Marco Deyasi | Assistant Professor | »
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Art & Design
Although France's colonial involvement in Southeast Asia (primarily Vietnam and
Cambodia) lasted nearly 100 years, very little art-historical research has been published
on the influence of Asia on French art. My research addresses this gap in the scholarly
literature by exploring how French modern artists understood (or misunderstood) the
art, religion, and culture of Southeast Asia between 1885 and 1940. For this grant, I will
be focusing on two aspects of this larger cultural relationship: 1) an understudied leftwing
strand within Symbolist art and literature (1880-1900) that was influenced by the
utopian cultural politics of Theosophy, an invented religion whose adherents both
opposed colonial policy and colonial-era racism. Artists like Paul Ranson and his friends
among the Nabis group like Georges Lacombe were heavily influenced by Theosophy in
their Symbolist paintings. And 2) the largely unstudied influence of Cambodian sculpture
on the art and aesthetics of Auguste Rodin and his circle (1900-1930s), especially their
efforts to revitalize the classical tradition of French sculpture by drawing on Cambodian
art.
A Seed grant will fund a research trip to France to consult archives and libraries
with primary materials unavailable in North America. As well, the grant will cover the
cost of publication rights for photographs of art works. The outcome of the grant will be
two related scholarly articles to be submitted to peer-reviewed journals; the articles will
also be folded into a book that I am developing, Modern Primitives and Primitive
Moderns: French Visual Culture and Indochina, 1878–1968.