Ingres chez les Fauves

The Bain turc, more than any other Ingres work, escaped the claims of norma tive art history and spoke to a radical aesthetic community intent on frami ng a new art. This essay on the reception of Ingres's figure painting reads responses to the Bain turc at the small Ingres retrospective the Society o f the Salon d'Automne organized in 1905, and in 1907 when his Grande Odalis que was challenged by the elevation of Manet's Olympia to the Louvre. Three communities laid claim to Ingres at this time. Scholars like Lapauze and Mommeja ratified the Bain turc for the museum community and for its own er, the Prince de Broglie. The Fauvist avant garde had other goals in arran ging the retrospective. It is argued that the Bain turc, and the two dozen pencil studies exhibited with it, changed the visual orientation of artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Vallotton. The third group, standing between the artists and official gate-keepers, we re the critics. Some claimed Ingres for classicism and the French Tradition (albeit one skewed by an octagenarian's sexual longing). Left and Jewish c ritics close to the Salon rejected the academic authority figure, proclaimi ng the value of his nudes, line drawing and distorting arabesque. The debat e crystallized when Olympia was hung opposite the Grande Baigneuse. Matisse and Apollinaire judged the Manet to be passe, and soon afterwards the pro- Cubist writers Riviere and Lhote saw in the Grande Baigneuse the model for a revolution in the concept of drawing.