Nineteenth Century French Art

During the nineteenth century, France experienced an unprecedented growth in the visual arts, and Paris was its center. French art became a universally accepted benchmark, spreading its many ground-breaking developments -- the radicalism of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, the daring of Art Nouveau, and the innovations of Haussman's new urban landscape -- far beyond its borders, and in return receiving numerous influences from broad. During this extraordinary rich and productive period, French art also benefited from the synthesis of the past with the innovations of the present, resulting in an artistic output whose legacy is still being felt today. This chronological history, richly illustrated and recounted by experts from France's preeminent museums, charts the growth of this fruitful -- and revolutionary -- period in the history of world art. -- From publisher's description.

This is the newest volume in the National Gallery of Art's Systematic Catalogue, a series that presents and describes the Gallery's holdings of painting, sculpture, photographs, and decorative arts. This richly illustrated volume includes the work of such early nineteenth century French painters as Ingres, Courbet, Gericault, Delacroix, and Millet.

Over the past years, studies have begun not only to identify the factors that impeded the full participation of women artists in French cultural life, such as women’s limited access to professional art education, but also to bring to light the considerable artistic accomplishments of women occluded by historians for over a century. A similar effort at historical revision has been under way for French women writers. Works of fiction that enjoyed many editions in the nineteenth-century receded from our field of vision for almost a century before being rediscovered and reissued during the last decades of the twentieth century. Such efforts have resulted in scholarship that has helped revise the history of both artistic and literary expression in nineteenth-century France. Similarly, many women in nineteenth-century France had their art criticism published both in journal reviews and in book form, often for decades, in a number of the most influential venues of their day. However, it is perplexing that they remain almost totally invisible in histories of French culture. Women Art Critics in Nineteenth-Century France: Vanishing Acts is the first sustained effort to bring these prolific and influential critics out from the shadows. Although each of the chapters in this volume results from an interdisciplinary approach, the fact that they are written by scholars in art history and in literature means that there will be inevitable differences in approach and methodology. Thus, we study the women’s reception of specific artworks and aesthetic movements, discuss intersections of aesthetics and politics in their essays and the literary styles and rhetorical strategies of individual critics, explore the social conditions that allowed or impeded their successes, and suggest reasons for their all but disappearance in the twentieth century. In bringing to light for twenty-first-century readers the “vanished” writings of heretofore unrecognized or underrecognized women art critics, the authors hope to contribute to the ongoing revision of women’s role in cultural history. The multifaceted approaches to word/image studies modeled in this book, and the many avenues for further research it identifies, will inspire scholars in a number of disciplines to continue the work of reinscribing women in the history of cultural life.

"Using words and works of both pupils and masters of the French Academy of Beaux-Arts, this fascinating book provides a wealth of information about the environment and studio practices of French official art from 1830 to 1890. Albert Boime describes the training of new pupils in the Academic ateliers, from the time they began and were set to copy engravings and casts to their copying of the old masters in the Louvre to their work before the live model and landscape painting out-of-doors. Boime's account includes not only a history of the transition from guild-controlled arts sanctioned by the church to an academic system sponsored by the state but also a reassessment of the positive role played by the Academy's teaching program in the evolution of the independent movements of the nineteenth century"--Publisher's description.

The traditional relationship between painting and literature underwent a profound change in nineteenth-century France. Painting progressively asserted its independence from literature as it liberated itself from narrative obligations whilst interrogating the concept of subject matter itself. Simultaneously the influence of art on the writing styles of authors increased and the character of the artist established itself as a recurring motif in French literature. This book offers a panoramic review of the relationship between art and literature in nineteenth-century France. By means of a series of case studies chosen from key moments throughout the nineteenth century, the aim of this study is to provide a focused analysis of specific examples of this relationship, revealing both its multifaceted nature as well as offering a panorama of the development of this on-going and increasingly complex cultural relationship. From Jacques Louis David’s irreverence for classical texts to Victor Hugo’s graphic works, from Edouard Manet’s illustrations to Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings of books, from Honoré de Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s A Rebours, this interdisciplinary investigation of the links between literature and art in France throws new light on both fields of creative endeavour during a critical phase of France’s cultural history.

In late nineteenth-century France, when Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution had finally begun to permeate French culture and society, several academic artists turned to a relatively new sub-genre of history painting, the prehistoric-themed subject. This artistic interest in Darwin’s theories was manifested as paintings and sculptures of prehistoric humanity engaged in physical conflict with each other or other animals, struggling for food, or hunting—all nineteenth-century popular understandings of “survival of the fittest.” This book examines how this sub-genre captured the imagination of French Salon painters from the 1880s to early 1900s, in particular that of Fernand Cormon (1845–1924), one of the foremost academic painters during the final quarter of the nineteenth century. A central argument of this book concerns the unique interpretation of prehistoric humanity that Cormon visualized in his paintings. While the vast majority of prehistoric-themed images made by his salon colleagues focused on violence, combat, and sexual conquest, Cormon’s paintings depict a conflict-free humanity, in which collaboration and cooperation dominate, rather than physical struggle. This study probes the French intellectual understanding and appropriation of Darwin’s theories and considers how the French (mis)translation of The Origin of Species by Clémence-Auguste Royer, the first French translator of the text—along with Neo-Lamarckism and republican ideology in Third Republic France—may have collectively shaped Cormon’s representation of early humanity. The art press overwhelmingly favored Cormon’s visualization of the prehistoric world over that of his Salon peers. Through extended analysis of the art criticism concerning Cormon’s work, Shalon Parker argues that critics’ very clear preference for Cormon’s paintings was rooted in their awareness that he utilized the sub-genre of the prehistoric as a forum in which to reimagine and revive academic figurative painting at a time when the critical reception of Salon art had reached its nadir. Additionally, this study provides a broad overview of the visual models, in particular the anthropological and ethnographic texts and imagery, most readily available to Cormon as sources for shaping his vision of the prehistoric world.

These paintings - dreams of nature as a web of life in which human beings occupy a peripheral role - overwhelmed Rousseau's contemporaries with their novel light effects, original perspective, and "sheer profusion of visual sensation." While Baudelaire considered them superior to even Corot's works, they baffled art critics and have never fit convincingly into the received categories of naturalism, "pre-Impressionism," or modernism."--Jacket.

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.