Le dispositif de l’icône dans la peinture américaine de l’après-Deuxième Guerre mondiale : Le cas Barnett Newman

En prenant la production de Barnett Newman comme exemple, cet article examine la survivance d’une dimension iconique dans la peinture abstraite américaine de l’après-Deuxième Guerre mondiale. Les tableaux dits du champ coloré (color field paintings) qui, au cours des décennies 1950 et 1960, marquent l’apogée de la tendance moderniste à l’autodéfinition du médium, semblent de prime abord complètement étrangers à toute forme de signification religieuse. Non seulement ont-ils abandonné la figuration et, par voie de conséquence, l’iconographie chrétienne : ils travaillent même à effacer toute distinction formelle entre une figure et un fond dans le but d’établir le plan du tableau comme pure expansion chromatique. En tant qu’objets culturels, ces tableaux modernes ont le musée pour référence et les lois du marché comme indice de valeur. Notre étude veut cependant démontrer que certains de leurs aspects, une fixation sur la poursuite du grand sujet, un goût pour la frontalisation de l’image et pour les symétries bilatérales ainsi qu’un mode d’adresse particulier exploitant le rapport au format conservent des analogies avec la tradition des icônes, notamment avec le rôle central qu’y tient le concept de présence. Chez Barnett Newman, un artiste que son origine juive disposait à l’iconoclastie, la pratique d’un dessin réduit à sa plus simple expression mérite entre autres d’être confrontée aux débats théologiques byzantins entourant la circonscription.Taking Barnett Newman as a main reference, this article examines the survival of an iconic dimension in American abstract painting after the Second World War. The so-called color field pictures that, through the 1950’s and 1960’s, mark the height of modern painting’s orientation towards the medium’s self definition, seem at first sight completely alien to religious meaning. They have not only relinquished figuration and, by the same token, the whole access to Christian iconography : they have even eradicated the formal distinction between figure and ground in order to establish the picture plane as pure chromatic expanse. As cultural objects, these modern pictures belong to the museum and their value is connected with market transactions. Our study intends nonetheless to demonstrate that certain of these paintings’ features— an aspiration towards a universal Subject matter, a preference for frontal structures and bilateral symmetry, and a particular mode of address that depends largely on format— can be somewhat related to the old tradition of the icon, notably through the concept of presence that is central to that art. As an artist of Jewish origin, Barnett Newman was a natural/cultural iconoclast ; but his conception of drawing as a minimal but meaningful act bears some affinity with the Byzantine debates around circumscription

Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation for Severe Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome associated with COVID-19: An Emulated Target Trial Analysis.

RATIONALE: Whether COVID patients may benefit from extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) compared with conventional invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV) remains unknown. OBJECTIVES: To estimate the effect of ECMO on 90-Day mortality vs IMV only Methods: Among 4,244 critically ill adult patients with COVID-19 included in a multicenter cohort study, we emulated a target trial comparing the treatment strategies of initiating ECMO vs. no ECMO within 7 days of IMV in patients with severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (PaO2/FiO2 <80 or PaCO2 ≥60 mmHg). We controlled for confounding using a multivariable Cox model based on predefined variables. MAIN RESULTS: 1,235 patients met the full eligibility criteria for the emulated trial, among whom 164 patients initiated ECMO. The ECMO strategy had a higher survival probability at Day-7 from the onset of eligibility criteria (87% vs 83%, risk difference: 4%, 95% CI 0;9%) which decreased during follow-up (survival at Day-90: 63% vs 65%, risk difference: -2%, 95% CI -10;5%). However, ECMO was associated with higher survival when performed in high-volume ECMO centers or in regions where a specific ECMO network organization was set up to handle high demand, and when initiated within the first 4 days of MV and in profoundly hypoxemic patients. CONCLUSIONS: In an emulated trial based on a nationwide COVID-19 cohort, we found differential survival over time of an ECMO compared with a no-ECMO strategy. However, ECMO was consistently associated with better outcomes when performed in high-volume centers and in regions with ECMO capacities specifically organized to handle high demand. This article is open access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

Préface

Ce livre courageux et foisonnant se propose de reprendre au pied de la lettre un vieil énoncé de la doxa : « On n’arrête pas le progrès. » Appliquée aux discours de l’histoire de l’art, la phrase voudrait dire, littéralement, que le recours au concept de progrès n’est pas « arrêtable » (entendre ici qu’il est bien difficile à éviter). Depuis les prolégomènes humanistes d’un Vasari distribuant à ses compatriotes les palmes de la renommée jusqu’à l’impulsion scientifique qui, dans le courant du..

Dessein, dessin, design… Les tribulations d’Idea en régime de haut modernisme américain

This article examines the survival, in post-World War II American abstract painting and especially in the formalist critique interpreting and legitimizing it, of age-old debates concerning the primacy of thought over the mimetic representation of the world that have characterized occidental art theory since Plato. The history of these debates, which the Renaissance took up again and channeled in more aesthetic than metaphysical directions, has been masterfully summarized by Erwin Panofsky in his celebrated essay of 1924 dedicated to idea. One of the pivotal points of that theory as a whole is the relationship established between the plan or intention of the work (dessein) and the drawing or sketch (dessin) which gives it form. This article argues that modernist painting, although radically abstract and apparently devoted to the triumph of the colour field alone, paradoxically fails to reflect upon itself without recourse to a principle of internal articulation wherein subsist avatars of the old alliance between dessein and dessin. The radical transformation of art’s context of production and reception, brought about by the instauration of modernity, introduces however a third term into the equation, design (de-sign), which expresses the fear of a definitive loss: that of the capacity of art to reflect upon the world and provide meaning

Renoir, susceptibilités épidermiques

Taking as its point of departure Renoir’s lifelong fascination with the representation of skin, this article explores how this motif, relinquished by many “pleinairistes” because of its incestuous links with traditional painting, expresses the very core of Renoir’s professional and personal idiosyncrasies and sustains his ambiguous position within modernism. Renoir’s foreword to a 1911 French re-edition of Cennino Cennini’s Libro del Arte sheds light on the anxieties which seemed to plague a decorator turned easel painter, and were incited by his avant-garde posture to shun academic training. Not only is the representation of skin related for Renoir to never-ending technical queries and problems; the fantasmatic conception of the female body in which it takes part, especially during the artist’s old age, reveals deeper fears connecting social positioning with sexual roles