Modernity and Nostalgia
Art and Politics in France Between the Wars
Romy Golan(Author)
Yale University Press
Published on 25. October 1995
Book
Hardback
242 pages
978-0-300-06350-9 (ISBN)
Description
For most of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century, France was deemed to embody the very essence of artistic modernism. However, this study argues that, after World War I, traumatized by the experience of the trenches and then by the stranglehold of the Depression, France suffered a crisis of confidence so profound that it initiated a period of cultural, political and economic retrenchment that lasted into the Vichy years. The image that France acquired of itself - as a rural, feminine, feudal society - was not only reflected in the art of the period but was to a large extent fashioned and conditioned by it. Golan argues that reactionary issues such as anti-urbanism, the return to the soil, regionalism, corporatism and doubts about the new technology became central to cultural and art-historical discourse.
Focusing on the overlap of avant-garde and middle-of-the-road production, she investigates the import of these issues not only in painting, sculpture and architecture (concentrating on the work of Leger, Picasso, Le Corbusier, Ozenfant, Derain, the Surrealists and the so-called "naifs"), but also in the decorative arts, in the spectacle of world and colonial fairs, and in literature. Throughout she finds evidence that artists turned from the aesthetics of the machine age towards a more organic, naturalistic art. This leads her to ask whether the famous and momentous shift of the avant-garde from Paris to New York in 1939 did not, in fact, begin two decades earlier, in 1918. According to Golan, it is in democratic France of this period, rather than in Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, that one finds the a demonstration of the hidden interaction of art and ideology.
Focusing on the overlap of avant-garde and middle-of-the-road production, she investigates the import of these issues not only in painting, sculpture and architecture (concentrating on the work of Leger, Picasso, Le Corbusier, Ozenfant, Derain, the Surrealists and the so-called "naifs"), but also in the decorative arts, in the spectacle of world and colonial fairs, and in literature. Throughout she finds evidence that artists turned from the aesthetics of the machine age towards a more organic, naturalistic art. This leads her to ask whether the famous and momentous shift of the avant-garde from Paris to New York in 1939 did not, in fact, begin two decades earlier, in 1918. According to Golan, it is in democratic France of this period, rather than in Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, that one finds the a demonstration of the hidden interaction of art and ideology.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
96 b&w illustrations, 80 colour plates
Dimensions
Height: 256 mm
Width: 192 mm
Weight
910 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-300-06350-9 (9780300063509)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Content
France Revisited: Landscape as lieu de memoire - Re-embracing the Motif; A Moralised Landscape; The Landscape of the Trenches; The Landscape of the Body. Rusticising the Modern: Choosing the Regional Mosel Sculpture's Neo-Medieval Lineage; Painting's Naturalistic Lineage; Micons of the Regional - the French Peasantry Mythic Identities - the Artist as Peasant, Landed Aristocrat, and constructeur; Ludus Pro Patria 1920s Paris - a not so moveable feast. A Crisis of Confidence: From Machinism to the Organic - Years of Reckoning - 1927 to the Depression; The Machine Aesthetic Reconsidered Visions of Dystopia. The Return to Man: Le Monde Sans Ame A Young Man's Home Biological Man. At the Fairs: The Colonial Body of France Colonial Rustic; Regionalism Revitalised - the 1937 Fair Realisme de droite, realisme de gauche; Projecting on to Spain. In Defence of French Art: Mechanisms of Exclusion Fitting the terrien Mould Jew or israelite? The Final Stroke Conclusion: A Moralised Tale Notes.