Alternative Narratives

This essay examines the undoing of grand narrative history painting in post-Revolutionary France, focusing on the vitally experimental 1820s to 1840s. It assembles a broad range of visual material to bring out the underacknowledged significance of the period between the demise of late neoclassicism and rise of a realist and then modernist practice. Rather than being impotently 'shadowed' by David or unready for the modernism to come, artists negotiated the formal effects of a proliferation of artworks and a de-hierarchization of subject matter and genres as the conditions of artistic practice. Responding to larger changes in the socioeconomic landscape, serious narrative painting took different forms that unsettled conventional notions of the totality and unity of the work of art. In contrast to pursuing a closely focused specialist study, the essay proposes a speculative interpretation of trends in artistic practice in an effort to think across the period and with its discontinuities.