French Salons

MAILLOL ET APRÈS.
Colloque. Musée d'Orsay - Auditorium. Mardi 17 mai 2022
En lien avec l'exposition "Aristide Maillol (1861-1944). La quête de l'harmonie", 12 avril - 21 août 2022. Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

"Maillol et Orloff se sont exercés à l'illustration de livres d'art, à la gravure, à la peinture, à la céramique et à la tapisserie, avant de se consacrer à la sculpture. Dès 1900, Maillol se voue définitivement à la sculpture. Quant à Orloff, elle se dédie à la sculpture  les années 1920 face au succès de ses portraits sculptés. D'une part, ces deux artistes s'exercent au travail de différents matériaux et à différentes étapes, tels que le dessin, le modelage et la taille directe ou le coulage en bronze. Et d'autre part, ils réalisent des sujets "classique" : le portrait, la danse, mais surtout le nu. Le rapprochement entre leurs deux oeuvres sculptés se situe durant la période de l'entre-deux-guerres. De générations et d'origines diverses, les chemins artistiques - parcours, méthodes de travail, le volet pluridisciplinaires, les sujets et les moyens de diffusion - d'Aristide Maillol et de Chana Orloff s'entrecroisent et se rejoignent ; et c'est là que la filiation artistique se révèle."

In this age, by some called the Locomotive, when men travel with all manner of practical, scientific, and unscientific purposes; to fish Mexican oysters, and convert the heathen; in search of the picturesque, in search of cheap land, good groceries, bibliography, wives, new cookery, and, generally, though without effect, in search of happiness; when even kings, queens and constitutions, are so often sent on their travels; and what with railways, what with revolutions, absolutely nothing will stay in its place -the interest that once attached to mere travellers is gone: no Othello could now by such means win the simplest Desdemona. 1 Carlyle's suggestive inventory of literal and figurative dislocation characterises modernity as motion, a logic of dispersion, both geographic and social, that erases distinctions and diminishes wonder. 2 By contrast, he distinguishes Staë l as a recuperative force of exiled ennui whose search for 'noble characters' and 'national physiognomies' elevated her above the incessant fluctuations in men and manners and the revolutions in states and societies. She sought 'to read the living book of man, as written in various tongues; nay, to read the chrestomathy and diamond edition of that living polyglot book of man, wherein, for clear eyes, all his subordinate performances, practices and arrangements, or the best spirit of these stand legible'. Carlyle casts Staë l's travels through Germany as a quest 'not for this or that object of culture, this or that branch of wisdom; but for culture generally, for wisdom itself'. Her experiences in Germany as related in De l'Allemagne (1810-1813) appear to Carlyle as 'a 263 1. Thomas Carlyle, 'Schiller, Goethe and Madame de Staë l', Fraser's magazine for town and country 5:26 (March 1832), p.171-76 (171). 2. Though silent on this article, Jonathan Arac offers suggestive meditations on the railroad as a figure of modernity in the nineteenth-century imagination; see Commissioned spirits: the shaping of social motion in Dickens, Carlyle, Melville and Hawthorne (New Brunswick, NJ, 1979). See also Ian Carter, Railways and culture in Britain: the epitome of modernity (Manchester, 2001). true tour of knight-errantry, and search of spiritual adventures and feats of intellect -the only knight-errantry practicable in these times'. Such valorisation is at once nostalgic and proactive. Carlyle poses Staë l's comparative literary reflections as a chivalric antidote to an age of dissipation and revives her association with Schiller and Goethe within a 'rose-coloured cloud' of poetic imagination. 3 Yet Carlyle weaves this majestic mythology only to unravel it, moving, as he puts it, from 'fancy' to 'science' in translating a correspondence that reveals the mundane concerns and temperamental conflicts just behind the tapestry of Staë l's poetic achievement: 'The ''spiritual Amazon'' was a mortal woman; those philosophic joustings and symposia were also transacted on our common clay earth -behind that gorgeous arras, of which we see not the knotty side, who knows what vulgar, angular stone and mortar lies concealed!' 4 The 'stone and mortar', revealed both in the correspondence and in a select passage from Goethe's autobiography, concerns primarily the ongoing irritation both men felt with Staë l's inquisitive sociability and impassioned oratory, an 'immeasurable difference in temper and way of thought' which repeatedly drew them out of what Schiller guarded as his 'productive solitude'. Goethe's reflections in particular emphasise a distinction between the French traveller's wit and exuberance and the 'silent, collected posture' of the man of duty: 'To philosophise in society, means to talk with vivacity about insoluble problems. This was her peculiar pleasure and passion. Naturally, too, she was wont to carry it, in such speaking and counter-speaking, up to those concerns of thought and sentiment which properly should not be spoken of except between God and the individual.' Both Schiller and Goethe deem Staë l as temperamentally incapable of metaphysical speculation, 'the carbonic gas in which she dies', as Schiller puts it, 'for what we call poetry there is no sense in her: from such works it is only the passionate, the oratorical, the intellectual, that she can appropriate'. But neither Carlyle, nor Schiller, nor Goethe intend a simple repudiation of Staë l's ambitions and all three cast their complaints and ironies within a laudatory tribute. Carlyle leaves the final words to Goethe, who reflects: that work on Germany, which owed its origin to such social conversations, must be looked on as a mighty implement, whereby, in the Chinese wall of antiquated prejudices which divided us from France, a broad gap was broken; so that across the Rhine, and, in consequence of this, across the Channel, our neighbours at last took closer knowledge of us; and now the whole remote West is open to our influences. 5 264

Os defensores da arte moderna no Brasil atuantes na primeira metade do século XX acusaram os artistas brasileiros que os precederam de terem passado ao largo da revolução que se operava na arte europeia no final do século XIX. O intuito de verificar se tal acusação é merecida nos motivou a identificar que conceitos de modernidade artística circulavam na segunda metade do século XIX em Paris. Para investigar essa questão, estudamos a recepção crítica de obras expostas nos Salões parisienses, reveladoras das expectativas do público da época. Pretendemos, assim, enfrentar o debate sempre presente quando se trata da apreciação da produção artística do período.

Los Bailes de Salón en Venezuela contribuye a comprender cómo se fueron entretejiendo en el país -a través de una manifestación aparentemente banal y anodina como lo es el baile - los complejos vínculos entre lo público y lo privado, la cultura y el poder, las distinciones de clase y sus modos de representación, el entramado social  y los imaginarios de nación, la circulación de bienes culturales y la economía, etc. Por medio de un examen detallado de su significación social, de usos y costumbres, de su terminología, del desarrollo y evolución de la fiesta donde tiene lugar, de las músicas y coreografías, se describe la importancia que tuvo el baile para los venezolanos de finales del siglo XVIII hasta mediados del XX, hecho al cual la disciplina histórica no le ha prestado hasta ahora prácticamente ninguna atención. Este texto nos muestra la trascendencia del salón burgués como una de las instituciones fundamentales en la constitución de la Venezuela republicana, y cómo contribuyó a construir el país que hoy tenemos. Además, da cuenta de cómo la cultura venezolana es el producto de una intrincada red de relaciones internacionales, de las cuales recibió ingentes influencias, pero a las cuales aportó también sus propias particularidades. El texto está ilustrado  con abundantes grabados, pinturas y fotografías alegóricos  a su contenido, que  complementan la investigación.

Resonances of Art and Poetry:  A post-conflict reflection from a visit to Shusha, Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan. Princess Khurshidbanu Natavan (1832-1897) entertained Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) in Baku. Dumas was a close friend of the O’Donnell Counts, descendants of the Princes of Tyrconnell, in Paris in the 19th century. Princess Natavan was the daughter of the Mehdigulu Khan, the last ruler of the Khanate of Karabakh, under Persian suzerainty, his only child, and was born in Shusha. She learnt music, painting and poetry in her youth. Her poetry was mainly in Azeri or Persian languages, and she was known for her romantic ghazals and rubaiyat. She inherited vast wealth and lands and was very philanthropic and culturally active, and described as both artistocratic, progressive, and bohemian.

Une histoire globale des avant-gardes picturales se doit d’expliquer pourquoi celles-ci apparurent en certains endroits et pas en d’autres, comment elles circulaient entre les pays et les capitales, ce qui les portait et si elles rompaient réellement avec leur temps, sachant que la plupart finirent par connaître une véritable canonisation.
Les avant-gardes lièrent leur sort au développement des journaux et des revues, c’est-à-dire à celui des techniques d’impression et de reproduction en série. Elles profitèrent également d’un vaste mouvement de circulation des idées, des hommes et des objets avec le développement des réseaux ferrés et des transports maritimes.
Dans le même temps se forgeaient les identités nationales, férues de tradition et de préservation des cultures. L’approche géopolitique met au jour ce processus par lequel les plasticiens novateurs recoururent à la référence étrangère pour s’opposer aux institutions nationales, travaillèrent à internationaliser leurs réputations pour mieux s’imposer contre le refus de l’innovation porté par le nationalisme, ou, au contraire, se laisser récupérer par des partis nationalistes et révolutionnaires.
Mais à côté des stratégies, réseaux et marchés, place est faite à l’analyse du contexte culturel et moral, économique et politique, matériel et social, affectif et spirituel des artistes des avant-gardes à partir de 1848. Jusqu’à la rupture de 1920, quand ces avant-gardes deviennent politiques, plaçant l’avenir de l’art dans celui de la Révolution.

Over a quarter-century, the Scandinavian artists Jeanna Bauck and Bertha Wegmann painted a series of portraits and interiors in which they commented upon their shared identity as women artists while migrating between the artistic centers of Munich, Paris, and Copenhagen. Drawing from feminist and performance theory, and concentrating on three paintings in which Bauck and Wegmann imagine one another as emerging professional artists by mediated self-representation, the paper discusses the two artists' collaborative practices. The artists' correspondence with their mutual friend and colleague Hildegard Thorell, kept in the archive of Nordiska Museet in Stockholm, is presented here for the first time and provides important insights into their artistic companionship. This case study forms part of an ongoing dissertation project on Nordic women painters' self-representations in the late nineteenth century.

Con la collaborazione di Pietro Allia, Michele Bertolini, Lorenzo Lattanzi, Claudio Rozzoni, Adeline Thulard, Paola Vincenzi. Per la prima volta in Italia l’edizione critica completa, a cura di Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, dei Salons di Denis Diderot, che il philosophe compose con cadenza biennale fra il 1759 e il 1781, con l’eccezione degli anni 1773, 1777 e 1779. A completare questo unicum nel panorama italiano anche l’edizione, per la cura di Massimo Modica, dei Saggi sulla pittura e dei Pensieri sparsi sulla pittura, la scultura, l’architettura e la poesia, per continuare i Salons, che Diderot scrisse rispettivamente nel 1766 e dal 1777 in poi. L’opera è corredata di saggi introduttivi e di presentazioni alle diverse sezioni che portano all’attenzione del lettore i punti fondamentali per la comprensione del complesso pensiero diderotiano. Il volume rappresenta non solo un momento imprescindibile per una conoscenza più completa dell’opera di Diderot, della storia del pensiero illuminista e della storia dell’arte e della critica d’arte ma anche un potente strumento per una comprensione più adeguata e consapevole del presente, a partire proprio dalla rilevanza che la cultura delle immagini riveste nella nostra società.
Traduzioni di: Pietro Allia, Michele Bertolini, Lorenzo Lattanzi, Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, Massimo Modica, Claudio Rozzoni, Adeline Thulard, Paola Vincenzi.

La conocida como pintura de casacón no ha recibido demasiado atención por parte de los estudiosos de la plástica española decimonónica, pero de su gran éxito en el último tercio del siglo XIX dejaron abundantes y entusiastas testimonios los críticos de aquella época. Conjugando ambas fuentes, este ensayo pretende arrojar luz sobre el concepto y el contexto de este tipo de pintura, como marco en el que situar el estu-dio de algunos artistas españoles, y especialmente aragoneses, los cuales voy a tratar en futuras investigaciones.

The historiography of nineteenth-century Russian art has long been preoccupied with categories. This panel considers three artists who defy categorization. Instead of inserting their work into circumscribed stylistic boxes, it explores the possibility of multiple artistic identities and the porous boundaries between them. Margaret Samu's paper examines Briullov's Last Day of Pompeii, often used to exemplify the bridge from academic Classicism to Romanticism. This paper instead focuses on the aesthetic and political issues surrounding its reception at the Paris Salon of 1834 to explore alternative genealogies for this iconic work. Louise Hardiman's paper focuses on Vasilii Vereshchagin's naturalistic war paintings and images of British India, which were showcased in exhibitions across Europe. Examining critical reception of the artist's London exhibitions, this paper sheds new light on the impact of his cosmopolitanism and commercialism separating him from the Russian artistic mainstream. Rosalind Blakesley investigates the work of Emily Shanks, the British artist and first female Peredvizhnik, to examine the interface between Realism and Impressionism. This paper draws on Shanks's work to revisit these categories, and suggest that late Realism could be a lively interlocutor of modern Russian art. All three papers employ archival material and methods beyond narrowly defined 'isms', including critical reception, colonialism, and interdisciplinary approaches. Collectively they demonstrate that transgressing the conventions of art historical scholarship—refusing to confine artists to single categories—enables a more nuanced, less tidy narrative of artistic development in nineteenth-century Russia, and illuminates the complexity and resonance of the individual artists' work. Chair: Galina Mardilovich Panelist: Margaret Samu The Making of Karl Briullov's Last Day of Pompeii Karl Briullov's Last Day of Pompeii (1833) is a work that combines the rules of academic classicism with the emotion of the romantic sublime. Its reviews in Rome, Milan, and Paris were both glowing and mocking. Despite winning a gold medal at the Paris Salon, why did it have such a mixed reception? This paper will compare Pompeii to other gold medal winners in light of the Salon jury's evaluations. It will also consider current ideas in French art and visual culture to gain new insights into the discrepancy between the jury's and critics' verdicts. It aims to shed new light on what was at stake during the July Monarchy for the Salon jury to award its highest prize to a Russian.

"Alberto Pasini, un orientalista italiano al Salon" in Pasini e l'Oriente. Luci e colori di terre lontane, exh. cat. Parma, Fondazione Magnani-Rocca, March 17 - July 1 2018, Paolo Serafini & Stefano Roffi (ed.), Milan, Silvana Editoriale, 2018, p. 43-49

Pour qui entreprend une histoire transnationale des avant-gardes picturales au XXe siècle, la période que couvre ce deuxième tome, de 1918 à 1945, est la plus périlleuse. Car l'auteur doit se colleter avec le grand récit dicté par les avant-gardes elles-mêmes. Tout commence-t-il avec Dada? Dès 1910 s'observait la remise en cause symbolique de Paris par les nouvelles générations dans de nouveaux centres : Berlin, Munich, Londres, Bruxelles, Cologne, Moscou, New York. Dada, certes né dans les charniers de la guerre, fut plus encore issu de l'histoire de la modernité artistique et littéraire depuis les années 1850. Les avant-gardes furent-elles idéologiquement progressistes? Les acteurs ne cessèrent de négocier entre les logiques révolutionnaires, leurs ambitions nationales et celle de continuer tant bien que mal à se faire connaître sur la scène internationale. Loin que Paris fût la capitale unique, d'une ville à l'autre, et en particulier à Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Vienne, Moscou, mais aussi à Amsterdam, Bucarest, Zagreb, Barcelone et jusqu'à São Paulo, Mexico et au Japon, apparurent régulièrement de nouveaux groupes décidés à se faire une place dans le courant du modernisme. En revanche, l'entre-deux-guerres fut une période de marchandisation aboutie de l'innovation artistique. Dans les pratiques et les débats des avant-gardes, une problématique était récurrente : quelle place faire au marché, surtout en cas de succès?

Naming colours in art writing in the 18th century in France

This contribution aims to provide an understanding of a paradox: how to write about colours, to name colours, when one defends a "colorist" conception of the painting in the 18th century in France.
The 18th century saw indeed the victory of the colourists in painting: according to Roger de Piles “La couleur est ce qui rend les objets sensibles à la vue” ("Color is what makes objects sensitive to sight",1708). Therefore, because of its visible character, his successors assimilate painting to colour. But it is also the age of the rise of a discourse on art. Taking as sources the two main corpuses that are the Conferences of the Royal Academy of Painting and the collection of booklets of exhibition (the Deloynes collection), I will try to show how the colorist painters try to approach by language what, according to them, escapes him the most.
What colours use (in language) those who claim colour in painting? What do we learn about it?
The assumption I will try to support is that naming the colour of the painting is used less to name what exists than to name what can not be named.

In 1913 exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro Palace there were only tree female artist: Adriana Bisi Fabbri, Alis Levi and Elisabetta Scopinich Trefurth, among these there wasn’t Bice Levi Minzi (1885-1947) wife of the painter Gino Rossi. Even if she considers herself not an occasional paintress, Bice Levi Minzi will never exhibit in the halls of Bevilacqua La Masa foudation. Instead she takes part in some exhibitions of international importance (especially in the two-year period 1912-1913) like the 1912 Salon d'Automne in Paris and the 1913 International Women's Exhibition in Turin.


Alla mostra di Ca’ Pesaro del 1913 tre sono le espositrici: Adriana Bisi Fabbri, Alis Levi e Elisabetta Scopinich Trefurth tra queste non è presente Bice Levi Minzi (1885-1947) moglie di Gino Rossi. Pur non considerandosi una pittrice solo occasionale Bice Levi Minzi non esporrà mai nelle sale della Bevilacqua La Masa; tuttavia parteciperà ad alcune rassegne espositive di importanza internazionale (soprattutto nel biennio 1912-1913) come il Salon d’Automne del 1912 e l’Esposizione internazionale femminile di Torino del 1913.

Not long after his death in 1848, a claim began to circulate that Gaetano Donizetti's prodigious success in both serious and comic opera derived from a neurological idiosyncrasy. As biographer Filippo Cicconetti related, the composer had been ambidextrous, in a unique sense. Examining the failing composer, doctors noticed that he had »two founts of inspiration, one on the left side, which gave forth comic music, and the other on the right, from which sprung the serious music. When he sat down to compose it worked like a valve, which opened on one side or the other depending on the genre of the opera.« 1 This is just the most whimsical of the innumerable anecdotes that highlight the speed with which the Italian composers of the era worked. Elsewhere Donizetti is described as tossing off melodies in quarter-hours in coffee houses, and Rossini's facility was supposedly such that it was easier for him to rewrite a page from Il barbiere di Siviglia than to retrieve a page of music that had blown out of his hands. 2 These indications of haste were compounded by accusations of opportunistic recycling of musical material. With Italian opera early in the nineteenth century still more securely defined as »act« than as »text,« the question of who deserved to be called an »author« was an important topic of debate in journalistic discourse, broached implicitly whenever vignettes of speed or self-borrowing were retailed in the press. In light of the disapproval that informs such anecdotes, contemporary accounts of the composerly acitivities of mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran make surprising reading. In memoirs and early biographies, Malibran is celebrated for just the kind of speed and distraction that raised critical eyebrows when 1 Filippo Cicconetti, Vita di Gaetano Donizetti, Rome 1864, p. 178. 2 Donizetti's biographer Cicconetti relates that »often fearing that the ideas that came to mind during his walks through the city and during his pleasant conversations would flee from his memory before he returned home, [Donizetti] would enter some restaurant and, taking up a piece of paper, would notte his ideas with lightning speed«. Ibidem, pp. 69-70. The Rossini anecdote was first recounted in Geltrude Giorgi Righetti, Cenni di una donna già cantante sopra di maestro Rossini, Bologna 1823, and reprinted in Luigi Rognoni, Rossini, Parma 1956 (Biblioteca di Cultura Musicale 6), pp. 304-305. Philip Gossett discusses these tropes of speed and carelessness in his »Gioachino Rossini and the Conventions of Composition,« in: Acta Musicologica 42/No. 1-2 (1970), pp. 48-58, here: pp. 49-50.

Étienne La Font de Saint Yenne’s Réflexions emerges in 18th Century France seemingly prior to formal art criticism and at a proto-critical moment before L’Encyclopédie. One of its primary gestures, as Thomas Crow has pointed out, is to make the determination of value in painting and art a public matter, which also presents the reason why it was poorly received by artists still tied to a private system of guilds, societies, and royal patronage. Réflexions represents  textual production for the sake of a parallel artistic ecosystem in which the commentary of words that was art’s Other graduates from the écriteau and public applause or boos to monographs even paving the way for Denis Diderot’s writings on the art salon mid-century. The art critical monograph of La Font then, makes a connection from artistic ecosystems to print ecosystems, bringing the former into a new framework of critical reception and a prospectus for a novel mode d’emploi for works of art. La Font’s text is still interesting today because of this equation of the value systems of print with those of the visual arts and how it therefore transforms the notion of a critical context for visual art.

Analysis of the painting Bacchante Playing the Tambourine by Alexandre Ubeleski (Ubelesqui) (ill. 1) within its proper cultural context should evoke the formal and iconographic models, i.e. the sculptures of the Versailles garden and the prints depicting them (ill. 6–14). The above models and the antique iconographic tradition of the Bacchanalia (ill. 4–5) allow, among other things, to identify the young man depicted in the painting as a satyr, while the earlier attribution saw him as a shepherd.
Analysis of the symbolism of the painting (ill. 1) and the preparatory drawing for it (ill. 3) reveals that the painting presents exquisite Bacchanalia, where natural instincts are subordinated to convention, while the erotic elements smuggled in under the cover of mythology are softened and balanced by the virtuous expression of the Bacchante and the satyr. Numerous contradictory yet complementary aspects (mythology - 17th-century French culture; eroticism typical of the Bacchanalia - a moralizing theme; allegory of the five senses - the genre character of an intimate garden concert) are merged in Alexandre Ubeleski’s painting into a single, semantically multifaceted and visually attractive composition.

Paper for a seminar in MAHJ (Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris): "Les leçons de l'École de Paris".
June 17-18, 2021.
Conférence pour le colloque "Les leçons de l'École de Paris", au MAHJ, Paris.
17 et 18 juin 2021.

Presentation of three Jewish Women artists related to the "Ecole de Paris"in Paris between 1910 to 1940: a sculptor, a painter and a photographer, coming from Ukraine, Poland and Germany.
Their career paths, trainings,  difficulties, careers, art works and aesthetics in Paris between 1910 and 1940.

With an overarching goal of beginning to define some of the conditions of the age defined here as the Enlightenment, this paper puts forward an interpretation of the Parisian Salons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the opening section, groundwork is laid with a discussion of the seventeenth-century salon, also referred to as the ‘Aristocratic’ or ‘Precieuses’ salon. The study then moves on to my primary focus: the conditions surrounding the ‘Enlightenment’ salons of the second half of the eighteenth century.  Particular attention will be paid to the hostesses, or ‘Salonnières’ of these Enlightenment salons, where they will be represented as serious, ‘career’ women, whose aim it was to both educate themselves, while at the same time, enable the philosophes to undertake their work on the projects of the Enlightenment.

Il 28 settembre 1765 Charles-Hugues Lefebvre de Saint-Marc, il gouverneur del duca Louis-Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld, indirizza una lettera all'ex allievo, mentre questi ha iniziato da poche settimane il suo viaggio di studio in Italia 1. In essa lo informa dettagliatamente sull'esito del Salon parigino, inaugurato ufficialmente il 25 agosto 2. Egli scrive: Votre tableau n'a pas reussi. On en a trouvé la composition froide, petite et plus convenable a un eventail qu'a grand tableau. Les figures ont paru trop longues, roides et mal posées; on n'a pas eté content des ressemblances. Les connoisseurs ont pourtant admire les etoffes et quelques beautés de detail 3. Nell'esposizione di quell'anno sulle pareti del Salon Carré al Louvre il pittore Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, nel suo ruolo ufficiale di tapissier, aveva appeso un dipinto (nr. 77 del catalogo) di Alexandre Roslin, il cui soggetto è Un père arrivant à sa terre, où il est reçu par sa famille, commissionato dal duca de La Rochefoucauld. 4 Il quadro, uno dei pochi a fregiarsi di una cornice di pregio, è visibile nel dise

Die Ave­nue soll das erste popu­lär­wis­sen­schaft­li­che Maga­zin für Geis­tes– und Sozi­al­wis­sen­schaf­ten im deutsch­spra­chi­gen Raum werden. Die Ave­nue erscheint vier­tel­jähr­lich – zunächst als offene Dis­kus­si­ons­platt­form auf dem Netz, dann als hoch­wer­ti­ges Druckerzeugnis.

Many scholars have problematised the meaning that is nowadays attributed to the word salon, even if most of them still use it as a concept to study a specific female type of sociability. The regularity of the meetings, and the mixtures of gender, social groups and nationalities are mostly mentioned as the defining characteristics of a salon. Since these have a quantitative fundament it is surprising that most scholars only use qualitative methods. Analysing the receptions of the Italian countess Ersilia Caetani-Lovatelli, this article shows the value of quantitative research. It helps disproving old historiographical assumptions that are mostly related to the social composition and functioning of the gatherings. It also leads to a plea for using of the alternative concept of private sociability.

Through a close reading of Parisian art criticism around 1900, this essay examines Paul Signac's role as de facto head of the neo-impressionists and guiding spirit of the Salon des Indépendants. Signac, and the neo-impressionists generally, had suffered from the decline of the Indépendants in the latter 1890s, but the resurgence of both group and Salon in 1901 positioned Signac as one of the most significant avant-garde artists in the early 20th century, where he played a vital role in the most significant art debates then animating Paris. Their return to prominence was due in no small measure to Signac's latest foray into the decorative, a highly charged arena that would be central to the artistic debates of the first decade of the 20th century.

Félix Ziem (1821–1911) was one of the wealthiest artists in nineteenth-century France. Recognized as the “painter of Venice,” he made his reputation in the 1850s by displaying his landscapes at the Paris Salon. In 1910, thanks to a bequest of Alfred Chauchard that included a number of his paintings, he became the first artist whose works entered the Louvre Museum during his lifetime. To what did the artist owe his fame and fortune? The key to understanding his reputation and, especially, his monetary success, is his account book, which he kept meticulously for more than thirty years, from 1850 to 1883. The aim of this article is to open this “black box” in order to understand both his economic success and the social networks at its core.

Welche Rolle spielte das »Esoterische« für die Selbstsicht der adlig-bürgerlichen Eliten beim Übergang zur Moderne? Dieser Frage geht die Studie Martin Otto Brauns mit dem Titel »An den Wurzeln der Tugend. Rheinischer Adel und Freimaurerei 1765–1815« nach. Auf der Grundlage der mythischen Geschichtskonstruktionen von Genealogien des rheinischen Adels sowie des Geheimbunds der Freimaurerei zeichnet der Autor die parallel zu den Entwicklungen der Naturwissenschaften verlaufende Transformation der Vorstellung vom tugendhaften »Adel des Blutes« hin zum bürgerlichen »Adel des Intellekts« nach. Die Studie kann dabei zeigen, wie der esoterische Gehalt des frühneuzeitlichen Bildes von Wachstum und Fortschritt des Familienstammbaums sich um 1800 mehr und mehr auf die Konzepte »Nation« und »Volk« im Gesamten ausweitete. Das esoterische Denken hielt sich auf dieser Grundlage bis in die Moderne und sollte vorhandene rassische Vorstellungen adlig-bürgerlicher Eliten der »Sattelzeit« nachhaltig prägen.

This book follows the life of Ivan Aguéli, the artist, anarchist, and esotericist, notable as one of the earliest Western intellectuals to convert to Islam and to explore Sufism. This book explores different aspects of his life and activities, revealing each facet of Aguéli's complex personality in its own right. It then shows how esotericism, art, and anarchism finally found their fulfillment in Sufi Islam. The authors analyze how Aguéli's life and conversion show that Islam occupied a more central place in modern European intellectual history than is generally realized. His life reflects several major modern intellectual, political, and cultural trends. This book is an important contribution to understanding how he came to Islam, the values and influences that informed his life, and-ultimately-the role he played in the modern Western reception of Islam.

The particular chapter explores Aguéli's artistic relations with departure point in the concept "Avant-garde institutions" (David Cottington). It follows how he made himself public, that is, through the structure in the way he appeared in publications and exhibitions. In particular, his art criticisms published in Paris in the 1890s is visited. By paying close attention to the public positions he took through his works and actions, as opposed to his authorial intentions, reveals an image of an artist deeply embedded in particular networks of his time, in Paris and in Sweden.

Delacroix's controversial Massacres of Chios provoked internal conflicts in the Restoration arts administration, which nonetheless bought the painting in 1824, in an irregular and politically risky procedure, without the King's official approval.  This essay argues that the apparent urgency of this acquisition reveals the regime's attempted management of a volatile public sphere, as it sought to reinvest culture with the royal authority of the prerevolutionary period.

L’émergence et l’épanouissement des pratiques d’exposition au XVIIIe et au XIXe siècles se sont accompagnés de la normalisation progressive des conditions d’observation des tableaux telles que la disposition des œuvres et la distance maintenue par les spectateurs. Comme les peintres et les visiteurs du Salon, les critiques d’art doivent s’approcher de leur objet pour le connaître, mais, paradoxalement, ils ne peuvent prétendre à l’objectivité qu’à condition de « prendre du recul », suivant l’expression consacrée. Trouver la bonne distance pour observer son objet, pour en saisir à la fois l’ensemble et les détails, est un des enjeux qui préoccupaient également, au XIXe siècle, les artistes, les critiques et les savants.
Parmi les différentes formes que prend dans la critique d’art la réflexion sur la distance, il en est une qui trahit de façon récurrente les présupposés de l’époque sur la proximité avec l’œuvre : il s’agit de la référence à l’odeur du tableau. Sens de la proximité, l’odorat métaphorise à merveille les plaisirs ou les malaises occasionnés par la contiguïté du spectateur avec un tableau, avec la matière picturale dont il est composé, voire avec le sujet qu’il représente. Dans la mesure où la perception d’une odeur est toujours le signe de la présence de la matière dont elle émane, la mention de l’odeur offre aux critiques d’art un instrument singulier pour appréhender la problématique de la proximité et saisir les enjeux esthétiques et sociaux de la peinture de leur temps.

Since the emergence of exhibition practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there has been a progressive normalization of the material
conditions for observing paintings, such as their placement and the spectator’s distance to them. Just like painters and Salon visitors, art
critics needed to move closer to their object of inquiry in order to gain better knowledge of it, but paradoxically, they could not claim objectivity
without stepping back. The ideal distance that would allow viewers to simultaneously grasp the whole and the details was a contentious topic of
discussion for nineteenth-century artists, critics, and scientists. Among the different ways in which this question was formulated in art criticism,
one in particular reveals the presuppositions of the time about proximity: the constant reference to the smell of the painting. Associated with
proximity, smell metaphorizes the pleasure or trouble spectators feel when they get close to paintings, to their pictorial materiality, or even to
the figures depicted. Because smell always functions as a sign of the substance from which it emanates, art critics’ reference to it allowed them
to consider the problem of proximity within the social and aesthetic issues of their time.

Histoire et civilisation du livre - Revue internationale, VII, 2011, A travers l'histoire du livre et des Lumières. Etudes d’histoire du livre offertes au professeur Daniel Roche par ses élèves, ses collègues et ses amis, Frédéric Barbier et Robert Descimon (éd.), p. 157-177.

Il volume è la prima edizione in lingua italiana di una ricca selezione dei Salons di Diderot, che vennero scritti fra il 1759 e il 1781 e costituiscono una preziosa testimonianza del confronto di uno dei protagonisti dell'Illuminismo con le arti visive. La selezione antologica è preceduta dai saggi critici di Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, Rita Messori, Paola Vincenzi, Michele Bertolini e Claudio Rozzoni, che analizzano alcuni dei nodi concettuali fondamentali dell'estetica e della teoria dell'arte di Diderot.