Twenty First Century Perspectives On Nineteenth Century Art

"This book presents an interdisciplinary and inclusive view of nineteenth-century art, observed from the vantage point of the new twenty-first century. The areas of expertise represented by the thirty essays herein span the full range of nineteenth-century studies, and include discussions of such artistic styles as realism, impressionism, romanticism, and art nouveau, as well as early twentieth-century movements that owe their formative influence to the nineteenth century. Topics span the historical gamut from revivalism to the roots of modernism, considering along the way such themes as the depiction of women, Orientalism, art criticism, evolutionary theory, political propaganda, history painting, landscape, and national identity. Aspects of art display, public monuments, and international exhibitions shed light on the roles of government and individuals in the dissemination of artistic styles and subject matter. Unique in this collection is an emphasis on the marketing of art, both in America and abroad, which considers the important financial and commercial issues that continue to influence viewers' beliefs and perceptions. Most important, this book demonstrates that the rich field of nineteenth-century studies continues to inspire discovery and creativity."--Publisher 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.

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.

Throughout the nineteenth century, academies functioned as the main venues for the teaching, promotion, and display of art. Contemporary scholars have, for the most part, denigrated academic art, calling it formulaic, unoriginal, and repetitious. The contributors to Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century challenge this entrenched notion and consider how academies worldwide have represented an important system of artistic preservation and transmission. Their essays eschew easy binaries that have reigned in academia for more than half a century and that simply oppose the avant-garde to academicism.

Mining various archives and newspaper repositories, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Nineteenth-Century Pioneer of Modern Art Criticism provides the first full-length study of a remarkable woman and heretofore neglected art critic. Pennell, a prolific 'New Art Critic', helped formulate and develop formalist methodology in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, which she applied to her mostly anonymous or pseudonymous reviews published in numerous American and British newspapers and periodicals between 1883 and 1923. A bibliography of her art criticism is included as an appendix. In addition to advocating an advanced way in which to view art, Pennell used her platform to promote the work of ?new? artists, including ?ouard Manet and Edgar Degas, which had only recently been introduced to British audiences. In particular, Pennell championed the work of James McNeill Whistler for whom she, along with her husband, the artist Joseph Pennell, wrote a biography. Examination of her contributions to the late Victorian art world also highlights the pivotal role of criticism in the production and consumption of art in general, a point which is often ignored.

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris examines a history of contact between modern Europe and East Asia through three collectors: Henri Cernuschi, Emile Guimet, and Edmond de Goncourt. Drawing on a wealth of material including European travelogues of the East and Asian reports of the West, Ting Chang explores the politics of mobility and cross-cultural encounter in the nineteenth century. This book takes a new approach to museum studies and institutional critique by highlighting what is missing from the existing scholarship -- the foreign labors, social relations, and somatic experiences of travel that are constitutive of museums yet left out of their histories. The author explores how global trade and monetary theory shaped Cernuschi's collection of archaic Chinese bronze. Exchange systems, both material and immaterial, determined Guimet's museum of religious objects and Goncourt's private collection of Asian art. Bronze, porcelain, and prints articulated the shifting relations and frameworks of understanding between France, Japan, and China in a time of profound transformation. Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris thus looks at what Asian art was imagined to do for Europe. This book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in art history, travel imagery, museum studies, cross-cultural encounters, and modern transnational histories.

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.

In recent years, the interdisciplinary fields of Native North American and Indigenous Studies have reflected, at times even foreshadowed and initiated, many of the influential theoretical discussions in the humanities after the "transnational turn." Global trends of identity politics, performativity, cultural performance and ethics, comparative and revisionist historiography, ecological responsibility and education, as well as issues of social justice have shaped and been shaped by discussions in Native American and Indigenous Studies. This volume brings together distinguished perspectives on these topics by the Native scholars and writers Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe), Diane Glancy (Cherokee), and Tomson Highway (Cree), as well as non-Native authorities, such as Chadwick Allen, Hartmut Lutz, and Helmbrecht Breinig. Contributions look at various moments in the cultural history of Native North America—from earthmounds via the Catholic appropriation of a Mohawk saint to the debates about Makah whaling rights—as well as at a diverse spectrum of literary, performative, and visual works of art by John Ross, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot, Emily Pauline Johnson, Leslie Marmon Silko, Emma Lee Warrior, Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, Stephen Graham Jones, and Gerald Vizenor, among others. In doing so, the selected contributions identify new and recurrent methodological challenges, outline future paths for scholarly inquiry, and explore the intersections between Indigenous Studies and contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies at large.