Emilie Anne-Yvonne Luse
PhD, Duke University. My dissertation, "Erasing the Avant-Gardes: Anti-Modernism in French Art History, Criticism, and Education, 1920-1944," can be downloaded for free here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wj8j5IvYi_W8fiOhZ3lS38spoGgZ6d-R/view?usp=sharing
This material has been copyrighted and may not be used for commercial purposes.
PhD, Duke University
Art, Art History & Visual Studies, 2019
BA, McGill University, 2006
Specialisations include art criticism, aesthetic theory, and politics in France between the two world wars.
Supervisors: Dr. Mark Antliff
Address: http://aahvs.duke.edu/people?Gurl=&Uil=15562&subpage=profile
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wj8j5IvYi_W8fiOhZ3lS38spoGgZ6d-R/view?usp=sharing
This material has been copyrighted and may not be used for commercial purposes.
PhD, Duke University
Art, Art History & Visual Studies, 2019
BA, McGill University, 2006
Specialisations include art criticism, aesthetic theory, and politics in France between the two world wars.
Supervisors: Dr. Mark Antliff
Address: http://aahvs.duke.edu/people?Gurl=&Uil=15562&subpage=profile
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Publications by Emilie Anne-Yvonne Luse
A free salon also meant freedom from the partisan judgment of the state, an aesthetic independence that Quatremère had argued would always reap the greatest artistic fruit for the nation. Though the revolutionaries did host a salon libre in 1791, it survived neither the National Convention (1792–1794) nor the Directory (1795–1799).
The French would have to wait until the return of Republicanism, with the Third Republic of Jules Ferry and Léon Gambetta, for the liberalization of artistic representation to finally take effect. Partisans of a free press, male universal suffrage, and private enterprise, the administrators of the Third Republic established an artistic policy of eclecticism and “strategic nonintervention” in the arts.10 In early 1881, the state would thus renounce its stewardship of an official salon, extricating itself from political controversies indelibly linked to the ancient regime. In line with the policies of capitalist liberalism, the qualities believed to be crucial to the cultivation of national talent under the new Third Republic were independence and individualism (including a fragmented art market).
The advent of the autonomous Salon des Indépendants, run entirely by artists, neatly coincided with this Republican position. Despite the rebellious characterization that its chroniclers have assigned it, state and municipal officials immediately recognized its value.12 Marking the institutionalization of values wished for in the crucible of early Republicanism, its representational structure also concretized the stated values of the Third Republic: rehearsing the principle of male universal suffrage (established in 1875 with the loi Wallon) while also serving a politique culturelle (ca. 1880) of broader artistic access and education for the public.By the 1920s, the Indépendants would be granted official state recognition as a public utility.
Thesis Chapters by Emilie Anne-Yvonne Luse
Art historians have identified a rightward turn in the artistic climate of France in the interwar period, one opposed to an avant-garde accused of being foreign to national culture, and reflective of a broader cultural and political shift towards the right. However, a study detailing the strength and variety of forces opposed to modernism and the avant-gardes in this period has yet to be written.
Drawing on newspapers, art journals, art history books, and sources from private and national archives in France, my dissertation presents four detailed case studies of reactionary, anti-avantgardeist and anti-modernist critics, art educators and art historians during this period, expanding our understanding of the position and influence of these rightwing intellectuals. Analyzing their aims, the artists they supported, their audiences, their social networks, and finally their links to the French state, the dissertation will reconstitute the multiple and multifaceted platforms of conservative cultural activism, revealing the contours of a powerful, persistent, and often successful cultural and political agenda that sought to undermine or reverse the course of modernism.
Accounting for the strategies through which rightwing art world actors battling modernism and the avant-gardes sought to institutionalize their campaigns, this dissertation complicates and revises our understanding of the substantial challenges posed to modern art in the interwar period, demonstrating the power of these interventions while also pointing to the tacit complicity of the French state with these efforts.
In the weeks that followed, the press on the far right applauded these actions of vandalism, reprinting a notice from the Ligue des Patriotes that claimed the "immorality of this bolshevist spectacle"3 justified the violence. Though the affected parties had gone to the police for the restitution of some 80,000 francs in damage, the scandal compelled the Préfecture de Police to order a new review of the film by the Examination Commission, which now mandated that offensive scenes featuring bishops be removed from future screenings of the film. On December 7, articles in L'Ami du peuple and Le Figaro, both owned by the fascist and anti-Semite François Coty, demanded more, asking for the banning of a film that dragged "family, religion, and nation" through the mud,4 adding that if censors did not act
affirming and legitimizing discourse present in anti-modernist strands of art criticism, these histories dismiss the contributions of foreign artists and the avant-gardes in France as extraneous to the development of art in France. The material impact of these narratives is considered in the second portion of the chapter, which shows how purchases by the French state during this period, determined by commissions that included the authors of these art histories as well as critics like Mauclair and George, closely reflected these narratives, pointing to the institutionalization of these reactionary tendencies.
Conference Presentations by Emilie Anne-Yvonne Luse
Papers by Emilie Anne-Yvonne Luse
A free salon also meant freedom from the partisan judgment of the state, an aesthetic independence that Quatremère had argued would always reap the greatest artistic fruit for the nation. Though the revolutionaries did host a salon libre in 1791, it survived neither the National Convention (1792–1794) nor the Directory (1795–1799).
The French would have to wait until the return of Republicanism, with the Third Republic of Jules Ferry and Léon Gambetta, for the liberalization of artistic representation to finally take effect. Partisans of a free press, male universal suffrage, and private enterprise, the administrators of the Third Republic established an artistic policy of eclecticism and “strategic nonintervention” in the arts.10 In early 1881, the state would thus renounce its stewardship of an official salon, extricating itself from political controversies indelibly linked to the ancient regime. In line with the policies of capitalist liberalism, the qualities believed to be crucial to the cultivation of national talent under the new Third Republic were independence and individualism (including a fragmented art market).
The advent of the autonomous Salon des Indépendants, run entirely by artists, neatly coincided with this Republican position. Despite the rebellious characterization that its chroniclers have assigned it, state and municipal officials immediately recognized its value.12 Marking the institutionalization of values wished for in the crucible of early Republicanism, its representational structure also concretized the stated values of the Third Republic: rehearsing the principle of male universal suffrage (established in 1875 with the loi Wallon) while also serving a politique culturelle (ca. 1880) of broader artistic access and education for the public.By the 1920s, the Indépendants would be granted official state recognition as a public utility.
Art historians have identified a rightward turn in the artistic climate of France in the interwar period, one opposed to an avant-garde accused of being foreign to national culture, and reflective of a broader cultural and political shift towards the right. However, a study detailing the strength and variety of forces opposed to modernism and the avant-gardes in this period has yet to be written.
Drawing on newspapers, art journals, art history books, and sources from private and national archives in France, my dissertation presents four detailed case studies of reactionary, anti-avantgardeist and anti-modernist critics, art educators and art historians during this period, expanding our understanding of the position and influence of these rightwing intellectuals. Analyzing their aims, the artists they supported, their audiences, their social networks, and finally their links to the French state, the dissertation will reconstitute the multiple and multifaceted platforms of conservative cultural activism, revealing the contours of a powerful, persistent, and often successful cultural and political agenda that sought to undermine or reverse the course of modernism.
Accounting for the strategies through which rightwing art world actors battling modernism and the avant-gardes sought to institutionalize their campaigns, this dissertation complicates and revises our understanding of the substantial challenges posed to modern art in the interwar period, demonstrating the power of these interventions while also pointing to the tacit complicity of the French state with these efforts.
In the weeks that followed, the press on the far right applauded these actions of vandalism, reprinting a notice from the Ligue des Patriotes that claimed the "immorality of this bolshevist spectacle"3 justified the violence. Though the affected parties had gone to the police for the restitution of some 80,000 francs in damage, the scandal compelled the Préfecture de Police to order a new review of the film by the Examination Commission, which now mandated that offensive scenes featuring bishops be removed from future screenings of the film. On December 7, articles in L'Ami du peuple and Le Figaro, both owned by the fascist and anti-Semite François Coty, demanded more, asking for the banning of a film that dragged "family, religion, and nation" through the mud,4 adding that if censors did not act
affirming and legitimizing discourse present in anti-modernist strands of art criticism, these histories dismiss the contributions of foreign artists and the avant-gardes in France as extraneous to the development of art in France. The material impact of these narratives is considered in the second portion of the chapter, which shows how purchases by the French state during this period, determined by commissions that included the authors of these art histories as well as critics like Mauclair and George, closely reflected these narratives, pointing to the institutionalization of these reactionary tendencies.