In reading “Postmodern History at the Musée d’Orsay,” I wondered about Mainardi’s own investments in the idea of “cohabitation,” which Sherman describes as analogous to the left-right cohabitation of the government at the time. Mainardi contextualizes the political cohabitation of the mid-1980s as “not just a necessity but a positive goal” (34) and aligns this need for compromise with the conditions of 19th century France, when the term “eclecticism” was favored. I kept thinking of Mainardi’s own formation as an art historian and as a member of the Redstockings and the political schisms that haunt the history of radical feminism. Perhaps this is my doing—reading too closely for biography, but this left me wondering: what are the implications of the playing out of present-day politics at the Musée d’Orsay for something larger than a French canon of art history or a “postmodern” museological practice? Were the Museum’s plans to place avant-garde and pompier art in dialogue an example of a larger trend of expanding the canon? The confusion surrounding the curatorial decisions of the Orsay seems larger than an institutional snafu.
Mainardi’s criticism, which I am inclined to agree with (recalling as best I can my most recent visit to the Orsay in 2016, which I suspect is at least slightly different from when the Museum first opened), is that this new cohabitation depoliticizes artworks by unproductively neutralizing social art history in favor of formalism (Nochlin offers a similar criticism, as quoted in the Sherman essay). Mainardi seems less concerned that the Orsay returned to certain nineteenth-century practices, so much as she is vexed by the cherry-picking of “historical reconstruction” (44). To return to some version of my question about the difference between staging “City of Cinema” in an art museum or a history museum, I continue to be skeptical of why a curatorial display of nineteenth-century art is beholden to nineteenth-century exhibition practices, or at least why such display must offer didactic transparency around their abandonment. This is not to suggest that I agree with the Orsay’s curatorial model and the curators' refusal of sufficient didactics (I remember being completely unable to find Olympia, only to find out [not from a sign, but rather after asking a security guard] that the painting had been taken down for conservation), but rather if we acknowledge that as contemporary viewers that we do not see these objects in the same way that nineteenth-century viewers did (on account of new epistemologies and ways of seeing), why is the status quo to assume that a museological approach is historically accurate? Mainardi’s point that revisionism according to some “ill-defined criterion of preference by official power” (48) fails to articulate a productive reshuffle is well-taken, but I wonder what she supposes should fill its place. By the end of the piece, it seems she believes that compromise is doomed to failure.
Sherman takes a somewhat different approach in arguing that the museological decisions of the Orsay reflect a reaffirmation of “the validity of its own institutional past” (55). Sherman seems much more focused on how the limits of state funds and private patronage falsify an “official taste” of the state in the nineteenth century, reinforced by curators’ “allergy” to wall labels (59). While Sherman and Mainardi agree on many points, including the depoliticization of radical politics, Sherman seems more concerned with the pedagogical limitations of the Orsay’s curatorial approach, taking up the Guide as his primary antagonist. His conclusion is similar—compromise and conservatism gave way to stagnation.
Considering the “aesthetic hegemony” (44) that Mainardi speaks of, I was not particularly surprised that the introduction to “Enfin le cinéma!” seems especially invested in putting Impressionist painting in dialogue with the technological advancements to capture movement, largely understating the role of popular culture within the exhibition.
Some further questions:
What in the Mainardi and Sherman pieces can be attributed to the growing pains of a new institution? To a hysteria around “postmodernism”?
Where do the authors’ investments lie beyond the confines of the Orsay?
Can a historical work of art be divorced from its contemporaneous museological model successfully? In other words, are the conditions of display the only way to historicize an object?
What does a museum of the social history of art look like?