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  • The Invention of the Model: Artists and Models in Paris, 1830–1870
  • Gabriel P. Weisberg
Waller, Susan. The Invention of the Model: Artists and Models in Paris, 1830–1870. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006. Pp. 168. ISBN 0-7546-3484-1.

The Invention of the Model: Artists and Models in Paris, 1830–1870 examines a series of interlocking themes that reveal the ways in which artists' models were found, trained, and employed during the July Monarchy and Second Empire. Author Susan Waller analyzes models as a series of ethnic types, and as individuals with their own inherent personalities, in order to demonstrate how they contributed to the emergence of modernity rooted in reality, regardless of whether they posed in the École des Beaux-Arts or in private studios. This challenging thesis becomes more complicated by the fact that uncovering information on the lives of models is a time consuming process, made difficult by the paucity of information to be found on specific models, save for a few isolated cases.

Waller demonstrates that the studio model became "a distinct social type" who helped artists move away from the heroicized, ideal male nude that dominated academies in earlier times. In focusing on the often illiterate, new types that appeared in studios, Waller creates considerable interest in explicating what was meant by the "Jewish model" and the "Italian model" at a moment when artists were claiming to paint under the banner of increased realism. One of her first examples is Paul Gavarni, a figure little studied in art history, who gave clothed models a new status by concentrating on a "non-elite visual culture." As she examines this move away from the ideal tradition, Waller further substantiates the shift toward the real world that was reflected in the selection of models, or types.

In her revelatory opening chapter, she tries to show how models that were drawn from the ranks of the "people" were the types that were destined to be valorized as the century evolved. Using prints as the medium of choice, and books as a way of showing how these models entered the consciousness of an increasingly literate audience, Waller establishes how street people became models and infiltrated the studios of the academy. It is a point well worth making, although it would have been helpful to cite examples of elite painters, who, early on, reflected these tendencies in their graphic art works.

In her second chapter, on the "vulgar model" Waller examines an even more complicated issue: the introduction of female models, through a variety of poses, to the academic world of the studios and the École. Surprisingly, Waller's discussion of teaching reforms at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1863 does not lead her to contemplate the hotly debated role of the model in Édouard Manet's Luncheon on the Grass, a painting [End Page 453] that focused intense attention on the role of models posed in a natural setting. While Waller fails to discuss this broader question, she does try to interpret the locations and levels of society from which models were drawn, and how an interest in sexuality contributed to the perception of female models by male students and teachers. Issues of propriety are raised, using Courbet's famous The Studio of the Painter (1855) as the focus of a discussion based on the positioning of the nude model behind the creator in the painting. But one longs for a more imaginative examination of how models were taken out of the confines of the rigid atelier while allowing a sense of their promiscuity to remain. The treatment of artist and model – by the mid 1860s – was of fundamental concern to artistic creativity as it shattered the definition of what was an acceptable subject for painting.

The third chapter "Ethnicities and Modernities" further accentuates the complexity of the themes. Here Waller examines how Jewish models were selected, although she has considerable difficulty in identifying who, among all the models, were actually Jewish. In testing the case for Italian models, Waller is also caught on the horns of a dilemma: were models genre types when they were painted or were they actual models drawn from society...

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