Sequestered in the darkness of storage more often than not, a consequence of the friability of the light-sensitive, powdery medium, pastels are rarely exhibited on a regular basis by museums. It was an unusual and welcome happening, then, when the Musée d’Orsay staged in the fall of 2009 what must have been a visually sumptuous installation of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pastels drawn from its unparalleled permanent collection. The project was initiated by Serge Lemoine, the outgoing former director of the Musée d’Orsay, and seen to completion under the direction of his successor, Guy Cogéval. It was accompanied by a book of essays, obviously meant to function less as a literal record of what was shown and more as a thoughtful overview of a subject that remains understudied in the history of art—the result, in part, of the inaccessibility of the objects.

Neither a comprehensive overview of the Musée d’Orsay’s rich holdings nor a generic bouquet of the museum’s most famous pastels, Le Mystère et l’Éclat: Pastels du Musée d’Orsay (also available in an English-language edition) seeks to direct equal attention to both the canonical and the neglected. Most of the modest 175 pages are given to full-page color illustrations, leaving little room for new scholarship, although the commentary in the seven essays is frequently astute. The first two discuss the medium, its peculiar effects, and critical history. The other five consist of short discussions about specific artists, from the most beloved practitioners, such as Jean François Millet, Edgar Degas, and Édouard Manet, to its less celebrated masters, such as Eugène Loup (1867–1948) or József Rippl-Rónai (1861–1927). That a moonlit landscape by this last, Hungarian artist graces the cover of the book indicates the commitment of the organizers to undeservedly neglected artists. Even the relatively understated format of the book itself, with its matte paper and simple design, seems to reflect the organizers’ intent to communicate the intimacy and feel of the pastel medium, rather than opt for a flashier, folio-sized production with glossy plates.

The essayists range from the non-specialist to curators and well-known art historians. In the opening essay, the author-critic Claude Arnaud expresses his reverence for this delicate medium through metaphors such as “stardust” (the title of the essay) or in foodie descriptions of the medium such as [pastel] “offers to the eye that sense of freshness that certain sorbets leave on the tongue” (11). Degas’s pastels are confections that well recall the Italian etymological roots of pastello, as in cake, “itself close cousin to hispano-moroccan pastilla with all its sweet and salty nuances” (16), while Eugène Boudin is a “brilliant symphonist of the air, clouds, and skies.” Arnaud well communicates the melancholy intrinsic to pastel as a medium, where appreciation of its visual brilliance is always tinged with the regretful knowledge that the work will inevitably fade with any prolonged exposure to light.

Art historian Stéphane Guégan’s more critically informed but even briefer comments on the nineteenth-century revival of pastel (part and parcel of the Rococo revival) opens with the fascinating historical tidbit of the first exhibition of the Société des pastellistes français, held at the Galerie Georges Petit in April 1885, in which the great Enlightenment portraitists Maurice- Quentin de La Tour and Rosalba Carriera were hung alongside contemporary pastellists. Conspicuously absent, however, were the innovators of the medium, Manet, Renoir, and Degas, the inheritors of Millet’s breakaway exploration of pastel for an entirely new range of expressive and atmospheric effects. Represented instead were Giuseppe De Nittis (1846–1884), Émile Lévy (1826–1890), Albert Besnard (1849–1934), and James Tissot (1836–1902), whose work the critic Félix Fénéon dismissed as “scratched-in false greenery, women dreaming according to formula, puffy nudes, ambitious nonsense: and Manet, Degas, Renoir, J.-L. Forain are not there” (25). Guégan then argues that pastel did not, in fact, see its rebirth with the Impressionists for it was never completely abandoned, having been practiced by Delacroix, to take one major example, throughout his career. As early as 1830, there was an entire section devoted to pastel and watercolor at the Salon. Guégan also mentions the now-forgotten pastellists Camille Flers (1802–1868) and Jules Grenier (1817–1883), whose landscapes predate the better-known Boudin’s studies of sea and sky. His essay, however, stops abruptly after a few paragraphs about the immense strides made by Millet in his extraordinary pastels.

The introductions to the mini-monographic sections of the book concerning the usual suspects when it comes to pastel—Millet, Degas, Manet, and Redon—by Musée d’Orsay curator Marie-Pierre Salé, archivist Isabelle Cahn, curator Anne Roquebert, and art historian Dario Gamboni, respectively, offer equally tantalizing but frustratingly brief introductions to their subjects. Each short essay is followed by a representative sample of the Orsay’s finest holdings by the artist under consideration. The selection offered is familiar, although the matte paper chosen for the book helps to convey something more, for example, of the velvety texture of Millet’s repeated strokes of color than one usually finds in exhibition catalogues. The dove grays and blush pinks of Manet’s ca. 1880 Portrait of Irma Brunner (also known as Woman in a Black Hat) are well reproduced, as is the gaslit illumination of Degas’s ballet dancers and café-concert performers. Perhaps reflecting Lemoine’s particular interest in the subject, the Symbolist Redon’s work is the most abundantly represented of all, from the enigmatic Mystical Encounter (ca. 1896) to the ravishing still life of a single conch shell. The last section departs from the monographic format to treat a plurality of lesser-known Symbolists in a short essay by art historian Jean-David Jumeau-Lafond. This section has the added virtue of reproducing works rarely on display and relatively unknown, such as Besnard’s Eclipse (1888) and The Last Chore of the Day (1891) by Giovanni Segantini (1859–1899). Most strikingly reproduced are the hallucinatory pastels of Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer (1865–1953), whose work deserves a full-scale exhibition.

The brevity of the book offers little room for new scholarship, but some of the remarks leave one hungering for more. For example, Arnaud’s comment that, “one could even argue for a ‘pastellization’ of oil, especially in the case of the Nabis, Vallotton, and Vuillard, for whom its optical dissonances were to have an influence comparable to the sonorous electroshocks of The Rite of Spring thirty years later” (16). The question of precisely what role pastel played in the history of avant-garde painting is certainly worth posing and remains little explored, with the notable exception of the fascinating account provided by James Ganz and Richard Kendall in their exhaustive treatment of Monet’s pastels (The Unknown Monet, Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2007). Even on the most intuitive level, Impressionist technique—its merging of the descriptive mechanisms of line and color and its sketchy, tactile brushwork—seems to be an adaptation in oil of the effects associated with the pastel medium. Impressionist brushwork and that of the later Nabis, as Arnaud hints, feed off of the temporality of pastel with its implied sense of spontaneity. This seeming collapse between seeing and mark-making is enhanced by the sense of touch that is intrinsic to pastel, both in terms of its toothsome appeal to the hand for the viewer and in terms of the artist’s direct contact with the paper support. The attraction to pastel, then, for Impressionists such as Monet and Renoir is not difficult to understand in terms of their presumed obsession with the most fugitive sensations. But the medium’s intertwining of the haptic and optic, in my view, has even deeper ramifications for Symbolist practice. The desired undoing of mind and body dualism through an appeal to the inextricability of sight and touch—necessarily the condition of experience as unconsciously felt—has everything to do with the aesthetic ends of turn-of-the-century primitivism and its aftermath.

Le Mystère et L’Éclat may whet the appetite for pastels, but the theorization of pastel and its peculiar signifying structures has yet to be written. It is to be hoped that a more rigorous overview of the medium, especially in the crucial transformation from the mimetic ends of eighteenth-century portraiture to the varied agenda of the nineteenth-century avant-garde, will be undertaken soon.