Art and Politics in Modern France

Catalog description

This course proposes to explore art and politics in France from the revolution to the present. Through a multimedia approach - including sculptures, paintings, prints, commemorative monuments, architecture, street art and photographs - we will retrace the changing forms that some of the most salient political messages have taken in modern French art. The course will follow a chronological progression, from Revolution to Empire, followed by the rise and fall of the IInd Empire, and the resulting thirst for revenge. We will then broach the 20th century, including the politics of the avant-garde, the art of colonialism, the varied aesthetic responses to the rise of totalitarianism, on display at the 1937 World's Fair in Paris, and evident in the art of collaboration and resistance produced in Occupied and Vichy France during the Second World War. The art of 1960s countercultural contestation - anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, feminist, etc.--will then be studied, before examining recent initiatives in the realm of commemorative art and cultural display that approach issues facing contemporary French society today, including terrorism and constructively confronting its colonial legacy.