Les Charmes de la vie (The Attractions of Life)

DESPITE the nationalistic tone of Le Mot and L’Elan, and the reference to Ingres in Picasso’s two portrait drawings of 1915, there was scant evidence to support Jacques Vernay’s prediction of a classical reaction when he wrote his review of the Triennale in April 1916. To the contrary, had he been at all conversant with the...

This chapter is concerned with the way in which courtly fantasies involving blacks and Africa were absorbed and adapted by the increasingly self-confident urban populations emerging in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in London and Paris in particular. If the court remained the dominant cultural force in Italy, in Germany (whether Catholic or Protestant principalities), and in...