Introduction: Critical Art and History -- Classicism and Romanticism -- 1. Patriotism and Virtue: David to the Young Ingres / Thomas Crow -- 2. Classicism in Crisis: Gros to Delacroix / Thomas Crow -- 3. The Tensions of Enlightment: Goya -- 4. Visionary History Painting: Blake and His Contemporaries / Brian Lukacher -- 5. Nature Historicized: Constable, Turner, and Romantic Landscape Painting / Brian Lukacher -- New World Frontiers -- 6. Old World, New World: The Encounter of Cultures on the American Frontier / Frances K. Pohl -- 7. Black and White in America / Frances K. Pohl -- Realism and Naturalism -- 8. The Generation of 1830 and the Crisis in the Public Sphere -- 9. The Rhetoric of Realism: Courbet and the Origins of the Avant-Garde -- 10. The Decline of History Painting: Germany, Italy, and France -- Modern Art and Life -- 11. Manet and the Impressionists -- 12. Issues of Gender in Cassatt and Eakins / Linda Nochlin -- 13. Mass Culture and Utopia: Seurat and Neoimpressionism -- 14. Abstraction and Populism: Van Gogh -- 15. Symbolism and the Dialectics of Retreat -- 16. The Failure and Success of Cezanne
Summary
"This is a radical reconsideration of the origins of modern painting and sculpture in Europe and North America. In art, as in nearly every other field, the nineteenth century was a time of questioning, experimentation, discovery and modernization. Artists divined and portrayed, as never before, the crucial connections between seeing and knowing, vision and society. From Goya to Blake, from Courbet to Eakins, from Cassatt to Cezanne, from Van Gogh to Ensor, they challenged the prevailing definitions of art and the social order." "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 emphasizing 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 methods 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 women and non-European peoples." "This rich and diverse volume suggests that nineteenth-century art remains compelling today because its critical insights have rarely been surpassed. It will prove of interest not only to the specialist, but to anyone fascinated by the art, history and culture of this unique era."--BOOK JACKET
Biography or History
Stephen F. Eisenman is Chair of the Department of Art History and the Visual Arts at Occidental College, Los Angeles
Thomas Crow holds the Chair of History of Art at the University of Sussex
Brian Lukacher is Associate Professor of Art History at Vassar College
Linda Nochlin is currently the Lila Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University
Frances K. Pohl is Associate Professor of Art History at Pomona College, California
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (p. 365-367) and index