Claire Moran – författare

Restoring the role of theatrical performance as both subject and trope in the aesthetics of self-representation, Staging the Artist questions how nineteenth-century French and Belgian artists self-consciously fashioned their identities through their art and writings. This emphasis on performance allows for a new understanding of the processes of self-fashioning which underlie self-representation in word and image. Claire Moran offers new interpretations of works by major nineteenth-century figures such as Paul Gauguin and Edgar Degas, and addresses the neglected topic of the function of theatre in the development of modern visual art. Incarnating Baudelaire's metaphor of the artist as an actor ever-conscious of his role, the artists discussed "Courbet, Ensor and Van Gogh, among others" employed theatre as both a thematic source and formal inspiration in their painting, writings and social behaviour. Moran argues that what renders this visual, literary and social performance modern is its self-consciousness, which in turn serves as a model with which to challenge pictorial convention. This book suggests that tracing modern performance and artistic identity to the nineteenth century provides a greater understanding not only of the significance of theatre in the development of modern art, but also highlights the self-conscious staging inherent to modern artistic identity.

This volume reframes French Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) in the history of art via a focus on the spaces and people that informed her work and thereby offers a new interpretation of Impressionism and of modernist aesthetics. Claire Moran utilizes close visual analyses of artworks, in particular those of family, friends and domestic servants; textual analysis of Morisot’s journals and letters; investigation of late nineteenth-century advice manuals, magazines and advertisements in relation to Morisot’s life and work; examination of house floor plans and gardens; and the study of specific household objects that recur in her work and their history. This multi-pronged method of analysis, grounded in Morisot’s lived experience, allows a new understanding of Morisot’s art to emerge, one that will not only highlight the modernity of her aesthetics, but also question both public and critical assumptions about Impressionism. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, gender studies, French studies and history of design.

Restoring the role of theatrical performance as both subject and trope in the aesthetics of self-representation, Staging the Artist questions how nineteenth-century French and Belgian artists self-consciously fashioned their identities through their art and writings. This emphasis on performance allows for a new understanding of the processes of self-fashioning which underlie self-representation in word and image. Claire Moran offers new interpretations of works by major nineteenth-century figures such as Paul Gauguin and Edgar Degas, and addresses the neglected topic of the function of theatre in the development of modern visual art. Incarnating Baudelaire's metaphor of the artist as an actor ever-conscious of his role, the artists discussed "Courbet, Ensor and Van Gogh, among others" employed theatre as both a thematic source and formal inspiration in their painting, writings and social behaviour. Moran argues that what renders this visual, literary and social performance modern is its self-consciousness, which in turn serves as a model with which to challenge pictorial convention. This book suggests that tracing modern performance and artistic identity to the nineteenth century provides a greater understanding not only of the significance of theatre in the development of modern art, but also highlights the self-conscious staging inherent to modern artistic identity.

Domestic Space in France and Belgium offers a new addition to the growing body of work in Interior Studies. Focused on late 19th and early 20th-century France and Belgium, it addresses an overlooked area of modernity: the domestic sphere and its conception and representation in art, literature and material culture. Scholars from the US, UK, France, Italy, Canada and Belgium offer fresh and exciting interpretations of artworks, texts and modern homes. Comparative and interdisciplinary, it shows through a series of case-studies in literature, art and architecture, how modernity was expressed through domestic life at the turn of the century in France and Belgium.

This collection of essays explores the relationship between art, literature and the stage in France and Belgium in the period 1830-1910. It is the first book to bring together scholarship on this neglected area of study and provides unique insights into current research within this rich interdisciplinary field. The rise in popular theatre, the beginnings of a ‘society of spectacle’, the emergence of the print media and the development of stage direction and set design, along with the crisis in pictorial and literary representation, created a dynamic cultural climate wherein the interface between writing, painting and dramatic representation thrived. The chapters in this volume chart different facets of this phenomenon: from the art of performing assumed by writers and the collaborations between artists and theatre directors to the theatrical motifs that infiltrated visual art and the increasingly ‘dramatized’ relationship between painting and spectator at the end of the century.