Alexandre-Louis-Marie Charpentier (1856–1909) was a French artist who was productive in the spheres of interior decoration, sculpture, and the beaux- arts. While a lot of his work was unique, other pieces were designed to be reproduced and made available for commercial sale. Charpentier was a prolific low relief modeller. He made a number of medals and plaquettes throughout his career. Although he did not live so long as Sir George Hill, the two men are close contemporaries, and the example of Charpentier’s work provides a useful counterpart to Hill’s interpretation.
Charpentier found it tedious to repeat or edition his own work, but when this labour was outsourced he took an active interest in the craftspeople with whom he worked. The status of the artisan and the labourer had been brought
to public attention in the late nineteenth century by a series of labour reforms intended to improve working conditions, and, at the same time, many trades were seeing challenge from increased mechanisation and industrialisation, and this affected both rural and urban labour. A burgeoning interest in the figures of the workman and the peasant – la plèbe et la glèbe – was met by a move away from academic allegory in sculpture, and a declining appetite across Europe for the rash of public memorials to leading citizens (Curtis 1999:5-50; Elsen 1974:3- 21). For these reasons, images of labour appeared modern, and this can be seen in the example of Charpentier’s own work.
Charpentier’s medals and plaquettes are preserved in several notable collections, including the V&A, the Metropolitan Museum and the Fitzwilliam, Cambridge.2 Charpentier’s medal Masons (figure 12 and below, c.1905,
Fitzwilliam) depicts on its obverse two craftsmen positioning a dressed block of stone, carefully and with evident labour. It is a matter-of-fact composition. The
Alexandre Charpentier Masons, c.1905
2 The collection of the Fitzwilliam houses six different objects by the artist. A
patron identified as ‘H.Newton’ gifted all of these bar one to the museum in 1938, and their accession was not properly recorded at the time of donation; ‘J.McClain’ gifted the other object in 1907, and this predates the modern numbering of these objects. For this reason, the Fitzwilliam objects lack accession numbers.
face of the block with which the two men struggle is exactly parallel to the plane of the medal’s surface: it is straight on to the viewer. This composition emphasises the mass of the stone, and just as much as the block is face-on, the men are turned towards the block, addressing the block rather than the
onlooker. The physical effort of the workmen is clear as they strain against the orthogonal object. This medal is not a portrait; it is a scene of labour. Masons depicts the delegation of toil: it is not the job of an architect to do this work; the work of the architect is discharged with a ruler and fine nib, the grid-like lines of which are evoked by the intersecting lines of scaffolding and the course of the wall.
Masons is a struck medal. Striking involves the application under great
pressure of a resistant die to a bronze billet called a ‘flan’. As the flan is squeezed against the die, it is forced into the die’s concavities and thereby it acquires an image. Striking is a staged process of facture, because – with only a very few exceptions – the dye is made by a specialist craftsperson or a
mechanised process, from a low-relief model that has been made by the artist. For this reason, striking is somewhat more attenuated in its expressive potential than is the case with lost-wax casting. Striking is an appropriate form of facture for this medal. The method of making is inferable in several ways. Firstly, the ground of a struck medal is nearly always non-porous, smooth and very finely grained. Because cast work is made from cooled liquid metal, its ground is inevitably very slightly uneven and minutely pitted; in addition to which, the ground of such a medal is made rather than machined, and for this reason it may also appear modelled. Struck work can also be inferred from the clearly defined nature of its planes, and the clarity with which they are arranged. This is particularly notable in this medal in the clothing of the figure who is bending down to remove or adjust one of the rollers on which the block sits, and in particular the planes of the man’s trousers. The medal’s form is very crisp, defined and contained, and somewhat mechanical in its appearance. The subject matter is similarly factual. The viewer is being shown what labour is.
Another medal by Charpentier takes the process of striking as its subject. It was commissioned by the company Duval Janvier and made in 1902 (figure 13 and overleaf, V&A A.32-1978; see van Alfen 2017:52-54; Vandenbrouck- Przybylski 2012:31; M. Jones 1979:129). On one side a worker can be seen operating a balancier, a kind of press used at that time to produce struck medals such as Masons discussed above. The man operating the balancier is stripped to the waist, and his face is turned away from view: he is not an artist but a labourer. Who he is as an individual is of no concern. What matters is the muscle-bound breadth of his back, stretched across the medal’s surface, the motive force driving the
Alexandre Charpentier Duval Janvier, 1902, obverse
perpendicular space of the press. Associated machinery can be seen in the background: this might be a reduction machine, a device for mechanically scaling-down designs (V&A 2017:online). This service, for which the company was famous, is efficiently depicted on the reverse (figure 14). Against a field bearing the text ‘Réduction et Frappe de Médailles’ (reduction and striking of medals) the obverse is repeated three times, successively smaller on each occasion. In this way, the struck medal is a pictorial representation as well as a physical demonstration of the processes that the company sought to advertise.
The sculptor employs this self-referential method on other advertisements. An example of this is Muller Stoneware Manufactory, which advertises a stoneware factory, and is made, quite fittingly, from that material (1897, Metropolitan Museum, Inv. 1989.8, figure 15). Comparative analysis of the two adverts shows some instructive differences between how the two figures are presented as workers. The metalworker on Duval Janvier is turned away from the viewer, and engaged in operating a machine: in this way the machine comes to dominate the process and the piece, the limits of which are contiguous with the pictorial frame of the medal itself. By contrast, the ceramic worker is shown at the end of the making process, given room, holding in his upturned hand a figure of Athena Parthenos, his own pose echoing that of the statue.
The sculpture Athena Parthenos is lost, but it is known from descriptions by ancient historians such as Pausanias as well as from its representation on
Classical cameos and larger sculptural copies (figure 16; Pausanias 1918:27). It is a work of immense sculptural significance, the central sculpture at the heart of the Parthenon, made by the most lauded sculptor of Classical antiquity: Phidias. The elegance of the reference in Charpentier’s plaque is that Athena Parthenos typically holds in her upturned hand a sculpture of Nike (Victory); here Athena herself plays Nike’s role. She is the craftsman’s conquest. In most
representations, Athena Parthenos is richly covered in attributions and
iconography. Charpentier has chosen to depict the figure from the side, and to frame only one detail: in the centre of her shield is the Medusa’s head,
harnessing the Gorgon’s power of petrification. Though there is no other
evidence to support this interpretation, it seems likely that this is a reference to the petrification at the heart of the process that is being advertised here: the metamorphosis of soft clay into stoneware. It is notable that there is nothing mechanical about this image. The craftsman, despite his curiously blank expression, addresses the viewer as an individual, at the centre of a representation that frames his practice in terms of classical antiquity and magical efficacy. In a cast bronze copy of the advert from the same year the worker appears even more central to the process (figure 17, Met 03.7.26). By
contrast, in the medal of Duval Janvier it is the equipment that dominates – in that medal, the labourer is a source of muscle, not intelligence.
As a business, Duval Janvier offered sculptors and designers an effective outsourcing of the force and dextrous skill needed to made medals. It is clear why this service would be attractive to medal makers, but in his book on
Portrait Medals of 1912, published a decade after Charpentier’s medal for Duval
Janvier was made, George Hill bemoans the invention of the reduction machine as an egregious bowdlerisation of the art (1912:19):
The majority of modern medallists seek to evade the difficulties which lie before them by designing on a large scale and reducing mechanically from their model to the size required for a final result. Nemesis follows quickly on their laziness; for neither modelling nor design can be truly translated on to a smaller scale except by an intelligent hand.
Hill’s phrase the ‘intelligent hand’ identifies what is at stake here. It is hard to see what value there would be to having the artist operate the balancier himself – this is mere physical effort; but Hill’s judgement is that some processes are the necessary responsibility of the artist: modelling is ideation, and this cannot be subcontracted or mechanised except at the cost of artistic quality. Of course, questions of ‘quality’ are aesthetic judgements rather than empirical measurements, and, for Hill, the capacity for aesthetic rather than metrical judgement is precisely the difference between an artist and a mechanic – or for that matter, a machine.
In Charpentier’s work a correspondence can be seen between the subject depicted and the processes used to make the object. The two struck medals depicting scenes of labour, masonry and medal-making, can be compared with two cast bronze plaquettes – by the same artist – that depict the arts of
Sculpture and Painting. These plaquettes were made around the same time as Muller Stoneware Manufactory and certainly before 1903 (figure 18 and next
page, V&A 328-1901 and figure 19, 327-1901). They also show people at work, and there are some similarities with the struck works described above. The artist is not concerned with the biographical identity of the people that are
Alexandre Charpentier, Sculpture, c.1897
depicted. They are profiles rather than portraits, and the figure of Sculpture has her back to the viewer, her shoulder and hair somewhat obscuring her face. In both cases, again like the struck medals, just over half of the available surface is given over to their tools, and, in a sense therefore, their labour. So there is a consistency between all four metal plaquettes, Duval-Janvier, Masons, Painting and Sculpture; despite these similarities, however, the images of the arts are of a quite different order from the social-realist medals. Certainly, the two young representatives of the arts have the physiognomies and haircuts of ordinary people, and in this way a kind of realism is evident in the work; but the figures are nude, and these depictions are preposterous unless these figures are
understood as personifications of their arts. This introduces a self-conscious and symbolic element to the work, which can also be seen in the advert for Muller
Stoneware Manufactory, but that is wholly absent in the scenes of stonework
and striking.
The plaquettes of the arts belong to a related group in Charpentier’s output that show individuals singing, or playing musical instruments, or – albeit less frequently – engaged in games like chess or dominoes. The majority of these figures are young women, though (as Painting) others are epicene boys or youths. None of the figures in this group are adult men. It is entirely conventional from classical antiquity to the late nineteenth century for
personifications to be depicted as unclothed women, but only rarely as
unclothed men (see van Straten 1994:25-44). These personifications should be distinguished from other more decorative works that Charpentier produced in which the female body is displayed as an object for sexual interest, for instance
Door Furniture (figure 20, c.1900 V&A 329-1901); though there is some overlap
between these two categories in plaquettes in which the whole female figure is shown, examples of which are the plaquettes of Dance and Female Figure
playing a bass-viol (pre.1903, Metropolitan Museum 03.7.22 and 03.7.19). This
overlapping group notwithstanding, most of these personifications are quite demure, many of them being closely cropped torsos, and nearly all of them turned away from the viewer. In addition to these two groups of female figures – the personifying and the provocative – can be added a third group of social- realist representations of women. Representative of this third group is the struck medal Mother Nursing her Baby (figure 21, 1899; V&A 840-1900).
Sculpture and Painting are not representatives of a social genera or trade,
neither are they mere decoration; they are symbolic representations of their arts. That the objects of their arts are not shown is significant to their meaning. The painting and the sculpture on which these people work both sit outside the pictorial space of the medal. Because the viewer is not shown these, there is no suggestion that the arts are limited to their finite forms – there is no equivalent of the block that dominates the Masons, or even the Athena that is the skilful craftsman’s prize. What are represented in these plaques is not so much the specific processes of Painting and Sculpture as the abstract potential of these arts. This is infinite rather than finite, ideal rather than real. This is a consistent feature in all of the personifications that Charpentier produced: the viewer is shown the chisel and the paintbrush, but never the object itself, except in those cases where the worker is an adult male, in which case the artwork on display is an object of craft, not art. Whereas Charpentier’s scenes of labour were struck, it is entirely commensurate with the subject of these other works that they are cast. Casting is expressive in a way that striking is not; it preserves the hand of the artist in the work in a manner that is impossible with striking. Whereas the
struck works are finite, factual, and realistic, these cast works are suggestive, evocative and ideal.
In these medals it is clear that Charpentier is using different processes to establish the modality of the subject matter. In his landmark work of 1920, George Hill presents an analysis of the difference between Italian and German Renaissance medals that opens up exactly the same distinctions in quality of process ([1920]1978:101-116). Whereas the distinction in Charpentier’s work is between lost-wax casting and striking, the distinction in Hill’s analysis is
between the Italian predilection for the wax model, (subsequently cast into lead, reworked by the artist, and then sand-cast), and the German preference either for striking or the production of wooden masters for sand-casting. Lost- wax casting, like the production of a wax master, is contiguous with the artist’s hand, a form of drawing; by contrast, striking or engraving a wooden pattern after a design, is more staged, more distant and more mechanical. Thus Hill admires the ‘fine technical execution’ of the predominantly struck German medals, but continues that this (1978:116):
…leads one to expect more from them, and to ask for an intellectual content on a part with their manual dexterity. This lack of imagination, coupled with a high ideal of craftsmanship, corresponds in art to that characteristic of the German mind which has been expressed so incisively in the statement of a German that the Germans possess knowledge but not culture, “Kenntnis ohne Kultur”.
The national slur notwithstanding, the association of different processes with a corresponding intellectual potential is identical: art is fluid, expressive, imaginative and cultural; craft is finite, dextrous, factual, and knowledgeable. In Charpentier’s work we see these associations being consciously exploited, either to endow his representation of ideals with intellectual potential on the one hand, or to give weight to the witness of his realism on the other, as appropriate.
These are significant cultural distinctions that shape how work is read. As has been shown above in the case of Charpentier’s work and Hill’s analysis, these distinctions are consciously understood, and exploited. At this stage in
history, as was the case from the 16th century until the early 20th century, they
all spring from the physical activities of hand and tool in which making is a constant. Both art and craft at this time are dextrously skilled material
disciplines. What has been described is a distinction within a continuous field of material practice. But only five years after Hill’s work on Portrait Medals was published, and three years before Hill’s defamation of the German craftsman, Marcel Duchamp created a sculpture that seems to belong to an entirely different period of human history, his Fountain (1913), the porcelain urinal. From this point onwards the crafted element of art, the necessity of making, is disarticulated from the main body of fine art practice. This is not to say that crafted art was rendered obsolescent by Duchamp’s gesture and the work that followed. Most artists in some sense still make their work; what has changed is that an artwork need not any longer necessarily be made – this was a genuinely new idea in artistic practice, and it took the best part of a century to propagate. Its eventual impact is that it disarticulates craft and art as ideas that can be quoted and used. As the example of Charpentier’s work shows, artists had hitherto consciously manipulated the image of the craftsman or the artist. After Duchamp, however, the identity of the artist is unmoored from its anchor in manual ability, and it becomes available for quotation in the manner that Adamson has described.