Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Focusing on regional art, this paper posits that, in order to better understand the scope of an artist’s identification with his native culture, studying works of fiction by an author thematizing the same region may provide useful and provocative insights into the artist’s practice. To this effect, I examine the works of artist Eugène Viala (1859-1913) in the light of literary works by author Jean Boudou (1920-1975). Born in the same area – although they never met – and both attached to rurality, Viala and Boudou express a striking, at times desperate melancholy in their works – visual for one, literary for the other. Of particular interest is the fact that they are issued from a linguistic minority that has long been ostracized. The language spoken there is Occitan. Although considered for centuries to be a mere “patois,” Occitan is the traditional language of southern France. Declining since the end of the nineteenth century, it is today an endangered language. Nevertheless, there continues to be a rich Occitan literature while Occitan scholars have over the years produced a seminal critical corpus on minority literature, identity-making, and regional discourse. As words of fiction offer a privileged site to dramatize the cultural loss engaged through the loss of a language, reading such literature allows the viewer to explore in meaningful ways the visual art of an artist attached to his Occitan identity, and see why this continues to matter today.