French Literature Reviews - 2026

A. Buisine, Huysmans à fleur de peau
Art and Visual Culture

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Alain Buisine, Huysmans à fleur de peau. Le goût des primitifs, Artois Presses Université, “Etudes littéraires”, 2004, 136 p., €17.

To date, there has been no book specifically dedicated to Joris-Karl Huysmans as an art critic of early German and Flemish masters. This volume aims to fill that gap by giving a prominent place to *The Three Primitives* (*Les Trois Primitifs*), with a particular focus on the analysis of Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece. Rather than merely offering a summary or overview, this essay undertakes a detailed examination of the dermographic imagery underlying Huysmans's art criticism (hence, clearly, the book's title). Driven by a desire for sublimation, Huysmans consistently strives to exhaust physiological interiorities in order to project them onto the surface of the skin. This highly complex operation is what the book brings to light, demonstrating that in this respect a genuine and unexpected solidarity exists between his early writings on the Impressionists and those dedicated to the Primitives following his conversion. But indeed, once Huysmans returned to the Church, can we truly still speak of painting?

A professor of literature at Charles de Gaulle University Lille 3, Alain Buisine focuses primarily on the intersections between literature and painting. He has recently published a series of works dedicated to Venice and its painters: Les ciels de Tiepolo with Gallimard, as well as Dictionnaire amoureux et savant des couleurs de Venise, Cènes et banquets de Venise, and Un Vénitien dit le Canaletto with Zulma. His forthcoming book is titled Nudités de Venise.

Joris-Karl Huysmans occupies a fascinating position in nineteenth-century French literature and art criticism, transitioning from the naturalism of his early period to the profound Catholicism of his later years. This critical study examines how his engagement with visual arts, particularly the works of early Flemish and German masters and Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece, shaped his aesthetic vision. By analyzing the intersection of literature and painting, the book situates Huysmans within the rich tradition of writer-critics who sought to translate the emotional intensity of visual masterpieces into the written word, bridging the gap between impressionism and spiritual devotion.

Alain Buisine, a specialist in the relationships between literature and painting at Charles de Gaulle University Lille 3, offers a focused examination that will appeal to scholars of nineteenth-century French literature, art historians, and readers interested in the evolution of Huysmans's critical thought. The volume provides valuable insights for those exploring the complex ties between bodily imagery, aesthetic sublimation, and religious conversion in modernist art criticism. It serves as an essential resource for understanding how visual culture informed the literary output of one of France's most distinctive transitional figures.