Resurrecting Gustave Dore: "... his ambitions and achievements in terms of illustrating a staggeringly vast encyclopedia of world literature far exceeded anything dreamed of by the young Romantics. Yet, like them, he continued to plunge us into fantastic extremes that only can be fully experienced behind closed eyes.".

• Author: Rosenblum, Robert
• Position: Art History - Critical essay

IT IS AN ODD AND telling coincidence that Paul Gustave Dore and Edouard Manet were born (1832) and died (1883) in the same years. Given the conventional patterns of art history, their exact coexistence should be an oxymoron. Manet, pivotal to the concept of the avant-garde, always has represented everything that was adventurous and new in 19th-century art, whether categorized as Realism or Impressionism, and continues to occupy center stage in any reading of what happened between the 1850s and the 1880s. From this point of view, Dore might just as well have lived in another century or, at least have belonged more properly to a much earlier generation of artists who, by the 1820s, had been pigeonholed under the rebellious banner of Romanticism. After all, it was then that young French artists began to thirst for ever more spine-tingling narratives in both contemporary and centuries-old literature, especially in works traditionally banished from the French classical literary canon--by such old and new foreigners as Dante and William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Lord George Gordon Byron.

Dore, although his birth date indicates otherwise, seems to spring from this soil. To be sure, his ambitions and achievements in terms of illustrating a staggeringly vast encyclopedia of world literature far exceeded anything dreamed of by the young Romantics. Yet, like them, he continued to plunge us into fantastic extremes that only can be fully experienced behind closed eyes. From this embrace of invisible worlds, he could take us to such extraterrestrial climes as John Milton's and Dante's visions of heaven and hell or to the arctic wastelands of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's imaginary voyages. Again and again, he could make us share such nightmare hallucinations as provided by Don Quixote's delusions, Jean de La Fontaine's grotesquely scaled animal societies of rats or grasshoppers, Francois Rabelais' gargantuan humanoids, or Victor Hugo's gigantic Octopus.

All of these apparitions are depicted within a perpetuum mobile of volcanic turbulence, in which figures and settings, and light and darkness, are adrift in an ocean of shattered chiaroscuro. Whether illustrating the Bible or Byron, Dore conceived his narratives as cosmic events taking place in a world far beyond the space-time coordinates of 19th-century life and even further beyond the reach of terrestrial human scale. What could be less like Manet?

Yet, at second glance, things may not be so black and white. Even thinking of Dore and Manet as exact contemporaries who presumably lived on separate planets, we discover that there are surprising convergences. For in stance, early in their careers, both artists bowed before Eugene Delacroix's "Bark of Dante," though, to be sure, in very different ways. In 1854, Manet, as part of the academic ritual of replicating the old masters, copied this painting, although he seems to have seen it through a lens that minimized its hellish narrative. Seven years later, at the Salon of 1861, Dote presented a group of paintings and drawings that, ignoring Delacroix's intense color and palpable flesh, pushed his infernal scene to far more extravagant extremes of scale and terror. Now, Dante and Vergil voyage through sublime voids and shadows more appropriate to visions of the Book of Genesis or the Deluge than to those figural traditions of Peter Paul Rubens and Michelangelo Buonarroti that had supported Delacroix's youthful vision of the most corporeal of damned souls. A more surprising fact, however, is that, in the 1850s, at least part of Dore's prolific production might have made him a competitor for Charles Baudelaire's title of peintre de la vie moderne, an honor the poet prematurely bestowed on Constantin Guys in 1859.

The larger point, however, is that Dote, like Manet, as well as like Guys, Paul Gavarni, and Honore Daumier, even while soaring across Olympian heights and Stygian depths in an opiate delirium, always kept one foot rooted in the realities of modern Parisian life. As he amply and precociously demonstrated in the two albums of lithographs he published in 1854, "La Menagerie parisienne" and "Differents publics de Paris," Dore, if constantly perched on the brink of the abyss, also could offer a journalist's view of the widest spectrum of rich and poor at work and play. His flaneur's repertory covered everything. There are Second Empire ladies in crinolines passing by us in a caleche and outdoor audiences at a cafeconcert enjoying an evening's gas-lit entertainment of song and dance. There are glimpses of such lower depths as the men who clean Paris' new sewer systems or the women who launder clothing on the banks of the Seine. All these themes, in fact, find endless counterparts in the work of those artists grouped within the genealogical table of social observers dominated by Manet. Dore continually joined forces with those renowned revolutionaries--Daumier, Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir--who rived in the present tense of mid19th-century French life.

Yet, there are other unexpected convergences. Although many artists associated with Manet seem to have censored the trauma of the Franco-Prussian War out of their work, Manet did not, and neither did Dort, who, born in Strasbourg, predictably responded in outrage to the German annexation in 1871 of his native Alsace, whose folkloric charm--peasant girls, gabled medieval facades, and wobbling, force-fed geese--he had evoked in an 1869 painting, just a year before France was stricken. Manet himself, who, under the Commune, enlisted as a lieutenant in...