Courses

Modern art was born as an idea at the end of the 19th century, when France was at the center of the arts. Since then, French writers have written about the art of their time and promoted it, as Zola did for the Impressionists, or Apollinaire for the Cubists. Writing about modern art was also a way for writers to reflect on their own approach to poetics, and for philosophers to better understand what “modern times” and “modernity” could mean. But, in the course of the 20th century, writers and the visual arts of their time became less tightly interwoven. Novels, theater plays or essays have become bitter, sarcastic, critical of “contemporary art.” What is it that makes contemporary art a subject of satire or irony, for contemporary writers? This course tracks the relationship between writers, especially in France, and the visual arts of their time. By studying mostly works of imaginative literature, but also critical essays, that deal with “modern art” and “contemporary art”, we will try to understand why writers are fascinated by the visual arts of their time, what art says about the time we live in, whether it is “modern”, “postmodern” or “contemporary”, and how writers use the art of their time to define their own work and their own approach to literature.

We will begin in 19th century in France by considering how Baudelaire coined the word “modernity” in his essays on painting, and by examining novels about painters by Balzac and Zola. We will then turn to the 20th century to see how poets and writers promoted the avant-gardes, how Virginia Woolf depicted a painter to reflect on her own modernism in To the Lighthouse, and to study important philosophical texts about the work of art by Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. In the second part of the semester, we move to the United States, the “center of the arts” after World War II. We will study how critics advocated for abstraction and modern art, how this art was met with irony and sarcasm by Tom Wolfe, and we will reflect on an American painter of this time who was not doing abstract art: Edward Hopper. We will visit the exhibition “Edward Hopper’s New York” scheduled at the Whitney Museum. To end, we will come back to France, where the debate around contemporary art has been heated, and read polemical texts as well as Yasmina Reza’s famous play “Art” and Michel Houellebecq’s novel on contemporary art. We will also watch Ruben Ostlund’s film The Square, which received the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 2017. In the last session we will read Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty and see how the debate around art has been changing over time as new questions are being raised, namely the question of minorities and white privilege in art.