Letter of Seminar
2011-2012
And what if art were capable of implementing democracy? That is the wager laid down by the New Patrons, who open thereby a new chapter in the history of art. The instigator is François Hers, who has been the initiator of many other transformations, such as participating in the creation of Viva photo news ...
Among the things the French Revolution changed were also the mores of the art world as it had been organized around the Académie royale de peinture (French Royal Academy of Painting). With the emergence of sociétés d’amis des arts (societies of friends of the arts), new forms of public exhibitions, and the development of ...
In his much-discussed major book, published just this year (Les Batailles de l’impôt. Consentement et résistances de 1789 à nos jours), Nicolas Delalande reconsiders the question of whether political democracy and universal suffrage must necessarily lead to State intervention in favor of a greater equality of conditions as he reexamines this still-current debate, which ...
Following in the wake of the Dada movement, the saying “Art is life and life is art” was a leitmotiv in the 1950s and 1960s. Wolf Vostell falls within the scope of this outlook with his Theater Is in the Street (1958), where he championed the active participation of the audience, which had hitherto ...
Anne Lafont reexamines the aftermath of the French Revolution, where the imperatives of equality and liberty held sway, though not that of the “fraternity” that had also been inscribed within the program—at least not when it came to women. Even though the author is well aware that the category of the “modern” had long ...
How does the historian think passion? It was in the late 1970s that François Furet, the author of the already famous book Penser la Révolution française (Interpreting the French Revolution), introduced the notions of sentiment and affect in relation to his nineteenth-century predecessors, and in particular Alexis de Tocqueville. While for Furet it was ...
Frans Masereel was a Belgian artist whose engraving work has had a lasting influence on the genre. Such influence spread a bit everywhere and even as far away as China, where he had emulators as early as the 1930s, starting when his works were brought there clandestinely. Known for adding an acid stroke to ...
Jérôme Bazin has just completed his doctoral thesis on painting and the graphic arts in the German Democratic Republic from 1949 to 1990, which has been greeted as a quite new and quite complete study of a situation that remains problematic today. While, in present-day Germany, works produced in the past create a sense ...
We know of Philip Nord’s impressive work on twentieth-century France, but less well do we know of his interest in art. Here, he takes two examples drawn from different eras–late nineteenth-century Impressionism and the post-1945 decentralization of French theater—in order to clarify the terms and conditions for “democratic art.” Such art, which broke with ...
Stéphane Van Damme, whom we admire for his works on the Age of Enlightenment, has reread for us the work of Tocqueville, a man who, in his love for individual freedom, mistrusted equality. Van Damme helps us to understand how, between the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, positions on equality ...