13 - An aesthetics of the subject: music and the visual arts

Summary

At the time of his death in 1945, the view of Valéry as a writer whose predominant interests lay in the arts was incontrovertible: of the twelve-volume Œuvres Complètes published by the NRF, the vast majority comprised the essays and lectures on literature, painting, architecture, dance and poetics. This work undoubtedly founded his reputation during his lifetime and in the decade or two thereafter; but former success has also played a part in its more recent eclipse, tending to identify his aesthetics as of a period and even of a certain taste, characterised, if not caricatured, by the preference for Wagner in music, and for Mallarmé and Racine within the literary canon.

His writings on art too have tended to consecrate the view of Valéry as a formalist, a classicist, of conservative and anti-modernist taste: a Valéry who appears to hark back to certain early Impressionists or else to the Italian masters; a Valéry attentive to earlier periods when aesthetic criteria were defined in terms of anatomy, perspective, composition, verisimilitude and when form and content were united in harmonious structure; who either ignores or takes issue with the major artistic movements in the twentieth century and who mocks the reductionism of modern subject-matter (‘deux prunes sur une assiette valent une Descente de Croix’ (‘two plums on a plate are worth a Descent from the Cross’) (Œ, ii, p. 1206)); a Valéry in whom the absence of reference to Picasso or Braque, as to Stravinsky or Schoenberg, only echoes a resounding silence with regard to contemporary writers.