French art

The Gallo-Roman period left a distinctive provincial style of sculpture, and the region around the modern Franco-German border led the empire in the mass production of finely decorated Ancient Roman pottery, which was exported to Italy and elsewhere on a large scale.

[1][2] During the Renaissance led to Italy becoming the main source of stylistic developments until France matched Italy's influence during the Rococo and Neoclassicism periods[citation needed] During the 19th century and up to mid-20 century France and especially Paris was considered the center of the art world with art styles such as Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism originating there as well as movements and congregations of foreign artists such as the École de Paris.

Celtic art is very ornamental, avoiding straight lines and only occasionally using symmetry, without the imitation of nature nor ideal of beauty central to the classical tradition, but apparently, often involves complex symbolism.

This artwork includes a variety of styles and often incorporates subtly modified elements from other cultures, an example being the characteristic over-and-under interlacing which arrived in France only in the sixth century, although it was already used by Germanic artists.

On the other hand, the rise of gold work and manuscript illumination brought about a resurgence of Celtic decoration, which, with Christian and other contributions, constitutes the basis of Merovingian art.

These include, those of Metz, Lyon, Vienne, Le Mans, Reims, Beauvais, Verdun, Saint-Germain in Auxerre, Saint-Pierre in Flavigny, and Saint-Denis, as well as the town center of Chartres.

Other important Romanesque buildings in France include the abbey of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire in Loiret, the churches of Saint-Foy in Conques of Aveyron, Saint-Martin in Tours, Saint-Philibert in Tournus of Saône-et-Loire, Saint-Remi in Reims, and Saint-Sernin in Toulouse.

Monumental doors, baptismal fonts, and candle holders, frequently decorated with scenes from biblical history, were cast in bronze, attesting to the skills of the contemporary metalworkers.

Rich textiles and precious objects in gold and silver, such as chalices and reliquaries, were produced in increasing numbers to meet the needs of the liturgy, and to serve the cult of the saints.

The king of Sicily and duke of Anjou, René was himself a writer of courtly love novels and asked the best artists to decorate his own writings with elaborate paintings, such as the Livre du cœur d'Amour épris illuminated by Barthélémy d'Eyck.

The art of the period from François I through Henri IV often is heavily inspired by late Italian pictorial and sculptural developments commonly referred to as Mannerism, which is associated with the later works of Michelangelo as well as Parmigianino, among others.

Some important French architects who adopted the Renaissance style are Pierre Lescot, who rebuilt a part of the Louvre palace for the king, Philibert Delorme, Jean Bullant and Jacques I Androuet du Cerceau.

Later, another major Italian sculptor who was employed at the court was Benvenuto Cellini, who worked for François Ier from 1540, and imported the Mannerist style to France (one example being the Nymph of Fontainebleau).

Major French sculptors or the time are Michel Colombe, responsible for the Tomb of Francis II, Duke of Brittany in Nantes, who had the opportunity to work along the Giusto brothers.

But French painting soon departed from the extravagance and naturalism of Italian baroque, and painters such as Eustache Le Sueur and Laurent de La Hyre, following Poussin's example, developed a classicist way known as Parisian Atticism, inspired by Antiquity, and focusing on proportion, harmony and the importance of drawing.

In architecture, architects such as Salomon de Brosse, François Mansart and Jacques Lemercier helped define the French form of the baroque, developing the formula of the urban hôtel particulier that was to influence all of Europe and strongly departed from the Italian equivalent, the palazzo.

From the mid to late seventeenth century, French art is more often referred to by the term "Classicism" which implies an adherence to certain rules of proportion and sobriety uncharacteristic of the Baroque, as it was practiced in most of the rest of Europe during the same period.

Pastel portrait painting became particularly fashionable in Europe at the time and France was the major center of activity for pastellists, with the prominent figures of Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Jean-Baptiste Perronneau and the Swiss Jean-Étienne Liotard.

The Louis XV style of decoration, although already apparent at the end of the last reign, was lighter with pastel colors, wood panels, smaller rooms, less gilding, and fewer brocades; shells, garlands, and occasional Chinese subjects predominated.

Highly skilled artists, called the ciseleur-doreurs, specialized in bronze ornaments for furniture and other pieces of decorative arts - the most famous being Pierre Gouthière and Pierre-Philippe Thomire.

In the later part of the reign of Louis XV, sculptors began to give greater attention to the faces; the leaders of this new style were Jean-Antoine Houdon noted for his busts of celebrated authors and statesmen, and Augustin Pajou.

The French academic system continued to produce artists, but some, such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, explored new and increasingly impressionist styles of painting with thick brushwork.

Meanwhile, Orientalism, Egyptian motifs, the tragic anti-hero, the wild landscape, the historical novel, and scenes from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance—all these elements of Romanticism—created a vibrant period that defies easy classification.

His rediscovery of Spanish painting from the golden age, his willingness to show the unpainted canvas, his exploration of the forthright nude, and his radical brush strokes are the first steps toward Impressionism.

It led to Claude Monet with his cathedrals and haystacks, Pierre-Auguste Renoir with both his early outdoor festivals and his later feathery style of ruddy nudes, and Edgar Degas with his dancers and bathers.

Les Nabis, a movement of the 1890s, including painters such as Paul Sérusier, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard and Maurice Denis, was influenced by Gauguin's example in Brittany: they explored a decorative art in flat plains with the graphic approach of a Japanese print.

There were those who continued in the artistic experiments from before the war, especially surrealism, and others who adopted the new Abstract Expressionism and action painting from New York, executing them in a French manner using Tachism or L'art informel.

[12] Prominent figures such as Marc Chagall, Jules Pascin, Chaïm Soutine, Isaac Frenkel Frenel, Amedeo Modigliani, and Abraham Mintchine were among notable contributors to the movement in France and abroad.

César Baldaccini was a prominent French sculptor of the 1960s, who created large waste sculptures by compressing discarded materials, for instance, automobiles, metal, rubbish, and domestic objects.

[18] In May 1968, the radical youth movement, through their atelier populaire, produced a great deal of poster-art protesting the moribund policies of president Charles de Gaulle.