Special Issue: French History in the Visual Sphere: Convergences: Visualizing French History

This issue marks, probes, and seeks to further the increasingly close convergence between historians, art historians, literary critics, and others in the exploration of the visual sphere as central to our understanding of the past. Although the roots of this convergence can be traced to the beginnings of humanistic scholarship, the particular development we explore here is more recent, dating roughly to the period since 1968. The founders of art history as a scholarly discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from Alois Riegl to Heinrich Wöllflin, all regarded themselves as deeply engaged with the study of the past, and not simply of its artistic achievements. One of those figures, Jacob Burckhardt, also occupies an important place in the development of modern historical writing. ¹ As Erik Inglis puts it in his essay, "We speak across disciplinary boundaries our predecessors would not have recognized."

Under distinct disciplinary pressures, however, the fields evolved in very different directions, so that by the 1970s those boundaries seemed more difficult to cross. In 1976, for example, the cultural and intellectual historian Peter Gay prefaced a book on Manet, Gropius, and Mondrian with the declaration, "Art historians have ways of reading pictures or, for that matter, buildings, that I admire but cannot imitate." ² The divergence implied in Gay's comment now seems particular to the moment. At the time he was writing, a social history attracted to, if not always employing, quantitative methods occupied the leading edge of historical research, while a formalism preoccupied with paradigms of "influence" dominated most art history departments. Yet the winds were already changing: for many modernists, the publication in 1973 of T. J. Clark's two books on French painting after 1848 resounded with the force of a starting gun. Clark, of course, invented neither the social history of art nor Marxist art history—Arnold Hauser's Marxist-based The Social History of Art, for example, was first published in 1951. ³ But Clark's deep engagement in both volumes with the complex historical situation of the 1848 Revolution and the Second Republic, together with his impressive command of unfamiliar sources and his brilliant deployment of theory, offered a model for scholars of varied disciplinary stripes. The parallel and contemporaneous work of Robert L. Herbert on nineteenth-century French painting would also prove extremely influential for a new contextual history of art. ⁴

Without in any way minimizing the importance of work in other fields that has spanned disciplinary lines, notably scholarship on patronage in the Italian Renaissance, on the Dutch golden age, and on architectural history, we think it safe to say that scholarship on France has played a pivotal role in bridging the divide between history and art history. French art from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries has long been central to the art historical canon, and so has enjoyed a privileged position in the teaching of art history at all levels. The prominence of the field has made it productive terrain for testing new methods and questioning orthodoxies. Beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s, the informal collaboration of historians and art historians at a number of institutions opened the eyes of graduate students in both fields to the possibilities, as well as the challenges, of genuinely interdisciplinary inquiry. At the same time, the growing influence of methodological and critical approaches that first emerged in cognate fields, including feminism, various strands of poststructuralism, and media studies, provided common ground for experimentation.

Even restricting the story to France, it is beyond the scope of this essay fully to describe the convergence of mainstream art and cultural history in the past two decades; similarly, a special issue chosen from a pool of some two dozen submissions in an open call for papers cannot pretend to comprehensiveness. But two parallel developments seem especially significant: the willingness of historians to scrutinize works of art and other visual images with...