Saints and lovers: myths of the avant-garde in Michel Georges-Michel's Les Montparnos

Shingler, Katherine (2012) Saints and lovers: myths of the avant-garde in Michel Georges-Michel's Les Montparnos. French Cultural Studies, 23 (1). pp. 17-29. ISSN 1740-2352

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Abstract

This article examines Michel Georges-Michel’s 1924 novel Les Montparnos as a study of the myths circulating around the Montparnasse avant-garde of the 1920s, and their function in relation to art. Key amongst these myths is the idea of art as a religion, according to which avant-garde artists are conceived as secular saints and martyrs. While this notion of artist as saint is strongly present in early-twentieth-century biographies of Van Gogh, Georges-Michel explicitly relates his fictionalized version of Modigliani’s life not to such recent models but rather to the Renaissance masters, and especially to Raphael, a link which is explained in terms of the post-war ‘retour à l’ordre’ in French artistic culture. The novel’s references to Raphael as archetypal painter-lover are also related to its construction of a myth of the artist as virile and sexually prolific, and to its identification of creative and sexual impulses.

Item Type: Article
RIS ID: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/708943
Keywords: avant-garde, Bohemia, Michel Georges-Michel, Amedeo Modigliani, Montparnasse, myth, Raphael, retour à l’ordre
Schools/Departments: University of Nottingham, UK > Faculty of Arts > School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies > Department of French and Francophone Studies
Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.1177/0957155811427631
Depositing User: Shingler, Katherine
Date Deposited: 10 Jun 2016 10:42
Last Modified: 04 May 2020 16:32
URI: https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/33900

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