Émile Zola, <i>Œuvres complètes: Critique littéraire et artistique</i> , <scp>i</scp> : <i>Écrits sur l’art</i> . Édition de Robert Lethbridge ZolaÉmile, <i> Œuvres complètes: Critique littéraire et artistique, <i> <scp>i</scp> </i> : Écrits sur l’art </i> . Édition de LethbridgeRobert. (Bibliothèque du <scp>xix</scp> ^e siècle, 70.) Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021. 775 pp.

The Classiques Garnier Œuvres complètes will no doubt become the definitive edition for Zola scholars, even if the volumes published so far provide, Robert Lethbridge himself has suggested, ‘a scholarly apparatus of varying substance and originality’ (French Studies, 75 (2021), 119). With his own magisterial edition of Zola’s writing on art, Lethbridge has set the highest of standards. The ninety-four-page Introduction provides an authoritative account of Zola’s life-long interest in the visual arts: from his first steps into the world of art-writing, through his militant championing of Manet, to the ‘impasse critique’ Zola had reached by the mid-1890s (p. 96) before a new avant-garde that seemed too much an affront to the mimetic project. Zola’s evolving tastes and allegiances were, Lethbridge shows, inextricably bound to his own political and aesthetic agendas as a novelist. Indeed, threaded through this analysis is a keen sense of the porosity of biography, critique, and fiction that reaches well beyond the most obvious reference point of Zola’s novel of the art world, L’Œuvre (1886). Lethbridge positions Zola’s art criticism within wider contemporary debates about the relationship between literature and painting, nostalgic conceptions of the ‘fraternité des arts’ ceding in the later nineteenth century to ‘une rivalité plus ou moins explicite, et marquée, aux frontières des deux champs culturels, par l’opposition de la plume et du pinceau’ (p. 11). The point is made through a brilliant close reading of Manet’s Portrait d’Émile Zola (1868), which appears as far more than a simple gesture of friendship towards the writer who had defended his work — Zola, ‘l’inventeur de M. Manet’, as Le Monde pour rire had it (cited, p. 65). Instead, Lethbridge deftly traces through Manet’s composition a set of oblique allusions to the lacunae in Zola’s own account of the painter’s art. No stone has been left unturned in this endeavour to draw together all of Zola’s published art criticism (his ‘Salons’, chroniques, studies and obituaries of individual artists, reports on art sales), along with the variations between different formats of publication, and extensive notes on the reception of Zola’s critical writing. Of particular significance is the inclusion of a lengthy interview Zola gave to the Revue populaire des beaux-arts in October 1897. Omitted from subsequent collections of Zola’s interviews, it represents a different ‘last word’ to the article (Le Figaro, 2 May 1896) hitherto taken as the art critic’s final adieu, and in which Zola had spoken of his diminishing interest in painting (pp. 693–94). Perhaps the edition’s most precious resource, though, is the inventory of contemporary artworks belonging to Zola — by far the most exhaustive and reliable to date. One cannot but feel a genuine sense of excitement about the possibilities this meticulous and generous edition opens up, supported as it is by an astonishing degree of detail in the footnotes, an up-to-date bibliography, as well as an index of names that will make it easily navigable. It is a piece of impeccable, even formidable, scholarship, which will prove indispensable to historians of both literature and art.

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