Publication : “Artistische Wanderer : Die Künstler(e)migranten der Französischen Revolution”.

WALCZAK Gerrit, Artistische Wanderer : Die Künstler(e)migranten der Französischen Revolution, Berlin, Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2019, 448 p.

Présentation de l’éditeur :

Dozens of painters were part of the emigration occasioned by the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Whether French or foreigners established in France, these artists were driven out of the country by the rapid demise of the art market in the wake of political instability. Yet the dynamics of radicalization and war soon eroded distinction between economic migration and political exile.

Whether officially designated as émigrés or not, painters such as Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, Jean-Laurent Mosnier, Henri-Pierre Danloux, François-Xavier Fabre, and Louis Gauffier practiced their profession in Rome and Florence, London, Hamburg and Saint Petersburg. Whilst some of them established themselves in their host countries until the end of the Revolution, others successively transferred between the European metropoles. This first comprehensive study of the Revolution’s “artistic wanderers”—a term coined in Hamburg in 1799—traces their transnational itineraries and investigates productions shaped by transfer, acculturation, and innovation.

Gerrit Walczak is habilitated adjunct professor (Privatdozent) of art history at the Technical University Berlin, and has previously taught at the universities of Bochum, Köln, and Greifswald. He presently serves as interim editor of the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte. His research focuses on the transnational migration of artists, on 18th-century art, its academies, and the art market. He is the author of Bürgerkünstler: Künstler, Staat und Öffentlichkeit im Paris der Aufklärung und Revolution (Deutscher Kunstverlag 2015).

C O N T E N T S

Here translated from the German

1  Introduction: Revolution and Mobility
Migration, Emigration, and Exile
Itinerant Artists and their Trajectories
Art Markets and Exile Art

2  Paris: The Initial Conditions of Artistic Emigration
The Fiction of Escape
Economy and Violence
Anti-Emigration Laws and Repression

3  Rome: The French Academy and the Revolution
Rome and Paris until the Fall of the Monarchy
Commission and Appropriations
The End of the French Academy and its Fallout

4  Florence: Exiles, Tourists, and Occupiers
History Paintings for Foreigners
Tuscan Landscapes
French Grand Tour-Portraiture

5  London: Rivalries and Confrontations
Genius loci
Acculturation and its Limits
Political Stances

6  Hamburg: A Place of Passage
The Lure of Boom Economy
Tradesmen and other Clients
Reception and Receptivity

7  Saint Petersburg: Integration / Extraction
Providers to the Imperial Court
Modes of Transfer
Flux and Reflux

8  Coda: Re-migrations
The Salon of 1802
Humiliations
Souvenirs