BERNARD VOUILLOUX: TABLEAUX D'UT PICTURA POESIS.

Review par Valentine Oncins

The edge of the visible-readable, that is to say the question: what makes a tableau within "painting-describing-writing," has generated a large number of works and articles (A. Chastel, M. Foucault, R. Krauss, R.W.Lee, J.-C. Lebensztejn, L. Marin, M. Schapiro...). B. Vouilloux's book presents three crossings: Diderot and Fragonard, Cézanne-reader of Balzac and André Breton in the image. He intends to demonstrate what authors' tableaux are:

There is therefore here a type of discourse on painting and a type of work with painting very distant from what could be conceived within the limits of ancient eloquence and classical literature, insofar as the relationship to painting and the inscription of authoriality functioned there under a completely different regime than that which "authors' tableaux" presuppose. (p. 10)

We find here the foundations of this crossing of literature-painting, namely fiction, with its components of the analogon, the proper name, and also the motif of any work: motif is to be understood in the sense of an activation and a reactivation of a tableau, a narrative or a manifesto. If A. Breton and D. Diderot are situated in the front line in the discursive, P. Cézanne, on the contrary, remains in secondarity in an identification with a literary character, the Frenhofer of Balzac's Chef-d'œuvre inconnu.

Throughout the work, shifts occur around the notion of model—biographical model, scenic model or interior model—; formulas such as the narrative makes tableau or the painter, mute, necessarily mute, had made himself tableau punctuate the argumentation, which is decisive.

Following the demonstration born from these three interweavings of literature-painting, the conclusion synthesizes the historical development of autonomization of these two arts, while developing the fundamental questioning on the notion of author:

recognizing the painter's authorial dignity was not, however, without ambiguity: it was, of course, to equal him to the writer, but it was also..., to continue comparing him to him, and to maintain him, consequently, within a schema of understanding that was viable only on the condition of transferring onto painting the properties recognized in literature. (p. 180)