Letter of Seminar
Romain Fathi is a student of the Great War and of commemorative practices. He invites us to reflect on the way in which Australia set up a section for the celebration of the arrival of the Australian and New Zealand Corps (ANZAC) in the Dardanelles in April 1915, a date hallowed as ...
War destroys human beings and things, and among the latter, it destroys cultural property, which testifies to the pastness of the past. Particular attention has been paid to the protection of such property, and this concern has been enshrined in law since the Hague Convention of 1906-1907 and followed up on in the ...
What comics and photography have in common is that they both emerged in the early nineteenth century while giving shape to their authors’ imaginaries. Isabelle Delorme, who is preparing a dissertation at Sciences-Po on historical graphic memoirs, calls to mind the growing role of photography in graphic albums which have themselves been on the ...
Through Chim’s biography, Carole Naggar raises the question of war photojournalism, its methods and motivations. Deeply disturbed by war as early as his youth in Warsaw, Chim lived through all the major conflicts of his time, starting with the Spanish Civil War, wherein he acted as a committed observer who sought to affect viewers ...
Art historians have gone to work on Italy’s colonial past. Yet visual sources for such a history remain rather rare, either because they have been destroyed or because they have been covered over or willfully omitted. Laura Iamurri opens a few possible paths of research and recalls that colonial exhibitions were indeed documented: the works ...
“Architecture in Uniform,” which is the title of Jean-Louis Cohen’s excellent exhibition at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris, presents projects both known and unknown that came into being between the Nazi’s destruction of Guernica in 1937 and the Allies’ atomic bombardments of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The interest of ...
Historians, we are told by Sylvain Venayre, the author of La Gloire de l’aventure. Genèse d’une mystique moderne. 1850-1940, neglected nineteenth-century European wars. Those wars are eclipsed by the great deadly conflicts of the twentieth century. The preceding century was said to be, by comparison, almost peaceful. Now, nothing of the sort is actually ...
Nicholas-Henri Zmelty defended a noted thesis (winner of the Orsay Museum Prize) on France’s ca. 1900 poster craze. Here, he looks at the mass-circulation illustrated press in France, investigating its strong links with prewar culture from the standpoint of heroic, erotic, and humorous representations. Laurence Bertrand Dorléac Between 1914 and 1918, the French illustrated ...
Thibault Boulvain studies here the work of Kader Attia, whose recent efforts are of fundamental importance for our reflections on how the events of colonial times and transfers between the African continent and the European one are committed to memory. Through his work, Attia investigates art’s role as the site within which conflicts are ...
Estelle Zhong studies here a very interesting case of artistic commitment undertaken in a new mode imposed by the contemporary international political context as it relates to war. Establishing “conversation” as a new political strategy does not necessarily culminate in an object that can be likened to a “work.” And yet, there really is ...
