The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism 1798-1836

TODD PORTERFIELD

The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism 1798-1836

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. 253 pp.; 20 color ills., 85 b/w. $55.00

DARCY GRIMALDO GRIGSBY

Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. 400 pp.; 81 color ills., 139 b/w. $70.00

There is no doubt that questions of empire, rarely raised in traditional accounts of painting in the period, have now become matters of urgent interest in the study of early-19th-century French art. In his classic study David to Delacroix, Walter Friedlaender spent relatively little time on Antoine-Jean Gros's Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa, remarking rather cursorily on the artist's debts to, and divergences from, iconographic and formal traditions and adding that it was "a picture which, though based on an old tradition must, through its Orientalisms, its strange gothic setting, and its dreadfulness of subject, have had a strange and exciting effect." (1)

The nature and complexity of these "Orientalisms" take center stage in both Porterfield's and Grimaldo Grigsby's works, together with a new and subtle scrutiny of the "strange and exciting effect" of this and other complex grandes machines that structure our understanding of French history painting in the first half of the 19th century. Of course, much has happened since Friedlaender. Waves of revisionist accounts have been successively more acutely attuned to politics and to reception. However, work of a sociohistorical bent still tends to organize the history of French art in this period according to the categories and chronologies of domestic French politics. (2)

The two books under review here take a different tack, choosing a path made feasible by the profound influence of Edward Said's discussion of how the physical expansion of empires and colonization of peoples in the latter half of the 19th century was foreshadowed and prepared by a cultural creation of the Oriental "Other." The features of this discursive Orient were fixed in a set of binary oppositions that helped to fashion not only the identity of this phantasmic Orient but also that of the Occident as it understood itself in the 19th century. (3) Said's chronology deemphasized the differences and distinctions between the separate "local" regimes that held power in France and the rest of his "West" and instead focused on a more pervasive and unified imperial or colonizing identity shared by regimes that we might otherwise see as disparate, an identity established through representations (literary, visual, musical, and so on) of "the Other." Said's work and that of his followers, such as Homi Bhabha, while attracting many and vociferous critics, have undoubtedly shifted emphases and reinvigorated discussions of the period. (4) Such work has displaced emphasis not only from histories of "influence" but also from more explicitly Marxist-oriented models of a revolutionary politics of art (and, indeed, from Jacques-Louis David as linchpin for all that came later) toward a discursive history that can contain more complex discussion of previously neglected or simply awkward issues, like race, desire, and violence, as they act on and through the art of the early 19th century.

These two books exemplify, in different ways, the possibilities opened up for art history by such reframings of the period. Porterfield makes clear from the outset his debt to Said's account and its pertinence for art history. His broad assent to Said's central thesis is reiterated throughout his chapters as he consistently reads the French involvement in and fascination with Egypt manifest in painting, monuments, and museology in the early 19th century as part of those technologies of knowledge and power that he sees as instrumental in preparing a colonial empire in North Africa. In his discussion of the Luxor obelisk (his first chapter), for example, he argues, "The obelisk was the product of, and it in turn produced, an apparently disinterested cultural output that proffered historical, moral and technological rationales for French imperialism in the orient, in the same years that France was securing and expanding its imperial push in Algeria" (p. 40).

Grimaldo Grigsby, too, makes clear through her methods, her references, and her style what she owes to Said and to post-colonial theory, particularly to Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (pp. 4, 65-66), but her book contests Said in many subtle and incisive ways. Both these works are also deeply indebted to the entire concept of "discourse" in a Foucauldian sense, and while they may challenge sociohistorical paradigms of understanding French culture, they remain indebted to new historicist interpretative paradigms of cultural "work," which necessitates a critical engagement not just with the artwork or cultural entity but also with the complexities of its reception and with the texts, habits, and orthodoxies it challenges or relies on.

Thus, in these works the traditional patterns of understanding of the course of French history in the early 19th century (from Directory to Consulate to Empire to Restoration to July Monarchy and beyond) are much less visible, and we must consider a different set of chronological markers. Porterfield gives us specific starting and finishing dates for his study in, respectively, the invasion of Egypt in 1798, when, he claims, "France's modern Empire began" (p. 3), and the partial conquest of Algeria in 1836, the eve of what might be called modern French colonialism.

And while the turbulent, even unfinished, process of revolution is a powerful, if spectral, presence throughout Grimaldo Grigsby's Extremities (which has "Post-Revolutionary" in its title), even more powerful, from first to last, is the turbulent history of the slave revolts of St-Domingue (Haiti), which provides a set of markers for her study of French understandings and representations of race and slavery. Not only do we find our chronological and political points de repere decentered in these studies, we must also rethink our traditional assignments of heroicizing liberal values to works like Theodore Gericault's Raft of the "Medusa" (thoroughly and convincingly reexamined in Grigsby's account). This, then, is no longer the "Age of Revolution," as the subtitle of a 1974-75 survey of French painting in the years from 1774 to 1830 called it, but the "Age of Empire." (5)

Todd Porterfield's book has four main chapters and an afterword. The chapters treat, in turn, the transportation and erection of the Egyptian obelisk in the Place de la Concorde; paintings of the Egyptian campaign; the Musee d'Egypte; and, finally, a chapter devoted to Eugene Delacroix's Women of Algiers. The afterword discusses the persistence of the Orientalizing constructions of France's colonies beyond the 19th and into the 20th century and very recent responses to, and rewritings of, these constructions in the work of Algerian writers and visual artists of our own time.

From this bare outline of content it is clear that Porterfield's scope ranges from painting to a wider investigation of architecture, urbanism, and museology. Part of the point of this diversity is to encourage a sense of a general, unified direction in culture and discourse. The first chapter deals with the projects, ideas, and eventual erection of the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. This chapter covers the entire chronological span of his book and introduces his key arguments. He argues in his pithy, often perceptive, and sometimes poetic discussion of the history of the Place de la Concorde and the plans to place the Paris/Egypt obelisk at its center, finally carried out under Louis Philippe, that far from being impassive or neutral or nonpolitical (as Louis Philippe himself seemed to claim), it represents a "Stake in the heart of France's Revolutionary history" (p. 24), a way of transcending and even erasing the struggles and oppositions of French politics, of supplanting them in favor of a new unifying imperial purpose and self-perception. Porterfield insists, rightly, on the Place de la Concorde as a contested and saturated "lieu de memoire," in Pierre Nora's terms, as the visible site of the display of power and its contestation, and the space of a crisis of legitimacy both of art and politics (pp. 16-24). The obelisk provided a strategy to create, in the center of this riven and turbulent civic space, "a safe haven from the murderous Revolutionary dialectic" (p. 41) and in doing so appropriate the glories of Egyptian culture for the purposes of modern France. Whether one can ever seek safe haven from historical dialectic is, of course, a question to conjure with, but Porterfield persuasively asserts that the obelisk project sought to forge a unifying identity based precisely on a notion of technical progress, imperial expansion, reflected glory of ancient empire, and a concept of conquest--a conquest of cultural if not physical territory, a conquest of difficulty (technical and logistical) by the almost miraculous means of modern French engineering, and sexual conquest.

In this chapter, as elsewhere in his book, Porterfield is keen to point out the remarkable unity of response across the various registers of critical text and other reflections on the obelisk. The same recurring topoi--civilization versus barbarism, technical dominance, and empire by appropriation of past glory--emerge across the spectrum of political, journalistic, and scientific commentary (pp. 36-38). Porterfield ventures to propose that the obelisk was "a monument that advanced the culture and politics of an era, not a regime" (p. 24). This may raise eyebrows, as recent historical work on both the Restoration and the July Monarchy puts far more emphasis on disunity and rift in the culture and polity of 19th-century France, and here, the reader sometimes wishes that Porterfield had given more space to an exploration of the eruptions of these tensions, even into the "safe haven" discourse of Orientalism.

In his second chapter, Porterfield explores paintings of Napoleonic campaigns, examining a range of familiar and lesser-known images, finding evidence in them of "three interlocking strategies--historical memories, moral contrasts and scientific postures which are used throughout the nineteenth century in the promotion of empire" (p. 47). Porterfield locates the importance of the paintings in the extent to which their logic anticipates a wider imperial project later in the century. Indeed, one of the key claims of this chapter is that Gros's paintings of the Napoleonic campaigns are foundational not for Romanticism but for "an orientalizing habit" (p. 53). Porterfield analyzes the workings of these strategies in paintings, including Gros's Battle of Nazareth, and argues persuasively that the novelty or importance of the picture lies not so much in what older accounts considered a Romanticizing break with the Davidian past as in a deliberate strategy to play down the nature of the canvas as idealizing history painting and thereby disguise its ideological moves by asserting itself as an "artless, laconic, prosaic, but ... truthful picture." Of course, as Porterfield points out, what we have is only the sketch for what should have been a vast canvas, and the very incompleteness of the project does not allow us to speculate on how Gros might have sustained the illusions of artlessness and documentary truthfulness in the grande machine format. The reasons for the abandonment of the painting had much to do with the instabilities and contingencies of the regime--and here I feel that Porterfield's account, historically surefooted as it is, never gives quite enough emphasis to the importance of the complex political atmosphere that forced such changes of mind. Between 1801 and the end of 1802 even, a referendum had signaled the effective end of the Republic and the beginning of a new kind of rule: 1802 brought the beginnings of the suppressions, censorships, and forced exiling of opponents that accompanied the transition to empire. It is as well to keep in mind as a constant in this era the lack of fit between the rhetoric of grand manner history painting and the expediencies and rapid modulations of the political climate.

Porterfield goes on to address Gros's General Bonaparte Visiting the Pesthouse at Jaffa of 1804 (now known most often as Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa). Here again, Porterfield's emphasis is on how "French scientific advancements in medicine were used to demonstrate the rewards of French Imperialism in the Near East" (pp. 56-57). He discusses in detail how the painting is informed by Dominique Larrey's reports on the diseases of the Egyptian campaigns (pp. 58-59) and the inclusion of the new medical technologies in the image, as well as the depiction of the various states of progression of the plague in the various victims. All this is incisive and of great interest and, indeed, decenters our gaze from "Napoleon's touch." At the same time, Porterfield is alert and sensitive to the significant religiosity of the image, with its feeding of bread to the dying and promise of burial as "appropriate recompense for nineteenth-century French crusaders, new claimants to the Holy Land" (p. 61). The alliance of scientific and religious triumphalism was, of course, to make a particularly potent colonializing brew in the latter half of the century.

There is something a little breathless about the remaining pages of the chapter. The "documentary pose" and the ideological work done by such a powerful fiction in Lejeune's Battle of the Pyramids (1806) is persuasively analyzed. On the other hand, the considerations of two altogether more complex works, Anne Louis Girodet's Revolt at Cairo (1810) and Pierre Guerin's Bonaparte Pardoning the Rebels in Cairo (1808), are too condensed to be entirely convincing. When Porterfield says that Guerin's canvas, with its references to Dominique-Vivant Denon sketching, becomes an "[e]xercise in intertextuality," the reader cries out for a more developed sense of intertext, one that would include anxious references to traditions of painting, the contingencies of current political discourse, the spectacular visions of contemporary popular visual and theatrical culture, and all the other elements that enrich the "intertext."

Porterfield's well-documented and fascinating third chapter switches the focus to museology, specifically, to the Musee d'Egypte. It is built on thorough knowledge of the archival and printed sources for the museum's creation and its decorative commissions. Porterfield's thesis is that:

    The Museum ... defined French historical, scientific, military,
    religious, sexual and racial attributes and conscripted them in the
    cause of imperial expansion in the proche orient. What had seemed
    dynastic (Napoleonic) was co-opted and transformed by the succeeding
    and ostensibly opposing (Bourbon) regime. In short the Musee
    d'Egypte marks the political turning point. The culture of
    imperialism becomes a national culture. (p. 82)

For Porterfield, the Egyptian Museum becomes a privileged site for the investigation of the creation of a new, explicitly imperial as well as dynastic representation of France. He spends some time on outlining the paradoxical and fascinating character of Jean-Francois Champollion, in particular on how his scientific genius came to be conflated with an idea--indeed, a fantasy--of a new inventive, intellectual, and entrepreneurial genius of France (p. 101). Yet his major focus is on the complex history of the decorative commissions, a multilayered history that spans two regimes. Porterfield outlines the ideological stakes and aims of the program and helpfully pieces together its changes. He also analyzes some of its most important paintings, including Abel de Pujol's Egypt Saved by Joseph, which he considers the "most important picture in the Musee d'Egypte for rationalizing French intervention in the East" (p. 106). He discusses the oppositions by which he sees the work functioning, including race and age.

After the ruthlessly polemic and often highly stimulating analysis of a complex museological and visual project that is the essence of chapter 3, the fourth chapter brings a sharper focus on a single painting. Delacroix's Women of Algiers. Central to Porterfield's analysis is the assertion. "The Women of Algiers was produced and received in an artistic, intellectual, political and military culture that was the legacy of the Egyptian campaigns, a culture that then supported the Algerian conquests of the 1830s...." (p. 135). Porterfield arrives at this conclusion via a poetic page on the Death of Sardanapalus and a more cursory review of the Massacres at Chios. The Women of Algiers, however, is primarily located not in a history of Delacroix's career but in a rich context of travel literature, illustrations for voyages and narratives of discovery, as well as caricatures, some stretching back to the 18th century. This allows Porterfield to argue against any notion that we should regard the Women of Algiers as reportage of any kind. He sees the accounts by Delacroix and others of their privileged vision as deeply ideological and linked to discourses of the penetration of the secret world of the harem that long predate Delacroix's actual voyage and that, for him, stretch back to Enlightenment narratives. Nonetheless, he finds that Delacroix's painting provides a major impetus for the kind of "intimate" scene that would so proliferate in the latter half of the century. All this is persuasively maintained and echoes Said and Linda Nochlin explicitly. Porterfield insists on our seeing the Women of Algiers as produced not by an artist but by a culture.

The afterword reveals how much Porterfield desires not only to examine the origins of Orientalism but also to pursue its reverberations in the so-called postcolonial present, via the early 20th century, when "Orientalism provided a clear and stable tradition that could unite the French as it had in Delacroix's day, suppressing political differences at home while reasserting the moral and sexual chasm that separated them from their colonized peoples" (p. 147). Porterfield takes as his principal vehicle for this inquiry a study of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso (in necessarily brief but certainly stimulating terms), as well as more ephemeral aspects of visual culture, specifically, a postcard of a barebreasted "Oriental" (North African) woman with a jug dating from the turn of the 20th century. The postcard is titled "La cruche felee," which Porterfield imaginatively and polemically contrasts with Jean-Baptiste Greuze's painting La cruche cassee: "Greuze's bedraggled girl, tattered, post-coital and clutching a broken pitcher, is meant to titillate the viewer and blithely teach a lesson in sexual virtue. In the postcard, on the other hand, the vessel is pristine: what is broken is the sexually (and continually) available Oriental woman" (p. 144). The fact that Porterfield's account rather oversimplifies the nature, reception, and intention of Greuze's image (and even mistakes its date) is somewhat indicative of the occasional tendency toward binary oversimplification in this book. It is, of course, a polemic--one that ties its various studies very closely together in the service of its main thesis, that needs to accumulate its evidence (as it does impressively) to illustrate its central argument, and that must inevitably sacrifice distinctness, and sometimes even complexity, in order to do so. Nevertheless, I longed at many points for a little more opportunity for the author to employ his evident gifts of observation and analysis in an extended way--for the book to be longer and more involved (sometimes argument and contemplation are relegated to the sixty pages of often discursively organized notes). However, perhaps such lingering over the complexities of the paintings and other cultural entities discussed here might have derailed an argument that is founded on the positing of stable entities in discourse. That Porterfield's is an intelligent, lucidly argued, well-informed polemic is beyond doubt, and as the most sustained and ambitious approach to an understanding of the Orientalizing impulse in early-19th-century French visual culture it will serve to provoke scholarly debate and stimulate students at all levels for a good long while.

In one sense, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby's Extremities is more limited in scope than Porterfield's Allure of Empire. Her objects of study are all paintings, and many of them are exceptionally well known, not to say canonical, works, by just four painters: Girodet, Gros, Gericault, and Delacroix. But around these paintings is woven a historical, discursive, and interpretative fabric that envelops race, desire, dislocation, and a sense of the complex va et vient between France and the spaces of conquest, war, anxiety, and struggle that lay far beyond its boundaries. Grimaldo Grigsby does not eschew the biographical (as Porterfield explicitly does), and in fact she draws consistently if subtly on psychoanalytic models of desire. However, she is equally indebted to models of close reading, from practical criticism to deconstruction to new historicism, which assist her in teasing out tensions, problems, hesitancies, uncertainties, and contradictions inherent not only in the complex works themselves but also in the intricate relations between historical events, the discourses that govern the understanding of these events, the personal preoccupations of the artists, and the materialities that mediate the representation of these events in painting.

This is a long book--almost a third bigger than Porterfield's--which, though internally very coherent, is most profitably read and reread in its chapter-sized chunks, in contrast to The Allure of Empire, in which Porterfield's narrative drive and argument incite a brisk and cumulative mode of reading. Many will be prepared for the texture of Grimaldo Grigsby's book by the fact that material in it has emerged already in articles and talks since the mid-1990s, but the study certainly affirms the coherence of the body of work that Grimaldo Grigsby has produced and the concerns that preoccupy her. There are six chapters and a postscript, each chapter structured around a theme, a location, a painting, and the date of the painting's public display. The very chapter headings give us a sense of the dense fabric of the book: "Black Revolution--Saint-Domingue: Girodet's Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-Representative of the Colonies, 1797"; "Plague--Egypt-Syria: Gros's Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa, 1804"; "Revolt--Egypt: Girodet's Revolt of Cairo, 1810"; "Cannibalism--Senegal: Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, 1819"; "Blood-Mixing--Ottoman Greece: Delacroix's Massacres of Chios, 1824"; and "White Slavery--Ottoman Africa: Delacroix's Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, 1826."

The book requires of the reader the same close, patient, and careful attention that Grimaldo Grigsby brings to her readings of the paintings, but it also invites, or perhaps cajoles, its reader, through its sheer conviction, brilliance, and flashes of welcome humor, to countenance extremities of interpretation, to join the author on much-disputed territory on which many might feel uncomfortable, but which Grimaldo Grigsby requires us to think of as not marginal but central. Rape, sodomy, penetration fantasy, sex change, and the consumption of flesh emerge as necessary components of our understanding of these canonical works. The field of sexuality is as pivotal to Grimaldo Grigsby's account, to her vision of empire and of the power relations that subtend it, as it is underplayed (though definitely acknowledged) in Porterfield's study. For Grimaldo Grigsby, the complexities of desire are both necessarily "unspeakable," and thus sublimated, transformed, or repressed, and, at the same time, locatable literally at the surface of the paintings she studies. One of her complex arguments is that close examination of the details of paint and its application in the grandes machines of French history painting shows that its very language--its dessin, its coloris, its nudes, its geometric structures, even--is heavily inflected by the psychic and social mechanisms of desire. This, of course, may be disquicting; how much more comforting it is for art historians to believe that the key to understanding Napoleon's gesture toward the plague victims in Gros's Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa is its association with the tradition of the healing "Roi Thurmaturge" than it is to contemplate that this gesture is "electrified by an unspeakable subtext" of sodomy and penetration (p. 80).

In order to persuade us of her often bold arguments, Grimaldo Grigsby, here as elsewhere, first draws us in by urging us to observe carefully the details of the encounter she wishes to signal as key to her analysis of the picture:

    The body of the general-in-chief is entirely covered except for his
    face and his single outstretched hand, which, as one critic points
    out, is made nude by the removal of a glove. It is his exposed
    flesh, his undressed hand, that touches the naked torso of the
    diseased man and thereby closes a circle created by the three men's
    bodies, a circle left open in the earlier oil sketch. Napoleon,
    moreover, is the only person touching a plague-stricken man with
    exposed flesh rather than with an interceding material (cloth or
    medical instrument). The contact between Napoleon's "nude" hand and
    the skin of the plague victim initiates a highly charged circuit of
    abutting flesh, hair, cloth, and leather, naked chests and limp but
    muscular, over-sized, elongated limbs. There in a pool of light,
    Napoleon touches the vulnerable and passive plague-stricken giant.
    A dressed man touches a half-naked man. A hand touches the opened
    underside of one of man's most recessive cavities. A fingertip
    touches the transition between attenuated bicep and nipple. (p. 79)

Notice here that Grimaldo Grigsby proceeds in what might be regarded as traditional art historical ways--remarking not only the differences between sketch and finished painting but also aspects of geometry, of proportion, of anatomy, and of the naked and the dressed. (Throughout her study, in fact, from Girodet's Citizen Belley to Delacroix's Massacres of Chios, Grimaldo Grigsby is unusually and productively attuned to the passage and the encounter between the naked and the veiled, between flesh concealed and revealed by fabric and flesh exposed and vulnerable.) In the end, though, the operation of this passage is anything but traditional. Her argument insists on the touch of the hand on the chest as substitute for a sexually penetrative encounter, and this claim is established through registering kinds of tactility as rendered in paint and finally made poetically, rhetorically, by her cascading of "touches" in the final sentences. We are very far here from Porterfield's equally important discussion of the scientific Gros, indicating the progression of disease in his depiction of the plaguestricken. This is a sensual reading and, in the end, a psychoanalytic one, which requires us to believe in the painting as tense, transgressive, and replete with a latent content, a network of the unspeakable, radically other than what is manifest in the actual gestures of the represented figures in a government-commissioned propaganda piece, and which succeeds in tapping into discursive anxieties and desires in painter and audience.

From here, Grimaldo Grigsby plunges us into further complexity: thinking of the painting in terms of both homosocial military and artistic practices, she argues that in the "exclusively masculine economy" of the picture, the painting "sustains the binary structure of heterosexual relations but changes the terms of difference" by setting up oppositions of penetrator and penetrated. She argues that the touched man, the male nude, becomes in some sense the penetrated man and, thus, paradoxically, the "emasculated term." She then further destabilizes this already displaced opposition through an illuminating discussion of the discourses of Oriental sodomy, of the problem of clothing Bonaparte, and a dense analysis of plague's meanings. Plague was, Grimaldo Grigsby informs us, "a metaphor saturated with a multiplicity of connotations in early nineteenth-century France," and readers of this book must be prepared for an encounter with this multiplicity, as she elucidates it. Here, as elsewhere in the text, the reader pleads to be allowed back to the surface for air, so to speak, and more than once I found myself going back over passages in order to ensure that I was ready for the next stage of the journey. The multiplicity of plague's meanings takes us to the concept of "rumor"--a slippery, often irrecoverable entity, but a vital one in Grimaldo Grigsby's account. Rumor becomes for her a kind of unconscious discourse, which contrasts not just with official, organized, and controlled political discourse but also with thought-out responses to art--an entity that swirls, unfixable and destabilizing, beneath the surface of articulated critical response.

In the course of Grimaldo Grigsby's interpretation, we find even the most solid of our critical and cultural oppositions melting away before us: Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa is a picture structured by the opposition between knowledge and its absence, we are told, only to be warned that even those "with knowledge" [the officers standing in the light] are surrounded by "a hushed and intimate--one might say murmuring--darkness. In this picture, paranoia runs both ways" (p. 98). Thus, Grimaldo Grigsby's pesthouse is a very different entity from Porterfield's. For her, the painting is not in any sense unabashedly propagandistic but instead complex, unstable, yet somehow accommodating of difference, ambiguity, rumor, terror, and dissent "within its very frame" (p. 101). This conclusion points to Grimaldo Grigsby's methodological and analytical allegiances. Her understanding of empire, though in some ways indebted to Said, is much more informed by the complex amalgam of psychoanalysis, cultural analysis, and deconstructive literary sensibility that marks the work of postcolonial theorists like Homi Bhabha, particularly in a work to which Grimaldo Grigsby makes reference, Bhabha's The Location of Culture (1994). This study's key concepts, such as liminality and hybridity, recur with some frequency in Grimaldo Grigsby's text and are used in an attempt to complicate the discourse of the "colonizer and colonized" and answer Bhabha's question, "How are subjects formed 'in-between,' or in excess of, the sum of the 'parts' of difference (usually intoned as race/class/gender, etc.)?" (6) The care, patience, and sheer attentiveness of her analysis, as well as the ultimate belief in painting as complex, mediated, and mediating, owe more to Grimaldo Grigsby's own art historical circles of influence, and specifically to those, like Thomas Crow and Timothy Clark, whom she cites as having decisively shaped her researches and their articulation.

What ultimately makes this study so engaging is not its methodological allegiances but its breathtaking audacity and its often virtuosic analyses of the paintings themselves. Time and again, after lengthy and dense passages that elaborate historical or cultural contexts, we return to stunning and sometimes even poetic descriptions of paintings. Take, for example, the first chapter. "Black Revolution," which focuses on Girodet's Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-Representative of the Colonies. It begins with a poetic ekphrasis--a descriptioncum-reenactment of Girodet's Endymion, which functions as one vital formal point of departure for Grimaldo Grigsby:

    The shadows, like the light, muffle the naked body's stubborn
    materiality. In the alternation of light and dark, creamy whites and
    gray browns, the sleeping beloved of a moon goddess is at all points
    open, a recumbent receptacle for a penetration which already
    transforms him, disassembling the male nude into a pulsation of
    evaporation and coalescence, oblivion and acuity, the in and out of
    sustained erotic interplay. (p. 9)

This is only the beginning, a jumping-off point for a highly original contrast with the Belley portrait, which for Grimaldo Grigsby "attests to the French Revolution's radical challenge to the Nation's art" (p. 12). How could history, and momentous and ongoing change, be charted in paint? How could the language of history painting be modified or adapted? For Grimaldo Grigsby, Girodet's Citizen Belley meets that challenge and is thus a "profound political as well as pictorial accomplishment." Grimaldo Grigsby is well aware of the multiplying literature on this painting, but her line is boldly personal, and her pages are, in my view, the richest and most profound reevaluation of this remarkable picture now in the literature. She starts with an informed discussion of what "race" meant in later-18th-century France, demonstrating that what we might perceive as binary notions of color were complicated by a tripartite model of racial difference, in which a category of "gens de couleur" became a third term in the tricolor. From this already nuancing observation. Grimaldo Grigsby brings us into a discussion of slavery, which in visual culture, she argues, was the enabling but never entirely represented binary for "liberty."

We are then carried, via Roland Barthes, to a discussion of how the abolition of slavery was engineered by the Jacobin government and a review of Belley's particular situation, which relies on a sensitive reading of both published and unpublished material, bringing new insights to our understanding of his career. This is interwoven with a pithy and polemical examination of abolitionist popular prints depicting the black and their recurring tropes of dependent, unclothed supplication (pp. 28-32) in order to argue that Girodet's portrait of Belley gives him, and itself, elevated status by "responding to the difference of the black man come into individuality and social stature in portraiture" (p. 35). All this is convincing, but it is the analysis of the picture itself that really sets the chapter alight; once again, just as she asserts the binary-confounding operation of the painting, so Grimaldo Grigsby will not let critical boundaries stand untested. In a remarkable passage (pp. 38-41), the "operations" of Belley on the enlightened reformer and author of Histoire des deux Indes Abbe Guillaume-Thomas-Francois Raynal (1713-1796) and vice versa are considered, but then complicated. "Belley petrifies--or successfully rehabilitates--Raynal by rendering stable, monologic and forceful a man who had been, like all men, inconsistent. By contrast, the bust of Raynal foregrounds Belley's contradictory aspects...." With the next passage, which treats Girodet's "perverse and obsessive drive always to vivify pictorial illusionism," we enter new territory in the close scrutiny of Girodet's use of shadow, specifically, the challenge of creating shadow and distinctness in the representation of the black face and the different ways Girodet chose to make materials work to meet these challenges (p. 46). These pages--the closest reading I have encountered of the material and painterly aspects of the canvas--serve to prepare a refutation of the view of the portrait as indebted to the explicitly racist precepts of Lavaterian physiognomy and a robust defense of the "lush polyvalency" of the painting.

Grimaldo Grigsby's account of the painting includes an extraordinary meditation on the prominence of the subject's genitals, which relies on the confident statement (by no means provable, except by the evidence of her own analysis) that "Belley was the object of Girodet's desire and fantasy" (p. 55). This is a daring proposal, convoluted but coherent in its own terms--yet to me it seems to be in some way defensive. Can we really follow Grimaldo Grigsby when she claims, "Beneath the veiling pants lies both the withheld state of privacy--the space of 'unmasked' physical and emotional expressivity--and the plot of sexual play and consummation, of improvisation, domination, violence and detumescence"? Or should we see Grimaldo Grigsby's "deep structural" vision of the penis here as a desperate struggle to keep the heroic interpretation of this picture alive against the pressing evidence of the physiognomic cliches, which, as she herself acknowledges, "threaten[s] to subordinate Belley to racial typology and the association of blackness with brute animality" (p. 55)?

Girodet is a center of fascination for Grimaldo Grigsby, and another of her chapters is built around Girodet's extraordinary Revolt of Cairo of 1810, which for most viewers remains cloaked in the relative obscurity of the tail end of a long visit to Versailles. At 11 1/2 by 16 1/2 feet (3 1/2 by 5 meters) it is a vast canvas, but one (as Grimaldo Grigsby readily admits) that cannot fail to raise a smile. To approach it, Grimaldo Grigsby first plunges us into the culture and the cult of the Mameluke in the Paris of Napoleon, via Napoleon's "pet" Mameluke, Roustan, as well as through fashion and popular culture. Grimaldo Grigsby allows us a smile with her way of making clear the artistic fascination with the Mameluke: "Men who resembled Mamelukes were being chased down the streets of Paris by artists and their friends" (p. 168). She counters the oppositions of Lejeune's Battle of the Pyramids and its sprawling, disorganized Mamelukes opposed to rational battalions of the French (discussed by Porterfield) with the assertion that, in fact, "Mamelukes were astonishingly fluid signs, not circumscribed by race or national origins or even by allegiance" (p. 111). Once again, she sets out to complicate a picture, destroy binary oppositions, and create a semiotic complexity. Then she makes a leap to Girodet's own Mamelukes, who inhabited his studio, and with whom, Grimaldo Grigsby claims on the basis of a close (but nevertheless contestable) reading of Girodet's correspondence with Julie Candeille, he entered into sexual contact (pp. 126-27). She argues that Girodet's studio became a space of discreet escape, a haven from the oppressive persecution of sodomitical desire. There follows a fertile reading of the painting itself, again like her previous readings, remarkably attentive to the painting's development, its geometries, its complex relation to Gros's Plague House at Jaffa, and, especially, to what Grimaldo Grigsby sees as the act of resistance to Napoleonic oppression that the painting represents, "a resistance very much bound up with pleasure," as "Girodet delights in the intermingling, the interlocking of peoples and things which remain forever discrete" (p. 144). Her discussion of the ways that "racial others are aligned with phallic power" (p. 149) in the canvas culminates in an extraordinary passage: "The collapsing Mameluke represents, after all, not only a postorgasmic swooning detumescence but a penetrable array of orifices, most notably the amazing vulva-like, diamond-shaped slit at his groin exactly level with the Arab's (previously unmasked) genitals." We have to travel with Grimaldo Grigsby here--and be ready for her claim that:

    The rhyming of the French hussar, decapitated Frenchman's head and
    expiring postorgasmic Mameluke can be interpreted as attesting to a
    desire, admittedly shot through with fear as well as yearning, not
    to have the swooning Mameluke but to be him--to be penetrated, to be
    taken by the Arab and made radiantly beautiful thereby. (p. 150)

All this is vital to Grimaldo Grigsby's self-consciously controversial final assertion that "in the Revolt of Cairo Girodet rejects radical equality (and color blindness) on the basis of pleasure" (p. 153). As an "embittered Royalist painter" (an interesting description of Girodet that many might wish to nuance), he rejects as a lie the notion of egalitarianism in society or in sexual pleasure (p. 153). It is only after developing this intense sociosexual conclusion that Grimaldo Grigsby allows us some relief--and admits, "The painting is absurd, and also inflated, bombastic, extreme." I did find myself wondering whether some of the projections involved in the relentlessly sexualized interpretation of this image in Extremities might not also make some readers smile at what they consider interpretative absurdities. But there is no doubt of the author's commitment to her interpretation, and there is something moving about the elegiac tone in the wistful evocation of the brutal oppression of the Mamelukes and other darkskinned persons after the fall of Bonaparte and a poetic tone to her account of Gericault's "drowning" of his copy of the Battle of the Pyramids (pp. 162-63) in his Scene of Deluge (1815-16) (pp. 162-63).

This leads nicely into Grimaldo Grigsby's marvelous chapter on Gericault's Raft of the "Medusa." On approaching it, we might groan with disbelief that after the saturation coverage that this picture has attracted there remains anything of substance left to say that can escape repetition, but again Grimaldo Grigsby combines sensitive, judicious reexamination of familiar material, both textual and visual, with surprising and jolting juxtapositions to produce a novel argument. A surprising textual key here is Daniel Defoe's adventure story Robinson Crusoe, which (in Grimaldo Grigsby's view) profoundly influenced the imaginary of a whole generation in Europe. Grimaldo Grigsby seizes on a trope of cannibalism, fear of it, and its "capacity (actually or imaginatively) to unravel the body's integrity and to challenge the assumption that individual identity resides in the body's parts" (p. 167). Cannibalism becomes, in Grimaldo Grigsby's interpretation, the excitement and the anxiety of Gericault's Raft:

    The languid parts, those cuts of meat, are touching one another,
    and the living mix with the dead, sensually, voluptuously--this too
    is cannibalism.... By mixing the animate and the inanimate, the
    painting invites a confusion between the desire for erotic and
    alimentary consummation, between modes of fleshly incorporation. (p.
    218)

Grimaldo Grigsby's often startling, imaginative reading of the Raft deploys what might be called new formalism. She perceptively draws the relation between aspects of the organization of the painting and Gericault's lithographs of Return from the Front and other work, as well as his relation to the history painting tradition in France, but she interprets these formal relations in historicized, psychological, and often surprising ways ("Endymion has come to resemble a Meal" [p. 219]). At the same time, she links the work insistently to "discourse," stressing, once more, both Gericault's efforts to make "race" signify and his critics' attempts to acknowledge his efforts (pp. 221-23). Her reading is hedged round with a patient, detailed review of the differing accounts of the events on the Medusa and the creation of the raft, in which Grimaldo Grigsby decenters and renders unstable our comfortable notions of the painting, particularly its "liberal" credentials (she characterizes the dynamic of the raft of the Medusa as it emerges in the famous survivors' accounts a bloody class war). However, there is a certain strain, I feel, in the use of Gericault's drawings of satyrs and nymphs (although the discussion itself, on p. 196, is convincing) to propose that somehow cannibalistic gorging in the survivors' accounts is a substitute for sodomitical rape. It should remind us that despite the density of the reading of the picture, with its new historicist emphases on its thick contextual history (cultural, discursive, sexual, and political) and its thorough grasp of contemporary critical response, this is a deeply personal, partial, always imaginative, inventive, rhetorical, and at times poetic meditation on the painting.

Delacroix is the focus for the remaining two chapters, in which race and desire remain firmly featured. Now, though, the complexities of same-sex desire as they enmesh with racial difference give way to an investigation of the ways in which this same sex desire, deeply repressed but, Grimaldo Grigsby maintains, omnipresent in Delacroix's psychic makeup, is figured as aggressively and overtly heterosexual strategies in studio practice, in private life, and in the creation of racial mixture and difference. Some of the material in her treatment of the Massacres at Chios in chapter 5 will be familiar to many via the provocative article published in Art History in 1999, which is here greatly amplified and nuanced in the exploration of the status of the mulatto as complex, sexualized hybrid. The chapter also contains some of Grimaldo Grigsby's lushest, closest, and most successful description of paint and its operations, including a particularly fruitful passage on Delacroix's "dividing the single body into disparate passages of color" (pp. 275-76). The close attention to paint is vital, because, for Grimaldo Grigsby (and here, the debt to Crow and Clark is clear), the picture "thematizes Empire in its very handling" (p. 225).

It comes as no surprise that in this chapter Grimaldo Grigsby wants to complicate easy oppositions. She spends some time contemplating "pro-Turk" arguments and rhetoric of the period in order to make us think beyond what she calls the "historical cliches" that slip into art historical accounts (p. 241). As previously, it is not the "veracity" of the painting that concerns her but its semiotic complexities and strangenesses. Her use of the term "weird" to describe the painting will strike many as apt, but we should pause to acknowledge the rhetorical and interpretative feat achieved by Grimaldo Grigsby and a new generation of scholars of French history painting. The trajectory "David to Delacroix" is rapidly becoming neither a narrative of a unified solid and authoritative French tradition nor a satisfyingly stable and coherent set of oppositions and transitions but instead a fascinating series of strangenesses, unspeakable and unspoken acts, tensions, and contradictions.

The discussion of Delacroix's Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, richly informed and remarkably fresh, is a radical challenge to existing accounts, arguing as it does for a decentering of our understanding of the picture in terms of philhellenism and a new focus on the connections between Greece, Egypt, and Haiti (pp. 302-5). She ends her analysis with the following words:

    Delacroix's canvas ... paints France's history of aggressions turned
    against itself. It paints black men who have become masters of
    whites, and it paints Egypt invading Europe rather than Europe
    invading Egypt; Africa invading Europe rather than Europe invading
    Africa. Napoleon had lost Saint Domingue and Egypt and Senegal.

Here painting reconfigures French relations with the extremities of its colonizing missions in terms of loss rather than conquest. This interpretation cannot coexist comfortably with Todd Porterfield's reading. But, ultimately, Grimaldo Grigsby comes to a point of intersection with him:

    Delacroix's picture also proposes that whiteness remains central and
    blackness peripheral ... liberation was an act of philanthropy, not
    a recognition of universal political rights. Belley had lost as
    well. Demonized, exiled, and sometimes orientalized, he could not be
    forgotten, however. In the end, the specter of black victory and
    white loss in Saint Domingue inspired the campaign to conquer the
    Barbary Regency of Algeria, a military aggression perpetrated in
    1830 on behalf of the white slave, but fought, as if in a dream of
    horrific brutality, against Haiti's ghosts. (p. 314)

The beginning of the aggressive scramble for Africa is foreshadowed, for Grimaldo Grigsby as for Porterfield, by both revolution and the Napolconic experience--but for Grimaldo Grigsby it is a haunted and troubled colonization, not a confident and heroic assertion of superiority.

Extremities is pathbreaking in so many ways, and in particular in the subtle and entirely fresh examination of the representation of race, color, and sexuality in the culture of early-19th-century France, that it deserves to be read widely by historians as well as art historians. Its audacity will undoubtedly provoke some resistance among the different constituencies, in the museum and the university, who have so heavy an investment in French history painting. Occasionally it is overconfident as well as overlong, and while it is often exigent of its readership, it perhaps underestimates the extent to which it must seek its readers' complicity. It demands that one believe in a complex pictorial unconscious, in the mechanisms of desire working through paint. To deal in the "unspoken" of desire--to discuss paintings in terms of displacements, repressions, and condensations--is to evoke a psychoanalytic theory of "dream work," which is ultimately just as contestable and as unverifiable as theories like Johann Lavater's much-reviled (in this account as elsewhere) ideas on physiognomy, but which has become indispensable to modern critical and cultural theory. Further, while it decenters "traditional" political readings of some paintings, it might be said to reinforce a canon of dense, rich works, and it demands that we accept a certain model of heroic and resistant pictorial complexity, about which Porterfield, for example, seems altogether more skeptical. That said, this is a brilliant and exciting book, which succeeds in decentering and refocusing our vision and understanding, forcing us back to both history and history painting to ask new and different questions.

Notes

1. Walter Friedlaender. David to Delacroix, trans. Robert Goldwater (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 63.

2. For example Albert Boime, Art in an Age of Bonapartism, 1800-1815 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), a volume in Boime's larger project, the series A Social History of Modern Art, which follows the chronology of French politics fairly closely; Michael Marrinan, Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe: Art and Ideology in Orleanist France 1830-48 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); and Beth Wright, Painting and History during the French Restoration: Abandoned by the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

3. Edward Said. Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); and idem, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).

4. See for example Frederick N. Bohrer, Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

5. French Painting 1774-1830: The Age of Revolution, exh. cat., the Grand Palais, Paris, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1974-75.

6. Homi K. Bhabha. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 2.

MARK LEDBURY is associate director of the research and academic program at the Clark Art Institute [Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass. 01267].

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