ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network:

“Modernism Adrift: Meier-Graefe at the Edge of Impressionism”

Dr. Victor Claass (INHA)

Thursday 24 October, 1700 (BST) / 1800 (CEST) / 1200 (EDT) / 0900 (PDT)

With his pioneering writings on modern art, German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe (1867–1935) played a decisive role in the canonization of Impressionism at the turn of the twentieth century. By subversively defending the paintings of Manet, Renoir, and Cézanne across the Rhine, he alienated the conservative elites of the Empire, who remained suspicious of the spread of modernism. Throughout his Franco-German career, which was punctuated by virulent polemics and shaken by the outbreak of the First World War, Meier-Graefe fought against the grip nationalism held on artistic narratives. His project to regenerate German culture was thus inseparable from his efforts to federate a pacified Europe of images. While his Francophile progressivism and the vitalism of his approach to painting have sometimes been emphasized, a study of his involvement in the cultural-political debates of his time reveals a more nuanced personality. This paper will analyze the surprising jolts and paradoxes of Meier-Graefe’s transnational career, which alternated between phases of unbridled enthusiasm and intense disillusionment. Meier-Graefe reveals himself as a thinker of the decline of culture and a champion of an idealized vision of modernism, of which Impressionism incarnated both the quintessence and the swan song.
 

Victor Claass holds a PhD from the Sorbonne University. His doctoral thesis on German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe was awarded the Orsay Museum Prize in 2018. He was a research assistant at the German Center for Art History in Paris (2012–15), before participating in the international research group Bilderfahrzeuge: Aby Warburg’s Legacy and the Future of Iconology (2015–18). After a postdoctoral year at the Louvre Museum, Victor Claass joined the National Institute of Art History in Paris in 2019, where he works as a research coordinator.
He is the author of Jeux de positions. Sur quelques billards peints (2021), a visual and social history of the game of billiards; directed a special issue of scholarly magazine Perspective about art transportation (2022); and recently co-edited En couple. Historiennes et historiens de l’art au travail (2024), a collection of essays about art historian couples. Based on his doctoral project, his latest monograph, L’impressionnisme à ses frontières Le cas Meier-Graefe et la lutte pour l’art moderne en Allemagne was published in late 2023 by the German Center for Art History.