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La Revue Blanche: Art, Commerce, and

Culture in the French fin‐de‐siècle
a
Janis Bergman‐Carton
a
Division of Art History, Southern Methodist University,

Available online: 11 Jul 2008

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in the French fin‐de‐siècle, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 30:2, 167-189

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 Nineteenth-Century Contexts
Vol. 30, No. 2, June 2008, pp. 167–189

La Revue Blanche: Art, Commerce, and

Culture in the French fin-de-siècle
Janis Bergman-Carton
Division of Art History, Southern Methodist University
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…1891 marked the first intervention of Jews in defense of avant-garde art at La Revue
Nineteenth-Century
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Blanche, where everyone was Jewish, beginning with the three Natanson brothers…where
modern painting was defended in cooperation with the dealers…and where the house
critic became a salesman in a Jewish gallery.1

Camille Mauclair’s 1944 pamphlet, La Crise de l’art moderne, argues that the depravity
of modern art is the result of a conspiracy between a consortium of Jewish dealers who
co-opt the avant-garde for profit and their accomplices, the art critics, who are beholden
to the mass-circulation press. The constellation of elements in Mauclair’s diatribe—
avant-garde aesthetics, a burgeoning art market, and the professionalization of the art
critic—forms the subtext of studies by Dario Gamboni, Romy Golan, Nicholas Green,
Robert Jenson, and Martha Ward.2 But the specific enterprise Mauclair associates with
the conspiracy’s nineteenth-century origins—the offices of the Symbolist journal La
Revue Blanche—has received less attention.3
Mauclair was not the first to implicate La Revue Blanche in the so-called judaisation
of French culture. Within several years of its Paris debut in 1891, the journal was
invoked to represent the promise and the threat of an acculturation process that, by the
early twentieth century, had granted Jews in France access to literature, theater, and the
visual arts. In 1894 Charles Maurras equated the revue’s cultivation of international
talent with its own essential foreignness. A decade later, Henry de Bruchard accused it
of polluting aesthetic norms.4 And Revue de l’Action Française’s 1899 inaugural issue
claimed as a sign of race the journal’s very title.5
In fact, the name La Revue Blanche was said to have been chosen by its founders to
evoke “a beacon of white light, the synthesis of all colors and all opinions.”6 It was
an apt metaphor for a community where “all trends were welcomed,” where “neo-
Parnassians, Symbolists, and Decadents were invited to publish side by side” (Veber
274). But in the jeux de mots of L’Action Française’s announced mandate—to counter
the influence of “des revues plus ou moins jeunes ou blanches”7—France’s premiere

ISSN 0890–5495 (print)/ISSN 1477–2663 (online) © 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/08905490802212458
 168 J. Bergman-Carton
anti-Semitic newspaper reduced La Revue Blanche’s ideal of diversity to a mark
of race.
Polemics about the journal published during the years of its actual run (1889–1903)
focus mostly on changes in literary journalism, particularly the growing interest in
foreign writers and the waning number, and commercialization, of publishing venues.
Commentaries, like Mauclair’s, that include the visual arts among the list of cultural
enterprises that La Revue Blanche “judaised,” appear mostly after it had ceased publi-
cation, when its history was read backwards through a skein of early-twentieth-century
anxieties about how inextricably tied avant-garde art, journalism, and the commercial
gallery system had become. The synergy between art, critic, and commerce that is still
downplayed in most narratives of modern art is quite accessible on the pages of La
Revue Blanche. Perhaps that is one reason the journal maintains a relatively low profile
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in art histories and exaggerated importance in nationalistic diatribes.

Within histories of late-nineteenth-century art, La Revue Blanche is known princi-
pally for its institutional support of the Nabis and neo-Impressionism. Art scholars also
note that Félix Fénéon served as editor for most of its run; that the journal sponsored
small exhibitions for artists like Seurat and Redon in its editorial offices; commissioned
art posters from Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre Bonnard (see Figure 1); that Paul
Signac’s “De Delacroix au néo-impressionisme” (1898) and Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa
were among the important art texts first published in its pages; and that the journal’s
owners, the Natansons, participated directly and indirectly in most of Edouard
Vuillard’s early commissions for large decorative painting cycles.8
Pierre Bonnard, poster for La Revue Blanche, 1894, lithograph, 80 × 62 cm. Boston. Museum of Fine Arts. Department of Prints and Drawings.

Not unlike art historical characterizations of La Revue Blanche, nationalist typifica-

Figure 1

tions that flatten the journal’s diverse institutional, geographic, aesthetic, and human
elements into the monolithic category “Jewishness” can be at once reductive and illu-
minating; though desultory in the information conveyed, they do at times afford
glimpses of details and structures less visible in mainstream narratives of the period.
This essay co-opts the texts that implicate La Revue Blanche in the judaisation of French
culture to recuperate the journal’s eclecticism and use it as a lens through which infra-
structural changes in late-nineteenth-century French art production, exhibition, and
consumption momentarily come into focus.
Though most historians would agree that modernism is inextricably linked to
commercial and popular art forms, period studies are still, by and large, organized
around oppositional relationships between “authentic” and profit-driven culture. La
Revue Blanche highlights the contiguities between vanguard and more entrepreneur-
ial forms of culture in the French fin-de-siècle. In particular, it underscores the late-
nineteenth-century symbiosis between artistic and literary production in a changing
marketplace whose principal forum was the capitalist arena of newspapers and
periodicals.9
This essay examines La Revue Blanche’s unusual comfort with the interconnected-
ness of art and money and how that comfort, coupled with perceptions of the jour-
nal’s “Jewishness,” made it an ideal target for figures seeking to abbreviate culture’s
increasing mercantilization—many of whose careers were fashioned through the very
practices they denigrated.
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 169
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Figure 1 Pierre Bonnard, poster for La Revue Blanche, 1894, lithograph, 80 × 62 cm.
Photo: Phillip Dennis Cate, Prints Abound: Paris in the 1890s, exh. cat. National Gallery of
Art, Washington D.C., 1991. 85.

I. La Revue Blanche
I.

Though it expressly avoided labels, La Revue Blanche generally is classified among a

second generation of fin-de-siècle Symbolist journals, many short-lived, that prolifer-
ated after the 1881 liberalization of France’s press laws.10 More specifically, it figures
among “les petites revues,” a subset of aesthetic journalism associated with enclaves of
mostly young writers looking for points of entry into the amorphous field of French
Symbolism (Genova 120–26). The flow of petites revues responded to the steady decline
of publishing venues for new writers in the wake of the economic recession of the
1880s. Many functioned within broader social communities that included regular
formal and informal gatherings and nurtured fertile collaborations. Certainly, La Revue
Blanche did.11 Like Mercure de France and La Plume, La Revue Blanche was conceived
 170 J. Bergman-Carton
in the late 1880s, less to exercise an editorial imperative than to extend and profession-
alize the intellectual and personal communities its publishers, contributors, and affili-
ates had formed as lycée students. The group of writers, artists, musicians, and
dramatists around which “les petites revues” formed expanded their networks, often in
salons like those sponsored weekly by La Revue Blanche’s owners, the Natansons, both
in their homes and editorial offices. These informal gatherings for conversation,
performance, and recreation spawned a wealth of projects in the final decades of the
nineteenth century that brought Symbolist theater, French decorative arts reform,
printmaking, and the book arts into dialogue with the anarchist movement, literary
journalism, and the growing network of art dealers and gallerists. They also generated
the primary audience toward which many of their subscription-based collaborations
were directed.
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From the outset, La Revue Blanche was known for its commitment to diversity and,
particularly, its interest in publishing “les oeuvres étrangères.”12 Though described in
late-twentieth-century accounts as the point of contact between anarchism and
Symbolism, or a “centre of Dreyfusard opinion,”13 the journal itself actively resisted
labels, opting for content selected on the basis of novelty and eclecticism. The essays it
published on literature, theater, politics, religion, science, sports, music, and art ranged
from Charles Henry’s “A Travers les sciences et industries” to Auguste Strindberg’s “De
l’inferiorité de la femme” to Tolstoi’s “Le Militarisme et la religion.” It was “la liberté,”
according to one of its contributors, Julien Benda, who characterized their selection:
“l’esprit de la maison est d’accueillir les positions les plus diverses, voire les plus
contraires” (Benda 68).
The journal began its fourteen year run in December of 1889 in Liège, under the
direction of Auguste Jeunehomme, Joe Högge, and the brothers Paul and Charles
Leclerq. Its offices moved to Paris in 1891, where two of its original contributors,
Thadée and Louis-Alfred Natanson, and their brother, Alexandre, assumed control,
and it remained there until the last issue was published in April of 1903. Under the
leadership of the Natansons, the revue was distinguished for the internationalism of
its coverage; its promotion of synaesthetic collaborations of music, theater, literature,
and the visual arts; and the savvy with which it improvised vehicles and venues to
launch the careers of new young talent. The eclectic models upon which it and other
petites revues drew ranged from the romantic legacy of les cénacles to the performative
culture of fin-de-siècle literary and artistic cabarets, models that encouraged the
expansion of the more conventional literary focus of aesthetic journalism to encom-
pass a range of fields that included music, painting, theater, politics, and even sports,
and that highlighted continuities as well as differences between the mass press and its
aesthetic variants.14
II.

II. Une Revue Juive

La Revue Blanche was identified as “une revue juive” almost from the date of its Paris
debut. The obvious, historical explanations include the religion of its owners, the
Natansons; the fact that their broader professional community encompassed a
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 171
relatively large group of Jewish writers; and the active support it provided for Alfred
Dreyfus beginning in 1898. Alexandre, Thadée, and Louis-Alfred Natanson were the
sons of a Jewish banker who had emigrated to Paris from Warsaw in 1878. Alexandre,
an appellate lawyer and entrepreneur, was its chief administrator. Louis-Alfred wrote
theater reviews. And Thadée, also an attorney, became the principal art critic and the
brother with whom the journal was most closely identified.
The Natansons were prominent reminders of changing patterns of acculturation in
France, particularly of a small, but growing Jewish presence in the previously inacces-
sible arenas of theater, music, literature, and the visual arts. For some, this change was
of demographic interest only. For others it heralded a conspiracy to infiltrate and infect
sacred French institutions: “Paris opened its eyes: Jewish salons had the upper hand.
The newspapers it opened were Jewish newspapers. People thought that the Jews were
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just financiers, in control of money. But the money had delivered everything into their
hands” (Maurras, Gazette 20).15
The Natansons’ entre into literary journalism was due, in part, to their position
within a generation of Jews who had earned the credential of the right lycée education,
a credential that allowed them to move within elite French social hierarchies. Like
Marcel Proust and a dozen or so writers and artists who contributed to La Revue
Blanche in the early phases of their careers, the Natansons had attended the lycée
Condorcet, a school known for both academic excellence and the unusual encourage-
ment its students received to supplement their training with the education Paris muse-
ums, theaters, and concert halls provided. Condorcet was also known as the lycée of
choice for wealthy Jewish families seeking promising avenues of integration for their
sons, a perception so widespread that the school figured regularly in anti-Semitic liter-
ature as a breeding ground for dangerous Jews.16
In Albert Guinon’s 1901 play Décadence, for example, Condorcet is the ticket to
wealth and social mobility for the nouveau riche Nathan Strohmann. His marriage to
an impoverished Catholic aristocrat clears the debts of one family and provides the
other access to good society. Strohmann’s polish and position is said to be the product
of his lycée training, which has made him in every way different from his father. He is
a second generation Jew, “whose tent has become a palace—a Jew, in other words, who
took his degree at Condorcet” (Guinon 41).
The cosmopolitan tastes for art, theater, music, and literature cultivated at
Condorcet and reinforced for many of its graduates at “les mardis”—the salon of poet
Stéphane Mallarmé, a former English teacher at the lycée—made logical the Natansons’
attraction after graduation to the nascent community of “jeunes revues.” But La Revue
Blanche began its Paris run in a climate of increasing economic and cultural protection-
ism. Thus, the Natanson’s ties to Condorcet only fueled suspicions about the project of
three Polish, Jewish brothers to relocate a Belgian enterprise to Paris, especially in the
pages of France’s fledgling anti-Semitic press.
Like anarchist terrorism and syndicalism, French anti-Semitism was one of several
radical social movements that emerged in protest of Third Republic economic and
social policies. It thrived on vehicles of political expression new to the late nineteenth
century, most importantly the mass-circulation press, in which lists of Jews active in
 172 J. Bergman-Carton
professions once closed to them were regularly featured. The fact that La Revue
Blanche’s stable of contributors included a larger number of Jewish writers than other
journals made it an easy target for those seeking evidence of clannishness and Jewish
over-influence. Though the large majority of its writers—figures like Paul Adam,
André Gide, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Emile Verhaeren, Remy de Gourmont,
Maurice Barrés, and even Camille Mauclair—were not Jewish, the impression
remained, and persists today, that the Natansons ran “une maison juive” (Mayence 3).
In addition to the religion of the Natansons and a portion of the writers they
employed, the most common reasons cited for La Revue Blanche’s identification with
Jewishnness was its prominence as a center for pro-Dreyfusard activity. In fact, the
organ of the nationalist Right, La Revue de l’Action Française, was founded specifically
to counter the pro-Dreyfus polemics of the Natanson journal.17 La Revue Blanche had
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become actively involved in the movement to rehabilitate Dreyfus in 1898, as evidence

confirming the Prussian-Jewish officer’s innocence came into circulation four years
after he had been charged with treason and court-martialed. In response to Emile
Zola’s call to young intellectuals to support the Dreyfus revisionist campaign, the
Natansons published the first of a series of articles protesting the judicial improprieties
of the process and the anti-Semitic climate that had made them possible.18 This
unprecedented expression of a unified position by an editorial board that, theretofore,
had prided itself on its unpredictability fueled stereotypes of Jewish duplicity among
those already paranoid about the depletion of national resources by foreigners with
divided loyalties, those for whom “Jewishness” was the standard placeholder for the
problem of France’s eroding economic and cultural borders.
III.

III. Enjuivement Narratives

As I have indicated, late-nineteenth-century commentaries on La Revue Blanche’s role
in the judaization of French culture, dating to the years of the journal’s actual run,
focus principally on incursions in the literary arena. Edmond de Goncourt’s journal
contains several comments in 1896 about Jewish over-influence in the field of literary
journalism. In one he writes: “Now the younger generation of Israelites has caught on
to the powerful influence of criticism and the kind of pressure that they can put on
theaters and editors. They founded La Revue Blanche, which is really a nest of ‘young
kikes.’ They think that with the help of their parents, who provide funds for almost all
their journals, they will become the heads of all of French literature before they are
twenty-five years old” (Goncourt 627).
Charles Maurras, one of the Third Republic’s most vocal critics, condemned the
Natansons for their part in the dilution of France’s literary heritage. Best known today
for his stewardship of La Revue de l’Action Française, the most powerful French organ
of anti-Semitism after 1899, Maurras began his career as a literary journalist.19 The
trajectory, from nineteenth-century littérateur to twentieth-century xenophobe, was
not uncommon, as Benedict Anderson has written. Print technology and capitalism
converged in the fin-de-siècle to create new forms of imagined communities that were
the precondition of nationalist rhetoric (Anderson 47).
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 173
In an 1894 survey of “les petites revues,” a relatively tame preview of Maurras’s full-
blown xenophobic vitriole, he contrasts the Symbolist sagacity of Mercure de France
with the internationalist perversity of La Revue Blanche, a gang of cosmopolitan trans-
lators who threaten the integrity of French literature. Many have noted “le rôle des
Israélites dans les jeunes revues,” he contends, a reality underscored by the recent
fusion of La Revue Blanche with le Banquet, where “la plupart des rédacteurs étaient
ici et là de race Israelite.” The “théorie de la ‘littérature européenne’” derives from
these Jewish journalists, according to Maurras. “M.M.Stringberg et G. Hauptman,
Oscar Wilde et Brandés n’ont pas de meilleurs défenseurs” (Maurras, “Les Jeunes
Revues” 118).
Like Léon Daudet (Maurras’s future co-editor at La Revue de l’Action Française),
who associated La Revue Blanche with the excessive vogue for Tolstoisme, Ibsenisme,
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and Nietzcheisme (Daudet 156), Maurras responds, in part, to the journal’s actual
credo: “foreign works will always have a place here.” He reacts to the monthly literary
calendars they published with recommended foreign titles and to the regular feature,
“Lettres étrangères,” which introduced in translation writers such as Jane Austen,
Gabriel d’Annunzio, Henrik Ibsen, Rudyard Kipling, Lao-Tse, Auguste Strindberg, and
Léon Tolstoi. His text recalls the journal’s collaborations with Le Théâtre de l’Oeuvre,
whose seasons were dominated by foreign authors or plays about foreign cultures. And
it reminds us of articles the Natansons published on the fluid borders of cultural
production, such as Eugène Morel’s 1894 response to concerns about foreign imports
which challenges the state to fund incentives that will nurture talent at home. Or
Ludovic Marchand’s condemnation of France’s self-protective, chauvinist stance that
encourages a return to the utopian internationalism of Henri Saint-Simon.20
La Revue Blanche’s de-emphasis on national school extended to its coverage of the
visual arts as well. In addition to the core of French artists who composed “les peintres
de la Revue Blanche,” the group included artists from Denmark, Holland, Switzerland,
and Hungary.21 The art reviews also addressed work produced both inside and outside
France, such as Edvard Munch’s Kristiana exhibition and Siegfried Bing’s decorative
arts projects that brought together artists from England, Belgium, Holland, Germany,
the U. S., and France (and included many of “les peintres de la Revue Blanche”).
Bing’s Maison de l’Art Nouveau, an internationalist craft project, became a target of
anti-Semitic slurs as well. The Paris based enterprise undertaken by a German-Jew to
regenerate the decorative arts in an international vernacular using American and
Belgian prototypes fed paranoia about France’s declining position in the industrial
arts. Bing’s gallery was attacked on the front page of Le Figaro as “confused, incoher-
ent, almost unhealthy,” a space that “smacks of the vicious Englishman, the Jewess
addicted to morphine … the cunning Belgian, or a good mixture of those three
poisons” (Alexandre 1). Collaborations between La Revue Blanche and Bing continued
during the attacks on Maison de L’Art Nouveau, feeding associations between the
Natanson enterprise and foreign threats to the integrity of France’s economic and
cultural borders. Those perceptions intensified after 1898, when La Revue Blanche
assumed a leading role in the movement to exonerate Alfred Dreyfus, and continued
well after the journal ceased publishing in 1903. Early-twentieth-century narratives on
 174 J. Bergman-Carton
the judaisation of French culture expanded the sphere of the Natansons’ nefarious
influence to include the visual arts, specifically its commercialization. They saw in La
Revue Blanche’s “Jewishness” a convenient shorthand for the substantial growth in the
speculative market for French contemporary art and the symbiotic ties between the
concept of avant-gardism and the dealer-gallery system it served, despite strategic
claims to the contrary (Jenson 10; Sieberling 33).
Catholic Nationalist Georges Sorel situates the origins of these changes within the
broader scope of what he calls “les temps dreyfusiens” (Sorel 52). In a 1912 essay of
that title for L’Indépendance, Sorel perpetuates the cliché of La Revue Blanche’s hybrid
milieu in his characterization of its circle as a “coterie of Polish Jewish alchemists who
mixed products of the most eccentric aesthetic in their kitchen.”22 The Natansons are
identified with systemic problems that began during “les temps dreyfusiens” and
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continue to enfeeble France’s creative culture. “The Natanson Academy” is described

as a salon of cosmopolitan anarchy where “esthetes rubbed shoulders with usurers
and impressionist painters, or more to the point, those who had provoked the bomb
throwing … where Jewish boursiers disguised themselves as art patrons to feed their
unhealthy appetite to dominate” (55). Sorel’s non-sequitor is at once odd and useful.
First of all, syntactically, it echoes the “eccentric aesthetic” it derides. That aesthetic—
what Maurras called the journal’s “méchanceté” and Henry de Bruchard its “juiverie
insolente”23— ranged from experiments with layout and typography to tonal discord
to self-parody. Though the typography and formatting of any newspaper or magazine
is subject to all manner of human idiosyncrasy and economic contingency, the
Natanson journal cultivated the expressive possibilities of dissonance. Its format and
content oscillated between the sober elegance of an elite revue and the high jinks of a
Montmartre cabaret.
Sorel’s characterization helps retrieve La Revue Blanche’s decision to assimilate
Alfred Jarry as a regular contributor in the same year as Ubu Roi’s audacious Paris
debut. It recalls the insertion of occasional oversized comic illustrated supplements
that unsettled the journal’s typographical and linguistic integrity, supplements that
required an awkward removal and unfolding process that disturbed the coherence of
its bound format. The pages of one such supplement, “Nib” (see Figure 2), juxtapose
the mechanical uniformity of columns of typeface with whimsical marginalia and auto-
graphic flourishes.
Sorel’s pastiche of seemingly unrelated elements —“esthestes, usurers, impressionist
Figure 2 Nib carnivalesque, 1 avril 1895, supplément de La Revue Blanche, lithograph by Pierre Bonnard and text by Romain Coolus.

painters, playwrights, and anarchists”—helps restore the multiformity of fin-de-siècle

art culture of which the journal was a part, including some of the Natanson’s more
unlikely partnerships. Odd couplings were hardly exceptional in late-nineteenth-
century journalistic culture, but the staff of La Revue Blanche seemed to take particular
pride in its eclecticism and unpredictability. The “Jewish salon of cosmopolitan anar-
chy” that Sorel caricatures invokes the collaborations between the haute bourgeois
Natanson circle and a number of France’s most politically engaged anarchists. La Revue
Blanche published provocative anarchist writings by Paul Adam, Victor Barrucand,
Gustave Kahn, and Zo d’axa and exchanged advertising space with Europe’s leading
anarchist journals (Sonn 18).
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 175
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Figure 2 Nib carnivalesque, 1 avril 1895, supplément de La Revue Blanche, lithograph by

Pierre Bonnard and text by Romain Coolus.

The figure whose affiliation contributed most to the journal’s anarchist tincture
was Félix Fénéon. Anarchist and dandy, art critic and War Ministry bureaucrat,
Fénéon himself was a mélange of disparate elements. 1894 marked his first contact
with La Revue Blanche during the Procès de Trente, the trial of thirty intellectuals and
criminals charged with anarchist conspiracy, when Thadée Natanson secured an
attorney to represent him. After Fénéon’s acquittal, Natanson offered him a post at La
Revue Blanche and soon the editorship, a position he held from 1895 to the end of the
journal’s run in 1903.24
While Fénéon’s chameleon history figures prominently in histories of Neo-
Impressionism, the avant-garde movement he both championed and named, the
Sorel text raises a historiographical issue rarely addressed in the literature. Fénéon is
cast as “one of the men who has done the most to corrupt the spirit of his young
contemporaries” (Sorel 55). To Sorel, he signifies a world gone mad, a world in
which “an escapee of the Procès de Trente” works side by side with “Jewish stock-
holders” (55). One might assume that Sorel alludes here to Fénéon’s eight years as
editor of La Revue Blanche. But here, as elsewhere in the article, Sorel liberally quotes
from Henry de Bruchard’s Petits Memoires du Temps de la Ligue. A return to the
section of Bruchard’s book from which Sorel borrows, on the decline of Symbolism
and the afterlives of the personalities associated with “les petites revues,” suggests that
he may have been alluding to a different phase in Fénéon’s professional life, a phase
about which remarkably little has been written.25
 176 J. Bergman-Carton
In Bruchard’s narrative, Fénéon’s “cowardly dilettantism” seems to refer to the posi-
tion he assumed after La Revue Blanche folded, managing Bernheim-Jeune’s new
gallery of contemporary art. It was to that position Camille Mauclair referred in La
Crise de l’Art moderne when he wrote: La Revue Blanche’s “house critic became a sales-
man in a Jewish gallery.” This final, eighteen-year “phase” in Fénéon’s career, that is
barely mentioned in art literature, expresses as well as any relationship could the
synergy between avant-garde art, criticism, and commerce for which La Revue Blanche
became an abbreviation.
Sorel’s characterization of La Revue Blanche as a place where “esthetes rubbed shoul-
ders with usurers and impressionist painters … where Jewish boursiers disguised
themselves as art patrons to feed their unhealthy appetite to dominate” recuperates the
increasing coordination between mercantilism and the hallowed quarters of advanced
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art as the authority of the Academy-Salon system receded and the dealer-critic system
advanced (Sorel 54). It offers a lens through which the growing late-nineteenth-
century culture of art entrepreneurship is momentarily brought into focus.
That culture is most visible in La Revue Blanche’s activities between 1893 and 1897,
the period of its most substantial engagement with the visual arts. That time frame,
which forms the focus of the remainder of this essay, corresponds to the era of “La
Revue Blanche Transformée” when the journal was refashioned. What had begun as a
“charming boyhood game,” the 1893 advertisement announcing the changes read,
finally would become “the work of men.”26 The enhancements introduced after 1893
were a measure of its success cultivating a constituency in the relatively new landscape
of aesthetic journalism. The more elegant typography, longer format, and expanded art
coverage targeted an elite readership of monied and well-educated urbanites, much like
the Natansons.
IV.

IV. La Revue Blanche Transformée

As I have indicated, in the earliest years of the Natansons’ association with La Revue
Blanche the journal actively evaded identification with particular literary or political
movements in favor of content selected on the basis of novelty and eclecticism.
It published a broad range of essays on literature, art, music, politics, religion, theater,
and sports, and its general mission was to promote new young talent (including many
former classmates from Condorcet) and “welcome diverse and even contradictory
positions.”27
This project took place both in the offices of the journal and in the homes of the
Natansons in the form of musical and theatrical performances, exhibitions and
publishing enterprises, and entrepreneurial social networks. While the model of
cultural production explored by the Natanson circle was not that different from many
of its peer publications, the openness with which it acknowledged the inevitable ties
between art and money was. In his mission statement for Mercure de France’s inaugural
issue, for example, editor Alfred Vallette lists the possible aims toward which a literary
revue might aspire. Given the choice of “making money, bringing together others in
aesthetic communion, forming a school and spreading the word, or finally publishing
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 177
the kind of pure artistic works and rebellious theories unwelcome in the papers of the
largest clientele,” it is the last with which he identifies his enterprise. Vallette confides
“we are too unskilled as speculators to hope for the metamorphosis of our writings into
gold” (Vallette 4).
Championing misunderstood genius and distancing it from the tainted world of
speculation was an increasingly common strategy among the French fin-de-siècle
cultural elite, and one of the founding myths of modernism. But that stance had less
currency at La Revue Blanche, which more openly than most petites revues engaged the
financial imperatives that attend even advanced art. This was particularly evident in La
Revue Blanche Transformée and the substantial increase in visual arts coverage that was
its most striking feature. By the end of 1893, La Revue Blanche was beginning to publish
longer and more regular art commentaries; commission original prints; install small
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exhibitions in the journal’s offices; and make forays into the burgeoning field of fine art
book publishing.
La Revue Blanche Transformée was part of the new topography of late-nineteenth-
century French art culture that has been difficult to integrate into linear histories. The
medley of projects that crossed boundaries between media, and between commercial
and fine art designations registers in La Revue Blanche Transformée as a diverse but still
legible snapshot of modern circuits of art production and consumption.28
Though the Natansons’ reasons for increasing the prominence of visual material in
La Revue Blanche Transformée are not known, they seem to respond to a growing
demand for new forms of art entrepreneurship as state-sponsored institutions exer-
cised less and less control over art production and display.29 La Revue Blanche’s copy
and advertising pages in this period —like the walls of its offices—joined an expanding
arena of alternative exhibition sites that included small shows in bookstores, art
studios, theater lobbies, and artistic cabarets.30
In addition to more regular art writing, the journal introduced “Art et Curiosité” in
1894, a feature capitalizing on growing interest in the art market. Several lengthy articles
in the early issues of La Revue Blanche Transformée directly address the economic imper-
atives of the modern artist in an age of diminishing state support and the relationship
of this consideration to “advanced art.” Lucien Muhlfeld’s “A Propos de peintures,” for
example, considers the profit motive small, independent exhibition spaces often sought
to disguise in order to argue that pat distinctions between vulgar art marketplaces and
“authentic” spaces of art are a luxury most contemporary artists cannot afford. Jean
Schopfer’s 1894 “Réflexions sur l’art de la sculpture” also engages the economic realities
of modern art production. Specifically, it contemplates how France might cultivate a
patron base that would liberate sculpture from the predictable historical eclecticism that
is the inevitable consequence of the medium’s continued dependence upon official
patronage.
While La Revue Blanche’s comfort with the possibilities of art entrepreneurship
was more evident after its transformation, it registered prior to 1894 in the form of
intertextual references. “A Renoir” and “A Pissaro,” for example, two original poems
by Romain Coolus, were printed on the same 1893 calendar page that announced the
painters’ current shows at Durand-Ruel.31 And, “Les Littérature des Assassins,” a
 178 J. Bergman-Carton
short story by Maurice Beauborg published that same year, is essentially a literary
advertisement. Beauborg’s alter ego in the story, a writer seeking confirmation of the
authenticity of his representation of criminal culture, compares assassin narratives
with a “criminal type” he meets in the Tuileries. The tale ends in triumph as the man
names a soon-to-be-released “real” book by Beauborg, Contes Pour les assassins, as
his favorite.
One stimulus to La Revue Blanche’s increased art coverage must have been the 1894
relocation of its offices to the rue Lafitte, a chic new address on the right bank. Their
neighbors were not other young reviews, most of which were housed on the left bank,
but rather Bernheim-Jeune, Durand Ruel, Ambroise Vollard, the Sagot, and Le barc de
Bouteville—six of more than twenty art galleries located on the street dubbed the “rue
des tableaux.”32 The reciprocal benefits of the move were immediately apparent. A July
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1895 review of a Constantin Guys exhibition at the Galerie Lafitte, for example, ends
with an announcement that admission to the show is free to La Revue Blanche
subscribers. The following issue includes a printed invitation to the same gallery,
Lafitte’s, for the newly installed “Artistic Publications of La Revue Blanche.” That
exhibition included examples of comic supplements the Natansons had published
illustrated by Toulouse-Lautrec; Bonnard’s advertising poster for the journal (see
Figure 1); illustrated books whose publications they had subsidized; and twelve origi-
nal prints the Natansons commissioned from “the painters of La Revue Blanche.” This
group that included Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Ranson,
Odilon Redon, Félix Vallotton, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Paul Sérusier was asked to
contribute an original print to be published in successive issues between July 1893 and
December 1894. The project corresponded to the growing market for fine art books
and prints stimulated by French bibliophiles and journalistic entrepreneurs. Like
André Marty’s L’Estampe Originale, designed to rekindle interest in the possibility of
originality in reproductive media, the Natansons’ Album of the Revue Blanche consoli-
dated the original prints they had commissioned for the journal and issued them as a
single volume.
The Natansons’ success and cache as art entrepreneurs registers in an Octave Uzanne
project the following year. Les Rassemblements: Baudieries Parisiennes consists of fifteen
short essays written by La Revue Blanche contributors, as Uzanne’s introduction cele-
brating the Natansons’ leadership among radical young reviews highlights. The
centrality of their mystique to Uzanne’s enterprise is emphasized by the Vallotton
woodcut that serves as its frontispiece, a crowd scene organized around several pieces
of “street art,” including a poster that directs us to “lisez La Revue Blanche.”
The changing late-nineteenth-century cultural field of which La Revue Blanche was
a prominent example is the subject of a series of drawings by Pierre Bonnard, one of
the artists most intimately engaged with the Natanson circle. In Life of the Painter, a
cahier of sketches, Bonnard considers the diverse activities of the modern artist within
formal and informal cultural syndicates like those the Natansons cultivated. Only one
of the twelve drawings is set in a traditional artist’s studio. Promenades down fashion-
able boulevards, conversations with art dealers, visits to printer’s workshops, the
construction of puppets for marionette theaters, and social intercourse in the offices of
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 179
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Figure 3 Pierre Bonnard, page from La Vie du peintre, ca. 1910. Photo: Le Théâtre de
l’œuvre 1893–1900, exh. cat. (Paris : Musée d’Orsay, 2005): 42.

La Revue Blanche (see Figure 3) form the remaining elements of this composite portrait
of the modern European artist’s life.33
In the journal’s offices, we see a casual conversation between Octave Mirbeau and
Figure 3 Pierre Bonnard, page from La Vie du peintre, ca. 1910. Photo: Le Théâtre de l’œuvre 1893–1900 , exh. cat. (Paris : Musée d’Orsay, 2005): 42.

Henry de Regnier in the drawing’s center. To the left, the almost formulaic representa-
tion of Félix Fénéon, working in isolation, hunched over his desk, and to the right, the
business machinations of Alexandre and Thadée Natanson.
On the architectural story just above, Bonnard depicts an enterprise with which La
Revue Blanche had its most sustained and productive collaboration during the years of
La Revue Blanche Transformée—the company of the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, the most
influential Symbolist theater of the decade launched by former Condorcet classmate
Lugné-Poe. In the drawing, Lugné-Poe is seen dividing his time between actors
rehearsing lines and artists he commissioned to design stage sets, costumes, and
program covers.
 180 J. Bergman-Carton
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Figure 4 Edouard Vuillard, program for Gerhardt Hauptmann’s Âmes solitaires at the
Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, lithograph, December 13, 1893. Photo: Le Théâtre de l’œuvre 1893–
1900, exh. Cat. (Paris : Musée d’Orsay, 2005): 29.

One such program (see Figure 4), commissioned of Edouard Vuillard in 1894,
emblematizes the diversity of late-nineteenth-century visual culture and offers a literal
expression of the contiguities between art, print culture, and commerce. Operating in
several discursive fields simultaneously, Vuillard’s lithograph is at once an original
work of art evocative of the Symbolist sensibility of Gerhardt Hauptmann’s Ames
Solitaires —the production at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre for which it was commissioned;
an informational pamphlet reproducible for broad distribution; and an advertising
page for La Revue Blanche Transformée.
Its dyptich format can be read as a single composition, or folded in half as a separate
Figure 4 Edouard Vuillard, program for Gerhardt Hauptmann’s Âmes solitaires at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, lithograph, December 13, 1893. Photo: Le Théâtre de l’œuvre 1893–1900 , exh. Cat. (Paris : Musée d’Orsay, 2005): 29.

cover and back. The cover image, to the right, depicts a shadowy interior whose inky
surface doubles as a scrim through which we discern a trio of interlocking figures. The
airtight, shallow box is relieved only by a luminous garden visible through the small
window to the right, and dark, fluid calligraphy that conveys the play’s title and credits.
Tonal and compositional echoes imply a relationship between the window view and
the program’s back cover, the scene of a woman seated in that light-filled garden. She,
too, appears to exist behind an opaque fourth wall whose surface is affirmed by calli-
graphic lettering. But rather than more details about the play, this lettering announces
another kind of performance, the new format of the Natanson journal (in which the
Hauptmann play will be reviewed and advertised), “La Revue Blanche Transformée,” set
to debut on January 1, 1894.
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 181
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Figure 5 Gyp, En balade: images coloriyes du petit Bob, ink drawing, 1897. Photography
Collection. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. The University of Texas at Austin.

Though hybrid projects like Vuillard’s, which contested aesthetic, economic, and
cultural boundaries, were not unique, La Revue Blanche’s Jewishness seems to have
provided a convenient shorthand for the discursive complications they posed. Even
works commissioned for the private spaces of the Natanson circle were implicated in
anti-Semitic commentaries on the changing landscape of late-nineteenth-century art
culture. In 1897 (the same year Camille Mauclair published Le Soleil des morts with its
barely disguised portrait of the Natansons as “the Soldmanns”), the notorious anti-
Semitic writer known as “Gyp” parodied art works executed for the Natansons in the
illustrations for her book titled En Balade.34 One (see Figure 5) implies a correspon-
dence between Bonnard’s and Vuillard’s anti-naturalist treatment of the human figure
and the Jewish physiognomy of the artists’ most important patrons in the 1890s, the
Natansons.35
The Natanson circle helped launch the careers of Vuillard and Bonnard during the
Figure 5 Gyp, En Balade, ink drawing, 1897. Photography Collection. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. The University of Texas at Austin.

era of La Revue Blanche’s “transformation,” which included not only more art writing
but a flourishing culture of art patronage. The two artists became close friends of Thadée
Natanson and his new wife Misia and regular guests at “the Annex,” the apartment on
the rue St. Floretin that was the domestic counterpart to La Revue Blanche’s offices.
Among the many commissions Vuillard received from the Natansons’ extended family
was a series of nine, seven-foot painted decorative panels intended for the dining room/
 182 J. Bergman-Carton
salon of Alexandre and Olga Natanson’s hotel. It was to this 1894 series, known collec-
tively as The Public Gardens, that Gyp turned for portions of the En Balade drawings.
Gyp’s book follows a transhistorical group of characters in their tour of a judaised,
nearly unrecognizable Paris. Among the signs of the Old regime’s displacement by a
new Jewish aristocracy are the once exclusive Paris parks, that are today overrun by
children “with hooked noses, thick lips, and fine clothing” who will soon control the
wealth of France’s poor feudality. That displacement is visualized in a drawing that
conflates elements of Vuillard’s Public Gardens with the fashionable society of women,
children, and nannies to whom they cater and a folding screen by Bonnard that also
had strong ties to the Revue Blanche circle.
Though the Vuillard panels were installed in a private residence, they attracted public
attention. A story about the extravagant vernissage for the panels Alexandre Natanson
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organized for 300 of La Revue Blanche’s closest friends, for example, appeared on the
front page of Le Figaro. The account of the event abbreviates the excesses of the occasion
as “Jewish” (Natanson 39).
Gyp’s drawing appropriates elements from two of the Vuillard panels, The Two
Schoolboys and Under the Trees (see Figure 6), a grid of chestnut trees distinctive to the
Tuileries and decorative mauve leaf clusters that enliven their green foliage. The place-
ment of the horizon line and the proportion of ground plane to tree cover also seem to
derive from that source. For the figural anecdotes, Gyp appears to have looked to
Pierre Bonnard’s Nannies Promenade (see Figure 7), a folding screen that probably
belonged to Thadée Natanson and was displayed in both Siegfried Bing’s La Maison de
l’Art nouveau in 1895 and in the artist’s first one-person exhibition at Durand-Ruel a
year later. Bonnard’s denizens of the park enliven the screen’s pictorial and literal
golden white “ground,” a decorative abstraction of what was until recently one of the
Tuileries most distinctive features: sandy, flat spaces Bonnard described as a “dusty,
mini-Sahara” (qtd. in Groom 50).
The En Balade drawing excerpts Bonnard’s classic nanny silhouettes (the bell-shaped
Figure 76 Edouard
Pierre Bonnard,
Vuillard,
Nannies
The Two
Promenade,
SchoolboysFrieze
and Under
of Carriages,
the Trees,
1894,
1894,
distemper
distemper
on on
canvas.
canvas.
Private
Photo:
Collection.
Guy Cogeval, Edouard Vuillard, exh, cat. (Montreal: Montreal Museum of Art, 2003): 178.

cape, the bonnet, and wide streaming ribbons); his representation of the popular stick
and hoop game; and the sailor-suited gamin accompanying the fashionable French
Parisienne in the screen’s lower right corner. This last coupling underscores the screen’s
particular relationship to the Revue Blanche circle, as it is a variant of the figural anec-
dote Bonnard used in his famous 1894 poster for the journal, a poster (see Figure 1)
juxtaposed with Nannies Promenade in the final climatic gallery of the artist’s 1896
Durand-Ruel exhibition.
Where Gyp departs from her models is in the anatomical particularity of her figures,
her transmutation of the generalized or invisible faces of Vuillard and Bonnard’s
figures into detailed contrasts between the “Semitic” features of the children and the
“Latin symmetry” of their blond nannies. The equation implied between Bonnard’s
“deformations” and racialized physiognomic stereotypes (“clawed fingers, hooked
noses, and thick lips”) forces an anti-naturalist aesthetic designed to challenge western
canons of beauty to stand instead for its degraded “other.”
Gyp’s efforts to contain as “Jewish” the anti-naturalist aesthetics of Vuillard and
Bonnard—like Maurras’s and Bruchard’s to diminish the Natansons’ typographical
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 183
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Figure 6 Edouard Vuillard, The Two Schoolboys and Under the Trees, 1894, distemper on
canvas. Photo: Guy Cogeval, Edouard Vuillard, exh, cat. (Montreal: Montreal Museum of
Art, 2003): 178.

experiments as “méchanceté” or “juiverie insolente”—can be used instead to retrieve

La Revue Blanche’s eclecticism and unpredictability. Its hybrid forms, surprising
collaborations, and mixing of genres were not unusual, but the openness with which
this petite revue cultivated their expressive potential was.
As I have demonstrated, the same was true of the symbiotic ties between advanced
art and commerce. The inseparability of vanguard novelty and bourgeois entrepre-
neurship from which many artists and writers were at pains to distance themselves,
registered comfortably on the pages of La Revue Blanche Transformée. One of the
 184 J. Bergman-Carton
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Figure 7 Pierre Bonnard, Nannies Promenade, Frieze of Carriages, 1894, distemper on

canvas. Private Collection, New York; photograph by Bruce Jones.

articles mentioned earlier, which appeared just one month before the journal’s facelift
was announced, offers a manifesto of sorts for the rapidly changing sphere of art
culture at the turn of the century. Addressing an altered system in which artists have
both the opportunity and burden of locating new methods to guarantee their work is
seen and recognized, “A Propos de peintures,” by then editor, Lucien Muhlfeld, praises
the recent trend toward smaller, exhibition venues that preserve an intimacy, coher-
ence, and focus impossible in the large Salon. In a bourgeois democracy, he argues,
where sales to museums and the state are rare, it is crucial to increase regular opportu-
nities to show works of art to those for whom they are intended. “Artists still need to
sell to live” (Muhlfeld 457). Another aspect of this changing art culture Muhlfeld
demystifies is the role of the art critic. Acknowledging the altered circumstances for
literary art criticism in the venerable tradition of Diderot, Muhlfeld concedes, “[W]e
all aspire to try our hands, but the reality is we know nothing about art.” Despite that
fact, he continues, “for understandable reasons … artists prefer the hypocrisy of
friends to unruly bulldozers” (453).
Muhlfeld’s words invoke the professionalization of art criticism in the last decades
of the nineteenth century, spurred by an increasingly commercialized mass-circulation
press and the rapid expansion of art venues to cover. Though art criticism remained by
and large a secondary interest cultivated by litterateurs and political writers, bread and
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 185
butter work for many, by the 1890s it was a standard feature of most newspapers.
Though never the literary and economic staple of journalistic culture that theater
reviewing had been throughout the nineteenth century, art criticism did grow expo-
nentially in the fin-de-siècle (Ward, “Impressionist Installations” 170–71). But that
growth, and the increasing volume of art venues to which it responded, generated what
appeared to many a much less substantive product.
It generated what Camille Mauclair referred to in 1944 as a generation of pseudo-
critics, litterateurs beholden to art dealers who have traded in the respectable genre of
the Salon review for the more lucrative exhibition catalogue preface and artist mono-
graph. As Romy Golan has written, Mauclair’s narrative about the corruption of art
criticism by Jewish dealers promoting advanced art parallels the story of his own
professional life (156). Like most fin-de-siècle litterateurs, Mauclair maximized his
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exposure and earning potential by diversifying his literary output in the form of maga-
zine essays, novels, poetry, plays, travel books, and art criticism. He and La Revue
Blanche, which in fact numbered among his earliest affiliations, came of age in the same
decade and reaped benefits from the same burgeoning entrepreneurial art culture.
Mauclair figures among those writers who invoked La Revue Blanche’s Jewishness
as a strategic device of alterity because they were unwilling or unable to assimilate
their own complicity with the very practices they maligned. Though it is widely
acknowledged today that the marketplace is inseparable from the ideology of the
avant-garde, that the mythology of the artist/outsider advanced rather than impeded
art’s commodification, that categorical distinctions between bourgeois and bohe-
mian are delusory, it has been difficult to extricate our histories from those fictions
(Jenson 10).
Though it also made La Revue Blanche an easy scapegoat for the aporia of art and
money that informed all cultural production by the late nineteenth century, the jour-
nal’s synergy between the aesthetic and commercial helps us do that. As historian and
publicist Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu writes in Israel Among the Nations (1895), if we are
honest with ourselves, we will recognize that Jews are not responsible for the depravity
of French culture, they merely show us the aspects of ourselves that we do not want to
see (267–69).

Notes
[1] Mauclair (10).
1.

[2] See Gamboni; Golan; Green; Jenson; Ward; and Gee.

2.

[3] Art historical studies of La Revue Blanche consist, principally, of exhibition catalogues such as
3.

Georges Bernier’s La Revue Blanche: Paris in the Days of Post-Impressionism and Symbolism,
and Grace Sieberling and Bret Waller’s Artists of La Revue Blanche: Bonnard, Toulouse-Lautrec,
Vallotton, Vuillard. The two seminal reference texts from which all subsequent studies draw
for primary source material are Fritz Hermann’s Die Revue Blanche und die Nabis and A.B.
Jackson’s La Revue Blanche 1889–1903. Two recent dissertations provide useful contributions
to our understanding of the journal from a literary and sociological framework, respectively.
These include: Geneviève Comès’s 1987 thèse d’etat, La Revue Blanche et le movement des idées
and Vinni Datta’s 1989 dissertation, La Revue Blanche: Intellectuals and Politics in France.
4.
 186 J. Bergman-Carton
[4] Maurras (“Les Jeunes Revues” 118); de Bruchard (44).
[5] La Revue de l’Action Française (10 July 1899): 7.
5.

[6] “Pour Paul Leclerq, ce titre avait un sens spécial. Leur revue serait ‘blanche’ parce qu’elle
6.

essaierait de représenter la synthèse de plusiers tendances en art et littérature. Elle serait la

somme de toutes les couleurs” (Jackson 13).
[7] L’Action Française (10 July 1899): 7.
7.

[8] See Groom.

8.

[9] For a more extensive discussion of this relationship, see Bourdieu; and Moriarty.
9.

[10] Newspaper and periodical literature expanded significantly beginning in the July Monarchy,
10.

but venues specifically devoted to coverage of the literary and visual arts really flourished after
Jules Ferry passed the 1881 Press Laws granting all French citizens, including women, the
right to publish a journal. As Pamela Genova argues, the shifting press mission of news
culture after 1881, from political protest to information, coincided with the rise of alternative
salons, the dealer/gallery system, and the professionalization of art criticism. Once freedom of
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the press was no longer a central issue, there was more time and incentive to broaden the
parameters of literary journalism.
[11] La Revue Blanche was one of the new spaces of sociability where art was generated within a
11.

cultural nexus of diverse cultural fields.

[12] La Revue Blanche (Nov. 1891): 156.
12.

[13] Wilson (83). The specifics of their activities during the Dreyfus Affair are discussed in Benda
13.

(207–09); and Jackson (100–32). Sonn describes La Revue Blanche as “the most important
journal to defend simultaneously the causes of Symbolism and anarchy…” (18).
[14] The inevitable intersections between the mass press and literary journalism are discussed by
14.

Bordieu.
[15] In Mes Modèles, painter and writer J.E. Blanche comments on the assimilation of Jewish intel-
15.

lectuals in the literary and visual arts as virtually a non-issue before the rise of the anti-Semitic
press (qtd. in Bernier 55).
[16] Jules-Philippe Heuzy’s 1901 novel Fils d’Abraham begins in the recreation yard of Condorcet
16.

with the humiliation of a young Jewish boy named Lambert. When he returns home to report
the anti-Semitic taunts he suffered at school, his father smiles reassuringly and reminds him
that his Condorcet education and the gold of Israel it guarantees will be sweet revenge. The
rise of anti-Semitism in French lycées in the 1890s is discussed by Wilson (405). François
Bournand refers to problems specific to the Lycée Condorcet in Les Juifs et nos contemporains
(L’Antisémitisme et la question juive).
[17] La Revue de l’Action Française (10 July 1899): 7.
17.

[18] The succession of articles in La Revue Blanche on the Dreyfus Affair that marked its first
18.

sustained political engagement began on 1 February 1898.

[19] Many of the early-twentieth-century Catholic nationalists, like Maurras, made their names in
19.

the journalistic industry, as poets, novelists, and occasional art and theater critics. Maurras,
who became the standard-bearer of anti-Republicanism, previewed his activities with La
Revue de l’Action Française in articles like ‘Le Repentir de Pythéas,’ a controversial essay
published in January of 1892 in L’Ermitage that berated the cult of foreign writers as
misguided and destructive of the ideal of Latinicity France had inherited.
[20] Morel (431); and Marchand (544).
20.

[21] In Peints a leur tour, Thadée Natanson identifies “Les Peintres de la Revue Blanche” as Paul
21.

Sérusier, Maurice Denis, Ker-Roussel, Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Charles Cottet, Paul
Ranson, Rippl-Ronai, H. G. Ibels, and Félix Vallotton. To this list he adds Henri de Toulouse-
Lautrec and Odilon Redon (244).
[22] Sorel associates La Revue Blanche with the Third Republic’s dismantling of class hierarchy and
22.

conflict, the engine of French creative vitality.

[23] Maurras (“Les Jeunes Revues” 118); Bruchard (43–44).
23.

[24] Lucien Muhlfeld served as editor prior to Fénéon’s assumption of the job.
24.
 Nineteenth-Century Contexts 187
[25] After La Revue Blanche stopped publishing in 1903, Fénéon worked briefly at Le Figaro and Le
25.

Matin. Then in 1906, Thadée Natanson and Félix Vallotton introduced him to the owners of
the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery where he was offered a job directing its new section devoted to
contemporary art, a position he held until 1924.
[26] La Revue Blanche (Décembre 1893): 401.
26.

[27] La Revue Blanche (Décembre 1889): 1.

27.

[28] For a discussion of the increasingly collective nature of art production and the symbiosis
28.

between the modern press, literary journalism, and visual culture, see Bourdieu (Les Règles),
and Green (The Spectacle of Nature).
[29] See, for example, Pierre Louis’s (Maurice Denis) plea for enlightened patrons to liberate
29.

artists from conventional easel painting in “Pour les jeunes.”

[30] In a sense, La Revue Blanche might be thought of as one of many new alternative exhibition
30.

venues that transformed the topography of late-nineteenth-century French art culture. Small
monographic or group shows could be found in bookstores, art studios, newspaper offices,
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and theater lobbies. For a brief period, Paul Fort’s Théâtre d’Art actually mounted an “exhibi-
tion” on stage as the epilogue to several Symbolist plays. After the final act, the curtain would
rise one more time for a three minute meditation on a single painting by an unknown artist
accompanied by a musical selection and a scent chosen specially for the occasion. Charles
Morice discusses the trend for small, alternative display spaces in “Salons et salonnets.” See
Ward (“Impressionist Installations and Private Exhibitions” 599–622).
[31] La Revue Blanche (Feb. 1892): 125.
31.

[32] For discussions of the nature of the rue Lafitte, see LeComte; and Vollard.
33.

[33] The drawings in Bonnard’s sketchbook, dated ca. 1910, are executed in pen and brown ink
33.

with blue wash.

[34] Marie Antoinette de Mirabeau, comtesse de Martel de Janville (Gyp), published more than
34.

one hundred and twenty novels and plays, many built around anti-Semitic themes.
[35] Thadée Natanson first met Vuillard and Bonnard in the summer of 1891 when he visited
35.

the apartment they shared with Denis and Lügne-Poe. In addition to the original litho-
graphs they contributed to Album de la Revue Blanche, Bonnard produced one of the jour-
nal’s most famous posters and did many illustration projects for Publications de la Revue
Blanche. Vuillard was the beneficiary of five major commissions from the Natanson family
and his first one-person exhibition in their offices.

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