Acknowledgments

Golan, Romy

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Acknowledgments

Romy Golan

Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars

~In the course of writing this book I have received the help of numerous colleagues, museum curators, and friends in France, England, and the United States.

Author

Romy Golan

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23847

Acknowledgments

In the course of writing this book I have received the help of numerous colleagues, museum curators, and friends in France, England, and the United States.

I would like to thank Marie Bouchard of the Musée Henri Bouchard; Catherine Bouche of the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens; Yvonne Brunhammer of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs; Isabelle Denis of the Mobilier National; Laurent Gervereau and Laure Barbizet Namer at the Musée d’Histoire Contemporaine; Claude Lamouille of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Martine Lasson at the Fondation Le Corbusier; Claude Schweisgut at Musée National d’Art Moderne; Dragonette de Warine Bohan; and Geneviève Claisse.

Some of my closest friends and colleagues have provided wonderful encouragement and advice over the years. I am grateful to Walter Cahn, Michèle Cone, Hélène de Mont-Serrat, Barbra Ladner, Karen Lucic, Mary McLeod, Suzanne Tise, Sarah Wilson, James Young, and, most of all, to Sasha Newman. I would like to thank Robert Yarber for being such a thoughtful and talented artist, as well as for spending too many a weekend painting while I was endlessly trying to finish the book. I would also like to thank Malcolm Gee and Jill Lloyd who read the Ph.D dissertation at the time of my defense one memorable day a few years back, blessed with the hottest heat wave ever to have hit London in the past century; Adrian Rifkin, for being such a sensitive and encouraging reader of the manuscript; Miranda Harrison and Fiona Screen for their work on the text; and Gillian Malpass for her uniquely English grace, patience, and support.

Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to three people. To my supervisor Christopher Green, without whose teaching at the Courtauld I would have never discovered the interwar period. To Lesley Baier, for her superb and endlessly probing editing. Most of all I am indebted to Kenneth E. Silver for his supervision, advice, inspiration, and even more important, his friendship and sense of fun. He made me the art historian I am: it was from him that I understood the pleasure of working on small as well as major aspects of French culture, and from him that I learned that one can be a serious academic and have a life besides.

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Book details

BOOKModernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars

Romy Golan

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23845

For most of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, France embodied the very essence of artistic modernism. However, in this original and perceptive study, Romy Golan argues that, after the First World War, traumatized by the experience of the trenches and then by the stranglehold of the Depression, France suffered a crisis of confidence so profound that it initiated a period of cultural, political, and economic retrenchment that lasted into the Vichy years. The image that France acquired of itself—as a rural, feminine, feudal, and victimized society—was not only reflected in the art of the period but was to a large extent fashioned and conditioned by it.

Golan argues that reactionary issues such as anti-urbanism, the return to the soil, regionalism, corporatism, and doubts about the new technology became central to cultural and art historical discourse. Focusing on the overlap of avant-garde and middle-of-the-road production, she investigates the import of these issues not only in painting, sculpture, and architecture (concentrating on the work of Léger, Picasso, Le Corbusier, Ozenfant, Derain, the Surrealists, and the so-called naïfs), but also in the decorative arts, in the spectacle of world and colonial fairs, and in literature. Throughout she finds evidence that artists turned from the aesthetics of the machine age toward a more xenophobic, organic, naturalistic art. This leads her to ask whether the famous and momentous shift of the avant-garde from Paris to New York in 1939 did not, in fact, begin two decades earlier, in 1918. According to Golan, it was in democratic France of this period, rather than in Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, that one finds the most compelling demonstration of the hidden interaction of art and ideology.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*

Author

Romy Golan

PublisherYale University Press

Print publication date October 1995 (out of print)

Print ISBN 9780300063509

EISBN 9780300276305

Illustrations 184

Print Status out of print

Publisher (out of print)

WorldCat

Google Books

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