Cultural Resistance through the Manuscrit Moderne: Tériade’s editions of Rouault’s Divertissement and Bonnard’s Correspondances

Author(s)

  • Rodney Swan University of New South Wales

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18352/relief.951

Keywords:

artists’ books, cultural resistance, manuscrit moderne, Tériade, Georges Rouault, Pierre Bonnard

Abstract

Inspired by the politico-cultural significance of the French medieval manuscript, the Greek born publisher Tériade created its modernised counterpart, his manuscrit moderne, pushing the artists’ book to new innovative heights in France during the Second World War. Tériade commissioned Georges Rouault’s Divertissement (1943) and Pierre Bonnard’s Correspondances (1944) during the darkest days of the Occupation, and in a historic reversal of the process, these artists created their images, embedded with codes and symbols of resistance, before they authored the text. The wartime manuscrit moderne with its handwritten text set the preconditions for this new genre to flourish after the Liberation.

Author Biography

  • Rodney Swan, University of New South Wales

    Dr Rodney T Swan is an Adjunct Academic at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He was awarded a PhD in June 2016, with a thesis titled Resistance and Resurgence; the cultural and political dynamic of the livre d’artiste and the German Occupation of France. His research focuses on analysing how the French artists’ book became a strategic instrument of cultural resistance in occupied France.

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Published

2017-06-27

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 1 (2017): Text and Image

Section

I. Treasures of the Koopman Collection

License

All articles published in RELIEF appear in Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). Under this licence, authors retain ownership of the copyright of their article, but they allow its unrestricted use, provided it is properly cited.

How to Cite

Swan, R. (2017) “Cultural Resistance through the Manuscrit Moderne: Tériade’s editions of Rouault’s Divertissement and Bonnard’s Correspondances”, RELIEF - REVUE ÉLECTRONIQUE DE LITTÉRATURE FRANÇAISE, 11(1), pp. 40–65. doi:10.18352/relief.951.