Art and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the end of the Second World War

Catalog description

This course examines the relationship between art and politics in Europe from the French Revolution to 1945, focusing on public monumentality and politics, allowing students to study the political history of European regimes through this lens. It focuses on how art was conceived by contemporaries, in different and evolving modalities, as essential to the construction or perpetuation of a state or political system, and not merely as a "covering" for politics. This course will focus on two major "moments" in the relationship between art (as architecture and public monumentality) and politics. The first is that of Revolution and artistic production - and destruction. Did the French revolution have a specific vision of art compared to the monarchical regime that preceded it? What was expected from artistic production in terms of politicization? Why did the Revolution destroy a large part of the Ancien Régime artistic production (and especially churches)? What is iconoclasm? The second moment focuses on the construction of nation-states and art, mainly in 19th-century Germany and Italy.