Ruins, rhetoric and revolution: Paul Signac's Le Demolisseur and anarchism in the 1890's

• Autores: Richard Thomson
• Localización: Art history: journal of the Association of Art Historians, ISSN 0141-6790, Vol. 36, Nº. 2 (April), 2013, págs. 366-391
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Between 1897 and 1899 Paul Signac worked on a large painting, "Le Démolisseur", representing a worker knocking down a building. The extent to which this late neoimpressionist painting represents Signac's known political views is ambiguous, given how the Third Republic government imposed punitive laws against anarchism following the terrorist bombings of the early 1890s. At odds with the typical imagery of Third Republic France, with its emphasis on construction, this essay investigates the potential for a new violence suggested by the iconography of "Le Démolisseur" and the possibility that the painting functions as a veiled self-portrait.