Émilie Charmy (1878–1974) charted a remarkable course in the world of French modern art in the first half of the twentieth century. Her earliest works, executed around 1900, explored the legacy of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting. An engagement with the avant-garde circle of Fauve painters defined her art in the years leading up to the First World War. In the ensuing interwar period, Charmy found her mature style, characterized by optical realism, an adherence to the traditional genres of portraiture, the nude, landscape, and still life, and a modernist notion of direct, vigorous paint application as a mark of artistic sincerity. This attitude found its ultimate expression in numerous renderings of the female nude, which, by virtue of Charmy’s melding of ostensibly feminine and masculine qualities, charm and seductiveness on the one hand and power and firmness on the other, confounded prevailing expectations about the nature of women’s art. These images retain their provocative force today. This publication accompanies the first U.S. retrospective of the painting of Émilie Charmy, which is organized by the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia. Exhibition curator Matthew Affron surveys key phases of Charmy’s artistic career in relation to major issues in modern French painting of her era. Sarah Betzer examines two principal subjects of Charmy’s early work, the nude and the bourgeois interior, as evidence of an ambitious dialogue with avant-garde precedent. Rita Felski considers Charmy in light of recent feminist approaches to the study of the role women creators played in defining modernism.

Émilie Charmy

Arts & Photography

Affron, Matthew

History & Criticism

The Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia

Joseph Cornell (1903–1972), the American pioneer of collage, montage, and assemblage art, is sometimes regarded as a solitary star within the constellation of great Surrealists. The essays in Joseph Cornell and Surrealism consider connections between Cornell and the Surrealist group during the 1930s and 1940s, during Cornell’s artistic development and the heyday of Surrealism in the United States. He shared with the Surrealists his basic conception of the visual image as the product of poetic juxtaposition. In his best-known works—the collages, small constructions of found objects, and classic shadow boxes—he took key Surrealist methods in new directions. The essays also examine Cornell’s achievement in other formats, including his ground-breaking collage film and the open-ended and nonlinear archives of printed materials that he called “explorations,” as well as the art, literature, music, and dance that nourished his unconventional artistic output.
The essays in this volume were commissioned for the catalogue Joseph Cornell et les surréalistes à New York, published to accompany the exhibition of the same name that was co-organized by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia. 
Aside from the editors, the contributors are Stephen Bann, Emmanuel Guigon, Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Jodi Hauptman, Howard Hussey, Ségolène Le Men, Camille Lévêque-Claudet, Patrick Mauriès, Anne Morra, and François-René Martin.

Joseph Cornell and Surrealism

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Books by The Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia

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Émilie Charmy

Joseph Cornell and Surrealism