The story of the surrealists' radical anticolonialism: a political, aesthetic and poetic avant-garde.

An essay on French artist Paul Chenavard (1807-1895), romantic cursed painter-prophet, illustrating the distance between the historic claims which build the modern myth of the artist and a relative efficiency.

A major contribution, by German philosoph and art historian Horst Bredekamp, to the current debate on the 'tree of life' in evolutionary biology. The essay deals with the aesthetic and political dimension of the coral, in Darwin's system a model of anarchic evolution which opposes the hierarchical metaphor of the tree.

A new approach on the Situationist International and its paradoxical myths.

This brilliant work studies the notion of modernity as it's been defined at the end of the XIXth century, especially through the analyse of the links between the visual culture and several main social debates of the time such as sexuallity, urban crowd, riots and social control mechanisms, the Republic and the Church, nationalism and militarism.

How, in the course of their American exile, the surrealist artists (Duchamp, Tanguy, Masson, Ernst, Lam, Carrigton ...) were influenced by the literary and artistic context. Also a specific study on the perpetual renewal of Surrealism after war, linked with the importance of esoterism, the Amerindian civilizations, and Charles Fourier.

Art as a social practice through Gustave Courbet's œuvre and political commitment.

An elucidation of the myths and the political fantasies that surrounded Gustave Courbet's work and life under the second Empire.

A thoroughly investigation of the social role of art articulated by the French left during the July Monarchy and Second Republic.

A pioneering study of the relation between the fine arts and philosophy in France, from the aftermath of the 1789 revolution to the end of the nineteenth century, when a philosophy of being called "monism"—the concept of a unity of matter and spirit—emerged and became increasingly popular among intellectuals, artists and scientists.

Drawing on a material, cultural and social history of art, Hugo Daniel proposes to understand the recognition and redefinition of drawing by the avant-garde in the 1950s and 1960s, between the questioning of artists, the evolution of critics and the projects of gallery owners and curators, to show how drawing is understood as a complex reality, in act.