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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In 2008, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon acquired a painting called The Flight into Egypt which was attributed to the French artist Nicolas Poussin. Thought to have been painted in 1657, the painting had gone missing for more than three centuries. Several versions were rediscovered in the 1980s and one was passed from hand to hand, from a family who had no idea of its value to gallery owners and eventually to the museum. A painting that had been sold as a decorative object in 1986 for around 12,000 euros was acquired two decades later by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon for 17 million euros. What does this remarkable story tell us about the nature of art and the way that it is valued? How is it that what seemed to be just an ordinary canvas could be transformed into a masterpiece, that a decorative object could become a national treasure? This is a story permeated by social magic the social alchemy that transforms lead into gold, the ordinary into the extraordinary, the profane into the sacred. Focusing on this extraordinary case, Bernard Lahire lays bare the beliefs and social processes that underpin the creation of a masterpiece. Like a detective piecing together the clues in an unsolved mystery he carefully reconstructs the steps that led from the same material object being treated as a copy of insignificant value to being endowed with the status of a highly-prized painting commanding a record-breaking price. He thereby shows that a painting is never just a painting, and is always more than a piece of stretched canvass to which brush strokes of paint have been applied: this object, and the value we attach to it, is also the product of a complex array of social processes - with its distinctive institutions and experts - that lies behind it. And through the history of this painting, Lahire uncovers some of the fundamental structures of our social world. For the social magic that can transform a painting from a simple copy into a masterpiece is similar to the social magic that is present throughout our societies, in economics and politics as much as art and religion, a magic that results from the spell cast by power on those who tacitly recognize its authority. By following the trail of a single work of art, Lahire interrogates the foundations on which our perceptions of value and our belief in institutions rest and exposes the forms of domination which lie hidden behind our admiration of works of art.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Front Matter
Acknowledgements
Plates
Introduction: unravelling a canvas
Flights into Egypt: trajectories, rivalries and controversies
The real: between material continuity and social discontinuity
The objects of research: status, values and modes of behaviour
Pulling on a loose thread
Coda
Notes
Book 1. History, domination and social magic
Chapter 1. Self-evident facts and foundations of beliefs
Notes
Chapter 2. Domination and social magic
The objective forms of domination
A problem hidden beneath the fragmentation of points of view
Capital or symbolic effects?
Outline of a general theory of the magic of power
Notes
Chapter 3. Linked oppositions: dominators/dominated and sacred/profane
A history of the linked transformations of power and the sacred
Magic and power in stateless societies
Magic and power in State societies
The high and the low
Political fictions or how man created God in his image
Struggles for the appropriation of the sacred
Secularization, sanctification and the sacred foundations of all society
Notes
Book 2. Art, domination, sanctification
Chapter 4. The expansion of the domain of the sacred: the emergence of art as an autonomous domain, separate from the profane
Poets and artists, sovereigns and demiurges
The history of a collective sanctification
From relics to works of art
The separation of art and life
Admire first, interpret later
Beneath admiration, domination
The magic of paintings
Fables and hoaxes
Copies and forgeries
Notes
Chapter 5. Authentication and attribution
Where to look for scientific truths?
The expert: doing things with words
Performative act I: the catalogue raisonné
Performative act II: the exhibition
Attributions and disattributions: controversies and changes of opinion
The history and logic of attributionism
Science in the service of the sacred
Taking the ‘obvious’ out of the authentic
Notes
Book 3. On Poussin and some Flights into Egypt
Chapter 6. Sublime Poussin: master of French classicism
Journey of an artist against time and tide: independence and creative freedom
Painter-philosopher and artist
On Poussin’s success
To art, a nation’s gratitude
Notes
Chapter 7. The fabulous destiny of paintings attributed to Nicolas Poussin
Links, associations and changes in status
Histories of paintings
The painting of a great painter whose talent is declining
On the trail of an admirable painting
Three canvases resurface
A growing controversy
New developments: the request for the annulment of the 1986 sale
The acquisition of a national treasure
In search of sponsors
The magic of a masterpiece
The end of a controversy
The conditions of enchantment and disenchantment
A version without an expert
Notes
Chapter 8. Poussin, science, law and the art market
Poussin in the laboratory
Poussin in court
The price of a painting
Notes
Chapter 9. How each person plays their game
Art historians: who has the eye?
The gallery owners: playing (and losing) the game
A museum director playing (and winning) her game
Notes
Conclusions
Working outside the fields
At the root of beliefs
Exposing the invisible monster
A fragile learned game
Notes
Post-scriptum: the conditions for scientific creation
Notes
Summary of information sources consulted
Bibliography
Supplementary bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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To my son Nathan, whose creative spirit and sense of humour delight me.
This is Not Just a Painting
An Inquiry into Art, Domination, Magic and the Sacred
Bernard Lahire
Translated by Helen Morrison
polity
First published in French as Ceci n’est pas qu’un tableau. Essai sur l’art, la domination, la magie et le sacré © Éditions La Découverte, Paris, France, 2015
This English edition © Polity Press, 2019The translation of this work has benefited from the support of the Institut Universitaire de France
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2871-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lahire, Bernard, author. | Translation of: Lahire, Bernard. Ceci n’est pas qu’un tableau.Title: This is not just a painting : an inquiry into art, domination, magic and the sacred / Bernard Lahire.Other titles: Ceci n’est pas qu’un tableau. EnglishDescription: English edition. | Medford, MA : Polity, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2018025192 (print) | LCCN 2018026191 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509528714 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509528691 (hardback)Subjects: LCSH: Poussin, Nicolas, 1594?-1665. Flight into Egypt. | Aesthetics. | Mysticism and art. | Art appreciation.Classification: LCC BH39 (ebook) | LCC BH39 .L22813 2018 (print) | DDC 759.4--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025192
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Acknowledgements
I would first of all like to thank Sylvie Ramond, director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon who initiated this project. Thanks also to Agnès Cipriani, development officer for the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, who facilitated our access to the museum’s archives.
I would also like to thank all those who agreed to be interviewed. In alphabetical order: William Bourdon, Agnès Cipriani, Michel Colonna Ceccaldi, Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Yves Di Domenico, Isabelle Dubois-Brinkmann, Hubert Duchemin, François Duret-Robert, Richard Pardo, Vincent Pomarède, Pierre Rosenberg, Henri Zerner and the son of the original owner of the painting now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon.
During my long period of research, I benefited from the scientific collaboration of Géraldine Bois, who interviewed most of the ‘major actors’ in connection with the recent history of The Flight into Egypt and who put together all the various documentation needed for a historical reconstruction of Nicolas Poussin’s fame.
I have been fortunate to benefit from contact with various colleagues, including Samuel Coavoux (Centre Max Weber) and Marianne Woollven (Université de Clermont-Ferrand), Emmanuel Renaut and Claude Gautier (ENS de Lyon), Frédéric Vandenberghe (IESP of the State University of Rio de Janeiro), Mathieu Hilgers (ULB, Belgium) and Felice Dassetto (Université catholique de Louvain/Académie Royale de Belgique).
This research would not have been possible without the help of several groups of students, all participants in the ‘Atelier Poussin’, at the École Normal Supérieur de Lyon, during the academic years 2008/2009, 2009/2010, and 2010/2011. I am all too aware that I would never have had the courage to embark on a project so fraught with risks because of its sheer historical scope, the constant requirement to step outside the specialized domains and the multiple scientific implications had that risk not been shared within the context of this ‘teaching’.
There are two main approaches to teaching at university level. One is based on a distinction between a teacher who knows and students who learn, and the other places teacher and learners in the same uncertain situation, where the only advantage held by the former is to have had more experience sailing these uncharted seas than the young crew members embarked on the same voyage. There is something reassuring about the ‘cold’ knowledge which is transferred in the first kind of teaching. There it is: objectivized in the research texts, commentated on in the more scholarly texts or works, presented by the teacher, and the student who wishes to appropriate it can devote all the time required for the task by reading and then re-producing in an oral or written form the fruits of his or her study. ‘Hot knowledge’ can be destabilizing, emerging as it does somewhat unpredictably throughout the academic year, but it offers far greater opportunities for scientific minds to develop. It was this second type of teaching that the students who participated in the ‘Atelier Poussin’ were confronted with: a mix of genuine case studies and theoretical or methodological commentary, a mobilization of authors or texts depending on the variable needs of the research, the sense of helplessness or of ignorance which marks the different stages of a research project and which sets the course of tasks yet to be achieved, etc.
My thanks therefore go to: Nadège Conte, Barthélemy Durrive, Maëva Gonzales, Maïlys Lascour, Anaïs Lemoalle, Aurélia Léon, Christian Marcucci, Florian Milesi, Tiphaine Parot, Adélaïde Ploux-Chilles, Mathilde Provansal, Pierre Royole Degieux, Anne-Camille Seyssel, Christelle Siboni and Marine Tregan (participants in the ‘Atelier Poussin’ in 2008/2009, ENS de Lyon); Marie du Boucher, Lisa Marx, Claire Oppenchaim, Louise Piguet and Mathilde Provansal (participants in the ‘Atelier Poussin’ in 2009/2010, ENS de Lyon); Laura Cappelle, Johan Hernandez, Lucie Jégat, Clémence Perronnet, Claire Piluso, Luisa Salieri and Cécile Thomé (participants at the ‘Atelier Poussin’ in 2010/2011, ENS de Lyon).
I am also indebted to the Rhône-Alpes region, which offered financial support for the first two years of this research in the context of Cluster 13 – ‘Cultures, patrimoine et création’ (Culture, heritage and creation). Unfortunately, however, those national authorities capable of funding research, who often tend to favour the large-scale projects (multi-team, multi-disciplinary, international, etc.) often based on compromises, and loose arrangements or consensus, could not be approached for such a project. The more risky and unusual the project and the more it differs from the standard type of project, the less likely it is to be the result of inter-team collaboration. A few isolated but closely-knit researchers can, in my view, achieve far more than loose groupings of teams or laboratories, which are often forced to get together in order to finance research and to keep their staff busy. And, given how difficult it is to get funding for science outside this carefully organized bottleneck, it seems to me that scientific life is harder now than it was in the past. Reversing the order of priorities, researchers tend to favour research projects they know are likely to be funded rather than seek funding for scientifically powerful projects, which have been devised without any consideration as to their potential to be financed.
I also want to thank Hugues Jallon, my editor, for the interest he has shown in my work over almost fifteen years and for his thorough re-readings of my manuscript. The final form taken by Book 3 in particular owes a lot to him.
Finally, I confided my progress, doubts and difficulties throughout the writing process to Sophie Divry, who always listened with curiosity and interest. Her willingness to listen and her reactions provided useful encouragement and her multiple re-readings were an invaluable help.
As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity – the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.
M. Foucault, The use of pleasure: The history of sexuality, Vol. 2. New York: Vintage Books, 1990, p. 8
If you want to push science forward as quickly as possible you will succeed in destroying it as quickly as possible; just as a hen perishes if it is compelled to lay eggs too quickly. Science has certainly been pushed forward at an astonishing speed over the last decades: but just look at the men of learning, the exhausted hens. They are in truth not ‘harmonious’ natures; they can only cackle more than ever because they lay eggs more often: though the eggs to be sure, have got smaller and smaller (…).
F. Nietzsche, Untimely meditations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 99
Nicolas Poussin, by Albert Clouet, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
1a and 1b. Ne pas toucher les œuvres (Do not touch the works), poster by Jean-Luc Chamroux, Louvre Museum, 1996, 100 × 150 cm and caption 15 × 15 cm, jean-luc-chamroux.net.
2. The Flight into Egypt, ‘Piasecka-Johnson’ version (photo: D. Rykner).
3. The Flight into Egypt, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon.
4. Comparison of the ‘Piasecka-Johnson’ (left) and the ‘Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon’ (right) versions of The Flight into Egypt (2008) (photo: D. Rykner).
5. The Flight into Egypt, Museum of Verrières-le-Buisson.
Introduction: unravelling a canvas
Introducing a book by beginning with a description of the conditions in which the work was conceived is certainly the simplest and the most honest way of addressing the reader, as well as the clearest. Research, and the books which emerge as a result, do not appear out of nowhere and are always the result of a subtle mixture of coincidences and opportunities and of scientific and personal imperatives.
This particular investigation owes its origins to Sylvie Ramond, director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. It was she who, in 2008, suggested I should take a close look at the recent story of a version of The Flight into Egypt by Nicolas Poussin, a painting recently acquired by the museum. Initially somewhat sceptical, as is often the case for researchers anxious to protect their independence, I finally agreed to take a look at the press file put together by the museum. It was at that point that I became caught up in the intrigue of this curious tale, which read rather like a detective story with plot twists, cliff-hangers and a cast of colourful characters, and began to identify a number of ways of approaching a problem which was gradually taking shape before my eyes. In spite of what may seem like an initial departure from the core focus in an effort to understand its broader meaning and to explore what this story could reveal about the structure of our societies, their historical foundations, and about the relations of dominance and the acts of social magic constantly at work within them, I hope that all those who have so generously opened up their archives to me and assisted me on numerous occasions with the process of my research will find food for thought in these pages.
The social, political and scientific context in which I have carried out this research, and gone on to write this book, is a significant element in the regressive approach I have chosen to adopt here, a process which consists of stepping back into the past in order to understand the present. Indeed, it seemed to me imperative to produce a work which sets out to shine a spotlight on a certain number of self-evident facts and foundations or bases of beliefs which, though virtually invisible, have a deeply significant influence on the way our lives are structured. Equally urgent was the need to reiterate the importance of relations of domination in this objectivized history which nevertheless quietly reveals so much about our current behaviour. This research therefore sets out to ensure that history in all its forms – whether structural and long term or individual and biographical – like the facts of domination, is not forgotten, either in a political or scientific context.
As someone who has campaigned for many years to ensure that sociology on an individual scale finds a legitimate place within social science research,1 I have also always defended the need to vary the scale of contextualization depending on the nature of the questions to be asked or of the problems to be resolved.2 There will therefore be no shift in my position in the course of this project, which often disregards individual singularities in order to focus instead on the great cultural foundations on which individuals play out their roles. Social issues, unfolded, that is to say examined from an outside perspective, in different societies and in different eras, are not incompatible with ‘folded’ or more internalized social issues embodied within socialized individuals.
Flights into Egypt: trajectories, rivalries and controversies
In 2008, the arrival in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon of a painting entitled ‘The Flight into Egypt’ (1657–1658), and attributed to Nicolas Poussin, was announced in the national press as an event which was, on a number of different levels, exceptional. Exceptional because of the reputation of the prestigious presumed creator of a painting presented as a masterpiece. Exceptional too because of the rollercoaster journey of an object which had been missing for a long time and had not always been recognized as an autograph work.3 Exceptional finally, because of the economic magnitude – €17 million – of public and private investment brought together in order to bring a Poussin into the collections of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon.
Breaking away from legends
It was indeed the exceptional nature of this work and its history, emphasized by many commentators, which first attracted my attention. Not that I sought to get involved in telling the intricate and fascinating story of this ‘famous work’ and, in particular, of the ‘incredible scientific and legal epic’4 which preceded the acquisition, but because that very exceptionality, as emphasized by all the commentators, struck me as an interesting focus in itself. From my very first exposure to the story of this painting, as with other similar stories, what astonished me most was the way it had somehow taken on the status of a kind of legend. The history of a painting which had been missing for more than three centuries, and which was then re-discovered but remained un-acknowledged, passing from hand to hand, from a bourgeois family who had no notion of its value and then to gallery owners who made assumptions regarding its value, a tale involving Franco-British controversies between the four greatest Poussin experts in the world, including two ‘Knights of the realm’ (one the curator of the art collection belonging to the Queen of England and a Russian spy known as the ‘fourth man’ of the famous ‘Cambridge Five’, and the other, a descendant of the family who had founded the Guinness Mahon investment bank), a professor at the Collège de France, and a Director of the Louvre who was to become a member of the Académie Française. Add to all this, the astonishing contrast between what was considered merely a decorative old item put up for sale in 1986 at the price of a simple contemporary copy (around €12,000) and the masterpiece by Nicolas Poussin sold for €17 million in 2007, the legal imbroglios around the ownership of the painting, etc. All of this has proved fascinating for many a commentator.
If some aspects of the painting’s history indeed resemble a detective story, it also has elements of a fairy-tale. In the manner of the frog transformed into a Prince Charming, we are told the tale of an ordinary canvas transformed into a masterpiece, a simple copy transmuted into a national treasure. This is the magic of transubstantiation, the social alchemy which transforms lead into gold, the ordinary into the extraordinary, the profane into the sacred. Social magic is everywhere here: in the phenomena of successive enchantment and disenchantment around certain objects, the white and the black magic of performative acts which bestow status or remove it, cause things to exist by simply naming them, or the admiring and reverential attitudes towards a sanctified object. Magic is omnipresent even though scarcely noticed.
This social magic might seem to be more of a matter for an anthropology of belief and of the effects of belief. But when beliefs generate so much social energy in so many different actors who discuss, authenticate, appropriate, buy and sell, admire, etc., when it is with these same beliefs that public or private money is committed or that laws are made, then belief and magic are no longer specialist questions. Instead, they are central facts which potentially concern the whole area of the social sciences, from the history of religion to monetary economics, from political anthropology to the history and sociology of art. What I set out to demonstrate here is that, with a different set of beliefs, and as a result, with a completely different accumulated history, the world, and our lives, would be totally different.
What fascinates us about ‘legends’ is therefore an important aspect of what will be explored here by focusing on this object made sacred by history and on the behaviours associated with it. It is not therefore the ‘incredible story’ or the ‘fantastical story’ of this painting that will be narrated in these pages since that would simply mean subscribing to the collective wonderment. The history of popular art abounds with such stories described as ‘thrillers’, as ‘incredible’, ‘breath-taking’ or ‘fabulous’. Such tales tell us more about the myths associated with great art and with creative genius than help us gain any genuine understanding of the meaning of our practices in relation to art. Thus, the spell-binding biographies of famous paintings do not at first appear to distance themselves with regard to pictorial art in general.5 Unconsciously part of a whole multi-layered history, those who write them forget what the current situation owes to the institutions, power struggles and shows of strength accumulated throughout the past.
This absence of distance continues to manifest itself in relation to the unique works whose various adventures are recounted. For example, Courbet’s The Origin of the World is supposed to represent ‘both the universal arms of feminine heraldry and a hymn to liberty’.6 Such paintings belong to a process which sees them singled out to become a focus of intense interest and particular fascination, and end up being universalized and mythicized. As Thierry Savatier writes: ‘But The Origin of the World is no ordinary picture. It has a unique place in western art because it represents, without compromise and without historical or mythological alibi, not only the sexual organs of a woman, but THE sexuality of WOMANKIND and, even more than that, of all women, mistresses and mothers included’.7 Finally, anecdotal history very often takes the form of a detective story, made up of little episodes which, bit by bit, spell out the trajectory of the picture (‘a complex story, with multiple plot twists, shadowy areas, lies, alibis, things left unsaid, all of which need to be approached like a police investigation’8).
In the same way, Donald Sassoon, in his Leonardo and the Mona Lisa Story. The History of a Painting told in Pictures, delivers an almost idealtypical fable, a story of enchantment and of ‘admiration’ which tells the extraordinary adventure of ‘the world’s most famous painting’,9 painted by Leonardo de Vinci around 1503–1507. The history of this painting is teleological (‘From its first viewing, this work of art caused a stir among all who saw it’) and the entire book consists of a historical account vaunting the growing glory of the painting: the high visitor numbers, the numerous photos of the painting, the multiple copies of the work (sixty alone registered in the two centuries following the artist’s death), the pastiches, the visitors filming it, the books, cartoons or films in which it features, etc.10 The focus is this portrait of the Mona Lisa who ‘has had 500 years of fame’, of the ‘sighs of recognition’ she provokes and of the ‘jostling of the crowd shifting from foot to foot’ and errors of history or inexplicable lapses in taste are blamed for all the moments when the canvas was not apparently considered as the undeniable masterpiece whose one-dimensional history is set out here.11
Categorized and classified paintings and retrospective illusions
None of all that will be found in this book, but, on the contrary, a determination to rationalize the legend, to lay bare the beliefs and to topple the myths. Reconstructing the socio-historical trajectory of a painting representing the biblical episode of the flight into Egypt, and of a number of other rival paintings, means looking at the history of the different ways in which such objects have been described and, as a result, at the history of the various categories into which they have been placed: ordinary object/objet d’art, copy/original, ordinary painting/old master, minor painting/masterpiece, single painting/painting featuring in a collection, etc. It is also to tell the story of the various tests, particularly legal and scientific, to which they have been subjected in order to be authenticated.
The history of a long-lost canvas, initially known only thanks to the existence of engravings and a few sparse mentions in written accounts, is, moreover, not such an easy one to tell without the risk of falling into the trap of retrospective illusion or teleological vision. The difficulty lies in the fact that several versions of the work reappeared in the public domain during the 1980s, but without any immediate or definitive clarification of their status. A first version, discovered in 1982 by the British art historian Anthony Blunt and published as an autograph painting,12 was followed a few years later, in 1986, by the reappearance, in an art auction in Versailles, of a second canvas, which I shall be focusing on in particular here. The attribution of the first painting to Poussin, initially uncontested, led the auctioneer and the expert to classify this second version as a simple studio copy (in the knowledge that Poussin is generally regarded as a painter who never painted the same canvas twice). However, in the years following the sale of this second painting, a controversy began to take shape, triggered by the publication, in 1994, of the second canvas as an autograph work, by Jacques Thuillier, an eminent French art historian and professor at the Collège de France, a view supported in the same year by the newly appointed director of the Louvre, on the occasion of a major Poussin retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. Another leading authority on seventeenth-century art history, Sir Denis Mahon, also from Great Britain, then stepped into the debate with a defence of the first version, in spite of the fact that throughout his entire career he had always systematically opposed Blunt. A third version of the painting, which subsequently emerged in the late 1980s, was put forward as potentially genuine by a less influential British art historian, Christopher Wright, but subsequently unanimously rejected by the more eminent specialists. The battle between these four major international experts (Anthony Blunt and Denis Mahon on one side and Jacques Thuillier and Pierre Rosenberg on the other) was to involve specialist historical knowledge of the work and life of Poussin and scientific analysis of the paintings.
In the early years of the twenty-first century, the second canvas gained ground in terms of legitimacy and moved closer to the Holy Grail, or in other words, the status of an autograph painting. The first version lost its strongest supporter with the death of Blunt in 1983, followed, in 2011, by that of Mahon. The second canvas, after a long legal imbroglio between the former owners and the gallery owners who had acquired it in 1986, was classified as a ‘national treasure’ by the French government and its trajectory finally came to a halt in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon.13 Such a story, very briefly summarized here,14 demonstrates how a cultural object only exists in so far as it becomes the subject of discussions, classification systems, tests, procedures and institutions which close in on it and commandeer it. It becomes an object of controversy, it is subjected to all kinds of tests (legal, scientific, technical, etc.), it is accepted or rejected, classified, indexed, exhibited to the public, put up for public sale, included in a collection, and so on.
It would be wrong, therefore, to recount the history of this second version of the painting, which made its appearance in 1986, as though it had always existed as an ‘autograph masterpiece by Nicolas Poussin’. That would be tantamount to forgetting that, at different periods and times, what is referred to by the title of ‘The Flight into Egypt’, but which was never given a title by its creator, has at diverse moments been a commission from a dealer by the name of Jacques Serisier of which Bernini had a rather poor opinion, a simple mention in various written accounts of a painting that had perhaps once existed, the lost model for engravings attesting its past existence, an item in various catalogues (in the absence of an actual canvas, but on the basis of engravings and written accounts), a painting published in 1982 by the art historian Antony Blunt, a painting which had been ‘copied’ and a resulting copy which turned up in an art auction in 1986, a source of scientific controversy between art historians of differing status intent on defending the authenticity of the two pictures, a painting previously considered as a mere copy but whose authenticity was gradually recognized by a growing number of experts, the object of a court case involving the former owners, the gallery owners who had subsequently acquired it, the auctioneer and his expert, a chef d’œuvre by a master of classicism worthy of being classified as a ‘national treasure’, the focus of local, regional, national and even international repercussions, an ‘exemplary’ sponsorship operation, a piece which completes a collection of seventeenth-century art at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, a means of attracting the attention of museum goers.
Giving the painting properties only recently attributed to it by using the term ‘a masterpiece by Nicolas Poussin’ in reference to its earlier existence would be falling into what Patrick Boucheron describes as ‘the retrospective illusion’, a reference to the state in which a witness to a speech made by a certain ‘Francis’ writes, long after the event, that he had seen ‘Saint Francis’, whereas the person he had actually seen, at the time he had seen him, was not yet a saint and ‘his name did not evoke the powerful echo which would resonate from it thirty years later, when life stories, legends and accounts of “Saint Francis of Assisi” had proliferated and merged together’.15
For me, therefore, it was a matter of reconstructing the series of actors (individuals or institutions) and the sequence of their actions which led to the same ‘material object’ going from the status of a copy of insignificant value, either in aesthetic or economic terms, to that of a highly prized painting with what was considered a record-breaking purchase price within the context of a sponsorship operation involving multiple partners, both public and private. Amongst these numerous actors, will be found, in no particular order, the original owners of the picture, lawyers, an auctioneer and his expert, a professor at the Collège de France, an ex-director of the Louvre Museum and member of the Académie Française, various major foreign experts (notably British or American), a series of art historians with less established reputations but who were nevertheless specialists in seventeenth-century art, curators from the Louvre museum, experts appointed by the courts, Le Laboratoire de recherché des Musées de France, the laboratory of the National Gallery, London, the French government, who took the decision to classify the painting as a ‘national treasure’, the authors of the 2002 law relating to sponsorship, major international museums who acquired seventeenth-century artworks in general and especially those of Poussin, thereby contributing to increase the reputation of seventeenth-century paintings and those of Poussin in particular,16 the private companies and public partnerships (municipality, region, State) who played a part in the acquisition, the management team at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, etc. Together, these actors form the long chain of actions, opinions, decisions, judgements, classifications or categorizations whether State, legal, aesthetic, cultural or scientific, economic evaluations, etc., leading up to the present situation.
The story of such an object, which one imagines will boost visitor numbers and the national and international reputation of the Musée des Beaux-Arts and of the city of Lyon itself, is clear proof that a painting is always more than just a ‘simple painting’: it is a public event, a matter with ramifications for the worlds of politics, museums, finance and publicity, a barometer of public tastes and interest, something which prompts numerous visitors, each with their own cultural outlook, to travel to the museum, and generates a multitude of discussions about art, the price of art, etc. But even more fundamentally, once authenticated, a painting is more than simply a stretched canvas on which brush strokes of paint have been applied. It becomes a magical object thanks to the aura which, from now on, seems to mysteriously emanate from it. This book will therefore focus on all the issues associated with this object and on the different effects it produces or provokes within the social world depending on the status attributed to it.
The real: between material continuity and social discontinuity
The situation of an object which, throughout its trajectory, has taken on very different meanings and values and which has been variously appropriated by different individuals, groups or institutions could generate discussions of a radical nominalism on the fact, for example, that it would be impossible to say whether it was indeed the same picture from one era (that in which the painting tranquilly decorated the walls of a bourgeois house or the one in which it was stored without any particular care in an old farm building) to another (when it was recognized as an autograph painting by the majority of experts).
I am not sufficiently nominalist to think that it is not ontologically the same object which has passed ‘through the hands’ of different owners, art historians, gallery owners, patrons, curators, scholars, lawyers, auctioneers, experts, etc. Its meaning and its value (both economic and aesthetic), and sometimes its actual status, have certainly varied considerably depending on the circumstances and on the way it has been appropriated by the individuals, groups and institutions with which it was variously associated throughout the course of a long trajectory which began in 1657 and ended (for us) in 2013. But it seems to me more reasonable to maintain the idea of a continuity in terms of the material existence of the painting (even when it had completely disappeared from circulation and when the historian, deprived of access to any archive, could not say anything either about its owners or about the context of its movements, it still continued to materially exist somewhere), while at the same time being careful to reconstruct the different stages and the different uses to which it had been subject. No contradiction exists between the two principles of the material continuity of the painting and the social and symbolic discontinuity of the ways in which it was appropriated.
Such a notion seems however to be challenged by Bruno Latour in an article on the subject of the death of Ramses II around 1213 BC.17 In the late 1990s, the Val-de-Grâce hospital (Paris) was able to prove that Ramses had probably died of tuberculosis, but Latour seriously questions the legitimacy of saying that the pharaoh ‘died from a bacillus discovered by Robert Koch in 1882’.18 Latour clearly highlights here the confusion between the scientific knowledge of the cause of illness and the reality of the facts. Ramses II did indeed die of a disease the origins of which would not be discovered until 1882, in other words, some 3,000 years later. There is no paradox, no anachronism, no scientism in such a statement. What can be added, however, is that the lives of patients and even of bacilli are no longer the same since the discovery of the bacillus. As a result of that discovery, vaccines and drugs have been created to eradicate this illness. What changes, therefore, are the social practices associated with the illness and the response of people to what is happening to them. At the time of Ramses II, as in our own time, the bacilli from which the illness originated, but which nobody was in a position to name or to study, existed and were active independently of any notion of the nature of the disease or knowledge. From one period of time to another, what has changed is the status of the disease, the treatment of the patient, the gestures and the attitudes adopted in order to avoid transmission of the disease. Once the bacillus was discovered, new measures, new preventative or healing strategies could be put in place. The same could be said of any object where the many different ways in which it is appropriated at any one time change the meaning, status, function and practice associated with it. The difference here is that the bacillus could only be identified once specific instruments (such as the microscope) allowed it to become visible. But processes which are invisible to the naked eye and as yet undiscovered are just as real as those which are visible and scientifically recognized.
Comparing ‘Koch’s bacillus’ to a ‘burst of machine-gun fire’ in order to condemn the anachronism of those who claim that Ramses died from tuberculosis and to claim that, ‘before Koch, the bacillus did not really exist’ is to confuse the scientific concept and the physical reality. For, if the machine-gun was indeed invented several thousand years after the death of Ramses II, viruses did not wait for scholars to appear on the scene in order to become active. They were active even without being observed, recognized and named. It is, moreover, rather paradoxical that a researcher who proclaims loudly and clearly that non-humans are actors too, should make the reality of the existence of the virus depend on it being observed and named by humans. In effect, this means giving humans a much greater power than they actually have. And if we took the hypothesis of linking the real existence of something to its recognition by humans to absurd lengths, we might indeed conclude that, in order to eradicate viruses, we would simply need to eradicate the scientists who discover them.
If, to avoid ‘committing the cardinal sin of the historian, which is that of the anachronism’ it is prudent to say that the pharaoh died from what would, several thousand years later, be known as ‘tuberculosis’, and that this death from tuberculosis would not even be diagnosed until one hundred years after the discovery of Koch’s bacillus, nothing can challenge the fact that, within the limits of what the state of science allows us to assert, the pharaoh died of what we would today call tuberculosis.
The objects of research: status, values and modes of behaviour
Objects, as some social scientists would tell us, are ‘non-humans’ and their point is a perfectly reasonable one. But these ‘non-humans’, they add, are actors in every sense of the term, ‘in their own right’, within the social world. The principle of ‘generalized symmetry’, which enjoins researchers to treat ‘non-humans’ as ‘humans’,19 should, if it had any relevance, allow us to read or hear what non-humans can tell us about the social world. But, to date, such accounts have so far failed to materialize within our societies. ‘To forget’ that objects cannot speak or write20 and that, when they do manage to do so, it is only as the result of programming by humans, is rather surprising on the part of sociologists or anthropologists who claim to be fighting against all the abstractions of ‘classic sociology’ and to adhere as closely as possible to the real. Forgetfulness on such a scale can legitimately raise questions about the intentions of those who forget.
Not only do objects not speak, but they are not in any way socially constituted to act, feel, sense, believe, all of which would be the product of their experiences. In this sense, objects have no particular attitude towards other objects or humans. These differences mean that objects, whilst they are omnipresent in social life and part of the constraints which humans must continually come to terms with, and therefore an issue for researchers in social science, are anything but actors. It is even one of their specificities that they are what the humans who invent them, use them, exchange them, interpret them, divert from their original function, etc., make them. Outside of films or science fiction, objects do not invent humans and have no intentions or attitudes towards them. Nor do they use them, exchange them or discuss them with a view to establishing what they can do with them. Such remarks may seem absurd and will indeed appear so to those who have never read the work of the authors referred to, but, when there is no consensus within a scientific community over such apparently obvious facts, it is not completely without value to revisit them.21
Objects do not exist in a socially independent way from the individuals, groups or institutions which appropriate them. They vary in terms of their meaning, their status, their value and in the modes of behaviour that they give rise to, precisely as a result of their status, value and meaning. For example, perfectly ordinary water, which could just as easily be used for washing dishes or as drinking water, can, in the Christian tradition, by means of a sacrament, become ‘holy water’, which can then itself be used in the sacramental act of baptism. While the act of blessing does not chemically alter the nature of the water, it does, however, change its status and significance, and leads believers to behave towards it with all due consideration.22 The efficacy of the sacrament ‘modifies the status or at least the position of the person it is intended for’.23 In a similar way, the placing of an ordinary object, or even what might normally be considered as simply a piece of refuse, in a museum by someone who has the status of an artist and can legitimately exhibit their work, makes that object into a work of art. The mere fact of exhibiting it in a museum is a way of saying: ‘This is a work of art.’ Whether the work in question is a painting, a urinal, excrement or the absence of any object whatsoever does not alter this fact. It can therefore be said that, depending on the way we appropriate them, objects change their status, and these changes in status modify their value and the way they are used in real terms. When a canvas goes from being a simple copy to being a genuine masterpiece, the same object, although it has not changed its substance, nevertheless really transforms social behaviour in respect to it, beginning with the sum of money the actors involved are prepared to pay to acquire it or their need to insure it heavily against theft and to keep it in a secure place, and ending with the individual aesthetic emotions that this new status inevitably provokes in the visitors to the museum.
If we examine in even more detail the successive statuses of objects, we discover that, for example, a canvas produces different social effects depending on whether it is regarded as a copy or as an autograph work, whether it is viewed in a church, a palace, on the television, in the possession of a wealthy individual or in a museum, whether it is seen in the context of an exhibition bringing together works by the same artist or in that of an exhibition grouping works from the same period by very different artists, whether or not the state has classified it as a national treasure, whether the artist in question is judged, in the context of art history and by all the official commentators on art, as a major or a minor artist, a great master, a genius or a second rate painter, etc. The attitudes of actors from the world of art and those of the public will therefore vary depending on what they think they are looking at. Each time an object becomes part of a new context or acquires a new status, it produces new effects and takes on new meaning. And, in the case of sacred objects (relics or works of art), ‘they project onto their owner an aura of wonder’,24 just as they do onto all those who seek to enter into contact with them.
The involvement and association of objects in social experiences are also what distinguishes a ‘new object’ from ‘an object which has a history’, in other words, one which is associated with people, with certain moments of existence and with which, as a result, an emotional relationship is possible. But, unlike the personal or familial object, whose history quickly disappears with the person or group of people who were associated with it, certain objects such as relics or art works are associated with institutions, places, texts, eyewitness accounts, written accounts and repeated collective rituals all of which prolong the status of the objects in question. The difference is therefore a difference in the degree of objectivization-crystallization of the status of the object, of the number of people sharing the history of a particular object and of the degree of legitimacy of the people with whom it is associated. As the anthropologist Jean Bazin writes:
The day Uncle Victor gave me a silver plated cup from Christofle in honour of my christening and Aunt Agatha presented me with a birthday present of a ceramic vase in the neo-Moustiers style, by so doing they transformed an ordinary object, which could be replaced by any number of other objects, into a unique item which would from then on, in a given world, be referred to by a proper noun as Uncle Victor’s cup, Aunt Agatha’s vase. […] After my death, in the absence of any suitable narrator, there is a high chance that Uncle Victor’s cup will disappear as such, only to resurface in some junk shop as the object of a potentially new gift, and therefore undergo a change of identity. Although, with the help of celebrity, the identities of successive donors and recipients can merge (the vase of Jackie Kennedy’s Aunt Agatha) and eventually live on permanently (the cup of Napoleon’s uncle Victor, which I picture in the museum in Ajaccio).25
Finally, like individuals,26 objects can be studied from two points of view and on different scales of observation which are not incompatible, but which do not lead to the same knowledge of the social world. On the one hand, there may be particular objects whose biography (trajectory) can be traced, objects which are in circulation, change hands, are the subject of commentaries, appropriations, etc. (such as the Poussin picture), and on the other hand, there are the representatives of a specific class of objects (that of works of art as opposed to artisan or industrial products), whose evolution, transformations, disappearance, etc., can be studied by history and macrostructural sociology.
The biography of objects and the macrostructural study of categories of objects complement each other27: if the former allows observation of actors at work, notably in their task of categorizing the objects in question, the latter is a reminder of what biographies sometimes forget, namely that the processes of categorization or the strategies of actors vis-à-vis objects imply the existence of established categories, of opposing classifications and of socially structured frameworks within which certain practices can be deployed and where strategies can be tried out. What I have tried to do in this book is to combine these two points of view while at the same time taking care to consider objects and individuals in their unique contexts, and to reconstruct the wider framework within which their lives, their circumstances and their behaviour make sense.28
Pulling on a loose thread
By focusing on the history of a painting, I found to my astonishment that a simple case study can lead to an investigation of major scientific and sociological issues. By simply pulling on a loose thread, the whole skein seemed to unravel before my eyes, even though I had not set out with any very precise idea of the size and exact nature of the skein of yarn I was dealing with. From theoretical interrogation to methodological reflexivity, from structural contextualization to historical regression, I gradually distanced myself from the specific case in order to gain a deeper understanding of it.
I make no claim to do the work of an art historian here. The existence of a completely separate discipline, that of art history, is, moreover, part of a process of autonomization through which art becomes a sacred domain, distinct from those of the profane, and this is exactly what I have sought to understand here. Once art has been separated and studied in itself and for itself, it becomes more difficult to link it to realities outside of the artistic domain and, in particular, to power structures. Starting out with the history of an object, which ended up being recognized, at least by some of the specialists, as a painting by Poussin, has not led me to focus my study entirely on the position of Poussin within the artistic world of his time or on his ‘career’ in both France and Italy. Nor has it led me to analyse his relationships with the royal power or with his patrons in order to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of his work or to embark on an interpretation of his paintings both from a thematic and a formal point of view. Instead, I have explored the place, role, meaning and value of art in history. I have also looked at how the social world, at different times throughout history, seized upon a certain canvas and how, once it had been recognized as the work of a great master, the painting in question in turn affected that social world. Some of these questions are no different from those examined by art historians, but their work has been as much the object of my analysis as a means of understanding the real. I hope they will not see this as an attack on academic practice, but simply as an opportunity for them (debateable, of course) to reflect in a different way on art and on their profession as art historians.
The historical sociology that I am engaging in here enables major theoretical questions from the field of social sciences to be examined. It allows us firstly to work on the link between events and long-term structures, and, in a more general manner, on the intersection of temporalities which come together in the present of the action. The interest in such an approach lies in the possibility it offers to link together, as Fernand Braudel29 suggests, long term and short term, and to see how the movements of social and cultural history as well as the most agitated scenes of the history of events take place against the background of the virtually immobile history of major social and cultural structures. Research of this nature involves taking a broad perspective on particular events (meetings, one-off interactions between actors, localized decisions, detailed speeches) and providing elements of a structural framework for both longer time sequences – spanning many centuries – as well as shorter time sequences lasting only a few decades.
