of an exhibition of Renoir's work in Paris, Exposition Renoir, in 1913, charac- terised Renoir's career as a patriotic mission. 209

Conclusion

The essay has sought to show how the ancient Greek cult of the body became the focus of a classical revival in France during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It has argued, • firstly, that the body of the ancient Greeks, and especially those of the so-

called "golden age" of Greece, the 5th c BC, which Pheidian sculpture was

supposed to have recorded, was claimed by the French as the authentic French body through genealogical descent;

• secondly, that the French tried to revive the ancient Greek body and with it the "golden age" of reason, order, strength and power which had created it, through physical exercise and natural life in the Mediterranean sea and sunshine;

• thirdly, that this return to the presumed authentic French self was stimu- lated by the desire physically to regenerate the nation, under conditions of military defeat;

• fourthly, that this body-centred, ethno-classical revival became associated with a Catholic revival which re-affirmed chastity and motherhood and celebrated another French "golden age", that of the Gothic cathedrals, an

age of moral virtue. Body-centred classicism and Mediaeval Catholicism

208. Magdalena M. Moeller, "Kirchner as German artist" in Jill Lloyd and Magdalena M. Moeller (eds.), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The Dresden and Berlin Years, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2003), 25.

209. Mauclair, L'Impressionnisme (as in n. 162), 126 and 143; and Mirbeau quoted in Christopher Riopelle, Renoir: The Great Bathers, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA (Philadelpia, PA: The Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1990), 5.




were presented as morally in harmony and complementary to each other. Together, they were expected to regenerate modern France, physically as well as morally;

• and fifthly, that the ideals of the two "national" traditions permeated French art and found expression even in the art of some of the most re- bellious and forward-looking of French artists, the Impressionists, Cézanne and Renoir. In their paintings from the 1880s to the end of their lives, the two artists demonstrated the new French ideal: France regen- erated, physically and morally, by return to the Mediterranean homeland and way of life. They depicted a new French "golden age" which combined physical vigour with moral virtue. In so doing they contributed, along with other artists of the avant-garde who also returned to the antique and the classical tradition, to a new classical revival in France and to the reconciliation of modernity with cultural tradition.

Both Cézanne and Renoir enlisted themselves in the body-centred, ethno-classicist cause, by drawing on classical principles and on a long and vital tradition of artistic classicism, both French and more broadly European. Their classicism consisted • firstly, of the representation of the nude as their core subject, and espe-

cially of the healthy and strong body, which was found to be the arche- typal subject of ancient Greek and Roman art. But while Renoir's nudes are sometimes invested with mythological and symbolic references, Cezanne's nudes remain actual, albeit generalised, living men and women, bathing in the rivers and the Mediterranean sea of Provence;

• secondly, of their use of figurai prototypes taken from the antique and its later tradition;

• thirdly, of more structured landscapes which they presented as the natural home of their healthy and strong classical figures; and,

• fourthly, of a more disciplined and constructive handling of paint. These classical subjects, models and compositional and technical principles they combined, each in his own way, with Impressionist naturalism and colourism. By combining Impressionist with classical principles and motifs they created images of the strong and healthy body that pulsated with colour and a dynamic use of paint. In so doing, they revitalised, extended and thereby modernised French classical tradition. At the same time, by making the ancient world part of the modern world, they strove to create a more orderly, vigorous and stable vision of modern France. Ultimately, they suc- ceeded in producing some of the most enduring icons of the Southern physical ideal which marked France at the turn of the century.

Both artists synthesised, each in his own way, the classical with the Catholic sensibilities of their era. Through their works they showed that there was no incompatibility between ancient Greek and Christian views of the world. Cezanne's male and female nudes bathe in waters of physical and spiritual regeneration and their home is an orderly and God-created nature, where Greek geometry and Gothic architecture come together. By contrast, Renoir's bathers, these chaste, comely and fertile young girls, are both Venus and Vir- gin Mary. And, like Venus, the Southern woman, they are also healthy, fleshy, tanned by the warm Mediterranean sun, happy, and loving. By thus combin-



Leoussi 441

ing, albeit in very personal ways, themes from the classical and Catholic reper- toires, the two artists produced a new French Renaissance as it were, a new reconciliation of mind, body and heart.

The current of classicism to which Cézanne and Renoir contributed so creatively was so powerful, as both pre-eminently modern and French, that if a foreigner, such as Picasso, a Spaniard, wished to become a French artist, this artist had to become classical. This meant that he or she had to draw, innova- tively, on this or that motif from the antique and its "classical" tradition. In- deed, Christopher Green has described Picasso's art as "sometimes serious, more often ironic applications to belong as a French classicist". Picasso's classicism consisted, apart from his Cézanne-inspired Cubism and apart from references to earlier French classicists - including Poussin - and to Greek art, of treatment of the theme of the bather as well as other classical themes. Exam- ples include his rather Ingresque Bathers of 1918 and Three Women at the Spring of 1921 inspired by Jean Goujon and the Parthenon sculptures.210 Through Pi- casso's influence, the resurrection of classicism achieved by Cézanne and Renoir was consolidated as a legitimate path for the avant-garde.

List of illustrations

1. Polycletus, Diadoumenos, Roman copy of about 100 BC, of a bronze original of about 430 BC, National Archaeological Museum, Athens, Greece: 1.95 m.

2. Venus de Milo, c.100 BC, Hellenistic marble statue, Musée du Louvre, Paris, H.: 202 cm.

3. Paul Cézanne, Les Grandes Baigneuses, 1906, Wilstach Collection, The Philadelphia Museum of Art /Licensed by Art Resource, NY, oil on canvas, 210.5 x 250.8 cm.

4. Paul Cézanne, Montagne Sainte-Victoire, c.1886-8, The Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Gallery, London, oil on canvas, 66.8 x 92.3 cm (canvas size).

5. Paul Cézanne, Le Grand Baigneur, 1885, The Museum of Modern Art, New York /Licensed by Art Resource, NY, oil on canvas, 127x 96.8 cm.

210. Christopher Green, Art in France 1900-1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 210. For the most comprehensive survey to date of the vital role of Cezanne's art, including his classicism, in shaping much of European and American art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Matisse, Picasso, Morandi, and others, see, Joseph J. Rishel and Katherine Sachs (eds.), Cézanne and Beyond, Catalogue of the exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 26-May 17, 2009 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). For a more general discussion of Picasso's relationship with the old masters see Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso: Challenging the Past, Published to accompany the exhibition at the National Gallery, London, 25 February to 7 June 2009 (London: National Gallery Company, 2009). For a special line of tradition and reception from ancient Greek and Roman sculpture through its 19th century 'archaeological' reception and Impressionists to Picasso see Seymour Howard, "Picasso's Neoclas- sic Outlines: An Archaeology of Consciousness", International Journal of the Classical Tradition 2 (1995-1996), 560-66.



442 International Journal of the Classical Tradition I September/ December 2009

6. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Parisienne, 1874, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, oil on canvas, 163.2 x 108.3 cm.

7. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Montagne Sainte-Victoire, c.1888-9, Yale University Art Gallery, USA/Licensed by Art Resource, NY, oil on canvas, 53 x 64.1 cm.

8. Pierre- Auguste Renoir, Les Baigneuses, 1918-19, Paris, Musée d'Orsay, oil on canvas, 110 x 160 cm.

9. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jugement de Paris, c.1908, Paris, Musée d'Or- say /Licensed by Art Resource, NY, drawing in sanguine and white chalk, 750x103 cm.



from civic to ethnic classicism the cult of the greek body in late nineteenthcentury french

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