FREN 3765

The Spectacular Fin-de-siecle

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2015-2016.

This course traces the exchanges between spectacular entertainments and avant-garde art that shaped late nineteenth-century European visual culture, and gave rise to collective spectatorship transgressing anarchist, bohemian, and bourgeois boundaries. We begin with politically-charged Montmartre cabarets—Le Chat Noir, Moulin Rouge—where shadow theater, acrobats, and quadrille dancers inspired the street posters of Toulouse-Lautrec, Steinlin, and Vallotton. We follow their influence to James Ensor's Ostend carnivals and Les XX (The Twenty), the painters' coalition dedicated to the Belgian Workers Party, and then look at fin-de-siècle print culture through Redon's haunting "noirs," lithographic albums inspired by Poe's tales of horror. We consider the Pont Aven Symbolists' turn from material to dream worlds visualized through stained glass and medieval tapestry; the close ties between Neo-impressionist painters and anarchist art critics; the Nabis (Prophets) pre-cinematic crowd scenes and the Lumière Brothers; and why the Nabis Vuillard and Bonnard abandoned their easels for costume and set design at the Théâtre d'Art. We consider the 1889 exposition universelle and the pavilions that fueled mass colonial fantasies and Gauguin's departure for Tahiti. Woven throughout are larger performances of decadence, crowds, and hysteria as modernity, and tensions between industrial life and utopic longing that led Symbolists to read Monet's Giverny grainstacks series as cosmic orbs, "the terrestrial life of the globe and the course of earth through space." We will see the epoch illumined by marvel—electric lighting, phantasmagoria, Jules Verne's voyages, and Méliès' enchanted cinema.

When Offered Spring.

Breadth Requirement (HB)
Distribution Category (LA-AS)

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