Provincializing Paris. The Center-Periphery Narrative of Modern Art in Light of Quantitative and Transnational Approaches Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel To cite this version: Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel. Provincializing Paris. The Center-Periphery Narrative of Modern Art in Light of Quantitative and Transnational Approaches. Artl@s Bulletin, École normale supérieure / CNRS, 2015, Spatial (Digital) Art History, 4 (1). hal-01479104 HAL Id: hal-01479104 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01479104 Submitted on 28 Feb 2017 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Artl@s Bulletin Volume 4 Article 4 Issue 1 Spatial (Digital) Art History Provincializing Paris. The eC nter-Periphery Narrative of Modern Art in Light of Quantitative and Transnational Approaches Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel Ecole normale supérieure, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas Part of the Cultural History Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, and the Modern Art and Architecture Commons Recommended Citation Joyeux-Prunel, Béatrice. "Provincializing Paris. The eC nter-Periphery Narrative of Modern Art in Light of Quantitative and Transnational Approaches." Artl@s Bulletin 4, no. 1 (2015): Article 4. This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. Provincializing Paris. The eC nter-Periphery Narrative of Modern Art in Light of Quantitative and Transnational Approaches Cover Page Footnote Béatrice Joyeux‐Prunel is an Associate Professor for Modern and Contemporary Art at the École normale supérieure, Paris. She works on the history of the artistic avant‐gardes in a global and transnational perspective, and promotes quantitative and cartographic approaches, digital humanities, and collaborative research. She is the director of the ARTL@S Project (www.artlas.ens.fr) This article is available in Artl@s Bulletin: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/artlas/vol4/iss1/4 Spatial (Digital) Art History Provincializing Paris The Centre/Periphery Narrative of Modern Art in Light of Quantitative and Transnational Approaches Béatrice Joyeux‐Prunel * École normale supérieure, Paris Abstract The alternative “centre‐periphery” is essential to the myth of modern art and its historiography. Even though Postcolonial studies have denounced the implications of such geopolitical hierarchies, as long as our objects remain centred on one capital city and within national boundaries, it will be difficult to escape the hierarchical paradigm that makes Paris and New York the successive capital cities of Modernism. This paper highlights how approaches focusing on different scales of analysis—from the quantitative and geographic to the monographic—challenge the supposed centrality of Paris through 1945. Résumé L’alternative « centre/périphéries » est essentielle au mythe de l’art moderne, comme à son historiographie. Si les études postcoloniales en dénoncent les implications, tant que les objets d’étude restent centrés sur une capitale et un cadre national, il reste difficile de sortir du paradigme hiérarchique qui a fait de Paris et New York, les capitales successives de la modernité. Cet article remet en cause la prétendue centralité de Paris jusqu’en 1945 à partir d’approches à plusieurs échelles, du quantitatif et du géographique au monographique. * Béatrice Joyeux‐Prunel is an Associate Professor for Contemporary Art at the École normale supérieure, Paris. She works on the history of the artistic avant‐gardes in a global and transnational perspective, and promotes quantitative and cartographic approaches, digital humanities, and collaborative research. She is the director of the ARTL@S Project (www.artlas.ens.fr) 40 ARTL@S BULLETIN, Vol. 4, Issue 1 (Spring 2015) Joyeux‐Prunel – Provincializing Paris As Napoleon III opened the Paris Universal Sache. Manchmal will sogar der Lokomotiv‐ Exhibition in 1855, an event organized to show führer nicht weiter fahren, und die sämtlichen that Paris was equal to London for industry, but Reisenden steigen in Regensburg aus.4 superior for arts, the poet Charles Baudelaire Are time and place so fatally associated, and are wrote: places so hierarchized? The centre‐periphery [...] la vitalité se déplace, elle va visiter d’autres frame is essential to the myth of Modernism. territoires et d’autres races [...] les lois [...] Numerous avant‐gardes, if not a majority of them, déplacent la vitalité artistique, et [...] Dieu justified their legitimacy with the idea that dépouille les nations quelquefois pour un Modernism contributed to the international temps, quelquefois pour toujours…1 influence of their own country. The supporters of Many of Baudelaire’s contemporaries also thought impressionism in Paris did so as soon as the that “Vitality moved,” that Paris had taken Rome’s French Republic was consolidated in 1875.5 So did place, Rome having succeeded to Byzantium, their counterparts in Germany and in Austria.6 The Byzantium to Athens, Athens to Alexandria, etc. Parisian Cubists and the German Expressionists Today, New York is considered as the new art gained institutional recognition locally by claiming world centre that “stole Modernism” from Paris that they served their country in the international after 1945.2 competition for cultural hegemony.7 After 1945, not only the Abstract Expressionists and their The canonical narrative of art history since the supporters,8 but also even after them the modern times has never contested the idea that a promoters of Pop Art used the national tune to succession of artistic centres dominated the world impose their existence to a public sphere claiming of art. It comes from a naive idea of World history, cultural power for America.9 made of three main presuppositions that are at the core of the modernist tale: the first, that art history The centre‐periphery alternative is also essential is a linear continuation of progress; the second, to scholarship on Modernism. Postcolonial and that innovation happens in one “centre” that Subaltern studies have denounced its political and decides what time it is—a Greenwich meridian of social implications.10 They diagnose the modernity;3 and lastly, that the peripheries of this humiliating effect of the centre‐domination, and its centre remain deemed to imitation, borrowing, or pervasiveness not only in the constitution of influence. According to this spatiotemporal idea of archives and museum collections, but also in the artistic progress, different aesthetic positions, Westernness of terms and questions. Postcolonial from the traditional to the modernist, would 4 Wassily Kandinsky, “Über die Formfrage“, in Franz Marc, and Wassily Kandinsky correspond to different spatial positions. Abstract (ed.), Der Blaue Reiter – Dokumentarische Ausgabe von Klaus Lankheit (Munich; Zurich: Piper, 1984‐2000), 132‐182 ‐ Quotation p. 142. painter Wassily Kandinsky himself explained it 5 Philip Nord, Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century (London; New York: Routledge, 2000); and Béatrice Joyeux‐Prunel, Nul n'est around 1912: prophète en son pays? : L'internationalisation de la peinture des avant‐gardes parisiennes, 1855‐1914 (Paris : N. Chaudun : Musée d'Orsay, 2009). Im praktischen Leben wird man kaum einen 6 Béatrice Joyeux‐Prunel, Les avant‐gardes artistiques. Une histoire transnationale. Vol. 1 1848‐1920 (Paris: Gallimard, forthcoming November 2015). Menschen finden, welcher, wenn er nach 7 On French Cubism’s nationalism see David Cottigton, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant‐Garde and Politics in Paris 1905‐1914, (New Haven: Yale University Press, Berlin fahren will, den Zug zu Regensburg 1998); and Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant‐ Garde, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). On the nationalist verlässt. Im geistigen Leben ist das Aussteigen orientation of many expressionist artists in Germany see for instance Christian Weikop (ed.), New Perspectives on Brücke Expressionism: Bridging History, (Farnham, in Regensburg eine ziemlich gewöhnliche Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011.) 8 Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art; Peter Schneemann, Von der Apologie zur Theoriebildung: die Geschichtsschreibung des Abstrakten Expressionismus (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003). 1 Charles Baudelaire, “L’Exposition universelle, I. Méthode de critique – De l’idée 9 About the nationalist discourse for Pop Art, see for instance Catherine Dossin, The moderne du progrès appliquée aux beaux‐arts – déplacement de la vitalité," Le Pays Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s‐1980s, A Geopolitics of Western Art Worlds (May 26, 1855) – see Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres Complètes, Vol. 2 (Paris : Gallimard, (Burlington: Ashgate, 2015) ; and Andy Warhol, “New Talent U.S.A.“, Art in America Pléiade, 1976), 582. vol. 50, 1 (February 1962), 40, quoted by Sophie Cras, L’Economie à l’épreuve de l’art 2 Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract