Browsing by Author "McWilliam, Neil"
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Item Open Access A Republic of the Arts: Constructing Nineteenth-Century Art History at the Musée national du Luxembourg, 1871-1914(2014) Clark, AlexisBefore the rise of the ubiquitous MOCA (museum of contemporary) there was the Musée national du Luxembourg that since its foundation in 1818, served as the first museum anywhere dedicated to contemporary art. Yet the Luxembourg has been left to lurk in the shadows of art history. Best remembered for its mismanagement of the Caillebotte Bequest (1894-1897) that left the French state as the beneficiary of several dozen Impressionist canvases, the Luxembourg has been dismissed as epitomizing official support for an exhausted academicism.
This dissertation has sought to correct these misconceptions of the museum and the Third Republic Fine Arts administration. It provides an institutional history of the museum under the early Third Republic (1871-1914) that reconsiders how different interpretations of republicanism informed its curators' policies and practices. Information culled from archives, official publications, art criticism, and even tourist brochures, has revealed that in the 1890s and especially the 1900s, the museum's curators embraced the politics of solidarism. Applying solidarist principles such as eclecticism, tolerance, and commitment to public education, its curators defended their acquisition of both avant-garde and academic works of art. These principles further spurred curators to trace the spectrum of contemporary painterly styles to French artist tradition. In so doing, the Luxembourg's administrators implicitly upheld republicanism as a characteristically, even classically, French ideology that, in its translation into paint and institutional policies, testified to the nation's continued cultural, artistic, and political supremacy.
Item Open Access Art, Commerce, and Caricature: Satirical Images of Artistic Life in Paris, 1750-1850(2017) Desplanque, KathrynThis dissertation examines a corpus of 486 satirical images of artistic life in Paris. The Parisian art-world was regularly the subject of a form of satirical criticism conducted in visual media. More significantly, this satirical criticism was produced in the medium of print, and in its reproducibility, could broadcast its satire to large audiences. By doing so in the amusing and subversive tone of satire, it constituted a visual counterpart to art criticism. I examine what these images reveal to us collectively over time as they overlap with representations of the art world disseminated in other equally understudied popular media, namely popular theater (vaudeville and opéra comique) and panoramic fiction (physiologies, short fiction, and so on).
This project sits at the intersection of the study of graphic satire and visual culture, and several strains of the social history of art, namely institutional histories of Paris’ art world, and the study of the representation of the artist and of artistic sociability. I also employed Digital Humanities Methodologies, namely Qualitative Data Analysis using NVivo, to produce distant and close readings of this corpus of images.
Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century art-world caricature was preoccupied with the art world and its actors, such as artists, connoisseurs, art critics, Salon juries, art audiences, dealers and sellers, and patrons and buyers. Further still, art-world caricature was overwhelmingly attentive to the relationship among different types of actors as mediated by an invisible system of structural relations, made visible via graphic satire’s representational language. These objects thus collectively mounted a coherent critique of the shifting structural relations within Paris’ art world. This dissertation argues that satirical images of artistic life in Paris presented a social type designed to contradict images of the artist as exceptional and as genius. Instead, art-world caricature proposed the “inglorious artist,” or the mediocre, common, and ordinary artist who toils, struggles, and ultimately fails to succeed in an increasingly liberalized art world.
Item Open Access In Perpetuity: Funerary Monuments, Consumerism and Social Reform in Paris (1804–1924)(2021) Alexander, Kaylee P.The cemetery reforms of the Napoleonic era formulated a heavily regulated, health-conscious system of burial throughout the French empire that, in its most radical move, ensured all citizens would have the right to a separate plot within a public cemetery, regardless of socioeconomic status or religious affiliation. This not only transformed the manner in which people were buried, but also how the lives of otherwise unremarkable individuals would be commemorated, remembered, and valued. Particularly as the middle classes of Paris acquired greater social mobility, the cemetery increasingly became a place of social distinction. Yet burial space was only guaranteed for five years, unless one purchased a concession: a private land grant that transformed the public space of burial into parcels of private property either temporarily (up to 15 years) or in perpetuity. As only a small fraction of the population could afford to purchase plots in perpetuity, the vast majority of burials were, from their conception, temporary. Consequently, it has typically been only the most expensive tombs that have survived into the present day, leaving scholars with little material evidence with which to study the commemorative practices of the general population.
Contrary to past studies of French cemeteries, which have tended to prioritize architects and sculptors, this dissertation critically assesses the role of the marbrier (stonecutter) as the chief producer of funerary monuments, and their middle-class clients as central to the visual culture of commemoration in nineteenth-century urban burial spaces. Since extant examples of these more vernacular monuments are rare, this dissertation takes a database-driven approach to analyze commercial almanacs, work logs, and burial records in order to compensate for losses in the material record. This allows for the identification of significant patterns in the development of the funerary monuments industry, which—when contextualized among more traditional forms of art-historical evidence such as model books, plans and caricatures—reveals the peculiar relationship between funerary practices and the emerging consumer culture and urban reform campaigns of nineteenth-century Paris. This work firstly contributes to discussions of how database-driven methodologies can be used to more accurately reconsider subjects in visual and material culture studies, especially in cases where the objects of inquiry have not tended to survive into the present; and, secondly, provides the first study dedicated to the popular market for funerary monuments in France and the regulatory environment that spurred its development within the context of urban, social, and economic changes at the beginning of the Modern period.