ODSECS 35: Daniella Berman

Aesthetics in Times of Turmoil: the Visual Language(s) of the French Revolution

Abstract:

“This history does not belong to the pen, but to the brush, to the chisel, to the burin.”
– Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard, La Décade philosophique, littéraire, et politique, 1798
During the unpredictable years of the French Revolution, artists sought to represent contemporary events that took on a new historic–and heroic–status. The importance of a visual record of the Revolution was understood to be of utmost importance, as Chaussard’s comment suggests, but how does one depict an event whose implications are still unfolding? This paper considers the ways in which artists navigated the political storms of a tumultuous decade through different forms of experimentation with both subjects and styles. What kinds of artistic adaptations could adequately respond to the Revolutionary period’s conditions of extreme and endemic uncertainty? The rhetoric of the Revolution called for a reconception of time and of the French nation, and increasingly understood History through incompletion: of political movements, municipal projects, and private ambitions. This talk explores how this notion of unfinishedness permeated the visual culture of the period and traces the productive impact of so-called failures in an effort to broaden our understanding of artistic concerns and visual language of times of turmoil.

Bio: A specialist of European art and visual culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Daniella Berman received her PhD from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 2023. She has contributed to many publications and exhibitions, including Horace Vernet, currently on view at the Château de Versailles, and Jacques-Louis David: Radical Draftsman, held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2022. She is co-editor of Duke House and the Making of Modern New York: Lives and Afterlives of a Fifth Avenue Mansion (Brill, 2022). Across these and other projects, her interests lie in interplay of artistic process and lived experience, and the shifting notion of History. Based in New York, Berman currently serves as an adjunct instructor at Stern College for Women at Yeshiva University, as Special Project Researcher for the Cultural Services of the French Embassy to the United States – Villa Albertine (New York), and as the Head of Special Projects and Strategic Initiatives for The Drawing Foundation, a non-profit focused on fostering dialogues around and appreciation of that medium. Additionally, she is Vice President of the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA) and an at-large board member for the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA).