Book Review: Framing France: the representation of landscape in France, 1870-1914

This collection of essays emerged out of the 1994 exhibition entitled Monet to Matisse: landscape painting in France, 1874–1914 held at the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. The editor, Richard Thomson, notes in his introduction that the study of French landscape art has developed significantly in recent years through the innovative contributions of Nicholas Green, Robert Herbert and others. This collection seeks to extend these insights and explicitly disengage from the narrowly formalist or Romantic legacy of art-historical writing on depictions of nature and landscape. The period under examination marks a series of transformations in both the physical characteristics of the French landscape and the different ways in which these landscapes were experienced by an increasingly urbanized, mobile and culturally sophisticated set of audiences. The opening essay by John House explores the status of French landscape painting in the 1870s. House links the production of art at this time to the repressive context of the Third Republic in the wake of the disastrous FrancoPrussian war. The foreign policy débâcle fostered a nationalistic emphasis on historical, religious or mythological subjects. As a consequence, landscape art found itself in an ambiguous relation to the salon and newly emerging trends in the French art market. In Chapter 2 Joy Newton considers parallels between naturalistic landscape depictions in art and literature. She explores the close social and intellectual interaction between Zola and Cézanne and their shared pursuit of multi-perspectival forms of cultural representation. The focus on Cézanne is also elaborated by Richard Shiff, who examines the significance of ‘blurring’ as a painterly technique which has become central to the modernist conceptualization of landscape aesthetics. Shiff finds historical continuities between the art of Cézanne and the postwar representational experimentation of Chuck Close and Jasper Johns. In Chapter 4 Griselda Pollock considers the crosscultural translation of landscape art between Holland and the south of France through the paintings of Van Gogh. She examines the simultaneous development of political disengagement and exoticist imagery in his work as part of a wider difficulty of engagement with the emerging avant-garde in Paris. The extraordinary permutations in the art of Maurice Denis form the focus of Jean-Paul Bouillon’s chapter. In seems as if the landscapes of Denis have compressed every facet of the evolving relation between art and nature in the First World War era ranging from traditional classicism to Symbolism. A close reading of a lesser-known artist from this era is also developed with Richard Thomson’s essay on the innovative murals of Henri Martin. For Thomson, the 508 Book reviews