In 1931, seeking to distinguish between a radically modern art and the flood of belle peinture that was submerging the French capital, the expatriate critic Carl Einstein unleashed an unsparing diagnosis in an essay entitled “The Little Picture Factory.” “In Paris,” he wrote, “the fabrication of pictures without worldview or risk is baser than the traffic in young women, for the facile dauber is rewarded by no punishment, only comfortable income” (Carl Einstein, “Kleine Bildefabrik,” Weltkunst 5 [April 1931]: 2–3). As Keith Holz sums up in “After Locarno: German Artists in the Parisian Picture Factory,” included in Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-garde, Paris was, as Einstein diagnosed, a place that managed to dampen the utopian or revolutionary ambitions that sustained avant-garde art elsewhere on the European continent in order to sustain a flowering economy of painting to suit every taste, however trivial. The eight authors in Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-garde (which originated as a panel at the College Art Association’s annual conference) scrutinize precisely what was so unsparingly dismissed by a radical avant-gardist like Einstein. Their subject is the still-underexplored terrain stretching from middle-of-the road to rearguard art in France from 1900 to 1960: the manifold amalgamations of academic styles with a modicum of formal innovation by those artists who had grudgingly come to accept Impressionism, let alone Fauvism and Cubism.

As the book’s two editors, Natalie Adamson and Toby Norris, correctly point out in their introduction, French twentieth-century rearguard art has been sidelined and has not received the same degree of attention as the equivalent phenomenon in literature. Nowhere is this more evident than in the exhibition history of Jules Grün’s mural-size canvas of 1911, which depicts the opening day of the capital’s most prestigious, and conservative, annual Salon des Artistes Français. The most memorable image in the otherwise sparsely illustrated Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-garde, and the one that graces its cover with its delicious saccharine colors (one wishes it were wraparound), it forms the centerpiece of Fae Brauer’s essay, “One Friday at the French Artists’ Salon: Pompier and Official Artists and the Coup du Cubisme.” In 1932 this monument to inveterate Parisianisme, an ultimate example of “pompiérisme” (the nineteenth-century derogatory term for pompous academic art that still held traction between the wars), was placed on deposit, which means carted off to the provinces, in the Musée des Beaux Arts of Rouen where it still hangs today. Reproduced with a detailed legend in a double spread in the mass circulation magazine L’Illustration, it offered contemporary readers the frisson of proxy-participation by allowing them to map out and elucidate the politics of placement, rankings, gestures, posturing, and costumes of the French art establishment. So engrossing are the endless nuances of etiquette found in Grün’s painting that Bauer ends up forgetting the event she had initially set out to contextualize in her essay: the succès de scandale provoked by the Cubists Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Henri Le Fauconnier, and Jean Metzinger when they decided to band together at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants.

Written exclusively by Anglophone scholars (the volume might have benefitted from the contribution of a group of young French art historians called “Relire les années 30,” especially those whose work has focused on figurative painting produced by a politically militant Left), the cumulative effect of this volume is a recalibration. Against the vastly expanded field of artistic practices, works by an artist like Jules-Émile Zingg—who produced for the Manufacture des Gobelins large rural scenes conceived as tapestry cartoons and painted in a belated Cézannisme—might, after reading this book, qualify as “modern,” which is the way it is discussed by Norris in his essay, “Between the Lines: The Juste Millieu in Interwar France.”

As trivial as much of the belle peinture addressed in this book might have been, it spurred—and was in turn spurred by—a feverish discursive activity. Countless critical reviews of salons and gallery shows were salted with polemical exchanges, replies, and retorts, and repartees were relentlessly ignited by the magazines’ circulation of a multitude of polls, interviews, and questionnaires. It is these textual sources more than the artworks themselves that drive the argument of the majority of the authors in this volume. While this flurry of journalistic writing muffled the tumult of history—a proletarian revolution in the East, two World Wars, and the ravages of a great economic depression—it allowed artists to be swept into viciously obfuscating ideological rambling. Mark Antliff’s essay, “Classicism, Neither Right nor Left: The Combat Group and the Cultural Politics of French Fascism during the 1903s,” demonstrates this by revealing how the sedate classicism of sculptors like Aristide Maillol and Charles Despiau and the architect Auguste Perret could be seen by such radical right-wing thinkers as Georges Sorel and Charles Maurras as exemplars of “classical violence.” Or how the moniker pompier could be wielded by the Right as a weapon to bludgeon the realist paintings produced by artists on the Left during the years of the Socialist Popular Front.

The power of assimilation of the Parisian mainstream is a recurrent theme. Holz’s essay follows the career paths of three German expatriates—Max Beckmann, the lesser-known Paul Strecker, and Dietz Edzard—measuring the degree to which they were pressured to change their styles in response to the conservative taste of a business-oriented group such as the Deutsche Kulturbund. A short-lived window of opportunity was opened to these artists during the eight-year rapprochement between France and Germany between the signing of the Locarno Pact and Hitler’s takeover. A similar argument for the capaciousness of the juste millieu subtends the essay by Kate Kangaslahti, “Foreign Artists and the École de Paris: Critical and Institutional Ambivalence between the Wars.” Aiming to provide a more uplifting account of the integration and ultimate success of the wave of Eastern European Jews that came to Paris in the 1910s and 1920s than the one provided by Kenneth E. Silver and myself with the exhibition The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris 1905–1945 at the Jewish Museum back in 1985, she argues that the “École de Paris” coined by the critic André Warnod in 1925 was initially intended as an assimilatory gesture toward the Eastern European Jewish artists who had flocked to Paris fleeing the pogroms before it was vitiated by the xenophobe (and Jewish) critic Waldemar George in the early 1930s as the other to a native “École Française.” This was especially the case, she argues, at the institutional level, when curators prepared the large exhibition of French art that coincided with the Paris 1937 World’s Fair, with all of the legitimizing power such an event entailed. While this thesis has its merits, it tends to mirror the one bequeathed by the French officials themselves, and runs the risk of reverting to an art history where Paris is portrayed as a welcoming mecca for beleaguered artists until the outbreak of the Second World War. Moreover, by stopping in 1937, Kangaslahi misses the opportunity to examine what came soon after: the active collaboration of the French establishment with the Nazis and the nation’s purging of most of its Jewish artists. Only in the aftermath of the war did the term “École de Paris” finally shake off this association with Jewish artists to become the blanket denomination for all modern painting, irrespective of religion and nationality, “made in Paris.”

Penelope Curtis’s essay, “Sculpture’s Alternative Modernities: The Public Maillol, the Private Rodin,” is the only one in Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-garde to steer away from painting. It tracks the seesaw oscillation of the critical fortunes—both French and transatlantic—of the pair that dominated the medium for decades without serious rivals to reveal how unstable the classification of modern vs. rearguard actually was. Auguste Rodin had become a living anachronism when his World War I memorial in San Francisco to honor the California soldiers who had died fighting on behalf of the Allies was unveiled. Back home it was the solid classicism of Maillol whom his compatriots craved in the wake of reconstruction. Indeed, as Curtis shows, so generic was Maillol’s classicism that his reputation remained untarnished, despite his courting of Nazi officials during the Occupation, into the 1950s, when he was chosen by Philip Johnson (himself, as it happens, a Fascist sympathizer during the war) to grace the pool of MoMA’s sculpture garden in New York, and into the 1960s when the Gaullist French culture minister André Malraux chose him to decorate the Tuileries gardens. Only then, in a last twist of fate, Maillol’s star began to fade and Rodin’s to rise again, due to a shift in taste toward a more introverted mood in public sculpture.

The first and the last essays in the volume can be seen to function as bookends in the way they define both the chronological and stylistic extremities of Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-garde. Neil McWilliam’s “Émile Bernard’s Reactionary Idealism” deals with an unapologetically reactionary artist. An arch-Catholic, Bernard was a convert from the avant-garde to tradition, having been a member of the Pont-Aven group in his youth. A disenchanted modernist who came to see fragmentation and individualism in art as the symptom of a broader cultural crisis afflicting the word, Bernard produced a hybrid body of work that ranged from neo-Byzantine church frescoes to surreptitiously erotic female nudes. Bernard’s worldview, which he shared with many turn-of-the-century reactionaries who found fresh life breathed into their pessimistic pronouncements during the troubled 1930s, was clearly no longer in order in France after the Liberation. The postwar situation described by Adamson in “The Serpent Eats Its Tail: Avant-garde and Arrière-garde in Paris, 1943-1953,” was one where avant-garde and rearguard seem to have merged. This “superb reconciliation,” as she calls it—a key concept psychologically, politically, and aesthetically at this historical juncture—was achieved by Nicholas de Staël, a painter whose formal elegance matched the expectations of progressive critics and grands bourgeois collectors alike, eager as they all were to absorb modernism as part of a French tradition. In one last recalibration enacted in this oftentimes fascinating collection of essays, Adamson’s focus on de Staël’s move back and forth, with equal panache, from “informel” abstraction to a figurative mode offers a welcome corrective to many art historians’ fixation with the “battle of styles” produced by the climate of the Cold War.