Art of the Actual

"The book explores the representation between the political culture of early Third Republic France and the visual arts, primarily painting. The Republic had come into being in 1870, but it was only about 1880 that its politics became coherently republican. The regime, with its rhetoric of liberty, equality and fraternity, pursued policies which were secular and anti-clerical, also emphasizing its commitment to science and technology. By this time naturalism was becoming the dominant mode in contemporary intellectual life and literature. With its understanding that art of all kinds should be drawn from the everyday world, that no subject was unworthy to be treated, and a degree of flexibility in representation , naturalism was an ideal aesthetic match forrepublican ideology. This consensual alliance was the dominant cultural mode in early Third Republic France, found in public decorations, Salon paintings and throughout visual culture. The book also considers how some artists, aided by the liberalizationof censorship in 1881, stretched the frontiers of the descriptive and added a critical edge to their work by introducing elements of caricatural style into their work. It asks whether under an ostensibly egalitarian Republic there was genuinely art produced by and for the people, not necessarily in hock to naturalist paradigms, or whether art was essentially filtered down from the upper echelons. The various ways artists stretched naturalist expectation, particularly by engaging with scientific concepts,is also assessed"--