Theatricality, Michael Fried and Nineteenth-Century Art and Theatre

Abstract

This provocation uses a case study of the French history painter Paul Delaroche to examine the way in which theatricality is invoked as a critical term. Michael Fried considers Delaroche’s work to exemplify theatricality, a designation that, for him, connotes qualities of exaggeration and inauthenticity, but I argue that this is not how Delaroche was viewed in his own time. This leads to a wider consideration of the assumptions that underpin thinking about theatricality. In particular, I question the idea that theatricality, as Fried understands it, is a quality of popular, as opposed to avant-garde, art. Finally, I want to challenge the automatic association between theatre and artifice that is threaded through discussions of theatricality.

Notes

1 Gabriel Laviron referred to Delaroche’s Jane Grey as an ‘actrice qui crainte de perdre quelque chose de sa grâce en s’abandonnent trop à l’impression du moment’ (cited in Shelton 2001: 727).

2 ‘Le public s’extase volontiers sur l’attitude de Jane Grey’ (Planche 1834: 51).

3 Planche, for one, complained that Delaroche had misrepresented Jane Grey’s character (1834: 51–2).

4 Dorval played Kitty Bell in Alfred de Vigny’s Chatterton (first performance, Théâtre- Français, 12 February 1835).