Women artists of the international avant-garde: the case of "Abstraction-Création" (1931-1936)

Women’s contribution to abstract art in the interwar period is a subject that, to date, has received very little attention. In this article we deal with the untold story of the participation of women artists in Abstraction-Création, the foremost international group dedicated to abstract art in the 1930s. Founded in Paris in 1931, the group took on the work of two previous collectives to become a platform for the dissemination and promotion of abstract art and consisted of around a hundred members. Twelve of these were women, whose writings and works were published in the group’s annual magazine, abstraction creátion art non figuratif (1932-1936), and who participated in a number of the group’s exhibitions. Compared to what had occurred in previous groups, the participation of women, although reduced in number, was comparable to that of the male artists and being members of the group had a generally positive impact on the women’s careers. However, all this came at the expense of relinquishing any gender specificity in their work and the public presentation of it, and demonstrates that the normalization of women’s contributions to the avant-garde could only be brought about alongside a questioning of the more dogmatic views of modernity.

Performance, représentation et (il)lisibilité du genre dans la fiction sandienne des années 1830

Dans son premier roman, Indiana (1832), Sand établit un réseau de correspondances entre la langue, la performance et l'identité sexuelle qui n'ont pas encore fait l'objet d'une étude approfondie. Or, ces correspondances sous-tendent d'autres romans des années 1830, notamment Lélia (1833), Le Secrétaire intime (1834) et Gabriel (1839). Deux concepts – la performance et la lisibilité – fondent en fait les réflexions de Sand sur la représentation et le genre. Il s'agit dans cet article d'étudier ce réseau d'associations et d'explorer son évolution dans la fiction sandienne des années 1830. Cette analyse permettra de souligner comment, chez Sand, la performativité du genre met en question et trouble la représentation mimétique.

Travelling Images, Images of Travel in Nicolas Bouvier's L'Usage du monde

Sketches and photographs are a familiar tool of the traveller-writer, who commonly draws on them when transforming experience into a textual narrative. The verbal thus displaces the visual — the latter retained, if at all, as mere illustration — in ways that echo James Heffernan's definition of ekphrasis as the ‘verbal description of visual representation’. Yet Nicolas Bouvier's 1963 travel narrative L'Usage du monde challenges conventional conceptions of ekphrasis. Juxtaposing the stark ink drawings of Thierry Vernet — Bouvier's travelling companion — with Bouvier's textual narrative, L'Usage du monde shifts representation away from a hierarchical relationship between verbal and visual; it offers instead an account of other cultures that is grounded in polyphony and exchange. This article applies Bouvier's own image of travel as a mosaic to the dual narrative form (or ‘iconotext’, to use Michael Nerlich's term) in order to consider a range of fluid relationships between Bouvier's text and Vernet's drawings. In examining these relationships of amplification, reduction, and absence, the article argues that the plurality of the narrative prompts a rethinking of conventional, binary paradigms of intercultural contact. Ultimately, the iconotextual nature of L'Usage du monde can be interpreted as a metaphor for the processes of cultural translation and transculturation that are central to Bouvier's travelling ethos.

Le travail du sens de l'Homme. La poetique de Paul Celan

This article presents the poetics of Paul Celan with regard to the constitution of the subject in poetry and the anthropological dimension of poetics.