Fragonard and the painted discourse on the agency of matter
In his paintings created around 1760, today known as “Les Blanchisseuses” (The Saint Louis Art Museum / Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen), Jean-Honoré Fragonard sketches a world of the social subclass that emerges only selectively from the darkness. These places, reminiscent of the entrances to the Roman catacombs and also populated by animals, serve as the setting for clandestine sexual activities, whereby the extremely sketchy painting style plays on the border of object-identifying vision anyway.
The steaming and fizzling in the course of the washing procedure is only the starting point for much more: the cooking and bubbling also seems to have taken hold of the painterly matter, so that the obscure laundry starts resembling a kind of alchemical workshop in which the transformation of painting matter into the material of the image is demonstrated and held in suspension. In the painting “Perrette et le pot au lait” (around 1770, Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris), created about ten years later, an even more wondrous metamorphosis takes place, as a cloud of white steam emerges from the spilled milk and dominates the center of the picture. It cannot be traced back to the literary source, but transgresses it, bringing out the painterly matter and the facture in an idiosyncratic way. At the same time, it functions as an embodiment of the viewer’s imaginative space. Color matter, seems here to gain a significant life of its own and even to elude the intention of the painter.
In the envisaged talk, these observations are to be thought together with a new concept of matter in the Age of Enlightenment. The decisive innovation here was that in the emerging natural sciences, which left behind the metaphysical patterns of explanation, the concept of matter had to be readjusted. If, like Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, one wanted to explain the emergence of life without the divine 'fiat', then matter itself had to possess a capacity for self-generation and self-development. These scientific developments have already been linked to French art in the 18th century in other contexts: sculptures by Pigalle (Kloss-Weber 2014) and landscape paintings by Fragonard (Lajer-Burcharth, 2018).
The thesis of the paper will be that the reconceptualization of matter in the natural sciences experiences a transposition to color as painterly matter in the case of the paintings mentioned. It is thus about a transposition into a painterly theoretical discourse that finds its point of reference and its venue in the materiality of color - and which, in the obviously conscious proximity to obscure alchemical processes apparently possesses a thoroughly ironic trait. By seeming to undergo surprising transformations of its own impulse, an uncontrollable spontaneity of color matter is staged here, which in the silent discourse of the images takes up a counter-position, as it were, to the academic discourse on images and its defining criteria such as transparency, logical comprehensibility, or the primacy of content.
Keywords: Fragonard, painting material, natural sciences, imagination, painted theory
(497 words)
Julia, Kloss-Weber, PD Dr., Vertretungsprofessorin, Seminar für Kunstgeschichte / Institut of History of Art, University of Hamburg, https://www.kulturwissenschaften.uni-hamburg.de/ks/mitarbeiter/kloss-weber.html
Fragonard’s paintings “Les Blanchisseuses” and “Perrette et le pot au lait” (1760 and 1770) will be analyzed as a painted and also ironic discourse on the agency and spontaneity of painting matter. The artist may have taken up here the new conception of matter in the natural sciences and translated it to color as painting matter. In the silent discourse of these images, an answer to the question of what painting actually is, is thus sketched: the always unexpected transformation of matter into painting material, of painting material into the image with its material presence – and finally into the beholder’s imagination.