Letter of Seminar
Rémi Baudouï is known for his studies on urban planning and his recent publication work editing Le Corbusier’s correspondence. He rereads Hannah Arendt for us, setting her writings on culture back into a broad historiographical context. The better to grasp her thought overall, he does not confine himself to the much-talked-about texts brought together ...
Todd Shepard, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University, devotes his research work to France and its colonial empire in the twentieth century. His first book, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), was translated into French as 1962. Comment l’indépendance algérienne a transformé ...
In her last book, De la visibilité. Excellence et singularité en régime médiatique, Nathalie Heinach studied “visibility capital,” which grants a form of superiority to those who possess it. This phenomenon, which was constantly growing in scope throughout the twentieth century, offered her the opportunity to reexamine the notion of the “total social fact,” ...
We are familiar with the foundational book written by Maureen Murphy, L’imaginaire au musée. Les arts d’Afrique entre Paris et New York de 1931 à 2005 (Les Presses du Réel, 2009). Here, Murphy reexamines how non-Western works of art have been treated, from the moment when they were placed on the bottom rung of the evolutionary ...
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 ...
