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Van Gogh Museum Journal 2000 (2000)

Van Gogh Museum Journal 2000

(2000)– [tijdschrift] Van Gogh Museum Journal–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende


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fig. 1
Eugène Delacroix, Medea, 1838, Lille, Musée des Beaux-Arts (photograph courtesy of the RMN)




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fig. 2
Eugène Delacroix, Medea, 1862, Paris, Musée du Louvre (photograph courtesy of the RMN)


The 19th-century art trade: copies, variations, replicas
Patricia Mainardi+

The question of replication has proved most troublesome for modernists, even those studying the 19th century, because modernism privileges chronological priority as the key to authenticity. The enterprise of replication, with its aura of duplicity, appears so contradictory to the basic modernist principle of originality that it seems only natural that, when comparing two similar paintings such as Delacroix's Medea of 1838 with his 1862 version (figs. 1 and 2) we should want to know which one came first. Insofar as we assume that the primary manifestation of a style or theme incorporates the quality of originality, while subsequent renditions need to be explained and justified in order to be valorised, we remain modernists and neglect centuries of studio practice by artists whose status in canonical art history is incontrovertible. This essay seeks to clarify the terms of earlier studio practice in order to reconsider the art production of the 19th century, positioned at the intersection of tradition and modernity.

It is a basic tenet of art historiography that classicism promoted imitation while modernism, particularly-romanticism, encouraged originality and individualism. Delacroix, for example, is an artist whom we think of as representing the epitome of romanticism with his fecund imagination, virtuoso brushwork and vivid coloration. Repetitiveness is more commonly attributed to Delacroix's rival Ingres who, throughout his life, produced numerous variations on his favourite themes. So closely has this practice been associated with Ingres that a major exhibition of 1983-84 and at least two subsequent essays have all focused on his studio practice,1 while no parallel investigation has ever been attempted of the oeuvre of Delacroix, whose methods were actually remarkable similar.

The explanation for this lies in Delacroix's painterly style, problematic in any consideration of repetition. The free play of the artist's hand - in short, virtuoso brushwork - seems less open to replication than the enamel-like finish and closed forms of classicism or 19th-century Salon painting.2 And yet atelier procedure from the Renaissance onward was analogous across the artistic spectrum; it is the prejudices and preconceptions of modernist art historians that - depending on whose work is under investigation - have caused them to either ignore certain practices, to explain them away as anomalies, or to focus on them as somehow defining.

Copies

Like the famous example of Eskimos having dozens of words for snow, 19th-century artists had an entire vocabulary to describe the phenomenon that we identify with the single word ‘copy.’ The distinction between ‘copying’ and ‘imitation’ was still clear in 18th-century art theory but has gradually eroded until our own period when the two words are used virtually interchangeably. Even by 1884, when the Institut de France published volume ‘C’ of its Dictionnaire de l'académie des beaux-arts, their meanings had blurred to the point that the entry for copie noted that ‘to copy a master’ was often said when one really meant ‘to imitate his style, his colour, his manner.’3 The correct term for an



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fig. 3
J.-A.-D. Ingres, Paolo and Francesca, 1819, Angers, Musée d'Angers (photograph courtesy of the RMN)


artist's later version of his own theme - what we see in Delacroix's second Medea (fig. 2) - was not copie, but répétition, the same word used in performance for a rehearsal. In performance we never assume that opening night is qualitatively better than later presentations - first performances are, in fact, usually weaker than subsequent ones, which gain in depth from greater experience and familiarity with the material. But when, by focusing on innovation, we shift the semantic model from performance to industrial production we valorise chronological priority and create a distorted problematic for 19th-century studio practice.

These nuances of meaning are important: when confronted with the many similar paintings by major 19th-century artists, we have tended to explain them, justify them, or condemn them in terms of our own art theory rather than theirs. And in so doing we have lost a unique opportunity to understand an aesthetic universe that is quite different from our own.

Copying in our sense of replication, i.e. the exact reproduction of an artist's work, was a procedure used chiefly by students ‘in the attainment of mechanical dexterity,’ as Sir Joshua Reynolds explained in his third

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fig. 4
J.-A.-D. Ingres, Paolo and Francesca, c. 1850, Bayonne, Musée Bonnat (photograph courtesy of the RMN)


‘Discourse.’4 Mengs, in his Gedanken über Schönheit und über Geschmack in der Malerei (1762) wrote that a student ‘should copy beautiful works correctly, without questioning at the start the reasons for their beauty. This will train the justness of his eye, the most essential instrument of art.’5 Academic art instruction developed from the writings of theorists such as these, and emphasised the importance of copying in the education of artists. Virtually all 19th-century artists made drawn or painted copies, either from engravings or in museums, whether or not they attended academic art schools. As part of their course of study, students at Paris's Ecole des beaux-arts who won the prestigious Prix de Rome, which gave them five years in the Italian city at government expense, were expected to complete a full-scale copy of a major work and send it back to France, where it then entered the national collections.6

Delacroix did not attend the Ecole, but he copied all his life.7 In his own ‘Dictionnaire des beaux-arts,’ which he began compiling shortly after his election to the Académie, he prepared a long entry on copies, copier that began: ‘This has been the education of nearly all the great masters. First he learns the manner of his master, just like an apprentice learns how to make a knife, without attempting to display

his originality. Then he copies everything that he comes across by contemporary or earlier artists. Painting begins as a simple craft.’8

Throughout the Journal Delacroix expressed his admiration for artists who made copies, noting when he was 49 that Tintoretto had made hundreds of them.9 Ten years later he wrote: ‘Rubens, when he was over fifty, during his mission to the king of Spain, spent his free time in Madrid copying the superb Italian originals that could still be seen there. In his youth he copied extensively. This exercise of copying, entirely neglected by the modern schools, was the source of immense knowledge (witness Albert [sic] Dürer).’10

And Delacroix himself copied - Raphael, Michelangelo, Rubens, Titian. His estate inventory listed 13 of his own copies after Rubens alone, and he collected Géricault's copies after the Old Masters. Nor was Delacroix the only modernist to do this. Courbet, Manet, Van Gogh, Degas, Cézanne, and all the major painters of the 19th centuryade copies of paintings they admired.

Variations, repetitions

This is the sense in which we commonly understand the meaning of the word ‘copy’; but what if an artist copies his own work, making what we would call replicas or variations, but what the 19th century referred to as repetitions? This is certainly what Ingres did, painting, for example, seven versions of Paolo and Francesca (figs. 3 and 4). Although it has received less attention because it contradicts our preconceived notions of romantic practice, it is what Delacroix did as well.

In the extensive definition of the word copie in the Dictionnaire de l'académie des beaux-arts, which comprises several pages, its various meanings were ranked in a surprising order. The primary definition is given as: ‘Copies executed or signed by the authors themselves of original works. Properly speaking these are simple repetitions, recognisable often through some variation that the master himself has intentionally put there.’11

In addition to insisting on the correct term, répétition, even while acknowledging its less precise common usage as copie, this definition makes an even more important point: that artists rarely made exact copies of their own work, or what we would call replicas. That was the task of students or studio assistants. We should be aware that the existence of an exact copy may be evidence that it is not autograph, for as the 18th-century connoisseur Jonathan Richardson wrote: ‘In making an original we have a vast latitude as to the handling, colouring, drawing, expression, etc., in copying we are confined; consequently a copy cannot have the freedom and spirit of an original.’12

Répétitions, however, were considered originals in their own right, and were expected to vary from the artist's first ‘performance’ of a theme. Today we call them variations - in order to assign them enough originality to signal their distinction from and superiority to an exact copy, a replica. This, however, is a classic Foucauldian example of how we have restructured the earlier ‘order of things’ to conform to our 20th-century values. We privilege the first rendition as the ‘original’ and then are obliged to either recuperate subsequent ones as ‘variations’ or dismiss them as ‘replicas.’ The problematic issue here is novelty.

Replicas

Previously, connoisseurs were concerned with originality primarily in order to detect the forgeries that threatened the market for Renaissance and Baroque paintings, while in modernism, as Walter Benjamin has pointed out, degrees of authenticity were established primarily as a response to the introduction of reproductive technologies that challenged the uniqueness of the original art object.13 The notions of copy, replica and variation were less problematic in the period preceding mass production and the widespread use of such technologies - which then established a standard of exactitude against which art was forced to distinguish itself. The best illustration of how this earlier mentalité differs from our own is the story that Vasari tells of how Federigo II of Mantua, passing through Florence on his way to visit Pope Clement VII in Rome, saw Raphael's Portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de'Medici and Luigi Rossi (Florence, Uffizi Gallery), and begged it from Clement as a gift. The pope ordered the painting sent to Mantua, but its owner, Ottaviano de' Medici, not wanting to part with it, had Andrea del Sarto paint an exact copy which he sent instead. The copy was so good it fooled everyone, including Giulio Romano, Raphael's student and collaborator on this very painting. When Vasari finally managed to convince him it was by del Sarto and not Raphael - in other words that it was a copy and not an original - Giulio shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘I value it none the less than if it were by Raphael's own hand, on the contrary even more so because it is an extraordinary feat and a most excellent thing to imitate someone's style and do it as well as he.’14 In the era of mass production, however, and especially after the introduction of photographic processes, this ‘extraordinary feat’ would be dismissed as mere mechanical reproduction. In the modernist period the most esteemed art would, by contrast, make a feature of its ‘originality.’

The exact copies we call replicas are defined in the academy's Dictionnaire as the second order of copy: ‘Copies made in the atelier or under the very eyes of the author by his students, recognisable through a much greater similarity to the original.’15 The distinction between replica and repetition is illustrated by Amaury-Duval, Ingres's student and biographer, who tells how he painted a copy of Ingres's Portrait of M. Bertin (Paris, Musée du Louvre): ‘I set out to execute this copy with all the exactitude of which I was capable,’ he wrote. When Ingres saw it, he contemplated it for a while and then, ‘all at once, turning to me [he] said, to our great astonishment, “Why didn't you try another background colour... a greenish background?”’ Amaury-Duval was horrified and replied: ‘“How could you think that I would permit myself to make any change, even the most insignificant, in one of your works, and especially a change of this importance?” “That's true... that's true...” said Ingres, “you are right, but nonetheless I do regret that this experiment wasn't tried.”’16 And therein lies the difference between a repetition done by the master himself and a replica made by an assistant.

As successful artists had done for centuries, Delacroix had his assistants execute replicas of his well-known works, which he then retouched, signed and sold as his own. Lee Johnson lists many such paintings, now often reattributed to Delacroix's assistant Pierre Andrieu.17 There was nothing suspect in this practice, which was standard from the Renaissance on, i.e. from the moment when the demand for signed works from celebrated painters began to exceed the supply. David, Ingres and Delacroix all did it, with no attempt to dissemble. It was part of what Delacroix called ‘the simple craft’ of being an artist. Confusion results only when we try to sort out the multiple versions in an attempt to rank them in a modernist hierarchy of authenticity based on chronological priority.

There are, for example, at least nine versions of Delacroix's Christ on the Sea of Galilee, two of which he kept in his studio all his life. A modernist interpretation holds this to be evidence of his personal attachment to the theme,18 but we might also note that for centuries it was standard studio practice to keep a model of sought-after subjects both to show to perspective buyers and to serve as inspiration for subsequent repetitions.

The practice of repetition was informal, either negotiated directly by the artist with collectors, or through dealer-representatives. It became institutionalised, and we might say, industrialised, later in the 19th century when it degenerated into replication. Beginning in the 1850s, the Maison Goupil arranged for replicas of well-known works to be executed first by the artists themselves, and later, in the 1870s, by a staff of professional copyists. These later canvases were signed by the artist and were even sold as autograph originals with the profits being shared by artist and dealer.19 We might see the later-19th century demand for exact replicas rather than repetitions as motivated by a combination of two factors: modernism's privileging of the chronologically earliest version of a subject, and industry's much-vaunted ability to make exact reproductions. As a result of this practice it is unclear, for example, which of the many repetitions of Cabanel's Birth of Venus (figs. 5 and 6) were executed by the artist himself, and which were done by his studio assistants or Goupil's copyists. This situation is unusual only insofar as these paintings did not all come directly from the artist's own atelier, produced by his own assistants. In a long essay on the word copie, Larousse's Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, published in the 1860s, attributed the custom to the revered masters of the Italian Renaissance whose standard business practice it had been to have their students turn out replicas of their most popular works, which the masters then signed and sold.20

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fig. 5
Alexandre Cabanel, Birth of Venus, 1863, Paris, Musée d'Orsay (photograph courtesy of the RMN)




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fig. 6
Alexandre Cabanel, Birth of Venus, 1875, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of John Wolfe, 1893 (94.24.1)


David, Ingres and Delacroix did the same thing, as did Courbet after them: ‘Painting begins as a simple craft.’21

And others...

What today is the most common meaning of the word copie was actually the third level of definition in the academic dictionary: ‘Copies, most numerous, made outside the influence or after the death of the author of the original.’22 These copies formed the basis of art instruction, and most artists continued to make them throughout their careers. Copies in this sense could be precise, in the nature of a replica, or freely done to isolate some aspect of the work. Delacroix, for example, made a pastel after a sea nymph in Rubens's Disembarkment of Marie de' Medici at Marseilles (Paris, Musée du Louvre), later transforming it into a female nude in his Death of Sardanapalus (Paris, Musée du Louvre).

Besides these three kinds of renditions - the autograph repetition, the assistant's replica and any copy after an unrelated master - there were two others. The reduced-size repetition was called a reduction. In 1852 Delacroix painted one of his 1841 Entry of the crusaders into Constantinople (Paris, Musée du Louvre), which Louis-Philippe had commissioned for the Crusades Room of the Pavillon du Roi at Versailles.23 The reduction is strikingly different from the Versailles painting. This may have been the result of Delacroix's working from sketches and memory, as he no longer had the earlier painting. But then again, this may simply be a modernist assumption, for in 1844 he had painted a reduction (Philadelphia Museum of Art) for himself of his 1827 Death of Sardanapalus before selling the picture. This time he did have the earlier piece right in front of him, and we must assume he had the intention of duplicating it as a souvenir; nonetheless, he made changes to both the coloration and composition.

The lowest ranking form of copie in the academic dictionary was the translation of an image into another medium, such as an engraving or a lithograph.24 This is no doubt a result of the general assumption that prints are merely faithful replications of prior images and thus more akin to a student's or studio assistant's copie than to the master's répétition. Delacroix often complicated this relationship, however, by conceiving images in prints years before he put them on canvas. The 1853 painting of Ophelia in the Louvre, for example, the most accomplished of several versions of the theme, followed by ten years his lithograph of the same subject, which in turn followed two small sketchy paintings.25 Ingres often reworked themes in collaboration with the engravers Luigi Calamatta and Achille Réveil, producing images distinctly different from the paintings that inspired them.26

Examining these multiple fine distinctions, we come to understand the problems modernist attitudes have created in our understanding of 19th-century art. By flattening the many diverse meanings of ‘copy’ into the simple concept of ‘replica’ we leave most of the period's work stranded. The contradictory fetish for both originality in the cultural realm and exact reproduction in the industrial realm - with the consequent devaluation of everything second-hand - has forced us to invent another category, variation, to recuperate all those works which our values have consigned to the aesthetic scrap-heap. But let us remember that in the 19th century a repetition was a performance to be judged on its own merits, neither necessarily better nor worse than its predecessors.

Imitation

This problem of variation and replica is a modernist conundrum. In 18th- and 19th-century art theory, the concept of ‘imitation’ was juxtaposed to that of ‘copying,’ a distinction which gradually vanished throughout the subsequent century. In his Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Mahlerei und

Bildhauer-Kunst (1755), Winckelmann stated succinctly: ‘There is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled; I mean, by imitating the ancients.’27 Ingres is often quoted as having said: ‘Raphael, in imitating endlessly, was always himself.’28 But Delacroix felt the same way; he wrote in his Journal: ‘Raphael, the greatest of painters has imitated the most. Imitation of his master, who left traces in his style which never disappeared; imitation of antiquity and of the masters who preceded him [...].’29 Delacroix well understood the difference between the concepts of copying and imitation, for he was praising Raphael for ‘imitating’ - not copying - earlier artists.

Because this distinction was gradually lost during the 19th-century and had completely disappeared by the 20th, modernists discussing earlier work often use the two words interchangeably, thereby further confusing the issue. But if we think of the 19th century as a period of transition between 18th-century aesthetics and those of the modern age, we can see how traditional studio practice and attitudes towards it changed during the course of this period.

Diderot's Encyclopédie gave the standard 18th-century definition of ‘imitation’: ‘A good imitation is a continual invention. It must, so to speak, transform its model and embellish its ideas; through the transformation that the artist gives to these ideas, he appropriates them. Whatever he takes, he enriches, and whatever he can't enrich, he leaves.’30 Nor was creation thought to be superior to imitation - the separation of these two concepts is itself a modernist idea. Diderot wrote: ‘The one who invents a kind of imitation is a man of genius. The one who perfects a kind of imitation already invented, or who excels in it, is also a man of genius.’31 And so when we try to determine whether David, Ingres, Delacroix or any other pre-modern artist painted his repetitions for money, out of friendship, or as vehicles for artistic exploration, we are in the wrong ‘order of things.’ We are forgetting that painting was a ‘simple craft,’ and we are adopting the modernist principle that innovation is primary and any repetition of themes needs to be explained and justified.

From imitation to replication

For centuries creation was envisaged as an unbroken continuum from antiquity to the present, with each generation passing the torch, so to speak, to the next. Imitation, defined as taking inspiration from the highest standards of earlier art, was considered normal, praiseworthy - and inevitable. ‘Who among the great hasn't imitated?’ wrote Ingres, ‘One can't make something out of nothing.’32 The shift we identify as modernism, despite all its complications, had one undeniable temporal change in that artists increasingly severed their ties with the past to look to the future, increasingly claiming themselves as sui generis. Novelty, newness, innovation, all these concepts gradually changed the climate in which artists worked. The process was gradual, of course, and much too complex to discuss in a short essay, but two factors indicate a founding moment of modernism. Before 1789, when the Salon was open only to members of the Academy, artists often exhibited the same works more than once. There was no particular cachet attached to novelty: if a painting was worth looking at one year, then it would be rewarding to see it again. And the practice of repetition continued, as we have seen, well into the 19th century, and was carried out by all major artists. While it is difficult to measure something as amorphous as changing attitudes, one factor we can point to is the moment when attitudes become crystallised into institutions.

In 1852 the published Salon regulations for the first time explicitly banned both copies and previously exhibited work, thereby institutionalising the values of originality and novelty, both of which had gradually displaced imitation in establishing hegemony over the aesthetic realm.33

We might think of 1852 as the moment when the aesthetic reception of repetition, which had gradually been growing chillier as the century progressed, dropped one more degree and froze over into ice-hard rejection. A decade later Larousse bemoaned the new values: ‘The 19th century has transformed everything. First it outlawed as plagiarism what in the three preceding centuries was considered only legitimate imitation, fortuitous borrowing [...].’34

The problem with this new attitude was that the enterprise of being an artist involves making a living as well as inspired creation. Centuries of tradition had evolved into the studio practice of Ingres and Delacroix. They established their reputations by producing large commissioned pictures, often carried out in collaboration with studio assistants. The fees they received for these commissions were large, but expenses for materials and salaries reduced their earnings considerably. Repetitions and reductions of these large-scale pictures not only provided them with additional income but also enabled them to develop more fully ideas that had arisen in the earlier works. Delacroix, for example, later revisited several of the themes from his Palais Bourbon decorations (1838-47), including Demosthenes declaiming by the seashore (Dublin, The National Gallery of Ireland) and Ovid among the Scythians (London, The National Gallery), and his Journal is full of notes about returning to old half-finished canvases and reworking them.

Ingres said of his own practice: ‘It has been said of me, and perhaps with justice, that I too often reproduce my compositions instead of making new works. Here is my reason: most of these works, whose subjects I love, have seemed to me to be worth the effort of rendering them better by repeating or repainting them. This was often the case with the first works I made, the Sistine Chapel among others. When through his love of art and through his efforts an artist can hope to leave his name to posterity, he will never be able to do enough to render his works more beautiful or less imperfect. I have for example the great Poussin, who often repeated the same subjects.’35

In seeking to understand this practice of repetition, modernists have privileged aesthetic considerations, emphasising the artist's ‘pursuit of perfection,’ to borrow the title of the 1983-84 Ingres exhibition. Post-modernists, on the other hand, and especially art-historical revisionists, have privileged economic considerations, particularly the ‘he did it for the money’ line of explanation. And yet, studio practice in the pre-modern period did not distinguish clearly between these two aspects. One might as well ask whether Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel for money or the glory or art.

In his Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (1766) Lessing wrote ‘Consider now these two points: first, that invention and novelty in the subject are by no means what we chiefly require from the painter; and secondly, that a familiar subject helps and quickens the effect of his art.’36 In many ways, Ingres and Delacroix were closer to that aesthetic than to the modernist one that can only valorise repetition as intentional seriality. Both artists maintained an interest in an assortment of themes throughout their working careers, but to describe their repetitions as serial production à la Monet, as modernists have done, not only distorts their oeuvres, it also elides the major shift that did take place in 19th-century art practice from repetition to serial production.37

The production of multiple unrelated versions of a theme - repetition - could persist only when work moved directly from the artist's studio to the collector. With the rise of the gallery system and the establishment of exhibitions as the primary means of marketing work, the door to the artist's studio became transparent, so to speak, and the existence of multiple renditions of the same image could not help but be known and, in an era that increasingly valued innovation, devalued.

Courbet was a product of this later period. He produced as many repetitions as Ingres and Delacroix, but neither he nor they ever conceived of exhibiting and marketing their work as unified series rather than as individual pictures. Had Courbet done so, he could have made his paintings' mutual resemblance a selling point rather than a drawback, for by the 1860s, after Delacroix's death in 1863 and Ingres's in 1867, we find him lying and dissembling about the uniqueness of his repetitions, four in the case of the Jo, la belle Irlandaise (figs. 7 and 8).38 When in 1863 he sent a crate of 33 flower paintings to his dealer Luquet in Paris, he advised him ‘Either hide the paintings, or else organise a mysterious exhibition of them at your place only.’39 Had he conceived of a ‘series exhibition,’ he would have been spared the further embarrassment of explaining to Bruyas - when arranging a loan of paintings for his private exhibition at the 1867 Exposition Universelle - that he didn't want to include his patron's Solitude (1866, Montpellier, Musée Fabre) because ‘the Empress has a

somewhat similar one that is in the Champ de Mars exhibition.’40 Solitude was, in fact, a repetition of the 1865 Puits noir (Paris, Musée du Louvre) that belonged to the Empress Eugénie. Courbet had not found it necessary - or politic - to mention this when selling Solitude to Bruyas. Instead he described Bruyas's painting in terms of its uniqueness, calling it ‘a splendid landscape of profound solitude, done deep in the valleys of my part of the world. It is the most beautiful one I have, and perhaps even that I have done in all my life.’41

This prevarication was something neither Ingres nor Delacroix ever felt was necessary. If we can see both Ingres and Delacroix as artists of the previous period continuing an earlier studio practice, then Courbet had the misfortune of coming right at the moment of transition, when repetitions could no longer be publicly acknowledged by modernist painters, although Goupil and his Salon artists continued to produce all manner of copies. Even modernists, however, found that the economy of art production made it impossible to create completely original works each time they took up the brush, particularly since small easel pictures for private collectors had all but replaced the major public commissions that had supported previous generations. Such extremes of originality would not only be prodigal of artists' resources, but would also force them into superficiality as theme after theme was taken up, used once, then abandoned, in a virtual caricature of the modernist fetish for novelty.

From replication to series

Courbet's career ended precisely at the moment when a new type of exhibition was invented that could have resolved many of his difficulties. In the year of the artist's death, 1877, Claude Monet exhibited the first of his series, showing seven versions of the Gare Saint-Lazare at the third impressionist show.42 Although this first presentation was not comprehensively organised - it included canvases of different sizes and views - in the following years Monet, in conjunction with the dealer Durand-Ruel, succeeded in creating a novel exhibition format. Paul Tucker has explored the genesis of Monet's series extensively, concluding that the ‘problems of cultural production’ - and he defines this in the broadest possible sense, including both aesthetic principles and economic necessities - served as the impetus to their creation.43 In his reading, at the end of the 19th century Monet was attempting to maintain the avant-garde status of impressionism in the face of challenges from other stylistic camps, while at the same time remaining deeply committed to the principles and practices of plein-air painting. By the 1890s he had found a way out



illustratie
fig. 7
Gustave Courbet, Jo, la belle Irlandaise, 1866, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, H.O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H.O. Havemeyer, 1929 (29.100.63)




illustratie
fig. 8
Gustave Courbet, Jo, la belle Irlandaise, 1866, Kansas City, Ml, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, (Purchase: Nelson Trust)


of the impasse between the modernist demand for originality and the exigencies of art production by developing the concept of a loosely-structured series of paintings constituting variations on a theme, united by subject matter, size and format, but available for individual purchase.44

Monet's exhibitions at Durand-Ruel's gallery in the late 19th and early 20th century of series such as the Grainstacks, Poplars and Rouen Cathedral, followed by Pissarro's cityscape, market and ports series, established an exhibition scheme that reconceived what for Courbet had been a drawback, namely the production of a large number of similar paintings. This new strategy could comply with unprecedented demands for originality and uniqueness, while at the same time allowing the old practice of repetition to continue; it thus represented a major advance in the economy of art production in the era of the middle-class collector. Courbet did not have this tool at his disposal, however, and so we find him constantly manoeuvring to both exhibit and sell his repetitions while maintaining the fiction of their uniqueness. Monet transformed the production of numerous similar paintings, which for Ingres and Delacroix had been standard practice, but for Courbet a guilty secret, into a modern marketing tool. In the form of ‘the series’ it has since become a standard feature of both modern and post-modern art production and exhibition.


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