Between Human and Inhuman, Artist and Object: The Eighteenth-Century French Art and The Myth of Pygmalion

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 7-24
Author(s):  
Hangyul Kim
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Art

scholarly journals From Exquisite to Transgressive Moderns? The Goncourt's "Decadent" Eighteenth-Century Art Revival

Nordlit ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 159
Author(s):  
Juliet Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
French Art ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Aesthetic Understanding ◽  
Aesthetic Expression

As avid collectors of French eighteenth-century art, the Goncourts' contribution to its nineteenth-century history is well-known. This article, however, explores a less welldocumented aspect of their L'Art du dix-huitième siècle (1858-1875): that is, its articulation of an art of latency and decadence prior to the term's fin-de-siècle association with explicitly transgressive cultures of modernity. Indeed, the paper argues that the Goncourts were amongst the first writers of their age to use the art of an age linked with political and cultural decay, to foreground latently decadent tendencies in mid nineteenth-century French art and culture. In so doing, they were to produce a paradigm of "decadence" defining not decline, but a new and highly modern artistry of heightened aesthetic expression. The article will explore these ideas in two principal ways. First, it considers neglected relations between the Goncourts' and Taine's ideas on art, and specifically, the Goncourts' use and exploitation of Tainean indicators of decadence, broached in Taine's study on La Fontaine (1861), for opposing artistically and culturally productive ends. Second it develops these ideas in a discussion of the three artist-studies in L'Art du dixhuitième siècle in which the Goncourts' developing theme of "decadence" is articulated with especial force and prescience: in "Boucher" (1861), "Greuze" (1863) and ‘Fragonard' (1864). These, as the paper argues, suggest particularly defined channels for the Goncourts' engagement with key Tainean ideas of the period, offering related opportunities for their promotion of corruption, vice and decline as aesthetically and culturally compelling. In repositioning Boucher's sensualism as "indécence", Greuze's "innocence" as "perverse" and Fragonard's Italianate expressivity as "impure", the Goncourts not only situate their "histories" in the vanguard of a new, transgressive aesthetic understanding of eighteenth-century art, they re-appropriate its Romantically exquisite aspects as emblems of an art of exquisite corruption and as triggers for recreation.

Diderot Et Roger De Piles

PMLA ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 444-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Par Gîta May
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Composition Design ◽  
Art Form ◽  
French Art ◽  
High Esteem ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Technical Terms

While it has recently been established (thanks to the records of the Bibliothèque du Roi, now the Bibliotheque Nationale) that Diderot read a major treatise by Roger de Piles, the influential seventeenth-century art critic and theorist, as early as 1748, the nature and extent of Diderot's indebtedness to his predecessor have not yet been fully explored. Internal evidence, as well as direct and indirect references, reveal the impact of Roger de Piles on Diderot's ideas concerning composition, design, and color. Roger de Piles was the first French art critic to take an uninhibited delight in light and color and to attempt to render, through a bold use of concrete and technical terms, the freshness and vividness of his impressions. In this respect, too, he is an important precursor of Diderot, for the latter frequently borrowed especially apt expressions and images from the writings of Roger de Piles. Articles in the Encyclopedia devoted to the fine arts also confirm the high esteem in which de Piles was held by eighteenth-century artists and connoisseurs. Diderot and his contemporaries recognized above all de Piles's expertise in practical matters concerning the artist's craft. Even though Diderot departs from de Piles in his preoccupation with the moral message of a work of art, he shares with his predecessor a spontaneous appreciation of the exuberant forms, the animated scenes, the down-to-earth realism that characterize the Dutch and Flemish schools of painting. The sketch, as an art form more revelatory of a painter's inner spirit and genius than the more finished product, was the subject of several key remarks by de Piles which Diderot, in turn, amplified and developed in his critical essays. And it was in the writings of de Piles that Diderot found some of his most telling arguments against artificiality and mannerism in art and against an unquestioning adherence to doctrine and dogma. (In French)

scholarly journals Artists and the city: mapping the art worlds of eighteenth-century Paris

Urban History ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-131
Author(s):  
HANNAH WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
World View ◽  
Art World ◽  
Urban Art ◽  
Digital Mapping ◽  
Art Worlds ◽  
French Art ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The City

ABSTRACT:Paris is renowned for artistic neighbourhoods like Montmartre and Montparnasse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But for earlier periods, the art-historical picture is much vaguer. Where did artists live and work in the eighteenth century? Which neighbourhoods formed the cultural geography of the early modern art world? Drawing on data from a large-scale digital mapping project locating the addresses of hundreds of eighteenth-century artists, this article answers these crucial questions of urban art history. Following an overview of the digital project, the article explores three different mappings of the city's art worlds: a century long survey of the neighbourhoods inhabited by the Academy's artists; a comparison of where the Guild's artists were living in a single year and a wider world view of Parisian artists abroad. Through its new cartographic models of Paris's art worlds, this article brings the city to the foreground of eighteenth-century French art.

Taste Endures! The Rankings of Roger de Piles (†1709) and Three Centuries of Art Prices

2013 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 766-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Graddy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Point Scale ◽  
Long Period ◽  
French Art ◽  
Art Prices

Roger de Piles (1635–1709) was a French art critic who decomposed the style and ability of 58 different artists into areas of composition, drawing, color, and expression, rating each artist on a 20-point scale in each category. Based on evidence from two data sets that together span from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, this article shows that De Piles' overall ratings have withstood the test of a very long period of time, with estimates indicating that the works of his higher-rated artists achieved both greater returns and higher critical acclaim than the works of his lower-rated artists.

Nervous canvas

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mechthild Fend
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Denis Diderot ◽  
The Other ◽  
Organic Substances ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
The Arts ◽  
French Art ◽  
The One ◽  
Sense Of Touch ◽  
Medicine And The Arts

This chapter looks at skin, sensibility and touch in painterly practice and the art literature on the one hand, and in medical as well as philosophical discourse on the other. It argues that the new medical understanding of organic substances as textured joined a special attention to brushwork in mid-eighteenth-century French art practice and theory. This conjuncture prompted attempts to imitate the skin's tissue with an appropriate facture produced by the artist’s hand. The chapter takes the medical metaphorisation of skin as a ‘nervous canvas‘ in the 1765 article ‘sensibilité‘ of Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie as its guide to discuss relations between artistic and medical visions of skin in mid-eighteenth-century France. It focuses on the so-called portraits de fantaise by Jean-Honoré Fragonard and argues that the carnations in these paintings are as much about flesh as they are about the materiality and vitality of skin. Pivotal for the analysis of the interconnections between the fields of medicine and the arts, are the writings by philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot as he thought about skin, flesh and the sense of touch his reviews of the Salon exhibitions, in his writings on physiology, as well as in his fictionalised account of the latest medical theories in his Rêve de d'Alembert.

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