Deaths of Henri Regnault
This is the first book in English on Henri Regnault (1843-71), a forgotten star of the European fin-de-siecle. A brilliant maverick who once seemed to hold the future of French painting in his hands, Regnault enjoyed a meteoric rise that was cut short when he died at the age of twenty-seven in the Franco-Prussian War. The story of his glamorous career and patriotic death colored French commemorative culture for nearly forty years – until his memory was swept away by the vast losses of World War I. In "The Deaths of Henri Regnault", Marc Gotlieb reintroduces this important artist while offering a new perspective on the ultimate decline of nineteenth-century salon painting. Gotlieb traces Regnault's trajectory after he won the prestigious Grand Prix de Rome, a fellowship that provided four years of study in Italy. Arriving in Rome, however, Regnault suffered a profound crisis of originality that led him to flee the city in favor of Spain and Morocco. But the crisis also proved productive: from Rome, Madrid, Tangier, and Paris, Regnault enthralled audiences with a bold suite of strange, seductive, and violent Orientalist paintings inspired by his exotic journey – images that, Gotlieb argues, arose precisely from the crisis that had overtaken Regnault and that in key respects was shared by his more avant-garde counterparts. Both an in-depth look at Regnault's violent art and a vibrant essay on historical memory, "The Deaths of Henri Regnault" lays bare a creative legend who helped shape the collective experience of a generation.
About the Author
Marc Gotlieb is the Class of 1955 Professor of Art at Williams College and director of the Williams College / Clark Art Institute graduate program in the history of art. He is the author of "The Plight of Emulation: Ernest Meissonier and French Salon Painting".
Reviews
"It would be hard to think of another book that encompasses the oeuvre, career, and reputation of a particular artist, let alone one that handles the topic with such archival perspicuousness, better than Marc Gotlieb's study of the ups and downs of Henri Regnault. It is nothing short of a tour de force" – Hollis Clayson, author of "Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life under Siege (1870-1871)"
"'The Deaths of Henri Regnault' is a joy to read. Gotlieb portrays Regnault as a rambunctious rebel who sought out the sublime, an artist who escaped the outmoded requirements and inimitable canons of the French academy. At the same time, we learn that Regnault was concerned with some of the same fundamental pictorial problems as his modernist contemporaries. This book shows Regnault to be a critically significant artist, important for advancing the study of nineteenth-century art beyond the conventional academic-modernist divide" – Martha Ward, coauthor of "Looking and Listening in Nineteenth-Century France"
"'The Deaths of Henri Regnault' is a terrific achievement – a brilliant and highly original study not just of the short career of an ambitious Orientalist painter, but equally of the complex and fascinating vicissitudes of Regnault's reputation following his heroic death in the Franco-Prussian War. It's hard to know what to praise more – Gotlieb's superb analyses of key paintings in the light of contemporaneous art criticism, his wide-ranging discussion of the larger context of the Orientalist obsession with light, or his painstaking and continually surprising excavation of responses to Regnault's art and death from the 1870s to the present" – Michael Fried, author of "Courbet's Realism"
