Cubism Celtism and Body Politic

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Cubism, Celtism, and the Body Politic Author(s): Mark Antliff Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Dec., 1992), pp. 655-668Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3045916Accessed: 02-09-2015 11:30 UTC

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Cubism, Celtism, and the Body Politic

Mark Antlif

In 1913, when Albert Gleizes published his essay, "Cubisme et la tradition," in the first two issues of Montjoie!-the self-styled "organ of French artistic imperialism"-he en- tered into a heated nationalist debate over France's cultural

identity.' With the election of Raymond Poincare to the

presidency in January 1913, France adopted an increasingly militarist posture internationally, and within the country itself a form of cultural nationalism became all-pervasive. The historian Eugen Weber has traced the origins of this cultural rhetoric to the bellicose pronouncements of the

royalist movement, Action Frangaise, and recent art historical discourse has followed his lead.2 Yet little has been said by either historians or art historians about the equally nationalist ideology of self-proclaimed leftists and their role in the influential debate over cultural politics and national destiny.3 In fact, "Cubisme et la tradition" places Cubism in the context of a hitherto unnoticed aspect of this nationalist

dialogue by adopting the anti-royalist, anarcho-syndicalist racial ideology of an organization known as the Celtic

League (founded in 1911). In that essay, Gleizes identifies the French proletariat as the incarnation of a "Celtic" national genius, condemning both "Latinism" and monar- chism as foreign to France's true racial essence. By politiciz- ing the message of Du Cubisme (1912), co-authored with Jean Metzinger and consequently homogenized, Gleizes presents himself as the ideological voice for Cubism in the public sphere, a logical extension of his previous involvement in the

Abbaye de Creteil, a utopian commune of artists and writers.4 His attempt to redefine Cubism politically both signals the central importance of cultural nationalism and reveals the complexity and range of the debate over national

identity on the eve of the First World War. In his pioneering dissertation of 1981 and recent book,

Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925, Kenneth E. Silver first explored the relation of right-wing politics to the Cubist avant-garde.

Focusing on the period of World War I and its aftermath, Silver pointed out that the rise of cultural nationalism among the avant-garde in France was defined largely in terms of a rhetorical embrace of the supposed "Latin" and "classical" roots of the French race on the part of the wartime Cubist movement. Other scholars have endorsed Silver's findings that references to national self-identity in Cubist-related

writings of the post-1914 era were made in response to the Action Frangaise's repeated accusation that those who did not embrace their monarchist centralism were themselves anti-French, indeed pro-German. Thus in Cubism and Its Enemies, Christopher Green, citing Silver, concluded that

during the War years the alliance

between an ideal of Classicism which was essentially Latin and a deep sense of French identity propagated on the far

Right before the war by Charles Maurras and Action

Frangaise had been so thoroughly and widely absorbed in France that it had become acceptable even to those who were obviously hostile to the political Right . . . From an initial impetus on the Right, a simplistic tendency to

oppose French and Germanic culture in terms of an

opposition between latin order and barbaric anarchy, classic reason and Gothic mysticism had become the dominant.5

While Silver and Green thus interpret the avant-garde's approval of Maurrasian classicism during the War as a

strategy of appeasement in the face of nationalist condemna- tions of Cubism as "foreign," some art historians have

conjectured that avant-garde attempts to appease the right had their origins in the burgeoning nationalism of the

pre-War period. Indeed, this rapprochement is the subject of Robert Lubar's recent analysis, in On Classic Ground, of the

reception of the Puteaux Cubist exhibition held at the Galeries Dalmau in Barcelona in spring 1912. Lubar cites

This study, delivered at the Annual Meeting of the College Art Association in Chicago in 1992, derives from research I undertook in Paris in 1988, which was subsequently incorporated into my dissertation. Research and writing of the dissertation were facilitated by a Predoctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a Mary Davis Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. My thanks go to Michael Fried, Linda Henderson, my advisor Robert Herbert, Patricia Leighten, and Richard Shiff for their help and advice at various stages of this project.

Unless otherwise noted, the English translations in the text are mine.

'Gleizes, 15-23. All quotations that follow are from the reprinted essay. 2 E. Weber, The Natzonalzst Revzval zn France, 1905-1914, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959. The political interpretation of Cubism was first broached by Kenneth E. Silver in his ground-breaking "Esprit de Corps: The Great War and French Art, 1914-1925," Ph.D. diss., Yale Univer- sity, 1981. For more recent studies of the interrelation of politics and Cubism, see D. Cottington, "Cubism and the Politics of Culture," Ph.D. diss., Courtauld Institute, University of London, 1985; C. Green, Cubism and Its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916-1928,

New Haven, 1987; P. Leighten, Re-Orderzng the Unzverse: Pzcasso and Anarchzsm, 1897-1914, Princeton, 1989; K. Silver, Esprzt de Corps: The Art of the Parzszan Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925, Prince- ton, 1989; Tate Gallery, On Classzc Ground: Pzcasso, Leger, de Chzrzco and the New Classzczsm, 1910-1930, exh. cat., intro. E. Cowling, London, 1990; and R. Lubar, "Cubism, Classicism, and Ideology: The Exposici6 d'Art Cubista in Barcelona and French Cubist Criticism," in On Classzc Ground, 309-323. 3For an analysis of such criticism, see P. Mazgaj, The Actzon Fran(azse and Revolutzonary Syndzcalism, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979. 4 See D. Robbins, "From Symbolism to Cubism: The Abbaye de Cr6teil," Art Journal, Winter 1963-64, 111-117. Gleizes later noted, in "The Abbey of Cr6teil, A Communistic Experiment," The Modern School, Oct. 1918, 300-315, that the Abbaye failed largely due to the anarcho- individualist orientation of its members, a complaint that helps explain his subsequent shift to the collectivist theory of the Celtic League. 5 Green (as in n. 2), 190; see also Silver, 1989 (as in n. 2), 209.



656 THE ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 1992 VOLUME LXXIV NUMBER 4

references to the "Latin" genealogy of Cubism proffered by Metzinger in 1911 and associates this with the Cubist critic

Roger Allard's reference, in the November 1910 edition of L'Art lhbre, to the Cubists' desire to broaden "tradition in the direction of a future classicism." On this basis, Lubar asserts that the classicism of the Puteaux Cubists echoes that of the Maurras-oriented Catalan critics Eugeni d'Ors and Josep Maria Junoy.6 Among those judgments Lubar considers as indicative of such political "affinities" are the location by the Maurrasian d'Ors of Cubism "within the French Cartesian

tradition, emphasizing the overiding intellectual and mathe- matical order of Cubist painting," and his association of Cubism with the "collective, Latin values" championed by Maurras.7 Moreover, d'Ors is said to echo the critique of

Impressionism developed by Allard when he located Impres- sionism in the latter half of Maurras's classical/romantic

equation. "Structuralism," said d'Ors, "represents the exact

opposite of Impressionism. The latter, romantic, maintained the cult of Sensation. The former, classic, maintains the cult of Reason."8 "Catalan Cubist criticism" therefore "offers

many insights into the ways in which the conservative and

counterrevolutionary arguments of writers like Maurice

Barrbs and Charles Maurras could be used to define a broad cultural politics." Lubar concludes, furthermore, that "the

ways in which Cubist criticism engage[s] in discourses of

pre-war French nationalism may point to the essentially conservative elements in the movement, as Eugeni d'Ors

immediately grasped. As Cubist painting retreated into

idealism, Cubist criticism more visibly reflected the cultural conservatism that was its counterpart."'9

Indeed, it could be inferred that the Cubist "retreat" was in fact a total rout, for in the history of French modernism charted above, the "nationalist discourse" of pre-War Cub- ism is deemed compatible with the Cartesian classicism of d'Ors and Maurras, with no hint that its ideological import differed from the "conservative and counterrevolutionary" views advocated by the Action Franpaise. Cubist classicism would seem to be a perfect vessel for the Action Frangaise's reactionary ideas on culture and society.

This conflation of Maurrasian classicism and avant-guerre Cubist classicism, however, does not stand up under close

scrutiny. Besides expounding a Cartesian definition of classicism in the pre-War years, Maurras and his literary allies Pierre Lasserre and Jean-Marc Bernard condemned the

Symbolist movement as anti-rationalist, exemplified by the

Symbolists' allegiance to the intuitionist philosophy of Henri

Bergson.'o Such criticism implicated the Cubists, for between 1910 and 1914 the Bergsonists Gleizes and Metzinger published in Symbolist-oriented journals such as Vers et prose, Les Bandeaux d'or, and Pan; additionally their literary supporters Roger Allard, Andr6 Salmon, and Guillaume Apollinaire were all major figures in the neo-Symbolist milieu." In other

words, by using Cartesianism to disparage the still vital

Symbolist movement, Maurras was in fact condemning its

pictorial bedfellow, Cubism. In response, Gleizes and his

neo-Symbolist allies Roger Allard and Tancrede de Visan

self-consciously opposed the royalists' trumpeting of Carte- sian classicism with a counter-definition of classicism based on Bergson's anti-Cartesian doctrine of intuition.12 For

example, when Allard defined Cubism as leading to a "future classicism" in the neo-Symbolist journal L'Art libre (Novem- ber 1910), he did so by claiming that the rhythmical properties of a Cubist canvas reflected the musical structure inherent in la duree, a Bergsonian term for the temporal flow of consciousness, which Allard and others related to Mal- larme's poetic theory. Allard defined Cubism as classical because he judged the Cubists' innovative style to be repre- sentative of their "intuitive" grasp of the collective duree of the French people.'3 Moreover, on the basis of their Berg- sonism, Allard and his colleagues claimed that this French

esprit could not be rationally discerned, and in the process they declared Maurras's correlation of classicism with ratio-

nality to be invalid. As I will show, this theme was further

developed by Gleizes's associate at the Abbaye de Cr6teil, Henri Martin Barzun, who combined the notion of Bergso- nian classicism with Celtic nationalism in an essay of 1912.

By the time Gleizes published his definitive nationalist statement, "Le Cubisme et la tradition" (1913), he had followed Barzun in joining the Bergsonian conception of intuitive classicism to a doctrine of "Celtic" nationalism that served further to undermine the Action Frangaise's "Latin"

ideology. Far from acquiescing to the conservative forces of the day, Gleizes and his neo-Symbolist colleagues confronted the right-wing Action Frangaise with an alternative definition of national identity allied to France's revolutionary tradition. In the process, intellectualism, Cartesianism, logic, and the

heritage of Greco-Roman culture were all rejected as foreign to a French Celtic esprit, whose "classical" legacy was seen to reside in the French Gothic and Romantic eras. Nothing

6 Lubar (as in n. 2), 314. See J. Metzinger, "Cubisme et tradition," Paris-Journal, Aug. 1911, unpag.; for Allard's description of Cubism as embodying a "future classicism," see R. Allard, "Au Salon d'Automne de Paris," L'Art libre, Nov 1910, 441-443.

Lubar (as in n. 2), 316. 8 Xenius (Eugenm d'Ors), "De l'Estructura," La Veu de Catalunya, June 1, 1911; quoted in Lubar, 309.

9 Lubar, 315 and 321.

10 Thus d'Ors, in speaking of the Cubist aesthetic in "Del Cubisme a l'Estructuralisme," La Veu de Catalunya, Feb. 1912, 6 (quoted in Lubar, 320), declared that "nothing could be further, in its effect, from [Bergson's] ideological position, from his anti-intellectualism, and from his cult of intuition and reality, than the art of these innovators, which is all abstraction, reason, and complete disdain for the flux and mere appearance of life. In reality, the Cubists are, at the core of their conceptions and methods, anti-Bergsomnians." That d'Ors considered his rejection of Bergsonian intuition in the name of classicism to be "ideological," points to a key issue missing from Lubar's consideration in his essay: the political import of anti-Bergsonism within the cultural politics of the Action Frangaise. For examples of attacks on both Bergson and Symbolism by prominent members of the Action Frangaise, see P. Lasserre, "La Philosophie de M. Bergson," LActwon fran(ase, Mar. 1911, 165-183; J.-M. Bernard, "Discours sur le Symbolisme," Les Guipes, May 1910, 200-213; and C. Maurras, "APropos de Bergson, Action fran(aise, Feb. 11, 1914, 1.

SSee K. Cornell, The Post-Symbolist Period: French Poetzc Currents, 1900-1920, New Haven, 1958, passim; Robbins (as in n. 4) considers the relations between the Symbolist movement and Puteaux Cubism. For an analysis of the Bergsomnism of Gleizes and Metzinger and its relation to neo-Symbolist theories, see my "Bergson and Cubism: A Reassessment," Art Journal, Winter 1988, 341-349. 12 See my "The Relevance of Bergson: Creative Intuition, Fauvism and Cubism," Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1990, in particular chap. 4, "Cubism and the Body Politic: The Classical Paradigm." 13 See my discussion of Allard's "Au Salon d'Automne de Paris" in chap. 4 of my dissertation (as in n. 12).



CUBISM, CELTISM, AND THE BODY POLITIC 657

could be further from the classicism of Charles Maurras or of

Eugeni d'Ors.

Indeed, between the summer of 1911 and the publication of Gleizes's "Cubisme et la tradition" in February 1913, the

neo-Symbolist avant-garde became allied with a Celtic nationalist movement. As I will demonstrate, the praise of Celtic roots and Gothic culture as "truly French" in Cubo-Symbolist circles was part of a concerted attempt to counter the

trumpeting of Greco-Latin culture by the Action Frangaise. In the spring of 1911, the linguist Robert Pelletier had founded the Ligue Celtique Frangaise and the journal L'Etendard celtzque to expound the later Symbolist movement's anti-Greco-Latin agenda. By the time L'Etendard

celtique had been replaced by the Revue des nations in

February 1913, the league's membership had expanded to include many figures associated with the Puteaux Cubists, the most prominent being Gleizes's and Metzinger's close friend Alexandre Mercereau; the founder of Vers et prose, Paul Fort; and the publisher of Du Cubisme, Eugene Figuibre. Gleizes painted a Cubist portrait of Figuibre in 1913,14 which

eulogizes the writings of Celtic League supporters Fort, Barzun, and Mercereau, whose book titles surround the central figure-telling evidence of Gleizes's familiarity with this political milieu. During 1913 Fernand Divoire, who contributed regularly to Barzun's Poeme et drame as well as

Montjoie!, the Cubist critic Olivier-Hourcade, and Bergson's major Symbolist apologist Tancrede de Visan all joined the movement. Pelletier in turn wrote for Potme et drame, and he

joined his Celtic League confreres at the famous "Diners des artistes de Passy," which Barzun's journal and the Puteaux Cubists sponsored. 15

Along with the linguist and league member Charles Callet, this group of writers promoted Pelletier's anti-Latin, pro- Celtic platform in a variety ofjournals. Ile sonnante, a literary journal that published the poetry of Metzinger, was among the first to publicize Celtism. From December 1909 to December 1913, Ile sonnante published twelve articles de- voted to the subject, including an essay of August 1912 by Callet lauding Pelletier's Celtic League. Callet's criticism also

appeared in Olivier-Hourcade's short-lived La Revue de France et des pays frangazses, along with favorable reviews of his

writings by Olivier-Hourcade himself.'6 In February 1912, Olivier-Hourcade referred approvingly in his journal to Callet's declaration in Ile sonnante that "France is not Latin, not German, it is, and should remain, Gallic." In another article, published in May of that year, he recommended Callet's writings to the literary historian Gustave Lanson and

the Symbolist Jean Roybre, two writers whom the Action

Frangaise had attacked as "Bergsonists." Lanson and Roybre, we are told, could find "new forces" in Callet's ideas "to combat the Latinist epidemic."'17 Concurrently, Gleizes's and

Metzinger's criticism became associated with journals promot- ing the Celtic League's agenda. When an excerpt from Du Cubisme was published in the first issue of Poeme et drame, it was preceded by an article by Callet, signaling Barzun's

approval of Celtism.18 In February 1913, Jacques Reboul, another promoter of Celtic nationalism,19 helped launch the modernist vehicle Montjoie! and actively promoted Pelletier's

ideological program in that journal. That same month Pelletier founded his Revue des natzons: contributors to its first issue included Paul Fort and Alexandre Mercereau, and the

journal also had an article by the "Passy" associate Pierre Florian on Bergson's philosophical legacy.20 Pelletier's own

inaugural article outlined the league's artistic purpose as the

promotion of medieval corporatism, of syndicalism, and the idealist and pantheistic spirit personified by the French "Primitive" artists and artisans of the Gothic era.

Pelletier's synthesis of medieval corporatism and syndicalism has a resounding echo in Gleizes's "Le Cubisme et la tradition." Gleizes's inclusion, in this article, of a woodcut after Clouet by Jacques Villon (Fig. 1) suggests that other artists in the Puteaux circle were sympathetic to the Celtic cause. A new-found interest in Gothic art and architecture was also registered by Raymond Duchamp-Villon. In an essay of 1914, published in Poeme et drame, Duchamp-Villon compared the engineers who built the Eiffel Tower to the "medieval masons" who constructed Notre Dame. In Du-

champ-Villon's opinion, these "French" edifices were far

superior to the "utilitarian" structures built by the "Romans."21

14 Mus'e des Beaux-Arts, Lyons; ill. in D. Robbins, Albert Glezzes, 1881-1953, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1964, fig. 19.

15 See E. Florian-Parmentier, La Littirature et l'poque: Histoire de la httirature fran(aise de 1885 d nos jours, Paris, 1914, 311-358, which outlines the movement's program and its membership. For Pelletier's contribution to Barzun's Poeme et drame and evidence of his presence, along with Gleizes, Metzinger, and Le Fauconnier, at the "Passy" banquets, see R. Pelletier, "Un Monument de la Poesie celtique: Le Barzaz-Briez," Potme et drame, Sept.-Oct. 1913, 58-69; and idem, "Diner des artistes de Passy," ibid., 92. Among those listed as having attended the nine Passy banquets over the course of 1912-13 are eight members of Pelletier's Celtic League: Paul Fort, Alexandre Mercereau, Olivier- Hourcade, Eugene Figuibre, Robert Pelletier, Tancr!de de Visan, Fernand Divoire, and Pierre Florian.

16 See C. Callet, "Renaissance celtique," Ile sonnante, Aug. 1912, 138-140, and idem, "Les Patois," La Revue de France et des pays frangazses,

June 1912, 217-221. 17 See Olivier-Hourcade, "Revues des revues," La Revue de France et des pays fran(aises, Feb. 1912, 58-61; and idem, "La Sagesse des druides," May 1912, 148-155. '8 C. Callet, "Reverie sur un centenaire: Auguste Callet, 1812-1883," Poe'meet drame, Nov. 1912, 56-58. 19 Reboul's theories, summarized in his L'Imprialisme fran(aise: Sous le chine celtzque, Paris, 1913, revolved around an attack on the influx of "Latin" culture into France and the supposed misconception that France's cultural heritage was "Latin" rather than "Celtic." Reboul, 280-281, cites Pelletier's Revue des nations and Barzun's Poeme et drame as among the principal journals advocating Celtism. 20 See A. Mercereau, "Paroles devant la fianc6e," Revue des nations, Feb. 1, 1913, 16-20; P. Fort, "Poesie," Revue des nations, Feb. 1, 1913, 25; and P. Florian, "Mouvement philosophique: Bergsomnisme," Revue des nations, Feb. 1, 1913, 48-51. 21 See R. Duchamp-Villon, "L'Architecture et le fer," Poeme et drame, Jan.-Mar. 1914, 22-29; trans. in W. Agee and G. H. Hamilton, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, 1876-1918, New York, 1967, 114-118. Nancy Troy, in a fascinating study of Cubism's relation to the decorative arts, has linked Jacques Villon's and Duchamp-Villon's production before 1913 to the politicized aesthetic of Andr6 Mare and his allies Marie Laurencin and Roger de la Fresnaye. Troy reports that the nationalist aesthetic of the latter group was premised on craft traditions of "the post-revolutionary Directoire, Empire, and Restoration periods," the Napoleonic and monarchical eras that Pelletier and Gleizes set out to condemn. However, Duchamp-Villon's newfound interest, in 1913-14, in the architectural merits of the Gothic style may indicate a shift in his political allegiances. On Duchamp-Villon's relations with Mare, see N. Troy, Modernism and the Decoratwive Arts in France: Art Nouveau to Le Corbusier, New Haven, 1991, 4-5 and 96-98.




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torfewwdo n o* to breAcS At auiteapds t o ce. eaisease de 0 ceAU M?-V pleada~leas note Re S~i 4e do aimw* te ge A"e Ithegoeed. w te #0t mdTwW a amir W 6dea i ~p"',m v sen"aOhimm $#" aftSi6* ftea ctla a *" S Ut raace, awmlse gie msaemat o OWgA9WW teds. le t SWWVO do to twus eaameb se e MI mamtr eto nk U& 6robm....4 sn.Ae...*A-na ae *

1 Jacques Villon, FranTois Premier, apres Clouet, published in A. Gleizes, "Le Cubisme et la tradition," Montjoie!, Feb. 10, 1913 (pho- to: University of Texas at Austin)

That same year he put his theory into practice, in an architectural maquette that combined the geometrizing fea- tures of his "Maison cubiste" (1912) with a Gothic style derived from English country house designs (Fig. 2). Thus in July 1913, when Visan described Paul Fort's Vers et

prose group as "a sort of renovated medieval guild," and Reboul, in Montjoie!, lauded Gleizes's essay for embodying the spirit "that led our predecessors seven centuries

ago to achieve the art of the cathedrals," they signaled a

political and artistic closing of ranks within the Cubist

movement in the face of a hostile, Maurrasian opposition.22 Charting the evolution of that response will highlight the

metamorphosis of Gleizes's Cubism into a theory of the body politic.

22 T. de Visan, "Notes sur la Closerie des Lilas," Le Cahier des poetes, July 1913, 215-219; J. Reboul, "La Revolution de l'oeuvre d'art et la logique de n6tre attitude presente," Montjoie!, May 29, 1913, 5.




''IDS

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. .. . ...... 41

2 Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Projet d'architecture, 1914. Phila- delphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchase (photo: Mu- seum)

The association of le peuple with the Celtic gaulois reflects a leftist discourse with a venerable history dating to the

eighteenth century.23 Critics of the French monarchy rou-

tinely identified the proletariat of France as a Gallic people subjected first to Roman rule and then to subsequent domination by the Franks, a tribe of supposed German

origin who came to constitute the French aristocracy. In- deed, as one historian has noted, "by 1789 the assimilation of Franks and ruling class was so common that, in his seminal

pamphlet, Abbe Emmanuel Sieybs called on the Third Estate, descended from the Gauls, to send the aristocrats

packing back to their Germanic forests."24 After the Revolu- tion, the incorporation of such rhetoric into republican

ideology resulted in the widespread popularity of the coq gaulois as a national symbol, and the founding in 1805 of the Acad6mie Celtique to resuscitate France's Celtic heritage. Moreover, the interpretation of the Revolution as an ethnic conflict between plebeian Celts and their Germanic over- seers found its most compelling advocate in Augustin Thi-

erry, a Saint-Simonian whose Considerations sur l'histoire de la France (1840) claimed a Gaulish nationality for the common

people and the Third Estate. The radical split along racial lines that Thierry drew between this plebeian class and the Frankish aristocracy influenced a wide spectrum of left-

leaning intellectuals, including Saint-Simon, Victor Hugo, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.25

Thierry's critique of the ethnic origins of the Frankish

monarchy had a significant impact on republicans who wished to establish a definition of what was truly "French" in the realm of art. In the wake of Louis-Philippe's restoration of Primaticcio's decorations at Fontainebleau as a symbol of the continuity of the French dynasty, art critics sympathetic to the avant-garde such as Theophile Thore, Ernest Chesneau, and Jules-Antoine Castagnary attacked the Italian art identified with that patronage.26 After the revolution of 1848 they called upon artists to reject the Italianate style promoted by the monarchy in the name of a return to France's Gothic and realist roots, exemplified by the art of Clouet, the Le Nain, Watteau, Chardin, and their "realist" followers, Courbet and Manet. "The seeds of a national art,"

Castagnary asserted in his review of the 1866 Salon, "were

beginning to grow in the various intellectual centers of our old provinces [when] Italian art suddenly invaded France, carried by the gentlemen of Francis I.'"27 In Castagnary's schema, Rosso Fiorentino, Primaticcio, and other artists affiliated with the Italian mannerism of the court of Francis I were rejected wholesale as foreigners who had undermined a French "realist" spirit with roots in the Gothic. Such rhetoric became the special province of leftist republicans such as

Leon Gambetta and Georges Clemenceau, both of whom were Thierry enthusiasts. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, Realism continued to be a code word for anti-monarchical

politics, with Manet himself numbered among the radical

republicans.28

By the turn of the century, the debate over France's Gallo-Frankish roots had not only influenced republicans, but prompted a vigorous response on the part of Maurras's

23 For a recent summation of the historical literature pertaining to this subject, see Weber, 21-39. Other studies include S. Mellon, The Political Uses of History, New York, 1957; C. Rearick, Beyond the Enlightenment: Historians and Folklore in Nineteenth-Century France, London, 1974; and N. Belmont, "L'Academie celtique et George Sand. Les Debuts des recherches folklorique en France," Romantisme: Revue de la Socidte des Etudes Romantiques, ix, 1975, 29-38. 24 Weber, 22.

25 Ibid., 24-29; and Rearick (as in n. 23), 22-31, 75-81. 26 As Michael Fried and Francis Haskell have shown, the revived interest in the art of the 18th century was intertwined with a resurgent republicanism following the revolution of 1848 and a deliberate repudi- ation of the cultural politics of Louis-Philippe; see M. Fried, "Manet's Sources: Aspects of His Art, 1859-1865," Artforum, Mar. 1969, 28-79, and F. Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion, and Collecting in England and France, Ithaca, 1980, 112-117.

27J.-A. Castagnary, "Salon de 1866," Salons I, 1892, 231-232; quoted in Fried (as in n. 26), 49. 28 On Gambetta's and Clemenceau's interest in Thierry, see Weber, 25 and 32. On Manet's association with a variety of radical republicans, including Gambetta, Clemenceau, Phillipe Burty, and Henri Rochefort, see P. Nord, "Manet and Radical Politics," Journal of Interdisciplinary

.History, Winter 1989, 447-480.




Action Frangaise. In contrast to Thierry, the Action Frangaise wished to undermine any history of ethnic division along class lines by subsuming both Celts and Franks within a Latin cultural and ethnic geneology. Following an argument first

developed by Fustel de Coulanges, Maurras held that the

Gauls, though conquered by the Romans, had in fact assimi- lated the best that Rome had to offer, and that they in turn Romanized the Germanic Franks when they subsequently invaded. As a result, the civilizing mission undertaken by the Romans was continuous with that of the kings, who ruled under the guidance of the Roman church. Among Maurras's

colleagues, it was the art historian and Catholic royalist Louis Dimier who gave cultural sanction to this view by exalting the Roman-oriented patronage of Francis I in a monograph on Primaticcio, published in 1900. Maurras's and Dimier's claims that France's roots originated in a Latin south did not

go unanswered, for in 1904 Henri Bouchot launched a counter-offensive in the form of an exhibition titled "Les Primitifs frangaises." Bouchot lamented that "the French works of the Clouets and of Corneille de Lyon, compositions still Gothic and national," were "soon to be submerged by the sad movement of the Renaissance. The influence of Italy in its decadence, of Cellini, Primaticcio, Rosso [had resulted

in] these frail, false, lifeless, thoughtless forms that the School of Fontainebleau imposed everywhere."29 Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner note that Bouchot's assessment

proposed "a break between the Gothic Primitives of the fifteenth century and the Renaissance," which condemned the latter "as a foreign intrusion." In effect, Bouchot's diatribe slighted both Italian culture and its royal patrons as

foreign oppressors, a maneuver that provoked a heated

response from Dimier.30 As Eugen Weber reports, Maurras's adversaries were also

prepared to adapt Thierry's theme of class war to the conflict between northern Celts and Romanized meridionals. One such writer was Gaston Mary, whose novel Jean Revolte (1892) held that the descendants of the Celts had been oppressed by corrupt Latins who pillaged the Gauls as they would any foreign people. In Mary's estimation, it was this Latin elite, rather than the bourgeoisie, who were the true enemies of the Celtic people, and, as Weber states, "M6ry also turned

against the Ecole Romane, denouncing the likes of Jean Mordas and Charles Maurras as alien Moors."3' In effect,

Mdry transformed Thierry's war between classes into a battle for survival on the part of Celtic France in the face of foreign invasion. The priority Mdry gave to race over issues of class in his Celtic polemic illustrates how easily Thierry's formulation could slip into outright racism.

As the direct inheritor of this volatile discourse, Pelletier's Celtic League combined Thierry's history of an ethnic class war with the Realists' critique of the Italianate monarchy and

Mdry's diatribe against the meridional politics of the Action

Frangaise. In La Revue des nations, Fernand Pelletier outlined the historical conflict between France's "Celtic" peoples and the "Latin" politics of Capetian France. In his essay "The Celtic League: Its Doctrine, Its Aim," Pelletier also separated the "Romanized" and "Celtic" elements in French society along class lines. Pelletier asserted that, before "le moyen age celtique," the ordinary peasant retained more of the Celtic cultural and linguistic tradition than France's "Romanized" elite-the nation's clerics, writers, and human- ists. This state of affairs only ended during the "Celtic" Middle Ages, when France overthrew the Roman yoke and reinstituted tribal and corporative forms of organization, comparable, in Pelletier's opinion, to the syndicalist organi- zations "of the proletariat today." Thus he noted with satisfaction that the head of the Conf6deration General du Travail, the anarcho-syndicalist labor union, called for "the reestablishment of the medieval social state," a reformation that would revive the medieval "Republique des Justes" that had synthesized "the rights of intelligence and of manual labor." The rise to political prominence of a figure like France's first minister, Abbot Suger, "the son of a serf of the Ile de France," exemplified the leveling of class distinctions

possible under a Celtic "Republique des Justes." Suger, rather than Louis VI or Louis VII, was the true, "Pare de la Patrie." Likewise, France's medieval cultural heritage, embod- ied in the artisanal production of "the painters called

primitive" and the "Gothic sculptors" who worked on the

cathedrals, "brought to light" the nation's "Celtic origins." "This is the tradition that the French Celtic League upholds and wants to defend."32

According to Pelletier, the Celtic era of "political liberty,"

religious tolerance, and social egalitarianism ground to a halt with "the introduction of the Roman code" and the

suppression of the Druidic religion in the fifteenth century. Concurrently the taste of the French aristocracy succumbed to the Italian Renaissance, and the medieval "primitives" fell out of fashion. This "retour du Romanisme" proved disas- trous for French civilization. The monarchy and upper classes were once again "Romanized" and divorced from the Celtic origins of their plebeian subjects. Though the Revolu-

29 Bouchot, quoted in C. Rosen and H. Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art, New York, 1984, 190. 30 Ibid. 31 For a discussion of the Action Frangaise's debt to Fustel de Coulanges, and Jules M6ry's attack on Maurras and Moreas, see Weber, 36-38.

32 R. Pelletier, "La Ligue Celtique fran?alse: Sa Doctrine, son but," Revue des natzons, Feb. 1, 1913, 8-15. John Hutton has noted that the comparison of the socialist mason du peuple to ancient cathedrals was a common metaphor within the anarcho-syndicalist and socialist movements in France at the turn of the century. The union halls were cultural centers where working-class art was exhibited, and as such they were

compared to the medieval cathedral, which was the very creation of artisans united in precapitalist, corporative guilds. See J. Hutton, "The Blow of the Pick: Science, Anarchism, and the Neo-Impressionist Movement," Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1987, 342. This anarchist interpretation of medieval architecture probably inspired Pissarro in his pictorial treatment of Rouen as a center of medieval and modern proletarian culture, and Monet in his own fully secular paintings of Rouen Cathedral. Given the pervasiveness of Celtic nationalism as a leftist discourse, their work, and anarchist theory generally, may also have been informed by such rhetoric. For an analysis of the images of Rouen painted by Pissarro and Monet, see C. Lloyd, "Camille Pissarro and Rouen," in Studies on Camdille Pissarro, ed. C. Lloyd, London, 1986, 75-93; R. L. Herbert, "The Decorative and the Natural in Monet's Cathedrals," in Aspects ofMonet, ed.J. Rewald and R. Weitzenhoffer, New York, 1984, 160-179; and P. H. Tucker, Monet in the 90's: The Series

Paintings, New Haven, 1989, 143-187.




tion of 1789 gave France a brief respite from this situation,

"Napolean Caesarism repeated the errors of the Romanized

Monarchy," by imposing on France a "totally Latinized" code of law. In a strident profederalist vein, Pelletier encour-

aged the French people to "renew the tradition of the 13th

century, to resume the work of the Revolution," and to undo the damage caused by the "Hellkno-Latins." And he went on to propose a new map of alliances for the French nation, based on this racial nationalism. "It is necessary to free anew the Gauls, to free individuals, families, communes, the

corporations of the provinces, from oppressive centraliza-

tion," in order to reinstitute "the federation of Gauls."

"France, a Celtic nation," will then unite the Celtic peoples of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, and Switzerland in "a moral federation." By rejecting ideas derived from the "Latin" or "Germanic race," "le corps de la Patrie" will once

again be identified with "the idea of the Celtic race," rather than "the personage of the King."33 Clearly, Pelletier opposed the Action Frangaise's monarchical politics and its "Helleno-Latin" cultural program in his conception of the

body politic. In the process, he identified the royalist proponents of Latinism as allies of Germany, and proposed a "Slavo-Celtic" alliance among Russia, Britain, and France to counter this "Germano-Latin" threat. In short, Pelletier's

political program not only replicated the pre-1914 system of alliances that set France, Britain, and Russia in opposition to

Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary, but neatly placed the Action Frangaise in the latter camp.34

Likewise, when Pelletier sought to bolster his Celtism with a reference to contemporary philosophy, he did not turn to

Cartesianism, but followed his Symbolist allies in endorsing Bergsonism. In Pelletier's Revue des nations, Pierre Florian's "Le Mouvement philosophique: Le Bergsonisme" aligned Bergson's notion of intuition with the spiritual aspirations Pelletier had declared "native" to the Celtic mentality. His article exalted intuition as a means of discerning a spiritual realm inscrutable to "positivism and scientism," and declared it to be in harmony "with the methods of reasoning in use in bardic philosophy."35 Thus Bergson's theories met the

key criteria indicative of "philosophic Celtism": spiritual in orientation and "bardic" by virtue of its intuitive methodology.

Among Gleizes's literary supporters, it was Barzun, in Poeme et drame's inaugural issue of November 1912, who associated the Cubist movement with the Celtic League's cultural agenda. Barzun's "D'un art po~tique moderne"

begins by proclaiming the need to redefine old aesthetic terms such as "classicism," and in so doing arrive at defini-

tions that "characterize the effort that this generation must make in order to acquire its absolute personality." Since "each epoch, each generation" possesses a personality, it must "re-create the meaning of words it is obliged to use."

Similarly the novel nature of any given era's artistic production makes the application of an "old iron-clad" critical

vocabulary developed for the art of a previous generation untenable. "Every generation," we are told, has "its own manner of living, speaking, perceiving and realizing itself." In sum, "there is only one factor" that governs "this capital differentiation: it is time, it is the life of the times.'"36

Barzun asserts that artistic production reflects the novelty of an era, and that as a result each era is classical. In Barzun's estimation, classicism should not be equated with "the servile

copy of such or such past art. Art cannot be classical like another or in relation to this other. Art becomes classic in relation to itself, to its origin, to its ascending curve up to the

point of consecration." This internal, ascending "force" or "curve" embodies the "novel force" intrinsic to artists and their era: it is novelty itself that now "proclaims itself classical." Under these circumstances classicism does not stand for the "recommencing" or "recopying" of older artistic styles; on the contrary, what is novel to each succes- sive epoch becomes classical and traditional in its turn. "Thus for us the romantic, parnassian, naturalist, symbolist arts became successively classical. It is from now on forbid- den to anyone, under fear of national disqualification, to exclude them from French art."37

Classicism is defined as a future possibility, the collective

legacy of an era's creative novelty, here identified with the "personality" of the French nation. And in a veiled attack

against the Action Frangaise, Barzun contrasts his definition of classicism with one based on a "Greco-Latin," "neoclassical current." Barzun's classicism will "break the canons" of this "false art" and "denounce its flat moulds, forms, regular- ities, symmetries, repudiate its immobile and cold reason, its artificial equilibrium, its perfection as peaceful as death." Barzun's condemnation of regularity, symmetry, and equilibrium tied to an immobile and "moribund" cold reason

metaphorically repudiates Maurras's association of classicism with rationality; furthermore, Barzun regards "rational" art forms as foreign to the "national genius" of the French

people. "Our national art," he asserts,

cannot be, must not be Greco-Latin without signaling its decline. It is a crime against our racial genius to want to

subject it . . . to the rules and artistic credos of extinct civilizations. Neither two centuries of the Renaissance, nor humanism can make us forget these fifteen centuries of national and social autonomy . . . which have left us

unique treasures: our cathedrals. Enough of Parthenons and mythologies! . . . That our art is above all that of our audacious Gallo-Celtic race, and is free, enthusiastic, living and passionate like it, on this condition alone will it be

33 Ibzd., 11-14. 3 For an equally politicized variation on the theme of a pan-Celtic alliance, see S. Sculfort de Beaurepas, Le Panceltzsme unversel et paczfique contre le Pangermanisme envahzsseur et 1Imprzahzsme anglazs, 2 vols., Paris, 1903, I, ii-iii, who proposes "la reconstitution complete de la nationalite celte ou gauloise ....

une question de vie ou de mort pour la race, si elle ne veut pas etre absorbee par les Allemands et les Anglo-Saxons." Beaurepas calls for the creation of a pan-European-Celtic federation allied to Russia and composed of "tous les peuples celto-gallo-latins, amis et allies du groupement russo-slave."

5 Florian (as in n. 20), 48-51.

36 H.-M. Barzun, "D'un art poetique moderne," Podme et drame, Nov. 1912, 74-76. 37 Ibzd., 77-78.



662 THE ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 1992 VOLUME LXXIV NLMBER 4

able to take its place in the hzghest tradition of peoples of the earth, where Greek art took its place in zts time,

according to its genius, its race.38

"According to its genius, its race": clearly the Greco-Latin or neoclassical art that the Action Frangaise upholds is alien to Barzun's "racial origins" of French creativity. Removed from the novel spirit of the French nation, neoclassicism is allied to the "cold reason" of a foreign culture. Lurking behind Barzun's racial categories is the specter of Maurras's Action Frangaise and the literary campaign that Barzun and his

colleagues mounted to rebut that movement's Latin ideology. Furthermore, Barzun aligned his classical program to the

Bergsonian conception of simultaneity forged in Du Cubisme,

by declaring rhythm to be his means of evoking an alogical state of mind. Through rhythmic organization, polyphonic images capture a "feature of a soul" that is "synonymous with creative freedom" and therefore antithetical to any "compos- ite assemblage of fragments of inspiration."39 In other words,

poetic rhythm evokes the soul's creative freedom, just as

passage, as it is discussed in Du Cubisme, is said to evoke the Cubist's creative personality. And as the term "polyphonic" implies, rhythm in Barzun's poetry has a decidedly musical

function, serving to bring disparate images into harmony with the poet's soul. Just as Gleizes and Metzinger, in Du

Cubisme, claim to grasp Bergsonian "duration" by way of "a

complex rhythm, a veritable fusion of objects within a restricted space," Barzun's polyphonic rhythm is his means of fusing his images into a synthetic whole, fully reflective of the soul's durational state of creative freedom.40 Barzun's

synthesis apparently met with Gleizes' approval, and the

following September he cited Gleizes's confirmation that "the Cubist aesthetic adheres absolutely to this principle of simultaneous rhythms," adding that the artist intended to write a text for Poeme et drame outlining the rapprochement.41

That Du Cubisme was first published in serial form in Barzun's journal placed that aesthetic tract in a political context unaddressed in the book itself. Since Du Cubtsme was the product of a consensus between Gleizes and Metzinger, it could be inferred that the absence of references to classicism, Latinism, or Celtism in this joint publication indicates their

differing opinions over such issues. Indeed, it was Gleizes alone who endorsed Barzun's theories, and translated Du Cubisme's cultural and Bergsonian terminology-its references to Realism, intuition, and organic form-into the context of Celtic nationalism, particularly in his later "Cubis- me et la tradition." To understand this ideological shift, a brief overview of Gleizes's aesthetic pronouncements is in order.

Between the fall of 1911 and the publication of "Cubisme et la tradition" in February 1913, Gleizes's aesthetic posture had evolved from an unquestioning trumpeting of Greco- Roman culture to an outright attack on that cultural heritage

as "foreign" to the Celtic roots of France.42 Significantly, this refutation of his own former position appeared in an article

published just prior to Callet's and Barzun's attacks on the Greco-classicism of the Action Frangaise in Poeme et drame in November 1912. In his search for "the most pure tradition," Gleizes now informs us that he must look "beyond the Renaissance, a foreign art borrowed from Greece, and classicism, to Gothic art, which is the art of our race, born

spontaneously of our soil." Moreover, adherence to the Gothic is not a matter of imitation or "pastiche" of its stylistic conventions, but simply the result of racial affinity with "the links of centuries that are Poussin, Ingres, Delacroix, Corot, Manet, Renoir."43 One can thus infer that Gleizes would have found the Action Frangaise's brand of Greco-Roman classicism anathema to the Gallo-Celtic tradition.

Gleizes's racial nationalism reached new levels of intensity in "Le Cubisme devant les artistes," an article published in December 1912, one month after Poeme et drame's appearance. Designed as a reply to the criticism of his peers, Gleizes's essay again departed from his co-authored text and

applied the Bergsonian tenets found in Du Cubisme to an

analysis of the French tradition. In many respects, this text was a condensed version of the article in Montjoze! that was to follow.44 Like "Cubisme et la tradition," the commentary in "Le Cubisme devant les artistes" signaled Gleizes's full adherence to Pelletier's Celtic ideology, to which he now added the notion of Bergsonian classicism developed by Barzun.

In both essays, Gleizes followed Pelletier in vilifying the Renaissance as a period of Italian cultural hegemony over France. In "Cubisme et la tradition," he judged "the official invasion called the Renaissance of the sixteenth century" to constitute "the most dangerous pressure" ever exerted on French culture.45 Gleizes's "Cubisme devant les artistes" even characterized the Cubists as "liberators" of a "French tradition" previously crippled by "the detestable Italian

influence, the sad heritage of the Renaissance." In the same

essay, Gleizes traced the lost period of French cultural dominance back to the Gothic era, whose cultural representa- tives were "our primitives and our cathedrals."46 In "Cubis- me et la tradition," he described Gothic art's practitioners- the "imagiers of the Middle Ages"-as truly embodying the

38 Ibzd., 78-80. 39Ibzd., 81-82. 40 See my "Bergson and Cubism" (as in n. 11), 341-349. 41 H.-M. Barzun, "Trois Pobmes simultanes," Poeme et drame, Sept.-Oct. 1913, 3-4.

42 In his early evaluation of the art of Metzinger for the September 1911 issue of La Revue independante, Gleizes had identified the contemporary return to "the French tradition" with qualities of "grandeur, clarity, equilibrium, and intelligence" stemming from the "Greco-Roman traditions" of "Occidental cultures." Yet in his review of the 1911 Salon d'Automne, published three months later, all references to Greco- Roman culture are conspicuously absent. The status of Greco-Roman culture, however, was clarified in December 1912 when Gleizes dispar- aged classicism as a Greek invention, foreign to French culture; see Gleizes, "L'Art et ses representants: Jean Metzinger," La Revue inddpen- dante, Sept. 1911, 161-172; idem, "Les Beaux-Arts: Apropos du Salon d'Automne," Les Bandeaux d'or, 1911-12, 42-51; Gleizes in A. Tudesq, "Une Querelle autour de quelques toiles," Parts-Midi, Oct. 4, 1912, 1; and Gleizes, quoted in in Henriquez-Philippe, 475.

43 Tudesq (as in n. 42), 1. 44 Henriquez-Philippe and Gleizes, 15-23.

45Gleizes, 16 4 Henriquez-Philippe, 475.




3 Albert Gleizes, Harvest Threshing, 1912. Private collection (photo: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York)

nation's "Celtic origins."47 It was from Gothic artists, "and not from the Italian masters," that French artists should take their lead, for, as he stated in his earlier article, "the Italian masters are not of our patrimony" and their "creative genius is inferior."48 In turning to the Celtic roots of their own culture, French artists should extract "the elements that are its essence, and develop them in this spirit; an affair of intuition, of tact, of will." Intuition, a Bergsonian term

standing for artistic creativity, allowed artists to develop a

painting's "plastic qualities," those elements of "design" and "form" whose interaction produces "plastic integration." In "Cubisme et la tradition," the same interaction was related to the "plastic dynamism" emanating from "rhythmic relations" established in response to "sensibility and taste." Speaking of taste in the earlier essay, Gleizes noted that spectators too could "savor the tableau as an organism," as an object "with its own raison d'etre."49 Having rediscovered the "Celtic

origins" of French art, Gleizes would have French artists

"develop" these origins through Bergsonian intuition to

create an "organic" art as rooted in the French tradition as the Gothic art of their Celtic forbears.

Besides echoing Pelletier in his condemnation of the harmful effects of the Italian Renaissance on France's Celtic

heritage, Gleizes's "Cubisme et la tradition" replicated Pelle- tier's analysis of the class divisions stemming from this influence. Gleizes blamed royal authority for the imposition on France of an Italian art "impregnated with Greek

antiquity" and hostile to France's "primordial aspirations." With the arrival at Fontainebleau of Rosso and Primaticcio, the court's "stilted and artificial" aristocracy "soon bowed before the King's will" and rejected France's Gothic primitives in favor of Italian Mannerism. Only artists like Clouet had "enough belief and courage" to adhere to the "ancestral truth" of Gothic art. Instead of imitating the Italian style, Clouet cultivated the "plastic values" of design and form. As a result, his art captured "the freshness and naturalness of our origins," rather than the "affectation and preciousness" of Italian Manner- ism. Clouet's style, like that of the Cubists, was deemed "natural," a reflection of Celtic "origins" untainted by foreign elements.50

47 Gleizes, 22. 48 Henriquez-Philippe, 475. 49 Ibid. 50 Gleizes, 16-20.




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4 Albert Gleizes, Chartres Cathedral, 1912. Hannover, Sprengel Museum (photo: Museum)




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5 Albert Gleizes, The City and the River, 1913. Chicago, R. Stanley and Ursula Johnson Family Collection (courtesy R. Stanley John- son)




Since the aristocracy was divorced from these "natural"

origins, their taste could only be as decadent and mannered as that of the artists they admired, the school of Rosso. Gleizes and Pelletier regarded Italian art as a foreign blight on French soil, and they both used organic metaphors to describe the harmful effects of Italian culture upon France. Gleizes lamented the aristocracy's acceptance of"the graft of an Italian art, already exhausted" onto "the vigorous rose- bush on which flowered the roses of our cathedrals." It was the "overrunning foliage" of Italian culture that would

subsequently "retard the flourishing of the main branch." Like Gleizes, Pelletier too regarded Italian culture as harmful to France's own "vigorous and fertile tradition."5'

The revival of that tradition required that the term "classical" be redefined, to distinguish it from the Greek classicism Gleizes considered abhorrent. It was an Italian art

"impregnated with Greek antiquity" that inspired David and

Ingres, the slavish imitators of Raphael, whose descendants "are the students of Cabanel." Theirs was an art of "frozen

attitudes," of plastic stasis, and "neo-Greekness" in subject matter. The Gallo-Gothic tradition, however, lived on in

Chardin, "who incarnates an entire race, full of sap." His

followers, "Gericault and Delacroix," replaced the "frozen attitudes" of Ingres and David with an artistic "dynamism," "fiery and lyrical" in its effect. Ultimately the legacy of their efforts was found in the "plastic dynamism" nascent in

C6zanne's "study of primordial volumes," and the art of the Cubists themselves. In Gleizes's history of the battle between the classics and the romantics, the Latin south and the Gothic north, it is the latter and their Celtic ancestors who

gain the upper hand.52 On this note, Gleizes returns us to the Bergsonian defini-

tion of classicism forged by Barzun. In so doing, he synthe- sizes the pronouncement, in Du Cubisme, that Cubist painting reflects the creative novelty of the artistic elite, with Barzun's definition of the classical dlan of the nation. For

although Gleizes criticized artists like Poussin for imitating the Italian style, he does not encourage his peers to treat the French "primitives" in the same manner. We would be "untrue to their memory if we suppose being true to them by imitating or copying them." Since paintings emanate "from human thought," they cannot be "fixed in form." Art, like human thought, "evolves without ceasing and without ceas-

ing gives its tribute to the field which it inherits." This ceaseless change, this creative evolution, is antithetical to an art form based on retrospective repetition of past styles. "The desire that the painting of today have the same aspect as that of the twelfth century" confuses the imitation that Barzun had condemned with adherence to tradition.53 And in a manner reminiscent of Barzun, Gleizes admonishes those who, in attacking Cubism, do not see in the novelty of its forms the basis for a future classicism. As a result, "the same insults that people formally employed" with reference

to "the art now called classical" are applied to the Cubists.

However, Gleizes and his colleagues are ready to accept such

criticism, since they "know that comprehension moves much more slowly than the creative faculties." The practitioners of artistic intuition are destined to become the "classics" of

tomorrow, once the public "comprehends" their novel forms.

Already those who first exhibited Cubist works at the "Inde-

pendents (Room 41)" are "surprised to see that many [of the

critics] who deny recent productions already acknowledge the paintings of that period."'54 "Is not tradition the ensem- ble of works that have succeeded, and which, in their day, were revolutionary?"-so Reboul asked in an article praising Gleizes's "Cubisme et la tradition" for its defence of France's Gothic heritage.55 Gleizes and his Symbolist allies all assure us that the "revolutionary" art of their day will become France's "classical" art, provided Cubism's practitioners remain true to an intuitive method reflective of the "Celtic"

spirit of their race. The program mapped out in Gleizes's "Cubisme et la

tradition" is powerfully expressed in his paintings of the

period. Gleizes's eulogy to Gothic art and the Celtic roots of

plebeian culture has its pictorial equivalent in his Harvest

Threshing of 1912 (Fig. 3), the centerpiece of the October 1912 Section d'Or exhibition and a celebration of peasant life thought to be inspired by Barzun's epic poem La

Montagne of 1908. Barzun's poetic ode to the sense of

collectivity and love garnered through a return to la vie naturale is paralleled in Harvest Threshing, a monumental

painting that idealizes rural labor in a panoramic landscape including three villages, one with a prominent church spire.56 The pictorial rhythms and earthen palette binding the

painting into an organic whole have their equivalent in the

painting's subject matter, wherein the rhythm of human labor is at one with the organic rhythm of the seasons. This is the ideological message of Gleizes's Harvest Threshing: it is a

pictorial confirmation of Pelletier's praise of the collective

esprit and durie of the Celtic peasant. Gleizes's and Pelletier's association of Celtic elan with

Gothic architecture was celebrated by Gleizes in his Chartres Cathedral (Fig. 4) and in The City and the River (Fig. 5), his

major painting of 1913. Both Daniel Robbins and David

Cottington have noted that Gleizes's placement of Gothic edifices at the center of these paintings symbolized the

temporal continuity uniting past and present, a continuity also signified by the ebb and flow of the river in the latter

picture.57 I would add that the church spires in both canvases break the picture frame, emphasizing their role as a link between matter and spirit, the spirit here being that of the Celtic race. However, Cottington then describes the theme of cultural continuity evident in such subjects as in stark contrast to the "simultanist devices" that make up the

painting's pictorial structure.58 In fact, both the form and content of this image are indicative of the organic durie of the

51 Ibid., 16; R. Pelletier, "Ce que nous voulons," L'Etendard celtzque, Apr. 15, 1911, 1. 52 Gleizes, 19-21.

53 Ibid., 23 54 Henriquez-Philippe, 475.

55 Reboul (as in n. 22). 56 See D. Robbins, "The Formation and Maturity of Albert Gleizes," Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1975, 104.

57 Ibid., 103-106; and Cottington (as in n. 2), 462-463. 58 Cottmington (as in n. 2), 463..




Celtic race, a duree expressed by Gleizes's association of the

"novelty" inherent in creative evolution's "organic" growth with the formal properties and with the subject matter of these paintings. Far from indicating Gleizes's "uncertainties over traditionalist and modernist impulses,"'59 the organic and novel impulse of the traditional and modern are deliber-

ately intertwined in works like The City and the River. That Gleizes places a Gothic cathedral in the midst of a contemporary urban landscape, complete with iron bridges, a French

flag, and a modern worker in the foreground, is not a contradiction in terms; it celebrates what Barzun and Gleizes saw as the novel rhythm of French society and what Gleizes identified as the latest manifestation of a racial elan vital with artisanal roots in the Gothic era. Thus the collective labor that went into the building of Gothic cathedrals had its

modern-day equivalent in the rural labor depicted in Harvest

Threshing, and in the industrial labor of the urban worker in The Czty and the River. In both cases, the rhythms of human

labor, whether rural or technological, were subsumed within the larger organic rhythm of the Celtic race's creative evolution.

Gleizes's pictorial synthesis was the product of utopian aspirations dating back to the beginning of his artistic career. His association of urban labor with the qualitative and

organic time championed by Bergson echoed a theme

already developed by members of the Abbaye de Creteil in 1906. Gleizes and his Abbaye associates had eulogized Rabelais's utopian vision of an artistic commune called the

Abbey of Theleme because Rabelais planned to banish clocks from the premises of the commune. In Rabelais's commune, artists were to be liberated from the social regulation of

homogenized time, so that they could act in response to their

subjective temporal rhythms.60 The commune of the Abbaye de Creteil evoked Rabelais in its Bergsonian vision of a

society composed of intuitive artists, freed from the "utilitarian" concerns of industrial capitalism.61 That Gleizes

did not abandon such utopianism is clear from his attempt, in "Cubisme et la tradition," to link the labor of urban

proletarians and their medieval forbears to Bergson's notion of qualitative time. When Gleizes wrote this tract, he and his Cubist colleagues were living in the industrial suburbs of Courbevoie and Puteaux, districts dominated by a socialist

proletariat agitated by attempts to introduce a new method of factory organization, known as Taylorism, in the Parisian factories. The Taylorist method not only fragmented production and reduced worker activity to the mundane repetition of a single task, but its proponents also sought to rationalize labor by regulating motion in response to a stop-watch. In this manner, a worker's temporal experience was to be

quantified and streamlined for purposes of increased production. By 1913 there had been repeated anti-Taylorist strikes in the industrial outskirts, and syndicalist leaders such as

Alphonse Merrheim and Emile Pouget warned that Taylor- ism would reduce the workers' craft skills and force them into a mechanical and uncreative form of labor. This protest culminated, in 1913, in a major strike at the Renault factory in Puteaux, which put an end to the forced introduction of

Taylorist techniques in French factories.62 That the Puteaux

group was cognizant of such protest is made clear by the

publication of an article decrying Taylorism in Les Cahiers

d'aujourd'hui, ajournal founded by Gleizes's Abbaye associate Charles Vildrac.63 In short, the aesthetic of the Cubist movement, and Bergsonism as a whole, was part of the widespread reaction

against the temporal hegemony of industrial capitalism. In sum, Gleizes's "Cubisme et la tradition" synthesized the

Bergsonian tenets fundamental to Du Cubisme with those of a

burgeoning racial nationalism of a "Celtic" rather than "Latin" type. By taking up Barzun's Bergsonian definition of

classicism, Gleizesjoined his Cubism to a temporal notion of the Celtic race's "creative evolution." Furthermore, the cultural politics that Gleizes expounded in "Cubisme et la tradition" are indicative of his affiliation with the Celtic

League, and the "Celtic" classicism advocated by Barzun and Gleizes in 1912 was set in direct opposition to the Greco- Latin agenda upheld by the Action Frangaise. Once we are aware of the Celtic League's concerted campaign against the Action Frangaise's "Latin" ideology, Gleizes's treatment of the French pictorial tradition in terms of race and class takes on new meaning as an anarcho-syndicalist and plebeian challenge to the royalist politics of the Action Frangaise. Gleizes's synthesis of leftist and racial themes on the basis of "Celtism" demonstrates how Bergsonism was utilized to defend Cubism against that movement's right-wing adversaries before World War I.

59 Ibid., 463. Within the context of Cubist studies, the Bergsonism undergirding the Puteaux Cubists' definition of classicism and Celtic nationalism serves as an important corrective to David Cottington's reading of the movement's political evolution. According to Cottington, the affiliation of the Puteaux group with the Mallarmean symbolism propagated in Vers et prose, Poeme et drame, and La Phalange led Barzun, Gleizes, and his colleagues "to substitute aesthetic for political action" and retreat from an engagement in leftist cultural politics. As I have attempted to show here, just the opposite was the case, for from 1910 onward the Puteaux Cubists and their allies, rooted in radical republican and syndicalist ideology, interpreted Mallarmean symbolism from a Bergsonian and "Celtic" perspective in order to counteract the right- wing ideology of the Action Frangaise. See Cottington, "What the Papers Say: Politics and Ideology in Picasso's Collages of 1912," Art Journal, Winter 1988, 350-359.

6o On Rabelais's theory of time, see R. Quinones, The Renaissance Dzscovery of Time, Cambridge, Mass., 1972, 187-203. 61 The poet Charles Vildrac first envisioned the Abbaye as a commune modeled after Rabelais's prototype, and nailed a placard with a poem by Rabelais on the door of the Abbaye de Creteil. The published "Appel de 1906" announcing the commune project to would-be participants described it as "a Thel!me" for artists and poets who wished to escape capitalist "utilitarianism." Rabelais's condemnation of clock time was fully compatible with Vildrac's interest in Bergson, whose philosophy was based on a critique of quantitative temporal measurement. On Vildrac's references to Rabelais, and the influence of Bergson on the Abbaye, see C. Senechal, LAbbaye de Criteil, Paris, 1930, 27 and 141; and M. L. Bidal, Les Ecrivains de l'Abbaye, Paris, 1939, 78-91.

62 L. Berlanstein, The Working People of Paris, 1871-1914, Baltimore, 1984, 23, 47-48 and 157-163, has discussed the demography and socialist politics of Puteaux. On the strike actions and debate over Taylorism, with special attention to the situation at the Puteaux and Boulogne Renault factories, see G. Cross, "Redefining Workers' Con- trol: Rationalization, Labor Time, and Union Politics in France, 1900- 1928," in Work, Community, and Power: The Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900-1925, ed. J. Cronin and C. Sirianni, Philadelphia, 1983, 143-172; and J. Merkle, Management and Ideology: The Legacy ofthe International Scientzfic Management Movement, Berkeley, 1980, 148-156

63 H. Wallon, "Nouvelle Methode d'esclavage," Les Cahiers d'aujourd'hui, June 1913, 159-163.



668 THE ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 1992 VOLUME LXXIV NLMBER 4

Mark Antliff received his Ph.D. from Yale, and was Postdoctoral Fellow of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in 1990-92. His "Bergson and Cubism: A Reassessment"

appeared in the Art Journal, Winter 1988, and his Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde is

forthcoming from Prznceton University Press in spring 1993. He is

currently working on a book on the theory of Georges Sorel and its

influence [The Johns Hopkins Universzty, Baltimore, Md. 21218].

Frequently Cited Sources

Gleizes, A., "Cubisme et la tradition," Montjoie! Feb. 10, 1913, 4; and Montjoie! Feb. 25, 1913, 2-3; repr. in Tradition et Cubisme: Vers une conscience plastique, Paris, 1927, 15-23.

Henriquez-Philippe, "Le Cubisme devant les artistes," Les Annales politiques et litteraires, Dec. 1, 1912, 473-475.

Weber, E., My France: Politics, Culture, Myth, London, 1991.



Documents

Cubism Celtism and Body Politic