Painting for the Salon? The French State, Artists and Academy, 1830-1852

Over the last forty years the extensive reappraisal of the history of French art of the nineteenth century, of which the creation of the Musée d'Orsay, inaugurated in 1986, is the most visible public embodiment, has not to date been accompanied by a corresponding reappraisal of the role of the French institutions for which this art was created and through which it reached its public and patrons. The most important of these institutions was the annual or biennial exhibition of contemporary art held in Paris during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and known as the Salon, yet despite its importance, there exists no serious history of this exhibition. This project aims i) to lay the groundwork for this history by establishing its framework and methodology and ii) to produce the first significant critical mass of research on this history by targeting one of its decisive phases, that of the period 1830-1852, comprising the July Monarchy (1830-1848) and Second Republic (1848-1852) and marked by the regime changes resulting from the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and Louis-Napoleon's coup d'état of December 1851.

As the French art historian G.-G. Lemaire stated in 1988 in Esquisses en vue d'une histoire du Salon, the Paris Fine Art Salon was unique among European art institutions in being tied so closely and for such a long period to the institutions of the State. Artists worked for the Salon, which provided essential access to state commissions, purchases and honours, as well as to private buyers. It was a key site in which the major contemporary artistic and cultural debates and confrontations were played out and was a major event in the Parisian nineteenth-century annual or biennial social and cultural calendar, attracting huge crowds over a period of three months or more. It was central to the development of art journalism from 1836. For these reasons Lemaire argued that in the nineteenth century French art and the Salon formed a single history, the one inseparable from the other.

This 'single history' view of the Paris Fine Art Salon has, however, been largely prejudicial to our understanding of its wider role in the history of French art for it has reinforced the reductive view of the history of the Salon as that of the individual works, artists, artistic styles, movements or genres shown there. Aligned in this way with the story of modern art and its construction of the avant-garde, the Salon's role has been reduced to that of a conservative institution hostile to the work of innovative art or artists. This project aims to replace this limited representation of the Salon's role with the first study of the Salon as a network of relationships bringing together government policy, administrative structures and artistic and cultural practices in an institution for which art was produced, through which it was circulated and in which it was analysed or ignored, sold or returned unsold.

The project will build on work already in progress in the two research groups with which the Principal Investigator has been engaged since 2003, as co-editor of the critical edition of the Salon reviews published by Théophile Gautier, France's most important art journalist of the period 1830-1872, and of a collection of essays on the history of the Salon, 1791-1890, to be published in the autumn of 2009. It will generate a critical mass of new published research (one co-authored book, one co-edited volume of conference proceedings, one co-authored dual-language English/French exhibition catalogue and one PhD thesis) designed to embed the institutional dimension in future art historical research, and an exhibition whose aim will be to educate the public and the wider academic community into the significance of the institutional dimension in cultural and art history.

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