Study day at the Rodin Museum - Dialogues, interviews, chats

Under the direction of François-René Martin, Professor of General Art History, Beaux-Arts de Paris, and coordinator of the research team, École du Louvre

Study day organised on the occasion of the publication of L'Art. Entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell, in French and English, published by the Musée Rodin (collection "Rodin: textes et recherches").

Since at least Francisco de Holanda's Dialogues de Rome with Michelangelo in the mid-sixteenth century, the "art interview", as Louis Marin calls it, has become a genre in its own right in art literature. It continued to be used in modern times, but became even more popular at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when it contributed to the dissemination of the artist's thoughts in the public sphere. Rodin himself played the game on numerous occasions with Truman H. Bartlett, Willem G. C. Byvanck, Ricciotto Canudo, Paul Gsell and Étienne Dujardin-Beaumetz. The interview thus marks, most often, a double pause: that of a retrospective look at the organic development of the work and that of an active look at the research in progress. At the same time, it is the sign of a passage to posterity of which both the artists and the interviewers are fully aware. The interview, which is akin to a confidence or anecdote, nevertheless defies the canonical models of the biography, the monograph or the simple text of criticism. And it is in the double gap between the formulation of a word and its written transcription, more or less faithful, and in the interpretation of these words, that the border between reality and fiction becomes tenuous. The ambition of this study day will be to consider the interview according to three main axes: as a form, as a method and as a source. In particular, it aims to explore the historicity of this genre and its role in the writing of art history and in the construction of the myth of the artist, from the modern era to the present day.