Decoration by design: The development of the mural aesthetic in nineteenth century French painting

This dissertation surveys the circumstances that gave momentum and currency to a specific aesthetic for mural painting during the nineteenth century in France and examines the response of young artist, who began to define their practice as painters in Paris in the eighteen-nineties, to the controversial relationship between easel and mural painting.;The proscriptive principles associated with mural painting derive from theories on the nature of architectural polychromy debated among architects and archaeologues in the early nineteenth century. The importance of the mural painting, from 1851-1873, was extended through efforts to coordinate the fine arts with commercial and industrial production in France. These efforts included the reorientation of drawing instruction at primary schools as well as colleges and the controversial pedagogic reforms at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts intended to enforce collaboration among architects, painters, and sculptors.;The alignment of the conditions for mural painting with the method, and purpose of drawing instruction shifted, in 1878, to the practical problem of what constituted civic art. Funds were allocated by the state and the city of Paris to support a decorative campaign of painting and sculpture throughout the capital. Public exhibitions, particularly the two official Salons, became the forum of debating the legitimate principles of mural painting and the broader interpretations, which appealed to the tastes and desires of the bourgeois viewing public.;In 1981 critics welcomed Bonnard, Denis, Vuillard, and Serusier to the Salon des Independants as a new breed of artist, the "decorator." Maurice Denis promoted himself as a painter-decorator and, with critic Albert Aurier, denied easel painting as commercial and self-indulgent. Their colleagues Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard in contrast sought solutions that intentionally obliterated the distinctions between the easel and mural painting in order to elaborate the expressive qualities they discovered within the ambiguities of the two modes of painting. In 1906 the coincidence of Robert de la Sizeranne called for the reaffirmation of the mural aesthetic and Matisse exhibited La Joi de vivre.