Katherine Shingler
Saints and lovers: myths of the avant-garde in Michel Georges-Michel's Les Montparnos
Shingler, Katherine
Authors
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 |
Contract Date | Jun 10, 2016 |
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