Saints and lovers: myths of the avant-garde in Michel Georges-Michel's Les Montparnos

Shingler, Katherine

Abstract

This article examines Michel Georges-Michel’s 1924 novel Les Montparnos as a study of the myths circulating around the Montparnasse avant-garde of the 1920s, and their function in relation to art. Key amongst these myths is the idea of art as a religion, according to which avant-garde artists are conceived as secular saints and martyrs. While this notion of artist as saint is strongly present in early-twentieth-century biographies of Van Gogh, Georges-Michel explicitly relates his fictionalized version of Modigliani’s life not to such recent models but rather to the Renaissance masters, and especially to Raphael, a link which is explained in terms of the post-war ‘retour à l’ordre’ in French artistic culture. The novel’s references to Raphael as archetypal painter-lover are also related to its construction of a myth of the artist as virile and sexually prolific, and to its identification of creative and sexual impulses.

Citation

Shingler, K. (2012). Saints and lovers: myths of the avant-garde in Michel Georges-Michel's Les Montparnos. French Cultural Studies, 23(1), https://doi.org/10.1177/0957155811427631

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 22, 2011
• Publication Date: Feb 1, 2012
• Deposit Date: Jun 10, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 10, 2016
• Journal: French Cultural Studies
• Print ISSN: 0957-1558
• Electronic ISSN: 1740-2352
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 23
• Issue: 1
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0957155811427631
• Keywords: avant-garde, Bohemia, Michel Georges-Michel, Amedeo Modigliani, Montparnasse, myth, Raphael, retour à l’ordre
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/708943
• Publisher URL: http://frc.sagepub.com/content/23/1/17