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Description: Globalizing Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism
The topics and themes raised by this anthology are closely connected to the institutional history of the Courtauld Institute of Art, where the conference “Writing Impressionism into and out of Art History” convened in November 2017. Initial plans for the conference were hatched in July 2016, when Alexis Clark, in partnership with David Peters Corbett at the Centre for American Art at...
PublisherYale University Press
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Preface
Alexis Clark with David Peters Corbett
The topics and themes raised by this anthology are closely connected to the institutional history of the Courtauld Institute of Art, where the conference “Writing Impressionism into and out of Art History” convened in November 2017. Initial plans for the conference were hatched in July 2016, when Alexis Clark, in partnership with David Peters Corbett at the Centre for American Art at the Courtauld, proposed to assess the current state of impressionism studies, which had seemed to decline in academic but not public interest. Importantly, the Centre for American Art inspired the conference to take a transnational turn—and that inspiration may be read here in the many essays that here interrogate impressionism and the Americas. Papers were solicited in response to the following call:
Impressionism has occupied a central place in the canon of art history. That place now seems to be called into question, however. New transnational approaches to nineteenth-century art history have troubled the perpetuation of Francocentric histories. As the field’s attention has increasingly turned to places outside France—Britain, the United States, Australia, and beyond—Impressionism has been pushed to the margins. Though Impressionism has long benefited from powerful and compelling narratives via the social history of art, these readings have been worked through so extensively that it warrants asking whether this area of art history may be exhausted for the moment.
Across the conference’s two days, the Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre at the Courtauld crackled with debate around future directions in the study of impressionism and post-impressionism, French and otherwise. As soon became apparent, “impressionism” as a label and style, especially when applied to art and artists unaffiliated with France, remained fiercely contested—even when contemporaneous art critics and artists applied that label. Many who participated in those debates as conference presenters, panel organizers, or attendees are published in this anthology, whose content was inspired by the 2017 conference but also redirected to concentrate on the historiography, museography, and market for impressionism inside and outside France. These scholars include: Ahu Antmen, Emily C. Burns, Laura Moure Cecchini, Alexis Clark, Laura D. Corey, Frances Fowle, Mitchell Frank, Morna O’Neill, and Hadrien Viraben.
“Writing Impressionism into and out of Art History” would not be the first time that impressionism would be studied from perspectives outside France. Coincident with the 1970s and 1980s boom of blockbuster museum exhibitions, record-breaking auction sales, and lushly illustrated publications on French impressionism, the field of impressionism studies expanded to include the world outside France. Monographs dedicated to artists such as Childe Hassam and William Merritt Chase, nation-based surveys of art and artists in Australia, Britain, Ireland, and the United States (notably, all anglophone), and catalogues related to art outside France readily embraced the label “impressionist.” Despite the concerted attempts of scholars and curators to dismantle the Francocentrism of the field, however, impressionism has continued to be bound to France: French art remains impressionist art, and impressionist art remains French art.
The Courtauld Institute of Art and Gallery has had a crucial stake in these debates. On its foundation in 1932, the Courtauld displayed impressionist and post-impressionist paintings collected by its namesake. For Samuel Courtauld, “impressionism” unquestionably meant Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, not John Lavery or Max Liebermann or Joachín Sorolla y Bastida. The Courtauld Gallery has bolstered the reputation and prominence of the institute in the study of impressionism, while it has implicitly reinforced the Frenchness of this art. From the 1970s to today, many of the anglophone art historians trained at the Courtauld, or, in turn, the students of those who trained there, continue to shape the field: T. J. Clark, Tamar Garb, John House, Griselda Pollock, Belinda Thomson, and Richard Thomson. In setting the terms by which this art may be studied, the prolific and critical research produced by many of these scholars has continued to closely tie impressionism and, perhaps to an extent, the field of nineteenth-century art, to France. In recent publications and exhibitions, these same scholars and curators, and, significantly, now their students, have started to adopt approaches attending to the international circulation of paintings, reproductions, capital, and people (artists and audiences) that effectively connect France to the world beyond its borders.
At the time of publishing, the Courtauld Gallery’s collection has recently returned to London, at the conclusion of an extensive renovation and years-long tour that led its impressionist paintings to be shared with institutions and audiences in France, Japan, and the United States. While the initial alliance with the Centre for American Art ensured that the 2017 Courtauld conference took a more transnational turn in its attention to impressionism and the Americas, the expertise, editorial guidance, and vision provided by Frances Fowle has ensured that the present anthology truly attends to the globalizing of impressionism. As a record of the 2017 conference and as a celebration of the soon to be refurbished Courtauld Gallery, the anthology turns its attention to the global spread of impressionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.