Academics, pompiers, official artists and the arrière-garde : defining modern and traditional in France, 1900-1960 / edited by Natalie Adamson and Toby Norris.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Adamson, Natalie, editor.

Norris, Toby, editor.

College Art Association of America. Conference (2006 : Boston, Mass.)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Art, French--20th century.

Art, French.

Avant-garde (Aesthetics)--France--History--20th century.

Avant-garde (Aesthetics).

France--Intellectual life--20th century.

France.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 247 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Newcastle upon Tyne, England : Cambridge Scholars, [2009]

Summary:

Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-garde: Defining Modern and Traditional in France, 1900-1960 is a collection of eight essays and a scholarly introduction by established and emerging scholars that challenges the continuing modernist slant of twentieth-century art history. The intention is not to perpetuate the vulgar opposition between avant-garde and reactionary art that characterized early-twentieth-century discourse and has marked much subsequent historical writing, but rather to investigate the complex relationship that both innovative and conservative artists had to the concept of tradition. How did artists and art critics conceive of tradition in relation to modernity? What was the role of an artist's institutional positioning in determining expectations for his or her art? What light is thrown on the structure of the French art world by considering artists from abroad who worked in Paris? How did the war alter modernist and avant-garde paradigms and force crucial changes upon art production in the postwar period to 1960?Particular attention is paid to the terms academic, pompier, official, and arrière-garde, originally used to situate the more conservative artists and works as second-rate or as the negative foil to the assumed radicalism of the avant-garde. By re-evaluating the work of artists pushed to the historical margins by such polemical descriptors, and by proposing alternative understandings of the aesthetic, economic, institutional and political factors that drive our ideas of avant-gardism and the modernist narrative in France, this collection of essays offers new routes to explore the terrain of twentieth-century art in France.

Contents:

Intro

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Index.

Notes:

"This book originated in a panel of papers presented at the College Art Association Annual Conference in Boston, 2006"--Acknowledgements.

Description based on print version record.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

1-5275-5473-2

OCLC:

744501180