ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network Research Forum:

Camille Mauclair and the Shaping of Impressionism: Critical Strategies and Networks before and after World War I

Dr. Katia Papandreopoulou - University of Patras, Greece

Wednesday 26 March 2025 //  1600 (GMT) // 1700 (CET) // 1200 (EDT) // 0900 (PDT)

The critic, Camille Mauclair promoted the concept of a “French” art within an ever-changing market. From the beginning of the twentieth century, he engaged in the discourse on an idea of a national art, often linked to the concept of “national genius,” his key phrase on the contribution of Impressionism’s legacy. His groundbreaking art criticism entwined the concepts of national, French art with Impressionism, a movement that had previously connotated different aesthetic and political principles. This paper will discuss how the writing of art history by art critics such as Mauclair marked the conceptualisation of Impressionism. It traces his strategies across the editorial, the reception, and the institutional, to explore his theories in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Finally, this talk will address how Mauclair and his intellectual and political allies of the interwar period presented the movement as an alternative to modernism. 

Katia Papandreopoulou is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Patras, Greece. She received her master’s (2006) and doctoral (2013) degrees at the Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Her thesis was awarded  the Prix du musée d’Orsay and published by Peter Lang (Camille Mauclair (1872–1945), critique, théoricien et historien de l’art. Un chemin périlleux entre cosmopolitisme et nationalisme sous la IIIe République, Peter Lang, 2024). She specializes in 19th- and 20th-century art and art criticism, the history of art exhibitions, and racist and nationalist discourses in the history of art.