Introducing a book by beginning with a description of the conditions in which the work was conceived is certainly the simplest and the most honest way of addressing the reader, as well as the clearest. Research, and the books which emerge as a result, do not appear out of nowhere and are always the result of a subtle mixture of coincidences and opportunities and of scientific and personal imperatives.
This particular investigation owes its origins to Sylvie Ramond, director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. It was she who, in 2008, suggested I should take a close look at the recent story of a version of The Flight into Egypt by Nicolas Poussin, a painting recently acquired by the museum. Initially somewhat sceptical, as is often the case for researchers anxious to protect their independence, I finally agreed to take a look at the press file put together by the museum. It was at that point that I became caught up in the intrigue of this curious tale, which read rather like a detective story with plot twists, cliff-hangers and a cast of colourful characters, and began to identify a number of ways of approaching a problem which was gradually taking shape before my eyes. In spite of what may seem like an initial departure from the core focus in an effort to understand its broader meaning and to explore what this story could reveal about the structure of our societies, their historical foundations, and about the relations of dominance and the acts of social magic constantly at work within them, I hope that all those who have so generously opened up their archives to me and assisted me on numerous occasions with the process of my research will find food for thought in these pages.
The social, political and scientific context in which I have carried out this research, and gone on to write this book, is a significant element in the regressive approach I have chosen to adopt here, a process which consists of stepping back into the past in order to understand the present. Indeed, it seemed to me imperative to produce a work which sets out to shine a spotlight on a certain number of self-evident facts and foundations or bases of beliefs which, though virtually invisible, have a deeply significant influence on the way our lives are structured. Equally urgent was the need to reiterate the importance of relations of domination in this objectivized history which nevertheless quietly reveals so much about our current behaviour. This research therefore sets out to ensure that history in all its forms – whether structural and long term or individual and biographical – like the facts of domination, is not forgotten, either in a political or scientific context.
As someone who has campaigned for many years to ensure that sociology on an individual scale finds a legitimate place within social science research,1 I have also always defended the need to vary the scale of contextualization depending on the nature of the questions to be asked or of the problems to be resolved.2 There will therefore be no shift in my position in the course of this project, which often disregards individual singularities in order to focus instead on the great cultural foundations on which individuals play out their roles. Social issues, unfolded, that is to say examined from an outside perspective, in different societies and in different eras, are not incompatible with ‘folded’ or more internalized social issues embodied within socialized individuals.
In 2008, the arrival in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon of a painting entitled ‘The Flight into Egypt’ (1657–1658), and attributed to Nicolas Poussin, was announced in the national press as an event which was, on a number of different levels, exceptional. Exceptional because of the reputation of the prestigious presumed creator of a painting presented as a masterpiece. Exceptional too because of the rollercoaster journey of an object which had been missing for a long time and had not always been recognized as an autograph work.3 Exceptional finally, because of the economic magnitude – €17 million – of public and private investment brought together in order to bring a Poussin into the collections of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon.
It was indeed the exceptional nature of this work and its history, emphasized by many commentators, which first attracted my attention. Not that I sought to get involved in telling the intricate and fascinating story of this ‘famous work’ and, in particular, of the ‘incredible scientific and legal epic’4 which preceded the acquisition, but because that very exceptionality, as emphasized by all the commentators, struck me as an interesting focus in itself. From my very first exposure to the story of this painting, as with other similar stories, what astonished me most was the way it had somehow taken on the status of a kind of legend. The history of a painting which had been missing for more than three centuries, and which was then re-discovered but remained un-acknowledged, passing from hand to hand, from a bourgeois family who had no notion of its value and then to gallery owners who made assumptions regarding its value, a tale involving Franco-British controversies between the four greatest Poussin experts in the world, including two ‘Knights of the realm’ (one the curator of the art collection belonging to the Queen of England and a Russian spy known as the ‘fourth man’ of the famous ‘Cambridge Five’, and the other, a descendant of the family who had founded the Guinness Mahon investment bank), a professor at the Collège de France, and a Director of the Louvre who was to become a member of the Académie Française. Add to all this, the astonishing contrast between what was considered merely a decorative old item put up for sale in 1986 at the price of a simple contemporary copy (around €12,000) and the masterpiece by Nicolas Poussin sold for €17 million in 2007, the legal imbroglios around the ownership of the painting, etc. All of this has proved fascinating for many a commentator.
If some aspects of the painting’s history indeed resemble a detective story, it also has elements of a fairy-tale. In the manner of the frog transformed into a Prince Charming, we are told the tale of an ordinary canvas transformed into a masterpiece, a simple copy transmuted into a national treasure. This is the magic of transubstantiation, the social alchemy which transforms lead into gold, the ordinary into the extraordinary, the profane into the sacred. Social magic is everywhere here: in the phenomena of successive enchantment and disenchantment around certain objects, the white and the black magic of performative acts which bestow status or remove it, cause things to exist by simply naming them, or the admiring and reverential attitudes towards a sanctified object. Magic is omnipresent even though scarcely noticed.
This social magic might seem to be more of a matter for an anthropology of belief and of the effects of belief. But when beliefs generate so much social energy in so many different actors who discuss, authenticate, appropriate, buy and sell, admire, etc., when it is with these same beliefs that public or private money is committed or that laws are made, then belief and magic are no longer specialist questions. Instead, they are central facts which potentially concern the whole area of the social sciences, from the history of religion to monetary economics, from political anthropology to the history and sociology of art. What I set out to demonstrate here is that, with a different set of beliefs, and as a result, with a completely different accumulated history, the world, and our lives, would be totally different.
What fascinates us about ‘legends’ is therefore an important aspect of what will be explored here by focusing on this object made sacred by history and on the behaviours associated with it. It is not therefore the ‘incredible story’ or the ‘fantastical story’ of this painting that will be narrated in these pages since that would simply mean subscribing to the collective wonderment. The history of popular art abounds with such stories described as ‘thrillers’, as ‘incredible’, ‘breath-taking’ or ‘fabulous’. Such tales tell us more about the myths associated with great art and with creative genius than help us gain any genuine understanding of the meaning of our practices in relation to art. Thus, the spell-binding biographies of famous paintings do not at first appear to distance themselves with regard to pictorial art in general.5 Unconsciously part of a whole multi-layered history, those who write them forget what the current situation owes to the institutions, power struggles and shows of strength accumulated throughout the past.
This absence of distance continues to manifest itself in relation to the unique works whose various adventures are recounted. For example, Courbet’s The Origin of the World is supposed to represent ‘both the universal arms of feminine heraldry and a hymn to liberty’.6 Such paintings belong to a process which sees them singled out to become a focus of intense interest and particular fascination, and end up being universalized and mythicized. As Thierry Savatier writes: ‘But The Origin of the World is no ordinary picture. It has a unique place in western art because it represents, without compromise and without historical or mythological alibi, not only the sexual organs of a woman, but THE sexuality of WOMANKIND and, even more than that, of all women, mistresses and mothers included’.7 Finally, anecdotal history very often takes the form of a detective story, made up of little episodes which, bit by bit, spell out the trajectory of the picture (‘a complex story, with multiple plot twists, shadowy areas, lies, alibis, things left unsaid, all of which need to be approached like a police investigation’8).
In the same way, Donald Sassoon, in his Leonardo and the Mona Lisa Story. The History of a Painting told in Pictures, delivers an almost idealtypical fable, a story of enchantment and of ‘admiration’ which tells the extraordinary adventure of ‘the world’s most famous painting’,9 painted by Leonardo de Vinci around 1503–1507. The history of this painting is teleological (‘From its first viewing, this work of art caused a stir among all who saw it’) and the entire book consists of a historical account vaunting the growing glory of the painting: the high visitor numbers, the numerous photos of the painting, the multiple copies of the work (sixty alone registered in the two centuries following the artist’s death), the pastiches, the visitors filming it, the books, cartoons or films in which it features, etc.10 The focus is this portrait of the Mona Lisa who ‘has had 500 years of fame’, of the ‘sighs of recognition’ she provokes and of the ‘jostling of the crowd shifting from foot to foot’ and errors of history or inexplicable lapses in taste are blamed for all the moments when the canvas was not apparently considered as the undeniable masterpiece whose one-dimensional history is set out here.11
None of all that will be found in this book, but, on the contrary, a determination to rationalize the legend, to lay bare the beliefs and to topple the myths. Reconstructing the socio-historical trajectory of a painting representing the biblical episode of the flight into Egypt, and of a number of other rival paintings, means looking at the history of the different ways in which such objects have been described and, as a result, at the history of the various categories into which they have been placed: ordinary object/objet d’art, copy/original, ordinary painting/old master, minor painting/masterpiece, single painting/painting featuring in a collection, etc. It is also to tell the story of the various tests, particularly legal and scientific, to which they have been subjected in order to be authenticated.
The history of a long-lost canvas, initially known only thanks to the existence of engravings and a few sparse mentions in written accounts, is, moreover, not such an easy one to tell without the risk of falling into the trap of retrospective illusion or teleological vision. The difficulty lies in the fact that several versions of the work reappeared in the public domain during the 1980s, but without any immediate or definitive clarification of their status. A first version, discovered in 1982 by the British art historian Anthony Blunt and published as an autograph painting,12 was followed a few years later, in 1986, by the reappearance, in an art auction in Versailles, of a second canvas, which I shall be focusing on in particular here. The attribution of the first painting to Poussin, initially uncontested, led the auctioneer and the expert to classify this second version as a simple studio copy (in the knowledge that Poussin is generally regarded as a painter who never painted the same canvas twice). However, in the years following the sale of this second painting, a controversy began to take shape, triggered by the publication, in 1994, of the second canvas as an autograph work, by Jacques Thuillier, an eminent French art historian and professor at the Collège de France, a view supported in the same year by the newly appointed director of the Louvre, on the occasion of a major Poussin retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. Another leading authority on seventeenth-century art history, Sir Denis Mahon, also from Great Britain, then stepped into the debate with a defence of the first version, in spite of the fact that throughout his entire career he had always systematically opposed Blunt. A third version of the painting, which subsequently emerged in the late 1980s, was put forward as potentially genuine by a less influential British art historian, Christopher Wright, but subsequently unanimously rejected by the more eminent specialists. The battle between these four major international experts (Anthony Blunt and Denis Mahon on one side and Jacques Thuillier and Pierre Rosenberg on the other) was to involve specialist historical knowledge of the work and life of Poussin and scientific analysis of the paintings.
In the early years of the twenty-first century, the second canvas gained ground in terms of legitimacy and moved closer to the Holy Grail, or in other words, the status of an autograph painting. The first version lost its strongest supporter with the death of Blunt in 1983, followed, in 2011, by that of Mahon. The second canvas, after a long legal imbroglio between the former owners and the gallery owners who had acquired it in 1986, was classified as a ‘national treasure’ by the French government and its trajectory finally came to a halt in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon.13 Such a story, very briefly summarized here,14 demonstrates how a cultural object only exists in so far as it becomes the subject of discussions, classification systems, tests, procedures and institutions which close in on it and commandeer it. It becomes an object of controversy, it is subjected to all kinds of tests (legal, scientific, technical, etc.), it is accepted or rejected, classified, indexed, exhibited to the public, put up for public sale, included in a collection, and so on.
It would be wrong, therefore, to recount the history of this second version of the painting, which made its appearance in 1986, as though it had always existed as an ‘autograph masterpiece by Nicolas Poussin’. That would be tantamount to forgetting that, at different periods and times, what is referred to by the title of ‘The Flight into Egypt’, but which was never given a title by its creator, has at diverse moments been a commission from a dealer by the name of Jacques Serisier of which Bernini had a rather poor opinion, a simple mention in various written accounts of a painting that had perhaps once existed, the lost model for engravings attesting its past existence, an item in various catalogues (in the absence of an actual canvas, but on the basis of engravings and written accounts), a painting published in 1982 by the art historian Antony Blunt, a painting which had been ‘copied’ and a resulting copy which turned up in an art auction in 1986, a source of scientific controversy between art historians of differing status intent on defending the authenticity of the two pictures, a painting previously considered as a mere copy but whose authenticity was gradually recognized by a growing number of experts, the object of a court case involving the former owners, the gallery owners who had subsequently acquired it, the auctioneer and his expert, a chef d’œuvre by a master of classicism worthy of being classified as a ‘national treasure’, the focus of local, regional, national and even international repercussions, an ‘exemplary’ sponsorship operation, a piece which completes a collection of seventeenth-century art at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, a means of attracting the attention of museum goers.
Giving the painting properties only recently attributed to it by using the term ‘a masterpiece by Nicolas Poussin’ in reference to its earlier existence would be falling into what Patrick Boucheron describes as ‘the retrospective illusion’, a reference to the state in which a witness to a speech made by a certain ‘Francis’ writes, long after the event, that he had seen ‘Saint Francis’, whereas the person he had actually seen, at the time he had seen him, was not yet a saint and ‘his name did not evoke the powerful echo which would resonate from it thirty years later, when life stories, legends and accounts of “Saint Francis of Assisi” had proliferated and merged together’.15
For me, therefore, it was a matter of reconstructing the series of actors (individuals or institutions) and the sequence of their actions which led to the same ‘material object’ going from the status of a copy of insignificant value, either in aesthetic or economic terms, to that of a highly prized painting with what was considered a record-breaking purchase price within the context of a sponsorship operation involving multiple partners, both public and private. Amongst these numerous actors, will be found, in no particular order, the original owners of the picture, lawyers, an auctioneer and his expert, a professor at the Collège de France, an ex-director of the Louvre Museum and member of the Académie Française, various major foreign experts (notably British or American), a series of art historians with less established reputations but who were nevertheless specialists in seventeenth-century art, curators from the Louvre museum, experts appointed by the courts, Le Laboratoire de recherché des Musées de France, the laboratory of the National Gallery, London, the French government, who took the decision to classify the painting as a ‘national treasure’, the authors of the 2002 law relating to sponsorship, major international museums who acquired seventeenth-century artworks in general and especially those of Poussin, thereby contributing to increase the reputation of seventeenth-century paintings and those of Poussin in particular,16 the private companies and public partnerships (municipality, region, State) who played a part in the acquisition, the management team at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, etc. Together, these actors form the long chain of actions, opinions, decisions, judgements, classifications or categorizations whether State, legal, aesthetic, cultural or scientific, economic evaluations, etc., leading up to the present situation.
The story of such an object, which one imagines will boost visitor numbers and the national and international reputation of the Musée des Beaux-Arts and of the city of Lyon itself, is clear proof that a painting is always more than just a ‘simple painting’: it is a public event, a matter with ramifications for the worlds of politics, museums, finance and publicity, a barometer of public tastes and interest, something which prompts numerous visitors, each with their own cultural outlook, to travel to the museum, and generates a multitude of discussions about art, the price of art, etc. But even more fundamentally, once authenticated, a painting is more than simply a stretched canvas on which brush strokes of paint have been applied. It becomes a magical object thanks to the aura which, from now on, seems to mysteriously emanate from it. This book will therefore focus on all the issues associated with this object and on the different effects it produces or provokes within the social world depending on the status attributed to it.
The situation of an object which, throughout its trajectory, has taken on very different meanings and values and which has been variously appropriated by different individuals, groups or institutions could generate discussions of a radical nominalism on the fact, for example, that it would be impossible to say whether it was indeed the same picture from one era (that in which the painting tranquilly decorated the walls of a bourgeois house or the one in which it was stored without any particular care in an old farm building) to another (when it was recognized as an autograph painting by the majority of experts).
I am not sufficiently nominalist to think that it is not ontologically the same object which has passed ‘through the hands’ of different owners, art historians, gallery owners, patrons, curators, scholars, lawyers, auctioneers, experts, etc. Its meaning and its value (both economic and aesthetic), and sometimes its actual status, have certainly varied considerably depending on the circumstances and on the way it has been appropriated by the individuals, groups and institutions with which it was variously associated throughout the course of a long trajectory which began in 1657 and ended (for us) in 2013. But it seems to me more reasonable to maintain the idea of a continuity in terms of the material existence of the painting (even when it had completely disappeared from circulation and when the historian, deprived of access to any archive, could not say anything either about its owners or about the context of its movements, it still continued to materially exist somewhere), while at the same time being careful to reconstruct the different stages and the different uses to which it had been subject. No contradiction exists between the two principles of the material continuity of the painting and the social and symbolic discontinuity of the ways in which it was appropriated.
Such a notion seems however to be challenged by Bruno Latour in an article on the subject of the death of Ramses II around 1213 BC.17 In the late 1990s, the Val-de-Grâce hospital (Paris) was able to prove that Ramses had probably died of tuberculosis, but Latour seriously questions the legitimacy of saying that the pharaoh ‘died from a bacillus discovered by Robert Koch in 1882’.18 Latour clearly highlights here the confusion between the scientific knowledge of the cause of illness and the reality of the facts. Ramses II did indeed die of a disease the origins of which would not be discovered until 1882, in other words, some 3,000 years later. There is no paradox, no anachronism, no scientism in such a statement. What can be added, however, is that the lives of patients and even of bacilli are no longer the same since the discovery of the bacillus. As a result of that discovery, vaccines and drugs have been created to eradicate this illness. What changes, therefore, are the social practices associated with the illness and the response of people to what is happening to them. At the time of Ramses II, as in our own time, the bacilli from which the illness originated, but which nobody was in a position to name or to study, existed and were active independently of any notion of the nature of the disease or knowledge. From one period of time to another, what has changed is the status of the disease, the treatment of the patient, the gestures and the attitudes adopted in order to avoid transmission of the disease. Once the bacillus was discovered, new measures, new preventative or healing strategies could be put in place. The same could be said of any object where the many different ways in which it is appropriated at any one time change the meaning, status, function and practice associated with it. The difference here is that the bacillus could only be identified once specific instruments (such as the microscope) allowed it to become visible. But processes which are invisible to the naked eye and as yet undiscovered are just as real as those which are visible and scientifically recognized.
Comparing ‘Koch’s bacillus’ to a ‘burst of machine-gun fire’ in order to condemn the anachronism of those who claim that Ramses died from tuberculosis and to claim that, ‘before Koch, the bacillus did not really exist’ is to confuse the scientific concept and the physical reality. For, if the machine-gun was indeed invented several thousand years after the death of Ramses II, viruses did not wait for scholars to appear on the scene in order to become active. They were active even without being observed, recognized and named. It is, moreover, rather paradoxical that a researcher who proclaims loudly and clearly that non-humans are actors too, should make the reality of the existence of the virus depend on it being observed and named by humans. In effect, this means giving humans a much greater power than they actually have. And if we took the hypothesis of linking the real existence of something to its recognition by humans to absurd lengths, we might indeed conclude that, in order to eradicate viruses, we would simply need to eradicate the scientists who discover them.
If, to avoid ‘committing the cardinal sin of the historian, which is that of the anachronism’ it is prudent to say that the pharaoh died from what would, several thousand years later, be known as ‘tuberculosis’, and that this death from tuberculosis would not even be diagnosed until one hundred years after the discovery of Koch’s bacillus, nothing can challenge the fact that, within the limits of what the state of science allows us to assert, the pharaoh died of what we would today call tuberculosis.
Objects, as some social scientists would tell us, are ‘non-humans’ and their point is a perfectly reasonable one. But these ‘non-humans’, they add, are actors in every sense of the term, ‘in their own right’, within the social world. The principle of ‘generalized symmetry’, which enjoins researchers to treat ‘non-humans’ as ‘humans’,19 should, if it had any relevance, allow us to read or hear what non-humans can tell us about the social world. But, to date, such accounts have so far failed to materialize within our societies. ‘To forget’ that objects cannot speak or write20 and that, when they do manage to do so, it is only as the result of programming by humans, is rather surprising on the part of sociologists or anthropologists who claim to be fighting against all the abstractions of ‘classic sociology’ and to adhere as closely as possible to the real. Forgetfulness on such a scale can legitimately raise questions about the intentions of those who forget.
Not only do objects not speak, but they are not in any way socially constituted to act, feel, sense, believe, all of which would be the product of their experiences. In this sense, objects have no particular attitude towards other objects or humans. These differences mean that objects, whilst they are omnipresent in social life and part of the constraints which humans must continually come to terms with, and therefore an issue for researchers in social science, are anything but actors. It is even one of their specificities that they are what the humans who invent them, use them, exchange them, interpret them, divert from their original function, etc., make them. Outside of films or science fiction, objects do not invent humans and have no intentions or attitudes towards them. Nor do they use them, exchange them or discuss them with a view to establishing what they can do with them. Such remarks may seem absurd and will indeed appear so to those who have never read the work of the authors referred to, but, when there is no consensus within a scientific community over such apparently obvious facts, it is not completely without value to revisit them.21
Objects do not exist in a socially independent way from the individuals, groups or institutions which appropriate them. They vary in terms of their meaning, their status, their value and in the modes of behaviour that they give rise to, precisely as a result of their status, value and meaning. For example, perfectly ordinary water, which could just as easily be used for washing dishes or as drinking water, can, in the Christian tradition, by means of a sacrament, become ‘holy water’, which can then itself be used in the sacramental act of baptism. While the act of blessing does not chemically alter the nature of the water, it does, however, change its status and significance, and leads believers to behave towards it with all due consideration.22 The efficacy of the sacrament ‘modifies the status or at least the position of the person it is intended for’.23 In a similar way, the placing of an ordinary object, or even what might normally be considered as simply a piece of refuse, in a museum by someone who has the status of an artist and can legitimately exhibit their work, makes that object into a work of art. The mere fact of exhibiting it in a museum is a way of saying: ‘This is a work of art.’ Whether the work in question is a painting, a urinal, excrement or the absence of any object whatsoever does not alter this fact. It can therefore be said that, depending on the way we appropriate them, objects change their status, and these changes in status modify their value and the way they are used in real terms. When a canvas goes from being a simple copy to being a genuine masterpiece, the same object, although it has not changed its substance, nevertheless really transforms social behaviour in respect to it, beginning with the sum of money the actors involved are prepared to pay to acquire it or their need to insure it heavily against theft and to keep it in a secure place, and ending with the individual aesthetic emotions that this new status inevitably provokes in the visitors to the museum.
If we examine in even more detail the successive statuses of objects, we discover that, for example, a canvas produces different social effects depending on whether it is regarded as a copy or as an autograph work, whether it is viewed in a church, a palace, on the television, in the possession of a wealthy individual or in a museum, whether it is seen in the context of an exhibition bringing together works by the same artist or in that of an exhibition grouping works from the same period by very different artists, whether or not the state has classified it as a national treasure, whether the artist in question is judged, in the context of art history and by all the official commentators on art, as a major or a minor artist, a great master, a genius or a second rate painter, etc. The attitudes of actors from the world of art and those of the public will therefore vary depending on what they think they are looking at. Each time an object becomes part of a new context or acquires a new status, it produces new effects and takes on new meaning. And, in the case of sacred objects (relics or works of art), ‘they project onto their owner an aura of wonder’,24 just as they do onto all those who seek to enter into contact with them.
The involvement and association of objects in social experiences are also what distinguishes a ‘new object’ from ‘an object which has a history’, in other words, one which is associated with people, with certain moments of existence and with which, as a result, an emotional relationship is possible. But, unlike the personal or familial object, whose history quickly disappears with the person or group of people who were associated with it, certain objects such as relics or art works are associated with institutions, places, texts, eyewitness accounts, written accounts and repeated collective rituals all of which prolong the status of the objects in question. The difference is therefore a difference in the degree of objectivization-crystallization of the status of the object, of the number of people sharing the history of a particular object and of the degree of legitimacy of the people with whom it is associated. As the anthropologist Jean Bazin writes:
The day Uncle Victor gave me a silver plated cup from Christofle in honour of my christening and Aunt Agatha presented me with a birthday present of a ceramic vase in the neo-Moustiers style, by so doing they transformed an ordinary object, which could be replaced by any number of other objects, into a unique item which would from then on, in a given world, be referred to by a proper noun as Uncle Victor’s cup, Aunt Agatha’s vase. […] After my death, in the absence of any suitable narrator, there is a high chance that Uncle Victor’s cup will disappear as such, only to resurface in some junk shop as the object of a potentially new gift, and therefore undergo a change of identity. Although, with the help of celebrity, the identities of successive donors and recipients can merge (the vase of Jackie Kennedy’s Aunt Agatha) and eventually live on permanently (the cup of Napoleon’s uncle Victor, which I picture in the museum in Ajaccio).25
Finally, like individuals,26 objects can be studied from two points of view and on different scales of observation which are not incompatible, but which do not lead to the same knowledge of the social world. On the one hand, there may be particular objects whose biography (trajectory) can be traced, objects which are in circulation, change hands, are the subject of commentaries, appropriations, etc. (such as the Poussin picture), and on the other hand, there are the representatives of a specific class of objects (that of works of art as opposed to artisan or industrial products), whose evolution, transformations, disappearance, etc., can be studied by history and macrostructural sociology.
The biography of objects and the macrostructural study of categories of objects complement each other27: if the former allows observation of actors at work, notably in their task of categorizing the objects in question, the latter is a reminder of what biographies sometimes forget, namely that the processes of categorization or the strategies of actors vis-à-vis objects imply the existence of established categories, of opposing classifications and of socially structured frameworks within which certain practices can be deployed and where strategies can be tried out. What I have tried to do in this book is to combine these two points of view while at the same time taking care to consider objects and individuals in their unique contexts, and to reconstruct the wider framework within which their lives, their circumstances and their behaviour make sense.28
By focusing on the history of a painting, I found to my astonishment that a simple case study can lead to an investigation of major scientific and sociological issues. By simply pulling on a loose thread, the whole skein seemed to unravel before my eyes, even though I had not set out with any very precise idea of the size and exact nature of the skein of yarn I was dealing with. From theoretical interrogation to methodological reflexivity, from structural contextualization to historical regression, I gradually distanced myself from the specific case in order to gain a deeper understanding of it.
I make no claim to do the work of an art historian here. The existence of a completely separate discipline, that of art history, is, moreover, part of a process of autonomization through which art becomes a sacred domain, distinct from those of the profane, and this is exactly what I have sought to understand here. Once art has been separated and studied in itself and for itself, it becomes more difficult to link it to realities outside of the artistic domain and, in particular, to power structures. Starting out with the history of an object, which ended up being recognized, at least by some of the specialists, as a painting by Poussin, has not led me to focus my study entirely on the position of Poussin within the artistic world of his time or on his ‘career’ in both France and Italy. Nor has it led me to analyse his relationships with the royal power or with his patrons in order to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of his work or to embark on an interpretation of his paintings both from a thematic and a formal point of view. Instead, I have explored the place, role, meaning and value of art in history. I have also looked at how the social world, at different times throughout history, seized upon a certain canvas and how, once it had been recognized as the work of a great master, the painting in question in turn affected that social world. Some of these questions are no different from those examined by art historians, but their work has been as much the object of my analysis as a means of understanding the real. I hope they will not see this as an attack on academic practice, but simply as an opportunity for them (debateable, of course) to reflect in a different way on art and on their profession as art historians.
The historical sociology that I am engaging in here enables major theoretical questions from the field of social sciences to be examined. It allows us firstly to work on the link between events and long-term structures, and, in a more general manner, on the intersection of temporalities which come together in the present of the action. The interest in such an approach lies in the possibility it offers to link together, as Fernand Braudel29 suggests, long term and short term, and to see how the movements of social and cultural history as well as the most agitated scenes of the history of events take place against the background of the virtually immobile history of major social and cultural structures. Research of this nature involves taking a broad perspective on particular events (meetings, one-off interactions between actors, localized decisions, detailed speeches) and providing elements of a structural framework for both longer time sequences – spanning many centuries – as well as shorter time sequences lasting only a few decades.
The arrival in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon of a painting by Nicolas Poussin therefore gave me the opportunity to reposition a slice of recent history within the longer-term history of art and, further still, within the long-term history of the relationship between the sacred and the profane and of how this is linked to relations of domination. It seemed to me that the whole of history, sociology and anthropology of domination, of the sacred, of legitimacy and of social magic suddenly shed light on all the behaviours I had witnessed in regard to this painting, and in particular all the strategies of self-aggrandisement and self-promotion and, ultimately, of the sanctification of the self, through association with a work of art. Each actor or group of actors plays out their role in an attempt to appropriate marks of prestige and to increase their status in their own field. For art, its structural place in our societies, its separation from the profane, and the admiration it receives (and demands) is not unconnected to the relations of domination which underpin our societies and which are an essential part of them. Behind art, there is, for those who are prepared to look closely enough, something quite different from art. And, through the history of one painting, we can expose some of the fundamental structures of our social formations. What may seem a rather tedious detour seems to me to represent the most logical and necessary step possible. With reference to Magritte’s well-known phrase ‘This is not a pipe’ which he placed alongside his famous drawing of a pipe in order to draw attention to the difference between the thing represented and the representation of the thing, I have often found myself saying, throughout the course of my research: ‘This is not just a painting.’
Even in my first sociological study, which focused on learning difficulties amongst working-class children in primary school,30 I tried to link the study of interactions within the classroom, or of the school work produced by the children, to long-term, and even very long-term, history. It seemed (and still seems) to me impossible to understand unhappy interactions and dialogues of the deaf in the classroom during the course of a French lesson, without knowing the history of writing, the history of grammar, the history of the relationship between written culture and power, the history of the shift from restricted literacy to a more generalized literacy, the history of how education is structured and of the relationships between learning and teaching, etc. Such a process took me a long way from the contemporary educational universe, on a journey from the stateless societies without a writing system studied by anthropologists, to European societies with high levels of literacy, via Egypt and Mesopotamia 3,000 years BC, ancient Greece or European societies from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. But the reward for this kind of distancing is the opportunity it brings to understand the closest and most contemporary issues hidden behind all the politico-pedagogical approaches of the moment. For each classroom gesture, each subject studied, each pedagogical or intellectual technique observed in the classroom today, carries within it a history that teachers and pupils are unaware of but which is nevertheless linked to the serious difficulties they encounter on a daily basis, some with the ‘transmission’ of school learning and others with absorbing it.
The members of the panel examining my thesis were either very discreet or remained silent in response to what was a somewhat atypical approach by a young candidate. And I was left feeling somewhat frustrated with these three hundred supplementary pages or preliminary remarks which did not really correspond with what was expected from a young sociology research student. I drew the practical, and almost unconscious, conclusion that sociology began with the production of ‘first-hand’ evidence and culminated with the interpretation of this, and that any reading of the work of historians, anthropologists, specialists in some particular area of past or present civilization, etc., although undoubtedly useful in terms of general levels of culture or scientific imagination, should not feature to any great extent in sociological study and were definitely not to be referred to or recycled in the construction of social theories. I continued to adhere to this view until the time came when, either my frustration reached a critical level, or my first instincts to follow imperatively the route of a long detour through history and through anthropological comparison ‘before’ embarking on the contemporary educational ground of my thesis, were revived. That frustration resurfaced in the face of a profession which was becoming more and more specialized and formatted, professionalized in a sense, where the researcher is transformed into a social investigator who is precise, thorough and even at times reflective, but who gradually abandons the big questions or the major problems seen as too metaphysical or too broad – questions such as; What is power? Or domination? Why have so few societies escaped a hierarchical structure? What is the sacred? Religion? Or magical thinking? What is art, literature, science?, etc.
Why go so far back? Why look so far from the empirical base of the events to be studied for the means to understand them better? The answer is, from my point of view, a simple one. This approach is the only way to grasp the fullest possible meaning, to understand all the issues at stake and all the implications. Throughout this book, I have tried to highlight the impact of the objectivized past – of the various strata of the objectivized past which overlap and merge – in present practice. Death seizes the living (as Bourdieu puts it); in other words, the past, in the form of all the institutions and beliefs about the sacred, art, museums, authenticity, the aesthetic and economic value of works of art, the law, science and many more things besides, weighs upon the present of the painting as it exists today.
The regressive approach that I adopt when it comes to the recent history of this Poussin painting consists in trying to identify the foundations of historical belief on which contemporary events are balanced. This process is not in any way specific to this particular story, nor even to the history of art or of culture. Any contemporary reality could be approached in exactly the same way. If I embarked on this research with enthusiasm and curiosity, it is because I saw it as offering a direct answer to all those sociologies based on presentism and contextualism which focus on the individual in the context of the present,31 concentrating essentially on the properties inherent in their situations and neglecting both the dispositional properties of individuals and the historic contexts, often far wider and invisible to the immediate view, that limit individual behaviour patterns. I am not doubting the interest of all forms of pragmatism (interactionism, ethnomethodology, pragmatic sociology of critique) when they lead to genuinely detailed studies of social encounters, human interactions or links between humans and objects, modalities of practice or of action. But the current risk of these conceptions is to lock us into the immediately visible present of situations, whereas we need to resituate our practice onto the different historical terrains from which they are the temporary outcome.
Finally, the plurality of domains and sub-domains of the various activities (pictorial, museum related, academic, legal, political, scientific and technical, economic, journalistic, etc.) involved in the study of the historical trajectory of a painting is an opportunity to highlight those objects pertinent to the research but which often end up confined to very restricted zones of specialization, and to mobilize areas of knowledge which are only rarely brought together: historians stop at the point where sociologists are supposed to begin their investigations, sociologists specializing in art rarely stray into the territory of religious history, just as political anthropologists leave other colleagues to deal with the issue of magic, or as sociologists of law do not concern themselves with science or art, and so on. Little by little, proximities or analogies are lost to sight, cross-disciplinary phenomena go unnoticed, interdependent relationships between areas of practice which, by definition, fall outside the scope of analysis based on a chosen domain or sub-domain, and questions or problems remain unaddressed on both sides of the different disciplinary or sub-disciplinary frontiers. As a result of a growing process of specialization,32 researchers have ended up becoming accustomed to limiting their interpretative ambitions and focusing on increasingly restricted fragments of the social world. This book is also a means of combatting this problematic impoverishment of specialized research.
I will end this introduction with a brief commentary on the form this book takes, beginning with its ‘funnel-like’ structure which takes the reader from the general to the particular, from the structural to the individual. The first part (Book 1: History, domination and social magic) begins with a reflection on objectivized history, in the form of a series of general proposals on the unquestioned facts and the foundations of belief that we inherit. This section sets out to emphasize that it is imperative for social science to take account of history in order to make sense of today’s practices (Self-evident facts and foundations of belief). I continue with an analysis of the social magic which is indissociable from the exercise of power in all its forms (Domination and social magic). I then go on to explore more closely the historically attested links between relations of domination and the opposition between the sacred and the profane (Linked oppositions: dominators/dominated and sacred/profane).
In the course of the second part (Book 2: Art, domination, sanctification), I set out to show how art, which gradually emerged during the course of the Italian Renaissance, became part of this long history of domination and of what constitutes the sacred (The expansion of the domain of the sacred) and how artistic forms of the sacred took over certain objects through the use of acts of social magic (Authentication and attribution).
And it is only at this point that the study of the trajectory of a painting by Poussin (The Flight into Egypt) can finally reveal all the issues involved and lay bare all its mysteries (Book 3: On Poussin and some Flights into Egypt). Starting with the creation of the reputation of the ‘sublime Poussin’ (Sublime Poussin: master of French classicism), the focus then narrows to examine the trajectory of certain paintings (The fabulous destiny of paintings attributed to Nicolas Poussin) and looks at the role of legal, scientific and economic measures and practices (Poussin, science, law and the art market) before zooming in on some of the major actors from its recent history (How each person plays their game). This third and final section, which represents the initial and central focus of my work, is by no means simply an illustration of what has already been stated in the first two parts. Within the true logic of research, it is the patient study of the story of a particular painting which necessitated the reflections and historic regressions of these first two parts and of the beginning of the third part. This study is the starting point for numerous theoretical and historical explorations which are simply the necessary conditions for an understanding of the case.
Moreover, I have used a model based on Spinoza’s practice (propositions and scholia33) in order to progressively introduce the principal elements of my argument:
The sole objective for this particular structure is to show as clearly and systematically as possible the way this analysis has developed, and within the reality of research, has taken shape very gradually, sometimes moving forwards and sometimes backwards. The principal interest of this attempt at theoretical clarification is to save time for all those who are interested in the same issues and to enable them to go further still or, of course, to facilitate discussion and analysis of the arguments put forward.
Finally, if in certain scholia associated with specific propositions I permit myself on occasion to refer to examples from situations taken from literary sources (notably Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Balzac, Proust and Kafka), it is neither as a substitute for a lack of empirical evidence nor because I consider them to be more eloquent or more apt to make my case more powerfully than situations taken from observation of the social world. My use of them essentially reflects the shape I have chosen to use for my argument: literary examples often take the form of ideal types of real situations which allow analysis to be focused on specific points. By sometimes choosing to refer to scenes or observations from literature in the course of theoretical discussion, I am able to focus my reflection more precisely. But I would only cite such extracts if I were sure that they represented real situations from social life which could be observed by anyone and which reflect the many examples studied in Book 3.