The Gilded Cage: The Paris Salons Organization, Jury and Congestion
- Art d'Histoire
- Jan 28
- 5 min read
In the 19th century, the Paris Salon was not merely an exhibition; it was a colossal administrative machine. It was a vast, bureaucratic apparatus designed to process thousands of acres of canvas and tons of marble. But as the century progressed, this machine began to malfunction. Caught between the demands of the state, the explosion of submitted works, and the uproar of the avant-garde, the Salon became a battlefield where medals were weapons, hanging committees were executioners, and the picture frame itself was a line of defence.
The Tyranny of the Jury
The heart of this machine was the selection process. While the Revolution of 1791 had briefly established the "freedom to exhibit" as a fundamental right —the resulting chaos was unmanageable. By 1791, the opening had to be delayed because works poured in, and by 1848, another attempt at a free Salon resulted in over 5,000 works being displayed, creating a "crush" where nothing could be seen. This republican and free experience explains why an artist such as Gustave Courbet, who held left-wing political views, informed his parents that the republican system was not conducive to the arts.
To combat this "presumptuous mediocrity," the administration reinstated the jury system as a "necessary evil." However, the task assigned to these jurors was humanly impossible. It was calculated that jurors had approximately 45 seconds to judge a painting. After viewing five hundred canvases, the "fatigue of the visual ray" set in, rendering even the most knowledgeable expert physically incapable of distinguishing form or colour. This industrial-scale judgment meant that the Salon became a lottery, where nuance was lost and genius was often shown the door in favour of the conservative and the obvious.
The War of the Wall
For those who survived the 45-second trial of the jury, a second, perhaps more humiliating ordeal awaited: the hanging. The placement of a painting determined its commercial and critical fate. The best spots were "on the line" (at eye level), but these were reserved for medallists and favourites. Everyone else fell victim to the practice of high hanging.
Paintings were stacked frame-to-frame up to the ceiling, creating a vertical mosaic that was impossible to decipher. Caricaturists mercilessly mocked this absurdity. Cham sketched visitors bringing telescopes to the gallery, while Georges du Maurier imagined "Edison's Anti-gravitation Under-Clothing" that would allow art lovers to float up to the ceiling to see the rejected masterpieces. Gustave Courbet himself complained that in such a "crush," it was impossible to be noticed, as the Salon had become a visual cacophony where art was silenced by its own abundance. In Olympia's case, the painting was protected from hostile onlookers intent on attacking it and armed with umbrellas by being hung high up on the wall.
The State’s Last Stand
The state, fearing the loss of its grip on "ideal beauty" and the encroachment of modern "decadence," attempted a desperate intervention. In 1873, Charles Blanc and Adolphe Thiers created the Musée des Copies. Their plan was to fill a room with full-scale copies of "universal masterpieces"—from Raphael to Piero della Francesca—to re-educate the public and artists.
, Battle between Heraclius and Chosroes, 1873
Thiers, who had a "mania" for copies, believed that while the material of a painting might be craft, the "idea" was divine and could be replicated. This "ghost museum" was a strategic move to restore academic splendour. However, it required annexing the exhibition space of the Palais de l'Industrie, which drastically reduced the room available for living artists, increasing the number of rejections. Consequently, rather than educating the public, it merely fuelled the uproar against the Salon jury, failing to achieve its intended outcome. The museum closed after just nine months, a failed attempt to use the ghosts of the past to police the present.
A Legion of Sheep
In this atmosphere of authoritarian control, official rewards became suspect to the independent spirit. Gustave Courbet, the arch-rebel, famously rejected the Legion of Honour in 1870, treating the state’s approval with disdain. However, he was not against all honours. He made a clear distinction: he refused the French government’s decoration but proudly accepted the Order of St. Michael from Munich.
Why? Because the Munich cross was awarded by a jury of artists—his peers and rivals—rather than government bureaucrats. For Courbet, a medal from the state was a leash; a medal from fellow artists was a true "Cross of Merit." He even joked (or maybe not) in letters to his parents that this foreign knighthood might protect his family property from Prussian damages during the war, valuing the recognition of "competitors" over the patronage of the Emperor.
Breaking the Golden Barrier
The final rebellion took place on the very edge of the canvas. The Salon regulations strictly enforced the use of the official gold frame. The administration believed that gold provided a neutral barrier that separated the "illusion" of the painting from reality. The Impressionists, however, influenced by the colour theories of Chevreul, declared war on this "fairground border."
Pissarro and Mary Cassatt began using white, green, or red frames to complement the dominant tones of their paintings, arguing that gold disturbed the chromatic harmony. Seurat went further, painting the frame itself with dots of colour to ensure a scientific optical transition. Degas was perhaps the most radical; he was known to remove gold frames from his pictures in collectors' homes using a two-penny coin. To the critics, these "frames smeared with red and green" were in the "worst possible taste," but for the avant-garde, they were the final proof that art could no longer be contained by the old rules. They also rejected the salon's traditional red walls, opting instead for colours that would complement their canvases.
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