Salons

"Your first author, Denis Diderot , seems to share that point of view. Yes, Diderot is a great philosopher and arguably the best-ever art critic. My own work as an art historian has engaged closely with his, especially Salons (the art-critical texts) and his related writings on painting and the stage. In my early book, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot , I discovered something about Diderot previously not recognised: the importance he placed on the relation between the painting and the viewer. That issue was central to the development of French painting in the mid-18th century – between Chardin and Greuze – and Manet and his generation over 100 years later. It’s a topic with resonance beyond the modern period. The basic idea is that painters inevitably construct a certain sort of relationship with the viewer. In the 1750s, Diderot put forward a set of claims as to how that relationship was supposed to work for a painting to be successful. I argue in my book that those claims and imperatives turned out to be foundational for modern painting and modern art generally."