List of French artists and artistic movements

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This site concerns (generally) French artists working in visual or plastic media (plus, for some artists of the 20th century, "performance art'). Please go elsewhere for information on French literature, French music, French Cinema and French Culture.

History

The French Renaissance

In the late 15th century, the French invasion of Italy and the proximity of the vibrant Burgundy court (with its Flemish connections) brought the French into contact with the goods, paintings, and creative spirit of the Northern and Italian Renaissance, yet the initial artistic changes in France were rarely carried out by native artists, and were more often the work of Italian and Flemish artists, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Jean Clouet (and his son François) and the Italians of the first ‘’Ecole de Fontainebleau’’.

There are however some French artists of incredible talent in this period including the painter Jean Fouquet of Tours who achieved amazingly realistic portraits and remarkable illuminated manuscripts, and the sculptors Jean Goujon and Germain Pilon.

Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the French Renaissance was the construction of the Chateaux of the Loire Valley: no longer conceived of as fortresses, these pleasure palaces took advantage of the richness of the rivers and lands of the Loire region and they show remarkable architectural skill.

The old Louvre castle was also rebuilt under the direction of Pierre Lescot and would become the core of a brand new Renaissance château. To the west of the Louvre, Catherine de Medici had built for her the Tuileries palace with a garden and grottos.

The French Wars of Religion however dragged the country into thirty years of civil war, at the end of which the refinements of the Valois court were all but lost.

Mannerism and Early Baroque

The ascension of Henri IV to the throne brought a period of massive urban development in Paris, including the Pont Neuf, the Place des Vosges (called the ‘’Place Royale’’), the Place Dauphine, and parts of the Louvre.

Under Louis XIII, the minister Richelieu undertook a new program of state control of the arts that would become the early foundation of absolutism.

In the 1640s the artistic debate in France focused on the distinction between Peter Paul Rubens (the Flemish baroque, voluptuous lines and colors) and Nicolas Poussin (rational control, proportion, Roman classicism). There is also a strong Caravaggio school represented in the period by the amazing candle-lit paintings of Georges de La Tour. The wretched and the poor are featured in a almost Dutch manner in the paintings by the three Le Nain brothers. In the paintings of Philippe de Champaigne there are both propagandistic portraits of Richelieu and other more contemplative portraits of people in the Catholic Jansenist sect.

Louis XIV and French Classicism

The architecture and the arts in the mid to late 17th century in France are most often referred to by the term Classicism, generally implying an adherence to certain rules of proportion and sobriety. The Baroque as it was practiced in Italy was not in French taste and Bernini’s famous proposal for redesigning the Louvre was rejected by Louis XIV.

Through propaganda, wars and great architectural works, Louis XIV launched a vast program designed for the glorification of France and his name. The Palace of Versailles, initially a tiny hunting lodge built by his father, was transformed by Louis XIV into a marvelous palace for fêtes and parties. Architect Louis Le Vau, painter and designer Charles Le Brun and the landscape architect André Le Nôtre created marvels : fountains danced; wandering revelers discovered hidden grottos in the gardens.

The initial impetus for this transformation of Versailles is generally linked to the private château Vaux-le-Vicomte built for Louis XIV’s minister of Finance Nicolas Fouquet. Having offered a lavish festival for the king in the newly finished residence in 1661 (Le Brun, Le Vau, Le Nôtre, the poet La Fontaine, the playwright Molière were all under Fouquet’s patronage), the minister was accused of misappropriation of funds and was sentenced to life imprisonment. The architects and artists under his patronage were all put to work on Versailles.

In this period, Louis’ minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert established royal control over artisanal production in France; henceforth France will no longer purchase luxury goods from abroad, but would herself set the standard for quality. This control was also seen in the creation of an Academy of painting and sculpture which maintained a hierarchy of the genres of painting (the noblest being history painting), a strong use of pictorial rhetoric and a strict sense of decorum.

The furnishings and interiors from this period are referred to as ‘’Louis XIV style’’; they are characterized by thick brocades of red and gold, heavy gilt work on plaster moldings, large sculpted sideboards, and heavy marbles.

Eventually, Versailles was transformed into the official residence of the king (1682); the Hall of Mirrors was built; other smaller châteaux like the Grand Trianon were built on the grounds; a huge canal featuring gondolas and gondoliers from Venice was created.

In his youth, Louis XIV had suffered during the civil and parliamentary insurrection known as the Fronde. By relocating to Versailles, he could avoid the dangers of the capital; he could also keep his eye very closely on the affairs of the nobles and could play them off against each other and against the newer ‘’noblesse de robe’’. Versailles became a gilded cage: to leave spelled disaster for a noble, for all official charges and appointments were made there. A strict etiquette was imposed. A word or glance from the king could make or destroy a career. The king himself followed a strict daily program, and there was little privacy.

Through his wars and the glory of Versailles, Louis became, to a certain degree, the arbiter of taste and power in Europe and both his château and the etiquette in Versailles were copied by the other European courts. Yet the difficult wars at the end of his long reign and the religious problems created by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes made the last years dark ones.

Rococo and Neoclassicism

The death of Louis XIV lead to a period of licentious freedom commonly called the Régence. The heir to Louis XIV, his great grandson Louis XV of France, was only 5 years old; for the next seven years France was ruled by the regent Philippe II of Orléans. Versailles was abandoned from 1715 to 1722. Painting turned toward ‘’fêtes galantes’’, theater settings and the female nude. Painters from this period include Antoine Watteau, Nicolas Lancret and François Boucher.

The ‘’Louis XV style’’ of decoration (although already apparent at the end of the last reign) was lighter: pastels and wood panels, smaller rooms, less gilding and fewer brocades; shells and garlands and occasional Chinese subjects predominated. Rooms were more intimate. After the return to Versailles, many of the baroque rooms of Louis XIV were redesigned. The official etiquette was also simplified and the notion of privacy was expanded: the king himself retreated from the official bed at night and conversed in private with his mistress.

The latter half of the 18th century continued to see French preeminence in Europe, particularly through the arts and sciences, and the French language was the lingua franca of the European courts. The French academic system continued to produce artists, but some, like Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, explored new and increasingly impressionist styles of painting with thick brushwork. Although the hierarchy of genres continued to be respected officially, genre painting, landscape, portrait and still life were extremely fashionable.

The writer Denis Diderot wrote a number of times on the annual Salons of the Académie of painting and sculpture and his comments and criticisms are a vital document on the arts of this period.

One of Diderot's favorite painters was Jean-Baptiste Greuze. Although often considered kitsch by today's standards, his paintings of domestic scenes reveal the importance of Sentimentalism in the European arts of the period (as also seen in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Samuel Richardson.)

One also finds in this period a kind of "Pre-romanticism". Hubert Robert's images of ruins, inspired by Italian cappricio paintings, are typical in this respect.

The middle of the 18th century saw a turn to Neoclassicism in France, that is to say a conscious use of Greek and Roman forms and iconography. In painting, the greatest representative of this style is Jacques Louis David who, mirroring the profiles of Greek vases, emphasized the use of the profile and whose subject matter often involved classical history. The dignity and subject matter of his paintings were greatly inspired by Poussin in the 17th century.

The ‘’Louis XVI style’’ of furniture (once again already present in the previous reign) tended toward circles and ovals in chair backs; chair legs were grooved; Greek inspired iconography was used as decoration.

The French neoclassical style would greatly contribute to the monumentalism of the French revolution, as typified in the structures La Madeleine church (begun in 1763 and finished in1840) which is in the form of a Greek temple and the mammouth Panthéon (1764-1812) which today houses the tombs of great Frenchmen. The rationalism and simplicity of classical architecture was seen -- in the age of Enlightenment -- as the antithesis of the backward-looking gothic.

The Greek and Roman subject matters were also often chosen to promote the values of republicanism. Rather than concentrating on the depiction of the Imperial period of Roman history, painters chose key dates from the earlier Roman Republic. One also finds paintings glorifying the heroes and martyrs of the French revolution, such as David's painting of the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, a student of David's who was also influenced by Raphael and John Flaxman, would maintain the precision of David's style, while also exploring other mythologicial (Oedipus and the sphynx, Jupiter and Thetis) and oriental (the Odalesques) subjects in the spirit of Romanticism.

Romanticism

The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars brought great changes to the arts in France. The program of exaltation and mythification of the Emperor Napoleon I of France was closely coordinated in the paintings of Gros and Guérin.

Meanwhile, Orientalism, Egyptian motifs, the tragic anti-hero, the wild landscape, the historical novel and scenes from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, all these elements of Romanticism created a vibrant period that defies easy classification.

One also finds in the early period of the 19th century a repeat of the debate carried on in the 17th between the supporters of Rubens and Poussin: there are defenders of the ‘’line’’ as found in Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and the violent colors and curves as found in Eugène Delacroix. The comparison is however somewhat false, for Ingres' intense realism sometimes gives way to amazing voluptuousness in his Turkish bath scenes.

The Romantic tendancies continued throughout the century: both idealized landscape painting and Naturalism have their seeds in Romanticism: both Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon school are logical developments, as is too the late 19th century Symbolism of such painters at Gustave Moreau (the professor of Matisse and Rouault) or Odilon Redon.

Capital of the 19th century

Walter Benjamin called Paris the capital of the 19th century. In order to understand the amazing diversity of artistic expressions which Paris gave birth to from the 1860s to the 1940s, one needs to understand both the unique experience of this city and the financial, social and political experiments that it was host to.

Baron Haussmann’s massive renovation of the city created amazing perspectives and broad boulevards, but also replaced poorer neighborhoods and created fast routes to move troops through the city to quell unrest. Yet there was also a second Paris at the limits of Haussmann’s city on the hill of Montmartre with her windmills, cabarets and vineyards. Café culture, cabarets, arcades (19th century covered malls), anarchism, the mixing of classes, the radicalization of art and artistic movements caused by the academic salon system, a boisterous willingness to shock… all this made for a stunning vibrancy. What is more, the dynamic debate in the visual arts is also repeated in the same period in music, dance, architecture and the novel: Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Proust, Nijinski…

Edouard Manet represents for many critics the division between the 19th century and the modern period (much like Charles Baudelaire in poetry). His rediscovery of Spanish painting from the golden age, his willingness to show the unpainted canvas, his exploration of the forthright nude and his radical brush strokes are the first step toward Impressionism.

Impressionism will take the Barbizon school one further, rejecting once and for all a belabored style (and the use of mixed colors and black), for fragile transitive effects of light as captured outdoors in changing light (in part inspired by the paintings of Turner). Claude Monet with his cathedrals and haystacks, Pierre-Auguste Renoir with both his early outdoor festivals and his later feathery style of ruddy nudes, Edgar Degas with his dancers and bathers.

Some of these techniques were made possible by new paints available in tubes. These painters were also to a certain degree in a dialogue with another discovery of the 19th century: photography.

From this point on, the next thirty years are a litany of amazing experiments. Vincent Van Gogh, Dutch born but living in France, opened the road to expressionism. Georges Seurat, influenced by color theory, devised a pointillist technique that controled the Impressionist experiment. Paul Cézanne, a painter’s painter, attempted a geometrical exploration of the world (that left many of his peers indifferent). Paul Gauguin, the banker, found symbolism in Brittany and then exoticism and primitivism in French Polynesia. Henri Rousseau, the self-taught dabbler, becomes the model for the naïve revolution.

The products of the far east brought new influences. Les Nabis explored a decorative art in flat plains with a Japanese print graphic approach. The discovery of African tribal masks lead Pablo Picasso to his ‘’Demoiselles d’Avignon’’ of 1907. Picasso and Georges Braque (working independantly) returned to and refined Cézanne’s way of rationally understanding objects in a flat medium; but their experiments in cubism would also lead them to integrate all aspects of the day to day life: collage of newspapers, musical instruments, cigarettes, wine… Cubism in all its phases would dominate Europe and America for the next ten years.

At roughly the same time, Les Fauves (or “wild beast”), exploded in color (much like German Expressionism).

Dada and Surrealism

World War I did not stop the dynamic creation. In 1916 a group of discontents met in a bar in Zurich (the Cabaret Voltaire) and create the most radical gesture possible: the anti-art of Dada. At the same time, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp in Paris were exploring similar notions. In an art show in New York in 1917 Duchamp present a white porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt” as work of art, becoming the father of the ‘’readymade’’.

This was also the period when the "Lost Generation" took hold: rich Americans enjoying the liberties of Prohibition free France in the 1920s and poor G.I.’s going abroad for the first time. Paris was also, for African Americans, amazingly free of the racial restrictions found in America (James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Josephine Baker).

When Dada reached Paris, it was avidly embraced by a group of young artists and writers who were fascinated with the writings of Sigmund Freud, and particularly by the notion of the unconscious mind. The provocative spirit of dada became linked to the exploration of the unconscious mind through the use of automatic writing, chance operations and, in some cases, altered states. The surrealists quickly turned to painting and sculpture. The shock of unexpected elements, the use of frottage, collage and decalcomania, the rendering of mysterious landscapes and dreamscapes were to become the key techniques through the rest of the 1930s.

World War II ended the feast. Many surrealists (like Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, André Breton and André Masson fled occupied France for New York and the States (Duchamp had already been in the U.S. since 1936), but the cohesion and vibrancy were lost in the American geometric city.

Meanwhile a new generation of Americans were making art that finally owed nothing (or nearly so) to the old world.

Post War

The French art scene immediately after the war went roughly in two directions. There were those who continued in the artistic experiments, especially surrealism, from before the war, and there were those who took on the new Abstract Expressionism and action painting from New York and tried them in a French manner (Tachism).

Chronological List of French Artists

Medium is indicated with P (painter), S (sculptor), G (engraver), Ph (Photography), O (other).

See also European art history, Art history and History of Painting.

Middle Ages

See also Middle Ages, Gothic architecture, Illuminated manuscript

Renaissance

See also Renaissance, Francis I of France, Henri II of France, Henri III of France, Henri IV of France, Louvre, Fontainebleau.

17th Century

See also Louis XIII of France, Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIV of France, Palace of Versailles, Classicism, Baroque.

18th Century

See also Palace of Versailles, Louis XV of France, Madame de Pompadour, Rococo, Louis XVI of France. For art criticism, see Denis Diderot.

19th Century (From Romanticism To Impressionism)

19th Century (From Impressionism to Fauvism)

20th Century (Pre World War II)

20th Century (Post World War II)

Chronological List of Artistic Movements

The following is a chronological list of artistic movements or periods in France indicating artists who are sometimes associated or grouped with those movements. See also European art history, Art history and History of Painting and Art movement.

School of Fontainebleau

The Ecole de Fontainebleau was in fact two periods of artistic work in the Renaissance at the Château of Fontainebleau.

First School (from 1526)

Second School (from 1590s)

Classicism

See as well Louis XIV of France, Palace of Versailles, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis Le Vau, Jules Hardouin Mansart, Baroque.

Rococo

See as well Louis XV of France, Palace of Versailles.

Romanticism

See also French Revolution, Napoleon I of France, Victor Hugo.

L'Art-Pompier

See also Academic art, Napoleon III of France, Second Empire. The expression pompier is pejorative and means pompous ; it refers to Academic painters in the mid to late 19th century.

Naturalism

Barbizon School

The Ecole de Barbizon was a landscape and outdoor art movement which preceded Impressionism. The city is near the forest of Fontainebleau.

Impressionism

From around 1872.

Post-Impressionism

Pont-Aven School

Pont-Aven is a town on the coast of Brittany frequented by artists in the late 19th century (1886-1888).

Symbolism

Les Nabis

The expression comes from the Hebrew word for ”prophets”; from around 1888.

Les Fauves

The term means “wild beasts”. They first appeared at the salon of Autumn 1905-1908.

Cubism

“Cézanne period” (1907-1909); “Analytic period” (1909-1912); “Synthetic period” (1913-1914).

Orphism

Sometimes called "Cubic Orphism"; compare to the British Vorticism.

Dada

Surrealism

School of Paris

The Ecole de Paris starts from around 1925.

Tachism or L’art informel

See also Abstract Expressionism.

Op Art

Lettrism

Situationist

Though not an art movement per se, the Situationists did produce much détournement of art. See also May 1968 for work from the attelier populaire.

Fluxus

French Photographers

See also List of photographers.


Museums in France

Paris

  • Musée du Louvre
  • Musée d'Orsay - 19th century art (national collection)
  • Centre Pompidou (Beaubourg) - 20th century art (national collection)
  • Musée National du Moyen âge (Cluny) - medieval collection
  • Palais de Tokyo - 20th century art
  • Musée Guimet - Asian art
  • Grand Palais - changing expositions
  • Petit Palais
  • Le Jeu de Paume - changing expositions
  • Musée Picasso - the artist
  • Musée Rodin - the scultor
  • Musée Zadkine - the sculptor
  • Fondation Dubuffet - the sculptor and painter
  • Musée Carnavalet - Paris and the 17th century in a former mansion
  • Musée Jacquemart-André - private collection from the renaissance to the 19th century
  • Fondation Cartier - contemporary Art
  • Centre National de la Photography
  • Musée Bourdelle - the sculptor
  • Musée Dapper - African art
  • Musée Gustave Moreau - the symbolist painter
  • Manufacture des Gobelins - tapistries and weaving from the 17th century
  • Musée Nissim de Camondo - private collection of 18th century works
  • Musée Maillol - Fondation Dina Vierny - the scuptor
  • Maison Européenne de la Photographie
  • Musée de Céramique à Sèvres

Near Paris

Northern France

Southern France

Institutions, Salons and Exhibitions

The Académie française was founded in 1634 by Cardinal Richelieu. It is concerned with the French language.

The Académie des beaux-arts was created in 1816 by the reunion of the Académie de peinture et sculpture founded by Cardinal Mazarin in 1648 and the Académie d'architecture fouded by Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 1671. It is responsible for the Académie de France in the villa Médicis in Rome, founded in 1666.

From the 17th to the 20th century, the Académie organized official painting exhibitions called Salons. To show at a salon, a young artist needed to be received by the Académie by first submitting an artwork to the jury; only Académie artists could be shown in the salons. Salons were started under Louis XIV and continued from 1667-1704. They start up again in 1725. Under Louis XV, the most prestigious Salon is the one that takes place in the Salon carré of the Louvre, but there are also salons in Bordeaux, Lille and Toulouse.

In the 19th century, the salon system frequently incited criticism from artists for the bland or academic quality of the artwork, while radical artists (like Edouard Manet) would not be received or would be greatly censured by the "respectable" public. The salon system thus forced radical and modern artists to seek alternative or "unofficial" exhibition sites. This is especially true for Les Nabis and Les Fauves.

The Exposition universelle de Paris - a kind of world's fair - was held in Paris in 1889. It was for this fair that the Eiffel Tower was built (1887-1889).

The Grand Palais and the Petit Palais were built as exhibition halls for the 1900 World's Exhibition.

Paris was also the site of two world exhibitions on decorative arts. The Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes in 1925 launched the style called Moderne, or "Streamline Moderne" or "Art Deco". The subsequent exhibition in 1937 saw, to a certain degre, the end of this style; the Palais de Tokyo was built for this exhibition.

See also List of world's fairs.

Vocabulary

French words and expressions dealing with the arts:

  • peinture - painting
  • tableau - painting
  • gravure - engraving
  • dessin - drawing
  • aquarelle - watercolor
  • croquis - drawing
  • ébauche - drawing
  • crayon - pencil, a pencil drawing

Reference Works

Anthony Blunt. Art and Architecture in France 1500-1700 . ISBN 0300053142

External Sites

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