Letter of Seminar
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 ...
In art, the question of equality is posed in many different ways. Thomas Schlesser, whose excellent books on the nineteenth century we are familiar with, returns here to the artist’s propensity to vie with history. Through the case of Paul Chenavard, he offers us an example of an egalitarian and spiritual dreamer who wanted ...
We know Antje Kramer because of her thesis on Les Nouveaux Réalistes en Allemagne (1957-1963) (The New Realists in Germany, 1957-1963), forthcoming from Presses du Réel. Here, she studies the figure of the artist as teacher in the 1960s and 1970s through the writings and actions of Yves Klein, George Maciunas, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Wolf ...
Under the heading of the battles led in favor of equality for all in cultural matters, the name of Gaëtan Picon may be mentioned, as we are told by Agnès Callu, the author of a dissertation about this man, one of “history’s vanquished.” Picon is said to have consistently tried to impose an elitist ...
Laurent Le Bon, the new Director of the Pompidou Center-Metz (which was inaugurated in May 2010), responds to Callu on the level of achieved results. Le Bon has headed up an unprecedented experiment--one Picon would perhaps have approved of--that follows in the wake of what French President Georges Pompidou attempted and succeeded in imposing ...
The principal thesis of the second volume of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is that the dominant passion of modern societies is equality. One of its effects would be the “softening of customs,” but it would also engender cultural upheaval and an upending of established cultural objects. For, if it is really aristocratic ...
The principal thesis of the second volume of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is that the dominant passion of modern societies is equality. One of its effects would be the “softening of customs,” but it would also engender cultural upheaval and an upending of established cultural objects. For, if it is really aristocratic ...
