Dossin - France and the Visual Arts Since 1945

France and the Visual Arts
since 1945

France and the Visual Arts
since 1945

Remapping European Postwar and
Contemporary Art

Edited by Catherine Dossin

Tables

Figures

BOATE, Rachel is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, whose research has been supported by the cole Normale Suprieure in Paris, the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), the Georges Lurcy Institute, and the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art.

CONSIDINE, Liam is Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. His research is focused on the international impact of Pop art in the 1960s and on the critical problems of contemporary art.

CRAS, Sophie is Matre de confrences at Universit Paris 1 Panthon-Sorbonne. An English translation of her book, L'conomie lpreuve de lart. Art et capitalisme dans les annes 1960 (2018), is forthcoming with Yale University Press.

DOSSIN, Catherine is Associate Professor at Purdue University and Editor of the Artl@s Bulletin. She is the author of The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s1980s: A Geopolitics of Western Art Worlds (2015) and has co-edited with Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Batrice Joyeux-Prunel Circulations in the Global History of Art (2015).

ERICKSON, Ruth is Mannion Family Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. She has organized numerous exhibitions and published scholarly catalogs, including Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st-Century Naturalist and Leap before You Look: Black Mountain College 19331957.

FREDRICKSON, Laurel is Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Art and Design at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her book Jean-Jacques Lebel: French Happenings of the 1960s and the Erotics of Revolution, will be published in 2018.

GALIMBERTI, Jacopo is a Post-Doctoral Fellow of the British Academy at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Individuals against Individualism: Western European Art Collectives (19561969) (2017).

GUY, Emmanuel is Assistant Professor of Art and Design History and Director of the M.A program in History of Design and Curatorial Studies at Parsons Paris, The New School. He is the co-author with Fabien Danesi and Fabrice Flahutez of La Fabrique du cinma de Guy Debord (2013), and with Laurence Le Bras of Guy Debord, Un Art de la Guerre (2013) and Lire Debord (2016). His book, Vers un design de l mancipation: le Jeu de la Guerre de Guy Debord, will be published in 2019.

JOLY, Nomi teaches at the cole du Louvre and at the Panthon-Sorbonne University. Her research focused on the German ZERO Group, with a special focus on the relations between art and technology in the 1950s and 1960s.

LAKS, Dborah is Scientific Coordinator at the Deutsches Forum fr Kunstgeschichte, and teaches at the Panthon-Sorbonne University, Sciences Po, and cole du Louvre. She is the author of Des dchets pour mmoire. Lutilisation de matriaux de rcupration par les nouveaux ralistes (19551975) (2017).

ONEILL, Rosemary is Associate Professor of Art History at Parsons School of Design, The New School. She is the author of Art and Visual Culture on the French Riviera, 19561971 (2012).

PICCIONI, Lucia is Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Muse du Quai Branly. In 2015, she received the cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales Best Dissertation Award.

PICHON-BONIN, Ccile is a researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and lecturer at Sciences Po. She is the author of Peinture et politique en URSSLitinraire des membres de la Socit des artistes de chevalet (OST), 19171941 (2013).

SARV-TARR, Marin is Post-Doctoral Fisher Collection Curatorial Fellow at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She co-curated the exhibition Interiors and Exteriors: Avant-Garde Itineraries in Postwar France at the University of Chicago Smart Museum of Art in 2013.

SIEGELBAUM, Sami is a Los Angeles-based art historian whose research focuses on the relationship between art and labor. He is completing two book manuscripts: The Ends of Political Art, on the ways artists in France responded to May 1968, and Surviving a Capitalist Economy, on Christopher DArcangelo.

TISO, Elisabeth is a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Center the City University of New York. She is the co-author of New Yorks New Edge: Contemporary Art, the High Line and Urban Megaprojects on the Far West Side (2014).

VANEL, Herv is Assistant Professor at the American University of Paris. He is the author of Triple EntendreFurniture Music, Muzak, Muzak-Plus (2014) and Le Parti CommonisteRoy Lichtenstein et lart pop (2013). He co-curated the exhibition Warhol Unlimited at Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris (20152016), for which he edited the accompanying catalog.

WOODRUFF, Lily is Assistant Professor of Art History at Michigan State University. Her book, Disordering the Establishment: Participation and Institutional Critique in France, 19581981, will be published in 2019.

Catherine Dossin

The present book originates from a sentence by American philosopher Arthur Danto I came across several years ago in a book on twentieth-century American art. It read: French painting between the wars and after the Second World War exemplifies so protracted a decline that the final three-quarters of the twentieth century could be written with scarcely a mention of France. who had provided such a sophisticated understanding of the discursive workings of the art world. It would seem that the decline of French art was so universally recognized that it did not need to be discussed or explained, let alone proven; it could simply be stated as a truth. French art is usually thought to have declined sometime during or after the Second World War, but according to Danto it was already over by the beginning of the century unless it had started earlier still.

Indeed, a quick review of American literature on France revealed that its end had long been announcedlong before the twentieth century. In fact, French decadence is a recurring motive in American thinking of France since the very beginning of Franco-American relations. As historian Saliha Belmessous explained, the French failure at establishing colonies on the North American continent in the sixteenth century was regarded as the result of moral shortcomings. The moral corruption of France, which was illustrated in the religious and civil wars that then raged throughout the country, From then on, France was the decadent, corrupted other of the United States.

Within the rich amount of American literature on French decadence, an article published in 1910 in the literary journal The North American Review is particularly noteworthy. Written by Maria Longworth Storer, an artist, socialite, and the wife of Bellamy Storer, a US representative and diplomat in Europe, it is exemplary in the way the clich of French moral decadence was used in the complicated geopolitical context of the years leading to the First World War. According to Storer, religion and justice, which are the pillars of society, had been replaced in France by the Desse de la Raison (literally the Goddess of Reason, that is to say secularity) and socialism. After describing the aggressive campaign of secularization of public education driven by the Rpublicains since the 1880s, the success of socialist ideas, and what she saw as the consequent degradation of authority, Mrs. Storer concluded that the French people had lost any moral sense. The general moral decadence of the country also resulted, in her eyes, in such a lax attitude within the French Army that little was to be expected from French soldiers in case of a conflict. In contrast to Frances moral and military corruption, the United States stood strong and powerful on the values of religion and justice (defined here as the opposite of socialism).