Clark Symposium: Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? The Painting of Modern Life Now

October 30, 2009 - October 31, 2009

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The art of the French avant-garde produced between the Salon des refusés of 1863 and the last Impressionist exhibition of 1886 has for twenty five years at least been the focus of active and pace-setting research in art history, as the art of Manet and the Impressionists became the focus of some of the most lively debates about modernity, feminism, social and cultural history in the discipline. This two-day Clark symposium has a double mission: to put excellent new work on view from across the generations of a famously active field, and to consider the fortunes of that field today. Does anyone still care about “Parisian Modernity”? Is this category still a hub for thinking about our discipline? Or have other modernities and post-modernities, other more global and more contemporary concerns, made it just another branch of art history?

In 2009, we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Charles Baudelaire’s infamous essay that gave a name to a generation: “The Painter of Modern Life” (first published in 1863, but written in late 1859 and early 1860). 2009 will also mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of T. J. Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, the book—itself titled with a nod to Baudelaire—that marked a turning point in the study of the field, and remains controversial to this day.

From the later 1970s, into the 1980s and beyond, all eyes looked to this particular sub-field of art history for inspiration and leadership. The liveliness of the entire discipline of art history seems to have depended in part on the excitement attending the particular epistemic shifts first launched there—whether querying the “social,” the “sexual,” the “gendered,” or the “visual.” But what of today? Have these debates, has the field as a whole, lost some of their earlier urgency?

This symposium seeks to air the debates—some old, others new—that have seethed over the borders and centers of this zone of art historical scholarship: Paris vs. the provinces, the hexagon vs. the globe, the nation-state vs. its empire. Scholars have pointed to the presence of an avant-garde sensibility well before 1863, and have argued that Impressionism did not end with its last official exhibition. The dominance of painting as the central artistic medium of the period has been vigorously contested by a consideration of all things (apparently) visual and material. But do these developments ultimately imply that a specific set of questions, concerns, and methodologies relevant to the particular conditions of avant-garde art production in France between the early 1860s and late 1880s are no longer necessary, or all the more so? It is with this question uppermost in mind that we are bringing together the newest work in the field.

This symposium is convened by Hollis Clayson, Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities, Northwestern University, and André Dombrowski, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Pennsylvania 

Register at the door ($30 adults, $20 students, free for Williams students and faculty).

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