Book Reviews
that, even if located on the surface, has shaken the core of
twentieth-century visual and material culture.
Invoking the theories of ‘ontological democratization’ by
theorist Bill Brown, Cheng argues that ‘the process of [Baker’s]
objectification – even as it takes subjectivity from her – also
invests the objects around her with subjectivity, which in turn
provides a kind of cloak for her nakedness’ (p. 117). Such
balancing act expresses a fundamental psychological need to
connect with and reinvent ourselves through and as objects
that facilitate an expanded form of relationality. Extending the
problematic of Cheng’s previous book, The Melancholy of Race
(2001) and revising Franz Fanon’s earlier formulation on the
‘epidermalization of inferiority’ (Fanon, White Skin, Black Masks
quoted in Cheng, p. 12), Second Skin closes with a
re-evaluation (or de-‘denigration’) of vision in its ability not only
to reify, but also profoundly alter perceptions of racial
embodiment. ‘We do not master by seeing, we are ourselves
altered when we look’ states Cheng earlier (p. 21); such
personal alteration by vision may explain why ‘the surface can
also be profoundly structuring’ (p. 168) and why the eclipse of
ornamentation or any other visible trace from the same surface
can be equally structuring as well.
While complementing one another, the two books have
evident differences not only in method but also in argument.
Payne, for example, supports a clear distinction between
ornament and object and clarifies at the end of her
introduction that at the time of Loos and Le Corbusier, ‘color,
surface, or material richness’ were not to be confused with
ornament (Payne, p. 24). While demarcating similar distinctions,
Cheng opts to underline the radical instability between
ornament, adornment, object, cladding, and surface – an
instability whose predicament appears to have restructured the
architectural culture of more recent modernity. More than a
century after Loos’s invective against ornament, there have
been several polemical returns and periodic eclipses of
ornament, which suggests not only that ornament survives by
being periodically buried, but also that its ‘function’ (to use a
term by the American architect, Luis Sullivan) is not simply to
create florid or plain facades, but to instigate culturally relevant
debate. In this sense, even Loos is a great contributor to the
causes of ornamentation and these two highly intricate books
generously renew such contribution.
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kct024
Advance Access Publication 16 August 2013
Figuring Out Theory
Tom McDonough
Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 125 illns, 271 pp., ISBN
9780300162813, cloth $65.00
The processes of cultural legitimation occur at radically varying
time scales and with distinct effects. When in early 2007
474 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 36.3 2013
France’s Réunion des musées nationaux announced plans
for a major exhibition of the so-called Narrative Figuration
movement – a loose gathering of figurative painters that had
come to prominence in the mid-1960s – collectors quickly
moved to profit from its newfound visibility of these artists. The
postwar and contemporary art sale held in Paris at François
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Pinault-owned Christie’s on 11 December 2007 featured an
important group of paintings by artists of this movement,
including six key works from what the catalogue described as
an ‘important French private collection’ – actually the property
of Hervé Loevenbruck, a prominent younger Parisian gallery
director.1 Provided with high estimates, and frequently with a
guarantee, the lots did extraordinarily well: paintings by Hervé
Télémaque and Valerio Adami, for example, exceeded their high
estimates, and Erró’s monumental Comicscape, 1971 –
estimated at three hundred euros to four hundred thousand
euros – doubled its expected price and sold for over eight
hundred thousand euros. Several of the works sold had
been requested for the upcoming Grand Palais exhibition,
heightening the appeal of their provenance. In the wake of the
sale, websites tracking the art market could boast of Narrative
Figuration’s newfound appeal: ‘The group’s most sought-after
artist is Jacques Monory, whose price level has soared by more
than 500% in ten years; next in line are Gérard Fromanger
(+353% between 1997 and 2007), Valerio Adami (+231%),
Erro (+209%) . . .’.2
These artists, most of whom are little known or appreciated
outside Francophone circles, may seem unlikely candidates
for such market valorisation. The origins of Narrative
Figuration (less often, ‘New Figuration’) lay in an exhibition
during the summer of 1964 at the Musée d’art moderne de la
Ville de Paris organised by critic Gérald Gassiot-Talabot
(1929 –2002) and painters Bernard Rancillac (1931 –) and
Télémaque (1937–). Mythologies quotidiennes [Everyday
mythologies] included thirty-four artists of diverse stylistic
tendencies, all of whom, however, shared a rejection of
then-predominant modes of abstract painting and the lingering
art-for-art’s-sake social neutrality of the École de Paris in favour
of work that made clear reference to contemporary society and
to images drawn from film, advertising, and comics – as well as,
less frequently, the history of art. The exhibition followed by only
one month the triumph of American Pop art at the Venice
Biennale, where Robert Rauschenberg had been awarded the
grand prix for painting, but Narrative Figuration would reject
what its practitioners saw as the formalism of their US
counterparts. Not long after Mythologies quotidiennes, a group
of young painters – some of whom had shown in Gassiot-
Talabot’s exhibition – virtually took over the 1965 Salon de la
Jeune Peinture, proclaiming art’s value as a tool of social
transformation. These artists, along with others not included
in these inaugural exhibitions, appropriated contemporary
imagery to produce unexpected meanings, to suggest alternative
narratives, and to reveal hidden political implications – all in the
name of denouncing the alienations of postwar French society,
neo-imperialism, and the persistence of rightwing ideologies.
The most activist of them were deeply engaged in the politics
of the later 1960s, and especially in the events of May 1968
in Paris. Even in France, these commitments and the leftist

character of much of its work would by the late 1970s
marginalise Narrative Figuration, never well-known outside
Europe, as institutions and collectors turned to more socially
amenable forms of contemporary art. For a younger generation
of collectors and dealers, symbolised by Loevenbruck, however,
the politics of four decades ago appears to matter less than the
present-day accessibility and appeal of these canvases, so that
this movement has been taken up in a paradoxically depoliticised
form as a French parallel to American Pop.
Over the last ten years or so, in settings less dramatic than
Christie’s avenue Matignon salesroom or the exhibition halls
of the Grand Palais, curators and scholars have undertaken
their own reassessment and revaluation of Narrative Figuration,
presenting a competing version of the legitimisation of the
movement. This has partly been an endeavour of France’s
regional museums, which have proved much more willing than
those in Paris to display the often large-scale canvases
produced by the movement, and partly one of the dedicated
scholarship. In the English-speaking world, Sarah Wilson,
professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, has been the most
prolific and influential champion of this ‘rehabilitation’ of
Narrative Figuration. We might date this commitment to the late
1990s, when she began editing the collection ‘Revisions’ for
the London publisher Black Dog: originally projected to be five
volumes, only three of which appeared, the series consisted of
translations of essays by prominent representatives of ‘French
theory’ on artists of their time, each prefaced by a critical
introduction. So, we had a first English translation of Jean-
François Lyotard’s 1984 essay on Jacques Monory (1934–); a
volume collecting Gilles Deleuze’s 1973 and Michel Foucault’s
1975 studies of Gérard Fromanger (1939–); and finally Maurice
Blanchot’s 1965 essay on Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001),
accompanied by a selection of texts by the artist himself.3
Here was, in germ, the concept of her most recent book, The
Visual World of French Theory: Figurations, which pairs artists of
the Narrative Figuration movement – broadly defined – with
their collaborators among Structuralist and Poststructuralist
philosophers. Despite insisting that ‘the cultural history I offer . . .
has no specific agenda of advocacy’ (27), Wilson’s aim is most
certainly to mobilise the renown of these thinkers to spur interest
in their underappreciated contemporaries, for ‘it is via the
philosophers – names as familiar to an international academic
public as the names of Impressionist or Cubist painters – that
the art of 1970s France must be introduced to the wider
audience it deserves’ (19).
The Visual World of French Theory is, then, a work of
advocacy, as even the most cursory reading of the author’s
extensive acknowledgments makes clear. Its six chapters
champion artists who, thanks sometimes to friendship,
sometimes to powerful connections, were themselves
championed by thinkers who came to hold a great deal of
cultural capital. Sometimes, the encounter occurred relatively
early in the academic’s career, as when sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu prefaced a 1967 exhibition catalogue for Rancillac;
other times, it happened after the philosopher already had
achieved considerable fame, as when Jacques Derrida turned
to writing on Adami in the mid-1970s. In all cases, however,
Wilson wishes to demonstrate that these conjunctures were
Book Reviews
true dialogues – that is, she does not privilege the textual
discourses of the philosophers over the painterly arguments
of the artists, but instead attempts to show what the art itself
contributed to critical thought. Her thinkers do not so much
explicate paintings, rendering them transparent; rather they
confront obdurate visual objects that challenge their own
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accepted modes of thinking, and that sometimes expose their
own blind spots. We see this in Wilson’s discussion of
Bourdieu and Rancillac, whose biographies she traces in
parallel from their training through the early 1970s. If in 1967
the sociologist is able to recognise the artist’s strategy of
détournement of press and advertising imagery in his essay
‘L’image de l’image’ and to describe its critical effects (see pp.
81–3), Wilson nevertheless convincingly argues that it was
Rancillac – with his French leftist’s love / hate relationship to
America – who revealed to Bourdieu his blindness to American
mass culture and the effects of its importation to France. At
the very moment Bourdieu was assembling the surveys of
museumgoers that would demonstrate a strict, almost nineteenth-
century divide between class tastes, Rancillac’s work was
revelling in the more fluid cultural identifications permitted by
the hybridisations of the New World – even if his increasing
militancy meant that he would strenuously denounce this
Americanisation.
So, we might better say that Wilson’s book lays two rather
analogous charges. On the one hand, it demands a revision
of what she sees as our impoverished understanding of
French art of the mid-1960s through to the 1970s. If
Anglo-American scholars are aware of this period at all, it is
generally through the lens of conceptual practices such as
those of Daniel Buren and his colleagues in BMPT (an
acronym derived from the first letters of the last names of the
group’s four members), with their unequivocal opposition to
painting; the representational practices of the Narrative
Figuration artists, with their references to a history of French
Realist painting stretching from 1789 to 1848 to the Popular
Front and on into the postwar years, hardly appear in our
histories. On the other hand, she also criticises the ahistorical
approach to ‘theory’ that she sees as characteristic of the
English-language academy: she claims that this ‘“user’s
guide” or “theory as a toolbox” approach’, typical within art
history, is ‘completely undialectical’ because of its ‘syncretic
and anachronistic mixing of texts with varied dates of
translation’ (p. 22). Presumably her own effort to historically
situate these texts within the moment of their writing is, then,
what she means by a properly ‘dialectical’ approach, although
this seems an odd choice of terms for what is much more an
exercise in historicism.
In fact, both charges could be questioned. If Narrative
Figuration has indeed remained marginal to the Anglophone
writing of postwar French art history – excepting Lucy
Lippard’s inclusion of a discussion of it in her 1966 Pop Art
anthology – a rich body of scholarship has developed in
recent years that takes up questions closely related to the
political debates addressed by Wilson; one thinks of work by
younger scholars such as Noit Banai, Kaira M. Cabañas, Jill
Carrick, Rebecca DeRoo, and Hannah Feldman, among
others.4 DeRoo is the only one of these scholars to be
OXFORD ART JOURNAL 36.3 2013 475
Book Reviews
mentioned by Wilson in the body of the text – so that the
former’s award-winning book on The Museum Establishment
and Contemporary Art can be unfairly castigated as
‘misleading’ – while Carrick’s important work on some of the
very artists Wilson discusses is relegated to a brief footnote;
the rest are passed over in silence.5 Similarly, Wilson’s
dismissal of art historians’ use of French theory as an
interpretive tool severed from its original context is misguided
on several counts. We might first note that Structuralist and
Poststructuralist texts proved central to the rethinking of the
discipline in the 1970s and 1980s, and provided crucial
methodological impetus for a whole series of new readings of
artworks that cannot be dismissed simply for their
‘anachronistic’ use of theory. But her criticism also fails to
acknowledge the important body of work that has historicised
French theory, from the intellectual biographies of its major
figures to the more specialised studies of their writings on art
and aesthetics.6 Finally, and perhaps most vexingly, there is
the question of the very status of French theory in the early
twenty-first century: that is, can we still legitimate a group of
painters through a reference to ‘theory’?
This returns us to Wilson’s goal in The Visual World of
French Theory, that of staking a claim for Narrative Figuration
on the reputations of the stars of French philosophy of the
1960s and 1970s. There is something curiously anachronistic
in her very faith that these names – Bourdieu, Deleuze,
Foucault, Lyotard, and others – are in and of themselves
enough to guarantee interest in painters who, after all,
frequently had distinct agendas of their own that do not, shall
we say, ‘translate’ easily to the present. One subtheme of her
book is the continued dominance of the French Communist
Party in the struggle over the meaning of ‘Realism’ in these
years, and the artists of Narrative Figuration – at least the
more militant of them – operated well within its orbit, even as
a variety of other possible far-left positions were being
developed in these same years by, say, Jean-Jacques Lebel or
the Situationist International. There is something curious
about aligning a group of artists that sought precisely to
ground their production within an often-hypostatised vision of
the social with a group of thinkers that we most often
understand to have thrown the very conception of ‘the social’
as context into radical doubt. Although Wilson distinguishes
between their projects, she could have explored these
tensions in greater depth.
Among the virtues of The Visual World of French Theory is
the vast scope of its research – undertaken by both Wilson
and her students at the Courtauld, whom she carefully credits
in her footnotes – which will undoubtedly prove the basis of
much future work in the field. But the very proliferation of
476 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 36.3 2013
information, as fascinating as it can be, too often obscures
the broader outlines and implications of her argument, when
it does not stand in for an argument tout court. Indeed her
most ambitious claims – that, for example, ‘contemporary art
played a crucial role in formulating the new postmodern
mindset’ of the philosophers (p. 19) – remain unsubstantiated,
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inevitably, one could say; in fact, such a claim, presuming that
by ‘postmodern’ she means something like the collapse
of the great narratives of modernity, would have to stand in
direct opposition to her careful excavation of the profound
connections between Narrative Figuration and the various
Marxisms articulated within and in opposition to the French
Communist Party. The great strength of The Visual World of
French Theory does not lie here, in such broad assertions, but
rather in Wilson’s diligent archival work and her painstakingly
assembled portraits of these encounters between painters
and philosophers. This is not the work of market fashion, but
of years of scholarly commitment; whether it will deliver the
audience Narrative Figuration deserves is an open question,
but with this book Wilson has certainly provided us the means
to reassess its place within our history of postwar French art.
Notes
1. See Béatrice de Rochebouët, ‘Le grand retour de la figuration narrative’,
Le Figaro, 12 July 2007, p. 18.
2. See ‘Narrative Figuration – The Rehabilitation of a French Movement’,
Art Market Insight, March 2008 ,web.artprice.com/ami/ami.aspx?id=
Njc1NTE2NTM3MDAwNzk=. [accessed 29 January 2013].
3. Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Monory, The Assassination of Experience by
Painting – Monory / L’Assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture – Monory, trans.
Rachel Bowlby (Black Dog, Coll. ‘Revisions’: London, 1998); Gilles Deleuze,
Michel Foucault, and Gérard Fromanger, Photogenic Painting / La Peinture
photogénique, trans. Dafydd Roberts (Black Dog, Coll. ‘Revisions’: London,
1999); and Pierre Klossowski and Maurice Blanchot, Decadence of the Nude / La
Décadence du nu (Black Dog, Coll. ‘Revisions’: London, 2003). Projected volumes
of writings by Umberto Eco and Gina Pane were never realised.
4. For an early English-language treatment of artists associated with Narrative
Figuration, see Lucy R. Lippard, Pop Art (Praeger: New York, 1966), pp. 185– 6;
see also Marco Livingstone, Pop Art: A Continuing History (Abrams: New York,
1990), pp. 146– 7 and 154–8.
5. See Rebecca J. DeRoo, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The
Politics of Artistic Display in France after 1968 (Cambridge University Press:
New York, 2006); and Jill Carrick, ‘The Assassination of Marcel Duchamp:
Collectivism and Contestation in 1960s France’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 31, no. 1,
2008, pp. 17– 24.
6. For an outstanding example of the latter, see Catherine M. Soussloff,
‘Foucault and the Point of Painting’, Art History, vol. 32, no. 4, September 2009,
pp. 734–54.
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kct023
Advance Access Publication 10 October 2013