Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

French Modernisms: Perspectives on Art before, during, and after Vichy

2003; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3685535

1527-2095

Peter Schulman, Michèle C. Cone,

Cultural Identity and Heritage

"La terre ne ment jamais," Pétain was fond of saying, but what about Art? In her fascinating account of the sinister trends in the French art world surrounding Vichy and following it, Michèle Cone puts her finger on surprising conclusions regarding the true nature of French artistic reception following the explosion of creativity sparked by the Popular Front in 1934-36. Similar to such groundbreaking studies as Robert Paxton's Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order and works by a younger generation of French historians such as Pascal Ory and Henry Rousso, Cone postulates that while it might be easy to dismiss the Vichy period as an aberration in the history of French art, the vision that it then espoused was actually a continuation of certain artistic policies meant to safeguard the soi-disant "indigenous" aspects of French cultural production. Cone further argues that the legacy of the surprisingly creative Vichy period, rather than spawning a knee-jerk negative reaction to its cultural output, actually inspired a semi-extension of it, an extension that would backfire on French artists, unable to compete with the rising popularity of new and innovative American artists in the 1950s and 1960s. As Romy Golan had done in her earlier book, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (Yale, 1995), Cone takes a hard look at the French artistic landscape, and does not give in to the impulse to whitewash certain French art historians who might have been all too eager to make 1945 an arbitrary date of artistic renewal or a marker for a massive tabula rasa among French painters and critics.