French modernism

Abstract
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.

This dissertation offers a critical reassessment of modernist involvement in the Sacred Art Movement, the highly controversial Catholic art renaissance undertaken by the French Dominican Order between 1937 and 1954. Marie-Alain Couturier and Pie-Raymond Régamey, the Dominican co-editors of the influential religious art journal L’Art Sacré, led the Sacred Art Movement by arguing that to reveal the timelessness and universality of Catholic themes in the modern world, “it would be safer to turn to geniuses without faith than to believers without talent.” Far less understood are the motives that compelled these same “geniuses without faith” to create art for the Catholic Church at such a tense political moment.
I bring new insight to modernist interest in religious space by reframing the three sites at the center of the Sacred Art Movement debates as sites of international art pilgrimage that helped to promote the “avant-garde” character of the French tradition. I argue that the scandals that surround Notre-Dame de Toute-Grâce in Assy, Henri Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, and Pablo Picasso’s Temple of War and Peace in Vallauris obscure a pressing, post-traumatic desire by older modernists to leave an enduring record of their legacy in the illustrious tradition of Catholic monumentality. Willing to set aside their ideological differences for the sake of their ambition, this older generation of French modernists sought to create a religious monument along the lines of Giotto, Michelangelo, and Bernini, and to claim a similar rank within the art historical canon. This dissertation therefore elucidates the shared, historicizing impulse behind these sites to tell a new story of the Sacred Art Movement, the story of modern art’s “canonization.”

The Musée de l’Orangerie exhibits a collection of eight monumental Water Lilies murals that Claude Monet (1840–1926) painted over the final decades of his life and career. Scholars have either pinpointed these paintings as progenitors of abstraction in modern art or mainly assessed them in relation to Monet’s biography. This article moves beyond such analyses by focusing on the unique way in which the L’Orangerie Water Lilies are exhibited. The arrangement of these murals within the space they occupy merit an interpretation hitherto predominantly prescribed to the murals alone. As the paintings remain in situ and envelop their visitors, this article proposes that the Water Lilies gallery offers visitors an experience based on corporeal stimulation, as the museum’s internal architecture is intricately connected to the paintings. Moreover, it is argued that Monet’s L’Orangerie fits into the larger history of proto-installation art by exploring its connection to the painted panoramas popular in Europe throughout the nineteenth century and strategies of twentieth-century installation art. In examining the Water Lilies gallery’s phenomenology of display—the manner in which art and the space it inhabits work in unison to convey meaning through visuomotor experience—this article links Monet’s L’Orangerie to historical cases of immersive art and considers it a precursor to installation artworks of the present day.

Kolokytha, Chara: Museum Acquisition Policies in Germany and France, in: Drost, Julia, Ivanoff, Hélène und Vernerey-Laplace, Denise (Hrsg.): Arts et politiques: Le marché de l'art entre France et Allemagne de l'Entre-deux-guerres à la Libération, Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net, 2022 (Passages online, Band 13), S. 52-73.

Moissey Kogan was an innovative, influential sculptor-craftsman and printmaker, whose career straddled the European avant-gardes of the first half of the 20th century. A cosmopolitan Russian Jew, whose work was marked by his interest in Jewish mysticism and theosophical beliefs, Kogan looked to non-European cultures and ancient sources, in common with many of his contemporaries in Munich, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Paris, to root his avant-garde experimentations and revivals of ancient techniques, in what were considered more authentic means of expression.

On the day Adolf Hitler came to power, Kogan fled Berlin and returned to his home in Paris, forced to leave behind him many of his key works in the care of dealers and museum collections. He would be obliged to watch powerless as his work was seized by the Nazis, only to be vilified in the infamous Entartete Kunst show of 1937, and the related exhibition, Der Ewige Jude. In hiding in Paris and associated with the Résistance, the sculptor would finally be arrested by the Vichy police and transported to his death at Auschwitz.

This talk discusses Kogan’s artistic positioning within the European avant-gardes and his preoccupation with transcendence and light. In stark contrast, it considers the consequences of the Nazi looting of his work for the task of reconstructing his oeuvre and reclaiming his career from unjustified obscurity.

I will point out the inner tensions of the French literature of the inter-war period and its ambivalent relationship with the classics, addressing some of André Gide's, Jean Cocteau's and Jean Giraudoux's "classical" plays. On the one hand, these authors challenge and mock the classical tradition because of its being the basis of the dominant, bellicistic culture. On the other one, they try to use these same classics to promote an alternative ideology, pacifist and inclusive.
Such troubled relationship with the classics also implies some philosopical considerations: despite the most widely held critical positions, tending to read French modernism as a humanistic movement, the plays of the '20s and '30s display nihilistic patterns which are repressed by their authors. Yet, they still come to the light through the irony which pervades these texts. My paper therefore offers a psychoanalitical reading of these works in order to highlight their nihilist elements and their struggle against the pervasive humanistic discourse. In this view, humanism is thus a compromise formation between nihilism and the need for social order in the aftermath of the war and the classics are the battleground of these conflicting ideologies, being the norm both to follow and to escape.