The Politics Of Vision by Linda Nochlin

Author:Linda Nochlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

3. Paul Renouard, Les Invaltdes: Les aveugles, wood engraving, Paris, Bibliothèque

seems to guarantee “documentary” authenticity, as well as lending itself admirably to translation into wood engraving. It is signed and dedicated in the lower right-hand corner: “à Monsieur Depaepe/ souvenirs affectueux/ P. Renouard,” a dedication which has a certain significance in the interpretation of the work, as we shall see. The group represented would appear to consist of the “chef d’atelier” and his family, with one of the “compagnons,” the hired laborers who assisted in the home workshops of the weavers, standing behind the seated old man. The written description accompanying the engraved version of the drawing in Llllustration is fairly explicit about the critical situation depicted: “No work anywhere, and the scene, drawn from nature, which our engraving represents, is to be seen on almost every floor of the houses of the populous quarters of the city which is being so sorely tried: the Croix-Rousse, St.-Just, and the whole suburb of Lyons near La Guillotière. Our artist has taken us to the Croix-Rousse district, the staircase of the Carmelites. We are in a poor room where a whole family of old weavers lives: the father, the mother, and the widowed daughter with her child, a little girl…. No more resources; soon no more bread. Here and there some furniture and looms, abandoned and covered with paper to preserve the working parts from dust. And that is all. To think that the house in which this family lives has 370 windows, that each of these windows illuminates a room, and that in each room, or nearly each one, a scene like this is taking place!”20

The scene indeed seems to be drawn from nature, and derives its strength from this fact, but there is something more to it than the accuracy of a good piece of reporting. First of all, the weavers are lending themselves, if modestly, to the enterprise, sitting for their portraits as though to a sympathetic local photographer rather than being seized or violated in their privacy. Secondly, the drawing style is remarkably free of just that exaggerated virtuosity, that flamboyant gestural impressionism so well suited to an art of seizure and appropriation, which captivated Renouarďs admirers at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the contrary, Renouarďs, facture here seems to root his subjects to the spot with a kind of painstaking immobility. Certainly, there is no sense here of “une forme rapide et coloree” or “un instantané de dessin.”21 The formal language, like the mood of the drawing, is hushed, tensely meditative, still. Indeed, Sans Travail is remarkable for its intensity and concentration of vision, for the way the lot of this working-class family is at once so starkly individuated and yet so resonant with implications beyond its unique presence—not, it must be emphasized, diluted by the idealist generalization or the self-conscious quest for universality characteristic of more ambitious treatments of working-class subjects during the period. Indeed, the larger authenticity of the image is generated precisely

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