Painting And Sculpture In Europe 1880 1940

This new edition of 'a book that offers the best available grounding in its huge subject,' as the Sunday Times called it, includes color plates and a revised and expanded bibliography. Professor Hamilton traces the origins and growth of modern art, assessing the intrinsic qualities of individual works and describing the social forces in play. The result is an authoritative guide through the forest of artistic labels-Impressionism and Expressionism, Symbolism, Cubism, Constructivism, Surrealism, etc.-and to the achievements of Degas and Cezanne, Ensor and Munch, Matisse and Kandinsky, Picasso, Braque, and Epstein, Mondrian, Dali, Modigliani, Utrillo and Chagall, Klee, Henry Moore, and many other artists in a revolutionary age.

From the Classicism of Jacques-Louis David to the Realism of Courbet and the Early Impressionism of Renoir, this book outlines the course taken by painting and sculpture in Europe during the 19th century. Faced with the untidy sprawl of individualism which followed the French Revolution and threw up isolated geniuses like Goya, the author nevertheless charts the currents in what was predominantly a century of Naturalism and also - whilst artists were increasingly preoccupied with the inner man - of great landscape-painting when Friedrich, Corot and the Impressionists proper added light and atmosphere to the former achievements of the great Dutch masters.

From the Classicism of Jacques-Louis David to the Realism of Courbet and the Early Impressionism of Renoir the former Director of the Osterreichische Galerie at Vienna outlines the course taken by painting and sculpture on the continent of Europe during the nineteenth century. Faced with the untidy sprawl of individualism which followed the French Revolution and threw up isolated geniuses like Goya, Fritz Novotny nevertheless succeeds in charting the currents in what was predominantly a century of Naturalism and also-while artists were increasingly preoccupied with the 'inner man' of great landscape painting when Freidrich, Corot, and the Impressionists proper added light and atmosphere to the former achievements of the great Dutch masters.

A compelling analysis of how World War I spurred the rise of atheism and the subsequent effect on Western theology, philosophy, literature, and art. The catastrophic Great War left humanity in a world no longer trustworthy and reassuring but seemingly meaningless and indifferent. Instead of redressing humanity’s cosmic alienation, postwar Western culture abandoned its concern for cosmic meaning, lost its confidence in human reason, and enabled the scientific worldview of neo-Darwinian materialism to emerge and eventually dominate the Western mind. According to the proponents of that worldview, science is the only source of genuine truth, nature is the product of a blind evolutionary process, and reality at bottom is just physics and chemistry. Thus, God is dead and continued belief in a transcendently purposeful universe is intellectually indefensible and either disingenuous or delusional. By turning away from the eternal questions about the nature of reality, Western culture effectively ceded unwarranted credibility and prominence to neo-Darwinian materialism, including its recently strident New Atheism. “O’Connor revisits the 20th century’s journey from Nietzsche’s declaration of the ‘death of God’ to the rise of materialism as the dominant worldview of western intelligentsia. We live in a world that has largely expelled both mind and meaning from the citadels of serious intellectual pursuit, and O’Connor’s book is a fascinating and scholarly expedition into the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of that troubling development.” —Carter Phipps, author of Evolutionaries “I found this topic to be top-rate. The book is well researched and conceived, nicely narrated and analyzed, and an original body of inquiry into a challenging, fascinating intellectual tradition.” —Ronald M. Johnson, Professor Emeritus of American History, Georgetown University

This documents the distinguished collection of European art—from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries—that forms a significant part of the collections belonging to the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. This book includes stunning canvases by Gericault, Delacroix, Degas, Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Renoir, Picasso, and Matisse. What makes the collection so noteworthy are the extraordinary works by unknown artists and the unknown works by known artists.

Suitable for 19th and 20th century Europe/modern Europe undergraduate courses.This well-established and immensely successful book provides a standard introduction to the subject by one of Britain's most popular historians. Social, economic and social history are skillfully integrated within a framework of political narrative history.