Output details

Edmond de Goncourt's <I>Décors</I> — Towards the Symbolist <I>Maison d'art</I>

This article, accepted by competitive peer-review for the international 4* rated journal in Romance literatures, visual cultures and art history, builds on an earlier conference paper, ‘Towards the Symbolist maison d’art’, given at the international conference ‘Subjective Objectives’ (University of Oxford, December 2007) and related peer-review article on ‘Nature as a Musée d’art: Uncovering the Goncourts’ Jardin d’un peintre’, Garden History, 36, no. 2 (December 2008, pp. 229-52). ‘Edmond de Goncourt’s “Décors” (Romance Studies) elaborates the concerns of this earlier publication. Its focus is on interior space, and on the Goncourt’s ‘home of an artist’ as a particularly significant instance in material culture, text, display and photography of the late nineteenth-century aesthetic interior as a canvas and stage for new narratives of art collection, self and subjectivity in what Nietszche saw as the fin-de-siècle’s increasing ‘theatricalization’ of modern art and its cultural identities. The article develops this idea, extending recent scholarship on the aesthetic interior, urban space and material culture (Silverman,1989; Watson, 1999, Pety, 2003; Warner 2008), to create fresh material and conceptual insights into ways in which Goncourts’ maison d’art stages its art collection to create performances of ‘self’, ‘memory’ and cultural ‘display’, making it prototypical for related artistic practices in Symbolism (cf. Van Gogh’s response to it as the ‘house of a modernist’) and for their broader, performative extension through photography and journalism. The article is cited in Elizabeth Emery’s 2012 book Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum, 1881-1914 (Ashgate) as leading scholarship in this field (p. 21, 22, 46, 47) and for its pertinent contributions to broader visual and material cultural scholarship on the history, theory, imaging and contexts of display in modern art and related humanities studies.