Journal articles on the topic 'Art dealers – France – Paris'

Known primarily as a jeweler in the vanguard of Art nouveau and an important collector of the Impressionists, Henri Vever (1854-1942), as his private diaries make clear, was also a foremost connoisseur of Japanese art in fin-de-siècle France, “the most passionate of all,” to Edmond de Goncourt. Well-connected to networks of dealers, museum officials, publications, and sites of sociability such as the dîners japonais, Vever figures among the most prominent members of a second wave of Parisian enthusiasts of Japanese art, active from approximately 1880 to 1900. Under the tutelage of the Japanese art dealers Hayashi Tadamasa and Siegfried Bing and the fine art printer Charles Gillot, Vever constituted a renowned collection of not only Japanese prints but also other art objects previously disregarded by collectors. Vever’s multiple and intersecting identities as luxury craft producer, leading member of professional associations, art historian and critic, collector, and Republican mayor placed him at the forefront of efforts to legitimate the collection and appreciation of Japanese art in France. His diaries also underscore the connections between the worlds of Japanese and Impressionist art collectors, and between proponents of japonisme and Art nouveau. Further, they highlight the importance of the 1900 Paris Exposition universelle as a triumphant moment for japonisme in France, just as they signal the shift on the part of some japonisants, at the same time, from Japanese art towards the decorative arts of the Islamic world.

AbstractIn I987 a painting with illegible signature was shown at the RKD. When in spring 2002 a painting with similar signature came alight at a Paris art-dealer, it proved possible to read the signature correctly and identify the artist as the Antwerp-based Franciscus Hamers, only known through his membership of the guild in I674. Several other paintings could be attributed to him either on stylistic grounds or by recognising the characteristic signature. The paintings presented here show that he proved to be what was known in the seventeenth century as 'dozijnschilder' (lit: dozen painter), assembling his works by imitating, borrowing and copying from examples by other artists, notably Haarlem painters such as Pieter van Laer, Philips Wouwerman and Nicolaes Pietersz. Berchem. This proved to be a typical feature of the artistic climate in the I670s in Antwerp when economic recession forced many artists to produce paintings and copies by the dozen for art-dealers such as Guillaume Forchondt and Bartholomeus Floquet who then exported these paintings to France, Austria, Spain and Portugal.

AbstractOn the back of several paintings on panel in the oeuvre of Willem Kalf, the panelmakers mark of Melchior de Bout has been found. Like his father Philip, De Bout was registered in Antwerp as a 'witter ende paneelmaker'. He thus seems to have specialised in producing panels that were covered, on both sides of the wooden support, with a preparatory (ground) layer consisting of chalk and glue. Occasionally, an imprimatura was also applied. De Bout's 'ready-made' panels were not only used by Willem Kalf, but also by Sebastian Stosskopf, Charles Le Brun, Jacques Linard, Lubin Baugin and Willem van Aelst. Since these artists were all working in Paris around the middle of the seventeenth century, it seems justified to conclude that for a certain time, the Antwerp panel maker specifically produced his panels for distribution in the French capital. The popularity of the panels of this highly specialised Antwerp panelmaker illustrates the strong appeal that the dynamic art market in Paris had for artists, art dealers and buyers from France and abroad.

Inspired by Japanese art and French eighteenth-century porcelain, the Rousseau-Bracquemond ceramic table service of 1866 blurred the line between the decorative and the fine arts. Exhibited at the 1867 World’s Fair in Paris, the service met with exceptional critical and commercial success. This paper focuses on the Rousseau-Bracquemond service to propose that cross-cultural encounters unsettled hierarchical relationships among media in nineteenth-century France. Through a visual and historiographical analysis of this case study, the paper offers a re-evaluation of the interrelationships among ceramics and modern painting. Challenging Eurocentric art historical narratives, the paper explores how the Rousseau-Bracquemond service connected Japonisme, historicism, and Republican thought. Politically charged and technically innovative, the service exemplified a new type of cross-media collaborations among a network of artists, dealers, critics, and collectors. At the intersection of ornament and realism, their radical work marked a major change in the relation between art and design.

Abstract Francisco Oller was one of the most distinguished and influential artists to emerge from the Caribbean in the mid-nineteenth century. Often referred to as the painter of Puerto Rico, he is most noted for his depictions of everyday life on the island, landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and history paintings. However, his four lengthy journeys to Spain and France throughout his life indelibly marked his artistic production. This essay reconsiders the impact of French art on Oller. It deals with two heretofore unstudied paintings (both in private collections). A tabletop still life with peonies and other flowers reminds us of his interest in Henri Fantin-Latour and his contemporaries in Paris. Oller’s small but panoramic landscape of the pilgrimage shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes in southern France opens up questions regarding the artist’s own religious leanings and his interest in depicting public spaces.

The article deals with the life and career path of Serge Lifar, a Ukrainian world-class dancer, choreographer, theorist of choreography, historian and reformer of the 20thcentury ballet, Honorary President of the UNESCO International Dance Council. Serge Lifar was a prolific artist, choreographer and director of the Paris Opéra Ballet, one of the most preeminent ballet companies in Western Europe. Attention is drawn to the fact that pedagogical activity constituted a significant part of Lifar’s work. In 1947, he founded the French Academy of Dance, from 1955 he taught his-tory and theory of dance at Sorbonne University, having developed his own system of ballet dancers’ training and authored more than 20 works on ballet. In the same year, he was recognized as the best dancer and choreographer in France and was awarded the ‘Golden Shoe’. In 1957, he became the founder and rector of the Paris University of Dance. The author emphasizes that Lifar’s creative heritage is huge. He choreographed more than 200 ballets and wrote 25 books on dance theory. Serge Lifar trained 11 ballet stars. Serge Lifar’s style, which he called choreographic neoromanticism, determined the ways of development of the European ballet art of the second half of the 20th century. At the age of 65, Lifar showed his talent as a visual artist. His heritage includes more than a hundred original paintings and drawings, the main plot of which is ballet, dance, and movement. In 1972–1975, exhibitions of his works were held in Cannes, Paris, Monte Carlo and Venice. His yet another passion was books. It all began with Serhii Diahiliev’s personal archive, which included a collection of theatrical paintings, scenery and a library. Lifar bought it from the French government for a one year’s salary at the Grand Opera. In the USSR, Lifar’s name was concealed. Only in 1961, did he and his wife visit it for the first time as the Soviet authorities did not allow him to stage any ballet in the USSR. He always felt he was Ukrainian and ardently promoted the history and culture of his people. In honour of the outstanding countryman, the Serge Lifar International Ballet Competition and the festival ‘Serge Lifar de La dance’ have been held since 1994 and 1995, accordingly. Keywords: cultural diplomacy, art of artistic vision of choreography, Serge Lifar International Ballet Competition.

This article discusses art dealers who trafficked in looted art during the Third Reich and how they re-established networks and continued their trade in the postwar period. I argue that these dealers worked within a series of overlapping networks. A primary network was centered in Munich, with dealers such as Dr. Bruno Lohse (Göring’s art agent in Paris during the war); Maria Almas Dietrich, Karl Haberstock, Walter Andreas Hofer, and Adolf Wüster. These individuals worked closely with colleagues in Austria, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein (states contiguous with Bavaria) in the postwar years. Many of the individuals in outer appendages of the networks had not been complicit in the Nazis’ plundering program, yet they trafficked in looted works and formed dealer networks that extended to Paris, London, and New York. Both the recently discovered Gurlitt cache – over 1400 pictures located in Munich, Salzburg, and Kornwestheim – and the annotated Weinmüller auction catalogues help illuminate aspects of these networks. Art dealers played a key role in the looting operations during the Third Reich and in the transfer of non-restituted objects in the postwar period. The current generation of the profession may be the key to advancing our understanding of a still incomplete history.

Abstract:The article contrasts long-suppressed details of German art seizures during the Second World War from Ukrainian state museums and Western Jewish dealers, ordered to Königsberg by Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia and Reich Commissar of Ukraine. While most of the art from Kyiv was destroyed by retreating Germans when the Red Army arrived (February 1945), here we investigate “survivors.” Initial provenance findings about the collection Koch evacuated to Weimar in February 1945 reveal some paintings from Kyiv. More, however, were seized from Dutch and French Holocaust victims by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and his cohorts, including Jewish dealers Jacques Goudstikker (Amsterdam) and Georges Wildenstein (Paris). Many paintings deposited in Weimar disappeared west; others seized by Soviet authorities were transported to the Hermitage. These initial findings draw attention to hitherto overlooked contrasting examples of patterns of Nazi art looting and destruction in the East and West, and the pan-European dispersal of important works of art.

Abstract This article aims to provide a clearer understanding of the emerging market for Islamic art in the early decades of the twentieth century through a study of the changing purchasing habits of one European collector, Calouste Gulbenkian, and specifically his acquisition of mīnāʾī ware. Such an approach allows for a coherent, focused study that engages with the leading dealers, agents, and auction houses of the time. These were located primarily in Paris and, to lesser extent, New York and London, in the key period during which the Islamic art market became a major part of the broader art and antiquities business. The main focus is on the shift from buying newly excavated fragmentary material from Armenian dealers to purchasing seemingly complete, but heavily restored, bowls from established collections sold at the leading auction houses. Each of the pieces in Gulbenkian’s collection of mīnāʾī ware is examined in detail, and a new taxonomic classification is presented for this well known, but still poorly understood, class of Islamic ceramics.

AbstractAry Scheffer (1795-1858) is so generally included in the French School (Note 2)- unsurprisingly, since his career was confined almost entirely to Paris - that the fact that he was born and partly trained in the Netherlands is often overlooked. Yet throughout his life he kept in touch with Dutch colleagues and drew part of his inspiration from Dutch traditions. These Dutch aspects are the subject of this article. The Amsterdam City Academy, 1806-9 Ary Scheffer was enrolled at the Amsterdam Academy on 25 October 1806, his parents falsifying his date of birth in order to get him admitted at the age of eleven (fifteen was the oficial age) . He started in the third class and in order to qualify for the second he had to be one of the winners in the prize drawing contest. Candidates in this were required to submit six drawings made during the months January to March. Although no-one was supposed to enter until he had been at the Academy for four years, Ary Scheffer competed in both 1808 and 1809. Some of his signed drawings are preserved in Dordrecht. (Figs. 1-5 and 7), along with others not made for the contest. These last in particular are interesting not only because they reveal his first prowess, but also because they give some idea of the Academy practice of his day. Although the training at the Academy broadly followed the same lines as that customary in France, Italy and elsewhere (Note 4), our knowledge of its precise content is very patchy, since there was no set curriculum and no separate teachers for each subject. Two of Scheffer's drawings (Figs. 2 and 3) contain extensive notes, which amount to a more or less complete doctrine of proportion. It is not known who his teacher was or what sources were used, but the proportions do not agree with those in Van der Passe's handbook, which came into vogue in the 18th century, or with those of the canon of a Leonardo, Dürer or Lebrun. One gets the impression that what are given here are the exact measurements of a concrete example. Scheffer's drawings show him gradually mastering the rudiments of art. In earlier examples the hatching is sometimes too hasty (Fig. 4) or too rigidly parallel (Fig.5), while his knowledge of anatomy is still inadequate and his observation not careful enough. But right from the start he shows flair and as early as 1807 he made a clever drawing of a relatively complex group (Fig. 6) , while the difficult figure of Marsyas was already well captured in 1808 and clearly evinces his growing knowledge o f anatomy, proportion , foreshortening and the effects of light (Fig. 7). The same development can be observed in his portrait drawings. That of Gerardus Vrolik (1775-1859, Fig.8), a professor at the Atheneum Illustre (the future university) and Scheffer' s teacher, with whom he always kept in touch (Note 6), is still not entirely convincing, but a portrait of 1809, thought to be of his mother (Fig.9, Note 7), shows him working much more systematically. It is not known when he left the Academy, but from the summer of 1809 we find him in France, where he was to live with only a few breaks from 1811 to his death. The first paintings and the Amsterdam exhibitions of 1808 and 1810 Ary Scheffer's earliest known history painting, Hannibal Swearing to Avenge his Brother Hasdrubal's Death (Fig. 10) Notes 8-10) was shown at the first exhibition of living masters in Amsterdam in 1808. Although there was every reason for giving this subject a Neo-Classical treatment, the chiaroscuro, earthy colours and free brushwork show Scheffer opting for the old Dutch tradition rather than the modern French style. This was doubtless on the prompting of his parents,for a comment in a letter from his mother in 1810 (Note 12) indicates that she shared the reservations of the Dutch in general about French Neo-Classicism. (Note 11). As the work of a twelve to thirteen year old, the painting naturally leaves something to be desired: the composition is too crowded and unbalanced and the anatomy of the secondary figures rudimentary. In a watercolour Scheffer made of the same subject, probably in the 1820's, he introduced much more space between the figures (Fig. 11, Note 13). Two portraits are known from this early period. The first, of Johanna Maria Verbeek (Fig. 12, Note 14), was done when the two youngsters were aged twelve. It again shows all the characteristics of an early work, being schematic in its simplicity, with some rather awkward details and inadequate plasticity. On the other hand the hair and earrings are fluently rendered, the colours harmonious and the picture has an undeniable charm. At the second exhibition of works by living masters in 1810, Ary Scheffer showed a 'portrait of a painter' (Fig. 13), who was undoubtedly his uncle Arnoldus Lamme, who also had work in the exhibition as did Scheffer's recently deceased father Johan-Bernard and his mother Cornelia Scheffer-Lamme, an indication of the stimulating surroundings in which he grew up. The work attracted general attention (Note 16) and it does, indeed, show a remarkable amount of progress, the plasticity, effects of light, brushwork and colour all revealing skill and care in their execution. The simple, bourgeois character of the portrait not only fits in with the Dutch tradition which Scheffer had learned from both his parents in Amsterdam, but also has points in common with the recent developments in France, which he could have got to know during his spell in Lille from autumn 1809 onwards. A Dutchman in Paris Empire and Restoration, 1811-30 In Amsterdam Scheffer had also been laught by his mother, a miniature painter, and his father, a portrait and history painter (Note 17). After his father's death in June 1809, his mother, who not only had a great influence on his artistic career, but also gave his Calvinism and a great love of literature (Note 18), wanted him to finish his training in Paris. After getting the promise of a royal grant from Louis Napoleon for this (Note 19) and while waiting for it to materialize, she sent the boy to Lille to perfect his French as well as further his artistic training. In 1811 Scheffer settled in Paris without a royal grant or any hope of one. He may possibly have studied for a short time under Prudhon (Note 20) , but in the autumn of 1811 he was officially contracted as a pupil of Guérin, one of the leading artists of the school of David, under whom he mastered the formulas of NeD-Classicism, witness his Orpheus and Eurydice (Fïg.14), shown in the Salon of 1814. During his first ten years in Paris Scheffer also painted many genre pieces in order, so he said, to earn a living for himself and his mother. Guérin's prophecy that he would make a great career as a history painter (Note 21) soon came true, but not in the way Guérin thought it would, Scheffer participating in the revolution initiated by his friends and fellow-pupils, Géricault and Delacroix, which resulted in the rise of the Romantic Movement. It was not very difficult for him to break with Neo-Classicism, for with his Dutch background he felt no great affinity with it (Note 22). This development is ilustrated by his Gaston de Foix Dying on the Battlefield After his Victory at Ravenna, shown at the Salon of 1824, and The Women of Souli Throwing Themselves into the Abyss (Fig.15), shown at that of 1827-8. The last years of the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Influence of Rembrandt and the Dutch masters In 1829, when he seemed to have become completely assimilated in France and had won wide renown, Scheffer took the remarkable step of returning to the Netherlands to study the methods of Rembrandt and other Dutch old masters (Note 23) . A new orientation in his work is already apparent in the Women of Souli, which is more harmonious and considered in colour than the Gaston dc Foix (Note 24). This is linked on the one hand to developments in France, where numbers of young painters had abandoned extreme Romanticism to find the 'juste milieu', and on the other to Scheffer's Dutch background. Dutch critics were just as wary of French Romanticism as they had been of Neo-Classicism, urging their own painters to revive the traditions of the Golden Age and praising the French painters of the 'juste milieu'. It is notable how many critics commented on the influence of Rembrandt on Scheffer's works, e.g. his Faust, Marguérite, Tempête and portrait of Talleyrand at the Salon of 1851 (Note 26). The last two of these date from 1828 and show that the reorientation and the interest in Rembrandt predate and were the reasons for the return to the Netherlands in 1829. In 1834 Gustave Planche called Le Larmoyeur (Fig. 16) a pastiche of Rembrandt and A. Barbier made a comparable comment on Le Roi de Thule in 1839 (Note 27). However, as Paul Mantz already noted in 1850 (Note 28), Scheffer certainly did not fully adopt Rembrandt's relief and mystic light. His approach was rather an eclectic one and he also often imbued his work with a characteristically 19th-century melancholy. He himself wrote after another visit to the Netherlands in 1849 that he felt he had touched a chord which others had not attempted (Note 29) . Contacts with Dutch artists and writers Scheffer's links with the Netherlands come out equally or even more strongly in the many contacts he maintained there. As early as 1811-12 Sminck-Pitloo visited him on his way to Rome (Note 30), to be followed in the 1820's by J.C. Schotel (Note 31), while after 1830 as his fame increased, so the contacts also became more numerous. He was sought after by and corresponded with various art dealers (Note 33) and also a large number of Dutch painters, who visited him in Paris or came to study under him (Note 32) Numerous poems were published on paintings by him from 1838 onwards, while Jan Wap and Alexander Ver Huell wrote at length about their visits to him (Note 34) and a 'Scheffer Album' was compiled in 1859. Thus he clearly played a significant role in the artistic life of the Netherlands. International orientation As the son of a Dutch mother and a German father, Scheffer had an international orientation right from the start. Contemporary critics and later writers have pointed out the influences from English portrait painting and German religious painting detectable in his work (Note 35). Extracts from various unpublished letters quoted here reveal how acutely aware he was of what was likely to go down well not only in the Netherlands, but also in a country like England, where he enjoyed great fame (Notes 36-9) . July Monarchy and Second Empire. The last decades While most French artists of his generation seemed to have found their definitive style under the July Monarchy, Scheffer continued to search for new forms of expression. In the 1830's, at the same time as he painted his Rembrandtesque works, he also produced his famous Francesca da Rimini (Fig. 17), which is closer to the 'juste milieu' in its dark colours and linear accents. In the 1840's he used a simple and mainly bright palette without any picturesque effects, e.g. in his SS. Augustine and Monica and The Sorrows of the Earth (Note 41), but even this was not his last word. In an incident that must have occurred around 1857 he cried out on coming across some of his earlier works that he had made a mistake since then and wasted his time (Note 42) and in his Calvin of 1858 (Fig. 18) he resumed his former soft chiaroscuro and warm tones. It is characteristic of him that in that same year he painted a last version of The Sorrows of the Earth in the light palette of the 1840's. Despite the difficulty involved in the precise assessment of influences on a painter with such a complex background, it is clear that even in his later period, when his work scored its greatest successes in France, England and Germany, Scheffer always had a strong bond with the Netherlands and that he not only contributed to the artistic life there, but always retained a feeling for the traditions of his first fatherland. Appendix An appendix is devoted to a study of the head of an old man in Dordrecht, which is catalogued as a copy of a 17th-century painting in the style of Rembrandt done by Ary Scheffer at the age of twelve (Fig.19, Note 43). This cannot be correct, as it is much better than the other works by the twelve-year-old painter. Moreover, no mention is made of it in the catalogue of the retrospective exhibition held in Paris in 1859, where the Hannibal is given as his earliest work (Note 44). It was clearly unknown then, as it is not mentioned in any of the obituaries of 1858 and 1859 either. The earliest reference to it occurs in the list made bv Scheffer's daughter in 1897 of the works she was to bequeath to the Dordrecht museum. A clue to its identification may be a closely similar drawing by Cornelia Scheffer-Lamme (Fig. 20, Note 46), which is probably a copy after the head of the old man. She is known to have made copies after contemporary and 17th-century masters. The portrait might thus be attributable to Johan-Bernard Scheffer, for his wife often made copies of his works and he is known from sale catalogues to have painted various portraits of old men (Note 47, cf. Fig.21). Ary Scheffer also knew this. In 1839 his uncle Arnoldus Lamme wrote to him that he would look out for such a work at a sale (Note 48). It may be that he succeeded in finding one and that this portrait came into the possession of the Scheffer family in that way, but Johan-Bernard's work is too little known for us to be certain about this.

In 1928, some young artists living in Bordeaux decided to create a local market for contemporary art, as an alternative to the Salon des Amis des Arts of their own city, on the one hand, which they considered retrograde and conservative, and to the centralized and centripetal Parisian world on the other. They joined forces to create the group of the “Artistes indépendants bordelais” (AIB) and they organized an annual exhibition in which they could sell their works, in Bordeaux. This article aims to understand the functioning of this so-called “provincial” alternative to Paris and to measure its potential success, both as a market and as an arbiter of taste. The analysis proves that the AIB exhibitions happened to be a semi-failure, since this local initiative could not detach itself from Paris. In order to gain legitimacy, the AIB invited avant-garde painters and sculptors and they left the door open to Parisian dealers and art critics but all these actors, in turn, overshadowed the artists from Bordeaux. This economic and symbolic domination stemmed from the lack of a strong artistic identity for this group, the absence of domestic galleries specializing in contemporary art and the low demographics of Bordeaux collectors.

Abstract The American self-made businessman Daniel J. Terra (1911–1996) collected art as a testament to his patriotism and in an attempt to establish his cultural prowess. Between 1971 and his death in 1996, Terra amassed a collection of 605 paintings, works on paper, and sculpture, made possible by a small network of art dealers who aided Terra in his rapid transformation of the American art market. After a failed attempt to donate his collection to the Art Institute of Chicago, Terra created not one, but two museums in Illinois and one in France over the course of twelve years. Each Terra-backed museum struggled to find visitors, structures of support, and strategic vision while under his control. With the disappearance of each museum, the story of Terra’s art collection became inexorably intertwined with concepts of value, identity, and the physical shift from private hobby to public endeavour.

For the first time in Russian historiography the article collects and systematizes information concerning art exhibitions in Paris in the eighteenth century, which makes it possible to identify the cultural and social significance of that phenomenon. Exposition activity is seen as a new and very significant phenomenon of cultural life at that time, a symptom of the democratization of art, which entailed the development of mass reflection on the role and significance of creative work in the form of a well-developed art criticism. A study of sources such as the minutes of the Royal Academy and the collection of critical reviews of art exhibitions (Deloigne’s Collection) at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris allowed seeing and appreciating the immediate reactions of contemporaries to metropolitan exhibitions of various scales. A wide variety of the public, as well as the renewed role of the viewer, overturned the idea of art as a luxury available only to the elite, and turned the visual arts in France into an asset of the nation.

Purpose – This paper aims to analyze the evolution of the marketing of paintings and related visual products from its nascent stages in England around 1700 to the development of the modern art market by 1900, with a brief discussion connecting to the present. Design/methodology/approach – Sources consist of a mixture of primary and secondary sources as well as a series of econometric and statistical analyses of specifically constructed and unique data sets that list nearly more than 50,000 different sales of paintings during this period. One set records sales of paintings at various English auction houses during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the second set consists of all purchases and sales of paintings recorded in the stock books of the late nineteenth-century London art dealer, Arthur Tooth, during the years of 1870/1871. The authors interpret the data under a commoditization model first introduced by Igor Kopytoff in 1986 that posits that markets and their participants evolve toward maximizing the efficiency of their exchange process within the prevailing exchange technology. Findings – We found that artists were largely responsible for a series of innovations in the art market that replaced the prevailing direct relationship between artists and patron with a modern market for which painters produced works on speculation to be sold by enterprising middlemen to an anonymous public. In this process, artists displayed a remarkable creativity and a seemingly instinctive understanding of the principles of competitive marketing that should dispel the erroneous but persistent notion that artistic genius and business savvy are incompatible. Research limitations/implications – A similar marketing analysis could be done of the development of the art markets of other leading countries, such as France, Italy and Holland, as well as the current developments of the art market. Practical implications – The same process of the development of the art market in England is now occurring in Latin America and China. Also, the commoditization process continues in the present, now using the Internet and worldwide art dealers. Originality/value – This is the first article to trace the historical development of the marketing of art in all of its components: artists, dealers, artist organizations, museums, curators, art critics, the media and art historians.

Abstract In 1955, Paris Police Commissioner Guy Isnard curated the exhibition Le Faux dans l'art et dans l'histoire at the Grand Palais in Paris. Featuring a wide variety of forgeries, most notably counterfeit sculptures and paintings, the exhibition was an occasion to showcase the anti-counterfeiting efforts of the National Police. But in the broader context of the politically and economically weakened Fourth Republic, more was at stake. In the immediate postwar period, French society was steeped in uncertainty and a growing fear of inauthenticity, fueled by rumors of currency manipulation by foreign powers, the perceived corruption of the French language by an increasingly influential English, and anti-Americanism in intellectual and political circles. In this environment, the organizers of the exhibition called upon culture, and art in particular, to reaffirm a strict distinction between truth and falsity while also establishing France as the uncontested guardian of truth. This essay shows that Le Faux dans l'art et dans l'histoire constituted a crucial threshold moment in twentieth-century French history, both as an attempt to preserve a rapidly fading vision of truth and originality and as a prefiguration of aesthetic and philosophical debates to come.

The cooperation of the new Soviet art and the artists of Russian emigration is a subject of particular interest. The period of the 1920s became a unique in the history of art when the new Soviet avant-garde artists, as well as artists who remained at home and those who decided to leave and not return, got along at international exhibitions within the Russian section. Russian art was still perceived as a single whole, geographical boundaries did not play a role, and the abyss of “non-return” had not yet opened between the creators themselves. The last chords in that still general composition were some art exhibitions that have become iconic. One of them was the exhibition of modern French art in Moscow (September – November 1928), which is the focus of the article. The organization of the exhibition brought together efforts of highranking officials of the USSR and France (A.V. Lunacharsky, E. Herriot), major cultural institutions (State Museum of New Western Art, Tretyakov Gallery, State Academy of Art Sciences), private French galleries and art dealers, as well as individual artists. On the basis of archival documents from the funds of the RGALI and the Archive of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the author restores the events associated with the preparation, organization, negotiations and participation in the exhibition of emigrant artists.

The 1930 master plan for Rio de Janeiro, drawn up by the French architect-urbanist Alfred Agache, had an important impact on Rio and on the development of modern planning in Brazil. Reflecting the socioscientific methods of Edmond Demolins and the Musée Social in Paris as well as the sociological ideas of Gabriel Tarde and Emile Durkheim, the plan exemplifies the ambitions and techniques of the urbanism of the Société Française d'Urbanistes (SFU). Agache, a leading theorist, teacher, and practitioner of SFU urbanism, developed a sociological urbanisme parlant that evolved out of his Beaux-Arts training and his background in French sociology. Agache's ideas on the fine arts and urban planning were synthesized and refined in the courses on social art history and urbanism, the first of their kind in France, that he taught at the Collège Libre des Sciences Sociales in Paris. In defining theoretically and expressing artistically the Brazilian capital's urban program in terms of the fine art of applied sociology, Agache provided the Brazilians with a blueprint for socioeconomic and moral reform on the levels of both urban and national development. Situated chronologically between the international expositions of 1925 and 1937 in Paris, Agache's project reflects as well the larger purposes and methods of the two expos and, in so doing, clarifies the historical evolution of SFU urbanism.

In May 1962 French museum administrators removed over 300 works of art from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Algiers and transported them, under military escort, to the Louvre in Paris. The artwork, however, no longer belonged to France. Under the terms of the Evian Accords it had become the official property of the Algerian state-to-be and the incoming nationalist government wanted it back. This article will examine not only the French decision to act in contravention of the Evian Accords and the ensuing negotiations that took place between France and Algeria, but also the cultural complexities of post-colonial restitution. What does it mean for artwork produced by some of France’s most iconic artists – Monet, Delacroix, Courbet – to become the cultural property of a former colony? Moreover, what is at stake when a former colony demands the repatriation of artwork emblematic of the former colonizer, deeming it a valuable part of the nation’s cultural heritage? The negotiations undertaken to repatriate French art to Algeria expose the kinds of awkward cultural refashioning precipitated by the process of decolonization and epitomizes the lingering connections of colonial disentanglement that do not fit neatly into the common narrative of the ‘end of empire'.

The paper reviews Cassirer's recent reception in France and takes two international meetings in Rennes and Paris as an opportunity to determine current research interests in this area. A striking feature of French concern is the stress on art historical contextualization of Cassirer's thought (Riegl, Wolfflin, Panofsky).

James D. Herbert, Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 207 pp., £31.50, ISBN 0-801-43494-7. Andrea Kupfer Schneider, Creating the Musée d'Orsay. The Politics of Culture in France (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 150 pp., $25.00, ISBN 0-271-01752-X. Juan Pedro Lorente, Cathedral of Urban Modernity. The First Museums of Contemporary Art, 1800–1930 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), £47.50, ISBN 1-859-28383-7. Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Direction des Musées de France, Centre national de la Recherche Scientifique, Centre de Sociologie des Organisations, Musée National du Moyen Age, Publics et projets culturels. Un enjeu des musées en Europe. Actes des Journées d'étude 26 et 27 octobre 1998, Paris, Musée national du Moyen Age (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2000), price not given, ISBN 2-738-48645-2. Paul Rasse, Les Musées à la lumière de l'espace public. Histoire, évolution, enjeux (Paris: L'Harmattan, Logiques Sociales, 1999), 238 pp., price not given, ISBN 2-738-47769-0. Selma Reuben Holo, Beyond the Prado. Museums and Identity in Democratic Spain (Liverpool University Press, 1999), 222 pp., price not given, ISBN 0-853-23535-X. Brandon Taylor, Art for the Nation. Exhibitions and the London Public 1747–2001 (Manchester University Press, 1990), 314 pp., price not given, ISBN 0-719-05452-4.

The French celebration of the centenary of Victor Hugo's death in 1985 included new editions of his works, biographies, an exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris, all that you would expect in honor of his life and art. But Hugo's death and funeral also drew the attention of some scholars, and forgood reason. Beginning on 18 May 1885, when what proved to be his final illness was announced, the newspapers were filled with reports and rumors about Hugo's condition. Following his death on 22 May journalists concentrated on what has been called the funeral of the century. Two million peoplecame to see Hugo's body lying in state at the Arc de Triomphe, and anenormous crowd viewed the procession to the Panthe on where he was buried.

The years 1870–1960 were a period of vibrant innovation in France when traditional ideas about art and living were challenged. At the turn of the twentieth century, Paris became the epicentre for creative risk, innovation and originality. The city both represented and became a ‘laboratory of culture’ that attracted individuals eager to ride the waves of modernism. What forces enabled Paris to become a site of such artistic vibrancy? What cultural labour was involved in propelling avant-gardism forwards? In this article, I introduce a few examples of women who played a vital role in the modernisation of the arts in Paris, the internationalisation of French artistic tastes, and the cultivation of Paris’s reputation as the centre of avant-gardism and artistic development. In doing so, I offer a new paradigm for understanding the art worlds of Paris in this period by revealing women as important and effective arbiters of taste.

When the Bibliothèque Nationale moves into the new Bibliothèque de France, leaving behind only six specialised departments, the opportunity will arise to use the buildings of the Rue de Richelieu site to bring together a group of art history libraries and research centres. Priority will be given to the remaining Departments of the Bibliothèque Nationale, which need more space than they presently occupy; they will be joined by the inter-university library of art and archaeology from the Rue Michelet, the central library of the national museums, from the Louvre, and the older collections of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. The architectural holdings of the latter might be identified as the foundation for a major architectural collection to satisfy the demand for such a library in Paris. The collections thus brought together will not be merged, but will be exploited by means of shared services, including a union catalogue, and will be developed by means of a common acquisitions policy This concentration of resources on one site will not in itself constitute a ‘national art library’, but will provide a central node for a wider network. (An English version follows the original French text).

The historic site of the French national library is currently being renovated in order to become a major centre for art documentation and special collections. It will incorporate three separate institutions: the specialist departments of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the library of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art, and the library of the Ecole nationale des Chartes. Completion of the project is scheduled for 2017.

The article is the first to consider the impact of the early work of Chaim Soutine, produced in the South of France around 1920, on a circle of painters working in Britain some 30 years later, notably Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, as well as on the writer David Sylvester who promoted both their work and the key French artists such as Alberto Giacometti and Soutine who seemed to epitomise the new ‘existentialist’ climate. After the war Soutine became a cult figure in London, as he did in contemporary Paris and New York. He embodied the idea of the ‘tragic’ artist in his still-life imagery of flayed animals, his uncompromising, heavily-laden paint surfaces, and in his identity as a Jew who had died in 1943, an indirect victim of the Nazi occupation of France. I try to identify which works in particular were known to the English artists, themselves all Jewish except for Bacon, and to describe the very different ways in which they reacted to Soutine's art and adapted its lessons to their own artistic purposes.

French interest in India and neighbouring regions dates back to the 17th century. Oriental studies developed as a distinct discipline through the 19th century, stimulated in France by French colonial activities in Indochina, and culminating at the end of the century in the emergence of Oriental art and archaeology as a subject in its own right. The Commission Archéologique de l’Indochine was established in 1898, and became the Ecole Francaise d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) in 1901 with responsibility for listing and protecting antiquities in the French colonies; its library in Paris constitutes a major resource. France’s relationship with Afghanistan facilitated French archaeological activities in that country until 1975; archaeological finds enabled the Musée Guimet to extend its scope and to become a museum of Asiatic art, and its library became and remains the major library in Paris so far as Asian art is concerned. The library of the Ecole du Louvre supports courses on Asian art, while the Bibliothèque Nationale and such libraries as the Bibliothèque Forney also contain valuable collections. Photographic collections in some of these institutions have not been so well looked after as books, and their condition is a matter of concern. Unpublished archival materials are also held in some of the same institutions. The resources of a number of smaller, specialised institutes are currently being brought together in a new building under the name ‘Institute d’Asie du Collège de France’, while some other collections are being linked with the library of the EFEO to create a ‘Bibliothèque d’Asie’. Meanwhile it remains to be seen whether the new Bibliothèque Nationale des Arts will include the arts of Asia within its scope. No library in France has responsibility for modern Indian art. (An English translation follows the text in French).

The library of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris has recently conducted detailed research into the classification which will be used for the large amount of stock which will be on open access to its users. A working group was established which, after rejecting the idea of a specially created scheme, looked at what other systems were available, comparing those currently in use in the largest art and archaeology libraries in France and abroad. They also studied the two encyclopaedic classifications – Dewey and UDC. The final recommendation was adoption of the Library of Congress Classification and work to implement this decision is now under way.

Auction catalogues contain important information — attributes describing various objects that may be relevant to the work of art historians and librarians. They indicate the author, name, size, technique, time of creation, cost, provenance, information about the former owners, abstract essays by experts. However, the catalogue prepared for a certain auction has its own specifics, which does not allow using it as a regular reference guide. The article examines the history of identifying and studying the features of cataloguing auction catalogues in the historical aspect. The study of auction catalogues and the first experiences of their cataloguing date back to the 1950s and 1960s. At present, it becomes possible to create specialized consolidated electronic catalogues that combine bibliographic records of several libraries, which conduct analytical recording of auction catalogues, archival documents, inventory books of art dealers, periodicals and other evidence describing cases of public sales. In total, six major projects were revealed, conditionally divided into two groups. The first group includes electronic catalogues, which accumulate information from auction catalogues of the international art market. The second group presents projects dedicated to the research of catalogues of the national art markets of Great Britain, Germany and France. The tasks of all six projects include the creation of consolidated electronic catalogues, ensuring retrieval of information of auction catalogues that will allow finding factual information necessary for art historians and librarians. In turn, this can speed up the process of studying individual items, track their provenance and movement between owners, as well as take a new approach to the study of both international and national art markets at different historical stages.

From December 1956 to December 1957, no fewer than four exhibitions presenting the oeuvre of Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński were organised: the Posthumous Exhibition of Władysław Strzemiński’s and Katarzyna Kobro’s Oeuvre, shown fi rst in Łódź (16 December 1956 – 14 January 1957) and then in Warsaw (18 January – 10 February 1957), and two exhibitions in Paris: 50 ans de peinture abstraite at Galerie Raymond Creuze (9 May – 12 June 1957) and Précurseurs de l’art abstrait en Pologne: Malewicz, Kobro, Strzemiński, Berlewi, Stażewski at Galerie Denise René (22 November 1957 – 10 January 1958). All received a strong response, both in Poland and abroad. Research focused on these exhibitions has brought some surprising results. None of them had been planned until 1956, and only after the events of October 1956 was it possible to show the works of Kobro and Strzemiński in Warsaw in 1957. The exhibition at the Łódź Division of the Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions was prepared with exceptional care and is immensely important, as it occasioned the fi rst attempt at preparing a catalogue of both Kobro’s and Strzemiński’s works, of Strzemiński’s biography and a bibliography of texts authored by Strzemiński and Kobro. In addition, it was there that Strzemiński’s treatise Teoria widzenia fi rst came to public attention; it was published only two years later. The exhibition was transferred, quite unexpectedly, to the Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions in Warsaw, which was the chief institution involved in exhibiting modern art in Poland; this gave offi cial sanction and a considerable status to the oeuvre of both avant-garde artists. The exhibition entitled Précurseurs de l’art abstrait en Pologne became, paradoxically, the fi rst-ever offi cial exhibition of Polish avant-garde art to be held abroad and organised by a state agency, i.e. the Central Bureau of Art Exhibitions, under the aegis of the ambassador of the People’s Republic of Poland in France. It was also the only exhibition in which Kazimierz Malewicz was regarded as a Pole and presented as belonging to the history of art in Poland; the mission initiated by Strzemiński in 1922 was thus completed. The institutions involved in arranging the loans of Malewicz’s works for this exhibition were the Ministry of Culture and Art, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its subordinate Polish embassies in Paris and Moscow. This was the fi rst time that the works of Kazimierz Malewicz were presented in the West, thanks to the efforts and under the aegis of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the period of the post-Stalinist thaw; notably, this happened before their presentation at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (29 December 1957).

For the first time in Russian, the article reconstructs the history of the free school of drawing founded by the French artist and talented teacher J.-J. Bachelier (1724—1806); analyzes the charter and rules of this institution, its educational programs and practical activities; determines the role in the development of artistic craft in France. The article’s subject matter is multidisciplinary and is located at the intersection of the theory and history of art, art education and pedagogy. In view of the small number of comprehensive studies on the history of art education in France, this study expands the notion of it on the example of this educational institution. The school was opened in Paris at the initiative of J.-J. Bachelier for boys from the craftsmen environment. Although many different schools had been founded throughout France, the educational institution of Bachelier had special conditions of origin and a fortunate destiny — later it became part of the National School of Decorative Arts. From 1750, Bachelier became head of the Painting Department of the Vincennes (later Sevres) Porcelain Manufactory. According to his notes, his first concern was to make specialists. That is why he decided to organize a school where children were accepted from the age of eight and spent six years receiving the highest quality secondary art education of that time. Until now, Russian scientific literature has not paid enough attention to the history of French educational institutions in the field of art, despite the fact that France used to serve as a model for the whole of Europe in this regard. This article partially fills this gap, as well as provides a brief overview of other (less successful, but no less interesting) projects of J. Bachelier, for example, an art school for girls, the brilliant idea of which was never realized.

Among countries like Germany, France and England, Denmark took part in the ‘japanomania’ that swept the West in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Key figures in promoting Japanese art were art historian Karl Madsen and artist and museum director Pietro Krohn. Both played a significant role in trying to establish Denmark in the field of Japanese art on a par with serious international art collectors and connoisseurs. Their connections to Justus Brinckmann in Hamburg and Siegfried Bing in Paris enabled them to put on exhibitions that would introduce to a Danish audience a, so far, relatively unknown and ‘exotic’ art and culture. Often perceived in the West as expressing an innate understanding of nature, Japanese art became a source of inspiration for Danish artists and designers, such as Arnold Krog, who would create a synthesis between the Nordic and Japanese in his porcelain works.

We are two Canadian arts-based educational researchers who collaborated during a studio residency in Paris, France, during May 2015, for ten days. Our residency curriculum included study of feminist poet-thinker Hélène Cixous, taking walks in Paris locales, viewing women’s art, and engaging arts-based inquiry methods such as journaling, life writing and creative embodied practices, as a way to pay attention to and document our daily experiences. We practiced what we call companion pedagogy, with a feminist focus on mothering and gifting relations. We find that arts-based, restorative practices strengthen our wellbeing and resiliency as educators, and also support our desire for a more nurturing, mothering humanity to come forward for gifting a healing education. Healing education begs the question of how to address the resiliency of educators over time through what are increasingly challenging and depleting conditions of institutional cultures and economies. We thus offer creative practices such as studio residencies for collective care and gifting that can nurture a restorative pacing of life, while supporting the resiliency of educators to gift their energies towards creative curriculum visioning and enacting of social change.

Angelos Katakouzenos, a Greek neurologist and prolific medical writer at the beginning of the 20th century, belonged to a group of artists and scholars that formed the “generation of the 30s,” a cultural movement that emerged after World War I and introduced modernism in Greek art and literature. Born in 1902, Katakouzenos studied medicine in France at the Universities of Montpellier and Paris, where he trained in neurology and ­psychiatry under Georges Guillain, Henri Claude, Jean-Athanase Sicard, Pierre Marie, Clovis Vincent and Théophile ­Alajouanine. In Paris, he attended to Freud’s patients, collaborating with the psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte, while he was introduced to the contemporary avant-garde movements of this time, developing long-lasting friendships with artists and intellectuals, including Marc Chagall and Tériade. Although Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of ­Paris, Commandeur of the Légion d’honneur and founder of the first neuropsychiatric clinics in Greece, Katakouzenos lived far from the limelight. Despite his numerous publications, his scientific work remained largely unacknowledged. Yet, as a ­psychoanalyst he gained international fame and treated patients including William Faulkner who later would write, “To the wise scientist, the in-depth judge of the human soul, my friend Dr. Katakouzenos, who has helped me like no one else to redeem myself from the tortuous questions that troubled me for years – from the depths of my heart, many, very many thanks”. In this paper, the rediscovery of Katakouzenos’s remarkable work in the field of neuroscience aims to tell the story of a great physician whose lifework in bridging art and science may, in retrospect, reinstate him as one of the most captivating neurologists of the 20th century.

The French museum world is dominated by large public institution. The cradle of public museology, France boasts a long-standing tradition of central management in this domain, whose continuation can be found in the current legislative solutions (Act of 4 January 2002) organizing the system of museum activity, their approval, and financing modes. It is all based on the musée de France status that can be granted to institutions owned either by the state or to any other legal entity under public law or legal entity under private law engaged in a non-profit activity. The latter, belonging to associations and foundations, or run by them, in order to win the state’s recognition and support, have to comply with specific requirements defined in particular with respect to conservation and scientific elaboration of the collections, as well as to making them available for public viewing. What dominates among ‘private’ museums are institutions of the public benefit organization status, whose model was shaped in the 19th century, e.g. the Paris Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs or Cinémathèque Française, to a substantial degree financed with public resources. Some of them, e.g. ecomuseums and industrial museums in Mulhouse, are almost self-sufficient financially. Another form of a ‘private’ museum is a foundation set up by a company/ concern or artists and patrons. The latter group includes institutions that are owned by e.g. Institut de France in Paris, Musée Calvet in Avignon, or Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, as well as first of all those involved in mounting big Paris exhibitions, foundations – museums of modern art: Fondation Cartier, Fondation Louis Vuitton, or Collection Pinault which is currently being established. Thanks to their spectacular architectural settings, aggressive publicity policy, and astounding turn-out successes, these new private museums are substantially transforming the artistic stage in France.

In 2014, in the course of the Revolution of Dignity, Ukraine consciously opted for European values. Thus, cooperation with one of the founding member states of the EU bears strategic importance. The author believes that the the interaction between the two countries is based on ancient relations between France and Ukraine. Apart from political relations, France and Ukraine are bound by creative endeavours of many artists. After celebrating the 25th anniversary since the establishment of diplomatic relations between our countries, the Ministers for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine and France opened an exhibition dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the foundation of Ukrainian diplomatic service. The author stresses that France was the first Western state with which Ukraine signed the 1991 Interstate Agreement on Mutual Understanding and Cooperation. Moreover, it was in Paris where the Charter of Paris for a New Europe was signed, the document which allowed Ukraine to join the CSCE as a full-fledged member. Taking into account the current development in the east of Ukraine, the author underscores that France and Germany were the initiators of the Normandy Format negotiations. France consistently supports the territorial integrity of Ukraine, while not recognising the annexation of Crimea and takes a firm stand towards Russia. The author mentions the establishment of the France-Ukraine friendship group, headed by Valerie For-Muntean. Apart from political cooperation, economic ties between the two states are also gaining momentum. Nowadays, Ukraine is examining modern initiatives of France in ecology, energy efficiency, etc. The article outlines the interation of the two states in the educational sphere. France is encouraging numerous riveting projects intercultural projects displaying the best specimens of modern Ukrainian art. New intercultural contacts are also gaining ground. The author highlights the main events held at the culture and information centre of the Embassy and reports about the multidisciplinary festival Week-End a l’Est – Kyiv. Yet another recent development has been the inauguration of the web platform Nouvelle Ukraine, whose aim is to raise awareness about Ukraine in France, contribute to the positive image of the country, and build economic and cultural contacts. According to the author, the cooperation of Ukraine and France is only beginning to gain momentum and has infinite potential. Keywords: France, Ukraine, the EU, France-Ukraine friendship group, Ukrainian-French ties.

This was the first international meeting for unclassified research worldwide on X-ray lasers. There were 86 participants from 10 countries. It was organized most perfectly in the French Alps just before the end of the skiing season by Pierre Jaegle (Universite Paris-Sud, Orsay) who himself may be considered as one of the first, in the field of X-ray lasers. Jeagle et al. published, in 1971, a paper on the extraordinary increase of the 117 angstrom aluminium lines when a target was irradiated by laser and a comparison with cases emitted from different volumes. His result was highlighted in 1973 by Benjamin Lax and Art Guenther (1974): ‘The most definitive evidence of non-equilibrium population of excited atomic states in a laser-produced plasma was obtained by Jaegle et al. at the University of Paris in Orsay’.

The 4 th joint BIRNDL workshop was held at the 42nd ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2019) in Paris, France. BIRNDL 2019 intended to stimulate IR researchers and digital library professionals to elaborate on new approaches in natural language processing, information retrieval, scientometrics, and recommendation techniques that can advance the state-of-the-art in scholarly document understanding, analysis, and retrieval at scale. The workshop incorporated different paper sessions and the 5 th edition of the CL-SciSumm Shared Task.

Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une auto-analyse. Paris, Raisons d'agir (Collection “ Cours et travaux ”), 2004, 144 p.Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Chamboredon, Jean-Claude Passeron (dir.), Le métier de sociologue. Préalables épistémologiques. 5e édition. Berlin et New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 2005 [1968], xix + 357 p.Edwige Corcia, Bertrand Geay, Annick Coupé, Violaine Roussel, Sylvia Faure, Philippe Adrien, Markos Zafiropoulos, Martine Fournier, Sylvain Bourmeau, Philippe Corcuff, Bernard Vernier, Daniel Buren, Gérard Mauger, Vincent de Gaulejac. Pierre Bourdieu: les champs de la critique. Paris, Bibliothèque Centre-Pompidou, Collection “ BPI en actes ”, 2004, 284 p.Carles, Pierre (réalisateur), avec Pierre Bourdieu, La sociologie est un sport de combat [en anglais : Sociology Is a Martial Art]. Paris et Brooklyn : VF Films, et Pierre Carles (C-P Productions). Distributeur pour l'Amérique du Nord : First Run/Icarus Films, 2001. Vidéocassette VHS, NTSC, 146 minutes.Yvette Delsaut et Marie-Christine Rivière, Bibliographie des travaux de Pierre Bourdieu, Pantin (France), Le temps des cerises, 2002.

In this article Professor Walton examines the influence of bourgeois women on industrial production in nineteenth-century Paris. She argues that women, as arbiters of taste and consumers for the family, sought art and originality in manufactured goods, and that their demands in turn fostered handicraft and less skilled hand methods of manufacturing as the best means of providing such goods. By establishing the connections between women's roles and bourgeois demand, and between bourgeois demand and hand manufacturing, this study offers a new perspective on the persistence of hand production in France.

Abstract This article focuses on the French reception of Russian Arts and Crafts in the early 1900s. As a consequence, firstly, of the Russian display at the 1900 “Exposition Universelle,” and, secondly, of the increasing number of Russian exhibitions and other cultural events in Paris, French art periodicals and sections on art in the mainstream press contained many reports about the movement. Several writers expressed their opinion about Russian modern Arts and Crafts and participated in their promotion in France. The main purpose of the article is to shed light on those French critics who were responsible for this process of mediation and the way in which their discourses adopted a comprehensive approach to Russian Arts and Crafts experiments. It examines which artists and which exhibitions were particularly welcomed in around 1906; special attention is paid to Abramtsevo and Talashkino, and, therefore, to Maria Tenisheva.

The new AGORHA database at the INHA in Paris gives access to numerous information resources of value to art history researchers internationally. These include the catalogues of the Institute’s Library and its Jacques Doucet collection, which record the details of its heritage collections and archives, and the entire run of the Répertoire d’art et d’archéologie (1910-1972). It also hosts an increasing number of research databases that are a product of the research and teaching activities of the Galerie Colbert, which works in partnership with specialist education bodies throughout France. AGORHA will be online on the web by the time this article is published.

Alexandre Yakovlev was a famous Russian painter, graphic and theatre artist, a graduate from the Imperial Academy of Arts and a member of the “World of Art”. In 1917 by the order of the Academy (material collection to decorate interiors of the Kazanian railway station) Yakovlev went to Beijing, then he traveled a lot throughout China, Mongolia and Japan. He explored Chinese and Japanese theaters, as a result he made many ethnographic sketches, portraits and photographs. He arranged the exhibition of his drawings in Shanghai (in 1919). Finding out about the revolution in Russia he emigrated to France. Since 1919 he lived in Paris. He showed multiple works of Far Eastern cycle at personal exhibitions in Paris (Barbazanges Gallery, 1920 and 1921; together with V. Shuhaev), London (Grafton Gallery, 1920) and Chicago (Art Institute, 1922). In 1922 the pub-lisher Lucien Vogel published an album Drawings and paintings of the Far East, which included 50 reproductions of Yakovlev’s Far-East cycle (the book was designed by Shuhaev). At the same time the artist produced an album on the Chinese theater with accompanying text by a Chinese author Zhu Kim-Kim. In 1931–1932 Yakovlev took part in the “Yellow Cruise” arranged by the “Citroen” company. From this expedition he brought some new series of drawings. At the end of the cruise he presented his artworks in Paris and at foreign exhibitions. This background of the artist’s life is subject to be studied better in Russia.

The article introduces into scientific circulation two letters written by the widow and daughter of F. M. Dostoevsky in 1912 and 1924 and addressed to the famous French director Jacques Copeau. These documents were discovered as a result of archival searches in the J. Copeau foundation in the National Library of France. The two letters are connected by their subject — the debut production of the play “The Brothers Karamazov” by Copeau at the Paris Theater of Arts in 1911. Reviews of the production published in the European and Russian press contain range of opinions: from enthusiastic to sharply critical. In his letter A. G. Dostoevskaya praised Copeau’s drama, however, she familiarized herself with it without seeing the theatrical production itself, by reading the book that the director had sent her. The publication of Copeau’s play, which is based on the novel “The Brothers Karamazov”, is a little-known exhibit of the Memorial Museum of F. M. Dostoevsky, established by the writer's widow in 1889. It is mentioned only in the notebook of A. G. Dostoevskaya 1912–1913. The year of inclusion of published Copeau’s play in the collection of the Memorial Museum of F. M. Dostoevsky is established based on the letter and the notebook of the writer’s widow. The letter from L. F. Dostoevsky contains information about her communication with such famous French writers as Jacques Copeau, Irénée Mauget and Paul Bourgeois, as well as about the attempts of the copyright heiress to receive remuneration for the production undertaken by Copeau. These details augment the currently scarce information about the emigration period in the biography of the writer's daughter. The appendix to the article contains the letters of A. G. and L. F. Dostoevsky in French and in translation.

AbstractArt nouveau design is one of the principal markers of the identity of the French city of Nancy, which became internationally renowned as one of the most important centres for the development of this artistic style around 1900. Like other strands of the style, especially in Spain, Germany and parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire, art nouveau in eastern France has been linked to long-standing regionalist sentiments that resisted centralised Parisian control over local affairs typical in nineteenth-century France. This article examines the evolving bank architecture in central Nancy, a major facet of the introduction of art nouveau in its urban environment, to show that the construction of the city's modern character was a negotiated process that involved careful planning among financial institutions, architects and decorative artists. The design and erection of modern banks in Nancy in the first decade of the twentieth century balanced generalised architectural principles emanating from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris with the employment of highly symbolic regional naturalist motifs and architectural elements. This strategy fulfilled a variety of communicative functions to appeal to a civic populace whose identity was multivalent and shifting with the era's political climate, particularly with regard to the nearby ‘lost provinces’ of Alsace-Lorraine in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war.

In this article we will try to offer a new perspective on the theater, and we will try to include the theater in other spaces to create artistic values, including digital technology. Since its beginning, the theater space has been a place to see, to watch, to present, to perceive, to understand. So, in a basic sense, theater has been and is a first pathway. At the core of the theatrical experience – as Peter Brook suggests – is the act of watching and being watched. Throughout the history of Western culture, the theater has been a primitive dance circle, a Greek amphitheater, a church, an Elizabethan stage, a market square, a garage, a street, a front stage theater, a Broadway theater, a theater house university, a restored warehouse or recently, even a digital platform on our laptop, computer, or mobile phone. Close-up theater is a continuation of the conceptual changes that took place with theater spaces – and therefore – with the way of watching theater. In the past decades, Jerzy Grotowski in Poland, Ariane Mnoushkin in Paris, Peter Shuman in Vermont and Peter Brook from Africa in Avignon, France, have organized the theater space in different ways to bring the audience and the actors as close as possible to each.