Modernism And The Decorative Arts In France

In this book, Nancy J.Troy argues that the decorative arts are vitally important to understanding early 20th century modernism. She examines the effects of industrialization and international competition on the development of decorative arts in France during the period that began with Art Nouveau in 1895 and culminated in the Art Deco exhibition of 1925.

Explores the shift in the locus of modernity in fin-de-siecle France from technological monument to private interior. The text examines the political, economic, social, intellectual and artistic factors specific to the French fin-de-siecle that interacted in the development of art nouveau.

Cubism was the most influential artistic movement of the 20th century, yet just what cubism was, or stood for, is still in dispute. This book offers a way beyond this confusion through a narrative of cubism's beginnings, consolidation and dissemination.

Illustrated in colour throughout Amanda O'Neill examines the way fashion has changed and how it has affected the way objects are decorated from the largest buildings to the smallest pieces of jewellery.

Providing a fresh perspective on an important but underappreciated group of late nineteenth-century French painters, this is the first book to provide an in-depth account of the Nabis' practice of the decorative, and its significance for twentieth-century modernism. Over the course of the ten years that define the Nabi movement (1890-1900), its principal artists included Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Paul S?sier, and Paul Ranson. The author reconstructs the Nabis' relationship to Impressionism, mass culture, literary Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Wagnerianism, and a revolutionary artistic tradition in order to show how their painterly practice emerges out of the pressing questions defining modernism around 1900. She shows that the Nabis were engaged, nonetheless, with issues that are always at stake in accounts of nineteenth-century modernist painting, issues such as the relationship of high and low art, of individual sensibility and collective identity, of the public and private spheres. The Nabis and Intimate Modernism is a rigorous study of the intellectual and artistic endeavors that inform the Nabis' decorative domestic paintings in the 1890s, and argues for their centrality to painterly modernism. The book ends up not only re-positioning the Nabis to occupy a crucial place in modernism's development from 1860 to 1914, but also challenges that narrative to place more emphasis on notions of decoration, totality and interiority.

Golan argues that reactionary issues such as anti-urbanism, the return to the soil, regionalism, corporatism, xenophobia, and doubts about the new technology became central to cultural and art-historical discourse. Focusing on the overlap of avant-garde and middle-of-the-road production, she investigates the import of these issues not only in, painting, sculpture, and architecture (concentrating on the work of Leger, Picasso, Le Corbusier, Ozenfant, Derain, the Surrealists, and the so-called naifs), but also in the decorative arts, in the spectacle of world and colonial fairs, and in literature. Throughout she finds evidence that artists turned from the aesthetics of the machine age toward a more organic, naturalistic art. This leads her to ask whether the famous and momentous shift of the avant-garde from Paris to New York in 1939 did not, in fact, begin two decades earlier, in 1918.

The modernist garden, which flourished in France between the 1910s and the 1930s, vividly mirrored the geometries and cubist aesthetics familiar to the decorative and fine arts of the period. Created by architects and artists, these gardens were often conceived as tableaux in which plants played a role only as pigment or texture. This handsomely illustrated book by Dorothée Imbert presents for the first time - in word and image - a comprehensive study of these arresting architectonic gardens.

By foregrounding the overlaps between sculpture and the decorative, this volume of essays offers a model for a more integrated form of art history writing. Through distinct case studies, from a seventeenth-century Danish altarpiece to contemporary British ceramics, it brings to centre stage makers, objects, concepts and spaces that have been marginalized by the enforcement of boundaries within art and design discourse. These essays challenge the classed, raced and gendered categories that have structured the histories and languages of art and its making. Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and practice of sculpture and the decorative arts and the methodologies of art history.