Där tider möts : Om anakronismer och historiemedvetande i Hubert Roberts måleri

Sammanfattning

This master thesis investigates how the passing of time manifests in figures and spatial compositions in the paintings of Hubert Robert (1733-1808). The thesis consists of three sections devoted to three temporal aspects of the artist's work: the experience of the past, the present, and the expectations of the future. The first section investigates Robert's Roman capriccio, the second his Parisian motifs during the French revolution, and finally, section three is devoted to his engagement at the Louvre. Previous research has interpreted his works as expressions of ruin poetics, the sublime, or a model of cyclical time. In contrast, this thesis argues that Robert's production of complex heterochronic montages fluctuates and changes depending on the historical moment, the site's spatial order and the recurrent artworks as figures he chose to include in his paintings. Throughout his carrier, Robert was concerned with problematizing temporality. By using conceptual history (Reinhart Koselleck, François Hartog) and anachronistic art theory (Georges Didi-Huberman, Alexander Nagel & Christopher Wood, Aby Warburg) as a theoretical framework in dialogue with historical text sources (Diderot, Winckelmann, Burke, Quatremère de Quincy, among others), this thesis shows how Robert's paintings create ontological investigations of the observers' experience of objects changing temporal status in the wake of the modern regime of historicity.