Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow Alexis Clark has reviewed Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? (ed. Hollis Clayson and André Dombrowski) and Cultures of International Exhibitions, 1840-1940: Great Exhibitions in the Margins (ed. Marta Filipovà) for the fall 2017 issue of Oxford Art Journal.
Clark’s review, entitled “We’ll Always Have Paris,” contends that where Paris’ role as nineteenth-century art world capital went uncontested for much of the twentieth century, the French capital and, by extension, the study of art in terms of centres and peripheries must be interrogated anew. We’ll always have Paris. But, as Clark works to demonstrate through her review of these two anthologies, the twenty-first conception of nineteenth-century Paris, its artists, and its art must be a Paris better connected to the world outside its city limits. It must be a Paris now rebuilt for an age of uncertainty and a period in which the geopolitics of global capitalism promise to radically reshape the world and be radically reshaped by the same world.
