Gloria Victis!: Victors And Vanquished In French Art

Synopsis

"Gloria Victis! Victors and Vanquished in French Art 1848-1910 This book focuses on the conflict between the old and the new in French painting and sculpture in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Modern art history has hailed the avant-garde as winners and labelled the academic artists losers. However "Gloria Victis! (Honour the Vanquished) allows victors and vanquished to meet in open dialogue over the changes in artistic taste through the ages. The last half of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a multifaceted avant-garde, comprising Realism, Impressionism, and many other "Modernistic" trends. These were accompanied by a new aesthetic which came into open conflict with the Classical-Academic tradition. On their side the Academics greeted the new directions in art with mistrust. There quickly developed a view of the new painting as decadent, immoral and provocative: in consequence it rapidly became the target of extreme value judgements by the academically-minded contemporary,art critics. But towards the end of the nineteenth century taste changed in favour of the avant-garde. Consequently art history, which has since been written from a modern perspective, has branded the Salon artists as hopelessly out-moded and consigned them to a shadowy existence in the storage vaults of museums. In recent years, however, Salon art has been allowed back into the light after a long absence from public exhibition. "Gloria Victis! should be seen as an attempt at a serious analysis, in the spirit of the last twenty years' reevaluation of the art of the second half of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it is, after all, not so simple to distinguish tradition fromavant-garde-- and the reverse. It is our hope that the "lost" traditionalists will be seen as more than just dead copyists, who have been denied the validity of their artistic endeavours. By the same token the artists of the