Balzac And The Model Of Painting

"Texts about paintings, painters and sculptors are obvious test cases for issues of representation. A significant corpus of artist stories is scattered through Honore de Balzac's Comedie humaine which, from Marx to Lukacs to Roland Barthes's enormously influential S/Z (1970), has been a key literary work for critical debates around French realism. In a series of close readings, Diana Knight explores Barthes's 'model of painting' - the metaphorical code of painting and sculpture that underpins realist discourse - in the context of Balzac's fictional representations of the relation between artists, their models and their works of art. Whereas critics have tended to denounce Balzac's realist aesthetic as complicit with the misogyny of the society he portrays,Balzac and the Model of Painting takes the artist-model relationship, variously gendered in these stories, as the focus of the author's powerful realist critique of the sexual politics of prostitution and marriage in nineteenth-century France."

Leading specialists shed new light on key narrative and thematic features of the writings of Honoré de Balzac.

Violence is one of the main themes in the novels of Hanore de Balza. Executions, muders, savagery and death accompany the conspiracies and the turbulence that characterise his post-Revolutionary times, from the terror to Napoleonic campaigns and then to the upheavals of 1830 and 1848. Despite the importance of violence in Balzac, this is the first book-length study of the topic. The book begins by tracing the links between violence and Balzac's approach to the novel, not merely in terms of violent content, but, equally importantly, in terms of the form associated with that content. From and content combine to perpetuate and naturalise violence and suffering. After charting examples of this combination in one of Balzac's earliest fictions, the books moves on to the links between violence and place violence and history (Catherine de Medicis; the Terror), between violence and place(from his native Touraine to sickness in Paris), and between violence and gender/sexuality. It alos examines the representiation of violence in the form of spoken or written death. Throughout the analysis, the bokk asks the following question: do Balzac's novels reinforce or counteract the literary text's apparent love-affair with violence?

The Unknown Masterpiece is a short story by Honoré de Balzac. Young Nicolas Poussin is an aspiring artist who pays visit to Porbus in his studio. He is joined by the old maestro Frenhofer as they collectively ideate a new project that will shake the world of art...

Examining how the rise of book illustration affected the historic hegemony of the word, Keri Yousif explores the complex literary and artistic relationship between the novelist Honoré de Balzac and the illustrator J. J. Grandville during the French July Monarchy (1830-1848). Both collaborators and rivals, these towering figures struggled for dominance in the Parisian book trade at the height of the Romantic revolution and its immediate aftermath. Both men were social portraitists who collaborated on the influential encyclopedic portrayal of nineteenth-century society, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes. However, their collaboration soon turned competitive with Grandville's publication of Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, a visual parody of Balzac's Scènes de la vie privée. Yousif investigates Balzac's and Grandville's individual and joint artistic productions in terms of the larger economic and aesthetic struggles within the nineteenth-century arena of cultural production, showing how writers were forced to position themselves both in terms of the established literary hierarchy and in relation to the rapidly advancing image. As Yousif shows, the industrialization of the illustrated book spawned a triadic relationship between publisher, writer, and illustrator that transformed the book from a product of individual genius to a cooperative and commercial affair. Her study represents a significant contribution to our understanding of literature, art, and their interactions in a new marketplace for publication during the fraught transition from Romanticism to Realism.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Unknown Masterpiece [Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu] Honoré de Balzac Translated by Ellen Marriage Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu (English "The Unknown Masterpiece") is a short story by Honoré de Balzac. It was first published in the newspaper L'Artiste with the title "Maître Frenhofer" (English: "Master Frenhofer") in August 1831. It appeared again later in the same year under the title "Catherine Lescault, conte fantastique." It was published in Balzac's Études philosophiques in 1837 and was integrated into the Comédie humaine in 1846. "Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu" is a reflection on art, and has had an important influence on modernist artists. Young Nicolas Poussin, as yet unknown, visits the painter Porbus in his workshop. He is accompanied by the old master Frenhofer who comments expertly on the large tableau that Porbus has just finished. The painting is of Mary of Egypt, and while Frenhofer sings her praises, he hints that the work seems unfinished. With some slight touches of the paintbrush, Frenhofer transforms Porbus' painting such that Mary the Egyptian appears to come alive before their very eyes. Although Frenhofer has mastered his technique, he admits that he has been unable to find a suitable model for his own masterpiece, which depicts a beautiful courtesan called Catherine Lescault, known as La Belle noiseuse. He has been working on this future masterpiece, that no one has yet seen, for ten years. Poussin offers his own lover, Gillette, as a potential model. Gillette's beauty is so great that it inspires Frenhofer to finish his project quickly. Poussin and Porbus come to admire the painting, but all they can see is part of a foot that has been lost in a swirl of colors. Their disappointment drives Frenhofer to madness, and he destroys the painting and dies that night.

To the time-honored myth of the artist creating works of genius in isolation, with nothing but inspiration to guide him, art historians have added the mitigating influences of critics, dealers, and the public. Bodies of Art completes the picture by adding the model. This lively look at atelier politics through the lens of literature focuses in particular on the female model, with special attention to her race, ethnicity, and class. The result is a suggestive account of the rise and fall of the female model in nineteenth-century realism, with a final emphasis on the passage of the model into photography at the turn of the century. This history of the model begins in nineteenth-century Paris, where the artist?model dynamic was regularly debated by writers and where the most important categories of models appear to be Jewish, Italian, and Parisian women. Bodies of Art traces an evolution in the representation of this model in realist and naturalist literary works from her "birth" in Balzac to her "death" in Maupassant, in the process revealing how she played a key role in theories of representation advanced by writers. Throughout the book, Marie Lathers connects the artist's work to the social realities and actual bodies that surround and inhabit the atelier. Her work shows how much the status of the model can tell us about artistic practices during the century of the birth of modernity.