Resumen de Un musée idéal de l'art chrétien: trois regards des anées 1930
Between 1918 and 1939, three works appeared aimed at presenting a sum total of religous art from the catacombs to the contemporary period. These were: Abel Fabre's "Manuel d'Art Chrétien", at first meant for seminaries; Maurice Denis' "l'Histoire de l'Art Religieux", synthesis for a cultivated public; and, in a more iconographical perspective, Louis Bréhier's "L'Art Chrétien". The three works have in common their conclusion with a presentation of works by M. Denis and G. Desvallières, as well as the celebration of a renewal that is not without an effect on the retrospective vision that they give of the more ancient times past. The eclecticism dominating this view of the 1930s clearly contrasts with that imposed a century earlier and whose significance can still be felt in some exclusions. As open as this panorama is to certain schools, it nevertheless seeks to educate the eye and to defend a specific concept of Christian art, while new issues are appearing in the decorations of churches and in the polemics notably linked to abstraction. Furnishing the imagination of the readers with abundant reproductions contributes to inscribing the new forms in an ideal museum, chanted from century to century by the masterpieces of Western religous art.
