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AESTHETICS AND CULTURAL POLITICS IN THE AGE OF DREYFUS: MAURICE DENIS'S HOMAGE TO CÉZANNE
Author(s) -
KUENZLI KATHERINE MARIE
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2007.00573.x
Subject(s) - politics , modernism (music) , nationalism , portrait , alliance , art history , art , painting , aesthetics , history , law , political science , archaeology
This article examines the alliance between painterly modernism and right‐wing politics in France at the height of the Dreyfus Affair. Political struggles took on an aesthetic dimension in the cultural battles waged around 1900. Maurice Denis's monumental group portrait Homage to Cézanne (1900) serves as the focus of my inquiry. This painting is often cited and reproduced in histories of French modernism, but has yet to be examined within its historical and political moment. Although Homage does not directly reference contemporary political events, Denis's formal and compositional choices in Homage were informed by Adrien Mithouard's right‐wing nationalist cultural politics.