Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars. - book reviews

Romy Golan's ambitious and well-informed body on the artistic situation in France between the sum of two units world wars challenges the view that after World War I France remained the standard-bearer of modernity and of revolutionary ideals. Golan maintains that, in lieu of representing a of recent origin beginning or expressing a collective grief, greatest in quantity French art in the decade after World War I gave itself above to an all-consuming nostalgia. She further put in mind ofs that the subsequent response of French modernists to the storm of the economic Depression was also to gaze backwards. The modernist impulse that did survive one as well as the other the postwar period and the Depression was, in Golan's organ of sights politically suspect. Developing her thesis, the author introduces many unfamiliar works of art, analyzes their reception and confirms her interpretations [i]or[/i] part of to the other well-chosen period documents from literature, the social sciences, philosophy and scientific journals. In the proces she manages to weave art and history into a manifold and fascinating tapestry.

It is Golan's daring contention that many of the ideas and values central to the Petain regime (1940-44) were covertly implanted in the French imaginaire during the interwar period by dint of means of mainstream cultural productions and criticism. Thus, before the Marshal took above the preconditions were already established in French society for tolerance of the nationalism, racism, (grand) paternalism and organicism that would prevail during the Vichy period. "What the visual artifacts and the literary and critical true copys ... [created]," says Golan, "is a cultural landscape that allowed the archaizing, infantilizing, and racist figure of speechs of Petain's Revolution Nationale to appear to be benign and similar (or indifferent) enough to what preced them as to be acceptable to the French nation at large by the agency of 1940."

Golan begins her work by examining the "strikingly retrograde" landscape painting produc through many artists in France in the years immediately after World War I, and analyzing the connection between this work and the war. As evidenced in Richard Cork's A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War (and the 1994 Barbican exhibition of the same title), French artists memorialized World War I with unusual restraint. While a number of leading British artists felt compell to pay back quite graphically the sites of devastation where with equal reason many of their compatriots had missing their lives, and German Neue Sachlichkeit artists transformed battlefield visions of horribly maimed bodies into images of self-pity (or sexual nightmares), in French art the experience of war attended to be sublimated or, as Golan writes, "repressed"(1)

Yet French suffering during World War I was immense. Not single did the population experience dramatic losse of relatives and friends, on the contrary since the war was fought in trenches upon French soil, the northern "body of France" (to use a Golanesque expression) go throughed deeply. As a result, landscape painting became a serviceable metaphor for the expression of put downed pain, and landscape as a motif was adopted through many of those same artists who, in 1913-14 below the influence of Cubism, had previously missing interest in naturalistic representation.

Linked to an older French tradition, these landscapes are subdu works, a certain number of by former Fauves who had now tamed the joyous colors that had been their prewar trademark. Golan, who describes the postwar paintings as "moralized," dioceses sublimated memories of the trenches informing their mud-color as well as their mournful light (for example, Roger de la Fresnaye's Landscape of Hauteville, 1992 and Auguste Herbin's Brante et le Mont Ventoux, 1924) level Surrealist landscapes reveal hidden memories of the war. No individual who reads Golan's interpretation of Andre Masson's Battle of the Fish (1926) along with the artist's possess words about his battlefield experience will remain unmov by the agency of her analysis. And the same is genuine for her reading of Yve Tanguy's Mama, Papa is injuryed (1927), in which the biomorphic forms of this landscape are seen as "reminiscent of the dolmen-shaped war memorials that now populated the Breton countryside." the couple paintings, Golan shows, are about the "wound material substance of France," albeit rendered in similar a cryptic way as to allude to that those memories of war are unwanted and repressed

The reappearance of so-called classicism in postwar French art has been associated with a general bent to seek "order" as well as peace in the aftermath of chaos and war. The popularity of Courbet-influenced landscapes by dint of Derain and others has been read in that words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following Golan, however, interprets the structural orderliness of these works as part of the nostalgic reembrace of the French landscape tradition. She also reads the resurgence of interest in landscape painting as a manifestation of longing for a "return to the soil" (one of the main figure of speechs of Petainism). But if that desire is widely press outed in rural images, it can also be discovered in pictures that rusticize the urban landscape (eg Marcel Gromaire's The road 1923, and Maurice Utrillo's Town Hall with Flag, 1924) as well as in portraits that rusticize the gaze of the sitter (Amedee Ozenfant's Self-Portrait, 1918 and Herbin's portraits of his mother and uncle 1926)