Choice Reviews Online · 1996 · 103 citations · 0 references
Social SciencesArt HistoryCultural StudiesIconographyPaintingVisual CultureDeaf ArtDeaf StudiesDeaf Visual CultureVisual ArtsVisual Culture CriticismVisual PoetryDeaf ArtistsDeaf Culture RepresentationDeaf IconographyDeaf PaintingDeaf Visual ArtNineteenth-century French ArtPictorial LanguagePictorial Narratives
The study situates the dynamic relationship between French art and deaf sign language from the philosophes to the advent of sound cinema, noting that deaf artists from the Paris Institute shaped a vibrant culture while later being marginalized as savages by Darwinist and eugenic discourses. It investigates how marginalization of deaf people was institutionalized, the construction of an exclusionary centre, and the pivotal role of visual culture, aiming to offer an alternative 19th‑century art history. The authors employ archival and pictorial research, conducting an intertextual analysis of the “silent screen of deafness” to challenge canonical narratives of art, Enlightenment inheritance, and visual culture meanings. The book demonstrates that the French Revolution redefined painting as poetry into a 19th‑century school of over 100 deaf artists.
This text explores the dynamic interaction between art and the sign language of the deaf in France from the philosophes to the introduction of the sound motion picture. It shows how the French Revolution transformed the ancien regime metaphor of painting as poetry into a 19th-century school of over 100 deaf artists. Painters, sculptors, photographers, and graphic artists all emanated from the Institute for the Deaf in Paris, playing a central role in the vibrant deaf culture of the period. With the rise of Darwinism, eugenics, and race science, however, the deaf found themselves categorized as savages, excluded and ignored by the hearing. This book is concerned with the process and history of that marginalization, the constitution of a centre from which the abnormal could be excluded, and the vital role of visual culture within this discourse. Based on archival and pictorial research, the text's intertextual analysis of what it terms the silent screen of deafness produces an alternative history of 19th-century art that challenges canonical views of the history of art, the inheritance of the Enlightenment, and the functions, status, and meanings of visual culture itself. Fusing methodologies from cultural studies, poststructuralism and art history, this study will be of interest to students and scholars of art history, cultural and deaf studies, and the history of medicine, and should also interest a general audience concerned with the relationship of the deaf and the larger society.