A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art


Book Description

A comprehensive review of art in the first truly modern century A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art contains contributions from an international panel of noted experts to offer a broad overview of both national and transnational developments, as well as new and innovative investigations of individual art works, artists, and issues. The text puts to rest the skewed perception of nineteenth-century art as primarily Paris-centric by including major developments beyond the French borders. The contributors present a more holistic and nuanced understanding of the art world during this first modern century. In addition to highlighting particular national identities of artists, A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art also puts the focus on other aspects of identity including individual, ethnic, gender, and religious. The text explores a wealth of relevant topics such as: the challenges the artists faced; how artists learned their craft and how they met clients; the circumstances that affected artist’s choices and the opportunities they encountered; and where the public and critics experienced art. This important text: Offers a comprehensive review of nineteenth-century art that covers the most pressing issues and significant artists of the era Covers a wealth of important topics such as: ethnic and gender identity, certain general trends in the nineteenth century, an overview of the art market during the period, and much more Presents novel and valuable insights into familiar works and their artists Written for students of art history and those studying the history of the nineteenth century, A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Art offers a comprehensive review of the first modern era art with contributions from noted experts in the field.




Conservative Echoes in Fin-de-Si_cle Parisian Art Criticism


Book Description

While the painting of the 1880s and 1890s in Paris has been studied in great depth, the concurrent art criticism has not been given the attention it deserves. Conservative Echoes examines previously unexplored aspects of the symbolist criticism of art, revealing its conservative nature, and thus providing a new view of the art criticism of one of the most significant periods in the development of modern art. Art historians tend to focus on a small body of criticism written by authors who championed one or more of the artists recognized today as leaders of the avant-garde. In essence, it is the art that directs most studies of criticism rather than the criticism itself. Michael Marlais has studied late nineteenth-century criticism on all levels, from popular press to esoteric review, in order to understand the context in which avant-garde art criticism appeared. He focuses on the critics Félix Fénéon, Albert Aurier, Alphonse Germain, Camille Mauclair, and Maurice Denis, noting both conservative and modernist features of their writing, while attempting to situate them within the antinaturalist intellectual trends of the period. Marlais emphasizes the relationship of avant-garde critics to the broader cultural milieu, thus providing both a valuable corrective in the study of fin-de-siècle art history and another way of understanding the cultural climate in Paris during that time.




Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism


Book Description

The essays in this wide-ranging, beautifully illustrated volume capture the theoretical range and scholarly rigor of recent criticism that has fundamentally transformed the study of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Readers are invited to consider the profound issues and penetrating questions that lie beneath this perennially popular body of work as the contributors examine the art world of late nineteenth-century France—including detailed looks at Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Degas, Cézanne, Morisot, Seurat, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. The authors offer fascinating new perspectives, placing the artworks from this period in wider social and historical contexts. They explore these painters' pictorial and market strategies, the critical reception and modern criteria the paintings engendered, and the movement's historic role in the formation of an avant-garde tradition. Their research reflects the wealth of new documents, critical approaches, and scholarly exhibitions that have fundamentally altered our understanding of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. These essays, several of which have previously been familiar only to scholars, provide instructive models of in-depth critical analysis and of the competing art historical methods that have crucially reshaped the field. Contributors: Carol Armstrong, T. J. Clark, Stephen F. Eisenman, Tamar Garb, Nicholas Green, Robert L. Herbert, John House, Mary Tompkins Lewis, Michel Melot, Linda Nochlin, Richard Shiff, Debora Silverman, Paul Tucker, Martha Ward







Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde


Book Description

Martha Ward tracks the development and reception of neo-impressionism, revealing how the artists and critics of the French art world of the 1880s and 1890s created painting's first modern vanguard movement. Paying particular attention to the participation of Camille Pissarro, the only older artist to join the otherwise youthful movement, Ward sets the neo-impressionists' individual achievements in the context of a generational struggle to redefine the purposes of painting. She describes the conditions of display, distribution, and interpretation that the neo-impressionists challenged, and explains how these artists sought to circulate their own work outside of the prevailing system. Paintings, Ward argues, often anticipate and respond to their own conditions of display and use, and in the case of the neo-impressionists, the artists' relations to market forces and exhibition spaces had a decisive impact on their art. Ward details the changes in art dealing, and chronicles how these and new freedoms for the press made artistic vanguardism possible while at the same time affecting the content of painting. She also provides a nuanced account of the neo-impressionists' engagements with anarchism, and traces the gradual undermining of any strong correlation between artistic allegiance and political direction in the art world of the 1890s. Throughout, there are sensitive discussions of such artists as Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, as well as Pissarro. Yet the touchstone of the book is Pissarro's intricate relationship to the various factions of the Paris art world.




Monet's Minutes


Book Description

A stunning exploration of the vital links between Claude Monet's Impressionism and the time technologies that helped define modernity in the nineteenth century Monet's Minutes is a revelatory account charting the relationship between the works of Claude Monet (1840-1926)--founder of French Impressionism and one of the world's best-known painters--and the modern experience of time. André Dombrowski illuminates Monet's celebration of instantaneity in the context of the late nineteenth-century time technologies that underwrote it. Monet's version of Impressionism demonstrated an acute awareness of the particularly modern pressures of time, but until now scholars have not examined the histories and technologies of time and timekeeping that informed Impressionism's major stylistic shifts. Arguing that the fascination with instantaneity rejected the dulling cultures of newly routinized and standardized time, Monet's Minutes traces the evolution of Monet's art to what were then seismic shifts in the shape of time itself. In each chapter, Dombrowski focuses on the connections between a set of Monet's works and a specific technology or experience of time, while providing the voices of period critics responding to Impressionism. Grounded in exceptional research and analyses, this book offers new interpretations of key works by Monet and a fresh perspective on late nineteenth-century art, society, and modern temporality.




Art Criticism and Its Institutions in Nineteenth-century France


Book Description

This book explores a range of social, institutional and discursive conditions in and through which criticism emerged and functioned in 19th-century France, and goes on to develop broader theoretical questions drawn from historical case studies.