Fragonard: Art and Eroticism

by Mary D. Sheriff

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Jean Honoré Fragonard, perhaps the most significant French painter of the eighteenth century, was condemned first as a purveyor of luxury items and later as an artist who abandoned noble subjects for the erotic genre. In this revisionist, art-historical study, Mary D. Sheriff challenges such pejorative views of Fragonard by arguing that he is better understood as an artist whose unsurpassed technical skill and witty manipulation of academic standards established a dynamic relation with the audience his art both courted and created.

Sheriff begins her inquiry with an appraisal of Fragonard criticism, followed by an extensive and thoroughly original reading of selected works by Fragonard and of the eroticism encoded in them. Art and eroticism converge in a discussion of execution, in which Sheriff explores the changing conception of execution and elucidates its complex rhetorical and cultural underpinnings. Drawing on analytic methods from contemporary critical theory and an understanding of each work's cultural milieu, Sheriff pays particular attention throughout to the relation between beholder and work of art, which she views as manifest in the artist's preoccupation with the play between the real and the fictive. Scholars and students of art history, eighteenth-century culture and history, critical theory, literary criticism, and all those drawn to the work of this great French painter will find this work essential reading.

Genres: Art History

253 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 1990

Reviews

[Jesse Field · Rating 5 out of 5]

To deepen my visits to "Look Again" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I wanted to sit at my desk and poke through close readings of European paintings in printed books. This one turned up at the New York Public Library, and gave me such pleasure over the last few weeks, I think I'm hooked on art history for good. Ms. Sheriff's essays greatly augmented my intuitive, but vague appreciation of the 'rococo' arts -- maximalist expressions of color and composition, pregnant with feelings and witty references and mythic layers of meaning. What Ms. Sheriff is so helpful in is to navigate close looks at these works, sorting out unique styling from convention, and unraveling how the antinomies of aesthetic value play out in tensions on the canvas -- spontaneity versus artifice, and deeper meanings versus surface signs.

Here's a peek from my notes, which are drastically incomplete even after holding on to the library book well past its due date. I may well return to the text, or even pick it up, should I happen to come across it in a used book store.


With Coresus Sacrificing Himself to Save Callirhoe, we learn to let our eyes dance from face to face, and appreciate each expression, a variation on surprise and fright in this highly dramatic moment: the priest Coresus sacrificing himself instead of his (unrequited, of course) love, Callirhoe. Among the characters in the scene, we have surrogate viewers at focal points near the framing devices that guide us in cycles toward the "orgasmic loss of consciousness" of the priest Coresus, dying for love. Ms. Sheriff supplies a lavish reading that has us seeing these elements in triangular distributions, as well as highly intentional striations of light and dark. Maybe some day I will see this Coresus at its home in the Musée du Louvre; until then, my reading of French academic ideals is established by this example.



The Meeting is one of a set of decorative paintings commissioned for Mme Du Barry, a consort of Louis XV who wanted amusing and engrossing works to adorn the walls of her little chateau at Louveciennes, where parties of high society no doubt spoke, and drank, and flirted with each another, traipsing out the stone doorways from time to time for trysts in the gardens. On their way out, they would have passed this representative scene, which might have led them to think of themselves as the unseen figures who interrupted the lovers' rendezvous -- "Wait!" she gestures silently, as he, stilled, tries to slow down his leap over the wall. The whole set of works is marvelously interactive, in fact, and has to be appreciated as part of the architecture, and social networks, that it came up in.

Astoundingly, Mme. Du Barry is said to have rejected the works, which then had a storied journey through Europe, and after World War II turned up in -- surprise! -- New York's upper east side, at the Frick Collection. Currently closed for renovation, the Frick is scheduled to reopen in April 2025. I am buzzing -- not an exaggeration, something in my head buzzes -- for the chance to see the new room and the paintings. Here's my problem with experiencing art in New York: I'll stare for minutes and minutes and minutes at this painting alone -- I think it's huge, actually, over six feet tall -- but it's one of four, and they all deserve a full go-round. I may not do more than simply experience the Fragonards on my first trip to Frick, for to do otherwise would leave me overfull, and unable to digest. Consider then, just how long it would take me to consume the rest of the Frick Collection. And the Met, and MOMA. Whitney...the Chelsea galleries -- I drown in the riches of this city.


The Wanderer

Perhaps the most bravura readings of the book are in this highly conventional sequence of large decorative paintings now owned by the Detroit Institute of Arts. Sheriff convinces us they are witty plays on erotica -- our wandering lady has had her brood, now holds up the empty chalice, awaiting spring seed -- care to lay kisses above, on the boutons about her bosoms? (It would be an eyebrow raising choice for a gay bottom to mount in his boudoir!) In the society of amateur and connosseur viewers of that time, suggests Sheriff, the great pleasure would be to interpret the covert signs and experience erotic sensation even as the painting did not suggest it on the surface level. What an attractive method, and how useful that would be, for re-building attention and focus in our all-on-the-surface present media worlds.



Inspiration features brushwork, and the expressive power of brushwork, to amplify the energy. Our fantasy artist is fire, the thick strokes of color climbing his sleeve the licks of flame, from dark red lower to slight touches of yellow at his shoulder. The artist has a mythic nature, community agrees -- this figure likely resembles Fragonard's great patron and amateur of the craft, the Abbé de Saint-Non. He and Fragonard believe the artist should envision the work whole, in an instant. Naturally this is reflected as a variation on sexual arousal -- in French, enthousiasme, and nothing speaks of touch like the artist's use of his brush.


In a bravura display of scholarship, Mary D. Sheriff traces The New Model as a take on The Modest Model of Badouin, which in turn was painted in response to a prompt by Diderot:

Greuze said to me, I would like to paint a woman totally nude without offending modesty, and I responded, make the Modest Model. Seat before you a young girl totally nude; [imagine that] her poor coverings are thrown on the ground beside her and signal her misery; that her head rests on one of her hands; that two tears from her lowered eyes run the length of her cheeks. Her expression must be one of innocence, of shame, of modesty. Her mother is next to her, with her hands and with one hand of her daughter she covers the girl's face -- or she hides her face in her hands while that of her daughter is placed on her shoulder. The clothes of the mother also reveal extreme poverty, and the artist, witness to this scene, is touched and lets drop his palette or his brush. And Greuze said, I see my painting.

And where Badouin subverts the message of modesty by generating curiosity in his answer to the prompt -- why does the model stop? This wasn't done just for money, surely! -- in Fragonard's response to Badouin's answer, all pretense of shame is dropped. The intensity of clothes clutching is entirely removed. All three have happy smiles, the procuress sporting a green hat that plays well off both the girl she represents and the artist's palette, dotted with the other colors of the painting. Above and behind them all, a blank canvas, ready to go, inviting the viewer to paint an arousing image of nudity.

This work would have been a small canvas passed among close friends and admirers of the craft, kept in their boudoirs for private delectation. The delicate paint handling particularly rewards close scrutiny. Although hard to see in reproduction, we can identify the familiar Fragonard contrast of items painted in close detail, and items swiped out in coarse, personal strokes. Following convention, we see that Fragonard gives his man hard outlines, and his women, wispy thin spritzes of paint that threaten not to be there at all, especially around the face and bosom of the shockingly pale model -- Sheriff says to compare her with the blank canvas behind.

These paintings are from the 1760s, mostly, so Fragonard could not have known about semiotics, or Marshall McCluhan's dictum "The media is the message." But his characteristic play with the impression of painted image on various audiences shows that he was a skilled practitioner of what McCluhan, and Roland Barthes, and Ferdinand de Saussure would only later attempt to spell out in discursive prose. He knew that the human mind could be fooled, and that art was self-expression and mimesis in one. I wonder if on some level Fragonard and his circled didn't understand themselves as mere drones, passing along the great memes of Western epistemology, answering to the larger social and cultural forces within the civilization.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was very well written but the photographs did not support the text. When Sheriff is talking about the shading on a painting and the picture of it is in black and white, it does not support it. Naming the various paint colors and having the author interpret them in a black and white picture does the author a real disservice.