French Painting Research Articles

Pectus excavatum or Pectus chiaroscurum in paintings of St. Jerome (17th century)?

Considering the influence of artistic style is a key methodological step in the iconodiagnostic process in order to avoid some pitfalls. The two present artworks, depicting Saint Jerome, attributed respectively to the 17th-century Neapolitan school and to Valentin de Boulogne, French painter of the 17th century, highlight how the interplay of light and shadow can enhance and disguise a possible pectus excvatum.

Mission (im)possible – le traducteur en tant qu’ambassadeur de l’art

This article introduces the translator involved in the translation of art titles and art albums as an ambassador for art. Given the role of painting titles in the process of interpreting a work of art, but also in identifying it from other art products, the translator, as the artist’s spokesperson, has to perform a number of actions to enable the correct interpretation and identification of the work in the target culture. This is a very arduous and responsible task, which is particularly difficult in times of new media and the unlimited possibilities of digital reproduction and distribution of cultural goods. Based on the examples of translations of the titles of paintings by selected French painters published in Polish-language albums, the author shows the translator’s responsibility for the promotion and, above all, for the protection of the identity and integrity of works of art, especially those that belong to the public domain and are therefore deprived of proper protection.

Aberrant Shakespeare: Ron Athey’s Excesses, Bataille’s Solar Anus, Becomings-Macbeth

l In this article we argue that Ron Athey’s performance Solar Anus is an aberrant adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in which the parodic world of abundant excess that the witches catalyze is redemptively captured and transformed through the playful, androgynous, and excessive performance of Athey, who fulfills the witches’ prophecy and continues to live on sovereignly as both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Athey is a Los Angeles-based performance artist who practices what is sometimes called “extreme performance,” exploring the limits of aesthetics and the capabilities of the human body to express both beauty and pain. His work Solar Anus draws on the works of Georges Bataille, especially his short essay-poem, Solar Anus, as well as Paul Molinier, a queer French painter and visual artist who worked on the fringes of the surrealist movement. We work through the combined sociopolitical theory, performance aesthetics, and research methodology of transversal poetics and engage especially with the theories and explorations of aesthetics and sovereignty by Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in order to explore the ways in which Athey is capable of realizing the witches’ prophecy of sovereignty without being destroyed by the parodic world that they create and inhabit. Alongside the concepts of sovereignty, we examine how Bataille’s ideas of parody, sacrifice, and excess offer new ways of understanding the world of Macbeth and how excess and sovereignty both function within its porous borders.

“A New Age for the Living Dead”: Palestinian Nation-Building Through Theater

This article is an attempt to trace the emergence and development of Palestinian theater in the shadow of the Israeli-Arab conflict and against the background of the Nakba and Palestinian nation-building. It examines the first dramatic and theatrical attempts made during the first half of the twentieth century, the uprooting and the decline of these efforts after the 1948 War, the repression of Palestinian cultural activities during the 1950s, and the new start and subsequent growth of professional Palestinian theater after 1967, espe- cially with regard to the al-Ḥakawātī troupe. The founder of this troupe was François Abū Sālim (Abu Salem) (1951-2011), the son of a Hungarian-born French poet and a French painter and sculptor, who integrated himself into Palestinian identity and culture. The pro- fessionalization of Palestinian theater in general has been taking a line parallel to the escalation of resistance and has lived up to numerous historical challenges, defying the hardships imposed on the Palestinian people by Israeli government censorship, geographical isolation, and lack of education.

"Michelangelo's Seal" in Translation: Élisabeth-Sophie Chéron and the Polemics of Print

Abstract: In 1709, the French painter Élisabeth-Sophie Chéron (1648–1711) designed a print after an engraved carnelian held in Louis XIV's collection and known as "Michelangelo's Seal" for its supposed previous owner. Soon after its 1710 release in Paris, this print prompted a quarrel between Chéron and antiquarian scholars who condemned her unfaithful reproduction of the prized gem, a judgment later reiterated by the connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette in his Traité des pierres gravées (1750). While previous studies of "Michelangelo's Seal" have discussed the negative reception encountered by Chéron's print, this essay examines how she formulated the image in the first place. Following recent interest in the role of prints in shaping early modern forms of intermediality, the essay treats the 1709 print as a résumé of Chéron's prior achievements in painting and poetry. I adopt a Benjaminian hermeneutic of translation to analyze the artist's visual strategies and engagement with two of the meanings ascribed to engraved gems in her time: their monumentality as cultural remnants of antiquity and their use as seal-stones. I argue that Chéron tailored her translation of "Michelangelo's Seal" according to her skills and status as an active member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture since 1672. Moreover, in the process, she subverted not only the intended status of female members of that institution, but also broader, gendered norms of artistic creativity.

„«odkryłem» największego malarza religijnego naszej epoki”. Rouault Herberta

The essay describes Zbigniew Herbert’s fascination with the biography and creative work of Georges Rouault. The author discusses the essayist texts on the French painter previously published by the poet in the press in the 1950s, as well as an early poem titled “Paysage legendaire” written in 1949, not published during the poet’s lifetime. The ekphrastic description of the elements characteristic for Rouault’s landscape painting presented in the Herbert’s poem is analyzed in the context of biblical symbolism. The author discovers the poet’s strategy of using the ambiguity of biblical symbols to build a poetic interpretation of Rouault’s oeuvre. The essay demonstrates the poet’s transposition of a painter’s sign onto a word, and it offers an insight into Herbert’s vision of the French artist in the changing context of contemporary religious art.

Perspective Analysis of Eustache Le Sueur and His Paintings

Eustache Le Sueur, a 17th-century French painter, is celebrated for his contributions to the Baroque movement. His artistry, profoundly influenced by Italian masters like Raphael and Poussin, is epitomised in "The Life of Saint Bruno", a series detailing the Carthusian founder's life. Notably, Sueur's exceptional skill in perspective use is a hallmark of his work. Perspective in art, the technique to create depth and distance illusions on a flat surface, was adeptly wielded by Sueur. He often employed "linear perspective", a method establishing a vanishing point with diverging lines, thus creating depth perception. This approach not only imparted a three-dimensional feel but also infused his paintings with dynamism and drama. By varying object size and placement, he enhanced the narrative and emotional intensity of his scenes. Sueur's mastery of perspective significantly contributes to his enduring legacy. His innovative use of this technique achieved depth and brought vibrancy and energy to his compositions. Today, his influence persists in modern painting, underscoring his pivotal role in the Baroque era and the enduring significance of his perspective techniques.

L’art annexé comme source d’inspiration. Un paysage de Rembrandt venu de Cassel à Paris et une peinture de Georges Michel

The article explores the considerable impulses that have been generated by paintings which had come to Paris in the wake of the confiscations of works of art during the Napoleonic Empire. At the centre of the contribution is a revealing case study that shows how, around 1814, the French painter Georges Michel responded to a landscape by Rembrandt and used it as inspiration for his own painting. Based on this example, two questions are addressed : On the one hand, Michel’s painting exemplifies how much contemporary landscape painting in Paris benefited from the unusually good presence of Rembrandt’s landscapes in the years up to 1815. On the other hand, the case study could allow to determine the chronology of Michel’s oeuvre more precisely.

Touches to the iconography of Prince Dmitry A. Golitsyn: the search for portraits

Author consider a number of works that have been identified by various researchers as portraits of D. A. Golitsyn, a prominent statesman of the Russian Empire in the second half of the 18th century. The Prince's interest in art determined his special role in the artistic world of Europe, as well as in the formation of the Hermitage collection and in attracting foreign artists to the country. The subject of research is the connection of existing portrait images with the milestones of the fate of Golitsyn and in the context of interaction with the artistic world of the 18th century. Despite the prince’s close contacts with painters, sculptors, and graphic artists, few portraits of him are currently known. Research method used in the article is the iconographic elucidation of the main features of Prince Golitsyn's appearance, which allow to identify his images. The scientific novelty of the study consists in the systematization of the iconographic series of images of D. A. Golitsyn available today, as a result of which his well-known silhouette portrait turned out to be created by a modern graphic artist I. V. Golitsyn based on an engraving depicting the son of the prince, a priest of the Catholic Church D. D. Golitsyn. The attribution of one of D. A. Golitsyn's portraits from the collection of his daughter's heirs, the German aristocrats Salm-Salm, is recognized as erroneous, since it is a copy of the work of the French painter of the first half of the 18th century from the Coypel family and depicts another person. The circle of absolutely indisputable images of Prince has been determined. Golitsyn, which include sculptural portraits by French artist Marie-Anne Collot, one of which is now in a private collection in Moscow, as well as a profile drawing by her husband Pierre-Etienne Falconet.

« Ces orgies d’inspirations ». Le destin du peintre d’après le Journal de Félix Ziem

“These orgies of inspiration”. The Destiny of the Painter According to the Journal of Félix Ziem The present paper focuses on the diary of the French painter Félix Ziem (1821-1911) and inquires the destiny of the painter emerging from his writings. Basing on the theories of diary writing (B. Didier, A. Girard, J. Lis), it shows how the artist represents his profession. The analyses convey that three elements are necessary for Félix Ziem to fulfill the destiny of the painter: hard work, dreamy contemplation of nature and travels. Those elements are described in detail in the three consecutive parts of the paper. The conclusions display a self-confident artist, influenced by Romantic aesthetics, who consciously constructs in his diary a testimony of his life as an example of painter’s destiny.

Robert Lowell's Still Lifes and the Market Economy of the Poetic Profession

ABSTRACT: In the 1970s, Robert Lowell began to feel financially constrained or insecure. He therefore occasionally meditated on poetic art that would cater to consumerist cravings in the fashion of Dutch seventeenth-century still-life artists and French painters of food such as Chardin and Manet. In his descriptions of dishes and laid tables, Lowell toyed with poetry's ability to construct images of pleasure and obscure the work and procurement mechanisms necessary to obtain these commodities. The poet began to wonder about the market value of such poetically constructed comforts. However, Lowell was also aware of his dissimilarity to the classical still-life artists. His own attempts at representing foodstuffs are irresolute. Moreover, they are volatile, easily giving in to various reflective moods such as vanitas or ethical ponderings on labor. Almost never can Lowell's poetic still lifes be experienced purely sensually. His lack of enthusiasm for such a commodity poetics helps explain the decline of Lowell's posthumous reputation in the subsequent decades.

Rap and Realism

Over a century and a half since his passing, scholars remember Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) as a French painter who expanded the boundaries of art through his rejection of traditionally imposed artistic conventions and cultivation of a larger-than-life persona. As a master of self-promotion and image creation, Courbet’s unique self-positioning and performance of identity are frequently explored within contemporary scholarship. However, extant literature has yet to consider the similarities between Courbet’s performance of identity and that of influential contemporary rap artists. Looking to artistic themes employed by the painter and his self-presentation, I argue that Courbet tailored his identity performance so that audiences conflated his artistic output with his public image, both of which drew upon his rural background to suggest a disadvantaged socioeconomic status—a background lauded by his supporters as providing Courbet with the authenticity required for artistic legitimacy. Furthermore, I argue that contemporary rap artists perform their identity in much of the same manner. Like Courbet, contemporary rap artists continuously enact qualities associated with a low socioeconomic status and reference this social standing in their music to fuse their personal reputation and musical output, which affords these artists the authenticity required for success.

Nineteenth-Century French Painting of Rural Life on Diplomatic Mission to China

Abstract Paysages et paysans: la vie rurale en France au XIXe siècle, 1820–1905 was the anodyne title of a loan exhibition inaugurated in March of 1978 at Beijing's National Gallery of China. As the first exhibition of Western painting in China after the instauration of the Communist regime in 1949, the show was a cultural- diplomatic landmark; its planning and reception can refresh our understanding of both Franco–Chinese cultural relations in the waning years of Maoism and the diplomatically recuperative uses of French nineteenth-century painting. This article uncovers the rationales of French actors and institutions as revealed in archival documents and then scrutinizes the unexpected reception of an art exhibition that remains an important episode in cross-cultural relations and aesthetic reclamation.

Armand Point’s The Princess and the Unicorn

Abstract This article discusses the literary and visual symbolism in Armand Point’s The Princess and the Unicorn. Point composed several versions of this mysterious legend in pastel, enamel, and bas-relief. Under the artistic influences of the medieval tapestry of the Lady and the Unicorn, the French painter Gustave Moreau, and the Italian Renaissance painter Alessandro Botticelli, Point unveils a spiritual creation that in its form, content, and medium seeks to evoke the ‘soul’ in a work of art.

James Tissot: peintre de la vie moderne (1836-1902) par Olivier Deshayes

Reviewed by: James Tissot: peintre de la vie moderne (1836-1902) par Olivier Deshayes Catherine Gaughan Deshayes, Olivier. James Tissot: peintre de la vie moderne (1836-1902). L'Harmattan, 2021. ISBN 978-2-343-23931-6. Pp. 200. The chouchou of the British aristocracy, James Tissot emerges in this fascinating study as an artist known for his eclectic and modern style. Unlike some of his more academic colleagues, Tissot traveled the world for inspiration with his companion and muse, Kathleen Newton, and the book traces his journeys exploring the various locations that influenced his style and unique approach to painting. Considered one of the most "English" of French painters of the nineteenth century, Tissot left an indelible mark on the artworld, in particular through the ways in which we understand narrative paintings and historical evocations, and is also remembered as a savvy salesperson who knew the value of his work. Written in French in a style that is both informative and engaging, the chapters trace Tissot's inspiration that spans the gamut from the Middle Ages to photography and naturalism. Deshayes divides his study of Tissot's contribution to painting into three specific periods: his time spent in Paris between 1859 and 1870; then in London 1871-1882, concluding with the death of Kathleen Newton; and finally, his work dedicated to religious imagery of the Old and New Testament as a result of several trips to the Middle East. The examples throughout the book provide a deeper understanding of the modernity of Tissot's themes exploring his London period and his feminine portraits, with particular attention to one of his most acclaimed paintings: La Dame à l'ombrelle (pictured on the cover), dating from around 1880-1882. Deshayes' analysis emphasizes the significance of this work from Tissot's technique to his choice of colors, as well as the demand for portraits from a social class concerned with image, perhaps not unlike our current obsession for the selfie today. Overall, a well-researched book with several illustrations, it also takes into account Tissot's interest in Japan as an avid collector of Japanese objects and works of art which can be seen in his own paintings' involving images of geishas, kimonos, and tatami, amongst others. The epilogue underlines the continued interest in Tissot as an artist, citing the current monetary value of his paintings and his ongoing influence on contemporary artists. An enjoyable read, the book gives a glimpse into the life and times of an artist whose works are frequently exhibited in England and the United States while still not widely recognized in France. It would be of interest to art historians and scholars of French painters alike. [End Page 211] Catherine Gaughan Toronto Metropolitan University (Ontario, Canada) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Decolonizing the Museum

This essay presents a decolonial analysis of the French painter François-Auguste Biard’s Le Pasteur Laestadius instruisant des Lapons (1840). A highlight at Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum (Northern Norway Art Museum) in Romsa/Tromsø, Biard’s work represents the pastor Lars Levi Laestadius (1800–1861) preaching to a group of Sámi people outside their goahtis in winter. Exhibited in 1841 at the Salon (1667–present) in Paris, the painting originates in sketches Biard did during his travels with the French expedition La Recherche to Scandinavia and Spitsbergen in 1839. Taking this centrepiece from Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum’s collections as a reference point, I discuss the original colonial context in which it was painted, with particular focus on Laestadius’s role in assisting the French explorers with the collecting of Sámi human remains in the name of science. I then make a leap in time to the museum’s acquisition of the work in 2002 and its subsequent display in Romsa. At that time, the painting represented the institution’s costliest acquisition, and substantial media coverage and fundraising were used to come up with the funding to secure it. Once in-house, Laestadius Teaching Laplanders was immediately presented in a “neutral” display as one of the museum’s most treasured works. My analysis applies decoloniality as a framework for acknowledging institutional blind spots, countering museum neutrality, and recognizing the interwoven complexities of Indigenous and settler coexistence. It aims to intervene in art museum practices to emphasize the ongoing need for healing from colonial trauma through reconciliation and reparation. By exposing the museum’s disregard for and implication in the colonial legacy of this work, I will insist on the ethical inability of neutrality in museum displays and the inherent need to “unhighlight” Laestadius Teaching Laplanders and other art with similar problematic histories and contexts.

Fractal and statistical characterization of brushstroke on paintings

Identification of an individual artist’s touch on paintings is studied using surface metrology. Paintings’ topographies were measured using focus variation and stitching, creating 13 × 13 mm maps with 1 μm sampling intervals, and 169 megapixels, with a 10X objective lens. Topographic characterization parameters were analyzed for their ability to differentiate different painters’ renderings. Statistical treatments from data mining were used to discriminate, by optimization, multiscale topographic signatures characterized by a multitude of areal texture parameters. It appears that a fractal dimension can define 3 characteristic scale ranges. One from 3 to 70 μm corresponds to brushstroke details. Another, from 70 to 700 μm, corresponds to the topography of the material of the canvas fabric. Finally, scales greater than 700 μm correspond to undulations of the canvas. For scales less than 50 μm, the fractal structure of the topography left by brushstrokes follows a power law characterized by the slopes of the topography. The topography of the clouds painted on the canvas has an Sdq (topographic slopes) increasing with the clarity of the clouds at scales of 3–500 μm. According to the Torrance-Sparrow theory, the higher the Sdq, the more diffuse the light on the surface. The painter therefore wanted to show, by his brushstroke, that the light clouds diffuse more light giving an impression of local brightness. This study is confirmed by the analysis of the painting of Max Savy, a French painter from Carcassonne (1918–2009), which was measured with a white light interferometer Zygo NewView 7300, a X100 objective lens giving a 517 μm × 517 μm stitched surface, with a sampling interval of 0.109 μm. The box-counting method for estimating the fractal dimension of the topography of an oil painting appears optimal by the fact that it morphologically integrates scale variations of the local slopes of the surface morphology. This method thus characterizes the multiscale aspects, as well as the scale changes, of the topography.

Efficiency of combined MA-XRF and CXRF to give nondestructive insights about changes of a historical painting

Historical paintings with important iconographical changes represent an analytical challenge. Considering the case study of a fifteenth-century French painting studied during its restoration, the efficiency of a combined noninvasive approach of two-dimensional scanning macro-X-ray fluorescence imaging (MA-XRF) and a laboratory-based depth-resolved confocal micro-X-ray fluorescence (CXRF) is discussed. Large chemical maps of several elements were obtained by MA-XRF, enabling the identification of zones of interest representing changes in the painting composition. In these areas, depth profiles were measured with CXRF, allowing to evidence overlaying paint layers. The advantages of this technique are that it can give direct information on the stratigraphy of paint layers in a nondestructive way and can reduce the sampling needed, as well as increase the locations analyzed (in our study twenty-two depth-resolved scans). These results complement information obtained by scanning electron microscopy coupled with an energy-dispersive X-ray analyzing system (SEM–EDX) on three cross-sectional samples taken in the areas of interest. Additionally, the three cross sections of the painting were studied by CXRF lateral scans (y) in order to evaluate the efficiency of the CXRF analyses against SEM–EDX. The study shows the benefits of the combination of MA-XRF and CXRF for analyzing painting compositions, as such a high number of cross sections would have been impossible to sample. From an art-historical and conservation perspective, this combined study provides an understanding of the original painting’s paint sequence and its later retouches, helping to make informed conservation treatment decisions.Graphic

L’analyse sérielle des œuvres picturales

We cannot reduce a pictorial work to an image or painting. As a work, it invokes, from the outset, other paintings, sketches, variants, a creative practice, a know-how, materials and gestures, forms of legitimation, exhibition, publication and archiving devices, etc. Therefore, we can consider each painting part of one or several series. The work is then the series, not each of the paintings taken separately. We thus adopt a conception of the work as fundamentally being plural, hybrid, heterogeneous, and one of the effects of this is the series. If we consider a painting as an image, the presentation space is flat and delimited by edges: exploration and interpretation are constrained by this elementary topology. But, if one adopts the perspective of the work as a series, the evoked space-time is multiple, stratified, and multi-dimensional. Choosing the serial analysis of the works does not imply that they are already classified as ‘serial’ but that the method that will apply to them will reveal serial properties. In this article, seriality is approached only in a comparative way, as the comparison of the work of two painters who oppose formidable difficulties: an Iranian painter, Medhi Sahabi, and a French painter, Georges Laurent. In both cases, the serial structure and meaning have a concrete impact on understanding the work and the choices we must make when presenting them in public: How do we organize the exhibition? How do you configure the archiving? From a methodological viewpoint, this serial analysis involves identifying the syntagmatic forms of associations and metamorphoses within the series and then the properties of the space-time in which they unfold.

Давид Бурлюк в журнале «Цвет и Рифма» (Color and Rhyme). Статья вторая. Связать эпохи и культуры: путешествие во Францию (1949)

In 1949 Maria and David Burliuk made a trip to France “following Van Gogh” in order to restore the memory of the French painter's stay in Arles. This trip was embodied in a series of Burliuk’s paintings and in the text Journeys available in Russian (handwritten manuscript) and in English (magazine publication). The paper considers author’s narrative strategies in both versions of the travel journal; special attention is paid to the subjective organization of the text. One can hear the voices of Marusya Burliuk as well as her husband’s although she employs the author’s we. Complex narrative structure of the text is construed with a number of techniques, the most important one being switching of point of view. The paper focuses on the goals of the journey that were set by the travelers and on the ways they were reflected in the text. It is shown that the trip to France, first of all, was aimed at strengthening Burliuk's reputation as an “American Van Gogh”, and, next, at commemorating the French painter and preserving his heritage. The publication in the magazine Color and Rhyme is a unique complex work based on the interaction of both visual and textual material, it includes ekphrases, literary allusions, an epistolary, reprints of materials from the press, American reviews of the Burliuk’s works, etc. There are lots of descriptions, genre scenes, literary portraits, masterfully created by Marusya Burliuk in the published version of the journey, while on the handwritten version reflects private, intimate aspects of the journey (letters to the family).