Issue Print Test | Nonsite.Org
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
ISSUE #14: NINETEENTH- CENTURY FRANCE NOW 14 nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities affiliated with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2015 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668 1 EDITORIAL BOARD Bridget Alsdorf Ruth Leys James Welling Jennifer Ashton Walter Benn Michaels Todd Cronan Charles Palermo Lisa Chinn, editorial assistant Rachael DeLue Robert Pippin Michael Fried Adolph Reed, Jr. Oren Izenberg Victoria H.F. Scott Brian Kane Kenneth Warren FOR AUTHORS ARTICLES: SUBMISSION PROCEDURE Please direct all Letters to the Editors, Comments on Articles and Posts, Questions about Submissions to [email protected]. Potential contributors should send submissions electronically via nonsite.submishmash.com/Submit. Applicants for the B-Side Modernism/Danowski Library Fellowship should consult the full proposal guidelines before submitting their applications directly to the nonsite.org submission manager. Please include a title page with the author’s name, title and current affiliation, plus an up-to-date e-mail address to which edited text and correspondence will be sent. Please also provide an abstract of 100-150 words and up to five keywords or tags for searching online (preferably not words already used in the title). Please do not submit a manuscript that is under consideration elsewhere. ARTICLES: MANUSCRIPT FORMAT Accepted essays should be submitted as Microsoft Word documents (either .doc or .rtf), although .pdf documents are acceptable for initial submissions.. Double-space manuscripts throughout; include page numbers and one-inch margins. All notes should be formatted as endnotes. Style and format should be consistent with The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. or above. Second and later references to a previously cited work should be made in the text, giving the author’s last name and the title of the work. Do not use op. cit. POETRY: SUBMISSION PROCEDURE We accept unsolicited poetry via nonsite.submishmash.com/Submit. Please submit your work in .doc or .pdf formats. Your submission should be a single file consisting of no more than ten pages, and may include, if you wish, a cover letter listing a few of your recent publications. We consider only previously unpublished work, and while we encourage simultaneous submissions, we request that you notify us ([email protected]) immediately if your work is accepted elsewhere. MEDIA AND PERMISSIONS Authors must obtain permissions for illustrations that require permissions. A 300 dpi file (JPEG, GIF, PIC, or TIFF) of each illustration will be needed, though a legible scan is acceptable for initial submission. Hyperlinks will need correct URL addresses; video clips should be in MPEG, MOV or Quicktime formats; sound files should be high-quality MP3s. Nonsite is subject to the same copyright restrictions and intellectual property laws as all publications. It is the contributor’s responsibility to obtain necessary permissions to reproduce images, video clips, and sound files in the article text. Permission is not required for the inclusion of hyperlinks; the use of links may offer a more efficient way of including video, music, and image files. Image captions should include appropriate credits and permissions. ABOUT NONSITE nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities affiliated with Emory College of Arts and Sciences. 2015 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668. 2 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #14: NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE NOW (WINTER 2014/2015) ISSUE #14: NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE NOW WINTER 2014/2015 TABLE OF CONTENTS ISSUE DESCRIPTION Issue #14: Nineteenth-Century France Now Art, Technology, Culture . 8 ARTICLES When I was a Telegrapher . 12 By Richard Taws (University College London) Capital in the Nineteenth Century: Edgar Degas’s Portraits at the Stock Exchange in 1879 . 48 By Marnin Young (Yeshiva University) Bonnard’s Sidewalk Theater . 76 By Bridget Alsdorf (Princeton University) How Orientalist Painters Die . 112 By Marc Gotlieb (Williams College) Gérôme, Rodin, and Sculpture’s Interior . 144 By Gülru Çakmak (University of Massachusetts Amherst) Portraits of Fantasy, Portraits of Fashion . 166 By Susan L. Siegfried (University of Michigan) Visible Specters, Images from the Atmosphere . 214 By Nancy Locke (Penn State University) 4 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #14: NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE NOW (WINTER 2014/2015) ISSUE DESCRIPTION ISSUE DESCRIPTION 6 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #14: NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE NOW (WINTER 2014/2015) ISSUE DESCRIPTION ISSUE #14: NINETEENTH- CENTURY FRANCE NOW ART, TECHNOLOGY, CULTURE In this issue, nonsite features new work on 19th-century French art and visual culture, from telegraphy to lithography, Orientalists to Post-Impressionists, Manet to Degas. Edited by Bridget Alsdorf. 8 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #14: NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE NOW (WINTER 2014/2015) ARTICLES ARTICLES 10 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #14: NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE NOW (WINTER 2014/2015) ARTICLES WHEN I WAS A TELEGRAPHER RICHARD TAWS Discussing his adopted city of Paris, where he lived from 1830 until his death in 1837, German writer Ludwig Börne described it as “the telegraph of the past, the microscope of the present, and the telescope of the future.” 1 Börne’s technological analogy is, to the modern reader, at once deeply familiar and oddly discordant. City-as-microscope makes a certain amount of sense as a vivid descriptor for a world becoming accustomed to new forms of spectacular realism, even if microscopy itself was hardly a concept or technique specific to the nineteenth century. 2 Telescope- town also works, the predictive powers of an urban milieu that drove not only industry but also novelties in art and fashion aligning with our expectations about the modern city’s future-oriented telos. But “the telegraph of the past”? Why would telegraphy look backwards, and what kind of past might it communicate? Furthermore, while the other two devices are avowedly visual, telegraphy resonates for us as a technology grounded in a turn away from representation, a marker of the modern world’s gradual drift towards elusive, immaterial, virtual presence. Telegraphy seems to mark an effective victory of writing over image-making, visual culture abandoned by the speed with which information could now be transmitted and by the inability of the telegraph to convert a visual field into code. 3 12 RICHARD TAWS - WHEN I WAS A TELEGRAPHER Fig. 1. Télégraphe de Chappe, cross-section of apparatus, from Louis Figuier, Les merveilles de la science, ou description populaire des inventions modernes (Paris: Furne, Jouvet, 1868) But the telegraph that Börne had in mind was, in fact, avowedly visual in character. Börne’s analogy was not with electrical telegraphy, but with the Chappe optical system, which operated in France from 1794 until 1855. 4 The longevity of the Chappe telegraph—introduced by Claude Chappe and his brothers at the height of the revolutionary Terror and still current in the aftermath of the 1830 Revolution—meant that it was, arguably, 13 NONSITE.ORG - ISSUE #14: NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE NOW (WINTER 2014/2015) ARTICLES able to offer a more convincing metaphor for historical thought than the technological and social caesura suggested by electrical telegraphy. Chappe’s system took the form of a series of windmill-like metal “arms” set atop towers and prominent buildings. 5 In Paris, these included at various points the Louvre, Saint-Sulpice, Saint-Eustache and Montmartre. The arms of the telegraph were manipulated by an operator (known as a stationnaire) to form a series of discrete shapes, each of which was encoded with words or phrases (Fig. 1). An operator at the next station viewed the signals through a telescope, reproduced them, and transmitted them down the line to the next station, until after passing through a number of relays the messages were transcribed and decoded at their final destination. Associated irrevocably with the Revolution and Empire—indeed, promoted in its early years as especially revolutionary in character—this system was remarkably successful and wide-ranging, spreading for over 5000 kilometres within France. 6 The telegraph became a ubiquitous sight, altering significantly skylines across the country, transforming the role of architecture and reconfiguring the ways in which landscape, both urban and rural, was perceived; a range of contemporary observers commented on its visual effect. In Paris, the telegraph, used almost exclusively for military signals, was a continuous presence on the horizon, transmitting its secret messages just above normal lines of sight (Fig. 2). By the 1830s the telegraph was viewed increasingly as an instrument of a repressive state. Nonetheless, via association with the telegraph, the city figures in Börne’s neat one-liner as a site where the ghost of the 1789 Revolution might appear—in material, technologized form—in the guise of 1830. Moreover, the comparison with telegraphy presented the metropolis as a scene for the reanimation of spectres of all kinds. 14 RICHARD TAWS - WHEN I WAS A TELEGRAPHER Fig. 2. Vue de l’église St Sulpice, 1840, coloured etching, 31 x 46cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. From Chappe onwards the systematization of telegraphy has been understood as contributing to an acceleration of life that has been taken to be a dominant characteristic of the nation- state, of modernity, and of a defining technological transformation; what media theorist Friedrich Kittler, comparing the comparative