Organization or Business Name

Asbury University

Contact Email

LStratford@asbury.edu

Website

http://www.asbury.edu/academics/departments/art

Art Interests

Art Criticism, Art History, Arts Administration, Education, Museum/Gallery, Theology

Artist / Personal Statement

Since earning my Ph.D. in 2001 I have continued to refine my Stony Brook dissertation topic addressing art and national identity in France through research grants allowing research overseas and strategic presentations related to the quarrel over expressionist abstraction in twentieth-century France. I have been in a full-time art history position at Asbury University since completing the Ph.D. While at Asbury I have also enjoyed healthy collaboration with colleagues in the art department at our local research institution, The University of Kentucky. UK hired me to teach my dissertation as a graduate course there during the sabbatical absence of their 20th-century art historian Robert Jensen. I was also delighted to be asked to organize and co-curate the University of Kentucky Art Museum’s traveling exhibition Realism to Impressionism. While I am a career professor with primary calling to the classroom and to scholarship, I have been willing to draw upon administrative skills as needed, recently forming along with colleagues, a new scholarly association, The Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art (ASCHA; www.christianityhistoryart.org ). Part of my current ASCHA work involves with co-editor James Romaine, organizing a collection of scholarly essays for publication. Now in an advanced stage, Methodologies of the History of Christianity and the Visual Arts examines the profusion and range of available methodologies as well as the methodological challenges and opportunities that writing about Christianity in the history of art represents.

Accomplishments / CV

current manuscript in preparation

Artists into Frenchmen: The Quarrel over Expressionist Abstraction in France

Linda Stratford

Artists into Frenchmen: The Quarrel over Expressionist Abstraction in France suggests that leadership in the realm of the visual arts in the West after World War II was not so much “stolen” from Paris as Cold War accounts suggest, but sidelined by certain “forces of order” within France itself.

“Truly French” Art
Throughout the 1950’s a unitary notion of French art guided by classical principles of order, discipline and heroic sensibility prevailed in critical and official discourse. Despite the presence of a great variety of contemporary approaches stemming from School of Paris and expressionist influences, contemporary painting falling outside a narrowly defined rubric (measured largely by Matisse, Bonnard and Braque) enjoyed neither institutional support nor critical acclaim.

The American Menace
However, by 1959, the failure to embrace international cosmopolitanism threatened the very reputation of the French. On the heels of the widely acclaimed Jackson Pollock and the New American Painting and other abstract expressionist shows brought to Europe in the 1950’s, The United States, already enjoying political and economic status, seemed to be eclipsing France as a worldwide cultural force as well.

Gaining Lost Ground
The new Gaullist administration of the Fifth Republic set in motion a process intended to restore French reputation worldwide. Minister of Culture André Malraux acknowledged the role to be played by the state in redressing the French origins of progressive painting, reversing decades of judgment casting School of Paris and expressionist approaches as “less than French.”

Lessons Learned
A number of historians on both sides of the Atlantic have expressed the need for a revisionist history in regard to the American “lead” in contemporary art in the postwar period. Consideration must be given to the possibility that leadership in the realm of the visual arts after World War II was not “stolen” as Cold War studies suggest, but rather, sidelined by certain “forces of order” within French society and the French artistic milieu itself. This study demonstrates the risks of viewing artistic initiatives as belonging, or not belonging, within the framework of a nation, as demonstrated in the aesthetic “call to order” discovered in France in the 1950’s.