Beyond the Clichés of “Decadence” and the Myths of “Triumph”: Rewriting France in the Stories of Postwar Western Art

Catherine Dossin

The present book originates from a sentence by American philosopher Arthur Danto I came across several years ago in a book on twentieth-century American art. It read: “French painting between the wars and after the Second World War exemplifies so protracted a decline that the final three-quarters of the twentieth century could be written with scarcely a mention of France.”¹ It caught my attention not so much for what it stated—the irrelevance of French art is a predictable cliché in the literature on postwar Western art, especially in the United States—but rather for who uttered it: whereas such a swiftly dismissive comment was to be anticipated from art critics, dealers, or artists who stand to benefit from undermining artists belonging to other groups, it was unsettling coming from the author of “The Artworld”² who had provided such a sophisticated understanding of the discursive workings of the art world. It would seem that the decline of French art was so universally recognized that it did not need to be discussed or explained, let alone proven; it could simply be stated as a truth. French art is usually thought to have declined sometime during or after the Second World War, but according to Danto it was already over by the beginning of the century … unless it had started earlier still.

Indeed, a quick review of American literature on France revealed that its end had long been announced—long before the twentieth century. In fact, French decadence is a recurring motive in American thinking of France since the very beginning of Franco-American relations. As historian Saliha Belmessous explained, the French failure at establishing colonies on the North American continent in the sixteenth century was regarded as the result of moral shortcomings. The moral corruption of France, which was illustrated in the religious and civil wars that then raged throughout the country, was contrasted with the pretended purity and virtue of the new continent.3 From then on, France was the decadent, corrupted other of the United States.

Within the rich amount of American literature on French decadence, an article published in 1910 in the literary journal The North American Review is particularly noteworthy. Written by Maria Longworth Storer, an artist, socialite, and the wife of Bellamy Storer, a US representative and diplomat in Europe, it is exemplary in the way the cliché of French moral decadence was used in the complicated geopolitical context of the years leading to the First World War. According to Storer, religion and justice, which are the pillars of society, had been replaced in France by the “Déesse de la Raison” (literally the “Goddess of Reason,” that is to say secularity) and socialism. After describing the aggressive campaign of secularization of public education driven by the Républicains since the 1880s, the success of socialist ideas, and what she saw as the consequent degradation of authority, Mrs. Storer concluded that the French people had lost any moral sense. The general moral decadence of the country also resulted, in her eyes, in such a lax attitude within the French Army that little was to be expected from French soldiers in case of a conflict. In contrast to France’s moral and military corruption, the United States stood strong and powerful on the values of religion and justice (defined here as the opposite of socialism).⁴

From this article and others, one is drawn to conclude that the so-called postwar decadence of French art is part of a rich and long tradition that defines the United States as strong, moral, and thriving in comparison to a (perceived) decadent France. The decencies, motivations, and stakes have varied but the cliché has remained unchanged. Comments on France’s creative exhaustion uttered from the United States during the postwar period, such as Danto’s, thus need to be relativized, historicized and accordingly considered as discursive arguments. The question is not whether or not France produced any interesting art in these years but rather why at that particular moment the American art worlds appropriated the old cliché of French moral decadence to claim that nothing interesting was then coming from France. Moreover, what were the historical and cultural bases that allowed this cliché to develop and take hold in such a way that, expanding outside the United States, it became regarded as a fact everywhere, even in certain quarters of France? How has this affected and how does it continue to affect the historiography of postwar Western art and, more particularly, our understanding of the visual arts in France? And finally, what would it take to rewrite France in the mainstream history of postwar art? These are some of the questions that I would like to address in the following pages.

US discourse on the decline of French art in the postwar period

The origin of the American discourse on the decline of French art is usually assigned to a text written in 1948 by the art critic Clement Greenberg, in which he discussed new art from France that was then presented in New York, and famously declared: “The conclusion forces itself, much to our own surprise, that the main premises of Western art have at last migrated to the United States, along with the center of gravity of industrial production and political power.”5 Even though Greenberg’s actual knowledge of the French art scene was limited, to say the least, his programmatic argument about the decline of Paris and the rise of New York slowly gained influence in the United States over the following years to the point of becoming a “truth.”⁶

One of the reasons behind the success of Greenberg’s comment on the decline of France in the United States was people’s utter disenchantment with Europe.⁷ Twice now they had needed to intervene to stop the Europeans’ killing frenzy. They were appalled by the megalomania of the fascist and communist regimes, the madness of their fratricidal wars, and the barbarity of their genocides. They were also disappointed in the French for failing to resist the German invasion. Now the United States had to feed the Europeans, help them rebuild, and protect them from the Soviet Union. How could the Americans still hold Europe in high regard? How could they not despise them? In this context, the old belief that Europe was rotten and that Western civilization could regenerate itself only in America regained momentum. The United States was a good country with good people, and Americans were proud of the American way of life. As the prestige of European culture evaporated, the interest in American culture increased. After 1945, the number of American Studies programs in American universities went from twenty-nine to eighty-two. There were also more books devoted to American literature and art and perhaps the most visible of these was Alexander Eliot’s influential Three Hundred Years of American Art (1957). Similarly, US museums organized shows about the nation’s history of art, including Two Centuries of American Painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1954.⁸

If before the war the label of “American artist” was a stigma associated with provincialism, after the war it started to take on positive connotations. Many American critics, including Greenberg, whose voices had emerged during the war, made the defense of American art their main issue. They repackaged America’s purported provincialism as an independent and original identity, radically different from the European identity. In spring 1952, Partisan Review organized a symposium in three parts on American culture. Among its contributors there was a strong desire to assert the superiority of America over Europe, and a conviction that a long-overdue cultural affirmation of the United States was underway.9 In September 1953, Art Digest asked the question: “Is the French Avant-garde overrated?” Greenberg, of course, reiterated his conviction that Paris was finished: “Do I mean that the new American abstract painting is superior on the whole to the French? I do.”

Yet, not all the participants at the symposium were convinced that such a shift had actually happened or could happen. The painter Jack Tworkov, for instance, dismissed the question: “In a symposium such as this one, it would be my aim to obtain a better climate for American painting rather than to fan up competition with the French.” Ralston Crawford, a painter who had actually spent time in France and so knew the scene first-hand, was perplexed:

“There haven’t been any great artists in Europe since Picasso” has become an American song. Then there is the unsung but often suggested chorus: “That makes us all great.” The logic leading to this chorus has eluded me for a long time. In France, now there are many fine artists working in various styles. During my time there in 1951 and 1952 I didn’t happen to see any young artists who seemed to have the substance of Cézanne, Picasso or Gris. I don’t find them in New York either.

In his response, Greenberg theorized the difference between belle peinture française and rough and tough American painting. French painting was, according to the critic, decorative and dated (he was certainly thinking of Braque, Matisse, and Bonnard who were presented as the “French” painters at that time). American painting, in contrast, was wild and immediate.¹⁰

This image of the American artist as a savage—an image to which Greenberg would return in 1955 in his essay “American Type Painting”—came, as Arthur Danto has noticed, from Philip Rahv’s 1939 article “Paleface and Redskin.”¹¹ In this essay, Rahv created a distinction between “paleface” writers who, like Henry James, were “highbrow,” and “redskin” writers who, like Walt Whitman, were “lowbrow.” The palefaces were European in taste, while the redskins were American originals.¹² Danto has suggested that the concept of the American artist as wild actually came from the Surrealists, who were interested in primitivism and liked to see the Americans as rough and primitive. In the same way that they created the myth of the femme-enfant, they originated, or at least fostered, the emergence of the myth of the wild American artist. Accordingly, after the war American artists were packaged as free and spontaneous. Jackson Pollock, born in Wyoming, became the best-known image of the redskin American artist; the antithesis of the paleface European artist.13 Willem de Kooning, who was 22 when he arrived in the United States and remained proud of his European origins, was annoyed by such discourses and used to mock the American artists: “They stand all alone in the wilderness, breast bearded.”¹⁴ Although there was an element of parody in the redskin image (and it is difficult to think of Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman as primitive and instinctive artists), this American identity won over the public’s imagination.

If the end of Paris started to be under discussion in certain American circles during the war,¹⁵ the same was not true in Western Europe. Across the continent Paris remained the undisputed center of the art world, the place where museum directors, dealers, and collectors would go to discover new talent and where young artists would go seeking inspiration and success. John Franklin Koenig, an American in Paris, found the city’s cultural life amazing in the 1950s: “It was an extraordinary period: France’s intellectual and artistic renewal after the war. It was fantastic, it had incredible diversity and richness.”¹⁶

As late as December 1961, the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum of Eindhoven organized Kompas: Paris—Carrefour de la peinture, an ambitious exhibition devoted to the School of Paris, featuring, among others, Nicolas de Staël, Serge Poliakoff, Pierre Soulages, Jean Bazaine, Pierre Tal Coat, Maurice Estève, and Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. In the exhibition catalog, Edy de Wilde, the director of the museum, asserted: “It is in Paris, more than anywhere else, reception center for artists of all nationalities, that the entire range of painting becomes visible.”¹⁷ Supporting this claim, the exhibition presented a School of Paris at its apogee. In 1961, Poliakoff, Soulages, and de Staël constituted the pantheon of postwar painting—those whose names were destined to pass into posterity.¹⁸ By 1964, however, everything had changed. In 1962, the international art market underwent a severe crisis, which led the international art world to move away from abstraction—especially Parisian abstraction—in favor of a new realism that better represented the spirit of the new decade, and of which American Pop art was the best representative.19

The end of Paris’s privileged position was ratified in June 1964 when the American Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg received the Grand Prize of Painting at the Venice Biennale. On that occasion, Alan Solomon, the curator of the American pavilion, rejoiced openly that the superiority of American art was finally being recognized abroad: “The fact that the art world center has shifted from Paris to New York is acknowledged on every hand.”²⁰ That year, the American art critic Thomas Hess wrote “Tale of Two Cities,” an account of “the decline of Paris as an art center and the rise of New York in its place.” Hess begins his tale with the following observation: “We all know what happened to International School of Paris Painting at some time in between 1939 and 1945; it ceased to exist. We know how it happened; the evidence is plain in literally thousands of pictures by hundreds of very gifted, intelligent artists.” Echoing the old comments on the decadence of the belle peinture française, he continued:

The nicely adjusted harmony of blues and roses took on a deathly look of undertaker’s cosmetics. Virtuoso drawing strangled form instead of defining it. The secret recipes of the painters’ cuisine, of fine cookery to Cocteau’s taste, now combined to dish up cloying sauces, pastries that would never rise no matter how thoroughly the dough was teased, the cream whipped, the crusts garnished and dusted.

Following such a vivid description, Hess then goes on trying to understand why “International Paris painting degenerated with a rapidity that was as astonishing as it was saddening,” using a terminology of corruption, decay, debacle, self-destruction, and vitality commonly found in the American literature on France. He concludes by assigning blame to the French painters for having sold themselves to the establishment, instead of resisting it. French art was over because artists lacked the moral strength to resist becoming “the servants” or “the cook” of the “the vanguard audience.”²¹

This was also the opinion of the painter Robert Motherwell, when he was interviewed in 1964 by the Parisian art critic Michel Ragon:

R. M.—It is my opinion that French art is completely crushed.

M. R.—Under what?

R. M.—Crushed from the inside. It is a moral issue.

After having read the transcript of his interview, Motherwell sent a letter to Ragon trying to rectify his comments:

The true response … is that I am not very well informed about the current situation of School of Paris … I have not spent more than a couple of days in Paris over the past twenty five years. I do not know if the French artists that are exhibited in New York are representative of what is happening in Paris, where there might be excellent artists that we do not see here.22

Demonstrating rare lucidity for those years, Motherwell realized that the moral argument was begging the question, and that he (and his fellow Americans) could only have incomplete knowledge of contemporary French art. If they did not go to Paris, they knew only what was brought to their doorsteps, which could only offer a partial view of French production.

In the following years, as interest in French art decreased further, knowledge of it became ever more limited in the USA. Art magazines would have been the only way to learn about new art made in France, but by then French magazines had lost their significance and some, like Cahiers d’Art, had disappeared altogether. The production of knowledge about contemporary art was in the hands of US-based art magazines, which at best were uninterested in French art and at worst hostile to it. They failed to feature French artists so that reading them one would get the impression that nothing was going on in Paris anymore. In 1966, when the artist Donald Judd famously dismissed European art, his exact words were: “I am not interested in European art and I think it is over.”²³ It was indeed first and foremost a matter of interest.

Nothing interesting was happening in France, not because artists there suddenly lost their creative power but because the Western art world centered in New York was no longer interested in what they were doing; their attention had shifted from Paris to New York, throwing Parisian artists from the spotlight into media invisibility. As such, the low profile of Parisian artists in the second part of the twentieth century is not a problem. Many international artists had been overlooked internationally in the first half due to the prevalence of Paris. Perhaps they deserved their subsequent invisibility. They were now sharing the fate of any artists not based in New York, be they from Brussels, Berlin, or Chicago. The French situation is just particularly striking, not only because Paris was once the center of attention, but more importantly because the decline of French art is the key narrative device in the “American Century” plot on which our understanding of postwar Western art rests.²⁴

Indeed, the decline of French artists is the necessary flip side of the so-called “triumph of American art,” on which the narrative of postwar Western art is constructed. Without the inferiority of French art, American art could not be great. Danto’s comment about the decadence of French art was made in a book on American art because the decline of French art in the second part of the twentieth century (or the last three-quarters of the century) had little to do with what was actually going on France at the time. It is nothing but a literary device in the triumphant narrative of American art because, as Danto actually implies, it is all about writing the history of art.

Writing the story of postwar art: the triumph of the New York perspective

In Stories of Art, art historian James Elkins draws attention to the differences between the Western narrative of art history, exemplified by Helen Gardner’s Art Through the Ages and Marilyn Stokstad’s Art History, and its non-Western versions.25 But within the Western world, there are divergent narratives, as well. Their differences are particularly striking when it comes to twentieth-century art.²⁶ To better understand this disparity, we can compare three textbooks devoted to that period: Harvard Arnason’s History of Modern Art (4th edition, 1998),²⁷ Karl Ruhrberg’s Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (2000),²⁸ and Daniel Soutif’s L’Art du XX^ème siècle: de l’art moderne à l’art contemporain (2005).²⁹ The tables of contents in these books clearly show the variations amongst different nationalities regarding the development of contemporary art.

Let me start with the US-based narrative, encapsulated in the following excerpt from its table of contents (Table I.1).

Table I.1 Table of contents of H. Harvard Arnason’s History of Modern Art (4th edition, 1998)

This story opens with American (in fact, mostly New York) Abstract Expressionism as the major artistic development of the postwar era. The next chapter covers parallel developments in France, Spain, Italy, Benelux, and England in the aftermath of the war. The chapter devoted to “Pop art and Europe’s New Realism” begins with British Pop, moves to American Pop art, and ends with Nouveau Réalisme, despite that movement having chronologically preceded American Pop art. The next two chapters, “Sixties Abstraction” and “The Pluralist Seventies,” present a succession of movements that are either specifically American (Color Field Abstraction and Pattern and Decoration) or that developed internationally but still are rooted in the United States (Conceptual art).30 There is no single chapter devoted to specifically European movements such as Zero (Germany), Arte Povera (Italy) or Supports/Surfaces (France). Arnason’s chapter on the 1980s opens, curiously, with paintings by Georg Baselitz and Gerhard Richter dating from the 1960s.³¹

Karl Ruhrberg’s Malerei des 20. Jahrhunderts starts on a very different course (Table I.2). Instead of opening with US art, this story published in Germany begins with the situation in Paris at the end of the war, focusing on geometric and lyrical abstraction. The title of this first subchapter, however, refers to German painter Willi Baumeister’s book, Das Unbekannte in der Kunst (1947; The Unknown in Art), thus placing the artistic development of the postwar era under German patronage. The second sub-chapter, “Abstrakte Kunst in Deutschland,” is devoted exclusively to abstraction in Germany, while the third subchapter considers non-representational painting in “anderen Ländern” (Other Countries). Whereas Arnason does not mention postwar German art, Ruhrberg gives preponderance to their work, granting an extra sub-chapter to German painter Wols (who was based in France).

Table I.2 Table of contents of Karl Ruhrberg’s Malerei des 20. Jahrhunderts (2000)

Another difference between these two nationally oriented narratives lies in the importance they confer to the Italian Lucio Fontana, the French Yves Klein, and the German Zero-Gruppe. The US story associates Fontana with postwar Italian abstraction, Klein with Nouveau Réalisme, and the Zero-Gruppe artists with 1960s American abstraction. The German story, in contrast, groups their works together as a European response to American art, thereby offering a vision of a continent united.

The main characteristic of Ruhrberg’s story is its thematic approach, which emphasizes continuity in the history of art over ruptures—projects rather than national voices. Thus the subchapter on “Pop Art und Nouveau Réalisme” is subtitled “Fascination with Triviality,” and examines this tendency from Jean Hélion to Christo. Likewise, the subchapter on “Aspekte des Neorealismus” (Aspects of Neo-realism) presents figurative tendencies from Bernard Buffet and Francis Gruber to Gerhard Richter and Chuck Close, while “Malerei an der Jahrtausendwende” (Painting of the Twentieth Century) considers the meaning and function of painting from Baselitz (clearly identified as a 1960s artist) to the present. Overall, the author portrays postwar art as being composed of international movements in which German artists produced art of equal relevance to that of their American and other European counterparts.

Not surprisingly, Daniel Soutif’s L’ Art du XX^ème siècle differs from both the German and the American accounts (Table I.3). Soutif’s story opens by discussing neither American Abstract Expressionism nor European abstraction. It begins instead with the end of militant Surrealism, the redefinition of abstraction, the late works of Picasso and Matisse, the realism of André Fougeron and Renato Guttuso, and finishes with Marcel Duchamp. Soutif therefore stresses the continuity between pre- and postwar developments, and asserts figuration and realism as distinctively postwar trends, unlike Arnason and Rurhberg, who present abstraction as the postwar style. This focus on continuity and figuration is also present in his second chapter, “L’Expressionisme abstrait et ses suites,” (Abstract Expressionism and its Afterlives), which starts with American Regionalism and ends with the return to figuration of Larry Rivers and Robert Rauschenberg, thereby relativizing Abstract Expressionism’s exceptionalism—a cliché in US literature.

Table I.3 Table of contents of Daniel Soutif’s L’ Art du XX^ème siècle (2002)

Soutif’s story also diverges in its presentation of Nouveau Réalisme, which appears in the American and German books after American Pop art, despite its chronological anteriority. The French book, conversely, examines the movement in a chapter titled “Fin de la peinture?” (The End of Painting?) along with monochrome painting, Yves Klein, and the Affichistes.³² American Pop art is discussed at length in a subsequent chapter that also considers American Minimalism and Conceptual art. Just as Ruhrberg challenges the belief that nothing happened in Germany in the 1950s, Soutif and his collaborators dispute the common prejudice against French art in the 1960s with a chapter-long presentation of the artistic creation in France during that period, from Figuration narrative to BMPT and Supports/Surfaces. Finally, unlike the US book which presents the developments of the 1970s internationally, Soutif’s story stresses the national roots of the movements of that decade, as exemplified in the chapter titled “De Fluxus à Arte povera en passant par la Belgique.”

The differences in the stories told and the illustrations used cannot simply be dismissed as mere patriotism or historical opportunism. Beyond the expected preferential coverage given to their respective national artists, there are major discrepancies in the chronologic, geographic, and thematic ways in which movements and ideas are presented. In the US-American story, Nouveau Réalisme follows Pop art, the 1960s and 1970s are dominated by US-American art, and Baselitz is a 1980s artist. According to Rurhberg’s story, Abstraction dominates Western artistic production until the 1960s, Wols and Bacon are major figures (if not the major figures) of postwar art, and Baselitz is a 1960s artist. From the French point of view, abstraction is just one of the postwar movements, the United States just one center of artistic production, and art movements are firmly rooted in their historical and geographical contexts.

Such discrepancies are not surprising, since those events must have looked different seen from Paris, New York, Berlin, or even between Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Munich, Strasbourg, Paris, Grenoble, and Nice, or New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, etc. so much so that it is difficult to talk of an “American,” or a “French,” or a “German” perspective. The stories that developed in each of these cities differ from one another not only because of their authors’ ideological positions, but also because of the point of view their location gives them on the international art scene. While the European members of Nouveau Réalisme started developing their specific practices in the mid-1950s, their works were not seen in the United States before the early 1960s. Likewise, Baselitz, whose first German solo-show took place in West Berlin in 1963, only began exhibiting in New York in 1981. The French, German, and US-American stories may diverge, but they might all be valid to the extent that they reflect multiple possible perspectives on the events that took place in the corresponding art worlds during the second half of the twentieth century. There is no one “true” story because there is not a correct way to perceive reality.

Yet, we have to admit that the New York perspective that sees New York-based artists leading the trail of artistic innovation from Abstract Expressionism to Post-painterly Abstraction, Neo-Dada, Pop art, Minimal art, and Conceptual art has come to dominate the others. It has become the overarching story of postwar Western art—the one we all supposedly know and against which we mentally compare and contrast “other” stories (even our own) as we encounter them. These “other” stories are regarded as local narratives more or less solidly affixed onto the main story, and “local” artistic developments are perceived in relation to those of New York. We thus used New York-based Pop art as point of reference to discuss and make sense of works created in other local scenes in the 1960s.33

The founding myth of this American story is, as already mentioned, the end of Paris and the rise of New York. Ignoring prewar artistic creation in the United States as much as dismissing any postwar developments in France, this story tells how, after the Second World War, the center of the art world shifted from Paris to New York. France, materially and morally ruined, had lost her creative power, while the United States gave birth to a radical new movement, Abstract Expressionism, which took over the regeneration of the avant-garde spirit from the School of Paris. As the story goes, modernist innovation became henceforth identified as an exclusively American project. This persuasive story was written and promoted through a series of books and articles that were published starting in the 1970s, including Irving Sandler’s The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970) and Dore Ashton’s The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (1973), but also Max Kozloff’s “American Painting during the Cold War” (Artforum, 1973), and even Serge Guilbaut’s Comment New York vola l’idée d’Art Moderne (1983; When New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art), since their analyses of the methods used to support the international success of American art further promoted the myth of its triumph.³⁴

And, as the myth became part of the historiography of postwar Western art, its flip side—the creative exhaustion of Paris—became likewise a “fact” in the history of postwar art. The cliché of the moral and creative decline of French art having taken hold, the same Parisian artists who had been enthusiastically acclaimed in the 1950s were relegated to the historical dustbin. Reflecting on this reverse of fortune, Parisian art critic Pierre Descargues recalled:

Then art historians came and they pulled the carpet under our feet. No, they wrote, what you lived is worth nothing. The real adventure took place in the United States. Not in Paris … nothing happened in Paris. The School of Paris is irrelevant. They are serious people, the historians. And as they copy each other, at the end, the number impresses. Should we believe it? That what we had lived made no sense? Our life did not look like what the historians had decided.35

Beyond the American glass: French art in its context

To make sense of the Parisian experience described by Descargues, it would be necessary not only to look beyond the US-based prism but also to use a different template for interpreting it (another grille de lecture, in French). Simply affixing references to events that took place in France within the official story of postwar art would indeed be insufficient because it would be using reference points that are meaningful in a US context but would not necessarily make sense from a French one (and this is true for any other country one would like to consider). Seen from a New York perspective, the artistic activities that took place in France (or Germany, Mexico, India, etc.) would appear partial and distorted. Writing France (or of any other country) into the story of postwar art would thus require us to rewrite the whole story and use a different analytic grid for reading history, politics, and art.

Experiences and memories of the Second World War

It would first be necessary to consider the specific French experience (or rather experiences) of the Second World War, which drastically differs from the American, but also from the Italian or German, because without knowledge and understanding of what happened locally during the war, we cannot understand postwar developments in different countries, because the experience of the war motivated the different paths visual arts in each nation took afterwards.³⁶

In France, the experience of the war was that of an occupied country, in which everyone including artists, dealers, critics, and art historians had to find a way to continue living.37 After France declared war on Germany in September 1939, many artists and intellectuals had to flee. This was particularly true for the Surrealists, who were well-known communists and often had, like André Masson, fought against Franco during the Spanish Civil War. But the majority stayed. For them, artistic life continued during the four years of the German occupation and Vichy government. In fact, the art field had rarely been as active as it was during the occupation. Artists seemed even more productive. At the Salon d’Automne of 1941, there were 2,447 artworks on display—a record number for the period, according to Sarah Wilson who explains this growth of activity in relation to the lack of other distractions, a deep-seated need to express oneself and communicate with others, and the return to favor of academic styles.³⁸ This increased activity did not slow down, either, as collectors were also buying more art. The occupation of France actually stimulated the art market. As one of their first measures, the Germans devalued French currency. This gave them extraordinary buying power, which many German officials took advantage of in their own art-collecting endeavors. In the economic context of occupied France, art also became one of the rare outlets for anyone who had cash, from collaborators to black marketers. Artworks became regarded as highly desirable objects—safe assets in a very uncertain world.³⁹ The 1941–1942 season was particularly good for the Parisian market. The auction house Hôtel Drouot sold more than a million objects—a record. Buyers were particularly fond of Bonnard, Braque, and Matisse, that is, established French artists.⁴⁰

The dynamism of the art scene was reinforced by the relative freedom artists enjoyed. The Germans tolerated in France the kind of art and artists that were condemned as degenerate at home. Unless the work was obviously anti-German or the artist Jewish or communist, German censorship in France was rather lax. As for the Vichy government, its art policy was not particularly strict, either. Maréchal Pétain himself was in favor of a traditional, sentimental, realist style, but the visual arts were not his priority. French artisans were far more important, because they produced useful and beautiful objects that could be sold and that demonstrated the famous French savoir-faire. As a result, there was little official theorization of what art should be and no strong censorship.

Although no style was imposed on them by the German occupiers or the Vichy government, French artists spontaneously adopted a style inspired by Fauvism and Cubism, two styles that were widely exhibited and sold in Paris during the occupation. The Salon d’Automne in 1943, for instance, organized an important retrospective of Braque’s work. Braque and Matisse, who had remained in France, became the models for a younger generation in these precarious years—the symbol of better times and of a French culture that needed to be preserved. Thus, the works exhibited in the famous Vingt jeunes peintres de tradition française, which opened on May 10, 1941, at the Galerie Braun in Paris, featured Cubist features and the Fauvist palette. Young artists were not interested in abstraction or Surrealism,41 because those styles were too cosmopolitan and too leftist to have symbolic power in occupied France, and their main practitioners had fled. The interest of the young artists went rather to Romanesque art—a French tradition to which art historian Pierre Francastel drew public attention with the publication of his Humanisme roman (Romanesque Humanism) in 1942.⁴² Besides, as Sarah Wilson indicates, the Romanesque rooms were also the only exhibition rooms open in the Louvre during the war. The works of young French artists, such as Jean Bazaine, Maurice Estève, and Alfred Manessier, thus synthesized French modernity and French tradition, in a soft, spiritual language that could pass censorship and that reflected the uncertainty of the period.⁴³ Overall the occupation prompted artists, critics, and art historians to cling to threatened French traditions. It was indeed during the war that art historian Bernard Dorival wrote his two volumes on French painting and his three-volume Étapes de la peinture française contemporaine that were published after the war, in which he called for and defined an art growing out of the French tradition.⁴⁴

The anxiety over the preservation of French culture and values did not end with the liberation and cessation of hostilities. Once the festivities were over, France was faced indeed with the depressing reality of postwar recovery.⁴⁵ If the fighting did not completely destroy the country’s infrastructure, it was nonetheless worn out by years of economic exploitation. French industry was in a poor state and had difficulty meeting the basic needs of the population. As Simone de Beauvoir explained: “The war was over; it remained in our hands like a great, unwanted corpse, and there was no place on earth to bury it.”46 The French had first to deal with the uncomfortable issue of the Vichy government and collaboration. In the first days of the libération, there was a surge of violence against those accused of collaboration with the Germans. Women’s heads were shaved, while notorious collaborators were executed. Jean Fautrier’s Otages series began in 1943 as a monument to the resistance fighters shot by the Germans in the forest of Châtenay-Malabry near his home, but the location’s meaning changed after the liberation when the resistance started to use that same forest to shoot collaborators.⁴⁷ In the following years, the épuration of France continued through thousands of public trials and condemnations that prolonged the fear, anxiety, and anger of the occupation years. In the name of a necessary national reconciliation, however, President Vincent Auriol started using his amnesty power in 1947 to forgive many collaborators and bring back peace within the country.⁴⁸

Yet people did not forget, and the memories (or repressed memories) of these dark years continued to haunt French artistic creation long after the war ended, so much so that, as Jill Carrick showed for the Nouveau Réalisme, one cannot understand the French postwar art scene without taking the painful and complicated memories of the war, occupation, libération, and épuration into consideration.⁴⁹ They define the artistic production in France as late as the 1990s when a public discussion on France’s responsibility in the Holocaust was finally started following the trials of Klaus Barbie (1984–1987) and Maurice Papon (1981–1997), and President Jacques Chirac’s recognition of France’s responsibility in the deportation and death of French Jews in 1995. The testimonies of the victims, accounts of the accused, and defenses of their lawyers who placed their clients’ offenses in the larger context of France’s crimes during and after the war—especially during the wars of decolonization—shook the country and triggered the creation of somber works of which Christian Boltanski’s 1990s installations and Louis Malle’s motion picture Au revoir les enfants (1987) are only the most famous.

The geopolitics of the Cold War and decolonization

The specificity of the French experiences and memories of the Second World War is not the only thing that needs to be taken into account when trying to understand the French artistic production of the postwar period. One needs also to consider the geopolitics of the Cold War and decolonization, and how they widened the gap between France and other Western countries, especially the United States, where the Cold War had different meanings and implications.

In postwar France, communism had an aura of prestige due to its role in the Résistance, and consequently it became an important political force.50 Until the late 1960s, the Parti communiste français (PCF; French Communist Party) would get up to 29 percent of the seats in the Assemblée nationale, and during the 1969 presidential election, Jacques Duclos, the Communist candidate, received 21.5 percent of the votes. Many French people subscribed to communist ideals, rejecting US imperialism as the worst of all evils. Others, like Charles de Gaulle, wanted Europe to act as a third force in the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. To counterbalance US influence, de Gaulle formed links with the Soviets and left NATO in 1966.⁵¹

In the United States, in contrast, communists were not seen as heroes of the resistance but as enemies. As the image of the Red Menace prevailed, McCarthyism officially deemed members of the Communist Party traitors. For mainstream US citizens communism was not an option and they could not understand how it could fool European intellectuals and artists. When Picasso became a member of the PCF in 1944, for example, American artists and intellectuals wrote him a letter begging him to reconsider his decision. Picasso was reportedly puzzled by the Americans’ irrational fear of communism: in his village, everybody was a communist—the butcher, the baker, the teacher—and they were all nice people.⁵²

It would, however, be wrong to conclude from the importance of the PCF in postwar France that the country was divided between those who embraced communism and those who chose capitalism, in the same way as the world was divided between Soviet and American zones of influence. In fact, it would be a mistake to read the situation in France through a Cold War ideological opposition between two models, with Frenchmen on either side. The situation was more complicated because the political spectrum expanded to the left beyond the PCF, which represented the establishment and, as such, was criticized and attacked from both the right and the left. The leftist critique of communism was particularly strong among intellectuals and artists who rejected the PCF because of its links to Moscow and who instead adopted a palette of Marxist positions ranging from Trotskyism, Maoism, and socialism to different types of anarchism.

Maoism was particularly in favor in France. In the context of the Cold War, the People’s Republic of China had come to represent for them the country of “real” communism. While the Soviet Union had betrayed the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary ideal and given in to imperialism, Mao’s China was carrying on the spirit of revolution. In the 1960s, Maoism offered an alternative to Soviet communism: a way to remain faithful to Marxism without aligning oneself with Moscow. Standing strong against both US and Soviet imperialism, the heroic figure of Mao captured the French imagination and fired up the revolutionary spirit among students, artists, and poets.53 Seen from France, the anti-authoritarian nature of the Cultural Revolution appeared as a popular movement in which the masses were given authority to criticize the establishment.⁵⁴ Jean-Luc Godard captured the early enthusiasm of French youth for the People’s Republic of China in his movie La chinoise (The Chinese, 1967). Such enthusiasm was particularly strong among artists because it assigned them an important role in the revolutionary project.⁵⁵

But Maoism was not the only leftist position that could be adopted. Understanding the complex—to say the least—political landscape of postwar France and grasping the subtle differences among the different Marxist, Maoist, and anarchist groupuscules, as well as their evolutions before and after the events of the social uprising of May 1968 is key to understanding the art scene of the period because they shaped the French art worlds and influenced artists’ practices. Even though seen from afar, especially from New York, they might have seemed to be all “communist,” from Paris they were opposing groups who would not talk to each other, let alone exhibit together.⁵⁶

Reading the situation in postwar France through the Cold War lens used in the American narrative is thus problematic overall. Not only did the ideological divide play differently there, but also it was not the most meaningful geopolitical event for the French nation; decolonization and in particular the Indochina War (1945–1954) and the Algerian War (1954–1962) were. These decolonization wars affected the entire country at all levels. Economically, the wars to prevent the loss of the colonies were costly and the difficulties integrating former colonists (the so-called Pieds-Noirs) weighed heavily on the country’s growth.⁵⁷ Politically, the falling apart of its colonial empire further diminished France’s international significance, and caused much instability at home. This culminated in April 1961, when four French generals attempted a military putsch to overthrow President Charles de Gaulle, in reaction to his initiating peace negotiations with the Algerian National Liberation Front. Morally, the wars of decolonization and the French military’s use of torture, which was revealed to the public in 1957, resulted in disenchantment with France and its supposedly republican values. In fall 1960, 121 French intellectuals thus signed the “Déclaration sur le droit à l’insoumission dans la guerre d’Algérie” (Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the War in Algeria), an open letter to the government requesting the recognition of Algeria’s independence and condemning the use of torture.58

The Algerian War had a strong impact on the Parisian art scene. Since every Frenchman over twenty had to serve as part of the obligatory military service, many artists were enrolled in a war they did not support and which they more actively condemned upon their return.⁵⁹ The terrorist actions launched by the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) after February 1961 to hinder the peace process and the generals’ putsch in April 1961 brought back dark memories of the Second World War and created an urge among artists to act against fascism.⁶⁰

In October 1960, the artist Jean-Jacques Lebel and the critic Alain Jouffroy organized a debate on Western civilization and the above-mentioned Manifesto of the 121 in collaboration with the Italian artist Enrico Baj at the Milanese gallery of Arturo Schwarz. This was followed by three exhibitions entitled Anti-procès, which took a position against the war, fascism, and torture.⁶¹ During Anti-procès 3, which took place at the Galleria Brera in Milan in June 1961, Lebel, Baj, Erró, Antonio Recalcati, Roberto Crippa, and Gianni Dova created a collective work full with screaming mouths, bulging eyes, a quartered female body, collages of a Virgin and Child in the mouth of a decorated general, a swastika, photographs of Pope John XXIII and Cardinal Ottaviani, painted words (moral, fatherland, death), and names of Algerian towns (Constantine, Sétif) that evoked dark moments of the war. On June 14, 1961, the Italian police confiscated the Grand tableau antifasciste collectif (Great Anti-Fascist Collective Painting), considering it to be an attack against the state, religion, and the Pope.⁶²

As Hannah Feldman showed so well in her book From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962,⁶³ the artistic production of postwar France needs to be considered in the specific context of decolonization. More than the Cold War, it is the disturbing and pervasive background on which the history of French art ensued.

Thinking of art in terms of engagement, ideology, and structure

Not only does French art require to be read through a different historical and geopolitical lens than American art; it also needs a different aesthetic reading grid. While in the United States Clement Greenberg’s ideas dominated aesthetic debates for most of the second part of the twentieth century as a model or a foil, in France Greenberg’s texts were only translated in 1988, and his name and ideas little known before the 1960s. In the French context where most intellectuals adhered to one form of Marxist thinking or another and, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Michel Foucault, regarded political engagement as their duty, aesthetic questions were posed in different terms. There, art did not seek to be pure and autonomous in Greenbergian terms; it wanted, to use the words of Eduardo Arroyo, a Spanish artist living in Paris, “to participate totally in the real. That is to say, to accuse, to denounce, to cry out, and not to be afraid of taboo subjects such as politics and sexuality.”64

To take stock of the differences between US and French discourses on art, we can consider the example of Gilles Aillaud’s compelling and influential reflection on art and politics. Aillaud, who had studied philosophy and whose ideas followed the thinking of Louis Althusser, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and other contemporary French writers, developed a very original understanding of modernity and the avant-garde, which became the driving force behind the Jeune Peinture, a rather large and heteroclite association of artists founded in 1953.⁶⁵ In the pages of the Bulletin de la Jeune Peinture, he repeatedly presented modern art as a myth created by the bourgeois capitalist society to serve its own interests. Part of the myth involved the concept of creative freedom, according to which artists are totally free to create whatever they want. Yet, artists had to express themselves within the limits of a physical medium and a formal language that restrict their freedom of expression. Moreover, artists were always the product of a general and artistic education that shaped their creativity such that they are never absolutely free. Artistic freedom was nothing but an illusion—a perverse illusion which made artists believe that they are free so that they see no need to fight for their freedom:

The artist in the bourgeois society plays the role of a free man. He spreads, by exhibiting it through his works, the image of the total freedom and the unlimited creative power of the human mind. It is in that sense that he is a particularly effective defender of the capitalist system of exploitation. It is his duty to make us understand that the fight is meaningless because we are already free.⁶⁶

Another aspect of the bourgeois myth of modern art was the autonomy of art, which postulates that art exists outside the real world and can remain unaffected by the logic of society. Aillaud thus regarded art for the sake of art as a trick. By making art autonomous, it became disconnected from the real world and its problems, and reduced to the world of forms and colors. Aillaud thus invited artists to reject the illusionary autonomy of art and, instead, “to manifest themselves as true individuals in time and space,”67 because “only then [can] we show that as painters we intend to get involved in what they want us to believe does not concern us, that is the affairs of the world and not of forms and colors.”⁶⁸

The third aspect of the myth Aillaud attacked was the quest for originality, which leads artists to always try to be more autonomous from the world. “Why is the bourgeoisie systematically encouraging cultural novelty?” he asked. “The answer may be found in this assertion—‘because it does not call anything into question.’”⁶⁹ Besides carrying artists deeper into formal investigations and farther away from the world, the cult of originality also isolates artists from one another, trapping them in their individual styles and personalities. As solitary individuals, artists have no power.⁷⁰ The quest for originality and individuality culminates in the myth of the avant-garde, in which formal revolution is mistaken for real revolution.

Obviously, Aillaud’s radical ideas were not shared by all French artists, but they exemplified the type of thinking and discussions that were taking place in France at the time, especially in regard of the pervasiveness of ideology even in the most abstract artworks—a model completely at odd with Greenberg’s formalism. One of the consequences of this belief was a shared desire among French artists to deconstruct the ideological structures of the artworks and the art worlds.

Such a focus on the structure was also shared by the cineastes of the French Nouvelle Vague, who deconstructed movies to show viewers the codes and conventions that made them. Their films constantly reminded viewers that they were watching actors playing in a film through the use of different techniques ranging from natural lighting to actors’ directly addressing the camera to mise en abyme.⁷¹ A similar structural deconstruction was also taking place in the Nouveau Roman. The nouveaux romanciers endeavored to systematically deconstruct the traditional novel and create a new form of text.⁷² As the writer Jean Ricardou summarizes, “The novel is not the writing of an adventure but the adventure of writing.”73 The same type of analyses of literary techniques and conventions can also be found in the contemporary work of French literary critics, and in particular in the writings of Roland Barthes. Discussing the ambition of this nouvelle critique, Barthes explained: “Literature is truly only a language, that is to say a system of signs: its being is not in its message, but in this ‘system.’ Thereby, the critic does not have to reconstitute the message of the work, but only its system.”⁷⁴

A similar interest in structures was shared by other French scholars working in different disciplines, including Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology, Michel Foucault in history, and Jacques Derrida in grammatological critique—an approach often described as deconstructivist, structuralist, or post-structuralist in American literature.⁷⁵ The idea of structural analysis also applied to art criticism. In 1968, Pierre Daix wrote Nouvelle critique et art moderne, in which he called for a new approach to art: “A criticism of convergence, that is, a multiple criticism that is structural … in the active sense of a criticism engaged in the art and capable of clarifying its living relations. In other words, ‘a new criticism.’”⁷⁶

While many artworks created in France in the second part of the twentieth century could only fit oddly in a history of art written from a New York perspective because their interest in the underlying ideology, structures, and conventions of painting were at odds with the conversations formulated in the United States at the same time, placed in the larger intellectual context of the Nouvelle Vague, the Nouveau Roman, and the Nouvelle Critique the works of artists in France in the postwar period make perfectly sense.

Conclusion

It goes without saying that all I have just said is not intended to provide a complete analytical grid for reading the history, politics, and art of postwar France. My intention in these introductory pages is merely to highlight various ways of reading the artistic production that took place in France after the Second World War. By offering examples of instances where the ambitions, conversations, and artistic creations that actually developed were at odds with the overarching (US) narrative of postwar Western art, I simply wish to call attention to the fact that this story is biased. It looks at postwar art through a New York lens that we cannot use to interpret the situation in other regions without running the risk of distortion and misunderstanding. I will let the essays that follow explore further this necessary shift in perspective through the corrective lenses of their specific cases studies. My hope is that they will offer English-speaking readers ways to not only rethink the place of France in the visual arts since 1945, but more generally to remap and rechart Western postwar and contemporary art.

 

 

 

¹    Christos M. Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal, eds., American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture, 1913–1993 (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1993), 22.

²    Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 571–584.

³    Saliha Belmessous, “Greatness and Decadence in French America,” Renaissance Studies 26, no. 4 (2012): 559–579. James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826) provides also an excellent context for early Franco-American relations.

⁴    Maria Longworth Storer, “The Decadence of France,” The North American Review 191, no. 651 (February, 1910): 168–184.

⁵    Clement Greenberg, “The Decline of Cubism,” Partisan Review 3 (1948): 366–369.

⁶    In the immediate postwar period, exchanges between Europe and the United States were actually very limited, so that knowledge of the different art scenes was partial and biased. See Catherine Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s–1980s: A Geopolitics of Western Art Worlds (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015).

⁷    Douglas Tallack, “Culture, Politics and Society in Mid-Century America,” in American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture, 1913–1993, ed. Joachimides and Rosenthal, 29–38.

⁸    On this new interest for American art and culture, see Sidra Stich, Made in the USA: An Americanization in Modern Art (Los Angeles; Berkley: University of California Press, 1987), 8.

⁹    Newton Arvin, et al., “Our Century and Our Culture,” Partisan Review 19 (1952): 282–326, 420–450, 562–597.

¹⁰  For the complete transcript of the symposium, see Ralston Crawford et al., “Symposium: Is French Avant-garde Overrated?” Art Digest, September 15, 1953, 12–13, 27.

¹¹  Arthur C. Danto, “Philosophizing American Art,” in American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture, 1913–1993, ed. Joachimides and Rosenthal. 21–28.

¹²  Republished in Philip Rahv, Image and Culture, Fourteen Essays on Literary Themes (Norfolk, CT: New Directions Books, 1949).

¹³  Serge Guilbaut, “Création et développement d’une avant-garde: New York 1946–1951,” Histoire et critique des arts, July 1978, 29–48. Serge Guilbaut, “Postwar Painting Games: The Rough and the Slick,” in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris and Montreal 1945–1964 (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 1990), 30–78.

¹⁴  Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 125.

¹⁵  See for instance Harold Rosenberg, “On the Fall of Paris,” Partisan Review 7, no. 6 (December 1940): 440–448.

¹⁶  Quoted in Corine Giriaud, “Cimaise 1952–1963—Une revue dans une période de transition: du monopole parisien à la suprématie new-yorkaise,” (Mémoire de Maitrise, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2001), 28.

¹⁷  Quoted in Edy De Wilde and Roger Van Gindertael, Kompas: Paris—Carrefour de la peinture (Eindhoven: Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, 1961), no page.

¹⁸  On Paris’ central position in the 1950s, see Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art, 85–111, as well as Julie Verlaine, Les galeries d’art contemporain à Paris: une histoire culturelle du marché de l’art, 1944–1970 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2012).

¹⁹  On the triumph of Pop art see: Catherine Dossin, “Pop begeistert: American Pop art and the German People,” American Art 25, no. 1 (Fall 2011): 100–111; Catherine Dossin, “To Drip or to Pop? The European Triumph of American Art,” The Artl@s Bulletin 3, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 79–103.

²⁰  Jean-Robert Arnaud, “Mise à mort dans Venise la Rouge?” Cimaise, July–October 1964, 104.

²¹  Thomas B. Hess, “A Tale of Two Cities,” Location 1, no. 2 (Summer 1964): 84–111.

²²  Michel Ragon, Vingt-cinq ans d’art vivant (Paris: Casterman, 1969), 309–315.

²³  Quoted in Lucy R. Lippard and Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd. Interview by Bruce Glaser. Edited by Lucy R. Lippard,” ARTnews 65, no. 5 (September 1966): 57.

²⁴  See The American Century: Art & Culture 1900–2000, an exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1999 in New York City.

²⁵  James Elkins, Stories of Art (New York, London: Routledge, 2002).

²⁶  A point made by many art historians. See for instance Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (London: Reaktion, 2009).

²⁷  Harvard Arnason, History of Modern Art (revised by Marla F. Prather), 4th ed. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998).

²⁸  Karl Ruhrberg and Manfred Schneckenburger, Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Taschen, 2000).

²⁹  Daniel Soutif, ed., L’art du XXème siècle: de l’ art moderne à l’art contemporain, 1939–2002 (Paris: Citadelles & Mazenod, 2005).

³⁰  On Conceptual art’s internationalism, see Sophie Cras, “Global Conceptualism? Cartographies of Conceptual Art in Pursuit of Decentering,” in Circulations in the Global History of Art, ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 167–182.

³¹  For a discussion of the US reception of these German artists, see Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art, 229–275.

³²  On the Affichistes, see Esther Schlicht, Roland Wetzel, and Max Hollein, eds., Poésie de la métropole. Les affichistes (Bâle: Museum Tinguely, 2015).

³³  As we can see in the recent wave of events devoted to international Pop art movements, such as The World Goes Pop (Tate Gallery, September 2015–January 2016) or International Pop (Walker Art Center, April 11–August 29 2015).

³⁴  On the promotion of this story in the 1970s, see Jean-Luc Chalumeau, “Le ‘triomphe’ de l’expressionisme abstrait américain: Jackson Pollock,” in Lectures de l’art (Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1991).

³⁵  Pierre Descargues, “1945 à Paris: la liberté partout?” in L’Envolée lyrique—Paris 1945–1956, ed. Patrick-Gilles Persin (Paris: Musée du Luxembourg, 2006), 24.

³⁶  For an international overview of the visual arts during the war, see Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Géopolitique des avant-gardes. Une histoire transnationale, 1918–1945. Collection Folio Histoire. Vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), 787–901.

³⁷  For a detailed account of German occupation of France, see Pascal Ory, La France allemande (1933–1945) (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). On the specific situation of the visual arts in occupied France, see Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, L’Art de la défaite, 1940–1944 (Paris: Le Seuil, 1993) and Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, ed., L’Art en guerre: France 1938–1947 (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2012), as well as Agnès Callu, Patrick Eveno, and Hervé Joly, eds., Culture et médias sous l’Occupation. Des entreprises dans la France de Vichy (Paris: Éditions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2009).

³⁸  Sarah Wilson, “La vie artistique à Paris sous l’occupation,” in Paris–Paris, 1937–1957—Création en France, ed. Pontus Hultén (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1981), 96–105.

³⁹  Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art (New York: BasicBooks, 1997), 122–154; Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1995), 153–183.

⁴⁰  On the French art market during the war see, among others, Joyeux-Prunel, Géopolitique des avant-gardes. Une histoire transnationale, 1918–1945, 819–834 ; and Georges Bernier, L’Art et l’argent—Le marché de l’art à la fin du XXème siècle (Paris: Éditions Ramsay, 1990).

⁴¹  Surrealism remained important for some younger artists, including the founding members of La Main à Plume who saw themselves as the “guardians” of the movement. See Michel Fauré, Histoire du surréalisme sous l’occupation (Paris: La table ronde, 2003).

⁴²  On all these polemics, see Michela Passini, La fabrique de l’art national. Le nationalisme et les origines de l’histoire de l’art en France et en Allemagne (1870–1933) (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2013).

⁴³  See Sarah Wilson, “Les peintres de tradition française,” in Paris–Paris, 1937–1957—Création en France (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1981), 106–115; and Michèle C. Cone, “‘Abstract’ Art as a Veil: Tricolor Painting in Vichy France, 1940–44,” The Art Bulletin, June 1992: 191–204.

⁴⁴  Bernard Dorival, Les étapes de la peinture française contemporaine, vols. 1, 2, and 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1943–1946).

⁴⁵  See Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, “La joie de vivre, et après?” in 1946, l’art de la reconstruction, ed. Maurice Fréchuret (Genève: Skira, 1996), 14–68.

⁴⁶  Frances Morris, ed., Paris Postwar: Art and Existentialism (London: Tate Gallery, 1993), 15.

⁴⁷  Patrick Le Nouëne, “Jean Fautrier, des Otages aux Partisans, 1945–1957,” in Face à l’histoire, 1933–1996—L’artiste moderne devant l’événement historique, ed. Jean-Paul Ameline (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou/ Flammarion, 1996), 230–243.

⁴⁸  On the épuration, see Rousso Henry, “L’épuration en France une histoire inachevée,” Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire 33 (January–March 1992), and Bénédicte Vergez-Chaignon, Histoire de l’épuration (Paris: Bibliothèque historique Larousse, 2010).

⁴⁹  Jill Carrick, Nouveau Réalisme, 1960s France, and the Neo-avant-garde: Topographies of Chance and Return (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010).

⁵⁰  On Art and Communism in postwar France, see the contribution of Cécile Pichon-Bonin and Lucia Piccioni to this volume: “Art and Communism in Postwar France: The Impossible Task of Defining a French Socialist Realism.”

⁵¹  French governments tired also to build strong relations with Eastern European countries, Poland in particular, and to maintain a strong presence in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. On the Cold War in Europe, see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2005).

⁵²  See Pierre Cabanne, Le siècle de Picasso, vol. 2 (Paris: Denoël, 1975), 120–121; Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 64–65.

⁵³  For a detailed study of French Maoism, see Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

⁵⁴  On the Cultural Revolution, see Rodrick MacFarquhar, “The Cultural Revolution,” in Art and China’s Revolution, ed. Melissa Chiu and Zheng Shengtian (New York: Asia Society, 2008).

⁵⁵  See Catherine Dossin, “Alors la Chine? The Journeys of Parisian Intellectuals to the People’s Republic of China in 1974,” in The Chinese Chameleon Revisited: From the Jesuits to Zhang Yimou, ed. Yangwen Zheng (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 200–228.

⁵⁶  See Sami Siegelbaum’s contribution to this volume: “Reimagining Communism after 1968: The Case of Grapus.”

⁵⁷  See Jacques Marseille, Empire colonial et capitalisme français. Histoire d’un divorce, 2nd ed. (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 2004).

⁵⁸  See, for instance, Raphaëlle Branche, La guerre d’Algérie: une histoire apaisée? (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2005); Jean Balazuc, Guerre d’Algérie—Une chronologie mensuelle: Mai 1954–décembre 1962 (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 2015).

⁵⁹  Ernest Pignon-Ernest, the subject of Jacopo Galimberti’s contribution to this volume, is one of these artists: see “Places of Memory and Locus: Ernest Pignon-Ernest.”

⁶⁰  Laurent Gervereau, “Des bruits et des silences: cartographie des représentations de la guerre d’Algérie,” in La France en guerre d’Algérie: novembre 1954–juillet 1962, ed. Laurent Gervereau, Jean-Pierre Rioux, and Benjamin Stora (Paris: Musée d’histoire contemporaine, 1992), 178–209.

⁶¹  On these events see Robert Fleck and Annie Gouëdard, “Tableau d’Histoire ou histoire d’un tableau,” in Grand tableau antifasciste collectif, ed. Laurent Chollet (Paris: Éditions Dagorno, 2000), 65–130; as well as Laurel Fredrickson’s contribution to this volume.

⁶²  Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, “Un tableau collectif contre la torture,” in Grand tableau antifasciste collectif (Paris: Éditions Dagorno, 2000), 37–63. See note 5.

⁶³  Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

⁶⁴  Quoted in Jean-Jacques Lévêque, “Le Salon de la Jeune Peinture écartelé entre Bonnard et Bacon,” ARTS: Lettres, Spectacles, Musique (January 15, 1964): no page.

⁶⁵  On Althusser’s influence at the Jeune Peinture, see Sami Siegelbaum, “The Riddle of May ’68: Collectivity and Protest in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture,” Oxford Art Journal 35, no. 1 (2012): 53–73.

⁶⁶  Anonymous “Police et culture: Notes préliminaires pour la prochaine manifestation de la Jeune Peinture,” Bulletin de la Jeune Peinture 4 (March 1969): 3.

⁶⁷  Gilles Aillaud, Vivre et laisser mourir ou la fin tragique de Marcel Duchamp (1965). Reproduced in Jean-Louis Pradel, La Figuration Narrative (Paris: Éditions Hazan, 2002), 163.

⁶⁸  “Éditorial,” Bulletin de la Jeune Peinture 2 (December 1968): 4.

⁶⁹  Gilles Aillaud, “Essai de développement. Atelier populaire: oui. Atelier bourgeois: non,” Le Bulletin du Salon de la Jeune Peinture 2 (December 1968). Reproduced in Opus International 7 (June 1968), 64, 66.

⁷⁰  Gilles Aillaud, “Les raisons de continuer notre action,” Le Bulletin du Salon de la Jeune Peinture 3 (March 1969): no page.

⁷¹  On the Nouvelle Vague, see Antoine de Baecque, La Nouvelle Vague : Portrait d’une jeunesse (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 2009).

⁷²  Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1963), 149.

⁷³  Jean Ricardou, Problème du nouveau roman (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), 111.

⁷⁴  Roland Barthes, Essais critiques (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1991), 257.

⁷⁵  See Anna Boschetti, Ismes. Du réalisme au postmodernisme (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2014).

⁷⁶  Pierre Daix, Nouvelle critique et art moderne (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968), 198.