Decadent Aesthetics and the Acrobat in French Fin de siècle

Jennifer Forrest

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032089928
• eBook ISBN: 9781000682465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In his discussion of clowns in nineteenth-century French painting from Jean-Léon Gérôme's 1857 La Sortie du bal masqué to Georges Rouault, art historian Francis Haskell wondered why they are so sad. The myth of the sad clown as an allegory for the unappreciated artist found echoes in the work of literary counterparts like Charles Baudelaire and his "Vieux saltimbanque" who seeks in vain a responsive public. For some, the attraction of the acrobatic clown for the creative imagination may have been his ability to embody the plight of the artist: these artistes generally led an ambulatory and uncertain existence. Other artists and writers, however, particularly the Decadents, perceived in the circus acrobat – including the acrobatic clown – a conceptual and performative tool for liberating their points of view from the prison-house of aesthetic convention. If authors' protagonists were themselves sometimes failures, their aesthetic innovations often produced exhilarating artistic triumphs. Among the works examined in this study are the circus posters of Jules Chéret, Thomas Couture's Pierrot and Harlequin paintings, Honoré Daumier's saltimbanque paintings, Edgar Degas's Miss Lala au Cirque Fernando, Édouard Manet's Un bar au Folies-Bergère, the pantomimes of the Hanlon-Lees troupe, and novels, short stories, and poems by Théodore de Banville, Edmond de Goncourt, J. K. Huysmans, Gustave Kahn, Jules Laforgue, Catulle Mendès, Octave Mirbeau, Jean Richepin, Edouard Rod, and Marcel Schwob.

1 1857, Part I

Plays with Sad Clowns

The year 1857 saw the publication of Théodore de Banville’s Odes funambulesques. That same year, Thomas Couture painted Le Duel après le bal masqué and Jean-Léon Gérôme La Sortie du bal masqué, both based ostensibly on the same event, a duel in the Bois de Boulogne after a masked ball.¹ And while art historians have been at pains to identify the origin date for a great many of Honoré Daumier’s drawings and paintings, one can safely assume that he drew or painted at the very least one of his circus arts-related subjects in that year.² What is certain is that while “clowns crowded the walls of the Salon,” the works of these five artists and writers contributed each in his own way to preparing a paradigm shift toward a modern aesthetic in which the funambule held a privileged position (119) (Figures 1.1 and 1.2).³

Figure 1.1 Thomas Couture, Le Duel après le bal masqué, 1857. The Wallace Collection, London.

Figure 1.2 Jean-Léon Gérôme, La Sortie du bal masqué, 1857. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

In the introduction to the special issue of Études françaises “1857. Un état de l’imaginaire littéraire,” Geneviève Sicotte identifies 1857 as an extraordinary year for literature. There appeared not only Banville’s Odes funambulesques, but also Jules Champfleury’s treatise on Le Réalisme, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. The trials for the latter two authors’ affront to public decency took place during that year as well. The historical moment was pivotal on multiple levels:

Tout se passe comme si les événements et les œuvres contribuaient à la donner pour une année-charnière au cours de laquelle s’exposent les grandes tensions qui structurent le champ littéraire au long du XIX^e siècle – tensions entre le romantisme et le réalisme, entre la poésie, le théâtre et le roman, entre les discours littéraires et journalistiques ou essayistiques, entre l’art et l’argent, entre l’art et la morale. (Sicotte 9)

The figure of the clown offered a model for the expression of many of these tensions. “Clowns are,” as Louisa E. Jones notes, “[…] figures of boundaries and crossroads” (25). Clowns from the circus or pantomime erase barriers, obscuring the lines separating persona and person, performer and spectator, and dream and reality (Jones 17, 20). Clowns are equally figures representative of crossroads. They establish sites at which shifting – aesthetic, semantic – may occur.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, clowns, depicted graphically or in literature, mirrored the social and cultural climate; in the second half, clowns and their acrobatic colleagues – funambules – became in many instances agents of social and cultural change.⁴ In the first half of the century, clowns functioned thematically: writers, in particular, imagined their problematic heroes as fools or jesters whose grotesque masks hid their princely qualities. A notable example is Victor Hugo’s Triboulet in Le Roi s’amuse (1832).⁵ In the second half of the century, funambules were figures of an existential doubling that placed them both within a specific historical moment as well as outside of time. They were increasingly transformation tools, too: artists and writers transposed the experience of the funambulesque into the very form of their works.⁶

It is not just a coincidence that funambule-centered works by Banville, Baudelaire, Couture, Gérôme, and Daumier appeared in the same year – 1857 – since mid-1850s French culture was saturated with funambules: Paul Legrand entertained audiences as Pierrot at the Folies-Nouvelles; Charles Deburau continued his father’s legacy as Pierrot at the Théâtre des Funambules until the late 1850s⁷; the Cirque de l’Impératrice (the future Cirque d’Été) and the Cirque Napoléon (the future Cirque d’Hiver) were at their height; and readers of illustrated journals were sure to enjoy caricatures featuring politicians as circus performers (Daumier) and commedia-inspired carnival revelers (Paul Gavarni). Starting in the 1850s, Pierrot imagery figured strongly in the “premières tentatives de marketing généralisé,” from “encre Deburau” (a reference probably to Charles Deburau) to Desfossé wallpaper reproducing Couture’s commedia-themed Souper à la Maison d’Or (1855) (Boime, Couture 302; Rykner 25). The ubiquity of the figure signaled its passage into the cultural imagination. This period also marked the beginning of a deeper, more complex association between artist/writer and the funambule, one that will extend into the late 1920s with the waning of Surrealism.

Formal innovations initiated by these artists and writers in 1857 anticipate Decadence. To Théodore de Banville, the Decadents will owe, among other things, the notion of imagining and even realizing formally the impossible as epitomized by a feat executed by an acrobatic clown. Banville proposed as well a unique conception of the real that has nothing to do with realism and everything to do with the manipulation of time and space that occurs uncannily during acrobatic performance. Decadents will trace the image of the “gouffre d’en haut” and “d’en bas” to Banville and Baudelaire, images that provoke a certain existential vertigo that will thread, for example, through the novels of Octave Mirbeau.⁸ Baudelaire cites his own experience of vertigo, one which occurs during a funambulesque performance or from crossing “la frontière du merveilleux” (377). With Daumier and Couture, one encounters troubling paradoxes that function like photons⁹: when the viewer approaches one of their funambule paintings or drawings as allegory, they behave like social commentary, and when one interprets them as anchored in a specific historical moment, they offer themselves instead as timeless symbols.

How and why, one could wonder justifiably, does Gérôme’s painting fit into this group? While art historians often include his painting in a discussion of the artist as sad clown, La Sortie du bal masqué was Gérôme’s sole contribution to the theme, and its dying clown hardly expresses the degraded condition of the artist vis-à-vis his public. One would be hard pressed to find in Gérôme’s work – a representative of the art pompier – the type and degree of innovation associated with the others. Nevertheless, he is discussed here because his one clown-themed painting, far from getting lost in the sea of clown paintings that one could find at the Salon, was so enormously popular an image throughout the rest of the nineteenth century that its conceptual weight would have been difficult for any artist revisiting the figure to shake.¹⁰

In his seminal “The Sad Clown: Some Notes on a 19th Century Myth,” Francis Haskell wonders parenthetically if Gérôme was the first artist to paint a sad clown with his La Sortie du bal masqué. “Sad Clowns,” as he notes, played a “significant role” in French painting beginning in the 1850s with Gérôme’s tableau and continuing into the twentieth century with works by Georges Rouault and Pablo Picasso, two painters with whom we customarily associate the figure as an allegory of the artist. Haskell does not place great value on Gérôme’s painting’s position as initiator of the sad clown myth: the painter did not identify with his dying Pierrot, nor does he invite the viewer to do so. Gérôme would represent, however, an actualization of the nascent trend. Haskell wonders, however, what factors trigger the clown’s sadness and why this figure’s unusual and unexpected melancholy emerges in art, particularly in the 1850s (3). Gérôme’s painting serves in Haskell’s essay primarily as a historical marker whose quality pales considerably in comparison to the handling of the very same subject by Couture, a greater painter, just a few months prior to Gérôme’s interpretation. If Haskell does not discuss the two very different treatments, it is because Couture’s painting depicts an earlier stage in the story of two dueling masqueraders and therefore does not offer an example of the sad clown.

In addition to identifying the significance of this particular historical moment, Haskell distinguishes two “distinct, but closely associated, contributions” to the myth of the sad clown, the second of which he finds in the series of works depicting fairground acrobats by Daumier from the late 1850s to the mid-1860s (13). For him, the perceived sadness of Daumier’s saltimbanques stems from the very real precariousness of their profession and itinerant existence.¹¹ The metaphysically sad clown and the economically vulnerable one, Haskell proposes, merge later in the century with Félix Larcher and Paul Margueritte’s efforts to revive classical pantomime, particularly with the creation of the Cercle Funambulesque in 1888 (13). I propose that there are less two distinct contributions that eventually come together than two temporally parallel variants with fundamentally unrelated ideological trajectories. Their paths cross in only a few clashing encounters during the last half of the century, encounters that, in keeping with the subject of both Gérôme’s and Couture’s paintings, I view as aesthetic duels. One thread follows a theatrical use of the sad clown theme, beginning with Jules Champfleury and his application of bourgeois realism to pantomime – a radical revision that is given visual authentication in Gérôme’s painting – and continuing through to the pantomimes of the Cercle Funambulesque. The other thread takes inspiration in the formal innovations of non-theatrical funambulesque performance, beginning with Banville, Baudelaire, Couture, and Daumier, and continuing through to early modernism.

If Gérôme had no investment in the figure of the sad clown, one wonders how fiercely independent artists of the likes of Banville, Baudelaire, Couture, Daumier, and the many artists and writers that followed them in the next forty years – in this instance, men in pursuit of creating nothing short of wholly original and modern works – were willing and able to work with the figure of the funambule. One need only think of the disdain many writers held for those objects that they deemed debased precisely for their easy accessibility and pervasiveness. For example, in Banville’s short story “Les Féeries du zinc” from 1853, the narrator categorically refuses to read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) precisely because of its ubiquity in Paris:

où il n’y a plus d’autre livre que l’Oncle Tom, plus d’autres gravures que les illustrations de l’Oncle Tom, où tous les théâtres ont joué de l’Oncle Tom, où les carafes, les verres, les foulards et les bas-reliefs d’armoires à glace représentent exclusivement l’Oncle Tom. (Pauvres saltimbanques 59)¹²

We find another notable example later in the century among the Decadents in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours (1884). In des Esseintes’s efforts to select jewels with which to incrust the shell of his tortoise, he dismisses many gems precisely because of their popularity among members of the lower middle classes. Diamonds had become “singulièrement commun[s] depuis que tous les commerçants en portent au petit doigt,” and topazes and amethysts, the latter especially, were anathema because one could find them “aux oreilles sanguines et aux mains tubuleuses des bouchères” (133–34). So, how is it possible that, given the saturating presence of funambules in the French, primarily Parisian middle-class culture of the 1850s, these artists and writers adopted what should likely have been a highly unattractive subject by virtue of its very ubiquity and commerciality?

One consideration is the extent to which relations with the marketplace and an awareness of having to please an audience provoked engagement with the figure of the funambule. The works from 1857 by Banville, Baudelaire, Daumier, Couture, and Gérôme address this encounter in some fashion. As regards the first three of these artists/writers, the tension between the quest for artistic authenticity and the demands of the market will be discussed more extensively in Chapter 2. For Couture, his series of Pierrot and Harlequin paintings, which signaled his renunciation of grande peinture, were a source both of personal and aesthetic fulfillment as well as ambivalence toward the fact that they were commissioned by private buyers and were completed with a view to financial gain. As for Gérôme, in his review of La Sortie du bal masqué, the art critic Edmond About claims that the artist seemed less interested in “dessiner que de réussir” (69). Celebrity and financial success so appealed to the painter that, About concluded, he sought only to “renouveler ses succès sans renouveler son talent” (77). We find the difference between these two artists in that the former faced the market with hesitation and trepidation but accepted it as a reality of modern artistic production, while the latter embraced and exploited it.

We can trace to the 1850s the sources of the Decadents’ own conflicted relation to the market. The image of the Decadent author who mak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 1857, Part I: Plays with Sad Clowns
• 2 1857, Part II: Making Clown Faces
• 3 1879, Part I: Suspending Identity with the Hanlon-Lees
• 4 1879, Part II: Time and Space and the Hanlon-Lees Effect
• 5 The Paradox of the Lady Acrobat
• 6 The Poetics of Pantomime and Circus, Part I: Jules Laforgue
• 7 The Poetics of Pantomime and Circus, Part II: Octave Mirbeau
• Epilogue
• Index