Dr%20Claire%20O%E2%80%99Mahony: List of publications

Modern tapestry makers articulated aspirations and anxieties about creativity and craft amidst the economic and political instability of twentieth-century France. In 1946 Jean Cassou selected tapestry as the focus for the Musée national d’art moderne’s opening exhibition re-defining post-war France to itself and the world. Liberté, a 1943 tapestry from a cartoon drawn by Jean Lurçat inspired by a poem by Paul Éluard, woven clandestinely in the attic rooms of Suzanne Goubely’s Aubusson workshop, typifies this narrative. However, the contrast between Lurçat’s wartime writings on tapestry and a 1945 photo essay of Aubusson weavers at work by Robert Doisneau highlights the vigorous debates about where to locate this “renaissance” of tapestry, transformed from a courtly luxury into a collective and economically viable national craft industry. Tapestry was renewed as a modern medium through the collaboration of artist-cartoon makers and weaving workshops; the exhibition culture of galleries run by collectors such as Marie Cuttoli of Maison Myrbor, Jeanne Bucher and Denise Majorel of La Demeure; the administrators of the National Manufactures; and the work of art educators and craftworkers, A. Marius Martin and Pauline Peugniez. The embodied experience required to create and to understand tapestry, where individual and collective experience commingle, resonates with Simone De Beauvoir’s principle of “situated freedom”. In twenty-first century Aubusson, the new initiatives of the Cité de la Tapisserie and the Olympe de Gouges tapestries celebrate and promote these liberties.

This article argues that the so-called ‘countermonuments’ which emerged in West Germany as of the 1980s are not as pathbreakingly new, in terms of their intentions, as has hitherto been thought. It examines post-1945 West German memorials to Jewish victims of Nazism to demonstrate this point. At the same time it seeks to define exactly what it was that was new about the ‘countermonuments’. It concludes by identifying a new breed of memorials which developed out of, and to an extent contemporaneously with the countermonuments, and which this article terms ‘combimemorials’ to designate their integration of memorial, archival, and exhibition elements.

This volume provides innovative analyses of nineteenth-century power relations in France across a series of interlinked spheres: artistic, literary, cultural, political, scientific and topographical.