Jody Blake demonstrates in this book that although the impact of African-American music and dance in France was constant from 1900 to 1930, it was not unchanging. This was due in part to the stylistic development and diversity of African-American music and dance, from the prewar cakewalk and ragtime to the postwar Charleston and jazz. Successive groups of modernists, beginning with the Matisse and Picasso circle in the 1900s and concluding with the Surrealists and Purists in the 1920s, constructed different versions of la musique and la danse negre. Manifested in creative and critical works, these responses to African-American music and dance reflected the modernists' varying artistic agendas and historical climates.

"French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars illustrates that coping with trauma was a central concern for French musicians active after World War I. The losses and violent warfare of World War I shaped how interwar French musicians-from those fighting in the trenches and working in military hospitals to more well-known musicians-engaged with music. Situated at the intersections of musicology, history, sound and performance studies, and psychology and trauma studies, Resonant Recoveries argues that modernists' compositions and musical activities were sonorous locations for managing and performing trauma. Through analysis of archival materials, French medical, philosophical, and literary texts, and the music produced between the wars, this book illuminates how music emerged during World War I as an embodied technology of consolation. Resonant Recoveries demonstrates that music making came to be understood by French interwar musicians as a consolatory practice that enhanced their abilities to remember lost loved ones, gave them opportunities to perform their grief publicly and privately, allowed them to create healing bonds of friendship, and soothed them with sonic vibrations and the rhythmically regular bodily movements required in order to perform many French neoclassical compositions. In revealing the importance music making held for interwar French musicians, this book refigures French modernist music as a therapeutic medium for creators, performers, and audiences, while also underlining the importance of addressing trauma, mourning, and people's emotional lives in music scholarship"--

A narrative history of the founding of the Louvre that also explores the ideological underpinnings, pedagogical aims, and aesthetic criteria of this, the first great national art museum.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the first modern, public museums of art—civic, state, or national—appeared throughout Europe, setting a standard for the nature of such institutions that has made its influence felt to the present day. Although the emergence of these museums was an international development, their shared history has not been systematically explored until now. Taking up that project, this volume includes chapters on fifteen of the earliest and still major examples, from the Capitoline Museum in Rome, opened in 1734, to the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, opened in 1836. These essays consider a number of issues, such as the nature, display, and growth of the museums’ collections and the role of the institutions in educating the public. The introductory chapters by art historian Carole Paul, the volume’s editor, lay out the relationship among the various museums and discuss their evolution from private noble and royal collections to public institutions. In concert, the accounts of the individual museums give a comprehensive overview, providing a basis for understanding how the collective emergence of public art museums is indicative of the cultural, social, and political shifts that mark the transformation from the early-modern to the modern world. The fourteen distinguished contributors to the book include Robert G. W. Anderson, former director of the British Museum in London; Paula Findlen, Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University; Thomas Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute; and Andrew McClellan, dean of academic affairs and professor of art history at Tufts University. Show more Show less

This volume explores the ways in which the aesthetics of public art were affected by the social, political, and cultural changes of the Enlightenment.