Louis Réau

Louis Réau (1 January 1881 – 10 June 1961) was a French art historian.

Biography

Born in Poitiers, he studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris and then at the École nationale des langues orientales vivantes where he was specialized in Russian language and culture. Louis Réau was elected member of the Institute (Academy of Fine Arts) in 1947.

Réau wrote the monumental Iconographie de l'art chrétien, in the six volumes of which he successively studied the iconographic models of the Bible and the Saints, can be linked to the whole of his work on the history of art. However, his study goes far beyond France to encompass the whole of Europe, including of course Orthodox Christianity as far as Russia.

Louis Réau was also director of the French Institute of St. Petersburg in the 1910s. Under his leadership, this institute became not only a center for academic information on France, but also a teaching center that worked to expand France's intellectual influence. It was also a way to oppose the growing influence of Germany. Réau was a Germanist by training, but the ideological context of the time pushed Germanists towards the Slavic countries which were a counterweight to the German culture. During his directorship he organized, together with his Russian colleagues from the Mir iskusstva movement who wrote in the journal Apollon, an exhibition of 19th century French art in Russia.

In Russia, Réau met Alexander Benois, Igor Grabar, and other Russian artists, which allowed him to study not only Russian art but also French art abroad.

His book L'Art russe des origines à Pierre le Grand is the first to tackle this subject since Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in 1877. He replied to the latter, who had never been to Russia, but had written a book L'Art russe based on drawings and documents. Viollet-le-Duc was a supporter of panslavism, whereas Réau's approach to the Slavic world was gallocentric. The pages he devoted to the art of St. Petersburg illustrate his conceptions, contrary to those of Hautecoeur, an art historian trained in Rome, who established the cosmopolitan origin of the art of the Russian capital.

Louis Réal was the father of Marianne Cornevin, physician and Africanist. He died in Paris.

Works

• L'Art Français sur le Rhin au XVIIIe Siècle (1908)
• Cologne et Saint-Pétersbourg dans Les Villes d'Art Célèbres (1908)
• Peter Vischer et la Sculpture Franconienne du XIVe au XVIe Siècle (1909)
• Les Primitifs Allemands (1910)
• Mathias Grünewald et le Retable de Colmar (1920)
• L'Art russe (1921–1922; 2 volumes)
  • L'Art Russe des Origines à Pierre le Grand (1921)
  • L'Art russe de Pierre le Grand à nos jours (1922; awarded the Charles-Blanc Prize by the Académie française in 1923)
• Étienne-Maurice Falconet (1922)
• Histoire de l'Expansion de l'Art Français (1924–1933; awarded the Grand prix Gobert by the Académie française in 1934)
• Histoire de la Peinture Française au XVIIIe Siècle (1925–1926)
• L'Art Français aux États-Unis (1926; awarded the Charles-Blanc Prize by the Académie française in 1927)
• Une Dynastie de Sculpteurs au XVIIe Siècle: Les Lemoynes (1927)
• "Les compagnes de Diane", Gazette des Beaux-Arts 8 (1932)
• L'Art Français dans les Pays du Nord et de l'Est de l'Europe (1932; with Gunnar W. Lundberg & Roger-Armand Weigert)
• L'Art du Moyen Âge, Arts Plastiques, Art littéraire, et la Civilisation Française (1935)
• L'Europe Français au Siècle des Lumières (1938)
• Histoire de la Peinture au Moyen-Age (1944)
• L'Art Gothique en France: Architecture, Sculpture, Peinture, Arts Appliqués (1945)
• L'Art Religieux du Moyen-âge (La Sculpture) (1946)
• Le Rayonnement de Paris au XVIIIe Siècle (1946; awarded the Prix Jean-Jacques-Berger by the Institut de France in 1947)
• Vieilles Églises de France (1948)
• L'Ère Romantique: Les Arts Plastiques (1949)
• J.-B. Pigalle (1950)
• Rome (1951)
• Dictionnaire Polyglotte des Termes d'Art et d'Archéologie (1953).
• Iconographie de l'art chrétien (1955–1959; 6 volumes)
• Fragonard: Sa Vie et Son Oeuvre (1956).
• Histoire du Vandalisme: Les Monuments Détruits de l'Art Français (1959; 2 volumes)
• Houdon: sa vie et son œuvre (1964)
• L'Art Russe (1968; 3 volumes)
  • I: L'Art Gréco-scythe/ le Moyen-âge à Kiev et Novgorod (1968)
  • II: La Renaissance à Moscou / Le Baroque à Saint-Petersbourg (1968)
  • III: Le Classicisme / Le Romantisme / Le XXe Siècle (1968)

References

• A. Frolow, "Louis Réau. Iconographie de l'Art Chrétien, t. I: Introduction Générale", Revue de l'Histoire des Religions, Vol. CL, No. 2‎ (1956), pp. 229–32.
• Olga Medvedkova, "'Scientifique' ou 'Intellectuel'?: Louis Réau et la Création de l'Institut Français de Saint-Pétersbourg", Cahiers du Monde Russe, Vol. XLIII (2002), p. 411–22.

External links

• Works by Louis Réau at Gallica
• Works by Louis Réau at Persée