Ausdrucksformen- Die Suche nach einer expressiven Sprache in der französischen Genremalerei des 18. Jahrhunderts

Walsh, Linda (2012). Ausdrucksformen- Die Suche nach einer expressiven Sprache in der französischen Genremalerei des 18. Jahrhunderts. In: Klein, Tobias R. and Porath, Erik eds. Figuren des Ausdrucks: Formation einer Wissenskategorie zwischen 1700 und 1850. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, pp. 125–146.

URL: http://www.fink.de/katalog/titel/978-3-7705-5008-1...

Abstract

My argument in this paper is that mid eighteenth-century French art criticism and aesthetic theory struggled with models of visual expression inherited from the previous century, and particularly with the expressive prototypes formulated by Charles Le Brun (1619-1690). By ‘expression’ I refer specifically here to the representation of emotion in the faces and bodies of painted human figures. This struggle was particularly evident in responses to genre paintings, that is paintings representing scenes from everyday contemporary life, which carried greater expectations of naturalism. As a mode of visual expression genre painting occupied a point some where between the binary opposites in play in contemporary aesthetic discourse. These opposites were as follows: mannerism and nature; exaggeration and decorum; the explicit and the open or suggestive; the violent and the gentle; variety and unity. It was often a matter of finding the right point on the spectrum joining these opposites: a matter of visual tone or register. I demonstrate this quest by reference to the mid-1760s salon criticism of Denis Diderot (1713-1784) and to the theoretical writing of Michel-François Dandré-Bardon (1700-1783).

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