A Forced Accord: The Dispositif of Industrial Art in the Works of the Manet-Whistler Circle, 1858-68

This thesis explores the relationship between French and British painting in the decade 1858-1868, a period in which progressive artistic practices in both France and Great Britain were concurrently transformed in style and subject matter. The scholarly literatures concerning the visual cultures of both nations in the mid-nineteenth century are substantial, yet comparatively few attempts have been made to reconcile their narratives of vanguardist practice in the 1860s. The thesis demonstrates that existing accounts of the development of early modernist painting in England and France may be more closely aligned by attention to the contemporary discourse of industrial art. The significance of this cultural apparatus, or 'dispositif', has hitherto been largely obscured both by modernism's disputed claims for painting’s discovery of its own medium and by the fragmentation of the polyvalent activities of industrial art amongst many modern academic disciplines. By identifying a pattern of pictorial phenomena evident simultaneously within the works of English and French painters and by describing this pattern as a contiguous, international discursive formation, the thesis proposes the existence of a coherent configuration of knowledge and state power that modified progressive practices in similar ways in both countries. Four case-studies are presented that map the characteristics of this discourse as it can be inferred from formal and iconographic relationships within and between paintings. The research suggests that international state collaborations in exhibition, museology and photography served to construct a universalist and predicative model of stylistic change that was subsequently appropriated by a distinctive but similarly international vanguardist grouping, here identified as the Manet-Whistler Circle, within which the materials of industrial art came to inform a range of innovative critical positions. The discursive object thus identified has not previously been considered a theoretically-coherent determinant on early modernist painting.