The Criticism of Salons. Edited by Mary Pittaluga, Florence, L'Arco Publishers, 1948

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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La critica dei Salons
[The Criticism of Salons]
Edited by Mary Pittaluga

Florence, L’Arco Publishers, 1948

Eugène Delacroix, The Massacre at Chios, 1824, Paris, Louvre Museum
Source: Wikimedia Commons

An anthology for post-fascist Italy

In the first few years after World War II the Italian publishing world experiences a flurry of initiatives determined by the collapse of fascism and the renewed air of freedom that one can experience again. In this context, we note the publication of an independent publishing house, whose life was unfortunately not long: the publishing house L’Arco, based in Florence.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, The bridge at Narni, 1826, Paris, Louvre Museum
Source: Wikimedia Commons

In 1948 L’Arco gave rise to a book series entitled Biblioteca di critica d’arte (Library of art criticism), of which only two volumes were released: this Criticism of the Salons, edited by Mary Pittaluga and, in 1949, La critica d’arte moderna: la pura visibilità (The Criticism of Modern Art: the Pure Visibility), by Roberto Salvini, whose review by Anna Maria Brizio was already proposed in this blog. To fully understand the importance of these publications, one has to understand, first of all, that they were among the earliest anthologies of art literature published in Italy. The merit of the Criticism of the Salons, specifically, is first and foremost objective: to allow the public of the time (including my father, who was nineteen) to directly read texts which were of difficult availability at the time. All this is obviously framed within Benedetto Croce’s idealism. Croce had been a crucial point of reference for the non-Marxist anti-fascism, and after the war was extensively re-evaluated. In a completely symmetrical manner, Lionello Venturi’s ideas found new space. He was - we should never forget - one of only twelve Italian academics who refused to swear loyalty to fascism in 1931, losing thereby the teaching assignment and moving to Paris and then to New York. In the United States, Venturi had published a major work in 1936, i.e. the History of Art Criticism, which was immediately translated into French, but was published in Italy only in 1945, under the title Storia della critica d’arte. The History of Art Criticism was printed in Italy by Edizioni U in the series 'Giustizia e Libertà' (Justice and Freedom). The title of the series (‘Justice and Freedom’ was an Italian anti-fascist resistance movement), says all about Venturi’s ideas; this was part of the initiatives of a group of intellectuals who, right after the war, was inspired by the Partito d’Azione (Actionist Party), and which conceived political engagement within professional life as a key component in everyday life. Hence the interest of Venturi for modern art, presented in a series of publications, and in particular his focus on the Impressionists [1].

Mary Pittaluga was one of the first students of Lionello Venturi, and also cooperated a long time with his father Adolfo [2]. She took charge of the editing work of this Criticism of Salons. Of course, the volume has its core element in the analysis of texts written in response to the advent of the Impressionists, but actually it is an anthology starting with Diderot and finishing around 1880.

Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849 (destroyed during World War II)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

As the Eurovision Song Contest

The idea of ​​a periodic exhibition of paintings produced by the best French painters (initially choosing them only among the Academy members) was actually an initiative already launched under Louis XIV. Since late seventeenth century, and with a completely irregular frequency, exhibitions were organised at the "Salon Carré" at the Louvre (hence the common name of Salon to identify this type of initiative). In XVIII century there were around fifty Salons. As from 1833, however, was institutionalized the annual exhibition which usually took place at the Louvre and lasted three months. Quickly - it must be said - the Salons became like our Eurovision Song Contests, involving the large public into authentic diatribes. Everything was disputed: the admitted and excluded artists; the accepted and rejected paintings; the high or low quality of individual art works; and even the location where they were placed in the Louvre. The disputes were preferably hosted in the daily or otherwise periodic press (whether specialized or not). The one who opened this genre - and was in fact the forerunner of militant criticism - was Denis Diderot in the second half of the eighteenth century. Not surprisingly, Ms Pittaluga’s anthology begins with him. Especially in the following century, the reviewers of the Salons were philosophers, poets, writers and not only stakeholders in the world of art in the strict sense.

Of course, the Salons directly originated from the academic world (in fact, the selection of the art works was made by a jury where members of the Academy had a dominant role). One should not wonder, therefore, if the choice of the artists who participated was rarely dictated by courageous choices, and far more often by traditionalist guidelines. And just like at the Eurovision Song Contest, the Salons also saw the ephemeral triumph of artists who today have fallen inexorably into oblivion.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, The Apotheosis of Homer, 1827, Paris, Louvre Museum
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Overall, collecting the essays and articles written on the occasion of the exhibitions helped to define in a clear manner the intersection and overlap of art tastes, and the conflicts they generated: neo-classicism, romanticism, realism, art for art, impressionism and symbolism find their place in the anthology by Mary Pittaluga and describe the overall trends of French art in a significant century as the nineteenth one. All styles find advocates who support or opponents who dismiss them. Writings such as those of Baudelaire, who boosted Delacroix, or Emile Zola, who stood openly in favour of the Impressionists (so that the newspaper for which he wrote fired him) have become famous and are available today with extreme ease. It was not so – I am repeating it - at the time the volume was released. French art criticism in the nineteenth century was so anchored to the Salons, that the term Salon itself acquired a new meaning and, instead of indicating a specific exhibition, became synonymous of any art-related critical essay. The "salons" (with a small s) became a literary genre also encompassing exhibitions held outside official occasions, and indeed often in opposition to the latter. Some examples: the famous Salon des Refusés, organized in 1864 to house the works of the artists rejected by the Academy, including Manet (with his Luncheon on the Grass), Monet, Whistler, Degas and Renoir; or the exhibition of the "independent artists" at the facilities provided by the photographer Nadar in 1874 (two key dates in the history of Impressionism). Of course, the anthology of Pittaluga refers to the "salons" in this second sense, i.e. it includes writings commenting not only the exhibitions of the Academy, but also exhibitions that have made the history of world art.

Édouard Manet, Luncheon on the Grass, 1863, Paris, Orsay Museum
Source: Wikimedia Commons

In all cases, whatever the views expressed, emerges from the book the birth of a militant criticism, dwelling on contemporary art. The real purpose of the book is to contrast this new-born militant criticism with the inexorable decline of Neoclassicism, guilty of having put a doctrinal cap to any critical judgment. The real object of Pittaluga’s arrows (and before it, of Lionello Venturi and historicist critics in general) is a system that imposed judging contemporary works of art according to strict criteria based on the (alleged) aesthetic norms of antiquity. Also a militant thesis, as we see, which was corrected in the following decades.

James Whistler, Symphony in White No. 1 (The White Girl), 1862, Washington, National Gallery of Art
Source: Wikimedia Commons

A review

Inside the volume is preserved a review published in Il Giornale della Sera on 22 June 1949, and signed G.G. Il Giornale della Sera used to be an independent newspaper published in Rome in the early postwar years. Unfortunately, I do not know the identity of G.G. If readers had suggestions about it, I would be indeed grateful if they could contact me. This is the text of the review:

“The Criticism of Salons” by Mary Pittaluga

by G. G. 

Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872, Paris, Marmottan Monet Museum

Source: Wikimedia Commons

"Lionello Venturi and the authoress of this book (published by «L’Arco», Florence, 1949) undoubtedly are, for Italy, the main disseminators and interpreters of critical thought on fine arts, especially in the foundational phase of modernity. To illustrate fully this critical thinking, a suitable anthology was still missing, where lovers of aesthetic problems, fans of applied literature, curious of developments or controversies in the history of the directions of verbalized taste and finally critics themselves could find the so often mentioned written examples under their eyes, without being obliged to simply refer to the "hearsay." "The Criticism of Salons" fills precisely this gap and does it egregiously, despite the difficulties of finding the presented essays, thus making a valuable service to all, especially to those experts – i.e. most of them – who contracted the habit of hiding under specious forms the "human respect" of their specific ignorance on the topic.

The anthology offered to us by Ms Pittaluga begins with Diderot and ends with André Gide. The structured sequencing of the writings places, so to speak, has the central axis in Baudelaire [note of the editor: a few years earlier, in 1945, Enrico Somaré had published Tutte le pagine di critica d’arte (All pages of art criticism) by Baudelaire]. This was not so much due to his genial discovery or lyrical representation, especially of Delacroix’s work, but above all because he was the first lieutenant of the "partisan criticism," to which basically - in the wake of Lionello Venturi - adheres to the author. The root of her accession to Baudelaire's point of view lays in the postulates of Croce’s aesthetics. Accordingly, when assessing, it is not allowed to escape the always vague reactions of the feelings and thus of the emotional aura, which can change from season to season (even if Croce himself liquidated all "poetic" trends). It is preferable, in any way, to “interpret the art of any time” by starting with ''the appreciation of contemporary art” instead of "judging modern works according to the principles of the ancient works." Nevertheless, in my personal opinion it would be even better, if possible, to judge according to principles which are valid for the ancient art, no less than for the modern one, i.e. principles with a universalistic nature and nevertheless reliable (despite the obvious frame of philosophical historicity, on which they must be based on).

These notations on Ms Pittaluga’s views about the kind of criticism do not want to take away the discerning merits she had in setting the writings to be published. Highly instructive are the 'salons' in the late eighteenth century and, very nearly, 1880; nor only the examples of Baudelaire, but also the essays by Stendhal, de Musset, Fromentin, Thoré, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Gautier, Mantz, Duranty. The reader's attention will of course be focused on those critics who variously reacted to the Impressionists and therefore, first of all, to Zola. The authoress made very well to specifically reserve a large space to the "Salons" in 1877. It was the decisive moment for the new art and therefore for the critical orientations. For these qualities the anthology of Pittaluga, enlightened by her opening remarks, is for many aspects a useful and culturally well documented guide for everyone. "

Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Onions, Paris, Orsay Museum
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Index

For completeness, please find enclosed the index of the anthologized passages:

Denis Diderot (1713-1784)

Letter to Grimm

Boucher

Chardin

The portrait of Denis Diderot by Michele Van Loo

Guillaume Guizot (1787-1874)

Sculpture and painting

Henry Beyle Stendhal (1783-1842)

Process to the school of David

Delacroix and "Le Journal des Débats"

Ingres

Prosper Mérimée Alias an English Painter (1803-1870)

Descamps

Gustave Planche (1808-1857)

Ingres and Delacroix

Victor Schoelcher (1804-1893)

Delacroix

Artists, audiences and critics

Alfred de Musset (1810-1857)

On the Salon, Delacroix, and Robert

Louis Peisse (1803-1880)

The sculpture at the 1844 Salon

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

Delacroix

Corot

Meissonier

What is criticism for?

Horace Vernet

Ingres

Eugène Fromentin (1820-1876)

Decamps, Delacroix and O. Vernet

On landscape

Théofile Thoré (1807-1869)

Delacroix and Gigoux

Letter to Béranger

Edmond et Jules de Goncourt (1822-96; 1830-70)

Comments on some painters

Theophile Gautier (1811-1872)

Ingres

Delacroix

Léon Lagrange (1828-1868)

On Meissonier and history painting

Paul Mantz (1821-1895)

On realism in painting

Corot

Émile Zola (1840-1902)

The artistic moment

Manet

Naturalism at the 1880 Salon 

Philippe Burty (1830-1890)

Notes on a few impressionist painters

Again on impressionist painters

Victor Cherbouliez (1829-1899)

The Impressionists in Rue La Peletier

Armand Silvestre (1837-1919)

The exhibition in Rue La Peletier

Georges Rivière (1855-1943)

Renoir, Monet, Degas

Cézanne, Pissarro and some other

Duranty (1833-1880)

Fantin-Latour

Georges Lafenestre (1837-1919)

The "independents"

Puvis de Chavennes

Edmond Renoir (1849-1944)

"Twenty rows of portrait" by Renoir

Charles Ephrussi (1849-1905)

On Degas and others

Jovis-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907)

Degas

Pissarro and Gauguin

Jules Laforgue (1860-1887)

Böcklin and Klinger

André Michel (1853-1925)

Modern life and art

Neo-classicism and modern art

Alfred de Lostalot (1837-1898)

Courbet

Henry Bouchot 

The incision at the 1893 Salon

André Gide (1869-1951)

Walking through the Salon d'Automne

NOTES

[1] For a review of the writings of Lionello Venturi on impressionism see Lionello Venturi, La via dell’Impressionismo. Da Manet a Cèzanne (The Path of Impressionism. From Manet to Cézanne). Introduction by Nello Ponente, Turin, Einaudi Publishers, 1970.

[2] We recall here the Polish edition of the Book of the Art by Cennino Cennini (Florence, 1933), which included a letter by Adolfo Venturi and seven pages of introduction by Mary Pittaluga.