ART: Après nous, le deluge?
Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress at the National Gallery
The assumption – casual or otherwise – that style has inherent moral, social and political implications is rarely more apparent or less apologetic than in response to le gout Pompadour, that last flutter of baroque fantasy before the triumph of neo-classicism. So if you’re the sort of person who thinks along these lines – and plenty of people do, including those who ought to know better – you’ll feel certain that while this particular variant of the rococo style was flimsy, intuitive, feminine, effeminate, lascivious, frivolous, elitist and obviously decadent, the neo-classicism that inevitably superseded it was substantial, rational, male, manly, sober, dignified, universal and just as obviously destined to prosper in a world where so-called ‘revolutions’ necessarily overturned old regimes.
To what extent does the National Gallery’s Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress – all the way from the slightly dumbed-down title to the profusion of china shoes and embroidered footstools cluttering the gift-shop – play up to such assumptions? At an explicit level, this somewhat misguided exhibition has a simple line of argument. During nearly two decades as maitresse en titre to Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour used the arts first to define and then to update her ‘image’ – to use an anachronistic shorthand much favoured here – in an ongoing attempt to retain royal favour. Unfortunately, since the exhibition itself has little to say about the way in which commissions were made, the relative originality (or otherwise) of Mme de Pompadour’s personal taste, the relationship between the royal circle and wider audiences for the arts or the overlap between French rococo and alternative styles, it largely fails to answer its own question. Instead, we are shown portraits, possessions and other material with biographical links to Mme de Pompadour, and in several cases there is an attempt to describe these with reference to the known facts of Mme de Pompadour’s life. At no point is much effort expended in exploring whether the art was as it was because of Mme de Pompadour, or conversely, whether Mme de Pompadour was as we imagine her to have been because of the art, or anything in between. Instead, the explanatory wall-texts offer a breezy little narrative canter through this dramatic if well-known story – the narrative placing more emphasis on sex, opulence and international celebrity than it ever does on art.
Perhaps this is carping too much. Christmas is coming, we are living in anxious times, and just to be practical for a moment, maybe this emphasis on the feminine, the frivolous and the mildly titillating is a good strategy for luring paying punters into the Sainsbury Wing’s uncharismatic basement. And certainly, there are some extraordinarily appealing objects in this show. The Royal Collection, for example, has loaned a marvellous lapis-blue Chinese vase set in a French rococo gilt-bronze mount – a marriage of opposites resulting in something as magnificent as it is self-confident. Also from the Royal Collection comes a bronze miniature version of Edmé Bouchardon’s Louis XV on Horseback, the full-sized version of which was erected in what is now the Place de la Concorde and later torn down during that pointless, vicious ‘Revolution’. Of no great artistic merit, yet perfectly delightful in their own way, are engravings of Mme de Pompadour’s little dogs Inès and Mimi, borrowed from a private collection. And James Penny’s handsome painting of the death of General Wolfe has, in real life, both a gravity and a faintly eerie lustre it lacks in any reproduction, even though its relevance to Mme de Pompadour is vanishingly slight.
The highlight of the exhibition – the experience that would make it worthwhile even if there were nothing else on show at all – is the chance to see François Boucher’s great portrait of Mme de Pompadour (1756), borrowed from Munich, together with a few other Boucher portraits in ‘alternative’ settings and a handful of important Pompadour portraits by Jean-Marc Nattier, Carle Vanloo, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour and François-Hubert Drouais. A few of these are so convincingly, so confident and so unlike anything else that it is no surprise they have ended up inextribably linked in our minds not just with an individual woman, but with a whole way of life. Presumably this was the conceptual germ from which the finished exhibition developed? Well, it was certainly a good idea to bring these works together. Standing amongst these pictures, it is easy enough to pose the sort of questions which the curators perhaps should have addressed more squarely, based on the evidence abounding on every side – Nattier’s elegant identikit mistress portraits, Boucher’s theatrical experimentation with costumes and settings, the process by which the half-naked huntress of 1748 evolved into the dignified and demure matron of 1763-4, seated at her sewing frame. But instead of a grown-up attempt to deal with these points, there is iconographic explanation more or less on the level of ‘dog equals fidelity, books equal learning, rose equals love’. The paintings are merely illustrations for the narrative. Well, back to the narrative we go.
Mme de Pompadour’s story is a colourful one. Her origins were solidly bourgeois. The prosaically-named Jeane-Antoinette Poisson was born in Paris in 1721; her father was a junior employee of a firm of financiers while her mother occupied her days entertaining a long stream of socially advantageous lovers. Perhaps her mother intended a similar career for Jeanne-Antoinette, who was quite possibly the daughter of one of these men. At any rate, she was given the perfect education for a courtesan – an education based, of course, not on her own intellectual development, but on training her to please other people. Thus she was able to supplement her modest beauty and considerable grace with proficiency in music, drama and cultivated conversation. In 1741 the strategy succeeded, and she was married off to an undistinguished if wealthy member of the nobility, to whom she bore two children. In 1745, however, at a masked ball at Versailles, Louis XV – already married and with ten children of his own – met and speedily succumbed to the charms of the former Mlle. Poisson. Within weeks she was installed in private apartments in Versailles and granted a formal separation from her rather puzzled husband, and within months she was given the extinct title of marquise de Pompadour, along with the eponymous estate and the right – which quite correctly scandalised established families – to use the three towers of the old Pompadour arms.
Mme de Pompadour’s achievement was to retain this uniquely privileged position until her death in 1764 at the age of 43. During this time she was the king’s trusted confidante, was suspected of wielding great influence, and was able to spend vast sums on anything she wanted. She occupied, in other words, a central role in one of the most glittering courts of Europe at one of the most interesting points in its history. She collected widely, if sometimes rather indiscriminately. She also is widely credited with one of the most poignant soundbites of all time: Après nous, le deluge. Hence the grave danger of seeing everything she did, everything she bought or commissioned, through the lens of historical events she would never know and could not possibly have imagined. An exhibition so preoccupied with narrative history should have made this point. This exhibition does not.
In fact the narrative is curiously bland and insubstantial – the sort of vague stuff that lets inaccurate preconceptions flourish unhindered. We learn, for instance, that Louis XV was a gloomy character. We do not learn that by the time he succeeded to the throne in 1715 at the age of five, he had lost his grandfather, father, mother, uncle and elder brother, leaving little of his domestic circle other than his governess, Maman the duchesse de Ventadour; one does not have to dabble deeply in psychological speculation to connect this sad childhood both with his rather insistent need for the short-term closeness of sexual intercourse, or with his concurrent need for absolute permanence in human relationships. We learn that about five years into his relationship with Mme de Pompadour, the two stopped having sex and that Mme de Pompadour thus had to negotiate the tricky transition from passion to the stonier slopes of amité, but we are told little about what caused the shift. Here the answer was not, as one might have supposed, royal disaffection with the deteriorating charms of his increasingly portly mistress, but either medical problems or lack of interest on Mme de Pompadour’s part, perhaps exacerbated by the four miscarriages she had suffered earlier in the relationship. More seriously, we are told that Mme de Pompadour was believed to exert pressure on foreign policy and even military strategy – one whole room of the exhibition is devoted to this premise – but we are neither told how she did this, nor what her objectives may have been, nor to what extent these claims about her influence are even true, rather than the work of her many enemies at home and abroad. In short, even the history aspect of this exhibition is denied serious treatment – almost as if there was something so fundamentally unserious about rococo style as to render it unfit for anything more than Hello!-level celebrity story-telling.
For what it is worth, I think Mme de Pompadour’s influence – on art as in court politics – is probably exaggerated here. Her goal, I think, was to remain at the King’s side, not least because every alternative open to her, once she had established herself there, must have seemed ghastly in the extreme. Of course he listened to her, enjoyed the informal little dinners she arranged for him, sat through her expensive amateur theatrical performances, appreciated her sympathetic enthusiasm for each of his new passions, whether it be for ornamental wildfowl or exotic plants or new building programmes. Quite possibly, he really did love her. Yet at the same time he was so troubled by his own adultery that, having once taken a mistress, he refused to receive communion and experienced frequent religious crises; he was fairly shrewd when it came to managing his ministers; in short, it may have been much easier for her many, many enemies to attribute influence to her than it was for her to exercise such influence. The fact that she was one of the more colourful and notorious figures of the king’s 59-year reign does not mean she was one of the more important figures. Because in her youth she knew Voltaire, d’Alambert, Diderot & Co., for instance, the sort of person who admires the so-called Enlightenment will always assume that she was intellectually sophisticated, but although Voltaire called her ‘one of us’, he left the country in disgust at the time of her greatest influence; D’Alambert wrote some spectacularly uncharitable things about her after her death, and Diderot hated the rococo style. It is easy enough to see why she has been given the sort of write-up she has, while at the same time seeing that aspects of this are almost invariably inflated.
As a patron of the arts, Mme de Pompadour was more notable as a big spender and intrepid shopper than as a discerning critic. By the end of her life she had accumulated so much clutter that several of her houses functioned as little more than overstocked storage spaces. To what extent she had any discernible personal style is open to debate. Her whole career was built on pretending to a social background that was not her own, and there is every reason to imagine that she might have remained careful to surround herself with things that appealed to the King and to his circle, rather than using style as some sort of expressive, motive strategy of her own. The idea that her taste for simplicity was somehow a bourgeois trait, rather than a continuation of a very long-running strand of aristocratic French taste, is too stupid to deserve discussion here.
But to consider, for a moment, the basic thesis of this exhibition, it is also debatable to what extent Mme de Pompadour took an active and self-conscious role in shaping her own ‘image’. How, at this distance, do we know what, if anything, she contributed to Boucher’s unforgettable images of her? Did she chose that strangely bruise-like palette of colours, or the costumes, or the settings? Well, quite possibly not. Her commissions for devotional images at a time when the dévots were in the ascendant at court – commissions resulting in, it must be said, some pretty frightful paintings by Boucher – are treated here as attempts to manipulate her image. Yet surely what this whole interlude shows is simply her ability to follow the crowd, to bow to prevailing sentiment, rather than anything more dynamic or remarkable? Mme de Pompadour didn’t create the style that bears her name – she was simply lucky enough to be able to make commissions at a time when the French rococo was at its high point of grace and vigour, and hence to ensure that her name remains permanently associated with it. But it was the premier style of the court of Louis XV before she ever arrived at Versailles, and would presumably have remained so, whoever the king had chosen to stay by his side. The Goncourt brothers might, in other circumstances, have ended up consecrating le gout Nestlé. Better still, the style might have avoided this durable, if spurious, association with fragile yet sexualised femininity.
An exhibition more focused on art, and less focused on the human interest end of history, might deal better with such questions. It is striking that the book accompanying Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress was written not by an art historian, but by Colin Jones, a professor of history from Warwick University who has written several rather textbook-ish works about France. The book takes the form of a biography, in which attempts to portray the heroine as the formidable architect of her own ‘image’ alternate with curiosities such as the following:
She showed a thorough lack of awareness of the violence that lay beneath the surface of the Bourbon state, whether this was the vicious torture and punishment of criminals such as Damiens or the collective violence of warfare. Her cultivation of image muddied the wider society’s view of her; but it also muddied her view of the wider society.
That’s asking rather more of a mistress than seems entirely reasonable, at least to me. The illustrations are attractive, but confusingly, not all the items illustrated in the book appear in the exhibition, while not all the items included in the exhibition appear in the book. Its language will go off pretty rapidly. The sort of person who is reassured by phrases like ‘cultural production’ and ‘image projection’ will enjoy this short, chatty and occasionally lucid volume; others may prefer their dog-eared paperback copies of Nancy Mitford’s far more elegant and, to use a very Colin Jones expression, ‘nuanced’ Madame de Pompadour (1954).
Interestingly, the French catalogue (the exhibition appeared in rather different forms in Munich and at Versailles) focuses much more solidly, and more seriously, on Mme de Pompadour’s role as a patron of the arts. Perhaps the powers that be at the National Gallery felt that such an approach would lack the easy if cheap appeal of the word ‘mistress’, or that such an approach would be off-puttingly sophisticated and arcane for UK audiences. Alternatively, perhaps there’s more than a degree of crude stereotyping, not only of the French per se but, more seriously, of the French ancienne regime, about which the Anglophone world has long had strangely conflicted feelings. There is a sense that while the Revolution was obviously horrible, at the same time the decadent French aristocracy got what they deserved. In this reading, the rococo style becomes simultaneously a symptom of decadence – a flawed idiom reflecting a flawed regime – while at the same time, a wealth of negative association – that word ‘mistress’, the shortness of Mme de Pompadour’s life, even the apparently inevitable onset of that deluge – serves to brand the rococo as a decadent style.
All of which is, on a number of levels, entirely unfair. Indeed, despite the apparent desire to cultivate a light, frothy tone, there seemed to me something more than a little unfair about Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress. The setting does not help. Oddly enough, I happened to spend a day at Versailles a fortnight before I saw this exhibition. Despite all that pointless destruction, the decades of neglect, the fibreglass restoration and the tourists, it is still a magical place, conveying in its totality a vision of the brilliant midday and long afternoon of Absolutism that no dingy London basement, no matter how well-stocked with paintings, is ever going to approach. At Versailles, for one thing, even the greatest pictures are subordinated – or, rather, given their rightful place – as incidents in a wider decorative scheme, no more or less important than the view through an enfilade, a distant garden prospect glimpsed in a darkened mirror, the whole rhythm and hierarchy of the interconnected rooms, each with its specialised function. Of course, much has been lost. As we experience it today, there are whole elements missing – the music, the super-ritualised life of court, that whole mini-universe with its own peculiar rites and protocols and quirks of pronunciation. But there remains, at least, a sense of power, purpose and magnificence that the succeeding centuries have done little to dim. Seen at Versailles, a delicate cup or inkstand or console table is simply one element of a visual order which is anything but fey and ineffectual – whereas the same objects, set out one by one against blank walls and mediated with informative panels, quite naturally look more than a little beleaguered – small, fragile things, admirable perhaps at an aesthetic level, but hopeless at a practical one. And this is not only unfair, but strangely sad to see.
All of which may appear to take us a long way from the question raised at the beginning of this review: does this exhibition succumb to the general tendency to impute moral, social or political implications to style? I think, unfortunately, the answer to that has to be ‘yes’ – and not only through a string of sins of omission, either. For instance, although the point is made that Mme de Pompadour owned works by Chardin and Greuze – painters whose style and subject-matter has caused them, for various reasons, to be associated with ‘simplicity’, lack of artifice and hence (however spuriously) with the values of bourgeois Paris rather than aristocratic Versailles – and although the point is made that Mme de Pompadour showed considerable and early interest in the neo-classical idiom – all this is relegated to the final room of the exhibition. This seemingly-innocent decision has two effects. First, it implies – and if the implication is only subliminal, it’s all the more dangerous for that – that Mme de Pompadour somehow started to turn from rococo frivolity to the down-to-earth values of Chardin’s kitchen boys and Greuze’s sentimental families late in life, which actually is not true. What’s more, though, the arrangement suggests that whenever she started collecting such work, it was too late – since again, at a subliminal level, the bronze model of the equestrian statue of Louis XV in the same room reminds us all too quickly where all that frivolity, the pastel colours and rarefied conceits, are going to lead us. It’s as if the sound of tumbrels rolling over wet cobblestones was being played out through the sound system. The narrative that has been set up can only lead one way. This is terrible both on the level of art history, and of history more generally.
But there are all sorts of anachronisms and false dichotomies here. Mme de Pompadour, after all, patronised Soufflot and must have approved of the design of the Petit Trianon, and while Greuze only came to prominence towards the end of her life, she certainly purchased ‘simple’ paintings and objects much earlier. Simplicity had always been part of her aesthetic. Indeed, part of the appeal of the rococo style apparently lay in its simplicity, its informality and ‘naturalness’ compared with the heavier baroque of the reign of Louis XIV. The simple fact is that as with many patrons of her age, Mme de Pompadour’s personal tastes could happily encompass, and indeed combine, styles that later generations assumed to be antithetical. Le gout Pompadour has been imposed by later generations on a fraction of what she personally chose. But by positioning her more ‘forward-looking’ purchases in, as it were, the shadow of the guillotine, the exhibition’s curators allow false assumptions about the rococo style to run riot. What assumptions? Those lingering assumptions that tell us rococo is pretty, that it’s all about mistresses and vice and extravagance, that it made France lose the Seven Years War and that it shows why the Revolution was inevitable – assumptions predicated on the idea that style has inherent and unchanging moral qualities. And in these days of knee-jerk calls for ‘modernisation’ that’s still as much of a live issue as it ever has been.
Again, this may seem to place an almost farcical burden of seriousness on what is at some level an attractive, entertaining art exhibition. Why not simply concentrate on what is good here, and stop carping about the failings of the presentation? Well, there’s a reason, and it is straight-forward enough. I can forgive the National Gallery their dreary underground bunker, which is hardly their fault and which no amount of sensitive hanging and tasteful repainting could have transcended. I can even forgive them the commercial imperatives that must have played a part in the strategy behind this show. What I cannot forgive, however, is the sly, insinuating sloppiness about something far more important than art – which is to say, the causes of one of the most influentially malign moments in European history, progenitor of the many nightmare-utopian regimes of the past unhappy century. If art exhibitions set out to talk about history, as well as art, then they owe it to all of us to get the relationship between the two right. Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress, is worth seeing, because there are beautiful and important things in this exhibition, but it has to be said that such beautiful things deserve a more congenial setting – and a more satisfactory intellectual framework, too.
Madame de Pompadour – Images of a Mistress, sponsored by Exxon Mobil, runs from 16 October 2002 – 12 January 2003 in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. Admission is £7.
Bunny Smedley is ERO's Arts Editor.
Bunny Smedley, January 6, 2003 06:53 PM