“This thoughtful and engaging study is neither a diatribe nor a prolonged lament. Rather, it’s a series of straightforward, loosely linked essays exploring the complex relations between the Vichy government and the world of art and design - and their repercussions today. Cone’s non sensationalist tone makes her observations seem all the more startling, as we see not only venality in action, but also naivete, self-interest, and survival as motivations.”

“A must read for those working on the Vichy period and its aftermath.”

“Having started her history with Hitler and Vichy, Cone fittingly ends it with de Gaulle and May ‘68 - not to draw parallels between these authoritarian regimes, but to point out how minimal information on the Nazi Occupation, together with little memory of the Holocaust can engender what she calls “a dangerous confusion.” Without exposure to the new histories to which she herself has so substantially contributed, different forms of authoritarianism risk being conflated as Fascism. While the May ‘68 posters of Hitler disguised as de Gaulle signaled students’ equation of the Resistance leader General de Gaulle with Hitler, French students ignored the Fascist reality of Vichy and Pétain - even though, as Cone incisively points out, its was Pétain, not de Gaulle, who was an accomplice to Hitler’s atrocities.”

“The starkness of Cone’s categories leads her to a dark view of artists whose political commitments have been more ambivalent than vicious, resulting in a more hostile assessment of French abstraction than is warranted. The point, however, does not invalidate her larger claim — that the French art world was crisscrossed by powerful, conservative currents that attempted a synthesis of national tradition and modernist technique. It is an argument that deserves further research. ”

“Her book is good to think with, about the continuities and discontinuities of the Third Republic, Vichy, and the postwar era in the politics of French culture.”

“A remarkable, eye opening study...”

“A significant, insightful, scholarly study recommended for art museums, and academic libraries...”

“Though Ms. Cone does not presume to lift the final veil from the imponderable factors affecting individual choices during the occupation, her admirable, detailed record documents exactly what those choices were.”

“Michele C. Cone’s Artists under Vichy: A case of Prejudice and Persecution is a fine and subtle work that examines how Nazism’s antimodernist policies took effect in France.”

“Cone’s book offers much valuable information; it does no disservice to say that in the end it makes a greater contribution to art history than to history tout court.”

“There is, quite clearly, much new and valuable information contained in the book, much of it surprising even for those who are familiar with the occupation period.”

“Cone demonstrates that critics actively and artists tacitly participated in the purge [of Jews and foreign artists], the former by following the Vichy line, and the latter by taking part in exclusionary exhibitions…. Yet Cone skirts the issue of what constituted collaboration for an artist. Was Henri Matisse a collaborator because he continued to exhibit his work under conditions of exclusion about which he cannot have been ignorant? How are we to regard the group of artists who agreed to make a tour of German cities sponsored by the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda, a group that included Maurice Vlaminck and André Derain whose works had been banned from German museums?”

“Artists under Vichy offers us a good deal of information, it also casts some of the information already known to us in a new light. Yet there is a curious diffidence in this book – a refusal to believe the worst about people that the author is disposed to think well of – that weakens its account of a terrible period and immures the whole chronicle in a blandness that seems particularly inappropriate to the material…
What is in some respects most fascinating about the book is its account of the kind of specious normalcy that was so quickly established in the Paris art world under the Occupation.”

“Well documented and carefully illustrated, this survey lights up unchartered areas of cultural history, opening further avenues for research. ”

“In this fascinating exploration of visual artists under the Occupation, the author Michele Cone is perhaps more honest than many others in acknowledging the judgmental edge of her research and conclusions. The preface sets out a stimulating mix of intellectual theory and morality. I found it refreshing and promising.”

“Cone extends the ongoing debate over art under totalitarianism in the 20th century to the little explored field of painting and politics in the early forties.”

“In this well-researched and beautifully produced book, Michele Cone explores the complex response of the French art establishment to Nazi rule and the Vichy regime during the Occupation of France from June 1940 until the liberation of Paris in August 1944.”