Decorative Painting and Politics in France, 1890-1914.

Abstract

“Decorative Painting and Politics in France, 1890-1914” examines the preoccupation with “decorative” painting and aesthetics in France, from the 1890s to World War I, a period in which artists and design reformers challenged the subordination of the decorative arts to the fine arts and the restriction of both to the elite. It demonstrates that this decorative ideal was not merely a response to the commercial potential of the increasingly fashionable decorative arts or of a sensually appealing formal harmony. Rather, it brought together multiple, sometimes contradictory, paradigms: older traditions of history and mural painting—both associated with elevated subject matter and grand architectural settings—along with newer, avant-garde conceptions of visual form as a universal language that spoke directly to the senses. The critics and artists examined in this dissertation turned to decorative aesthetics in the hopes of communicating with, and even acting upon, a wider public. In doing so, they asserted a social, political role for art. They nevertheless struggled to articulate the exact nature of this role, and which elements of the decorative ideal best furthered its aims. This struggle is traced through three case studies. The first highlights the use of the term “decorative” to describe the (seemingly opposed) work of the painter Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes and the commercial artist Jules Chéret: the shared label communicated a desire to combine the accessible, modern aesthetic of the poster with the collective significance of monumental civic decorations. The second foregrounds Neo-Impressionist Paul Signac’s combination, via decorative painting, of the didactic logic of anarchist propaganda with the “purely aesthetic emotion” of visual form. The final case study examines a similar effort, with opposite ideological aims, on the part of Maurice Denis to reconcile his Symbolist belief in the emotional power of formal distortions with the reason, order and technical perfection advocated by nationalist politics. These case studies complicate the enduring association of the decorative with an empty visual harmony. Rather than divesting art of its social character, decorative aesthetics signaled an (albeit, fraught) attempt to find an integral role for visual form in social and ideological engagement.