The politicization of nature: The critical reception of Barbizon painting during the July Monarchy.
Item
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Title
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The politicization of nature: The critical reception of Barbizon painting during the July Monarchy.
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Identifier
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AAI9986310
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identifier
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9986310
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Creator
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Chagnon-Burke Veronique.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Patricia Mainardi
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Date
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2000
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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, European
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines the critical reception of French landscape painting during the July Monarchy. I concentrated on the painters who, for a lack of better term will later on, in the 1860s and 1870s, be referred to as the School of Barbizon. The annual Salon and the multitude of reviews written on this occasion provided the framework of my study. As landscape paintings gained more and more visibility on the Salon walls every year, critics constructed a new discourse around this phenomenon. I documented the transformation of the significance of landscape painting in French art by identifying, gathering and analyzing a wide variety of Salon reviews.;By organizing this study around the political affiliation of the journals in which the Salon reviews appeared, I was able to demonstrate the importance that landscape painting had for each of the political factions. The analysis of these reviews enabled me to demonstrate how that new discourse about landscape painting was for some critics, especially those opposed to Louis-Philippe's government, highly charged with political implications.;One of the main issues at stake in these reviews was the debate between the supporters of paintings which represented specific views of the French landscape and the supporters of the classical mode who favored historical landscape painting. This debate alone should be of course seen in political term. As the Academy supported the classical tradition, how could artists oppose the Academy and not be seen as opposing the government?;Because some painters in the 1830s proposed a new and specifically French vision of the countryside, their supporters wove into their criticism issues of patriotism and national identity. The proliferation of landscape imagery, from travel prints to Salon landscapes participated in the ideological construction of a nation centered on the land and the diversity of its regions.;This dissertation was by nature archeological. It entailed a major attempt at resurrecting texts and their authors, who have many of them been long forgotten. I see my work as the first step in establishing a new history of texts in order to further our understanding of this period beyond a history of style.
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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.
