Volume 44, Number 15 · October 9, 1997
The Riddle of the French Renaissance
By Willibald Sauerländer
L'Art de la Renaissance en France: L'invention du classicisme
by Henri Zerner
Paris: Flammarion, 414 pp., 595 FF
The predominance of French art has been one of the longest-standing myths of Western civilization. It was only in the aftermath of World War II with the rise of the New York School that the belief in the superiority of the French genius in the visual arts began slowly to fade. The great works and traditions that gave shape to this myth included the Gothic cathedrals at Chartres, Paris, and Reims, the splendor of Versailles, and, not least, the predominant influence of the 'École de Paris,' from Delacroix to Picasso and Braque, on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. French Gothic was imitated everywhere in Europe; Versailles was the model for numberless castles and palaces from Spain to Russia; the Impressionists, the Fauves, and the Cubists were the models for nearly all modern painting up to the late 1940s. In 1939, just after the beginning of the war, Paul Valéry declared in a lecture on 'Pensée et l'Art français': 'It is our particularity to consider ourselves as universal.'
Review, 3998 words
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