080026 PS Case Study II/III: Decorative Painting in France in the 19th and 20th Century (2023W)

In this proseminar, we will look at decorative painting or the decorative in 19th and 20th century French painting.
During the Third Republic (1870-1940), the French government launched a major campaign to decorate public buildings with murals (grands décors). This form of site-specific painting (which, strictly speaking, was not really mural painting, as it was not painted directly on the wall, see toile marouflée) was considered a desirable ideal by many art critics and artists. Painting as decoration (décoration, peinture décorative) was opposed (as morally sublime) to the small-format, mobile easel painting (tableau de chevalet), the commercialisation of which was closely linked to the Salon exhibitions, among other things. The big winner of this campaign was Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898), whose painting was highly regarded from very different ideological and artistic positions and was an important reference for subsequent generations - also for painters who, for various reasons, did not or could not work in the public sphere as "peintres décorateurs" (e.g. Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis). These either produced decorations (décorations, panneaux décoratifs) for private clients or dealt with the decorative as a characteristic of painting whose function and meaning was not (or no longer) derived from its site-specificity and could therefore and seemingly paradoxically also find expression in easel paintings. The term "decorative painting" used in the title of the course is to be understood as an umbrella term for these different forms that we will be dealing with, but not as a fixed designation - much more as a question than as a definition.
After we have gained an overview of the complex (art) historical developments relevant for this course on the basis of the literature provided, which we will discuss together in excerpts, we will use our basic art historical skills of precise observation and description as well as our critical reflection skills to analyse the selected examples of works. The aim here is not to arrive at the quickest and most consistent classification of the individual cases into a category such as style/era/-ism etc., but to raise informed, critical (and quite difficult to answer) questions on the basis of concrete observations and the acquired knowledge, to look for possible connections between the examples and to record the (preliminary) findings acquired over several weeks in the form of a stringent written term paper.
Knowledge of French is advantageous for the course, but not necessary. The common reading is in English.