Ségolène Le Men’s ambitious Courbet makes a case for the continuing relevance and utility of the artist monograph. Cultural, political, technical, aesthetic and psychological influences and consequences of artworks can all be profitably explored through a monographic approach. There are, as well, scholarly gains to be made by considering the whole of an artist’s oeuvre in a single work. Publishers and booksellers likewise rely on such recognizable brands: the name of a well-known artist (ideally, along with a familiar self-portrait or other signal artwork) on the cover of a book is more likely to attract an audience of general readers than some arcane title or unfamiliar image. Monographs also help establish and preserve the artistic brand names upon which the art market has depended for centuries.

The monographic format enjoys a certain disciplinary prestige as the heritor of one of the earliest approaches to documenting art’s history: the inclination to examine works of art in relation to the lived experience of the artist goes back at least as far as Vasari’s Vite (some would argue that it goes back even to Pliny). The reasons for its persistence are, of course, numerous. While the intellectual status of the artist monograph may remain uncertain in some quarters, the genre survives, even flourishes. Attempts to present the life and work of an artist in its entirety fell out of fashion during the 80s and 90s, and art historians focusing on the work of a single artist tended instead to home in on a single thematic, social, or technical issue relevant to that artist’s oeuvre.

This approach elicited some wariness in the final decades of the twentieth century as many art historians reoriented their scholarship in response to the influence of critical methods (feminism, Marxism, Post-structuralism) that eschewed such “grand narratives.” The necessarily biographical organization of the traditional artist monograph came under particular suspicion as scholars sought increasingly to interpret artworks in relation to the social dynamics of artistic production and reception rather than the elusive intentions of a lone genius. Like its more ambitious cousin the catalogue raisonné, the traditional monograph seeks to wrangle an artist’s career within the bounds of a single, authoritative narrative. The artist monograph has become something of a vexed genre.

Courbet by Segolene Le Men