Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (Yale Publications in the History of Art)

In this original and perceptive study, Romy Golan argues that France-the embodiment of artistic modernism for most of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth-suffered a crisis of confidence after World War I that initiated a period of cultural, political, and economic retrenchment lasting into the Vichy years. Golan shows that France`s new image as a rural, feminine, feudal, and victimized society was reflected in and fashioned by the art of the period.