The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism. - book reviews

Central to the tempering of the machine aesthetic during the Depression was the emergent construction of America as a modernist, mechanized, dehumanized dystopia, America joining Germany in France's imaginaire. Significant as well to the project of self-definition were France's colonies. Looking at the world fairs, travel advertising, and a reemergence of Orientalism, Golan argues that the colonies were not only portrayed as an abundant source of raw materials, "a bottomless reservoir of organic plenty to be bestowed upon mother France" (p. 116), but were also instrumentalized to further shape France's anti-modern, naturalist aesthetic and largely agrarian agenda. In the search for the "primitive" against the looming specters of America and Germany, France would look as well to its southern neighbor, Spain. For, in "another conflicted instance of self-projection," Spain, with its small oligarchy of aristocratic landowners, its peasantry, and its deep Catholicism, could serve as "the encapsulation of the agrarian nation" (pp. 128-29).

In the increasingly antimodernist, nationalist, and xenophobic polemic of the 1930s, the peasant, or more broadly, the terrien, gives birth to the "biological man" of a deeply eugenic science, realized most vividly for Golan in Ozenfant's 1931-35 canvas Biological Life. Not surprisingly, this polemic affects the reception of artists whose very, identities, if not their work, did not conform to France's self-image, namely, the foreign, and mostly Jewish, artists working in urban Paris. Intent upon preserving the purity of the "true" French art, curators drew clear boundaries between French and foreign work. Similarly, critics redefined terminology so that the Ecole de Paris, once a rubric for all modern art produced in post-World War I Paris, applied exclusively to foreign artists, while at the same time, the Ecole Francaise became the exclusive preserve of the native French. Of course, even in the period before World War I the reception of modernism, particularly Cubism, was often infused with xenophobia and anti-Semitism. But by 1925, certain critics turned their gaze to the "other" within, pointing to the "problem" posed by Jewish art and artists, and produced a critical discourse in which Picasso could be seen as the incarnation of the "'pan-Semitic spirit,' as the true heir of the Arab ornamentalists and the Spanish Talmudists" (pp. 140-41). In a cultural and political climate dominated by regionalism and burgeoning nationalism, Jews, even French-born Jews, functioned as the ultimate embodiment of deracines.

By 1940, although active collaboration with the Vichy regime was limited to such "true" terriens as Andre Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac, Golan argues that the prevalent thematics of interwar cultural production were deeply sympathetic to, or easily co-opted by, the rhetoric of a Vichy led by the grandfather figure of le marechal paysan, Petain. It is with Derain's monumental tapestry cartoon The Golden Age, or Terrestrial Paradise, the Hunt, whose production spans the years 1938-44, that Golan concludes her account. For to Golan, the latent ideological implications of its sylvan tale are Vichy's own. With its heraldic imagery, its pseudo-naivete, its allegorization of present hunts, and its transformation of conflict into a scene of "benign bliss" (p. 161), "Derain's Golden Age may be said to embody France's deepest wish during the interwar years and those of Vichy: that of history at a standstill" (p. 163).