A CLOSET DECADENT

J.A.D. INGRES, PRINCESSE DE BROGLIE, 1853

(The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

The first thing you notice is the dress. Every time I walk into the small room at the back of the Metropolitan Museum of Art where Ingres’s portrait of the Princesse de Broglie has pride of place above the mantel, I am shocked anew by the hallucinatory realism of her dress. This portrait, executed over a three-year period when the notoriously slow painter was in his seventies, contains the most precisely calibrated and virtuosic fabric painting of his entire career. The gold damask upholstery on the chair and the white and gold shawl are also fine achievements, but only in the blow-your-eyes-out illusionism of that dress does Ingres equal or surpass the great fabric painters of the past: Holbein, Bronzino, Ter Borch. The effect is beyond photographic. The dress seems more like a large piece of cloth collaged onto the canvas than any creation of brushes and paint.

The appealing textures of the dress and chair, the harmonious colors of the painting as a whole, the perfect simplicity of the triangular composition–all combine into a cogent argument for the superficial pleasures of art. Why require more of art than a beautiful gown beautifully painted or a pleasant face pleasingly portrayed? Because the surface of this work is so interesting, it’s tempting to think that all of the painting’s interest is right there on the surface. It’s tempting for a twenty-first-century intellectual, taught to despise the nineteenth-century academy and all its products, to dismiss the painting as an exceptionally competent piece of academicism, an example of old-fashioned, uncomplicated illusionism, already rendered obsolete in its own day by the invention of the daguerreotype.

If we resist temptation, however, and spend some more time studying the Princesse, we begin to see that something very odd is going on. The overall structure of the work, with its prominent foreground illusionism and flattened, enclosed background space, seems designed to direct our attention to the surface. Her entire form, rather than receding into a defined perspective space like a good Van Dyck sitter, seems to lie upon the picture plane and threatens to invade our world. The color harmony between the dress and the darker sofa behind the princess forms a field of blue that overflows the canvas on both sides, a solid wall of color to stop our wandering eyes. The double barrier of the princess’s folded arms also says: this far and no further. Even in the painting’s most convincing passage of spatial illusionism–the palpable, shadowed space between the princess’s drooping left hand and her dress–she shows us the back of her hand, blocking our approach and barring access to the painting’s interior. Like Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray this work seems to warn, "Those who go below the surface do so at their peril."¹

In any portrait, of course, our attention should be focused on the sitter and her accoutrements, but Ingres’s multiple strategies are a kind of overkill, suggesting that something in this work has activated a deep anxiety in the painter. The longer I look at the painting, the more I wonder what Ingres is trying to hide. Why doesn’t he want our eyes to stray beyond the lovely folds and ripples of that dress?

One clue comes from a seemingly unlikely source. When the avant-garde poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote his (largely negative) review of the Ingres retrospective at the 1855 Paris Universal Exhibition, he included a strange "first impression" of the works in the gallery:

This impression is not easy to describe; it has some connection, but in unknown proportions, with disquiet, boredom and fear; it reminds one vaguely and involuntarily of the feeling of faintness due to lack of air, or to the atmosphere in a chemical laboratory, or to the awareness of being in a world of phantasms, or rather one that imitates such a world, a world of automatons, confusing to our senses because too obviously and palpably extraneous to us.²

Let us consider Baudelaire’s description: disquiet, fear, ennui, aimlessness, enclosure, claustrophobia, unreality, artificiality. One wonders if Baudelaire is describing the paintings of Ingres or the poems in Les Fleurs du Mal. Historians of art and literature have a word for this condition: Decadence.

French Romanticism first crosses the border into late-Romantic Decadence with The Death of Sardanapalus by Eugene Delacroix. In this canvas from the 1820's, now in the Louvre, a sadistic orgy of murder and destruction is acted out in the opulent boudoir of an Assyrian king who looks on impassively. The canvas emits a warm, reddish glow and overflows with brightly painted, bejewelled objects, their attractiveness at odds with the horror being enacted around them. The work is everything that Ingres’s history paintings are not: dark, dangerous, suffused with violent energy, and executed in vigorous, visible brushwork partaking of the styles and palettes of Titian and Rubens. Not surprisingly, Ingres set himself (and/or allowed himself to be set) in strict opposition to Delacroix and the Romantics. As the banner carrier for academic classicism and a former student of Jacques-Louis David, Ingres cast himself as the dictator of draftsmanship, defending the (supposedly moral) virtues of drawing and line against the encroachments of the morally and technically "looser" Romantic colorists. A much-reproduced cartoon of the time shows Ingres and Delacroix jousting in front of the Institut de France, Ingres using a giant drawing pen as a lance while Delacroix holds an outsized paintbrush.

But everyone knows that the only thing Parisian intellectuals enjoy more than establishing an untenable polar opposition is showing how it deconstructs itself. Even as the Ingres-Delacroix polarity was being constructed in the press and the salons, the two men’s works traveled paths that were far from divergent. At times the works of Ingres and Delacroix seem to approach each other asymptotically, coming close but never quite touching. A note struck by Ingres in an early canvas might appear transformed decades later in a painting by Delacroix, or vice versa. Ingres’s famous Grande Odalisque of 1814, for example, is a precursor of Delacroix’s later (and stylistically very different) Orientalist nudes. In the other direction, Ingres’s very late Turkish Bath, with its overflowing eroticism and flattened background frieze of voluptuous nudes, strangely recalls the foreground figures of Delacroix’s Massacre at Chios. Finally, the two central female nudes of The Death of Sardanapalus, one dying and the other with a dagger at her throat, strike unusual, sinuous poses that would not be out of place in Ingres’s Turkish Bath.

With Delacroix Romanticism tends toward Decadence, while with Ingres Neoclassicism takes a similar path. Decadence is a notoriously protean concept that I define generally as a mode of artistic expression characterized by highly stylized excess. Our most provocative writer on the subject, Camille Paglia, characterizes it thus:

[Decadence] is a process of objectification and fixation...High Romanticism valued energy, room to breathe. Decadent Late Romanticism shuts the doors and locks self and eye in pagan cultism...Art supplants nature. The objet d’art becomes the center of fetishistic connoisseurship. Person is transformed into beautiful thing, beyond the law. Decadence takes western sexual personae to their ultimate point of hardness and artificiality.³

These lines are taken from a discussion of Balzac, but they apply equally well to Delacroix’s Sardanapalus and Ingres’s Princesse de Broglie. Both works are set in vaguely defined interiors, but the Ingres is far more claustrophobic. Where Delacroix shows us a frenzied scene in which the king’s odalisques are little more than beautiful objects to be destroyed along with all the other trappings of wealth, Ingres shows us a woman who is both wrapped in an objet d’art and transformed into an art object. Anyone seeking decadent hardness and artificiality need look no farther than Ingres’s princess with her pale, flawless skin (reminiscent of the flesh tones in Bronzino, himself a Decadent Mannerist of the late Renaissance) and her severe, centrally parted hair, looking from a distance like a helmet of hard, dark wood. And then there is the face: her porcelain doll-like face rendered in a signature Ingresque oval. What could be harder than this symmetrical mask of a face, tilted like an object in a still life so that its central axis aligns with the angle of the chairback? Elsewhere, the complimentary contours of her dress and the chair together form a semicircular shape tangent to the top of the background sofa–a startling piece of artificial, nearly abstract, compositional geometry. Even the excessive realism of the dress is in fact highly stylized, the pattern of folds at the left echoing the shape and direction of the fingers on the princess’s left hand.

Once we pass beyond the dress, this work that at first seemed so real becomes in fact shockingly artificial. If Whistler had painted it, he would’ve called it "Arrangement in Blue and Gold"–an aesthetic construction of color and form with no reference to the subject. No wonder Ingres wants us to focus on the photorealism of the dress; everything else in the painting reveals his deeply closeted late Romantic Decadence.

I study the princess’s face for a few minutes, allowing my eyes to drift down the contours of her shoulders to the dress and chair, and new meanings begin to emerge. There is a dehumanized coldness about her, but also an air of melancholy. It is there in her sunken, shadowed eyes, in the way her left hand droops passively (a cliche of aristocratic portraiture that Ingres deploys to great effect). There is a sense of heaviness here, a burden: the cascading dress, the pearls hanging from her wrist, the white scarf that flows down to a still life of gloves, fan and other accessories that have fallen haphazardly out of frame. Her lovely possessions are falling away from her, and she couldn’t care less. She is exquisitely bored with the beautiful things of this world.

This Baudelairean ennui is yet another characteristic of Decadence, of course, but it may also be an element of a deeper psychological realism. We know that the Princesse de Broglie was an exceptionally shy woman who must have felt isolated in aristocratic salons where wit was at a premium. She gave birth to five sons, wrote religious books and died young of tuberculosis (a very Decadent disease, number two on the Hit Parade, just behind syphilis). Her isolation, her religiosity, her fragile health, all this is communicated (perhaps unintentionally) by Ingres’s Decadent technique. Her dimly lighted room is close and airless, pressing in upon her; her exquisite finery is but clothing for a porcelain doll; even her unblemished skin is as insubstantial as the delicately painted hair ornament that forms a subtle gray halo around her lower head. This sense of contemptu mundi, contempt for the things of this world, is also (unsurprisingly) a facet of Decadence. It’s what leads Des Esseintes, the protagonist of Huysman’s A Rebours, to cut himself off from the world, and it led Huysman himself to turn to monastic Catholicism near the end of his life.

When Ingres met the young Degas, his tiresomely predictable advice to the aspiring artist was, "Draw lines, young man." But one line Ingres the master draftsman had trouble drawing was the one separating idealized Classicism from late Romantic Decadence. Wherever we look in the Princesse de Broglie, the painter’s secret Decadence flashes out. The superreal dress intended to distract us from the work’s artificiality is itself a fetishized object, more tactile and caressable than any of Ingres’s nudes. On a deeper level, the unreality of the painting nearly repels us, while deeper yet we find a psychology in tune with Huysman and Baudelaire. For the artist, this painting is a portrait in anxiety. Ingres expends tremendous effort to control his Decadent tendencies, but each of his strategies is like a little confession. Despite all his anti-Romantic rhetoric and precise, illusionistic brushwork, Ingres the closet decadent cannot conceal himself behind Pauline de Broglie’s beautiful skirt.

NOTES

1. Wilde, Dorian Gray, 18.

2. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 126.

3. Paglia, Sexual Personae, 389.

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