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Watteau's painted conversations art, literature, and talk in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France

This study fully investigates, for the first time, the art of conversation as the privileged occupation of the society Watteau depicted. Recognizing the self-reflexive nature of social discourse, Watteau represented conversation in a way that defined and called attention to his new manner of painting. This representation of the functioning and forms of his own art is confirmed by Michel Foucault's analysis of the transformation of language beginning in the classical age. The new primacy of the spoken word in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century France, became linked to and reinforced: (1) the discreet, civilizing rhetoric of Watteau's subjects, (2) his insistent representation of artistic behavior and artistic process, (3) the open-ended character of his images that call for the beholder's visual and verbal participation, and (4) his liberation of high art from its traditional dependency on the written word.

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  • "Art, literature, and talk in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France"@en

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description

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  • "Antoine Watteau painted his engaging and ravishing fetes galantes during a period in which the art of polite conversation flourished in France. In this innovative study, Mary Vidal shows that conversation was central to Watteau's images of sociability and provided the framework for figural and formal relationships even in his military, mythological, theatrical, and religious works. Vidal argues that Watteau's paintings were not mere literal descriptions of social behaviour but represented conversation as part of an aesthetic, linguistic, and ethical system, as an art of living. Vidal shows that Watteau's focus on conversation was related to several developments in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France: the rise and elaboration of an art of conversation, the intimate connection between polite discourse and the redefinition of the nobility, the flourishing of women's salons in Paris, and the development of the literary genre of the written conversation. Watteau, in common with writers such as Moliere, Scudery, Fontenelle, and Marivaux, recognized speech as the central sign system of French society. He identified the witty, improvisational, fluid, and open-ended characteristics of fine conversation with his new manner of painting. Through this analogy, he presented the artistic process itself as the main concern of the elite artist, in contrast to the scholarly, text-dependent images of the Academy. Yet in choosing conversation as his subject, Watteau also associated his art with the subtle rhetoric and self-reflexive, civilizing behavior of polite society. In his conversational artmaking, Watteau set up complex dialogic relationships between spoken words and images, past and present art, art and society, viewer and painting. Often regarded as merely erotic and decorative, his painted conversations are here shown to be also works of substance, ideas, and morals comparable with those of the greatest conversationalists, writers, and artists of his age."
  • "This study fully investigates, for the first time, the art of conversation as the privileged occupation of the society Watteau depicted. Recognizing the self-reflexive nature of social discourse, Watteau represented conversation in a way that defined and called attention to his new manner of painting. This representation of the functioning and forms of his own art is confirmed by Michel Foucault's analysis of the transformation of language beginning in the classical age. The new primacy of the spoken word in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century France, became linked to and reinforced: (1) the discreet, civilizing rhetoric of Watteau's subjects, (2) his insistent representation of artistic behavior and artistic process, (3) the open-ended character of his images that call for the beholder's visual and verbal participation, and (4) his liberation of high art from its traditional dependency on the written word."@en

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  • "Pictorial works"@en
  • "Pictorial works"
  • "Criticism, interpretation, etc"@en
  • "Criticism, interpretation, etc"

name

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  • "Watteau's painted conversations : art, literature, and talk in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century France"
  • "Watteau's painted conversations art, literature, and talk in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France"@en
  • "Watteau's painted conversations : art, literature and talk in seventeenth and eighteenth century France"
  • "Watteau's painted conversations : art, literature, and talk in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France"@en
  • "Watteau's painted conversations : art, literature, and talk in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France"
  • "Watteau's painted conversations : art, literature, and talk in seventeenth and eighteenth century France"@en
  • "Watteau's painted conversations art, literature, and talk in seventeenth and eighteenth century France"
  • "Watteau's painted conversations art, literature, and talk in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century France"@en
  • "Watteau's painted conversations : art, literature, and talk in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century France"@en
  • "Watteau's painted conversations: Art, literature, and talk in seventeenth aund eighteenth century France"
  • "Watteau's painted conversations : art, literature and talk in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France"

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