Diderot and Eros
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Denis Diderot disliked François Boucher and has remarked with regards to the Odalisque brune in his review of the Salon de 1767 that he prostituted his wife for that painting.
In his review of the Paris Salon of 1765 he added:
- "I don’t know what to say about this man. Degradation of taste, color, composition, character, expression and drawing have kept pace with moral depravity. What can we expect this artist to throw onto the canvas? What he has in his imagination. And what can be in the imagination of a man who spends his life with prostitutes of the basest kind? [Peter Gay notes in The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (NY: Norton, 1995, p. 277) that this is “a daring rhetorical question, since the prostituées du plus bas étage Diderot had in mind were not merely Boucher’s models but Louis XV’s mistresses”] The grace of his shepherdesses is the grace of Madame Favart in Rose and Colas; that of his goddesses is borrowed from La Deschamps. I defy you to find a single blade of grass in any of his landscapes. And then there’s such a confusion of objects piled one on top of the other, so poorly disposed, so motley, that we’re dealing not so much with the pictures of a rational being as with the dreams of a madman." --translator unidentified
- Je ne sais que dire de cet homme-ci. La dégradation du goût, de la couleur, de la composition des caractères, de l'expression, du dessin, a suivi pas à pas la dépravation des mœurs. Que voulez-vous que cet artiste jette sur la toile ? ce qu'il a dans l'imagination. Et que peut avoir dans l'imagination un homme qui passe sa vie avec les prostituées du plus bas étage ? La grâce de ses Bergères est la grâce de la Favart dans Rose et Colas ; celle de ses Déesses est empruntée de la Deschamps. (Deschamps was a "Célèbre courtisane morte depuis un an dans la plus austère pénitence.") Je vous défie de trouver dans toute une campagne un brin d'herbe de ses paysages. Et puis une confusion d'objets entassés les uns sur les autres, si déplacés, si disparates, que c'est moins le tableau d'un homme sensé que le rêve d'un fou. C'est de lui qu'il a été écrit :
- ... velut aegri somnia, vanae
- Fingentur species : ut nec pes, nec caput... (Horatio)
We may call this comment strangely and comically hypocrite, since Diderot is the author of Les Bijoux indiscrets, a novel about talking vaginas which had come out 13 years earlier.
Even more short-sighted is his love of Greuze. Maybe it is the love of one hypocrite for another? For was it not Greuze who presented us base eroticism under a thin veneer of academic respectability? Did he not give us moralizing paintings in defense of virginity such as The Broken Pitcher while at the same time exploit our basest appetites in works such as Ariadne, The Sisters (1788) with the ripening breast of prepubscent girls.
See also
These notes are based on Denis Diderot's Paris Salon criticism.
