Nineteenth Century Art


Book Description

"The revised and expanded edition of Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History embraces many aspects of the so-called 'new' art history - attention to issues of class and gender, reception and spectatorship, racism and Eurocentrism - while at the same time recovering the remarkable vitality, salience and subversiveness of the era's best art. Indeed, the authors insist that there is a profound sympathy between these new perspectives and the art under examination. For it was nineteenth-century artists who first addressed the issues that preoccupy audiences and scholars today: the relation between popular and elite culture, the legacy of the Enlightenment, the question of the canon, and the representation of workers, women and non-whites."--BOOK JACKET.




Observing by Hand


Book Description

Today we are all familiar with the iconic pictures of the nebulae produced by the Hubble Space Telescope’s digital cameras. But there was a time, before the successful application of photography to the heavens, in which scientists had to rely on handmade drawings of these mysterious phenomena. Observing by Hand sheds entirely new light on the ways in which the production and reception of handdrawn images of the nebulae in the nineteenth century contributed to astronomical observation. Omar W. Nasim investigates hundreds of unpublished observing books and paper records from six nineteenth-century observers of the nebulae: Sir John Herschel; William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse; William Lassell; Ebenezer Porter Mason; Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel; and George Phillips Bond. Nasim focuses on the ways in which these observers created and employed their drawings in data-driven procedures, from their choices of artistic materials and techniques to their practices and scientific observation. He examines the ways in which the act of drawing complemented the acts of seeing and knowing, as well as the ways that making pictures was connected to the production of scientific knowledge. An impeccably researched, carefully crafted, and beautifully illustrated piece of historical work, Observing by Hand will delight historians of science, art, and the book, as well as astronomers and philosophers.




Representing the Past in the Art of the Long Nineteenth Century


Book Description

This edited collection explores the intersection of historical studies and the artistic representation of the past in the long nineteenth century. The case studies provide not just an account of the pursuit of history in art within Western Europe but also examples from beyond that sphere. These cover canonical and conventional examples of history painting as well as more inclusive, ‘popular’ and vernacular visual cultural phenomena. General themes explored include the problematics internal to the theory and practice of academic history painting and historical genre painting, including compositional devices and the authenticity of artefacts depicted; relationships of power and purpose in historical art; the use of historical art for alternative Liberal and authoritarian ideals; the international cross-fertilisation of ideas about historical art; and exploration of the diverse influences of socioeconomic and geopolitical factors. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of the histories of nineteenth-century art and culture.




Nineteenth-century European Art


Book Description

This survey explores the history of nineteenth-century European art and visual culture. Focusing primarily on painting and sculpture, it places these two art forms within the larger context of visual culture including photography, graphic design, architecture, and decorative arts. In turn, all are treated within a broad historical framework to show the connections between visual cultural production and the political, social, and economic order of the time. Topics covered include The Classical Paradigm, Art and Revolutionary Propaganda In France, The Arts under Napoleon and Francisco Goya and Spanish Art at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century. For art enthusiasts, or anyone who wants to learn more about Art History.




Making Waves


Book Description

Making Waves: Crosscurrents in the Study of Nineteenth-Century Art points the way toward futher appreciation and understanding of an era that still resonates strongly in our contemporary culture. Making Waves: Crosscurrents in the Study of Nineteenth-Century Art honours the life work of Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, who continues to lead the field in the study of the art of the nineteenth century. The twenty-eight essays in this book are authored by some of her many friends, students, and colleagues, including seasoned academics and those at the beginning of their careers; museum professionals and private-sector arts administrators; and American, European, and Chinese scholars. Following Petra Chu's example, and avoiding opaque theoretical language and extended technical analysis, authors present original ideas, based primarily on the study of objects and their documented historical contexts. Though their methodologies are diverse, their purposes are clear and their language straight-forward. The essays thoughtfully and respectfully address the solid reality of the nineteenth century in all of its complex (and sometimes repugnant) sensibilities. They disrupt traditional art historical categories and methodologies, and highlight topics that have been long ignored and overlooked. Making Waves demonstrates, in no uncertain terms, that art historians still have much to say to each other and to their readers, and that nineteenth-century art has only begun to be explored in all its complexity and variety. Laurinda S. Dixon is Professor Emerita of Art History at Syracuse University, New York. Her scholarship considers the intersection of art and science- particularly alchemy, herbalism, medicine, astrology, and music- from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. She is the author of many articles, book chapters, and ten books.




Nineteenth-century Theories of Art


Book Description

This unique and extraordinarily rich collection of writings offers a thematic approach to understanding the various theories of art that illumined the direction of nineteenth-century artists as diverse as Tommaso Minardi and Georges Seurat. It is significant that during the nineteenth century most artists felt compelled to found their artistic practice on a consciously established premise.




A Forest of Symbols


Book Description

A groundbreaking reassessment of Symbolist artists and writers that investigates the concerns they shared with scientists of the period—the problem of subjectivity in particular. In A Forest of Symbols, Andrei Pop presents a groundbreaking reassessment of those writers and artists in the late nineteenth century associated with the Symbolist movement. For Pop, “symbolist” denotes an art that is self-conscious about its modes of making meaning, and he argues that these symbolist practices, which sought to provide more direct access to viewers and readers by constant revision of its material means of meaning-making (brushstrokes on a canvas, words on a page), are crucial to understanding the genesis of modern art. The symbolists saw art not as a social revolution, but as a revolution in sense and how to conceptualize the world. The concerns of symbolist painters and poets were shared to a remarkable degree by theoretical scientists of the period, who were dissatisfied with the strict empiricism dominant in their disciplines, which made shared knowledge seem unattainable. The problem of subjectivity in particular, of what in one's experience can and cannot be shared, was crucial to the possibility of collaboration within science and to the communication of artistic innovation. Pop offers close readings of the literary and visual practices of Manet and Mallarmé, of drawings by Ernst Mach, William James and Wittgenstein, of experiments with color by Bracquemond and Van Gogh, and of the philosophical systems of Frege and Russell—filling in a startling but coherent picture of the symbolist heritage of modernity and its consequences.




Romanticism & the School of Nature


Book Description

This volume presents 115 drawings and paintings from the holdings of collector Karen B. Cohen. The 19th-century French and English works include landscapes, portraits, figure compositions, and still lifes by great artists of the romantic period and of the Barbizon and Realist schools, beginning with Prud'hon and ending with Seurat. Among the highlights is a group of little known works by Courbet and a series of cloud studies by Constable. Ives (curator, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) provides documentation and commentary for each work, placing it within the context of the artist's development and connecting it to contemporary artistic trends and innovations. Curator Elizabeth E. Barker contributed entries on Constable and Bonington. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR




Nineteenth Century Art


Book Description

Rich in ideas and illustrations...of interest to scholars and art enthusiasts alike.--Library Journal




Art Work


Book Description

"I was in high spirits all through my unwise teens, considerably puffed up, after my drawings began to sell, with that pride of independence which was a new thing to daughters of that period."—The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote Mary Hallock made what seems like an audacious move for a nineteenth-century young woman. She became an artist. She was not alone. Forced to become self-supporting by financial panics and civil war, thousands of young women moved to New York City between 1850 and 1880 to pursue careers as professional artists. Many of them trained with masters at the Cooper Union School of Design for Women, where they were imbued with the Unity of Art ideal, an aesthetic ideology that made no distinction between fine and applied arts or male and female abilities. These women became painters, designers, illustrators, engravers, colorists, and art teachers. They were encouraged by some of the era's best-known figures, among them Tribune editor Horace Greeley and mechanic/philanthropist Peter Cooper, who blamed the poverty and dependence of both women and workers on the separation of mental and manual labor in industrial society. The most acclaimed artists among them owed their success to New York's conspicuously egalitarian art institutions and the rise of the illustrated press. Yet within a generation their names, accomplishments, and the aesthetic ideal that guided them virtually disappeared from the history of American art. Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York recaptures the unfamiliar cultural landscape in which spirited young women, daring social reformers, and radical artisans succeeded in reuniting art and industry. In this interdisciplinary study, April F. Masten situates the aspirations and experience of these forgotten women artists, and the value of art work itself, at the heart of the capitalist transformation of American society.