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Size Matters

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DOI: 10.1093/oxartj/kcw004

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 Book Reviews
nature, and actions, the jug-thing ‘things’. Heidegger’s ontolog-
ical reflections on thingliness have been useful in a number of
fields, e.g. ecology, where theorists have developed a biocen-
tric 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 litera-
ture 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 ob-
ject. 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
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
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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
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 978-
1-934772-76-8, 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
ambitions of the École Polytechnique, and the mysticism of the
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 impera-
tives of iron architecture were analogous to the state’s function
‘as an instrument of domination by the bourgeoisie’ – an inher-
ent power and capacity for immense scale that early
nineteenth-century architects had failed to grasp but that engi-
neers, 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

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 mea-
sure 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 lib-
erate Baltard from a caricature that he claims historians have
long perpetuated, namely, that of the timid and reluctant inno-
vator, 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 po-
lemics 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 nineteenth-
century 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 myr-
iad manifestations is shown to be hubristic, prone to violence,
complicit with imperialism, and even hostile towards the ele-
mental 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 cri-
tique of that impulse for mastery which imagines forms, prop-
erties, 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 architec-
ture).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 pre-
sent, for example on the builders of skyscrapers, the subject of
Grigsby’s epilogue.
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Book Reviews
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 Mémoires, 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
Napoléon 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 re-
cent 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 accomplish-
ments.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 single-
handedly bringing them forth from the archival sources, with-
out sufficient acknowledgment that earlier scholars like Pinon
or Bertrand Lemoine (1980) already unearthed these docu-
ments and told these stories, and sometimes even quoted the
same passages from them that Mead now quotes. This reti-
cence casts something of a shadow over Mead’s many insight-
ful and original readings of individual buildings, which taken
as a whole constitute an advance over the interpretations of-
fered 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, self-
image, 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 compro-
mised the goal of disclosing how architects ‘fought to preserve
their professional autonomy within a growing municipal bu-
reaucracy’ (pp. 69–70). More engaging are Mead’s sensitive
analyses of Baltard’s work at the Paris Hôtel de Ville, and par-
ticularly the two Batiments Annexes he built on the square op-
posite. 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 sur-
rounding site. Their externally symmetrical facades thus echo
those of the neighbouring Hôtel 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 sep-
arating 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 unexpect-
edly evoke the centuries between the medieval past of the old
church and the industrial present of the neighboring boule-
vard. This suggestion of what Mead calls a ‘narrative of ongo-
ing 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 Mémoires. 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
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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 Saint-
Eustache. He also argues that when Baltard was forced by the
Emperor in 1853 to halt work and change the design to some-
thing 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 best-
known Parisian building, the church of Saint-Augustin, the sub-
ject of Mead’s final chapter. Here too we encounter Baltard’s
solicitude towards the urban topography, this time in the un-
conventional 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 in-
dependent 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 carac-
tère, 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 opti-
mism 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 di-
visive consumerism. But no sooner has Mead described these
modernist analyses than he takes his distance from them, not-
ing that when architectural modernism eventually tried to rec-
oncile 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 mid-
nineteenth-century French planning more broadly. The limita-
tions of Mead’s book, on the other hand, stem from the limit-
ing view of architecture itself upon which the inquiry is
predicated; a view of architecture that hardly extends beyond

the professional world of the architect – beyond the intertwin-
ing of the designer’s artistic idea, the constraints of bureau-
cracy 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 redu-
ces 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 real-
ity. 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 Napoléon’s expedition. Grigsby will point out re-
peatedly in what follows how that spectre continued to exert a
hold on the men responsible for the other projects she ana-
lyzes, 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 Frédéric-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-Léon Gérôme, sketching and photographing the
people and monuments of Egypt on a French government mis-
sion. After returning to France, Bartholdi too stole something
from the Saint-Simonians: the idea of erecting a colossal fe-
male 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 ex-
ploring 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
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Book Reviews
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 sug-
gests that Bartholdi’s failure to convince Ismail should be un-
derstood 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, earth-
brown Egyptian fellahs whose corvée labour was making the
canal. In 1863, however, Ismail Pasha had abolished corvée
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 ar-
rived 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 ac-
tually erected at the entrance to the canal: a statue of Lesseps
himself. It is a detail Grigsby strangely omits, but which con-
summates 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 com-
parison. 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 ‘photo-
sculpture’, 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 discus-
sions 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 indexi-
cality again in recounting how Bartholdi used a traditional pro-
cess 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 con-
tours 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 ab-
stract 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 even-
tually 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 Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who lamely pro-
posed to pack the statue with sand-filled metal coffers.
Following Viollet-le-Duc’s death in 1879, Eiffel assumed re-
sponsibility 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 inter-
ested only in the skeleton: for him the surfaces were just an
area subject to forces that needed to be controlled. This differ-
ence 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 re-
sistance (p. 110) suffers similarly. Grigsby’s account of the
prior uses of iron in architecture mentions only the Paris Opéra
and the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, 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 mod-
ernist 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 bull-
headedly argued against the advice of the engineers, including
Eiffel, that this new canal should use a system of locks to ac-
count for a mountainous terrain that was totally different from
338 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 39.2 2016
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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 mat-
ter and its stubborn resistance to the mastering abstractions
of the engineer. One senses something approaching an alle-
gory 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 dis-
concerting, 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 thou-
sands of these workers soon died. Lesseps reluctantly admit-
ted 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 be-
gan 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, prefer-
ring 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 con-
ducted 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 be-
gins 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 indepen-
dent 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 con-
tains 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

of William Van Ingen, the painter who received the official com-
mission 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 proj-
ect’s vast scale. Grigsby offers an extended discussion of ste-
reoscopic 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 phenom-
enal 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 ev-
erything 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) can-
not 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 ob-
solescence. 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 ‘re-
pellent’ 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 delib-
erate play on that much-misused word – has gone from an ex-
pression 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 exer-
cise doomed to failure. It always was’.
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Book Reviews
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 vacu-
ity of that assault may be, it would be difficult in our increas-
ingly 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 mathématiques pour assurer la solidité
des bâtimens, 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 péripéties d’une
reconstruction, la succession des projets, l’architecture d’un monument, l’enjeu d’une cité
(Paris: l’Équerre, 1980), p. 73–82.
5. Pierre Pinon, Louis-Pierre et Victor Baltard (Paris: Monum Éd. 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