Fine Arts | Rococo to Romanticism: Painting in France 1700-1850
A490 | 2065 | Molotiu
Topics in Art History
Above section for UG only. GR register for FINA A540.
This course will cover French painting from the late years of Louis XIV to
the rise of Napoleon III. The period's numerous political upheavals
(including the French Revolution, the Empire, the Restoration, and the
Revolution of 1848) were paralleled by a dazzling array of art-historical
developments: the rise and fall of the Rococo style, the anti-Rococo
reaction, Neoclassicism, Romanticism (both the proto-Romanticism of the
1770's and 1780's and the full-blown Romantic style of the 1820's), and
the birth of Realism. We will pay particular attention to the careers of
Watteau, Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard, David, Ingres, and Delacroix,
particularly inasmuch as each of them tried to negotiate the competing
interests of the State, the Academy, the wider Parisian art world, and
their own aesthetic inclinations. We will study the development of art
criticism, focusing particularly on the writings of Diderot and Stendhal,
and the rise of the public art exhibition in the form of the Academy's
biennial Salon. We will also look at the Academy as a teaching
institution, a center of art-theoretical discourse, as well as a political
instrument securing the interests of the period's successive governments.
The course's overarching questions will address the relationship between
social events and artistic innovation, as well as the interplay between
the public and private realms in determining each of the studied painters'