Bridget Alsdorf

How the urban spectator became the archetypal modern viewer and a central subject in late nineteenth-century French artGawkers explores how artists and writers in late nineteenth-century Paris represented the seductions, horrors, and banalities of street life through the eyes of curious viewers known as badauds. In contrast to the singular and aloof bourgeois flâneur, badauds were passive, collective, instinctive, and highly impressionable. Above all, they were visual, captivated by the sights of everyday life. Beautifully illustrated and drawing on a wealth of new research, Gawkers excavates badauds as a subject of deep significance in late nineteenth-century French culture, as a motif in works of art, and as a conflicted model of the modern viewer.Bridget Alsdorf examines the work of painters, printmakers, and filmmakers who made badauds their artistic subject, including Félix Vallotton, Pierre Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Eugène Carrière, Charles Angrand, and Auguste and Louise Lumière. From morally and intellectually empty to sensitive, empathetic, and humane, the gawkers these artists portrayed cut across social categories. They invite the viewer’s identification, even as they appear to threaten social responsibility and the integrity of art.Delving into the ubiquity of a figure that has largely eluded attention, idling on the margins of culture and current events, Gawkers traces the emergence of social and aesthetic problems that are still with us today.

Focusing on the art of Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) and his colleagues Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Frederic Bazille, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Fellow Men argues for the importance of the group as a defining subject of nineteenth-century French painting. Through close readings of some of the most ambitious paintings of the realist and impressionist generation, Bridget Alsdorf offers new insights into how French painters understood the shifting boundaries of their social world, and reveals the fragile masculine bonds that made up the avant-garde. A dedicated realist who veered between extremes of sociability and hermetic isolation, Fantin-Latour painted group dynamics over the course of two decades, from 1864 to 1885. This was a period of dramatic change in French history and art--events like the Paris Commune and the rise and fall of impressionism raised serious doubts about the power of collectivism in art and life. Fantin-Latour's monumental group portraits, and related works by his friends and colleagues from the 1850s through the 1880s, represent varied visions of collective identity and test the limits of association as both a social and an artistic pursuit. By examining the bonds and frictions that animated their social circles, Fantin-Latour and his cohorts developed a new pictorial language for the modern group: one of fragmentation, exclusion, and willful withdrawal into interior space that nonetheless presented individuality as radically relational.

I denne publikasjonen (norsk/dansk/engelsk) ønsker vi å belyse forestil lingen om medievalisme og middelalderisme slik det kommer til syne i litterære og visuelle uttrykk i de tre kunstnerskapene Agnes og Harald Slott- Møller og Sigrid Undset. Det er første gangen dette materialet blir belyst. Prosjektet har både en internasjonal, nasjonal og en sterk lokal forankring. Vi vil vise hvilken betydning Lillehammer, Maihaugen og Gudbrandsdalen hadde for internasjonale kunstnere og forfattere rundt 1900, og hvordan ideen om middelalderen gjorde seg gjeldende i ulike kunstneriske uttrykk. Det trekkes tråder til eksisterende forskning og undersøkes hvordan forholdet mellom de tre preget både Undsets litteratur og Slott-Møller-parets kunst. Samtidig oppdateres vår forståelse av hvordan middelalderen har ligget som en underliggende paralleltekst til moderniteten. Denne «middelalderen etter middelalderen» er utgangspunktet for utstillingen En moderne middelalder – Sigrid Undset, Agnes og Harald Slott-Møller – og prerafaelittene og denne publikasjonen med samme navn. Videre reiser deler av utstillingen til Fredriksborg –Nationalhistorisk Museum i Hillerød i Danmark. Prosjektet undersøker fenomenet middelalderisme med utgangspunkt i vennskapet mellom det danske kunstnerparet Agnes (1862–1937) og Harald Slott-Møller (1864–1937) og den nobelprisvinnende norske forfatteren Sigrid Undset (1882–1949) og deres felles fascinasjon for middelalderen og de engelske prerafaelittene. For første gang i Norden viser utstillingen et bredt utvalg av Agnes og Harald Slott-Møllers arbeider, både maleri og kunstindustri, i tett dialog med historiske og litterære referanser fra Sigrid Undsets forfatterskap. Den sterke forbindelsen mellom de tre store kunstnerskapene blir synliggjort. Boken er rikt illustrert.