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考古 【By 元叔】
For artists and writers alike, book illustration’s threat was double: it challenged the fine arts via their shared visual medium, and literature through the shared pages of the book. As such, critics needed a way to invalidate illustration’s artistic claims on both fronts. They did so by codifying the genre as industrial and mercantile, a lethal combination. The landscape painter Raoul de Croy (1802-79) led the charge, chastising the press for its use of what he described as ‘‘crude wood engravings’’ that transform ‘‘beautiful vignettes’’ into ‘‘black ink stains.’’ Here de Croy sets up a polarity between wood and metal engraving: the former being ‘‘crude’’ and ‘‘mechanical,’’ the latter representative of ‘‘this art so perfect, so difficult, so worthy of encouragement.’’ De Mercey followed suit, noting the ‘‘difficulty’’ and ‘‘length of work’’ involved with copper and steel engraving, as well as etching. Lithography and wood engraving, on the other hand, were ‘‘much less difficult to produce and much less expensive.’’
Although the Romantics, and de Croy himself, championed lithography as a spontaneous, emotive medium that captured the visible traces of the artist’s pencil— metonymic references to the artist’s thoughts and emotions the lithography of the 1840s fell on the side of ‘‘popular’’ art more often than not, as it was primarily used in the press and for low-end prints, with subject matter ranging from political and social caricature to licentious images. Accordingly, the medium took on the attributes of its publication venues and content: mechanical, commercial, destined for a popular audience.De Mercey’s and de Croy’s distinction between lithography/wood en- graving and metal engraving/etching establishes a series of dichotomies— mechanical versus hand-produced, mass-reproduced versus limited reproduction, industrial versus individual creation—which correspond to Bourdieu’s breakdown of the cultural field. These distinctions also testify to the very real nature of image reproduction in the nineteenth century: metal engraving was a lengthy and costly procedure where the bulk of the work was often done by one engraver, while wood engraving and lithography were much less expensive and easier to produce, with individual authorship giving way to the collaborative process of publishing illustrated newspapers and books. These differences fuel de Mercey’s and de Croy’s attacks on book illustration in that each critic attributes value to time, cost of production, and individual workmanship: thus metal engraving and etching are placed at the high end of the aesthetic scale, while lithography and especially wood engraving fall to the bottom. Yet ironically, by placing illustration within the academic hierarchy of mediums, de Mercey and de Croy suggest that it is gaining not only economic but also cultural capital. Despite its ‘‘crude’’ and ‘‘mechanical’’ nature, it has earned a place on the artistic ladder, albeit the lowest rung.
Critics reinforced the high-versus-low art dichotomy by adding commercialism, what Bourdieu qualifies as the ‘‘generative principle’’ of the field of cultural production. According to de Mercey, publishers turn to book illustration because they want ‘‘to produce bargains, common goods.’’Il- lustration is a step backwards towards ‘‘the mercantile civilization of America’’; ‘‘no other century has pushed as far as ours this debauchery of illustrations commercially conceived’’; ‘‘literature has become a counter, a boutique open on the street, with display windows and a sign.’’ In short, illustration is not art; it is simply a means to ‘‘build a fortune.’’
De Mercey plays on a related fear when he protests that both wood en- graving and lithography ‘‘largely contributed . . . to the democratization of minds [esprits].’’ De Croy grants that one may applaud the press’s efforts to ‘‘bring the taste for the arts to the poor person’s home,’’ but this must not be done by way of ‘‘assassinating the fine arts’’: ‘‘Where, thus, will good taste find refuge if we inundate the poor public in such a manner?’’ De Croy’s metaphor of a flood or wave of images signals the growing anxiety that illustration will eventually drown out or homogenize the visual arts. De Mercey and de Croy fear not wood engraving and lithography per se, but rather their infiltration and subversion of high art. And in many ways book illustration did just that, for as Philippe Kaenel notes, the majority of visual artists from 1830 to 1880 sold images to newspapers and booksellers at one time or another, blurring the boundaries between painting, engraving, caricature, and illustration. As Kaenel points out, the entry for the
letter ‘‘d’’ in Marcus Osterwalder’s Dictionnaire des illustrateurs (1983) in- cludes ‘‘Dargent, Daubigny, Daumier, Debucourt, Decamps, Delacroix, Denis, Derain, Deve ?ria, Dore ?, Durf, Du Maurier, etc.’’66 When such a varied collection of painters, caricaturists, and engravers illustrate books, how does one distinguish between the artist and the commercial hack?
The same question arises in the context of literature, for as de Mercey and fellow critics argue, book illustration’s attack on the artistic field targets both visual and literary aesthetics. The critic Elias Regnault warns that in order to maintain literature’s integrity, ‘‘the publisher must bring to this new path sureness in judgment, a purity of taste, which raises him to the ranks of an artist, if he doesn’t want to descend to the role of sketch sales- man.’’ Regnault cites a number of cases where the publisher fills books with too many images, poor quality images, or images that do not correspond to the text. Worst of all is the publisher who ‘‘brazenly changes the first words of a paragraph in order to offer hospitality to his illuminated letters.’’ Here Regnault targets publishers as the instrument behind illustration’s degradation of literature: ‘‘their most common error is to take on the airs of an artist vis-a`-vis the public and to reserve their merchant ways for the writer.’’ The publisher’s true crime is that he usurps the writer, taking over the book via illustration, all under the guise of ‘‘art’’ although he is in fact a salesman in artist’s clothing.
For de Mercey, illustration’s threat to literature is even greater as it not only corrupts aesthetics but, more importantly, it distorts the reading process by substituting image for word. As he explains, there is a certain ‘‘vague- ness’’ inherent to ‘‘verbal painting’’: ‘‘Nothing is precise, the reader’s mind is constantly required to call forth its reminiscences and its personal emotions in order to interpret, as it were, the poet’s idea.’’ But illustration makes this kind of creative individual reading impossible. The reader be- comes lazy, the mind weakened from the passive viewing of images: ‘‘When the illustrator gives precise forms to the writer’s reveries, his stories, it necessarily happens that the mind is no longer accustomed to understanding these stories, these reveries, unless in the clothes that the painter has dressed them. The illustrator thus substitutes himself for the poet; he imposes his personal interpretation in place of that multiple and living interpretation that each person can create according to his imagination or his nature.’’
Yet despite the critics’ attempts to discredit illustration, de Mercey, de Croy, and Regnault actually attest to its success, in that their articles amass a body of critical discourse devoted to wood engraving and lithography. By making book illustration a topic of discussion and interpretation, the critics actually validate its entry into the cultural field. What is more, the critics’ fervent attacks suggest that illustration succeeded at destabilizing, however temporarily, the cultural field. The threat to aesthetic hierarchies was real. |
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发表于 2014-9-30 23:59:00
