ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network: Power & Spectacle in France, 1800-1850
27 April 1600 (BST) / 1700 (CEST) / 1100 (EDT)
French art in the early nineteenth century was often concerned with Power & Spectacle, from Ingres’ Napoleon I on His Imperial Throne (1806) that sought to visualise monachal power to the caricatures of Honoré Daumier and Charles Philipon, in the example of Les Poires (1831), that looked to critique it. How was power and spectacle explored and represented in the first half of the nineteenth century in France? This session will explore the ways in which issues relating to power and spectacle were constructed or deconstructed in the visual culture of the time. Questions that could be explored might include: how might power have been represented in the domestic sphere, or in early advertising? How might have artistic institutions harness the power of visual ‘spectacle’ for public display? What was the impact of the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on French visual culture?
We are pleased to welcome the following speakers:
Elisa Cazzato (Ca’ Foscari University) - “What is beyond theatre? Ignazio Degotti (1758-1824) and the Staging of the Napoleonic Power at the Paris Opéra”
Through the activity of the stage designer Ignazio Degotti (1758-1822), this presentation explores the ways in which theatre décor and ephemeral settings contributed to the visual construction of Napoleon’s power. Degotti was the principal stage designer of the Paris Opéra from 1795 to 1822. He also worked with Jacques-Louis David, organising the scenography of the Coronation’s painting, where his portrait stands right next to that of Napoleon’s First Painter. Degotti approached his art as a fine and skilled connoisseur of architecture, perspective, decoration, and botany. Convinced that much of the effect of the opera resided in the visual, he accorded himself the special status of an artistic interlocutor among other opera creators. This paper highlights ‘behind the scenes’ episodes of Le Triomphe de Trajan (1807) and Fernand Cortez (1809), two key Napoleonic performances for which Degotti made the settings. These scenarios contrast the persona of Degotti against the controlling requirements of the theatre administration. Frustrating requests from the administration urged him to produce grandeur on stage, but under controlled measures. Ultimately, I argue that stage décor – as conceived by Degotti – played a pivotal role in the visualisation and communication of the imperial propaganda.
Elisa Cazzato is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice. During the period 2021-2022 she was a Visiting Scholar in the Institute of Fine Arts at the New York University. In 2018, she completed her PhD in Art History at The University of Sydney, with a thesis supervised by Prof. Mark Ledbury
Olga Johnson (CUNY) - “Performing Freedom in the Second Empire: How the Romantic Theater Changed Modernist Art”
The correlation between the Shakespearean influence on the French stage of the early 19th Century and E. Manet’s realist paintings of the early 1860s exposes a competitive spectacle of artistic sincerity and institutional censorship. The social class struggle initiated with the French Revolution was rekindled in Romantic depictions of les misérables and served as a foundation for Modernist frivolities with the Academic conventions. An analysis of the literary reception of Shakespearean works, events of veiled and explicit theatrical resistance to political censure, and the emerging positivist populaire imagery clarify Manet’s inexplicable paintings of “beggar-philosophers” and the political sanction of Salon des Refusés. In particular, the decisive historical event will be interpreted as the government’s success in ridding art of its enlightening function, while Manet’s works as misunderstood lessons of performative freedom.
Olga Johnson completed her Ph.D. in Art History and Criticism at Stony Brook University in August 2022. Her dissertation examines Shakespeare and Rembrandt as conceptual sources of Edouard Manet, focusing on theatrical performance as a paradigm for modernist painting. Hegel’s phenomenology aids the philosophical study of modern aesthetics. Currently, she is teaching as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at CUNY City College and Queensborough campuses. With an MFA in Painting from the University of Iowa, she taught studio arts at Montana State University and exhibited her art at various venues in Montana, Iowa, and Tennessee.
Emmanuela Wroth (University of Toronto) “From Branchu to Baker: Racialized and Sexualized Feminine Spectacle in 19th-Century Paris”
Historically, the emergence of Black women performers in European circles tends to be located largely in the twentieth century, with the arrival in Paris of Joséphine Baker (1906–1975). My postdoctoral project seeks to recover the established Parisian racialized and sexualized diasporic performance practices into which Baker inserted herself. This paper focuses specifically on the biracial Haitian singer Caroline Branchu (1780–1850) who starred at the Opéra at the start of the nineteenth century. It explores how Branchu, as a biracial woman, mobilized her sexual relationship with Napoleon for her own success at the Opéra, as the Napoleonic law of 20 May 1802 legalized slavery anew. It investigates how Branchu negotiated her aural and visual racialization by fashioning herself as a quintessentially French performer and as a key proponent of the French operatic form, the ‘tragédie lyrique’, and the ‘urlo francese’, the prevailing style at the Opéra.
Emmanuela Wroth is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto and her current project examines the overlooked careers of Black women performers in nineteenth-century Paris. She is also developing her dissertation into a monograph, entitled ‘Courting Celebrity: Creating the Courtesan on the Popular Parisian Stage and Beyond, 1831–1859’. Emmanuela has published a chapter on ‘New Approaches to Women Actors and Celebrity in Nineteenth-Century France’ for the forthcoming A New History of Theatre in France (Cambridge University Press); and her article ‘The Fashioning of La Dame aux Camélias: Eugénie Doche’s Creation of Marguerite Gautier’ is forthcoming in French Studies this July.
This is a virtual event - the Zoom link will be sent out on the day. For any issues please get in contact via email and we will try and help as best we can.
The network will meet (roughly) once a month virtually via Zoom. It is open to current PhD and research students as well as ECR's who have recently graduated and are making their way in the world of academia/museums/education/arts or heritage. It is global, open to those located anywhere in the world who wish to join. Feel free to join, participate and we hope to create an engaging, diverse, fun and rewarding community.
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