Abstract
At a time when French culture was aesthetically and politically polarized, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes provided a convincing national idiom. This paper examines the critical reception of Puvis de Chavannes's mural Summer (Paris, Hôtel de Ville, 1891) in the context of debates about modernism, nationalism, and subjectivity that permeated fin de siècle culture. Summer's large flat areas of color and generalized, disjunctive forms mobilized individual fantasies of the maternal. Picturing the motherland, Summer put fantasy to the task of instilling collective identity. Furthermore, Summer provided a site where the social consequences of a modernist address to the unconscious were explicitly debated.
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