Critical Voices is a fascinating account of women writing about art in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. Meaghan Clarke employs extensive original research in order to demonstrate the significant contribution made by women to the art world and draws on a diversity of sources, including diaries, letters and periodicals, to highlight the many different forms their criticism took. Focusing in particular on the work of three women - Alice Meynell, Florence Fenwick-Miller and Elizabeth Robins Pennell - Clarke argues that in order to understand fully art debates of the time it is essential we broaden our understanding of the role of women in the construction of art history. John Singer Sargent, James MacNeill Whistler, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, Elizabeth Butler, William Holman Hunt, Frederic Leighton, Walter Sickert, Henrietta Rae, and Rosa Bonheur are among the artists considered.

In recent years, there has been increasing scholarly interest in the history of museums, academies and major exhibitions. There has been, however, little to no sustained interest in the histories of alternative exhibitions (single artwork, solo artist, artist-mounted, entrepreneurial, privately funded, ephemeral, etc.) with the notable exception of those publications that deal with situations involving major artists or those who would become so - for example J.L. David's exhibition of Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) and The First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874 - despite the fact that these sorts of exhibitions and critical scholarship about them have become commonplace (and no less important) in the contemporary art world. The present volume uses and contextualizes eleven case studies to advance some overarching themes and commonalities among alternative exhibitions in the long modern period from the late-eighteenth to the late-twentieth centuries and beyond. These include the issue of control in the interrelation and elision of the roles of artist and curator, and the relationship of such alternative exhibitions to the dominant modes, structures of display and cultural ideology.

This book shows how painting since the mid?1800s has reflected Western society's mixed feelings about the transformations in our world produced by science and technology. Neither a chronicle of the development of modern art nor a history of the modern era, it instead discusses how artists have represented feelings and ideas about the technological changes of modern times. Some artists approach this task with an outward focus, representing the world they perceive. Others focus inward, choosing to represent their personal reactions to that world. The author examines both approaches to show how major art movements of the last two centuries are related to the largest-ever changes in human knowledge. An analysis of 28 works reveals perceptions of technological change as both blessing and curse. The result of this analysis is a fresh view of the major artworks of the past century and a half, along with intriguing insights into our own attitudes towards our world.

Conflicting Visions: War and Visual Culture in Britain and France, c. 1700-1830 offers the first systematic reappraisal of the cultural representation of war in Britain and France during the 'long' eighteenth century. This radical collection of essays explores the relation of visual imagery and aesthetics to conflict during this important period, drawing upon a wealth of materials including paintings and prints, maps and topographical drawings, commemorative sculpture and historical artefacts. The intriguing case studies reveal that military conflict was not a sphere of social activity separated from artistic culture but rather a determining factor in cultural production, and that war itself was largely comprehended, debated and experienced through those products. Key themes and preoccupations - how differing ideas of the public were predicated by the representation of war; how such notions were shaped by the imperial contexts of war; the relations between conflict, national identity and historical memory - are addressed to show that war served as a primary vehicle for the representation of numerous associated and contested issues, including patriotism and the idea of the nation, loyalty and opposition, heroism and masculinity, sympathy and sensibility.

Contemporary cultural practices have blurred and eroded traditional disciplinary boundaries of art and its discourses, and the ways in which they are taught. They have called into question the ideological premises and cultural assumptions on which traditional academic subjects were founded and which have underwritten the segregation between practice, pragmatic and speculative thought. The Scottish Theoros - Forum for Interdisciplinary Debate was jointly initiated by the Department of Philosophy and the School of Fine Art at the University of Dundee to create a space for dialogue between and across the various disciplines that are concerned with the study of visual arts: practice, aesthetics, theory, history and criticism. Theoros has initiated a series of international conferences bringing together professionals who are engaged in the research and teaching of art from different disciplinary perspectives. This volume contains selected contributions to the first Scottish Theoros conference on 'Aesthetics, Historicity and Practice', held in Dundee in 1998. Historicity marks the temporal nature of our existence and experience. It forms a central aspect in the making of and reflection on art. Here historicity is explored as a common ground for the integration of practice, critical thought and historical enquiry in the spaces of higher education and professional engagement.

Fueled by a flourishing capitalist economy, undergirded by advancements in architectural design and urban infrastructure, and patronized by growing bourgeois and elite classes, New York's built environment was dramatically transformed in the 1870s and 1880s. This book argues that this constituted the formative period of New York's modernization and cosmopolitanism-the product of a vital self-consciousness and a deliberate intent on the part of its elite citizenry to create a world-class cultural metropolis reflecting the city's economic and political preeminence. The interdisciplinary essays in this book examine New York's late nineteenth-century evolution not simply as a question of its physical layout but also in terms of its radically new social composition, comprising the individuals, institutions, and organizations that played determining roles in the city's cultural ascendancy.

Strange and exotic, seductive and threatening, the Orient has always been an enchanted space for the West. But this is a space, theorists argue, that has been 'Orientalized' by the West, constructed upon a system of knowledge and power which defines the West as much as this 'Other'. Within Western cultures, the French encounter with the Orient has been extraordinarily rich and varied, from the experiences of the first pilgrims to the challenges posed for the identity of modern-day France by its ethnic minorities. This collection of interdisciplinary essays explores the range of French and francophone encounters with the East from the medieval period to the present day. The contributions encompass a variety of Orients, both geographical and generic: the Orients of the visual arts, of historicist discourse, of fiction and travel writing. They consider not only those artists we immediately associate with the East, such as Nerval or Fromentin, but also those, like Proust, whose work appears firmly rooted in the West. They also provide new insights into the less familiar works of long-celebrated authors like Flaubert and more recently acclaimed writers such as Bouvier and Djebar.

This book offers a careful analysis of how far what John Ruskin writes to Louisa Waterford as a woman artist concurs with, or differs from, the views he propounds on art in his published writing, and examines the style and quality of mentoring that Ruskin offered to his female students.

A revolutionary figure throughout his career, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's work provides a distinctly revolutionary lens through which the Victorian period can be viewed. Suggesting that Rossetti's work should be approached through his poetry, Brian Donnelly argues that it is both inscribed by and inscribes the development of verbal as well as visual culture in the Victorian era. In his discussions of modernity, aestheticism, and material culture, he identifies Rossetti as a central figure who helped define the terms through which we approach the cultural productions of this period. Donnelly begins by articulating a method for reading Rossetti's poetry that highlights the intertextual relations within and between the poetry and paintings. His interpretations of such poems as the 'Mary's Girlhood' sonnets, the sonnet sequence The House of Life, and 'The Orchard-Pit' in relationship to paintings such as The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini! shed light on Victorian ideals of femininity, on consumer culture, and on the role of gender hierarchies in Victorian culture. Situating Rossetti's poetry as the key to all of his work, Donnelly also makes a case for its centrality in its representation of the dominant discourses of the late Victorian period: faith, sex, consumption, death, and the nature of representation itself.

First Published in 2002, Visual Words provides a unique and interdisciplinary evaluation of the relationship between images and words in this period.Victorian England witnessed a remarkable growth in literacy culminating in the new literary nationalism that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. Each chapter explores a different aspect of this relationship: the role of Dickens as the heroic author, the book as an iconic object, the growing graphic presence of the text, the role of the graphic trace, the 'Sister Arts/ pen and pencil' tradition, and the competition between image and word as systems of communication. Examining the impact of such diverse areas as advertising, graphic illustration, narrative painting, frontispiece portraits, bibliomania, and the merchandising of literary culture, Visual Words shows that the influence of the 'Sister Arts' tradition was more widespread and complex than has previously been considered. Whether discussing portraits of authors, the uses of iconography in Ford Madox Brown's painting Work, or examining why the British Library was equipped with false bookcases for doors, Gerard Curtis looks at artistic and literary culture from an art historical and 'object' perspective to gain a better understanding of why some Victorians called their culture 'hieroglyphic'.

This reference organizes and describes the primary and secondary literature surrounding Mary Stevenson Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzal?s, and Marie Bracquemond, four major women Impressionist artists. The Impressionist group included several women artists of considerable ability whose works and lives were largely ignored until the advent of feminist art criticism in the early 1970s. They studied, worked, and exhibited with their male counterparts including Degas, Manet, Monet, and Pissarro. The entries provide extensive coverage of the careers, critical reception, exhibition history, and growing reputations of these four female artists and discuss women Impressionists in general as they shared the challenges of becoming accepted as professional artists in late 19th-century society.

Containing nearly 900 citations of manuscripts, books, articles, reproductions, films, exhibitions, and reviews, this unique sourcebook will appeal to both art and women's studies scholars. Each artist receives a biographical sketch, chronology, information about individual and group exhibitions and reviews, and a primary and secondary bibliography, which captures details about the artist's life, career, and relationship with other artists. An art works index and names index complete the volume.

Pablo Picasso's continued search for the essential features of perceived objects and his natural abidance to the general principles regulating artistic creation determined his intuitive analysis of the various stages of vision. His exploration of pictorial language is reflected in the well-established periods in the development of Cubism. Progressively, objects were analyzed first by their image (or retinal) and surface (or external) features as viewed from particular observer-oriented viewpoints during the Pre-Cubist and Cezannian Cubist stages; then by viewer-independent, structural features during Analytic Cubism; and finally by categorial features during Synthetic Cubism. This final re-evaluation allowed the artist to treat pictorial language as truly arbitrary, leading to metaphorical correlations between objects that went beyond what was actually depicted on the surface of the canvas.

In the act of enclosing space and making rooms, we make and define our aspirations and identities. Taking a room by room approach, this fascinating volume explores how representations of domestic space have embodied changing spatial configurations and values, and considers how we see modern individuals in the process of making themselves 'at home'. Scholars from the US, UK and Australasia re-visit and re-think interiors by Bonnard, Matisse, Degas and Vuillard, as well as the great spaces of early modernity; the drawing room in Rossetti's house, hallways in Hampstead Garden Suburb, the Paris attic of the Brothers Goncourt; Schutte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt Kitchen, to explore how interior making has changed from the Victorian to the modern period. From the smallest room - the bathroom - to the spacious verandas of Singapore Deco, Domestic Interiors focuses on modern rooms 'imaged' and imagined, it builds a distinct body of knowledge around the interior, interiority, representation and modernity, and creates a rich resource for students and scholars in art, architecture and design history.

Japan held a profound fascination for western artists in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the influence of Japonisme on western art was pervasive. Paradoxically, just as western artists were beginning to find inspiration in Japan and Japanese art, Japan was opening to the western world and beginning a process of thorough modernisation, some have said westernisation. The mastery of western art was included in the programme.
This book examines the nineteenth century art world against this background and explores Japanese influences on four artists working in Britain in particular: the American James McNeill Whistler, the Australian Mortimer Menpes, and the 'Glasgow boys' George Henry and Edward Atkinson Hornel. Japonisme in Britian is richly illustrated throughout.

First published in 1999, this book asks what kind of advice was available to somebody wishing to embark upon oil painting in England between 1850 and 1900. It is a fascinating collection of Victorian instruction on how and what to paint, linked to crucial advice about art, its meaning and its relation to contemporary life, given by practising artists, important and often popular in their time, but whose lectures and writings are long overdue for reappraisal: Leslie, Hamerton, O'Neil, Poynter, Watts, Leighton, Armitage, Quilter and Herkomer. Here, beyond the familiar voices of Ruskin, Whistler and Pater, we have a whole range of experience from an age in which issues about painting were hotly debated by large numbers of people: professional artists, amateurs, critics, gallery-goers and Academy students. This anthology brings back to life the humour, seriousness, ambitions, eccentricities and controversies of people whose work shaped the nature of mainstream Victorian art.

From c.1750 to c.1810 the paths of music history and the history of painting converged with lasting consequences. The publication of Newton's Opticks at the start of the eighteenth century gave a 'scientific' basis to the analogy between sight and sound, allowing music and the visual arts to be defined more closely in relation to one another. This was also a period which witnessed the emergence of a larger and increasingly receptive audience for both music and the visual arts - an audience which potentially included all social strata. The development of this growing public and the commercial potential that it signified meant that for the first time it became possible for a contemporary artist to enjoy an international reputation. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the career of Joseph Haydn. Although this phenomenon defies conventional modes of study, the book shows how musical pictorialism became a major creative force in popular culture. Haydn, the most popular living cultural personality of the period, proved to be the key figure in advancing the new relationship. The connections between the composer and his audiences and leading contemporary artists (including Tiepolo, Mengs, Kauffman, Goya, David, Messerschmidt, Loutherbourg, Canova, Copley, Fuseli, Reynolds, Gillray and West) are examined here for the first time. By the early nineteenth century, populism was beginning to be regarded with scepticism and disdain. Mozart was the modern Raphael, Beethoven the modern Michelangelo. Haydn, however, had no clear parallel in the accepted canon of Renaissance art. Yet his recognition that ordinary people had a desire to experience simultaneous aural and visual stimulation was not altogether lost, finding future exponents in Wagner and later still in the cinematic arts.

This title was first published in 2002. To date, studies explaining decorative practice in the early modernist period have largely overlooked the work of women artists. For the most part, studies have focused on the denigration of decorative work by leading male artists, frequently dismissed as fashionably feminine. With few exceptions, women have been cast as consumers rather than producers. The first book to examine the decorative strategies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women artists, Women Artists and the Decorative Arts concentrates in particular on women artists who turned to fashion, interior design and artisanal production as ways of critically engaging various aspects of modernity. Women artists and designers played a vital role in developing a broad spectrum of modernist forms. In these essays new light is shed on the practice of such well-known women artists as May Morris, Clarice Cliff, Natacha Rambova, Eileen Gray and Florine Stettheimer, whose decorative practices are linked with a number of fascinating but lesser known figures such as Phoebe Traquair, Mary Watts, Gluck and Laura Nagy.

This was first published in 2000: A study of John Ruskin's engagement with art and architecture as a critic, a patron and a teacher. It offers insights into both his writings and the visual economy of the Victorian world. Each essay examines Ruskin's relationship with an individual artist or a distinct aspect of art practice. J.M.W. Turner, D.G. Rossetti, W. Holman Hunt and E. Burne-Jones are among those artists discussed whose personal relationships with Ruskin affected his critical writing. Ruskin's attitude to women artists and his approach to the teaching of art are given special attention.

This title was first published in 2003. The essay collection explores the conjunctions of nation, gender, and visual representation in a number of countries-including Ireland, Scotland, Britain, Canada, Finland, Russia and Germany-during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors show visual imagery to be a particularly productive focus for analysing the intersections of nation and gender, since the nation and nationalism, as abstract concepts, have to be "embodied" in ways that make them imaginable, especially through the means of art. They explore how allegorical female figures personify the nation across a wide range of visual media, from sculpture to political cartoons and how national architectures may also be gendered. They show how through such representations, art reveals the ethno-cultural bases of nationalisms. Through the study of such images, the essays in this volume cast new light on the significance of gender in the construction of nationalist ideology and the constitution of the nation-state. In tackling the conjunctions of nation, gender and visual representation, the case studies presented in this publication can be seen to provide exciting new perspectives on the study of nations, of gender and the history of art. The range of countries chosen and the variety of images scrutinised create a broad arena for further debate.

This title was first published in 2000. The nineteenth century saw the emergence of numerous artistic brotherhoods - groups of artists bound together in communal production, sharing spiritual and aesthetic aims. Although it is widely acknowledged that this is an unique feature of the period, there has not previously been a separate study of the phenomenon. This collection of essays provides a thorough and wide-ranging exploration of the issue. Situating artistic brotherhoods within their historical context, it offers unique insights into the social, political, economic and cultural milieu of the nineteenth century. It focuses on the most celebrated and influential brotherhoods, while also bringing to light lesser-known or forgotten artists. The essays explore the artistic fraternity from a wide variety of perspectives, probing issues of gender, identity, professional practices and artistic formation in Europe and the United States. This book investigates the Nazarenes, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Russian Abramatsova, the Primitifs, the Nabis as well as other leading groups. The book contains a substantial introduction, which establishes the key questions and issues surrounding the phenomena of the artistic brotherhood, including their relation to the larger artistic community, their association with other social and political organizations of the period, and the ways in which mythologies have been built around them in subsequent histories and recollections of the period.

This title was first published in 2000. London in the nineteenth century saw the founding of the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Other, less permanent, organisations flourished, among them the British Institution, water-colour societies and the Society of Female Artists. These worked alongside the schools such as the Royal Academy and the Slade School of Art. In this volume, eleven scholars, experts on the individual institutions, analyse their complex histories to investigate such issues as: How did they generate and redesign their publics? What identities did they create? What practice of art making, connoisseurship and spectatorship did they enshrine? These reports elucidate the values associated with the key institutions and describe the responses and adaptation over time to major cultural developments: new movements, political change and the development of the Empire. The volume as a whole offers a fascinating account of the interconnections between these key institutions. Challenging conventional readings of the subject, the Introduction, by Paul Barlow and Colin Trodd, offers a definition of public art during the Victorian period.

Title first published in 2003. In this detailed study of the landscapes and rural scenes of Britain and France made by artists like George Clausen, Philip Wilson Steer, Augustus John, Laura Knight, J. D. Fergusson and Spencer Gore, Ysanne Holt investigates the imaginary geographies behind the pictures and reconsiders the relationship between national identity, 'Englishness' and the native landscape. Combining close investigation of important works with a broader enquiry into the appeal of the Mediterranean for an age preoccupied with cultural degeneracy and bodily health, Ysanne Holt draws fascinating conclusions about the impact of modernism on the British tradition of landscape painting.

A distinguished list of contributors explores a variety of perspectives on the artistic culture of France and surrounding countries during the period 1870 to 1914. Aspects of dance, cinema, theater, poetry, prose, painting, social and political science, history, and medicine are covered in interdisciplinary essays that are both useful to researchers and accessible to students.

The first part of the book, which concentrates on France, assembles essays on the prose, poetry, and painting of Symbolism and Decadence, in particular Mallarme and Moreau; on avant-garde dance and performance; on women's writing; and on early cinema from Lumiere, Villiers, and Verne.

The second part explores the relations between France and several cultures. These cross-cultural investigations range from studies of the Anglo-Celtic "Rhymers' Club" to the Italian Crepusculari and include discussions of Belgian Symbolism and the Franco-Anglo-American Axis. The essays consistently point beyond the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth as they explore the multiple beginnings -- as well as the false starts -- that characterize the period.

Beyond the Frame rewrites the history of Victorian art to explore the relationships between feminism and visual culture in a period of heady excitement and political struggle. Artists were caught up in campaigns for women's enfranchisement, education and paid work, and many were drawn into controversies about sexuality. This richly documented and compelling study considers painting, sculpture, prints, photography, embroidery and comic drawings as well as major styles such as Pre-Raphaelitism, Neo-Classicism and Orientalism. Drawing on critical theory and post-colonial studies to analyse the links between visual media, modernity and imperialism, Deborah Cherry argues that visual culture and feminism were intimately connected to the relations of power.

eBook available with sample pages: HB:0415107261

This study investigates the paradoxical dynamics of American high culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by examining the strategies of Americans who wrote about European art in order to promote and legitimize literary careers. Contrary to the myths they themselves disseminated, American writers in Europe did not escape American culture but rather created and participated in US. Cultural institutions like journals, museums, and universities. Transatlantic careers articulated a cult of Europe in a privileged American space, served social and aesthetic hierarchies, and constructed formidable versions of professional authority of American writers.
The book focuses on four art careers Americans practiced in Europe: travel writing, art reviewing, connoisseurship, and salon hosting. It illuminates the careers of William Dean Howells, Henry James, Bernard and Mary Berenson, Celia Thaxter, and Gertrude Stein as itineraries of high-cultural formation and self-definition. In four chapters, the study examines these paradigmatic careers as both literary and cultural history, relating them to a diverse American society as well as Bostonian high culture.
Americans created and deployed expatriate art careers, the author argues, in a landscape of gender, ethnic, and class relations. The "use" of Europe was both figural and practical: writers created a fantasized Europe that both enacted social repression and enabled social liberation. Ultimately, as the example of James Weld Johnson demonstrates, elitist and Europhile high culture reflected a much larger America as well as the narrower cultural institutions that historically fostered it.