From Millet to Léger: Essays in Social Art History

A pre-eminent scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French art, Robert L. Herbert has written extensively on aspects of this subject during his long career. This book brings together some of his most important essays, works that discuss the artistic and social issues that lie behind the surfaces of notable prints and paintings by such artists as Millet, Courbet, Daubigny, Monet, Pissarro, Signac, Delaunay, Léger, and Ernst. In an introduction prepared for this volume, Herbert explains that these essays are linked by a focus on the relation of art to the urban-industrial revolution. The first three essays explore how artists in the second half of the nineteenth century were attracted to images of rural life and landscape as a reaction to growing industrialization and urbanization, at the same time creating new techniques and pictorial devices whose radical inventions opposed the dominant forms and subjects of academic art. Four essays then address issues of overt social and political opposition among artists, demonstrating that these oppositions were in fact embraced within modernist capitalism as correctives to outmoded traditions. The concluding essays center on Léger and the period from 1910 to 1925, in which there was a sudden acceptance of industrial imagery and the creation of forms that expressed the dynamism and fragmentation of modern culture. Written in a lively and accessible style, this book will appeal to students, scholars, and lovers of French art.