By using this website you agree to our Cookie policy

December 2005

Vol. 147 | No. 1233

Sculpture

Editorial

British sculpture 'outre-Manche'

AN EDITORIAL IN this Magazine in 1976 commented on the 'new and strange' success that British artists were then having in Paris. Numerous exhibitions of British art, many of them promoted by the British Council, began to appear in France from about the time of Francis Bacon's retrospective at the Grand Palais in 1971. A bastion had been breached, and not only with contemporary art. The Louvre was making important acquisitions of works of the British School (by Turner, Fuseli, Wright of Derby), and in 1975 a whole issue of André Chastel's Revue de l'Art had been devoted to art from Britain. The Editorial concluded by summarising British opinion on this change in French attitudes: 'We mourn its loss of supremacy. We hail its new-found open-mindedness.'

Editorial read more
  • The English origins of the Coronation of the Virgin

    By T. A. Heslop

    THE CORONATION OF the Virgin was a radical Romanesque invention, the inception of which depended on the political and devotional circumstances of early twelfth-century England. This is worth stressing at the outset since, as will be suggested here, without a direct cultural catalyst the imagery would have been, quite literally, unthinkable. The confluence of historical events and liturgical celebration was a necessary prerequisite, if not a sufficient explanation, for this remarkable imaginative leap.

  • Claus Sluter's 'Well of Moses' for the Chartreuse de Champmol reconsidered: part I

    By Susie Nash

    IN 2004 CLAUS SLUTER'S 'Well of Moses', one of the canonical works of European art, was at last revealed after having been hidden from public view for fifteen years. During this time the area around the monument was excavated and remodelled, the sculptures were cleaned and restored, and the platform that surrounded it was removed. The figures can now be viewed from ground level, as was originally envisaged (Fig.9); the space in which the Well stands is now closer in scale to the 102-metre-square cloister of the Carthusian monastery (Fig. 10), and, most dramatically, much more of the original polychromy can now be seen (Figs.9 and 18).

  • A Préault discovery: sculptural rhetoric and Republicanism in 1830s Paris

    By Brooks Beaulieu

    THE 1830s WAS a disastrous decade for the French sculptor Auguste Préault (1809-79). All had begun promisingly enough: he made his Salon debut in 1833, where the proletarian themes of his socially conscious exhibits, notably Deux pauvres femmes and Mendicité, found immediate favour with the liberal Republican press of the time. He was the first to make 'Republican art', proclaimed the journalist Jean-Barthelemy Hauréau, writing on Préault in his 1833 Salon review for La Tribune. But this and other enthusiastic endorsements were to cost Préault dearly and he soon became something of a scapegoat for the increasingly conservative Salon juries of the 1830s and 1840s. As a consequence, he suffered not only an all but total exclusion from the Salon, but also a complete dearth of commissions, either public or private. As the decade progressed, he began to lose support even within the Republican camp. One of his worst professional setbacks was his failure to secure the commission for the tomb of Armand Carrel, the Republican polemicist and founding-editor of the opposition journal Le National, who was killed at the age of thirty-six in a duel with Emile de Girardin, the father of commercial journalism and owner of La Presse. Initially favoured by the committee created to raise funds and erect a monument to the memory of the Republican martyr, Préault eventually lost the commission to his teacher and rival David d'Angers, who executed the Carrel tomb (1838-39) for the cemetery of Saint-Mandé, to the east of Paris.