1st Edition
Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789–1914
Focusing specifically on portraiture as a genre, this volume challenges scholarly assumptions that regard interior spaces as uniquely feminine. Contributors analyze portraits of men in domestic and studio spaces in France during the long nineteenth century; the preponderance of such portraits alone supports the book's premise that the alignment of men with public life is oversimplified and more myth than reality. The volume offers analysis of works by a mix of artists, from familiar names such as David, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Rodin, and Matisse to less well-known image makers including Dominique Doncre, Constance Mayer, Anders Zorn and Lucien-Etienne Melingue. The essays cover a range of media from paintings and prints to photographs and sculpture that allows exploration of the relation between masculinity and interiority across the visual culture of the period. The home and other interior spaces emerge from these studies as rich and complex locations for both masculine self-expression and artistic creativity. Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789-1914 provides a much-needed rethinking of modern masculinity in this period.
Biography
Temma Balducci is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Arkansas State University. She has published on the gaze and spectacle in nineteenth-century French art and on feminist art of the 1970s. Her manuscript in progress, Beyond the Flaneur: Gender, Space and the Gaze in Post-Haussmann Visual Culture, challenges the ubiquity of the Baudelairean flâneur in theorizations of gender and space in early Third Republic Paris.
Heather Belnap Jensen is Assistant Professor of Art History at Brigham Young University. Her research and publications examine women's contributions to early nineteenth-century culture. She is currently co-editing a volume on women, bourgeois femininity and public space with Temma Balducci, as well as working on a book manuscript titled Art, Fashion and the Modern Woman in Post-Revolutionary France.
Pamela J. Warner is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Rhode Island. Her research focuses on art criticism in France during the nineteenth century, and she has published articles in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Studies in the Decorative Arts and the Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt. Her book in progress focuses on the critical reception of Realism and its ties to materialist philosophy.
'The exploration of the theme of masculinity in relation to interiority is long overdue. This volume ameliorates some of the divisions that have haunted the scholarship of this period... a great addition to the roster of 19th century books.' Susan Sidlauskas, Rutgers University, USA
'Overall, the essays make case for the contingency of masculinity and the insufficiency of critical attention to that fact in modernism. While primarily of interest to historians of visual culture, the volume offers ways to understand articulations of masculinity beyond the public/private binary. The collection succeeds in giving shape to the case that understanding interiors, and the interiority expressed within them, has not just value but some urgency.' French History
'The twelve essays themselves cover a broad and exciting range of visual material across the period, from painting and sculpture to photography and fashion. Among fascinating discussions of topics such as family portraiture, the artist’s studio, and the cabinet de travail, the volume also offers engaging reflections on key nineteenth-century figures... All images are beautifully presented and meticulously set out, while an extensive bibliography provides an up-to-date resource for the fields discussed.' French Studies
