'Maîtres de l'Art Indépendant': Nationalisation of Modernism in France in 1937

By the late nineteenth century, art history was immersed in the construction of national identities in Europe. Museums and exhibitions were vital players in communicating these identities at home and abroad. Art historians increasingly appropriated painters and sculptors for their own countries as artists and their creations added significantly to a country’s prestige and increased cultural influence on the world stage – known in France as rayonnement culturel. Michela Passini’s magisterial La Fabrique de l’Art National (2013) focussed no longer only on politics and art but on the interaction of politics and art historiography instead. Since then there is a growing interest in the impact of nationalistic politics on the formal and institutional evolution of French art history from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The historiographical research of Passini and other scholars reflects the fact that art historians at that time were predominantly interested in art of...Show moreBy the late nineteenth century, art history was immersed in the construction of national identities in Europe. Museums and exhibitions were vital players in communicating these identities at home and abroad. Art historians increasingly appropriated painters and sculptors for their own countries as artists and their creations added significantly to a country’s prestige and increased cultural influence on the world stage – known in France as rayonnement culturel. Michela Passini’s magisterial La Fabrique de l’Art National (2013) focussed no longer only on politics and art but on the interaction of politics and art historiography instead. Since then there is a growing interest in the impact of nationalistic politics on the formal and institutional evolution of French art history from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The historiographical research of Passini and other scholars reflects the fact that art historians at that time were predominantly interested in art of the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. The understanding of the process of what could be called ‘nationalisation of modernist art’ in France, however, has not yet benefitted thoroughly from this shift towards art historiography. Traditionally, the period has either been analysed from the perspective of another Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes or seen through the lens of xenophobic sentiment towards Jewish and foreign modernist in the aftermath of the Dreyfus-Affair. This thesis focuses on ‘Maîtres de l’Art Indépendant’, an encyclopaedic exhibition organized at Paris’ Petit Palais to coincide with the world fair of 1937. It was the first officially endorsed retrospective of French modernism and included Cubism and Fauvism which had previously been conspicuously absent from most museums in the capital. My study aims to demonstrate that the decision to promote French modernism in 1937 was steeped in very similar nationalist priorities as those held by a previous generation of art historians investigated by Passini and others.Show less

Leiden University Student Repository

Documents

In Collections

'Maîtres de l'Art Indépendant': Nationalisation of Modernism in France in 1937