Resumen de Agnès Humbert, historienne de l'art
Agnès Humbert, Art Historian.
The contribution of women to the construction of art history, understood here as a scientific and academic discipline, has been ignored for much too long. It constitutes a vast field of research to be reintroduced into the historiographic canon. In this regard, Agnès Humbert's career can offer a solid starting point. After a thesis about the art critic, Théophile Gautier, presented at the École du Louvre, she proposed, in 1936, a Marxist interpretation of the career of the painter Jacques-Louis David. She played an important role in the preservation and transmission of the resources of popular culture, as well as publishing the very first work on the Nabis. Through the stands she took -artistic,ideological, and methodological- her critical and impasioned regard on art, she imposed herself as an art historian who was singular, committed and humanist, who sought to push back the frontiers of the discipline and to undo the idea of a hierarchy of the objects of its study. At the same time, her trajectory was accompanied by several symptoms often affecting the carrers of women in these institutional surroundings dominated by men, and obviously poses several questions for a history of art history that has for a lonf time thought without them. This article examines the itinerary of this forgotten intellectual, from her beginnings as an artist to her statue as art historian, graduate of the École du Louvre, assistant in the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires, then curatorial attachée and curator at the Musée National d'Art Moderne. As a resistant, she actively participated in the Réseau of the Musée de l'Homme. If this heroic part of her life is better known today, her experience as art historian is much less known even though it is crucial for understanding of her personaliy, her choices and her combats.
