Wild Masterpieces. The legend of the proto-modernist artist in "Manette Salomon" of the Goncourt brothers

Abstract

In the present study I aim to examine the condition of the fictional artist in Goncourt brothers’ Manette Salomon (1867) through the most recent studies on French Modernism in French literature. Also, I will reinterpret the goncourtian art novel through modernist art theory, with a particular focus on Clement Greenberg’s ontology of modernist painting. Firstly, I will suggest that the Goncourts, using a ‘pictorialist writing’, have contributed to expand Kris and Kurz’s concept of legend, myth, and magic in the image of the artist, reframing it through the lens of Modernism. Then, I will provide an overview of the main aesthetological problems raised by the novel, by making a genealogy of the so-called art criticism based upon mediality in the 19th century and comparing it with its further developments in the 20th century. Finally, I will investigate the characteristics of the goncourtian fictional painters by analysing some of the ‘virtual paintings’ featured in the book, as a means of figuring out the theory of image advanced by the authors; I will advance that it can be clearly referred to as proto-modernist.