Description:
From a Nation Torn provides a powerful critique of art history's understanding of French modernism and the historical circumstances that shaped its production and reception. Within art history, the aesthetic practices and theories that emerged in France from the late 1940s into the 1960s are demarcated as postwar. Yet it was during these very decades that France fought a protracted series of wars to maintain its far-flung colonial empire. Given that French modernism was created during, rather than after, war, Hannah Feldman argues that its interpretation must incorporate the tumultuous "decades of decolonization"and their profound influence on visual and public culture. Focusing on the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962) and the historical continuities it presented with the experience of the Second World War, Feldman highlights decolonization's formative effects on art and related theories of representation, both political and aesthetic. Ultimately, From a Nation Torn constitutes a profound exploration of how certain populations and events are rendered invisible and their omission naturalized within histories of modernity.
Review Quotes: "Hannah Feldman's book is a masterpiece of historical inquiry that fundamentally restructures our view of French society after 1945, banning the term postwar as a descriptor of that period. France was nothing but at war until 1962, first in Indochina, then in Algeria, and Feldman offers a radically new analysis of the impact those colonial wars had on its culture--from Malraux's musée imaginaire and grandiose plan to renovate Paris to the literary and filmic production of the Lettristes, the activities of the décollagistes, or that of photojournalists braving state censorship. A tour de force."--Yve-Alain Bois, Institute for Advanced Study