The Art Bulletin

“Genre” has its origins at Antwerp in the mid-sixteenth century with Bruegel the Elder’s Ice Skating before the Gate of St. George. In this groundbreaking work, Bruegel treats a scene from daily life as an independent pictorial category. An analysis of the creative process involved suggests that stoicism and satura (satire)—two traditions inherited from the ancient world in which the observer is accorded a primary place—were the catalysts that made this innovation possible. Their importance is underscored by their use in Bruegel’s Seven Virtues, a series that drew on Aertsen’s Meat Stall, with its own debt to satura.

Late in his career, which spanned the Revolution and beyond, Honoré Fragonard revived two major projects in limbo since 1773. His unsuccessful effort to have engraved his illustrations for La Fontaine’s Contes et nouvelles (1788–1809) demonstrates the dramatic upheavals in the post-Revolutionary print market and publishing industries and shifting reactions to his art. The unfinished series Progress of Love, expanded and recontextualized by the artist during the late 1790s and early 1800s, reveals Fragonard’s adaptation of his perennial subjects—flirtation, love, and picturesque nature—to changing cultural attitudes regarding the sexual power of women in the aftermath of the Revolution.

The publication of the original auditors’ transcripts of Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics offers an opportunity to reexamine the Hegelian inheritance in art history. Ernst Gombrich’s attempt to “work off” this inheritance provided an important corrective to the unquestioning use of his ideas by Vienna school art historians. However, the simplifications of this account—and the simplifications to which it in turn has been subjected—can be challenged by widening the scope of inquiry to include the “nonmetaphysical” readings of Hegel that have gained currency in contemporary philosophical debates. This raises broader questions about the concourse between the two disciplines.

In Degas’s Place de la Concorde (ca. 1875), an urban genre portrait of Viscount Lepic and his daughters proves to be layered with political signification, making it an eloquent visual account of the vexed nature of early Third Republican democracy. Most prominent among its signs is the erasure of the sculpture Strasbourg behind Lepic’s hat, creating an absence evocative of France’s territorial loss. Degas’s protomodernist vocabulary—fragmentation, cropping—also appears in the popular imagery expressing the contradictions of the Third Republic’s contested early history. Ultimately, Place de la Concorde emerges as a careful record of the ideologies of Impressionism’s formal language.

In his paintings from the late 1960s and early 1970s, Philip Guston employed an unconventional model of figuration in which temporal relations forged between two moments produce a meaningful statement about the present. Guston’s art partook in a larger “1930s renaissance,” in which artists cited the earlier decade—famous for its documentary impulse—as a means of figuring a present deemed resistant to representation. Guston’s use of the past, especially his appropriation of his own earlier motifs, invested his art with the drama of history at a moment when art’s capacity to affect history itself appeared increasingly diminished.