Pantheon De La Guerre: Reconfiguring a Panorama of the Great War [Hardcover]

Mark Levitch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2006

 

In its day it was, quite simply, the world’s largest painting.

            The Panthéon de la Guerre was a cyclorama the size of a football field, featuring 5,000 full-length portraits of prominent figures from World War I—a painting that blatantly sought to arouse patriotic fervor in its viewers. This book traces that work’s shifting fortunes during its unlikely journey from Great War Paris to cold war Kansas City and examines the continuing journeys of its fragments in the world’s art markets. 

Mark Levitch has written the first history and analysis of the Panthéon, capturing its social life in a story full of surprising twists and turns and as epic as the painting itself. Created in Paris as an artist-generated propaganda project while the war raged, the Panthéonwas celebrated there as a solemn and nostalgic work after the war, then was promoted as a circuslike spectacle on a postwar tour of the United States when it was “updated” to appeal to Americans’ more celebratory view of the conflict. Consigned to storage and all but forgotten after World War II, the Panthéon was eventually procured for Kansas City’s Liberty Memorial in 1956, where less than 7 percent of the work was reconfigured into a smaller U.S.-centric mural—some of the unused fragments eventually surfacing in Paris flea markets and on eBay.

Levitch looks at the Panthéon as both painting and artifact, combining cultural history, art history, and material culture studies to trace the changing reception of traditional art in the new age of mechanical media. He assesses the changing values attached to the Panthéon and argues that the panorama’s status and frequent reshaping have both informed and been informed by the experience and memory of the First World War in France and the United States—and also reflects on how it has promoted a politically and culturally conservative agenda.

            Brimming with facts and insights that will amaze anyone who has known the painting in any of its incarnations, Levitch’s handsomely illustrated book provides a unique lens through which to view a conflict and its commemoration. And as people continue to place importance on commemorative projects, it is a powerful reminder of how ephemeral such grand undertakings can be.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Levitch's fine archaeology of the Panthéon provides a great service to historians of the memory of the Great War...He tells his story in such an engaging manner that most anyone with an interest in that conflict will want to go to Kansas City as soon as possible to see what remains of it.

--Leonard Smith, Journal of Military History (July 2007)

Mark Levitch tells a fascinating tale of artistic vision, cultural politics, and Franco-American relations, and he tells it very well...How a work of French patriotic art became an icon of American political orthodoxy is central to the story Levitch traces with elegance, insight, and intelligence.

--Martha Hanna, H-War (July 2009)

This is a richly rewarding study...Well illustrated throughout, this is an engaging and thoughtful narrative of interest to students of cultural history, art and to the general reader, and is highly recommended.

--Graham Shaw, The ArtBook (February 2008)

Levitch creates a work that is both accessible and thought-provoking. While this book focuses on a very specific issue in art-history, the evolution and transformation of Panthéon raises a number of interesting questions about our relationship to war and to the past in general. 

--Angela O'Flaherty, French Studies (2008)

“Panthéon de la Guerre is a fascinating and original account of a neglected chapter in the cultural history of the First World War. . . . An intriguing and engaging piece of scholarship.” —Jay Winter, author of The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century

About the Author

Mark Levitch, a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Pennsylvania, was previously an intelligence analyst at the State Department and a graduate curatorial fellow at the National Gallery of Art. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: University of Missouri; 1 edition (November 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826216781
• ISBN-13: 978-0826216786
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 7.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,618,380 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect gift for military history buffs and art lovers!, January 9, 2007

By 

Richard Rabicoff (Baltimore, Maryland United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pantheon De La Guerre: Reconfiguring a Panorama of the Great War (Hardcover)

Art historian Mark Levitch has unearthed the fascinating back story to a revered painting that hangs in the nation's only World War I museum, The Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri. Turns out that this depiction of America's rescue of Europe originated as a relatively minor panel in a vast mural the length of a football field. Created during the Great War by select French academic artists, Pantheon De La Guerre was intended as a celebration of France and its allies, replete with the iconography of the period (not to mention the topography of France!). In Levitch's telling, the mural fell out of fashion in post-war France; only an idioscyncratic Baltimore collector saved it from the dust heap. The colossus was shipped to America, where in the 1930s it was thoroughly sheared and reconfigured as a paean to American heroism in the war. Components of the mural are dispersed worldwide and still show up at auctions and on eBay. In crystal clear and elegant prose Levitch portrays the strange devolution of the painting as an index to shifting tastes in modern art and culture between the wars. If you have any interest in the Great War and the art and culture of the period, you will find Levitch's account compelling reading. This handsomely printed and illustrated volume is fit for the coffee table or the study. Highly recommended.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pantheon de La Guerre Review, January 12, 2007

By 

Nancy K. Kargman "Steven Kargman" (Scottsdale, AZ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pantheon De La Guerre: Reconfiguring a Panorama of the Great War (Hardcover)

As a student of history it was exciting to come across Mark Levitch's recent book, Pantheon de La Guerre: Reconfiguring a Panorama of the Great War. Readers interested in art, political science, marketing or just wanting to expand their horizons will find this to be a brilliantly written work. With its many elegant illustrations you may find yourself doing as I did. Upon reading of an illustration I literally took a magnifying glass to better view it and was amazed how Mr. Levitch was able to minutely go over the painting to discover its varied stories. Mr. Levitch succeeds in presenting as grand a vista into the First World War from the perspective of the French nation by its artists as the artists themselves did with their colossal work. Intriguing indeed is the writing manner by which Mr. Levitch takes a one dimensional propaganda piece and literally makes it appear as a living, breathing and altering life form. His style draws one easily into understanding how the French and their allies came to revere this distorted air brushed view of the war as the Pantheon unfortunately presented. Mr. Levitch points out the numerous changes made to the Pantheon during the war, changes made to reflect the most current politically correct points of view as the war progressed. An example of this is Tsar Nicholas and his court which suffered the air bushing of history upon imperial Russia's abandonment of their French allies. Even the rampant bile of French anti Semitism found its way into the painting which, because of Mr. Levitch's research, is noted and the portion of the Pantheon containing its depiction is illustrated. I must wonder if the time spent by the author researching each figure, trying to identify every face and noting each modification to this enormous colossus is any less an endeavor than the actual painting itself. The book later follows the Pantheon's history through out the roaring twenties and its eventual arrival to its new home, the United States. Because of the vivid detailed documentation, various sections of the pantheon stand out and become a vision in the mind's eye. It was amusing to read of the inclusion of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S Truman into the Pantheon as the French viewpoint of the war became second fiddle at the hands of American artists revising the pantheon to reflect their tastes and to make its exhibition more palatable to Americans. To the owners belong the spoils and with the great art piece firmly in the ownership of Americans it was repainted, torn apart, and pieced back together to represent a significantly greater American involvement in the Great War than the French ever intended and perhaps more so than history can sustain. Today, as its 100 birthday nears, portions of the Pantheon de La Guerre are on display in Kansas City's Liberty War Memorial. Without Mr. Levitch's eye opening book, a museum visitor may easily assume these portions are the Pantheon as it was originally presented and in its entirety. It is no such thing. In reality, it is as much a distortion in its present state as the original was of the Great War. If for no other reason this would mark Pantheon de La Guerre: Reconfiguring a Panorama of the Great War an outstanding researched and must read book. When you parallel this with the author's writing style, the descriptive interesting tidbits and major informative facts presented I am in awe this is only the author's first book.