Open Collections

France makes history: the Exposition des Primitifs Français and the Third Republic

University of British Columbia

The Exposition des Primitifs frangais opened in the Pavilion de Marsan at the Louvre in 1904, with over 700 paintings, drawings, enamels, sculptures and manuscripts assembled there from French and international collections, both private and public. The exhibition, organized by the most prominent curators, academics and administrators in the Beaux- Arts community, attempted to rewrite French art historical canon by arguing that a heretofore overlooked School of French Primitive art, particularly paintings, had spanned the gap between the acknowledged highpoints of High Gothic sculptural and architectural production and the emergence of the so-called Golden Age of French art in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Organized partly in response to claims of Flemish artistic supremacy at the 1902 Exposition des Primitifs flamands at Bruges, the French primitifs were positioned in their 'genius' as parallel to and contemporary with Flemish and Italian early renaissance developments and as a national school equally deserving of academic, aesthetic and historical consideration. This exhibition, however, must be considered in the context of shifting discourses and contemporary events. The exhibition's Catalogue Definitif provides a field for diverse readings of these events and strategies and forms a central part of the analysis and argument. Through an examination of the language choices and focus of the Catalogue's rhetoric, as well as the structure of its argument, this thesis links the exhibition's claims to the contemporary political environment, specifically around Republican issues of a national identity defined in terms of language and culture, as well as issues of immigration and perceived threats to national integrity; Republican attempts to reestablish a distinct political position between the emerging Left and Right; and a reappropriation of the 'primitif from competing national claims and emerging avantgardist definitions.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-01-16

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/3726

Fine Arts

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace