[jean journet nadar] Félix Tournachon, known as Nadar, L’apôtre Jean Journet, 1857, Salted-paper print from a collodion glass negative, H 27 x L 22 cm, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Départment des Estampes et de la Photographie, Est. Eo 15 fol., Rés; page 204 new cat. …considered by all as a visionary he was attacked by Baudelaire in Le Salut public and awarded a place in Champfleury’s Excentriques….the gaze of his Chimeric spirit…”closely related to the theme of the passions that lies at the heaty of Fourier’s doctrine, the series can be compared to the series of studies of the ‘Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine’ made by Adrien Tournachon in 1854 under the direction of Dr. Duchenne du Boulogne (1806-75), as also to the studies of facial expressions acted out by Charles Deburau in Pierrot’s guise, the collaborative work by the Tournachon brothers and presented at the 1855 Exposition Universelle.” Journet died four years after this picture was made. “[Nadar] was also much influenced by the “theory of portraiture” formulated by his friend Francis Wey who held up painters such as Velázquez as suitable inspirations for photographers. (published in La Lumière, Apr. 27 and May 4, 1851.) (Climate of enthusiasm for all things Spanished Théophile Gautier and Charels Baudelaire) [new cat 204]; “The Saint Luke [by Jules Ziegler, Salon of 1839] so effectively crystallized religious fervor that the poet Gérard de Nerval remembered it six years later when he came to characterize the Fourierist Journet, of whom Courbet painted a well-known portrait: Jean Journet prepared his clothing to match his interests. He wears a kind of hooded cloak or dalmatic in a coarse fabric of brown wool that recalls the Byzantine coat of Ziegler’s Saint Luke…shown at the Salon several years ago” (“Jean Journet s’est arrange un vêtement en harmonie avec ses occupations. C’est une espèce de caban ou de dalmatique en grosse étoffe de laine brune qui rappelled le paletot byzantin du Saint Luc de Ziegler…exposé au Salon, il y a quelques années”. Nerval 1845. [Stéphane Guégan “From Ziegler to Courbet: Painting, Art Criticism, and the Spanish Trope under Louis-Philippe” in Manet/Velàzquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting” Eds. Gary Tinterow and Geneviève Lacambre, etal. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2003, note 35, page 195.] …Ton père avait une flamme de foi que Courbet ne pouvait voir, ne méritant pas plus de croire aux apostolats que de comprendre apôtres. Il était le dernier des homes pour render l’âme qui éclatait dans cette tête fulgurante de St. Pierre. Est-ce que mon brave Jean devant l’objectif a jamais ressemblé à cette figure de déménageur ? Ce n’est ressemblant que par le côté le moins élevé comme le moins distinguee. Comme peinture, c’est bien du Courbet – excellent, parfait comme metier – non de maître-peintre (comme il s’appelait en ne le fut jamais) mais d’ouvrier peintre de premier ordre. C’est admirablement bien “gâché” mais, comme l’ensemble de l’oeuvre de Courbet, cest peint lourd, terne et sale.” (trans: It is as de-idealized as Courbet could be…Your father had a burning faith that Courbet was unable to see, being no more worthy to believe in apostolates that to believe in apostles. He was the last person I would have chosen to depict the soul that shines forth from this dazzling St. Peter-like head. When did a photograph of my good friend Jean ever resemble a furniture mover? It only resembles him in the least elevated and least distinguished aspects. As a painting, it’s certainly Courbet—excellent, perfect as far as craftsmanship—not the work of a master (as he called himself but never was) but of a first-class jobbing painter. The paint is admirably well ‘slapped on’ but, like the rest of Courbet’s work, it is heavy, with colors that are dull and dirty.”) [Nadar in a letter to Journet’s son, Jules-Étienne Journet. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Départment des Manuscrits, New Acq. Fr. 24988/358. Jean Journet, né le 23 juin 1799 à Carcassonne (Aude) et mort en novembre 1861 à Toulouse, est un utopiste français se définissant lui-même comme « apôtre fouriériste ». Ce prêcheur infatigable sillonna les rues de Paris, parcourut la France, la Belgique, mais aussi le Texas pour porter la bonne parole de Charles Fourier. Il fréquenta un bon nombre de d’illustres contemporains comme Alexandre Dumas, George Sand ou Victor Hugo et lia une solide amitié avec Gustave Courbet et Nadar. TJC: Image, pg. 32: “If there was one man who served as a model for Courbet it was Jean Journet, the half-mad, fearless, ridiculous prophet of Fourierism, whom Champfleury had described in an 1847 feuilleton, (reprinted in Champfleury, Les Excentriques, 2nd edn., Paris, 1877, 1st pub. 1852., pp. 72-101) and Courbet had painted ‘setting out for the conquest of Universal Harmony’ in 1850. Courbet became Jean Journet, as Baudelaire ironically implied: adopted his manic style, decided (in the 1850 letter to Wey) that he too would embark on ‘the great vagabond and independent life of the Bohemian’. He became Journet, even in pictorial terms: he had based the 1850 portrait of Journet on a popular image as the source of his own definitive self-portrait in 1854, The Meeting. To read Champfleury’s essay on Journet is – in spite of the patronizing, trivial tone – to discover the prototype of Courbet’s life-style. Journet was desperate, prodigious, unstoppable: raining pamphlets from the balcony of the theatre before the police closed in; breaking up a literary soirée at Lamartine’s; persuading Dumas to give him an annual income; pouring scorn on Fourierist ‘revisions’ like Considérant – ‘omnivorous omniarch’, he called him. Journet’s language kept pace with his personal style. Two examples: prophesying doom, very accurately, on 20 February 1848: ‘The frenzy is mounting from hour to hour, the abyss is gaping for its prey, the cataclysm is upon us. It is upon us, and none of us but knows it!” (reprinted in Champfleury, Les Excentriques, 2nd edn., Paris, 1877, 1st pub. 1852., p. 101)…pg. 33…The reality of Bohemian life in the 1840s and 1850s was quite different. In the early days, for a few years after the 1830 revolution, Bohemia had been a comfortable part of the Avant-garde, supported by doting fathers and therefore carefree, fashionable, unscrupulous (Gautier, Houssaye, Nerval, Roger de Beauvoir had been its leading lights). But that group had broken up and gone its separate ways, into various kinds of accommodation with the market and the official world of art. Bohemia, after that, was a unassimilated class, wretchedly poor, obdurately anti-bourgeois, living on in the absolute, outdated style of the ‘Romantics’, courting death by starvation. Nerval lived through that change in the definition of Bohemia, and died in madness and hunger; Journet was committed to the Salpêtrière more than once.”
