Nineteenth-century French art was eclectic, but you would never know it. This eclecticism was considered a problem in the nineteenth century itself—an impediment to creating a cohesive narrative for the art production of the time. Joris-Karl Huysmans and Émile Zola in particular railed against what they saw as the eclectic nature of the art of their day. Zola refers to the exhibition of later nineteenth-century art as a “cacophony” and struggles through his art critical reviews and his fiction to instill some kind of order to the random quality of the art he encounters. Huysmans sarcastically critiques the connoisseurs who declare themselves “eclectic” and condemns them as “dilettantes.” Recent scholarship has named the 1867 art novel by the Goncourt brothers, Manette Salomon, a kind of emblem of the disparate styles of the later nineteenth century and an example of a foundation of modern art that was inherently fractured. In this talk, I will examine how the Goncourt novel goes beyond fragmentation and how it continues to speak to the challenges curators still face today. Despite decades of scholarship arguing for more nuance in the display of the later nineteenth century, Impressionism is still physically isolated in the permanent collections of major museums. Though museums are slowly evolving, we still tend to mask later nineteenth-century eclecticism.

Dr. Sara Pappas is Associate Professor of French and Visual Culture at the University of Richmond. She is a scholar of nineteenth-century French literature, art, and culture and twentieth and twenty-first-century critical museum studies. Her work focuses on the connection between the literary and plastic arts in nineteenth-century France and how that history is represented in today’s museum. Her book, titled Naturalism’s Imaginary Museum: French Art and the Eclectic Nineteenth Century, is forthcoming with the University of Toronto Press.

You can join us in person in 280 Park Hall or register to join us on Zoom via this link: https://buffalo.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcrcO2hqzsuEtA09JUAhU9TTihbI0Q61DSi

This event is sponsored by the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures and the Melodia E. Jones Chair. For more information, contact Prof. Colleen Culleton (culleton@buffalo.edu).