The Presence of the Past in French Art, 1870–1905: Modernity and Continuity by Richard Thomson

the painter Émile Bernard (1868Bernard ( -1941) ) announced the "foundation of a group of traditionists," whose members aspired to salvage contemporary French art from the twin perils of "the baleful routine of the École des Beaux-Arts, the principal cause of the harm from which art currently suffers" and "the corrupt invasion of lethal systems and prejudiced opposition."Confronted by this conspiracy between "ideas of anarchy, routine, Ignorance, and a Thirst for Publicity," Bernard called upon like-minded colleagues to join him in upholding "the eternal Tradition of true Art."1 Bernard's crusade, pursued in his journal La Rénovation esthétique (May 1905-April 1910) and in a series of paintings that ostensibly revitalized the lessons of the past, attracted few followers of note, but does highlight-in perhaps its most extreme form-a preoccupation with the continuing relevance of the Old Masters in a period often retrospectively understood from the partial vantage point of novelty and innovation associated with modernism.It is this doxa that Richard Thomson sets out to challenge in his important and wide-ranging new study, The Presence of the Past in French Art, 1870 -1905.Though .Though Thomson briefly mentions Bernard, the painter's fanatical devotion to the past makes him an outlier in a survey that primarily focuses upon the ways in which artistic tradition still resonated deeply in work produced by a broad spectrum of painters and sculptors.Eschewing Manichean distinctions between academy and avantgarde, Thomson demonstrates that, contrary to Bernard's allegation, past precedent continued to provide a fertile source for artists seeking to break new ground as well as for those more readily recognized by the critical mainstream.Thomson focuses on three cultural lineages to prove his point: the classical tradition, to which he devotes three chapters, and which provides the conceptual backbone to his study; the cult of Rubens; and the impact of the quattrocento on modern French art.While these three visual categories limit the stylistic (and, as we will see, the ideological) scope of his study, its chronological sweep, extending from 1870 to 1905, as well as its encyclopedic range of visual evidence, offers the reader a richly nuanced survey of the formal interplay between past and present in late nineteenth-century French art.