F Ferretti 2019 Anarchism Geography and PDF

Anarchism, Geography and Painting: Élisée Reclus and Social Art
Federico Ferretti
Abstract: This chapter investigates the relationship between the famous anarchist geographer
Élisée Reclus and the numerous artists he was acquainted with during his long career as a
scientist and a militant. It contributes to recent international literature on the relation between
art and anarchism through the prism of Reclus and his scholarly and activist networks. Based
on the exploration of primary sources such as correspondence and original texts by Reclus and
his collaborators, my main argument is that Reclus’s engagement with visual arts (especially
drawing and painting) allows understanding some fundamental points of both his geography
and his anarchism. Reclus’s idea of beauty was inseparably linked with his idea of justice.
Therefore, he argued that the social scientist, the activist and the artist had all the task of
building a better world, socially and aesthetically. For that reason, Reclus collaborated with
artists representing different visual tendencies because he considered the social contents as
paramount in the assessment of art, though engaging directly with visual languages for both
geographical publishing and political propaganda.
During his long life and career, the famous anarchist geographer Élisée Reclus (1830−1905)
engaged directly or indirectly with visual arts in three ways at least. First, he collaborated with
several artists to build the iconographic apparatus of his works: yet, this did not mean that
Reclus simply appointed draughtsmen for doing the maps and figures accompanying his books.
Indeed, he conceptualized these images together with them, as shown by the publication of new
sources such as the correspondence he exchanged with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel.
(Ferretti 2012b) Among others, this work involved Charles Perron (1837−1909) and André
Słomczynski (1844−1910), respectively cartographer and draughtsman for the New Universal
Geography (1876−1894); it was also the case with Léon Benet (1839−1916), famous for
illustrating the Jules Verne’s novels, (Benet et al. 2011) who made the illustrated tables
accompanying two of the most famous of Reclus’s works, Histoire d’une montagne (1880) and
the second edition of Histoire d’un ruisseau (1881). František Kupka (1871−1957), one of the
‘fathers’ of abstraction, completed the full illustration of the last of Reclus’s works L’Homme
et la terre in six volumes (1905−1908). Second, Reclus was directly acquainted with painters
who were akin to his political views and shared in some way his scholarly and activist networks,
such as Gustave Courbet (1819−1877), a protagonist of the Paris Commune in 1871, and
Auguste Baud-Bovy (1848−1899), a Geneva painter close to the circuits of internationalists and
political exiles in Switzerland of which Reclus was a prominent member. Third, Reclus’s works
exerted an important influence on several impressionist, neo-impressionist and ‘avant-garde’
F. Ferretti, “Anarchism, geography and social art”, in C. Kosuch (ed.) Anarchist Avant-Garde,
Amsterdam, Brill, 2019, 235-259,
https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004410428/BP000013.xml
painters who took inspiration from both his geography and his anarchism, such as Camille
Pissarro (1830−1903), Paul Signac (1863−1935), Maximilien Luce (1858−1941) and many
others.
Reclus engaged with different visual styles, as he was concerned with the social contents
and utilizations of art rather than in discussing aesthetic languages. Nevertheless, he actively
participated in the elaboration of the visual and graphic aspects of his books, contributing to
what French historians consider as a social turn that ‘fine arts’ experienced in the last decades
of the nineteenth century, when many artists adhered to advanced social movements which
inspired their artistic works. (Prochasson 2006) Reclus’s ideas substantially matched the
principles of ‘social art’ as discussed at that time and anticipated some features of what was
then called ‘avant-garde’. Definitions such as ʻavant-gardeʼ and ʻmodernismʼ are considered
very slippery by the classical works addressing their theories and need to be contextualized and
understood as an “historical concept”. (Poggioli 1968: 3) If authors like Renato Poggioli
extended the definition of avant-garde as “sense of exception, novelty and surprise”, (Poggioli
1968: 8) to the mid-nineteenth century, and even supposed an “avant-garde character of
naturalism”, (Poggioli 1968: 11) others, like Peter Bürger and Jochen Schulte-Sasse, argued for
“the historical uniqueness of the avant-garde of the 1920s”. (Schulte-Sasse 1984: x) These
critics disagreed with Poggoli’s views, which somehow equated modernism and avant-garde,
and considered that “the social role of the modernist and the avant-garde artists are radically
different”. (Schulte-Sasse 1984: xv)
According to Schulte-Sasse, these definitions differ because, while modernism mainly
“calls attention on its own material”, (Schulte-Sasse 1984: xxxv) the specificity of avant-garde
is that it “attacks the institution of art”, (Schulte-Sasse 1984: xxxvi) dealing directly with social
realities and, in Bürger’s definition, spreading consciousness of the “artistic means” by
“shocking the recipient”. (Bürger 1984: 18) Drawing critically upon Walter Benjamin’s notion
of ‘the loss of aura’, Bürger defined the European artistic avant-garde of the twentieth century
as “the conscious acts of a generation of artists”, (Bürger 1984: 29) who challenged the
(bourgeois) idea of ‘art for art’s sake’ and attacked “not a style but art as an institution that is
un-associated with the life praxis of men”. (Bürger 1984: 49) Given these premises, it would
be clearly anachronistic to define Reclus’s artistic networks as ‘avant-garde’. Yet, following
Bürger and Schulte-Sasse, it is possible to consider that Reclus’s ideas roughly anticipated some
of the characteristics that these authors attributed to avant-garde, such as the link between art
and some radical political commitment, the questioning of the ‘bourgeois’ principle where the
“individual is considered the creator of the work of art” (Bürger 1984: 52) and in general the
aim “to eliminate the antithesis between producer and recipient”. (Bürger 1984: 53)
These considerations suggest that the anarchist networks I address posed some bases
which might have been used for further artistic elaborations, as I discuss below. This chapter
also extends international scholarship rediscovering the historical and conceptual links between
anarchism and geography as being both ways of thinking spaces and terrestrial materialities to
transform society. (Pelletier 2013; Springer 2016) More specifically, the figure of Élisée Reclus
has been the object of new studies analysing his scholarly, activist, social and family networks
as a fundamental part of his work. (Brun 2014; Ferretti 2014a) A key member of Reclus’s
networks was another famous ‘anarchist geographer’, Piotr Kropotkin (1842−1921), who
shared a great part of Reclus’s geographical and activist endeavours.
Against the backdrop of these focal points, I will especially analyse Reclus’s networks
to assess the participation of artists and the signification of visual art for their viability. My
main argument is that early anarchist geographers were fully committed to include visual arts
in their strategy of public communication and their construction of spatial knowledge. Initially,
this was mainly intended to foster popular education and scientific dissemination; later, visual
styles such as neo-impressionism became conceptually inseparable from the idea of social
emancipation through space, though Reclus and Kropotkin always declared to be more
interested in visual arts’ social contents than in their formal languages. However, especially in
Reclus’s case, the great originality of early anarchist geographers was the fact that they thought
of the world as the true artwork, to be embellished by the social scientists and activists, an
aesthetic betterment which would have corresponded to social revolution.
In the first part of this chapter, I address the origins of this discourse, inspired by French
anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809−1865) who considered visual arts as a powerful
vehicle of political propaganda, a vision which influenced Reclus, especially during his exile
in Switzerland (1872−1889). There, Reclus’s networks included militant artists who
collaborated in the iconographic and cartographic apparatus of his Nouvelle Géographie
universelle (1876−1894), such as Perron and Słomczynski, or played a role in inserting Reclus
in local activists’ circles, like in the case of Baud-Bovy. All these authors were acquainted with
Courbet, who was an exile of the 1871 Paris Commune, like Reclus, and an important
interpreter of the concept of social art at that time. In the second part, I analyse Reclus’s concept
of the world as an artwork. On the one hand, this entailed giving value to the naturalistic fieldtrip
(i. e. the direct experience of the world) as the most important pedagogic experience. On the
other, it inspired the material construction of geographical objects which could provide a
representation alternative to that of flat maps, such as globes and raised-reliefs. In the third part,
I address the sociability networks which linked the anarchist movement, especially through
Reclus’s and Kropotkin’s close collaborator Jean Grave (1854−1939), to the movement of
French neo-impressionist painters, drawing upon recent literature (Roslak 2007; Ferretti-
Bocquillon 2010; Leighten 2013) and primary sources such as Reclus’s correspondence and
Grave’s archives surviving at the IFHS (Institut Français d’Histoire Sociale).1
Proudhon, Courbet, Reclus: art for everybody
With his pamphlet, Du Principe de l’art et de sa destination sociale (1865), Proudhon was one
of the protagonists of the debates on ‘art and the people’ launched in the nineteenth century by
several French socialists and by famous writers such as Victor Hugo. In the 1860s, Proudhon
intervened in the ongoing polemics on the realistic painting by Courbet, defending the painter,
who had proposed a public “discourse on the democratic art”. (Schlesser 2005: 1) This
discourse imbedded the rebuttal of metaphysics and of religious art as well as the purpose of
doing a ‘social art’, targeting people’s emancipation. (Prochasson 2006) Courbet’s production,
from works such as Un Enterrement à Ornans (1850), had this explicit social and philosophical
aim. According to Thomas Schlesser, Courbet “first attributed to his art a philosophical function
(‘reason’s emancipation’) allowing it to exert an influence on society and politics to promote
individual liberation and then collective emancipation through democracy”. (Schlesser 2005: 3)
Thus, substituting religious and mystic illusions with social realities was a central task for an
artist who considered himself as “coming from the people and talking directly to the people: it
was no longer time to paint the rich, the future was for social art”. (Schlesser 2005: 6) A
characteristic of this idea was the subversion of the social hierarchies represented in traditional
1
Part of the materials used for this chapter were discussed in French (Ferretti 2014b). All quotations from sources
in French have been translated by the author, with the exception of those from L’Art et le Peuple, which partially
rely on the translation appeared in Reclus 1927. For some idiomatic or especially significant expressions, the
original French has been given additionally to the English translation.
paintings: proletarians became the protagonists of the paintings, substituting celebrative images
of kings, priests, warriors and various ‘heroes’.
Already in 1854, Courbet appreciated Proudhon, defining him “the philosopher who has
my same ideas” (Courbet 1996: 122) and wishing to portray him, what in fact did happen.
(Bowness 1978) An inspiration for the federalist ideas of later anarchists like Reclus,
(Ferretti/Castleton 2016) Proudhon discussed the role aesthetics should play in the process of
social emancipation. The French philosopher considered art as politics, and its different values
were expressed by the historical succession of painting schools: there, Proudhon identified a
classical school, politically conservative and represented by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
(1780−1867); a romantic school, associated with liberal bourgeoisie and represented by Eugène
Delacroix (1798−1863), and a realistic school, politically the most radical, represented by
Courbet. Proudhon had been scandalized by a decision of the Second Empire administration,
which decided to admit Ingres as a member of the French Senate. “[E]ncore une fois, le
gouvernement préfère-t-il, en fait d’art, la décrépitude à la jeunesse, les antiquailles aux
inventions nouvelles. L’art est-il un élément de civilisation ou de décadence?” (“Once again,
our government prefers decrepitude to youth, old junk to new inventions in matter of art. Is art
a factor in progress or in decadence”?) (Proudhon 1865 [1875]: 8) The French philosopher
concluded that there is no politically neutral art. “Toute création de l’art, comme de l’industrie
ou de la politique, a nécessairement une destination; elle est faite pour un but. Il est absurde de
supposer que quelque chose se produise dans la société, ‒ pourquoi ne dirions-nous pas dans
l'univers? ‒ à seule fin de se produire”. (“Every creation of art, as well as of politics or industry,
does have necessarily a destination: it is done for some aim. It is absurd to suppose that, in
society, anything could be produced only to produce it”.) (Proudhon 1865 [1875]: 369) There
were only two alternatives for art: either being a vehicle for social emancipation through its
realism and educational value “to perform the moral, physical and intellectual betterment of
humankind”, or being ‘art for art’s sake’, devoid of a positive and social mission to perform
only “une [mission sociale] parfaitement irrationnelle, chimérique et immorale” (“a highly
irrational, chimeric and immoral [social mission]”). (Proudhon 1865 [1875]: 370)
It is in this historical, cultural and political context that we should read the important
relations Reclus had with artists, especially painters and draughtsmen. Courbet and Reclus were
both famous names associated with the 1871 Paris Commune, albeit playing different roles, as
the anarchist geographer was imprisoned by the people of Versailles after the first clashes, while
Courbet was a central figure in the Commune council, being also accused to be one of the
persons responsible for the destruction of the Vendôme column in May 1871. (Descaves 1922)
The shared experience was their common exile in French Switzerland, where Courbet died in
1877 and Reclus remained until his return to France in 1889. They also lived for few months in
the same village, La-Tour-de-Peilz, where Courbet resided permanently and Reclus stayed from
July 1874 to the spring of 1875. (Brun 2015) It is certain that they were acquainted and moved
in the same circle of friends in their Swiss exile, but they never cooperated directly for a series
of reasons. First, Reclus arrived in the canton of Vaud only in 1874, when the physical and
mental health of Courbet was already compromised by alcoholism, which led to his death three
years later. Second, their styles of life were too different: Reclus was the personified stereotype
of the great worker with ascetic habits, while Courbet was exactly the opposite, cultivating all
the possible excesses in matter of food, alcohol, tobacco and night life. According to Gary
Dunbar, who referred to the rigid education Reclus received as the son of a Calvinist minister
in Southwestern France, “Reclus’s puritanical habits provoked admiration and a little
amusement among his friends. Courbet said that Reclus lived on lentils and water and warned
against accepting invitations to dine with him”. (Dunbar 1978: 78) According to the historian
of the exiled Communards, Lucien Descaves, Courbet launched also sarcastic jokes on Reclus,
telling his friends that “il travaille comme une couseuse” (“he work[ed] like a seamstress”).
(Descaves 1922: 236) With such gags, Courbet eventually expressed some male chauvinism, a
position typical especially for Proudhon but strongly disapproved by Reclus, an enthusiastic
supporter of early feminists’ claims. (Ferretti 2016a)
Courbet’s behaviours caused also some embarrassment among the militants of the
Fédération jurassienne, the first anarchist organization in history (1871−1880) which brought
together Reclus and Kropotkin. (Nettlau 1928 [1930]) James Guillaume (1844−1916), Reclus’s
and Kropotkin’s friend and collaborator, described the impression Courbet made on him during
an otherwise sober anarchist dinner in Vevey as follows:
After the political meeting, there was a dinner party with speeches, music and socialist songs.
Courbet, who lived in Vevey since 1872, joined us; I had never met him before, and I looked with
some curiosity at this gentle giant who sat down, with two or three friends he brought with him, at
a table which was soon charged with wine bottles. With his rude peasant’s voice, he sang for us all
the evening, without any need to encourage him, some rustic and monotonous melodies from the
Franche-Comté, which at the end ‘sucked’ us, as was said by another Communard who did not like
him. (Guillaume 1905: 295)2
Thus, Courbet and Reclus shared the same networks of the French exiles associated with
the libertarian ‘minority’ of the Commune, constantly under the eyes of the French police. A
close collaborator of both Reclus and Courbet was the Polish painter André Słomczynski, also
called Slom, likewise exiled from the Commune, who lived in Courbet’s house in these years
(Lindsay 1973: 308) and worked then as a draughtsman for Reclus’s Nouvelle Géographie
universelle, realizing a part of the engravings until the mid-1890s. (Reclus 1927) According to
Descaves’s recollections, Slom was “un bien aimable garçon..., condamné à mort” (“a lovely
boy […] condemned to a death sentence”) (Descaves 1922: 207) for his actions during the
Commune. After the 1879 and 1880 amnesties, all the surviving Communards were allowed to
return to France, however.
In Switzerland, Reclus was also acquainted with local painters like Auguste Baud-Bovy,
a protagonist of an unique project that Swiss historian Marc Vuilleumier defined as a radical
community of Geneva artists and craftsmen, “who, in 1849, bought the Gruyères Castle [in the
Freiburg canton] starting to spend their summers there and to restore these very ruined
buildings. […] Courbet also frequented Gruyères from 1855 onwards”. (Vuilleumier 1996: 13)
According to Vuilleumier, the generation of Auguste Baud-Bovy turned this “phalanstère
genevois” (“Genevan phalanstère”) (Anker 1991: 22) into a clearly socialistic experience, a
place of welcome for foreign artists and political refugees. Baud-Bovy was close to the First
International activists in Geneva, and after 1871 was considered as “the devoted protector of all
the Commune refugees”. (Anker 1991: 22) Among the French exiles he supported, were not
only Courbet and Reclus, but also activists such as Benoît Malon (1841−1893) and his partner
André Léo, pseudonym of Léodile Béra-Champseix (1824−1900), novelist and early feminist,
a life-long friend of Reclus and a Baud-Bovy’s correspondent. (Vuilleumier 1996)
In Geneva, Baud-Bovy was the person who included Reclus in the ‘popular conferences’
which took place there from 1875 on. Progressive intellectuals were appointed to foster
workers’ education through evening lectures. (Heimberg 1996: 544) The correspondence
between Reclus and Baud-Bovy on arts and scholarship reveals the importance they ascribed
2
The French original reads: “qui, à la longue, finirent par nous ‘raser’, comme disait un autre communard qui ne
l’aimait pasˮ.
to education. It also highlights the role of daily and practical solidarity in shaping their
networks. For instance, Baud-Bovy was among the first to help Reclus, who worked in an
isolated village in Ticino from 1872 to 1874, to consult the books he needed for the big
endeavour of his Nouvelle Géographie universelle. Baud-Bovy networked for this purpose with
the Geneva Geographical Society on behalf of the French geographer, as a letter of Reclus
suggests:
Lady André Léo was so nice to write you about my issue, so I am encouraged to write directly.
Books arrive to me with some difficulties, and I often must send requests to libraries. Yet, I could
not find anybody for sending me Le Globe, the geographical journal of Geneva. […] If possible,
could you forward my subscription directly to the secretary of the Geneva Geographical Society? 3
The role popular education played for the sake of coherence between scholarly and
political activities is revealed by a letter in which Reclus accepted Baud-Bovy’s invitation for
the popular lectures.
Though very busy, I would not dare to refuse your proposal. The idea of lecturing for workers is
very seductive to me, and I would be very happy to contribute this way to our cause. But will I be
able to do that? […] Please give me some more details before proposing my name to the board. Will
I be allowed to do only one lecture per fortnight? Would my course ‘Geography Applied to History’
fit to the public? Will I have full freedom of speech? Can I discuss the choice of dates in order to
take advantage of my trips to Geneva, where I would like to attend the meetings of the Geographical
Society?4
Twenty years later, Reclus’s correspondences with Auguste’s son, Daniel Baud-Bovy
(1870−1958), novelist and art critic, showed further engagement towards performing aesthetic
experiences for pedagogical aims. In his letters to Reclus, the younger Baud-Bovy lamented the
death of Barthélemy Menn (1815−1893), artist and a sort of spiritual guru for the Geneva
cenacle Les Humanistes, whose members targeted “a transformation of the basic principles of
education through painting”. (Anker 1991: 68) According to Baud-Bovy, Menn’s loss had
rendered impossible the creation of the self-managed school of arts they wanted to open in
Geneva.5
3
Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève, Département des Manuscrits (hereafter BGE), Archives Baud-Bovy, Ms. 237,
Reclus to Baud-Bovy, 30 November 1872.
4
BGE, Archives Baud-Bovy, Ms. 237, Reclus to Baud-Bovy, 19 November 1874.
5
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France Département des Manuscrits Occidentaux, Nouvelles Acquisitions
Françaises (hereafter BNF-NAF), 22914, Baud-Bovy to Reclus, 19 November 1894.
In the milieus of Geneva internationalists Reclus met one of his most important
collaborators, Charles Perron, craftsman and enamel painter, who worked as the cartographer
for the Nouvelle Géographie universelle during the following twenty years. At that time,
geographical publications were increasingly enriched by iconographic systems of maps,
diagrams, engravings and photos. (Mendibil 2000) From 1895 on, Perron would also be one of
the protagonists of the realization of three-dimensional geographical objects for Reclus’s
project of the Great Globe, (Ferretti 2014c) as I discuss in the next section. During his exile in
Switzerland, Reclus also was preoccupied with the choice of the engravings which would
illustrate Histoire d’un ruisseau and Histoire d’une montagne. As his correspondence with the
Paris publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814−1876) suggests, the geographer was initially unhappy
with the work of Léon Benet, the draughtsman of Jules Verne, to whom Hetzel had entrusted
the illustrations. In his letters to both the editor and the artist, Reclus insisted on the principle
that an image, to have a pedagogical value, should be realistic and the most possible ‘true to
nature’. This demonstrates that Reclus was always very committed to seek the best visual
language to express his ideas. (Ferretti 2012b)
In that period (1870s−1880s), Reclus and his collaborators generally shared a rather
realistic-descriptive idea of art to serve pedagogic tasks. As I explain below, this was no longer
the case with the neo-impressionists and with a pioneer of abstraction like Kupka. To him,
Reclus entrusted the illustration of his last work L’Homme et la terre (1905−1908). Kupka
designed an accompanying graphic apparatus which Marie-Pierre Salé considers to be
“intimately linked to [Reclus’s] text” (Salé 2002: 105) and the result of a “passionate
collaboration” (Salé 2002: 105) between the two men. Yet, Kupka had little time to cooperate
directly with Reclus, as most of this work appeared after Reclus’s death, edited by Elisée’s
nephew Paul Reclus (1858−1941). Only on 4 June 1905, that is one month before the
geographer’s death, did Kupka send to Reclus the first two images he had drawn for him. They
were the famous cover image with a man looking down to earth from space, and of the likewise
famous frame (Fig. 1) containing the aphorism “Man is Nature becoming Self-Conscious”.6
Reclus was an important source of inspiration for Kupka’s work as the letters the painter sent
to Jean Grave after Reclus’s death suggest. There, Kupka promised benefit drawings for the
anarchist press, “to respectfully honour the memory of Élisée Reclus, who would be delighted
6
BNF-NAF, 22914, Kupka to Reclus, 4 June 1905.
to know that I am working with you”.7 Kupka also corresponded with the Spanish anarchist and
educator Francisco Ferrer y Guardia (1859−1909), who discussed with the artist a new coloured
version of the cover image for the Spanish edition of L’Homme et la terre. Kupka had proposed
the image of “an intellectual and a proletarian supporting each other”,8 but apparently it was
never completed.
Illustr. 1: “Nature Self-Consciousness” in Reclus 1905: 1.
It is possible to conclude this section with a reference to Hem Day (pseudonym of Marcel Dieu,
1902−1969), a Belgian anarchist intellectual and Reclus’s admirer. Day highlighted Reclus’s
care for all the aspects of his books, including the material ones studied today under the
definition of materialist hermeneutics, (Mayhew 2007) by arguing that the anarchist
geographer, “rêvait comme les Florentins de la belle époque de tailler lui-même les caractères
qui servent à l’impression de son livre” (“like the Florentines of the Renaissance, dreamed to
cut himself the typographic characters serving to print his book”). (Day 1956: 27)
7
Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, Institut Français d’Histoire Sociale, Fonds Jean Grave, 14 AS 184a (hereafter IFHS), Kupka
to Grave, December 1905.
8
Amsterdam, International Institute of Social History (hereafter IISH), Spain, Various Manuscripts Collection,
Folder 7, Kupka, Ferrer to Kupka, 5 July 1909.
Globes, fieldwork and ‘Naturphilosophie’: the world as an artwork
The aphorism on nature’s self-consciousness recalls a central point of Reclus’s thinking: his
life-long references to the German movement known as ‘Naturphilosophie’, especially
represented by Friedrich Schelling and Lorenz Oken, authors of Reclus’s youth readings,
(Reclus 1911: 17) and more largely by Baruch Spinoza, influential on Oken and Schelling, and
of course on Reclus. (Ferretti/Malburet/Pelletier 2011) ‘Naturphilosophie’ considered
‘humankind’ and ‘nature’ as consubstantial entities, denying any dichotomy between nature
and culture, the natural and the artificial, history and environment. As a logical consequence of
this idea, Reclus argued that the true artwork should be the world, referring to the idea of nature
not as an idealized ‘wilderness’ dissociated from human agency as his North-American fellow
geographer George Perkins-Marsh (1801−1882) proposed, but as the cooperation of both
human and non-human agencies to embellish the planet, that is to transform society according
to libertarian and egalitarian principles. (Ferretti 2014b)
In a pamphlet titled L’Art et le peuple (1904), the geographer dealt with these topics.
At the closing of the Salon, one of my friends, an amateur connoisseur of beautiful things, came to
me quite desolate. He had been ill and had taken a journey away from Paris. Now he returned too
late for the Exhibition and so he lamented not having been able to see these multitudes of marbles
and paintings which special reviews kept him conversant with. The dear comrade may reassure
himself. A walk upon forest-paths, on fallen leaves, or one moment of repose upon the brink of a
pure fountain − if he can find one still fifteen or twenty leagues away from the boulevard − will
console him for having missed his visit to the habitual museum where there is shut up every year
temporarily that which is called the fine arts. (Reclus 1904 [2012]: 140)9
This did not mean that Reclus despised the ‘fine arts’. On the contrary, he declared to
admire them, but at the same time he raised the problem of their social utility.
There also do I see the artist prestidigitators who manipulate and mix colours with an incomparable
dexterity, who blend in a thousand ways lights and shadows in a hash which is entirely unexpected
and who succeed in making a stunning light spring up from the darkest depths. All this seems to be
very fine, or rather surprising, and I applaud the virtuosi of the pencil in all sincerity. Nevertheless,
I am not at all satisfied. Is it this indeed which is true art? Can all these paintings, sculptures,
engraved or embroidered objects make me forget the sordid misery outside and the presence of the
armed policeman who stands near the door [...]? No, all this multi-coloured art that accumulates its
9
The French original reads “sa visite au palais coutumier où, tous les ans, sont enfermés temporairement ce que
l’on appelle les ‘beaux-arts’ˮ.
incongruous products in rooms lent by the State can only be a false and lying art, for it is not the
work of a free people. (Reclus 1904 [2012]: 141)10
A free art, on the contrary, could start to “embellish the planet” from architecture and regional
planning. “Ah, if the painters and sculptors were free, there would be no need for them to shut
themselves up in Salons. They would have but to reconstruct our cities, first demolishing these
ignoble cubes of stone where human beings are piled up”. (Reclus 1904 [2012]: 141−142)
Reclus’s idea of beauty was strictly linked to his idea of justice, which contradicts judgments
considering ‘political anarchism’ and ‘cultural anarchism’ as rather separate spheres, like in the
works of David Weir. (Weir 1997)
Matching Kropotkin’s views, Reclus found historical examples of coherence in
experiences of collective participation in town building such as in Ancient Greece and in the
Middle Ages.
This way, one saw the raising of Greek cities and medieval naves: entire populations, animated by
the same spirit, pushed by the same desire, collaborated to the common good which should be at the
same time the collective glory and the private pleasure of each citizen. […] Every member of the
commune found in the building the part where his ideal of beauty had taken a material form. (Reclus
1904 [2012]: 143)
Materiality was likewise important to Reclus, who highlighted misery as a key problem for art.
“Comment un peuple deviendrait-il artiste quand les souffrances de la faim et de la maladie
forcée l’enlaidissent?” (“How can a people become artists when the sufferings of hunger and
unnatural illness render it ugly?”) Quoting Ruskin and his idea of public betterment through
art, Reclus came back to his own principles in social and engaged art. “‘Art is life’, said Jean
Baffier, the workingman sculptor who has put so much passion and joy in chiselling out of the
marble the noble and pure figure of his mother, the peasant woman and those of the valiant
workers, prudent gardeners”. (Reclus 1904 [2012]: 145)
Consistently with ‘Naturphilosophie’, Reclus put the ‘embellishment’ of cities in the
wider framework of a progressive integration of town and countryside. (Ferretti 2012a) “It is
not only the restoration and embellishment of our cities that we expect from the man who
becomes artist. Because he will be free, we also count upon him to renew the beauty of the
fields, in adapting all his works to their proper milieu in nature”. (Reclus 1904 [2012]: 146)
10
The French original reads: “ne peut être qu’un art faux, mensonger, car il n’est pas l’œuvre d’un peuple libreˮ.
The harmony between a building and its site was again explained by a historical example. “A
Greek temple continued, developed and made flourish the shapes of the rock on which it was
built. It was its integral part, but giving it a more elevated sense”. (Reclus 1904 [2012]: 147)
On the other hand, building speculation didn’t belong to Reclus’s vision of
embellishment grounded in ‘Naturphilosophie’:
One has a feeling of real disgust when insolent architects, paid by obscene innkeepers, build
enormous caravansaries, erect rectangular blocks, on which are hewed out a thousand squares of
symmetrical windows, and which bristle with a hundred smoking chimneys. All this in the face of
superb summits of granite, fields of immaculate snow, rivers of blue ice meandering in the valleys
of the mountain. (Reclus 1904 [2012]: 147)11
Reclus’s conclusion clearly merged art, geography and activism. “The earth is infinitely
beautiful, but for us to associate ourselves to its beauty, to glorify it by a respectful art, there is
no other means but that of becoming free, of instituting the decisive revolution against money
and of ennobling the class-struggle by abolishing the classes themselves”. (Reclus 1904 [2012]:
147−148)
On the contrary, ugliness was considered to increase when the harmony between nature
and humankind was sacrificed for profit, like in the case of pollutant factories, or for reason of
State, like in the case of military settlements. In his early paper Du Sentiment de la nature dans
les sociétés modernes (1866) Reclus contrasted the beauty of landscapes with the ugliness of
their modification.
Speculation usurps all the charming places, dividing them in rectangular parcels, closing them with
uniform walls and then constructing hundreds or thousands of pretentious cottages […]. On the sea
shores, the most picturesque cliffs, the most beautiful beaches are often grabbed by egoist landlords
or by speculators who appreciate nature’s beauty in the same way a banker estimates a gold bar.
(Reclus 1866: 377)
The reason for all that was “the fact that everything can become private property”, (Reclus
1866: 377) implying that, for Reclus, art is incompatible with state and capitalism.
In L’Homme et la terre, Reclus came back to the concept of art in the chapter dedicated
to anarchist education, which drew upon a direct approach to the world, following the works of
Swiss pedagogue Heinrich Pestalozzi.
11
The French original reads: “Le tout en face de pics superbes de granit, des champs de neige immaculés, des
fleuves de glace bleue serpentant dans les vallées de la montagneˮ.
The part of education that should result in great aesthetic transformations is even more delicate than
the scientific one, because its elaboration is entirely personal and very nuanced. The feeling of
beauty precedes the notion of classification and order: art comes before science. The child is
enchanted by handling a luminous object, with vivid colours and silvery sounds; he enjoys
delightfully the music of sounds and nuances, and only later he tries to understand the reason of this
rattle. (Reclus 1908: 479−480)
This does not mean that art belongs only to the ‘irrational’ and the ‘non-scientific’: for Reclus,
the more the artist is free and creative, the more his work can be useful to the social cause. “The
one who pretends to be an artist by the servile imitation of masters […] will only become a
lamentable copyist, a generator of decadence and death. According to Ruskin, the first rule of
art is to be sincere, spontaneous and personal”. (Reclus 1908: 480) It is worth noting that this
did not correspond to a Rousseau-like naturalism praising the ‘state of nature’ against
civilization, because Reclus was enthusiastic not only about ‘nature’ but also about science and
technology, which he believed would not demolish but improve the environment. Throughout
his career, Reclus sought a synthesis between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ anticipating today’s
approaches deployed by ‘hybrid’ and ‘more-than-human’ geographies. (Ferretti 2017)
Reclus matched Proudhon’s anticlericalism, blaming Christian traditions in art for their
ideological role and their censure of the human body:
The material tyranny of masters and castes is not the only one which hinders art’s development: the
heavy oppression of an unintelligent public opinion does the same. The evil accomplished by the
moral and religious hypocrisy which rages in the Anglo-Saxon countries under the name of cant is
incalculable [...]. Until recent times, the so-called ‘convenient’ arts and literature were forced to
ignore completely sexual life. Beyond the purely spiritual love, it seemed that the human being was
completely bodiless: a flame, a light, an elf. In that, the modern epoch, submitted to this shameful
condemnation of flesh pronounced by Christianity, is still inferior to the noble Hellas, which
respected and divinized the human forms. (Reclus 1908: 484)12
Albeit an early propagandist of naturism and nakedness, Reclus still criticized the
artistic nudes produced in the ateliers as something morbid. “This appreciation of living bodies
should be done in complete freedom and in open air […] not in ateliers where people
accustomed to a conventional pose sell themselves for a tariff at each session”. (Reclus
1908: 485) Fashion and glamour were also considered as a form of commodification of art.
“Fashion still rules, like Lord Capital and the surviving State do. We should not expect that
12
The French original reads: “À cet égard, la société moderne, toujours soumise à cette honte, à cette malédiction
de la chair qu’avait prononcée le christianisme, est encore singulièrement inférieure à la noble Hellade, qui
respectait et divinisait les formes humainesˮ.
fashion abdicates spontaneously a new regime of art and reasonability arises, as it represents
the interests of numerous suppliers and infinite personal passions”. (Reclus 1908: 485)
Yet, Reclus’s contribution was not limited to theory. After engaging directly with the
iconographic apparatuses of his books, the anarchist geographer started to promote the
construction of geographical objects in three dimensions, such as globes and raised-reliefs,
whose aesthetic and visual extends had to be consistent with their scientific task. This was
defined by Reclus as the correction of the lies of flat maps. Recent scholarship has shown that
the anarchist geographers pioneered later critiques of maps as ideological devices informed by
Euro-centric views serving states, and proposed to substitute them with three-dimensional
devices especially conceived for pedagogical aims. (Ferretti 2014c) Flat maps are “d’autant
plus fausses … elles ne peuvent que tromper le lecteur sur les dimensions relatives des régions
différentes [tandis que] sur la rondeur d’un globe artificiel aucune méprise n’est possible au
sujet de la superficie relative des diverses individualités terrestres” (“false as […] they mislead
the reader on the relative dimensions of different regions. [On the contrary], on the roundness
of an artificial globe no misunderstanding is possible on the relative surface of terrestrial
individuals”). (Reclus 1895: 3−4) This was the reason for Reclus’s proposal of a Great Globe
at the scale of 1/100.000, resulting in a monumental object of 127.5 meters of diameter to be
presented at the 1900 Paris World Fair. Several studies already exist on this project: (Dunbar
1974; Alavoine-Muller 2003; Jankovic 2011; Ferretti 2014c) here, I would only stress few
points which are fundamental to understand the relation between art and anarchist geographies.
First, the Great Globe was inserted in a tradition of globes, georamas and landscape gardens
which combined both geography and visual arts all along the nineteenth century. (Besse 2003)
Second, Reclus envisaged to appoint a number of neo-impressionists (akin to his approach, as
I explain in the next section) such as Signac, Henri-Edmond Cross (1856−1910), Luce and Théo
van Rysselberghe (1862−1926), to draw the colour decoration for the globe’s huge surface.
(Roslak 2007: 109) Third, the great symbolic power of that object was an attempt to minimize
as much as possible the dichotomy between the world and its representations, that is to make
the world an artwork.
At the end, the Great Globe was not accomplished because it was considered too
pedagogical and not enough ‘spectacular’ to be funded. (Alavoine-Muller 2003; Besse 2003)
Nevertheless, Reclus continued to support the construction of smaller globes and reliefs,
endorsing Charles Perron’s Relief of Switzerland (1900) initially conceived as a part of the Great
Globe. (Ferretti 2014c) Besides, he worked with Belgian map-maker Émile Patesson for the
construction of a Globular Atlas consisting of so-called ‘spherical maps’, that is painted sheets
in aluminium reproducing in scale the terrestrial curvature related to the represented area. A
very telling anecdote is the public presentation of this object that Reclus gave at the Royal
Geographical Society in London, defining it as “a work of art, or of high-level artisanship” and
concluding that: “I speak here not as a geographer, but as an artist”. (Reclus et al. 1903: 298)
In the same years, the Geographical Institute founded by Reclus at the Université nouvelle de
Bruxelles was requested by Francisco Ferrer13 to provide this kind of objects for the Barcelona
Modern School, the most famous of the anarchist schools at that time. (Ferretti 2016b)
Finally, the anarchist geographers did not conceive the artists as ‘organic intellectuals’
like in the case of twentieth century Soviet realism. Criticizing the separation between manual
and intellectual work (Kropotkin 1898 [1910]) and matching some ‘avant-garde’ arguments
explained above, early anarchist geographers questioned the division between the professional
artist and the public, arguing that everyone should be an artist for society. This way, Reclus
joined indirectly the debate promoted in 1895 by Jean Grave on the idea of social art as opposed
to ‘art for art’s sake’. Lucien Pissarro (1863−1944) intervened, arguing that this distinction did
not exist, because
all real artistic production is social, independently by the author’s will, because who produced it
shares his emotions with his counterparts. It seems that you [Grave] are establishing hierarchies
between works, based on their direct utility for propaganda. I don’t think it is true. A work conceived
only for pure beauty might do more for human intellectuality than many others which pretend to
teach something, because this artwork will enlarge the aesthetic conceptions of other individuals.
(Pissarro 1895: 1)
For L. Pissarro, art should help to form a new society first positing the freedom of the artists as
the condition for them to be close to ‘true life’: a position like that of Reclus, eager to understand
advanced visual experiments but firstly considering their social contents. On the other hand,
Bernard Lazare (1865−1903), the anarchist writer engaged against anti-Semitism in the Dreyfus
Affair and Reclus’s friend and collaborator in Brussels, defended the idea of social art in an
1896 paper published by the journal L’Art Social, but refused to identify it with the ‘old’
naturalism and descriptive realism. (Lazare 1906)
13
BNF-NAF, 22914, Ferrer y Guardia to Reclus, 1 June 1903.
Anarchist geographies and neo-impressionism
Recently, historians of art called attention to the numerous links which existed between neo-
impressionism, the avant-gardes and anarchism in France. Among others, Robyn Roslak,
Patricia Leighten and Marina Ferretti-Bocquillon noticed how anarchist geographers such as
Reclus and Kropotkin influenced a number of artists on grounds of both their geography and
their anarchism. To give a prominent example, Paul Signac, whose adhesion to anarchism was
public and explicit, declared that his formation was influenced by Reclus and Kropotkin on
both political and cultural sides. (Roslak 2006: 860) Furthermore, according to Roslak,
anarchism and neo-impressionism shared discursive devices and metaphors inspired by
chemistry and natural sciences, which were then considered as instruments for social progress
as well as geography. (Ferretti 2017)
Chemical language and metaphors appeared regularly in the political commentaries of Grave and
Kropotkin most often in their description of human societies […] as the basis for constructing a
social order whose diverse parts were perfectly harmonized correlates with the neo-impressionists’
faith in science as the basis for constructing aesthetic harmony, the latter of which, according to
Seurat, was the essence of art. (Roslak 2007: 4−5)
The example of molecules’ reactions and recombination was often evoked to argue that all the
elements constituting a society (i. e. the individuals) could reach a condition of harmony with
the help of some correct ‘formulas’. The neo-impressionist techniques for separation of colours
and brush strokes were intended to exemplify a similar social process: the artist works on
colours’ ‘molecules’ to reach harmony in a painting, not unlike the activist and social scientist
who seeks harmony in society starting from the autonomy of individuals. (Roslak 1991) This
harmony took the form of a synthesis, a word very common in debates on the idea of anarchist
organization. (Malatesta 2014)
Ideas on landscape also played a role in this affinity between geographers and painters.
According to Roslak, “Reclus’ geography was more than an effort to understand the earth
surface objectively as a disengaged, scientific eye might see. He also understood it subjectively
and imaginatively as landscape”. (Roslak 2007: 101) This notion linked, in a rather
straightforward way, scholars like Reclus and artists like Signac. Many of these painters,
especially Luce, Signac and Charles Angrand (1854−1926), were also interested in Reclus’s
and Kropotkin’s studies on the problems of industrial cities, where they often pictured scenes
from proletarian neighbourhoods. (Roslak 2007: 126−132) Yet, urban landscapes were not the
unique places to which anarchist significations were attributed. Painters such as Henri-Edmond
Cross, and also Signac, located their representations of harmony in Mediterranean landscapes.
(Roslak 2007: 146−154) They recalled a classical anarchist interpretation often expressed by
Reclus who addressed pre-Christian Mediterranean civilizations, especially the Greek one, as
an example of societies characterized by free speech and a deep interest for philosophy, closer
to the ideal of secularization than more recent ones. Reclus even launched a metaphor defining
the Mediterranean tangles of islands and peninsulas as “the cerebral circuits where human
thinking was elaborated”. (Reclus 1876: 47) With this he contributed to what French
scholarship calls “the geographic invention of the Mediterranean”. (Deprest 2002)
Art historians like Marina Ferretti-Bocquillon stressed the direct engagement of authors
like Signac and Luce in the anarchist movement and their discussions about the best ways to
portray workers’ and popular life as symbols of proletarian action against the capitalist society,
as in the case of Signac’s painting The Demolisher. (Ferretti-Bocquillon 2010: 20−21) Yet, the
artist’s social networks intersected the anarchist intellectuals’ ones, where geographers and
artists were always in touch, directly or indirectly. A place for international exchanges was the
Université nouvelle in Brussels, Reclus’s headquarter from 1894 to 1905, where his friends
such as the poet Émile Verhaeren (1855−1916) and the painter Van Rysselberghe represented
the local contact persons for Luce, who worked in Belgium for a while. (Ferretti-Bocquillon
2010: 21) To give an example of this international circulation of activists, artists and scholars,
one might consider Camille Platteel (1854−1943): formerly a teacher in Brusselsʼ secondary
schools and a close friend of Rysselberghe, this unconventional woman is the author of the only
surviving notes on the courses Reclus delivered at the Université nouvelle.14 At the same time,
she was the lover of Félix Fénéon (1861−1944), decisive for the collaboration between
anarchists and neo-impressionists, and followed him to Paris, where she participated in the same
network, attending “all the avant-garde manifestations, where she knew everybody and
everything”. (Halperin 1991: 362)
In Paris, the main exponent of the anarchist strand internationally represented by Reclus
and Kropotkin was Jean Grave, editor-in-chief of the journal Le Révolté they founded in
14
Bruxelles, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Archives de l’Université nouvelle, I Z 456, Cours de M. Élisée Reclus,
Géographie comparée dans le temps et dans l’espace. Notes prises par Mlle Camille Platteel, professeur de
géographie aux cours d’éducation B de la Ville de Bruxelles.
Switzerland in 1879 and later published in Paris as La Révolte (1887−1894), and finally as Les
Temps Nouveaux (1895−1914). In what follows, I apply a relational approach to the Temps
Nouveaux circuits: as few documentary sources survived regarding direct contacts between
Reclus and the neo-impressionists, I use below Grave’s correspondence as a source accounting
for their interactions. While it is widely acknowledged that Grave was the major French
exponent of the political tendencies represented by Reclus and Kropotkin (then respectively
based in Brussels and London) and something like their ‘representative’ in Paris, the letters of
the authors quoted below contain several comments on Reclus and Kropotkin, or messages from
an artist to Grave on behalf of Reclus and vice versa. The implication of artists also targeted
important projects shared by Reclus and Grave like the anti-colonialist book Patriotisme et
Colonisation.
In his autobiographical recollections, Grave related the support that a significant group
of painters gave to the journal, not only to collect money but also to illustrate militant
publications, drawing especially covers for books and propaganda brochures. “We could count
on the good will of some whose reputation was not in doubt: Steinlen, Willette, Roubille, Iribe,
Grandjouan, Luce, Signac, Agar, Couturier, Angrand, Delaw, Delannoy, Van Dongen,
Lebasque, Jossot, Kupka”. (Grave 2009: 409) In the 1890s, a financial crisis arose when Reclus,
after finishing the Nouvelle Géographie universelle, could no longer provide his generous
economic contributions for Grave’s publications. (Ferretti 2014a) Thus, “Pissarro paid twice
our debts with the printer, giving thousand francs at each time”. (Grave 2009: 517) Then, an
important way of supporting the journal were tombola, for which the avant-garde artists offered
their works to be sold in support of the Temps Nouveaux. Again, Grave mentioned a list of
famous names:
For 25 pennies, it was possible to win paintings by Angrand, Agar, Bonnard […], Cross, Mme
Couturier, Van Dongen, Delannoy, d’Espagnat, Grandjouan, Hermann-Paul, F. Jourdain, Lebasque,
Lefèvre, Manzana, Paviot, Pissarro father, L. Pissarro, Luce, Petitjean, Roubille, Van Rysselberghe,
Raieter, Steinlen, Valloton and Willette. To only mention the most known. (Grave 2009: 520)
But this collaboration was not limited to benefit matters. The unpublished
correspondence of Grave, surviving in the Paris Institut Français d’Histoire Sociale (partially
reproduced in: Herbert and Herbert 1960) indicates that artists participated in the choice of
images, themes and editorial strategies, engaging with larger discussions on the anarchist
movement, like in the case of Signac, who corresponded with Grave for thirty years. Signac
provided Grave with constant feedback on the main debates and on his propaganda publications,
which he appreciated for their “langage politique net et précis et définitif […] pas des phrases:
des idées, des faits” (“clear and definitive political language […] not sentences, but ideas and
facts”).15 Like Signac, Luce widely debated activist topics, and his letters also reveal the
painter’s insertion in the international anarchist networks. At the beginning of the 1890s, Luce
requested Grave a presentation letter for one of his friends who had to visit London and was
trying to get in touch with Kropotkin.16 Luce seems to have played also a role in coordinating
the painters’ contributions for Grave’s publications, as shown by a letter dating back to 1900 in
which he mentioned the respective situations and commitments of Angrand, Cross and Signac.17
Also Charles Angrand performed similar tasks, writing to Grave that he would “try to include
as many friends as possible in our project”.18
A leitmotif of these letters was the artists’ requests for indications and inspiration for
the best kind of work to do in order to match Grave’s needs. While Luce wrote “please inspire
me, give me an indication”,19 others, like Rysselberghe, were more explicit in evoking the
difficulty of “expressing abstract ideas with an image”.20 Again, the work of these painters was
not only executive, as they also engaged in discussions about the best communicative strategies
for Le Temps Nouveaux. It was again Rysselberghe who advised Grave not to request
decorations and caricatures for the weekly journal because he thought that “l’aspect d’un
journal gagnerait à être seulement typographique. Je n’ai jamais trouvé que les vignettes,
quoique réussies fussent-elles, ajoutassent le moindre intérêt à aucun journal. [De même] un
titre orné me semble si inutile”) (“the aspect of a journal should be only typographic: I have
never thought that vignettes, albeit excellent, added any interest to a journal. [Likewise], a
decorated title seems to me so useless”).21 Jean Baffier, mentioned by Reclus in his pamphlet
on art, engaged with Grave in discussions on nature and its representations.22 Artists also
expressed their preferences concerning the best graphic solutions for popular propaganda and
15
IFHS, Signac to Grave, 18 November 1899.
16
Ibid., Luce to Grave, December 1890.
17
Ibid., Luce to Grave, 1900 [n. d.].
18
Ibid., Angrand to Grave, [n. d.], f. 48.
19
Ibid., Luce to Grave, Spring 1905.
20
Ibid., Rysselberghe to Grave, 6 July 1998.
21
Ibid., Rysselberghe to Grave, 30 March 1905.
22
Ibid., Baffier to Grave, 25 December 1895, 17 February 1897.
clarity, like in the case of Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (1859−1923). He argued that “we
should do a drawing and not a rebus, something which is too often forgotten in journalism”.23
Cross, the author of one of the most impressive anti-colonialist drawings for the
exceptional collective book edited by Grave and prefaced by Reclus in 1903, Patriotisme et
Colonisation (Fig. 2), discussed this work with Grave asking him to confirm the latest version
apologizing in case it would not fit Grave’s needs. “[J]’ai constaté en le faisant que je manquais
d’entrainement dans ce genre.” (“Doing this, I realized that I lack training in this genre.”)24
Indeed, the editorial engraving was a challenging genre for some of these painters, often
accustomed to work with different techniques. An exception were the authors specializing in
illustration, such as Lebasque, Steinlen or Hermann-Paul, artists whom Signac often
recommended to Grave because he considered himself unable to deal with all his requests.25
Yet, it was Camille Pissarro who was always willing to discuss with Grave editorial business
involving publishers such as Hachette, Stock or Gallimard. Pissarro asked his son Lucien to
contribute to the illustration of Grave’s novel Les Aventures de Nono (1901), which included a
tribute to Reclus portrayed as the savant Botanicus. Besides, he requested copies of the
autobiography of Kropotkin (both published by Stock).26 Steinlen similarly provided a cover
image for for one of the numerous editorial versions of Reclus's L'évolution, la révolution et
l'idéal anarchique (1898).27 Moreover, Lebasque, Hermann-Paul, Jourdan and Luce
corresponded with the other editor of Les Temps Nouveaux and Grave’s, Reclus’s and
Kropotkin’s friend Paul Delesalle (1870−1948), on the same kind of editorial projects.28
23
Ibid., Steinlen to Grave, 4 July 1912.
24
Ibid., Cross to Grave, n. d., f. 132.
25
Ibid., Signac to Grave, [n. d.], f. 1321, 1322.
26
Ibid., Pissarro to Grave, 15 September 1900; 27 August 1902.
27
Ibid., Steinlen to Grave, 10 June [no year, f. 1341].
28
Ibid., Dossier 14 AS 53ter, various artists to Delesalle.
Illustr. 2: Henri-Edmond Delacroix’s (ʻCross’sʼ) drawing for Patriotisme et Colonisation. (Grave 1903: n. p.)
Camille Pissarro’s published correspondence with his son Lucien witnesses his acquaintance
with Reclus and Van Rysselberghe. In July 1894, the three men travelled together in the
Flanders for some days; (Pissarro 1988: 469) according to Joël Cornuault, this travel expressed
the common involvement of painting and geography with fieldwork techniques. (Cornuault
1999) One of Reclus’s sons-in-law, William Barbotin (1861−1931), was a painter, albeit
working on more traditional styles than the neo-impressionists and avant-garde artists.
However, he contributed to the illustrations of his father-in-law’s works and militated in the
anarchist movement, (Jung 2013) including the realization of engravings for Grave’s tombola,
mainly portraying famous anarchists such as Bakunin, Proudhon, Cafiero and of course Reclus.
(Grave 2009: 529) In his correspondences with Grave, Barbotin often sent Reclus’s notes that
the geographer entrusted to him for Les Temps Nouveaux.29
29
Ibid., Barbotin to Grave, n. d., f. 658.
Finally, as Patricia Leighten has noticed, one of the topics which linked artist avant-
garde and anarchism was anti-colonialism, well exposed in a series of satirical drawings
published by journals such as L’Assiette au Beurre. (Leighten 2013) Yet, more work is needed
on the commitment of the artists mentioned above, namely Luce, Lebasque, Cross, Willaume,
Jourdan, Agar, Angrand, Couturier, Roubille, to Patriotisme et Colonisation. (Grave 1903) This
book, considered as the first political expression of French left-wing anti-colonialism, (Liauzu
2012) is also important to study the impact of anarchist geographers on anti-colonial thinking,
because it includes a preface by Élisée Reclus and reproduces several chapters of the
ethnographic works by his brother Elie Reclus (1827−1904), one of the early denunciators of
the genocides of first peoples and an anthropologist who studied empathically their adaptation
to environment without pretentions of white and European superiority. (Ferretti 2014a)
Merging anti-militarist, anti-clerical and anti-colonialist topics with the mobilization of an
original geographical imagination, these painters made a separate album which accompanied
Patriotisme et Colonisation. It can be considered as an outcome of the work of anarchist
geographers in carrying anti-colonialism from the field of scholarship to the field of activism
and public communication, thanks to popular edition and engaged art.
Conclusion
Reclus and the anarchist geographers were very committed to the visual arts of their day. They
proved to be at once influential and influenced in the processes of collaboration and networking
between intellectuals, activists and painters. Several aspects of the artistic avant-garde of the
first half of the twentieth century, such as the social role of art, the questioning of the aura and
the dichotomy between ‘creative genius’ and art’s recipients observed by Bürger and Schulte-
Sasse, are shared by early anarchist geographers. It is also possible to suppose that some of
Reclus’s and Kropotkin’s ideas inspired − at least indirectly − later avant-garde artists, mediated
by figures like Kupka and the neo-impressionists with their influence on the succeeding art
movements. (Leighten 2013) Indeed, activists such as Reclus worked with painters representing
the most ‘advanced’ tendencies of that time, but they never abandoned completely a more
‘classic’ idea of social art formerly expressed by Proudhon and Courbet. Working directly on
the iconographic apparatuses of his mammoth works, Reclus always privileged their social and
pedagogical effectiveness without preferring a visual language over another.
His originality is grounded in the application of art to the principles of
‘Naturphilosophie’ as he reinterpreted it in his social geography: the true artwork is the world,
and the metaphor of the artist working on rough materials was used to express the aim of the
social reformer engaged for embellishing (that is bettering) society. Reclus’s and Perron’s
endeavours to build globes and reliefs can also be read as an attempt to minimize the dichotomy
between ‘nature and culture’, that is between the world and its representations.
This chapter has highlighted the importance of studying sociability networks to
understand the works of early anarchist geographers, their contexts and their places. (Ferretti
2014) It also confirms the importance of the integration between manual work and intellectual
work for anarchist thinking. Questioning the exclusivity of the artistic task by stating that
everyone can be the artist of social reform meant bridging the gap between actor and spectator
and questioning the division of work and social hierarchy – as shown by the continuity of
geography, art and anarchism in Reclus’s thinking.
Bibliography
Alavoine-Muller, Soizic. 2003. “Un Globe terrestre pour l’Exposition Universelle de 1900.
L’utopie géographique d’Élisée Reclus” in L’Espace géographique 2: 156−170.
Anker, Valentina. 1991. Auguste Baud-Bovy (1848−1899). Bern: Benteli.
Benet, François et. al. 2011. Léon Benet illustrateur. Lettres et dessins inédits. Lardy: A la
frontière.
Besse, Jean-Marc. 2003. Face au monde. Atlas, jardins, géoramas. Paris: Desclée De Brouwer.
Bowness, Alan. 1978. “Courbet’s Proudhon” in The Burlington Magazine 120.900: 123−130.
Brun, Christophe. 2014. “Introduction” in Elisée Reclus. Les grands textes. Paris: Flammarion:
19−52.
Bürger, Peter. 1984. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cornuault, Joël. 1999. Élisée Reclus, étonnant géographe. Périgueux: Fanlac.
Courbet, Gustave. 1996. Correspondance de Courbet. Paris: Flammarion.
Day, Hem. 1956. Élisée Reclus en Belgique, sa vie, son activité. Paris-Bruxelles: Pensée et
Action.
Deprest, Florence. 2002. “L’Invention géographique de la Méditerranée. Éléments de
réflexion” in L’Espace Géographique 1: 73−92.
Descaves, Lucien. 1922. Philémon. Vieux de la vieille. Paris: G. Crès.
Dunbar, Gary. 1974. “Élisée Reclus and the Great Globe” in Scottish Geographical Magazine
90.197: 57−66.
———. 1978. Élisée Reclus. Historian of Nature. Hamden/CT: Archon Books.
Ferretti, Federico. 2010. “Les Reclus et la maison Hachette. La première agence de la
géographie française?” in L’Espace Géographique 3: 239−252.
———. 2012a. “Aux Origines de l’aménagement régional. Le schéma de la Valley Section de
Patrick Geddes (1925)” in M@ppemonde 4:
<http://mappemonde.mgm.fr/num36/articles/art12405.html>.
———. 2012b. Élisée Reclus. Lettres de prison et d’exil. Lardy: A la frontière.
———. 2014a. Élisée Reclus, pour une géographie nouvelle. Paris: Éditions du CTHS.
———. 2014b. “La Nature comme œuvre d’art. Élisée Reclus et les (néo)impressionnistes” in
Belgeo 3.2: <http://belgeo.revues.org/13207>.
———. 2014c. “Pioneers in the History of Cartography. The Geneva map collection of Élisée
Reclus and Charles Perron” in Journal of Historical Geography 43.1: 85−95.
———. 2016a. “Anarchist Geographers and Feminism in Late 19th Century France. The
Contributions of Élisée and Elie Reclus” in Historical Geography 44: 68−88:
<https://ejournals.unm.edu/index.php/historicalgeography/article/view/3533>.
———. 2016b. “Radicalizing Pedagogy. Geography and Libertarian Education Between the
19th and the 20th Century” in Simon Springer/Marcello Lopes de Souza/Richard J.
White (eds.). Transgressing Frontiers. New York: Rowman & Littlefield: 51−72.
———. 2017. “Evolution and Revolution. Anarchist Geographies, Modernity and Post-
Structuralism” in Environment and Planning D. Society and Space:
<http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263775817694032>.
———/Edward Castleton. 2016. “Fédéralisme, Identités nationales et critique des frontières
naturelles. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809−1865) géographe des ‘États-Unis d’Europe’”
in Cybergeo: <http://cybergeo.revues.org/27639>.
———/Philippe Malburet/Philippe Pelletier. 2011. “Élisée Reclus et les Juifs. Étude
géographique d’un peuple sans État” in Cybergeo:
<http://cybergeo.revues.org/index23467.html>.
Ferretti-Bocquillon, Marina (ed.). 2008. Georges Seurat, Paul Signac e i neoimpressionisti.
Milan: Skira.
——— (ed.). 2010. Maximilien Luce, néo-impressionniste. Retrospective. Milan: Silvana
Editoriale.
Grave, Jean (ed.). 1903. Patriotisme et Colonisation. Paris: Les Temps Nouveaux.
———. 2009. Mémoires d’un anarchiste, 1854−1920. Paris: Éditions du Sextant.
Guillaume, James. 1909. L’Internationale, Documents et Souvenirs, vol. III. Paris: Stock.
Halperin, Joan U. 1991. Félix Fénéon, art et anarchie dans le Paris fin de siècle. Paris:
Gallimard.
Heimberg, Charles. 1996. L’Œuvre des travailleurs eux-mêmes? Valeurs et espoirs dans le
mouvement ouvrier genevois au tournant du siècle (1885−1914). Geneva: Editions
Slatkine.
Herbert, Robert L. and Herbert Eugenia W., 1960, Artists and Anarchism: Unpublished letters
of Pissarro, Signac and others - II, The Burlington Magazine, (102), 693: 517-522
Jankovic, Nikola. 2011. “Le Vieil Homme et la Terre” in Élisée Reclus, Projet de globe au
100.000e. Paris: Éditions B2: 7−45.
Jung, Didier. 2013. Les Anarchistes de l’Ile de Ré. Reclus, Barbotin, Perrier et Cie. Saintes:
Les éditions libertaires.
Kropotkin, Piotr. (1898) 1910. Champs, Usines et ateliers ou lʼindustrie combinée avec
lʼagriculture et le travail cérébral avec le travail manuel [Fields, Factories and
Workshops: or Industry Combined with Agriculture and Brain Work with Manual
Work]. Paris: Stock.
Lazare, Bernard. 1896. “L’Écrivain et l’art social” in L’Art Social 7: 7−14.
Leighten, Patricia. 2013. The Liberation of Painting. Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-
Guerre Paris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Liauzu, Claude. 2012. Histoire de l’anticolonialisme en France. Du XVIe à nos jours. Paris:
Pluriel.
Lindsay, Jack. 1973. Gustave Courbet. His Life and Art. Somerset: Adams & Dart.
Malatesta, Errico. 2014. The Method of Freedom. An Errico Malatesta Reader. Edinburgh: AK
Press.
Mayhew, Robert J. 2007. “Materialist Hermeneutics, Textuality and the History of Geography.
Print Spaces in British Geography” in Journal of Historical Geography 33: 466−488.
Mendibil, Didier. 2000. “P. Vidal de la Blache, le ‘dresseur d’images’. Essai sur l’iconographie
de la France: Tableau Géographique (1908)” in Marie-Claire Robic (ed.). Le Tableau
de la géographie de la France de Paul Vidal de la Blache. Dans le labyrinthe des forms.
Paris: CTHS: 78−106.
Nettlau, Max. 1928 (1930). Eliseo Reclus. Vida de un sabio justo y rebelde [Élisée Reclus.
Anarchist und Gelehrter (1830−1905)], vol. 2. Barcelona: Edicciones de la Revista
Blanca.
Pelletier, Philippe. 2013. Géographie et anarchie. Reclus, Kropotkine, Metchnikoff. Paris:
Éditions du Monde libertaire.
Pissarro, Camille. 1988. Correspondance de Camille Pissarro, vol. 3, 1891−1894, ed. Janine
Bailly-Herzberg. Paris: Éd. du Valhermeil.
Pissarro, Lucien. 1895. “Lettre adressée aux Temps nouveaux” in Les Temps Nouveaux 32: 1.
Poggioli, Renato. 1968. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press.
Prochasson, Christophe. 2006. “Ni doctrine, ni école, ni mouvement” in Arts et Sociétés,
éditorial du 21 novembre 2006: <http://www.artsetsocietes.org/f/f-prochasson.html>.
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. 1865 (1875). Du Principe de l’art et de sa destination sociale. Paris:
Garnier.
Reclus, Élisée. 1866. “Du Sentiment de la nature dans les sociétés modernes” in La Revue des
Deux Mondes 63: 352−381.
———. 1876. Nouvelle Géographie universelle, vol. I. Paris: Hachette.
———. 1895. Projet de construction d’un globe terrestre à l’échelle du cent-millième. Paris:
Edition de la ʻSociété Nouvelleʼ.
———. 1898. L’Évolution, la révolution et l’idéal anarchique. Paris: Stock.
——— et al. 1903. “On Spherical Maps and Reliefs” and “Discussion” in The Geographical
Journal 3: 290−299.
———. 1904 (2012). “L’Art et le peuple” in Temps Nouveaux, Almanach de la révolution
[repr. 2012. Écrits sociaux. Genève: Héros-limite: 140−148; English version in: Joseph
Ishill, Élisée and Élie Reclus. In Memoriam. Berkeley Heights/NJ: Oriole Press,
<http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bright/reclus/ishill/ishill325-
330.html>].
———. 1905. L’Homme et la Terre, vol. I. Paris: Librairie universelle.
———. 1908. L’Homme et la Terre, vol. VI. Paris: Librairie universelle.
———. 1911. Correspondance, vol. I. Paris: Schleicher.
———. 1927. “A Few Recollections on the Brothers Élie and Élisée Reclus” in Joseph Ishill
(ed.). Élisée and Élie Reclus. In Memoriam. Berkeley Heights/NJ: Oriole Press, art. 25:
<http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/reclus/ishill/ishill1-25.html>.
Roslak, Robyn. 1991. “The Politics of Aesthetic Harmony: Neo-Impressionism, Science, and
Anarchism” in The Art Bulletin 73.3 (September): 381−390.
———. 2006. “Artisans, Consumers and Corporeality in Signac’s Parisian Interiors” in Art
History 29.5 (November): 860−886.
———. 2007. Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-siècle France: Painting, Politics
and Landscape. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Salé, Marie-Pierre. 2002. “Reclus et Kupka. L’Homme est la nature prenant conscience d’elle-
même” in Pierre Brullé/Marie-Pierre Salé/Marketa Theinhardt (eds.). Vers des temps
nouveaux. Kupka, œuvres graphiques. Paris: Réunion des Musées nationaux: 100-129.
Schlesser, Thomas. 2005. “Le Réalisme de Courbet. De la démocratie dans l’art à l’anarchie”
in Images Revues: <http://imagesrevues.revues.org/322>.
Schulte-Sasse, Jochen. 1984. “Theory of Modernism Versus Theory of Avant-Garde” in Peter
Bürger. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: vii−lv.
Springer, Simon. 2016. The Anarchist Roots of Geography. Toward Spatial Emancipation.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Vuilleumier, Marc. 1996. “André Léo, Malon et le peintre genevois Auguste Baud” in Bulletin
de l’association des amis de Benoît Malon 4: 13−25.
Weir, David. 1997. Anarchy & Culture. The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism. Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press.

F Ferretti 2019 Anarchism Geography and PDF

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

F Ferretti 2019 Anarchism Geography and PDF

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Anarchism, Geography and Painting: Élisée Reclus and Social Art

Proudhon, Courbet, Reclus: art for everybody

Illustr. 1: “Nature Self-Consciousness” in Reclus 1905: 1.

Potrebbero piacerti anche