Size Matters

Book Reviews nature, and actions, the jug-thing ‘things’. Heidegger’s ontological reflections on thingliness have been useful in a number of fields, e.g. ecology, where theorists have developed a biocentric critique of anthropocentrism attitudes towards nature and the relationship between man and the natural environment. Certainly, as Heidegger observed in his earlier reflections on things, ‘the stone in the road is a thing, as is the clod of earth in the field. A jug is a thing, as is the well beside the road’.13 One might observe that there are differences between things that exist in the natural world – a stone, a clod of earth – and made things, such as a road and a jug. It was with made things that Heidegger was mostly concerned in this earlier essay, on ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1935–1937). The discussion of ‘things’ has a long history, pre-dating even Heidegger’s initial interest in 1935, and it has informed literature ever since, e.g. Vladimir Nabokov’s Transparent Things, where on the first page we read: ‘When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines!’14 Learning to skim rather than sink has been popular in art historical scholarship for decades, although Bill Brown, a leading voice in ‘thing theory’, reminds us that to consider the very recent engagement with things by Byzantine art historians as belated is only to acknowledge that ‘the academic psyche has internalised the fashion system (a system meant to accelerate the obsolescence of things)’.15

9. Susan Sutton, ‘Resistant Surfaces’, in Byzantine Things in the World, pp. 140– 51, at p. 141. It is also possible to reflect upon what we mean when we speak of a Byzantine world. 10. Charles Barber, ‘Thingliness’, in Byzantine Things in the World, pp. 98–107, offers reflections on jugs and ampullae. 11. Isabel Kimmelfield, ‘Exhibiting Byzantium: Three Case Studies In the Display and Reception of Byzantine Art’, in Ingela Nilsson and Paul Stephenson (eds), Wanted: Byzantium. The Desire for a Lost Empire, (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2014), pp. 275–86. 12. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by Albert Hofstadter, (Harper and Row: New York, 1971), pp. 161–84 13. Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. by Hofstadter, pp. 15–79, at p. 20. 14. Vladimir V. Nabokov, Transparent Things (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), p. 1. 15. Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28/1, Autumn 2001, pp. 1–22, at 13. doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcw003 Advance Access Publication 16 June 2016

Size Matters Richard Wittman

Christopher Curtis Mead, Making Modern Paris: Victor Baltard’s Central Markets and the Urban Practice of Architecture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 157 b&w illns, 324 pp., ISBN 978-0-271-05087-4, hardcover £66.95

Notes 1. Anthony Cutler, ‘Makers and Users’, in Liz James (ed.), A Companion to Byzantium (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 301–12, at p. 307. 2. Bissera V. Pentcheva, Icons and Power. The Mother of God in Byzantium (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); ‘The Performative Icon’, The Art Bulletin, vol. 88, no. 4, 2006, pp. 631–55; ‘What is a Byzantine Icon? Constantinople versus Sinai’, in Paul Stephenson (ed.), The Byzantine World (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 265–83; ‘The Aesthetics of Landscape and Icon at Sinai’, RES. Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 65– 66, 2015, pp. 195–211. 3. Glenn Peers, ‘We Have Never Been Byzantine: On Analogy’, in Roland Betancourt and Maria Taroutina (eds), Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 349–60, at pp. 356–7, observing ‘perhaps the sensual museum – aside from children’s museums – is simply impossible for us. . .’. 4. Jori Finkel, ‘After 15 Centuries, St. Peter Finally Leaves Home’, New York Times, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9907EED6113FF931A2 5752C1A9609C8B63, 12 November 2006. 5. ‘The physical sense of sight . . . was a form of physical contact between the viewer and the object’, Georgia Frank once wrote in an often-cited paper on the Pilgrim’s gaze: Georgia Frank, ‘The Pilgrim’s Gaze in the Age before Icons, in Robert S. Nelson (ed.), Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance, Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 98–115, at p. 108. 6. Glenn Peers, ‘Real Living Painting: Quasi-Objects and Dividuation in the Byzantine World’, Religion and the Arts, vol. 16, 2012, pp. 433–60, at p. 434. 7. Glenn Peers, ‘Introduction’, in Byzantine Things in the World, pp. 21–35, at p. 28. 8. Glenn Peers, ‘Byzantine Things in the World’, in Byzantine Things in the World, pp. 38–85, at p. 48. 334 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 39.2 2016

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article-abstract/39/2/334/2223010 by guest on 29 March 2018

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal. Transcontinental Ambition in France and the United States during the Long Nineteenth Century (Pittsburgh and New York: Periscope Publishing, 2012), 240 illns, 224 pp., ISBN 9781-934772-76-8, hardcover £50 Early historians of iron architecture like Sigfried Giedion and Alfred Meyer sensed that iron represented something more than just an incremental technical advance. More than just an architectural material, iron symbolized new worldviews: behind it lay the energy of the Napoleonic engineering corps, the ćole Polytechnique, and the mysticism of the ambitions of the E Saint-Simonians. Giedion even suggested that the disruption caused by iron was so basic that it could only be understood in terms of a broader social progress. Walter Benjamin, reading these scholars as he prepared his Arcades Project, came to less optimistic conclusions. For him, the constructive imperatives of iron architecture were analogous to the state’s function ‘as an instrument of domination by the bourgeoisie’ – an inherent power and capacity for immense scale that early nineteenth-century architects had failed to grasp but that engineers, who were involved with the mass-produced iron rails of the new railroads, swiftly recognized.1 In a short radio talk on the subject, Benjamin referred with delight to the famous 1843 image by the French caricaturist J.J. Grandville, in which an iron bridge complete with gas streetlamps stretches across the

Book Reviews universe, each pier resting on a separate planet. (The second planet is Saturn, whose ring is depicted as a cast iron balcony where the inhabitants come to enjoy fresh air in the evenings.) Recent scholarship, following the lead of François Loyer, David Harvey, and others, has rendered commonplace the idea that a revolution in the scale of conception, driven in important measure by the technical properties of iron construction allied to the economic and organisational forms of capitalism, was an essential feature of nineteenth-century architecture.2 The two books under consideration here enter into this historiography from very different directions. Christopher Mead’s Making Modern Paris, which won the prestigious 2015 Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians, analyzes the work of the architect Victor Baltard. Amid a busy Parisian career that spanned the pre- and post-Haussmann periods, Baltard left behind several noteworthy buildings and one undeniable masterpiece, the Halles Centrales or Central Markets in Paris, a great glass and iron complex built between 1854 and 1874 and senselessly demolished in 1971–1973. Just as Mead’s first book in 1991 aimed to liberate Baltard’s student Charles Garnier from his critical reputation as a lightweight, Mead proposes here to liberate Baltard from a caricature that he claims historians have long perpetuated, namely, that of the timid and reluctant innovator, academic and backwards-looking, and insufficiently attuned to the radical implications of the new transparency achievable with iron and glass architecture. Thus Mead aims to rehistoricize Baltard, distancing him from modernist polemics and functionalist teleologies and instead presenting him as an innovator committed to reconciling new social and technological realities with the Parisian historical past. Where Mead’s book zeros in on one architect working mainly in one city, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s Colossal spans the continents, using four great, mainly French works of late nineteenthcentury engineering – the Suez Canal, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, and the Panama Canal – as the occasion for a series of wide-ranging reflections on questions of scale and representation in modern times. At the heart of Grigsby’s book is a critique of the worldview of the engineer, which in its myriad manifestations is shown to be hubristic, prone to violence, complicit with imperialism, and even hostile towards the elemental being of the world. In each of her case studies, whether they involve hollowing a canal from the earth or mounting an iron tower in the sky, Grigsby is interested in how engineers view material reality as subject to their will, and in the human costs of their insistence on reducing matter to abstractions. Indeed, her book could be read as a phenomenological critique of that impulse for mastery which imagines forms, properties, measurements, and appearances to be adequate representations of the real being of things (an argument not unrelated to that offered in 1805 by Charles-François Viel on the ‘impotence of mathematics’, a book that Walter Benjamin savoured and repeatedly cited in his research on iron architecture).3 The colossal emerges from Grigsby’s ambitious book as the emblem of a peculiarly nineteenth-century will-to-power; one that, nonetheless, continues to exercise a hold in the present, for example on the builders of skyscrapers, the subject of Grigsby’s epilogue.


Mead begins his study by investigating how exactly Baltard ended up with a reputation as an accidental contributor to the iron architecture revolution. The trail leads straight to Baron Haussmann’s bureau: for in his Me ´moires, the formidable prefect presented a demonstrably false history of the design process for Les Halles, making it seem as though Baltard, who he termed an ‘intransigent classicist by birth’, had wanted to build a backwards-looking, academic, masonry structure, and had only abandoned this idea for glass and iron because Napole ón III, that forward-looking man of action and purpose, had demanded it. Thanks to a long and continuing scholarly reassessment of nineteenth-century French architecture (partly sparked by the craven demolition of Les Halles itself in 1971), scholars have known for at least thirty-five years that Haussmann’s account is false, and that Baltard presented his first iron and glass design for Les Halles over a decade before Haussmann arrived on the scene.4 Yet Mead justifies his study with the claim that this long revisionist enterprise somehow never got around to redeeming Baltard himself, nor to the monument whose destruction helped inspire it. He sustains this exaggeration by engaging only selectively with the most recent scholarship. With a bibliography that lists nearly 200 works from the post-1945 period, there are only five from the last ten years and only eighteen from after 2000. For instance, Pierre Pinon’s 2005 French-language monograph on Baltard and his father takes almost for granted that no one any longer credits Haussmann’s efforts to diminish Baltard’s accomplishments.5 The existence of Pinon’s book is acknowledged by Mead, but its content less so. There is a little bit of a pattern of this, as Mead often tells his stories as though he were singlehandedly bringing them forth from the archival sources, without sufficient acknowledgment that earlier scholars like Pinon or Bertrand Lemoine (1980) already unearthed these documents and told these stories, and sometimes even quoted the same passages from them that Mead now quotes. This reticence casts something of a shadow over Mead’s many insightful and original readings of individual buildings, which taken as a whole constitute an advance over the interpretations offered by this older scholarship. After a first Chapter on Baltard’s architectural education, Mead considers Baltard’s municipal career. Echoing arguments made by David Van Zanten in Building Paris (1994), he depicts the constant competition between the various state and municipal bureaucracies overseeing Parisian building as an essential dynamic informing the efforts, selfimage, and fortunes of architects like Baltard. Some judicious editing, for example of the thirty-year background history of the Service of Architectural Works, would not have compromised the goal of disclosing how architects ‘fought to preserve their professional autonomy within a growing municipal bureaucracy’ (pp. 69–70). More engaging are Mead’s sensitive analyses of Baltard’s work at the Paris Ho ˆtel de Ville, and particularly the two Batiments Annexes he built on the square opposite. These are presented as hybrid monuments in which the formal unity of the internal functions is subordinated to a desire to acknowledge the historical development of the surrounding site. Their externally symmetrical facades thus echo those of the neighbouring Ho ˆtel de Ville, even as their highly OXFORD ART JOURNAL 39.2 2016 335

Book Reviews complex interiors combine and conceal residential, retail, and office spaces. François Loyer had identified the Fontaine Saint-Michel as the pioneer of this kind of sleight-of-hand, but Mead sees it fully developed already here in Baltard’s work. Mead also wants to contest the accusation levelled by David Van Zanten, among others, that Baltard’s work is ‘inexpressive’ or ‘unresolved’. We are told that this was instead a ‘deliberate response to Haussmann’s planning edicts’, and derived from Baltard’s concern to reinscribe the messiness of history back into a city from which Haussmann was rapidly purging it. This argument is pursued in Chapter 4, which centres on Baltard’s use of ornament to reflect on history and the surrounding city, an approach that Mead admits can make it ‘hard to appreciate’. The chapter considers a range of projects, both executed and not, and drives home the point with repeated accounts of the bureaucratic challenges the architect faced and the hybrid designs he typically produced. The sharpest of these accounts concerns the thirteenth-century church of Saint-Leu-Saint-Gilles, where Baltard trimmed, reorganized, and reframed the old church in response to the arrival of the new Boulevard du Centre against its east side, and in so doing thoughtfully blurred the lines separating the historic building from Haussmannian modernity. He did this chiefly by building two neo-Renaissance domestic buildings along the south side of the church, which unexpectedly evoke the centuries between the medieval past of the old church and the industrial present of the neighboring boulevard. This suggestion of what Mead calls a ‘narrative of ongoing modification’ (p. 140) was reinforced by the French Renaissance style itself, which had been extensively theorized by this time as the French transitional style par excellence. Chapter 5, the longest in the book, details the epic planning and construction of the Central Markets. It opens by returning to the paradox of Baltard’s bad reputation, and thus to Haussmann’s Me ´moires. Evoking again the claim that Baltard’s Markets have been neglected by revisionist scholarship, Mead announces that his reinterpretation will rest on a series of observations: first, that the project for the Halles and the reorganisation of its quarter had been largely worked out by Baltard and various municipal officials well before Haussmann arrived in power; and second, that the project for the Halles was a sprawling collaboration involving numerous officials and designers, as necessitated by the increasingly complex bureaucratic and regulatory context that developed in Paris after 1830. Though Mead briskly acknowledges the scholars who first demonstrated these claims decades ago, the footnotes sprinkled throughout the many pages he devotes to recapitulating them again refer almost exclusively to primary sources. As a result, only readers able and willing to reread the previous French scholarship will be able to determine exactly where Mead’s account offers a fresh perspective and where it recounts the work of others. Anglophone readers will nonetheless be grateful to have the long history of the project from its medieval origins through to the construction of Baltard’s pavilions available in English for the first time. The other point Mead stresses in his interpretation of the Markets concerns the continuities binding it to the kinds of historically sensitive, highly contextual work Baltard had done in his other 336 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 39.2 2016


municipal projects. In Mead’s words, this was a design that ‘synthesized the city’s historical patterns of growth with its spatial regularisation in the nineteenth century’ while simultaneously reconciling its ‘historic identity as a city of stone with its industrial transformation into one of iron’ (p. 147). This connects with the book’s larger argument about Baltard’s work, and offers a genuinely fresh insight. For instance, Baltard’s first pavilion, derisively mocked by contemporaries as the Fort des Halles for the heavy masonry envelope that concealed its interior iron supports, is interpreted by Mead as a contextualist gesture that referred to the great arched windows of the adjacent church of SaintEustache. He also argues that when Baltard was forced by the Emperor in 1853 to halt work and change the design to something entirely in iron, he remained attentive to the relationship between the grid of his pavilions and the old surrounding street patterns, and even managed to continue the dialogue with Saint-Eustache by echoing the church’s stepped profile, gabled transepts, and clerestory windows in his new pavilions. Similar concerns are again in evidence in Baltard’s next bestknown Parisian building, the church of Saint-Augustin, the subject of Mead’s final chapter. Here too we encounter Baltard’s solicitude towards the urban topography, this time in the unconventional flaring plan he used to situate the church on its trapezoidal plot. Baltard’s interest in the dialogue of (historical) stone and (modern) iron is also on display at Saint-Augustin, with a historicising stone envelope that stands completely independent of an iron skeleton that runs up the interior walls to support the vaults and, most memorably, the dome. Mead concludes with an epilogue on this concept of transparency – both the metaphorical transparency that, in eighteenth-century architectural theory, had been called caracte`re, and the actual transparency made possible by glass and iron building. Returning to Giedion, Meyer, and Benjamin, Mead recalls the vain hope that this new optical transparency would also engender social transparency. Against the optimism of Giedion et al., Benjamin realized that the architecture of iron and glass had ended up a tool of bourgeois capitalism in the glass-roofed shopping arcades of Paris, where it staged an illusion of transparency in the service of an opaque and divisive consumerism. But no sooner has Mead described these modernist analyses than he takes his distance from them, noting that when architectural modernism eventually tried to reconcile social progress with aesthetic innovations, it proved violently destructive. Indeed, it ended up destroying Baltard’s Central Markets. Mead places himself squarely on the other side of that event, among those, like Aldo Rossi and Tony Vidler and even Baltard himself, who are interested above all in the richly layered historical fabric of the city. The great value of Mead’s meticulous study resides in his expert demonstrations of Baltard’s exceptional sensitivity to history and to historical context. These constitute a valuable contribution to our understanding of the architect’s approach, and help open our eyes to heretofore obscure aspects of midnineteenth-century French planning more broadly. The limitations of Mead’s book, on the other hand, stem from the limiting view of architecture itself upon which the inquiry is predicated; a view of architecture that hardly extends beyond

Book Reviews the professional world of the architect – beyond the intertwining of the designer’s artistic idea, the constraints of bureaucracy and program, and the habits of a professional milieu. Such an approach sidesteps the big question of how Baltard’s buildings contributed to shaping a new vision of modernity in French culture. It leaves the place of the Halles Centrales in the culture and economy of Paris largely unexplored, and reduces contemporary commentary to a series of judgments to be either agreed with or contested. Mead’s book will now become the architectural history standard on Baltard and his œuvre, but one cannot help feeling that this hermetic approach rather undermines the promise of the book’s ambitious title. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s Colossal presents a completely different kind of approach. Grigsby explores a series of themes and problems centred on questions of scale and representation as they emerge from detailed recapitulations of the histories of four great international engineering projects. She opens, tellingly, with the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt and the techniques of representation employed in the Description de l’Egypte and elsewhere, both to record what was seen there but also to control and master it by dissociating it from the power and substance it retained in its real materiality. The chapter concludes with a telling evocation of two contemporary accounts of entering into the Great Pyramid. Unlike the reductive visualisations of pictorial representation, the intensely physical experience of dragging one’s body along the stifling interior tunnels of the pyramid is offered as an authentically non-abstracting form of encounter, one still yoked to the body and the laborious friction of its reality. Thereby Grigsby announces the major theme of the book, while reminding us also of how the spectre of the colossal, and particularly of the pyramids, was enshrined in the Western imagination by Napole ón’s expedition. Grigsby will point out repeatedly in what follows how that spectre continued to exert a hold on the men responsible for the other projects she analyzes, as a historical benchmark to admire, compete with, and ultimately surpass. French engineers return to Egypt in Chapter 2, which offers a suggestive recapitulation of the construction of the Suez Canal. We encounter two key figures: Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French diplomat who stole the idea for a new canal from the Saint-Simonian engineers and adventurers who conceived it, and who then won the rights to build the canal, organized its financing, and ultimately oversaw its construction between 1859 and 1869; and Fre ´de ´ric-Auguste Bartholdi, best known as the French artist who created the Statue of Liberty, but who in 1855 spent eight months in Egypt with the orientalist painter Jean-Le ón Ge ´roˆme, sketching and photographing the people and monuments of Egypt on a French government mission. After returning to France, Bartholdi too stole something from the Saint-Simonians: the idea of erecting a colossal female statue, in this case, a giant statue of a female Egyptian peasant or fellah to stand as a lighthouse at the mouth of the new canal. Grigsby offers a thoughtful discussion of Bartholdi’s photography and drawings in Egypt as a way of exploring how he saw Egypt, its historic monuments, and the Egyptians themselves, and how these different media helped determine the nature of the representations thus produced. By


1869, Bartholdi was back in Egypt trying to sell his planned statue of ‘Egypt Enlightening Asia’ – a heavily draped, forward stepping female figure with one arm aloft, holding a torch – to the ruler Ismail Pasha, as well as to Lesseps himself. Lesseps proved indifferent and Ismail ultimately declined. Grigsby suggests that Bartholdi’s failure to convince Ismail should be understood in the light of changes at the canal worksite itself. Back in the mid-50s, Bartholdi like many European visitors had written with orientalist lyricism about the timeless, earthbrown Egyptian fellahs whose corve é labour was making the canal. In 1863, however, Ismail Pasha had abolished corve é labour under pressure from the British government, forcing the French to transform their operation on the fly to one powered by immense dredging machines. (In this they were helped by the 84,000,000 francs they forced the Egyptian government to pay them in compensation.) Thus by the time Bartholdi arrived back in Egypt in 1869, the very aesthetics of the canal’s representation had changed. The silent multitudes whose labour had naturally evoked the construction of the pyramids had been replaced by the spectacle of mechanized modern technology. Bartholdi’s proposed colossus no longer told the story the canal’s sponsors wanted to tell. Twenty years later this was made crystal clear by the colossal statue that was actually erected at the entrance to the canal: a statue of Lesseps himself. It is a detail Grigsby strangely omits, but which consummates the shift she describes. But by then, Bartholdi was onto bigger things. Almost immediately after his disappointment in Egypt, he conceived the idea of recasting his statue as ‘Liberty Enlightening the World’ and seeking a home for it in the USA. This is the subject of Chapter 3, which begins by invoking the question of scale and representation: how could Bartoldi convince potential backers and the public of the powerful effect of the colossal scale he had in mind? In other large-scale projects, Bartholdi had used photographs that included human figures for comparison. Grigsby points to Bartholdi’s photographs of Egyptian colossal figures, noting that photographs are ‘indices of the optical, not the material’, unlike casts, and that therefore they can ‘contain and manage the colossal’ (p. 74). After a slightly gratuitous excursus on the contemporary technique of ‘photosculpture’, Grigsby turns to the concept of the fragment. Bartoldi ultimately hit upon the idea of publicly communicating the scale of his proposed statue by exhibiting isolated parts, such as the crowned head, the hand holding the torch, or even just a finger. It was a technique he probably remembered from seeing fragments of Egyptian colossi in situ. Grigsby’s discussions of scale are theorized with reference to Peircean icons, indexicality, and the haptic versus the optic, but in ways that – to this reader, anyway – sometimes served more to mystify than to illuminate the issues at stake. Grigsby takes up indexicality again in recounting how Bartholdi used a traditional process of successive scale factor multiplications to make ever larger versions of his small solid plaster working models of Liberty. In the final stage, copper sheets were hammered from the inside against a wooden framework that mirrored the contours of the final full-scale model. Grigsby points out that this relied entirely on indexicality (the worker’s job, ‘working blindly’, was ‘to hammer one thing against another thing, not OXFORD ART JOURNAL 39.2 2016 337

Book Reviews to judge or adjust’ [p. 83]), since each copper panel was abstract and illegible on its own. An innocent reader could easily infer from these pages that these techniques comprised part of the modernity of Bartoldi’s project; in fact they were ancient techniques in use already by the ancient Greeks and employed in a variety of (admittedly smaller) colossal statues right up into the nineteenth century.6 The hollowness of the resulting statue exercised a hold on contemporaries. We learn first of Thomas Edison’s ghastly idea (yet another theft from the Saint-Simonians) to outfit Bartoldi’s statue with a giant phonograph so that it could ‘speak’ an amplified message: ‘Welcome to our shores!’ We learn next of the 1886 Symbolist novel L’Eve future by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, in which a fictionalized Edison creates the perfect female android for a depressed friend. Finally, we turn to the interior of Bartoldi’s statue itself: how, after all, was this hollow assembly of copper panels meant to be supported internally? Via a steel armature fabricated by the engineer Gustave Eiffel. This leads us neatly into Chapter 4, which eventually comes to centre on the Eiffel Tower. First, though, Grigsby details Eiffel’s contribution to Bartoldi’s statue. We are first reminded that Bartholdi’s initial choice to engineer the statue was Euge `ne Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who lamely proposed to pack the statue with sand-filled metal coffers. Following Viollet-le-Duc’s death in 1879, Eiffel assumed responsibility and came up with his elegant solution of hanging the copper panels of the statue off a simple iron armature. Bartholdi, we are told, was interested only in the surface of the statue, in its appearance as a form, whereas Eiffel was interested only in the skeleton: for him the surfaces were just an area subject to forces that needed to be controlled. This difference in perspectives is worth noting, but the amount of space Grigsby devotes to it implies that there was something unusual about it, when actually such inorganic relationships between external appearance and internal structural reality were typical of European architecture and engineering at this date, and constitute a central theme of nineteenth-century architectural history. Architectural historians might also find other aspects of these pages unsatisfying. Grigsby is openly innocent about matters of structural engineering, and admits to being ‘stunned’ (p. 103) when structural engineers informed her that the precise external contours of the statue would have made little difference to Eiffel’s calculations. A discussion of wind resistance (p. 110) suffers similarly. Grigsby’s account of the prior uses of iron in architecture mentions only the Paris Ope ´ra and the Bibliothe `que Sainte-Genevie `ve, in order to assert that ‘the Eiffel Tower exposed what had been veiled’ (p. 106). (What about Baltard’s Markets, begun two decades earlier?) She also uncritically quotes Gidieon’s anachronistically modernist accusation (from a book published in 1941) that Labrouste had enclosed his iron construction ‘in the stonework of the exterior like the works of a watch in its case’ (p. 106). The last sections of this chapter edge us towards the subject of the next, the Panama Canal. This French effort was once again headed by Ferdinand de Lesseps, who bullheadedly argued against the advice of the engineers, including Eiffel, that this new canal should use a system of locks to account for a mountainous terrain that was totally different from 338 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 39.2 2016


that of Egypt. Lesseps instead wanted to cut right through the Isthmus of Panama in a straight line, as he had at Suez. This ties effectively into Grigsby’s larger theme of the reality of matter and its stubborn resistance to the mastering abstractions of the engineer. One senses something approaching an allegory at times here, where the order-making engineer is to be equated with imperialism, and the stubborn unvanquishable earth with the colonized. (The shift in tone here is slightly disconcerting, coming as it does after breathless expositions of Eiffel’s technical genius.) Despite the idiocy of Lesseps’s plan, it was adapted and the work was begun using workers and not the machines that had finished the job at Suez. Tens of thousands of these workers soon died. Lesseps reluctantly admitted his mistake and approached Eiffel to design a system of locks. Eiffel agreed and used part of his enormous advance to finance the construction of the Eiffel Tower. The year 1888 began with Eiffel supervising construction of the canal locks at a yard in Nantes, but ended with the French Panama Canal Company declaring bankruptcy. This led to a major scandal, since Eiffel had made a fortune while thousands of investors had lost their money. Eiffel’s reputation was permanently tainted and his tower became a symbol of capitalist greed. He soon withdrew from the world and never built again, preferring to spend his time at the apex of his eponymous tower, in an incongruously bourgeois office with patterned carpets, striped wallpapers, and a fringed ottoman, where he conducted scientific experiments. (The office survives, peopled with wax figures that represent Eiffel and Edison deep in conversation.) The longest and best chapter of Grigsby’s book is devoted to the rest of the construction of the Panama Canal – a project with a personal relevance for the author, who was born and raised in the Panama Canal Zone. (There is even a picture of the two-year-old Grigsby there on page 166.) The chapter begins with a discussion of the initial plans, which unfolded with a predictably swaggering sense of confidence and entitlement. Once again, Grigsby helps us to see how representations aim to clarify and simplify material conditions that in reality could appear to possess their own will and agenda. In this case, it is the Panama Isthmus which doggedly resists the hubristic will of the engineers. Grigsby recounts the circumstances by which the USA took over the project by fomenting a revolution in Colombia that permitted Panama to declare itself an independent country, thereafter to be a US puppet. Within weeks the USA had the concession for the canal, took over what the French had managed to dig, and began work on a lock-based project. The main challenge involved cutting through a set of five-hundred-foot high hills – what came to be called the Culebra Cut. These gave the Americans the same problems the French had had, but the Americans quickly discovered the utility of dynamite, which, despite the earth’s tendency to slide back into the canal channel, eventually helped them to extract vastly more earth than the French had done. This chapter contains the book’s only extended discussion of workers, thanks to an oral history project that recorded the memories of men who had worked on the canal. Their gruesome testimonies confirm that the hubris of the American engineers subjected them to horrors. The last part of the chapter takes up the story

Book Reviews of William Van Ingen, the painter who received the official commission to paint a set of murals in the rotunda of the Panama Canal Administration Building. This brings Grigsby full circle, back to the same concerns with scale and representation with which the book opened. Van Ingen declared that his challenge in conceiving these murals was to convey a sense of the project’s vast scale. Grigsby offers an extended discussion of stereoscopic images of the canal, several from her personal collection, centring on the stereoscope’s ability to represent distance and scale. The section is introduced by a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes: ‘Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable’. The line could almost serve as an anti-epitaph for Grigsby’s book, for it sums up the attitude she is concerned to expose and critique. We finally return then to Van Ingen and his cycle of paintings, which are described and also reproduced in their entirety here for the first time. The final chapter of the book is entitled ‘Toyland’, and it turns the question of scale on its head by examining the ubiquitous scaled-down replicas, models, and representations of the monuments and sites described up to this point. The main line of reflection here is phenomenological. Bartholdi and Eiffel used miniatures and even tried to make businesses from ‘relics’ of the construction of their monuments; Grigsby seeks to redeem such miniatures from the label ‘kitsch’, announcing that, ‘to me, extreme shifts in scale are wondrous’, and noting that a mini-colossus ‘lends itself to use as a personal fetish’. It becomes something to be felt and not just seen; it becomes ‘something pressed against warm skin’. Visuality itself seems to be in the dock here, revealed as the enabler of masterful geometrical fantasies. In counterpoint, the embodied phenomenal experience of material reality becomes an emblem or ally of reconciliation with the world. Grigsby remarks (160) that the book has been about two impulses: that of building colossal things, and that of shrinking those colossal things into various hand-held and portable formats. The latter impulse covers everything from Eiffel Tower key fobs to the Description de l’Egypte, stereoscopic imagery, and photographs. Grigsby adds a coda entitled ‘Tallest?’, which concerns the long running competition between nations to erect the tallest building in the world. At this point, Grigsby takes off the gloves. Noting that the Panama Canal has become outdated over the years because new ships (so-called post-Panamax ships) cannot fit into it, despite its having been enlarged several times, she insists that the victories of colossal triumphs are fleeting. Whatever their momentary relevance, they are doomed to obsolescence. She then parades a series of colossi and ‘world’s tallest’ buildings, each of which has been superseded by the next – except, naturally, for the current record holder, the ‘repellent’ Burj Khalifa in Dubai, whose absurd impracticality and naked ostentation Grigsby denounces. Other colossi, from Kiev to Dakar, come in for similar (well-deserved) mockery. In her conclusion, Grigsby writes that ‘man-made enormity’ – a deliberate play on that much-misused word – has gone from an expression of power and authority to kitsch and hallucination. The colossal and the miniature are thus inverted. ‘Colossi erode. . . To seek status on the basis of size alone is an exercise doomed to failure. It always was’.


The claim, however, feels like wishful thinking. Jaded intellectuals may recognize how the iconic status of the Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty was manufactured and regard them as kitschy, but they still hold enormous power and have done enormous work as icons of the cities and countries in which they stand. As for the two practical works she studies in the book, the Suez Canal played a crucial role in accelerating world trade and in facilitating the colonisation of Africa – morally dubious accomplishments to be sure, but certainly successes in the eyes of the men who built it – while the Panama Canal has been such a success that Nicaragua has recently engaged a Chinese company to build a new ‘Grand Canal of Nicaragua’, deeper, wider, and longer, to compete with it. Grigsby offers insightful reasons why the assault of techno-scientistic hubris on the reluctant materiality of our world and its least fortunate inhabitants warrants our mistrust and often our resistance. But however evident the moral vacuity of that assault may be, it would be difficult in our increasingly tropical times to take much comfort from a belief that its accomplishments are inevitably doomed to failure.

Notes 1. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge and London: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 16. 2. David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 12–13. 3. Charles-François Viel, De l’impuissance des mathe´matiques pour assurer la solidite´ des baˆtimens, et recherches sur la construction des ponts (Paris: Vve Tilliard et fils, 1805). Cited repeatedly by Benjamin in the Arcades Project. 4. Bertrand Lemoine, Les Halles de Paris: l’histoire d’un lieu, les pe´ripe´ties d’une reconstruction, la succession des projets, l’architecture d’un monument, l’enjeu d’une cite´ (Paris: l’E´querre, 1980), p. 73–82. 5. Pierre Pinon, Louis-Pierre et Victor Baltard (Paris: Monum E´d. du patrimoine, 2005), p. 169. 6. Marvin Trachtenberg, The Statue of Liberty (New York: Viking Press, 1976), pp. 119–26. doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcw004 Advance Access Publication 10 June 2016

Exposing German Communist Realities James A. van Dyke

Sabine Kriebel, Revolutionary Beauty: The Radical Photomontages of John Heartfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014) 99 b&w illns, 352 pp., ISBN 9780520276185, hardcover £48.95 Wolfgang Hesse (ed.), Das Auge des Arbeiters: Arbeiterfotografie und Kunst um 1930 (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2014), 440 pp., ISBN 3944669444, hardcover £29.50 For readers of the German Communist Party’s national daily newspaper, Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), 13 May 1928 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 39.2 2016 339