Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Vue du Salon de 1767

Course presentation

After the rout of the encyclopedic adventure and his failure at the theater, Diderot, at the suggestion of his friend Grimm, threw himself into writing reviews of the Salons, the exhibitions that the Royal Academy of Painting, in the eighteenth century, organized every two years at the Salon carré in the Louvre. Presented as familiar letters written to Grimm, Diderot's Salons were circulated in the Correspondance littéraire, a handwritten journal he intended for a handful of princely subscribers in the courts of northern and eastern Europe.

Diderot took to the game and, from the few pages of the Salon de 1759, moved on to volumes in 1765 and 1767. Yet at the outset, he knew very little about painting, to which he had only taken a passing interest in the Encyclopédie. It was from his experience as a theater theorist that he approached the pictorial scene, and it was to the dramatic effectiveness of composition that he was first sensitive. But painting resists purely theatrical modeling: Diderot will gradually discover what in painting resists the stage. Around this resistance takes shape Diderot's path to aesthetics: a path that is contradictorily Platonic and materialist, at the antipodes of Kantian aesthetics.

Programmed text

Diderot, Œuvres, tome IV " Esthétique - Théâtre ", Laffont, Bouquins, 1996

Course material

Stéphane Lojkine, L'Œil révolté. Les Salons de Diderot, J. Chambon, 2007

Program

Diderot at the Salon: truth, poetry, magic

From the Louvre Salon to Diderot's Salon

Definition, issues and problems of description in the Salons

Composing painting: the choice of the moment

• The Encyclopédie

article composition.

• Lépicié, Guillaume le Conquérant

Theatricality of painting

• Vanloo's Médée

Scene dissemination: Vernet

Essay topics

Subject #1

"To paint as one spoke in Sparta" (p. 1035)

Topic #2

In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord writes, in 1992:

"The spectacle, as the present social organization of the paralysis of history and memory, of the abandonment of history which erects itself on the basis of historical time, is the false consciousness of time." (n°158)

Do you think Diderot's relationship to the pictorial scene falls under this false consciousness of time? You will support your reflection with specific examples borrowed from the Salons and, where appropriate, Diderot's theater.

Subject n°3

In Le Spectateur émancipé, Jacques Rancière writes:

"What man contemplates in the spectacle is the activity that has been stolen from him; it is his own essence, now alien, turned against him, the organizer of a collective world whose reality is that of this dispossession." (La Fabrique, 2008, p. 13)

To what extent do these words apply to the relationship that Diderot develops vis-à-vis the work of art in the Salons? You will support your discussion with precise references to the text of the Salons and to the works Diderot describes there.

Subject #4

Explain and comment on these words by Diderot in the Essais sur la peinture:

"It's really a question of furnishing one's canvas with figures! These figures must place themselves there, as in nature. They must all contribute to a common effect, in a strong, simple and clear way; otherwise I'll say, like Fontenelle to the Sonata: "Figure, what do you want from me?"" (p. 500)

Subject no. 5

In La Tache aveugle, Jacqueline Lichtenstein writes, about the relationship between painting and sculpture in the eighteenth century:

"To see is to desire to touch. But the pleasure of seeing demands that this desire be restrained. To see is to desire to approach. But the pleasure of seeing requires maintaining a distance. Above all, don't touch. Or touch delicately, touch tactfully, that is, with the tips of your eyes only, without ever making contact." (Jacqueline Lichtenstein, La tache aveugle. Essai sur les relations de la peinture et de la sculpture à l'âge moderne, Gallimard, Nrf Essais, 2003, chap. 2, p. 75)

To what extent do these remarks seem to you to accord with Diderot's aesthetic experience in the Salons?