Aesthetics and Cultural Politics in the Age of Dreyfus: Maurice Denis's Homage to Cézanne (original) (raw)

The Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) and the doctrines of right-wing nationalism that it spawned in France decisively changed the political landscape of modernist painting. In the decades before the Affair, modernism's interpreters and critics aligned this political landscape with left-wing, progressive republican or socialist, politics. In the early 1890s Camille Pissarro and Paul Signac both noted signs of political reaction in the art of Paul Gauguin and the young symbolists. 1 However, ideological positions on the right were not neatly defined, and the political heterogeneity and ambiguity of much of symbolist art did not decisively alter the public perception of advanced painting's politics. 2 However, modernism's political fractures grew into deep divides at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, which polarized and politicized every aspect of French political, cultural and intellectual life from 1898 until 1906. One of the most lasting consequences of the Affair was the birth of right-wing nationalism. In the face of widespread division, Charles Maurras, Maurice Barrès and Adrien Mithouard formulated right-wing doctrines of national unity based on principles of hierarchy, order and the subordination of the individual to principles of authority and tradition. 3 These calls for unity often went hand-inhand with anti-parliamentarian politics and anti-Semitism. Right-wing nationalism encompassed both politics and culture: all three theorists were successful poets and writers before they became politicians, and their definitions of French identity often rested on claims to France's literary and artistic patrimony. Maurras's, Barrès's and Mithouard's seductive and powerful constructions of a modern France in touch with its glorious traditions attracted numerous artists and intellectuals, among them Paul Valéry, Edgar Degas, Camille Claudel, Auguste Renoir, Maurice Denis and Vincent d'Indy. During and after the Affair, right-wing nationalism competed with leftist political doctrines in actively shaping the practice and conceptualization of modernist painting. Condemnations of advanced painting as politically reactionary abounded after 1900. In 'La Réaction nationaliste et l'ignorance de l'homme de lettres' (1905) for instance, Camille Mauclair accuses avant-garde artists of trafficking in right-wing politics. He writes, '[o]ne wants to turn one's