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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2015

The German Century? How a Geopolitical Approach Could Transform The History of Modernism

Résumé

Geopolitics provides a model for studying power relations within the art world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,7 when the concept of national identities strongly influenced the history of art.8 The geopolitical approach, as we define it, follows the three levels of analysis Fernand Braudel distinguished in his Mediterranean: the longue durée of history and geography, the cycle of socio-economical fluxes and transnational circulations, and the finer scale of events, crisis, and artworks.9 Within those three levels, the geopolitical method understands as object what Pierre Bourdieu would call the international field of arts; that is to say, the social, transnational space polarized and regulated by values and institutions accepted or contested within the field,10 as well as the discourses—in the Foucauldian sense—that populate and define it. In the international field of modern art, people, objects, and ideas from various origins circulate, engage in dialogue, and compete, crossing over many national fields. It is in these intersections between national and international fields that the trajectories of artistic movements and artists’ careers fall or flourish. Our current representation of the art world (hierarchical and centralized) and of the history of modern art (evolutionist and diffusionist) results from this very system. To study those trajectories in the context of longue durée of cycles and events, we rely on different methodological tools ranging from cartography and statistics to prosopography and close readings of texts and artifacts. Such a comprehensive approach provides the foundations for a global history of modern art that is circulatory and inclusive, instead of hierarchical and exclusive. By throwing a new light on the very objects of modernist stories, artworks, artists—be they avant-garde or not—, and innovation, a geopolitical study of the modern/modernist field finally challenges and enriches our understanding and knowledge of artists’ oeuvres and individual artworks.
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hal-01479061 , version 1 (12-02-2018)

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Catherine Dossin, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel. The German Century? How a Geopolitical Approach Could Transform The History of Modernism. Circulations in the Global History of Art, Ashgate / Routledge, 2015, 9781472454560. ⟨hal-01479061⟩
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