Jacques-Louis David and Republican culture in France after Thermidor, 1794-1795. (Volumes I and II).
Item
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Title
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Jacques-Louis David and Republican culture in France after Thermidor, 1794-1795. (Volumes I and II).
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Identifier
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AAI9417486
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identifier
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9417486
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Creator
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Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Linda Nochlin
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Date
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1992
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | History, Modern | Biography
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Abstract
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The fall of Robespierre in July 1794 (Thermidor, year II) caused a major but thus far unexamined shift in the career of J. L. David as a Revolutionary artist. From a position of political and cultural prominence during the Jacobin republic, David was removed to that of a "subject on trial": he spent most of the Thermidorian period in prison, under constant attack for his past involvement with the fallen regime. Defending himself in his prison texts and images, David sought to prove his continuous commitment to the Revolution. These works nevertheless offer evidence of serious difficulties in maintaining cultural continuity for a republican artist after Thermidor. For David's individual crisis inscribed itself within a broader crisis of republican culture at a turning point in Revolutionary history: the end of the Terror. My thesis examines the relationship between the process of erosion of the Republican Imaginary linked to the collective need for marking a rupture with the Terror, and David's individual process of adjusting visual codes to maintain his position as a public artist after the Terror. I focus in particular on the function of gender in these processes.;Part One interweaves discussion of David's self- representations during his first imprisonment with analysis of the image of the Terror as constructed in imagery of the first phase of the Thermidorian reaction. Part Three deals with the reaction's second stage, marked by the last popular uprisings of Spring 1795 and by David's second imprisonment. It considers David's output from this period in relation to a war of symbols and political confrontations between the jeunesse doree and the sans-culotte militants, notably women.;An interchapter discusses the unexamined corpus of preparatory drawings for David's Sabine Women conceived in the reaction's first phase but significantly altered by the artist's experience of its second phase. The deployment of female figures as a signifying core of the image in these drawings is related to important changes in the function of women and femininity in Republican rhetoric after Thermidor.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
