Women Art Critics in Nineteenth-Century France by Guentner Wendelin;

Author:Guentner, Wendelin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

(Leave me be with my feeling, my heart, and also with my imagination; let me tell you what I experience, what I understand, what makes me suffer. May my sincere impressions written without any bias, under no family influence or [that of] personal preference, excuse me for my inexperience as a critic and as a writer, and wrench from you a smile of goodwill, from you who everyday read [works of] criticism [that are among] the best, and signed by the most famous names.)

Thus, although Stevens begins with an apology for her critique of the Salon, given that she is not only putatively inexperienced but also a woman, she ends up arguing that it would be worth reading precisely because the writer is from outside the professional art world. By holding her amateur status up for tolerant ridicule, and pity, Stevens embraces the construction of woman as someone who is naïve, sentimental, and close to nature. She is suggesting that if women are incapable of reasoning and analysis, they are also likely to be too simple to deceive or manipulate the reader. In sum, Stevens’s underlying message is that because she is a sincere, independent, and honest “woman,” readers can be confident that they will not be misled.

It is significant that Stevens also reveals that for her the notion of “impressions” refers to sentiment rather than to thought or analysis since “feeling,” “heart,” and “imagination” are the words that it conjures up for her. Such foregrounding of emotion can also be seen as a defensive ploy, for if a critical evaluation of a painting can be condemned for having been based on faulty or inadequate knowledge, a subjective response is unassailable so long as it has been made clear that communicating it faithfully is the critic’s goal. By stressing her essay’s originality, and uniqueness, Stevens thus engages her readers in a “pacte de sincérité” (sincerity pact) similar to the one that Philippe Lejeune has shown to be characteristic of the prefaces to autobiographical texts.[20] Perhaps Stevens felt the need to stress her honesty and credibility not only because she was the sister-in-law of the Belgian painters Joseph and Alfred Stevens but because Joseph Stevens was exhibiting at the very Salon she was reviewing. She might therefore have been keen to demonstrate her independence from family or affectional ties, and to assure readers that she would not show favoritism.

However, Stevens consistently has difficulty respecting this explicit promise to share only her own emotive responses to the paintings that attract her interest at the Salon. In fact, in the paragraphs directly following the above quotation, Stevens considers the generic requirements of the salon essay; she also explores the qualities needed by art critics and by “amateurs” (art lovers) who seek to appreciate not only art but also the different literary styles of reviews written by Denis Diderot, Gustave Planche, and Théophile Thoré. She recalls her reader’s expectations that she herself had helped determine: “Le temps presse, et le lecteur attend de moi

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