Fellow men : Fantin-Latour and the problem of the group in nineteenth-century French painting
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Bibliographic Information
Fellow men : Fantin-Latour and the problem of the group in nineteenth-century French painting
Princeton University Press, c2013
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 309-322) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Focusing on the art of Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) and his colleagues Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Frederic Bazille, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Fellow Men argues for the importance of the group as a defining subject of nineteenth-century French painting. Through close readings of some of the most ambitious paintings of the realist and impressionist generation, Bridget Alsdorf offers new insights into how French painters understood the shifting boundaries of their social world, and reveals the fragile masculine bonds that made up the avant-garde. A dedicated realist who veered between extremes of sociability and hermetic isolation, Fantin-Latour painted group dynamics over the course of two decades, from 1864 to 1885. This was a period of dramatic change in French history and art--events like the Paris Commune and the rise and fall of impressionism raised serious doubts about the power of collectivism in art and life.
Fantin-Latour's monumental group portraits, and related works by his friends and colleagues from the 1850s through the 1880s, represent varied visions of collective identity and test the limits of association as both a social and an artistic pursuit. By examining the bonds and frictions that animated their social circles, Fantin-Latour and his cohorts developed a new pictorial language for the modern group: one of fragmentation, exclusion, and willful withdrawal into interior space that nonetheless presented individuality as radically relational.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The Self in Group Portraiture 19 * In Homage 21 *Moi et Delacroix 39 * Manet: "One in a thousand, or alone" 56 * Degas: Relational Portraiture 61 Chapter 2 A Crisis of Pride 68 * Mutual Admiration Society 70 * Courbet's Studio 74 * To Truth! 79 * Mirror, Mirror 82 Chapter 3 Studio of the Self 105 * Solitary Confinement 111 * Velazquez's Mirror 131 * Bazille's Studio 144 * Secret Societies 149 Chapter 4 Deviance and Disappearance 156 *Les Vilains Bonshommes 160 * Courbet / Fantin / Pelletan 178 * In Absentia 189 * Manet's Crowd 193 * Rimbaud the Bourgeois 198 Chapter 5 The Irregularists 203 * Renoir's Society 206 * An Impressionist's Studio 215 * Degas, Odd Man In 217 Conclusion 228 Notes 243 Selected Bibliography 309 Index 323
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