French Modernisms - Perspectives on Art Before, During, and After Vichy (Relié)

French Modernisms: Perspectives on Art Before, During, and After Vichy examines the period 1937 to 1968 by looking at the margins of official art history. The author focuses on underreported exhibitions of modern French art, atypical visual artifacts, aberrant art criticism (Fascist or Vichy-inspired but also anti-establishment). Her Benjaminian approach uncovers surprising continuities in the French attitude toward the "other": a hybrid of anti-foreigner, anti-Semitic, anti-American protectionism, and little resistance to cultural narcissism.
Cone's analyses demonstrate that France attempted to safeguard the integrity of indigenous traditions in painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts not only during Vichy but throughout the period under consideration. Cone also argues that the French art establishment may have caused its own downfall after World War II by continuing to privilege an art of national identity and national tradition based on outmoded concepts of beauty.
Thus, she concludes, postwar French modernisms could not compete with either the so-called invasion of American Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s or American Pop art in the 1960s.