CFP 27.11.2015

Scenes of the Impressionist Life (Rouen, 6-7 Sept 16)

Musée des Beaux-arts de Rouen, France, 06.–07.09.2016
Eingabeschluss : 10.01.2016

Lucy Pike

Scenes of the Impressionist Life: A Musée imaginaire

International symposium around the exhibition Scènes de la vie impressionniste, at the Musée des Beaux-arts de Rouen, France (April 15 – September 23, 2016)

Organized by the Université de Rouen and the research unit Les Passés dans le Présent from Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, with the support of the Terra Foundation for American Art

Each artist possesses their own imaginary museum; masterpieces, paintings, sculptures and engravings, texts and quotes, memories and aesthetic emotions, in a word, the sensations and images that feed their outlook on the world. Forged by André Malraux in 1947 , this concept of "imaginary museum" commented extensively and sometimes challenged , has often been reprised until it became a central concept that, whilst allowing art historians to question the artists’ sources of inspiration and their visual and intellectual emulation , draws in counter-relief the intimate portrait of artists in their creative process. The growing success of the formula since the 1970s no doubt reveals our need to better understand the genesis and development process of the artwork.

To consider the imaginary museum of the Impressionists is therefore to question the plurality of their sources of inspiration, the construction of their imagination and their access routes to the culture of images. Such is the challenge of this symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition at Rouen’s Musée des Beaux-arts, Scènes de la vie impressionniste, which questions the ways an artwork journeys from the private to the public sphere.

Commonly attached to Impressionism is the premise of a new painting that would be freed from the conventions of representation and traditional sources, in favor of a gaze fixed on the present, the contemporary life and especially nature. Painters sometimes themselves have helped shape this image, partly amplified by subsequent historiography. However, some witnesses and historians of the movement first noted the importance of ancient sources for the Impressionists, their commitment to an artistic past that they had seized and did not hesitate to reinvent . This approach now needs to be resumed, extended and supplemented, by examining how the imagination of the impressionists proceeds from a vast ensemble, fed by the fine arts, the press, caricature and posters, visual sources that combine the past with the contemporary.

Under the term of the imaginary museum, this symposium proposes to open the debate widely on cultural references and their registers, on the collective and individual memory and its modes of transmission. The notion of Impressionism is itself understood in a broad sense, in its various international and particularly American extensions.

Four lines of thought or objects of study are suggested to the participants. They are only avenues for research; the conference program will be based on the proposals selected.
• Portrait, self-portrait: This first theme relates more specifically to the general subject of the exhibition at Rouen’s Musée des Beaux-arts and the Festival Normandie impressionniste 2016. This is to examine the creation of a self-image and that of the group through the traditions and customs of this pictorial genre.
• Museums, Galleries, art market: In this register, may be considered the contact points between the proponents of Impressionism, painters, critics, collectors, the art of their time and that of the past.
• Literature, library, archives: The recent book on Monet’s library (Bibliothèque de Monet) showed the importance of the textual sources kept by the artist at his home in Giverny, - classics, exhibition catalogs, periodicals-, in building his cultural horizon . In this perspective, we will address hitherto unexploited sources, including from libraries and archives.
• Images, reproduction, photography and film: With the rise of the press and the appearance of new techniques of image making, still and moving, other visual references were set up, more in the quotidian, that also became part of the impressionist imaginary museum - as Courbet, in the previous generation, had anticipated in his own way.

Applicants must submit a 20-minute communication project at most, along with a bio-bibliographical short CV. Proposals should not exceed 1800 characters or 300 words.
They must be sent no later than January 10, 2016 at musimaginaire.impressionnistesgmail.com. Proposals will be reviewed by a scientific committee.

Quellennachweis:
CFP: Scenes of the Impressionist Life (Rouen, 6-7 Sept 16). In: ArtHist.net, 27.11.2015. Letzter Zugriff 29.03.2024. <https://arthist.net/archive/11619>.

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