In a Germany exiting from Nazism, Joseph Beuys was effectively able to capture the attention of the public and the media by going back over the recent catastrophe. His spectacular return upon these events has meaning only when one recalls the violent world in which he had himself participated. Indeed, he set out to ...
# 14-2 | Realisms | Jérôme Bazin
In 1980, the title of a key exhibition held at the French National Museum of Modern Art--Realisms: Between Revolution and Reaction, 1919-1930--announced a program. The project manager for this show, Gérard Régnier (Jean Clair), recalled our common-sense understanding of the term Realism: “the artist’s scrupulous observation of the model being represented, whether it be ...
# 14-1 | Realisms | François Legrand
In 1980, the title of a key exhibition held at the French National Museum of Modern Art--Realisms: Between Revolution and Reaction, 1919-1930--announced a program. The project manager for this show, Gérard Régnier (Jean Clair), recalled our common-sense understanding of the term Realism: “the artist’s scrupulous observation of the model being represented, whether it be ...
# 13-2 | Primitivisms | Maureen Murphy
The Surrealists reinvented the idol of origins. They dreamed of their Primitive as someone standing apart from science and reality by curiously rediscovering the paths of history. As early as the 1920s, they were among the first to revolt against the serfage of non-Western peoples, and they did so not by calling, in the ...
# 13-1 | Primitivisms | Sophie Leclercq
The Surrealists reinvented the idol of origins. They dreamed of their Primitive as someone standing apart from science and reality by curiously rediscovering the paths of history. As early as the 1920s, they were among the first to revolt against the serfage of non-Western peoples, and they did so not by calling, in the ...
# 12-2 | What is Social Art? | Christophe Prochasson
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the reaction against spiritualism was a prelude to the struggle that would start up against art for art’s sake--against art seen as autonomous and rid of all social responsibility. A certain number of thinkers paved the way at the time by attacking this vision of an ethereal, ...
# 12-1 | What is Social Art? | Catherine Méneux
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the reaction against spiritualism was a prelude to the struggle that would start up against art for art’s sake--against art seen as autonomous and rid of all social responsibility. A certain number of thinkers paved the way at the time by attacking this vision of an ethereal, ...
#11-2 | Major Exhibitions | Olivier Berggruen
In The Ephemeral Museum, Francis Haskell decried the new hegemony created by major art exhibitions and the harmful consequences thereof. He recalled the genesis of the ways in which art works circulate as well as, from the early twentieth century, the first loans of paintings for prestigious international exhibitions, the establishment of ties between ...
# 11-1 | Major Exhibitions | Paul Ardenne
In The Ephemeral Museum, Francis Haskell decried the new hegemony created by major art exhibitions and the harmful consequences thereof. He recalled the genesis of the ways in which art works circulate as well as, from the early twentieth century, the first loans of paintings for prestigious international exhibitions, the establishment of ties between ...
# 10-2 | The Voyage of the Avant-Gardes | Laure-Caroline Semmer
We already knew the role the Armory Show of 1913 had played in the transatlantic exportation of European modernity. At the initiative of artists themselves, a number of foreign painters were able to achieve recognition in America as precursors of modernism. Cézanne in particular benefitted from the wave of exportation of French Impressionism before ...
