The New Caillebotte Affair

In their endeavor to revive the fortunes of academic artists of the past a revival that first and foremost serves the demands of the international art market revisionist art historians have lately devised a new tactic. Now the battles waged by avant-garde artists against the power wielded by the official academies are portrayed as nothing more than modernist mythology. Thus to be vindicated are not only the official artists themselves but also the state institutions and the petty bureaucrats who ran them in the service of conservative aesthetics and politics. We present here a number of recent articles, originally published in France, concerning one of the most famous episodes of institutional resistence to modern art. First, there is a chapter from Jeanne Laurent's Arts et pouvoirs, a study of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, in which she examines in detail the documents surrounding the refusal of twenty-nine paintings from the Caillebotte bequest of 1894; second, an article published in Le Figaro in January of 1983 by Pierre Vaisse, who wants to claim that the story Laurent tells is a fiction in the service of modernist orthodoxy,; and finally a short reply to Vaisse's charges by Jacques Chardeau, grandnephew of Gustave Caillebotte. It should be noted that the substance of Chardeau's account, published in the catalogue of the 1984 Caillebotte exhibition at the Musee Pissarro, was originally written in a letter to Le Figaro. The newspaper chose not to publish it, but rather to print a short notice, also included here, which included Vaisse's defense

Computer Science · Cultural Identity and Heritage · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis