Before publishing the sensuous and scandalous poems of Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) had already earned respect as a forthright and witty critic of art and literature. This stimulating selection of criticism reveals him as a worshipper at the altar of beauty, illuminating his belief that the pursuit of this ideal must be paramount in artistic expression. Reviews of exhibitions discuss works by great painters such as Delacroix and Ingres in fascinating detail, and 'Of Virtuous Plays and Novels' sees Baudelaire as an avenging angel in defence of true art. Writings on Poe, Flaubert and Gautier evoke a profound understanding of fellow artists, while his single excursion into musical criticism, 'Richard Wagner and Tannhauser in Paris', displays an incisive awareness of the magical power of suggestion in music.

The End of the Salon examines the cultural forces that contributed to the demise of an important exhibition centre for art in Europe and America in the late 19th century. Tracing the history of the salon from the French Revolution, when it was taken away from the Academy and opened to all artists, to the 1880s, Patricia Mainardi shows that its contradictory purposes, as didactic exhibition venue and art marketplace resulted in its collapse. She also situates the salon within the shifting currents of art movements, from modern to traditional, and the evolving politics of the Third Republic, when France definitively chose a republican over a monarchic form of government. An overview of the spectrum of art production at the end of the 19th century, government attitudes toward the arts in the early Third Republic, and the institution of exhibitions as they were redefined by free-market economics in the 19th century, are also provided. The book demonstrates how all artists were forced to function within the framework of the social, economic, and cultural changes then taking place and how art and social history are inextricably linked.

Painting in eighteenth-century Yangchow, a city that dominated the political and economic scene of mid-Qing China, has traditionally been viewed as the product of a group of nonconformist, "eccentric" artists who were supported by wealthy merchants.
This book, however, does not focus on the creative energy of the individual artist, the rise of the Yangchow school of painting, or patronage narrowly defined. Rather, it studies eighteenth-century Yangchow paintings as artistic products shaped by collective social and cultural experiences, and by constant exchanges between the artists and their audience. The author examines the paintings as commodities, revealing the mechanism of their exchange and the values negotiated, and she interprets the paintings in a framework that moves beyond economics into the social, political, historical, and literary contexts of their creation and appreciation.
The book begins by considering merchant patrons long associated with the Yangchow school of painting, and goes on to reveal that there were patrons from lower socioeconomic levels who were, in fact, perhaps the major consumers of Yangchow painting. The author then discusses four artists who exemplify the diversity of backgrounds and artistic traditions of Yangchow painters and patrons.
Fang Shih-shu represents the traditional scholar painter of conservative orthodox landscapes. Huang Shen, by contrast, represents painters with craftsman backgrounds who mingle the values of the literati with the technical skill of artisans. The last two painters, Cheng Hsieh and Chin Nung, represent the emergence of new types of artists who adopted painting as an occupation and commercialized both their artistic products and their personal cultural refinement and literati status.
By reconstructing the economic lives of these artists, examining their social roles, identifying their networks of patronage, and investigating their aesthetic choices, this book illuminates the process of professionalization of the scholar-artist and the commodification of literati culture in late imperial China.

Light was central to the visual politics and imaginative geographies of empire, even beyond its role as a symbol of knowledge and progress in post-Enlightenment narratives. This book describes how imperial mappings of geographical space in terms of 'cities of light' and 'hearts of darkness' coincided with the industrialisation of light (in homes, streets, theatres) and its instrumentalisation through new representative forms (photography, film, magic lanterns, theatrical lighting). Cataloguing the imperial vision in its engagement with colonial India, the book evaluates responses by the celebrated Indian painter Ravi Varma (1848-1906) to reveal the centrality of light in technologies of vision, not merely as an ideological effect but as a material presence that produces spaces and inscribes bodies. -- .

This book examines Theodore Gericault's images of black men, women and children who suffered slavery's trans-Atlantic passage in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including his 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa. The book focuses on Gericault's depiction of black people, his approach towards slavery, and the voices that advanced or denigrated them. By turning to documents, essays and critiques, both before and after Waterloo (1815), and, most importantly, Gericault's own oeuvre, this study explores the fetters of slavery that Gericault challenged-alongside a growing number of abolitionists-overtly or covertly. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, race and ethnic studies and students of modernism.

This bibliography provides a source for reviews of the state-sponsored Parisian exhibitions of painting and sculpture (Salons) held during the period 1699-1827. It includes an extensive list of references, each presented in a standard format with titles, dates and ordering codes based upon the holdings of the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris. It is indexed both by authors and by periodicals. The essays and articles that are catalogued are of fundamental importance in establishing a picture of contemporary reactions to art in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France, and yet the standard work by Maurice Tourneux, Salons et expositions d'art a Paris, 1801-1870, has been out of print for several decades. By incorporating and correcting the relevant material from Tourneux, adding references from the Deloynes collection (together with full details of original sources) and incorporating a broad sample from the periodical press, the authors have achieved a substantial increase in the volume and range of criticism available for analysis by cultural and literary historians.

This bibliography provides a source for reviews of the state-sponsored Parisian exhibitions of painting and sculpture (Salons) held during the July Monarchy and Second Republic (1831-1851). It includes an extensive list of references, each presented in a standard format, with titles, dates and ordering codes based upon the holdings of the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris. It is indexed both by authors and by periodicals. The essays and articles that are catalogued are of fundamental importance in establishing a picture of contemporary reactions to art in mid-nineteenth-century France and yet the standard work by Maurice Tourneux, Salons et expositions d'art a Paris, 1801-1870, has been out of print for several decades. By incorporating and correcting the relevant material from Tourneux and adding new references gathered from unpublished nineteenth-century manuscript bibliographies and a broad sample of the periodical press, this work offers a substantial increase in the volume and range of criticism available for analysis by cultural and literary historians.

In Alois Riegl in Vienna 1875-1905: An Institutional Biography, Diana Cordileone applies standard methods of cultural and intellectual history for close readings of Riegl's published texts, several of which are still unavailable in English. Further, the author compares Riegl's work to several of the early works of Friedrich Nietzsche that Riegl is known to have read before 1878. Using archival and other primary sources this study also illuminates the institutional conflicts and imperatives that shaped Riegl's oeuvre. The result is a multi-layered philosophical, cultural and institutional history of this art historian's work of the fin-de-siecle that demonstrates his close relationship to several of the significant actors in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century, an epoch of innovation, culture wars and political uncertainty. The book is particularly devoted to explaining how Riegl's theories of art were shaped by debates outside the purview of the academic art historian. Its focal point is the Austrian Museum for Art and Industry, where he worked for 13 years, and it presents a new interpretation of Riegl based upon his early exposure to Nietzsche.

Toward the end of his monumental career as a painter, sculptor, and lithographer, an elderly, sickly Matisse was unable to stand and use a paintbrush for long. In this late phase of his life-he was almost 80 years of age-he developed the technique of "carving into color," creating bright, bold paper cut-outs. Though dismissed by some contemporary critics as the folly of a senile old man, these gouaches decoupees (gouache cut-outs) in fact represented a revolution in modern art, a whole new medium that reimagined the age-old conflict between color and line. This edition of the first volume of our original award-winning XXL book provides a thorough historical context to Matisse's cut-outs, tracing their roots to his 1930 trip to Tahiti and continuing through to his final years in Nice. It includes many photos of Matisse, as well as some rare images by Henri Cartier-Bresson and the filmmaker F. W. Murnau, with texts by Matisse, publisher E. Teriade, the poets Louis Aragon, Henri Michaux, and Pierre Reverdy, and Matisse's son-in-law Georges Duthuit. In their deceptive simplicity, the cut-outs achieved both a sculptural quality and an early minimalist abstraction, which would profoundly influence generations of artists to come. Exuberant, multi-hued, and often grand in scale, these works are true pillars of 20th-century art, and as bold and innovative to behold today as they were in Matisse's lifetime. About the series TASCHEN is 40! Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible publishing, helping bookworms around the world curate their own library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia at an unbeatable price. Today we celebrate 40 years of incredible books by staying true to our company credo. The 40 series presents new editions of some of the stars of our program-now more compact, friendly in price, and still realized with the same commitment to impeccable production.

When Paula Modersohn-Becker's artistfriends examined her extensive estate afew weeks after her death, they were overwhelmed. They only gradually realised thatin the painter, who had died so young, theyhad had an outstanding artist in their midst.Modersohn-Becker was largely unrecognisedduring her lifetime but is regarded today asone of the pioneers of Expressionism.The sculptor Bernhard Hoetger was one of the few who recognised hertalent from an early stage. Hoetger's memories of Paula Modersohn werepublished in 1920 as an authentic contemporary document in the seriesJunge Kunst. They are reprinted as a facsimile in this revised and extendededition. The volume is a bibliophilic highlight with an essay explaining theartist's life and work from a present-day perspective, together with herbiography and some 40 illustrations of her most important works.

Despite his posthumous fame as a painter of flowers, still-lifes, gardens, landscapes and city scenes, during his lifetime Vincent van Gogh believed that his portraits constituted his most important works. Although as an artist he was `touched by so many different things', he was nevertheless committed to the art of portraiture - a quality that distinguished him from his contemporaries. Van Gogh was passionate in his avoidance of bland, photographic resemblances, in the hope of capturing the essential character of his models by means of expressive colour and brushwork. Showcasing a dramatic set of portraits created during Van Gogh's ten-year career, this book reflects the strong visual impact with which the artist captured the diversity of contemporary life. In his many portraits, we can discern the artist's desire to record expressively a number of themes, from the plight of the agricultural workers in his native Brabant and the destitution of prostitutes and their children in urban Europe, to the lives of his cosmopolitan acquaintances in Paris, including cafe owners and art dealers. It was here that he began his remarkable sequence of self-portraits. With reference to Van Gogh's extensive correspondence, Skea elaborates how the artist perceived his chosen subjects as would a writer, and how he felt that his portraits should somehow evoke what he considered to be the spiritual underpinning of human existence

The literature and art of the French Enlightenment is everywhere marked by an intense awareness of the moment. The parallel projects of living in, representing, and learning from the moment run through the Enlightenment's endeavors as tokens of an ambition and a heritage imposing its only and ultimately impossible cohesion. In this illuminating study, Thomas M. Kavanagh argues that Enlightenment culture and its tensions, contradictions, and achievements flow from a subversive attention to the present as present, freed from the weight of past and future. Examining a wide sweep of literary and artistic culture, Kavanagh argues against the traditional view of the Age of Reason as one of coherent, recognizable ideology expressed in a structured narrative form. In literature, he analyzes the moment at work in the inebriating lightness of Marivaux's repartee; the new-found freedom of Lahontan's and Rousseau's ideals of a consciousness limited to the present; Diderot's championing of Epicurean epistemology; Graffigny's portrayal of abrupt cultural displacement; and Casanova's penchant for chance's redefining moment. The moment in art theory and practice is explored in such forms as de Piles's defense of color; Du Bos's foregrounding of perception; Watteau's indulgence in a corporeal present; Chardin's dismantling of mimesis; and Boucher's and Fragonard's thematics of desire.

Paul Gauguin created some of the most advanced art in a brilliant generation of artists - all of whom struggled against the stifling conformity of the late 19th century's artistic mainstream.
He created paintings whose radically simplified lines and colors echoed the unschooled art of the rustic and native cultures he loved. After his famously disastrous stay with Vincent van Gogh in southern France, Gauguin escaped European civilization for the Polynesian islands. Immersing himself in the culture, he produced a series of radiant canvases and powerful sculptures - his last great works.
From his childhood in Peru to his experiences in Tahiti, the story of Gauguin's life is recounted in authoritative text by an expert on the post-Impressionists, coupled with powerful imagery by an award-winning illustrator.

A vigorously written account of the changes in the depiction of the rural poor in English landscape painting between 1730 and 1840.

First published in 1980. This anthology of fifty-three essays drawn from eleven weekly, monthly, and quarterly periodicals was assembled in order to reproduce in convenient form some of the more important articles on British painting published from 1832 to 1848 in Great Britain. Reviews of major exhibitions form a large part of the collection, but essays treating individual artists, discussions of the effect of state patronage of the arts and attempts to assess the uniqueness of the English tradition of painting are also included. This title will be of great interest to students of Art History

First published in 1983. This anthology of sixty-nine essays drawn from fourteen different journals was assembled in order to reproduce in convenient form some of the more important articles on British painting published from 1849 to 1860 in Great Britain. Reviews of major exhibitions form a large part of the collection, but essays treating individual artists, discussions of the effect of state patronage of the arts and attempts to assess the uniqueness of the English tradition of painting are also included. This title will be of great interest to students of Art History.

This book reframes the formative years of three significant artists: Henri Fantin-Latour, Alphonse Legros, and James McNeill Whistler. The trio's coming together as the Societe des trois occurred during the emergence of the artistic avant-garde-a movement toward individualism and self-expression. Though their oeuvres appear dissimilar, it is imperative that the three artists' early work and letters be viewed in light of the Societe, as it informed many of their decisions in both London and Paris. Each artist actively cultivated a translocal presence, creating artistic networks that transcended national borders. Thus, this book will serve as a comprehensive resource on the development, production, implications, and eventual end of the Societe.

In 1883 Paul Gauguin abandons his prominent banking career and decides that "from now on I will pai nt every day". The co - founder of Synthetism and trailblazer of Expressionism turns his back on the bourgeois world, leaves his wife and children, and, in 1891, sets out for the South Sea, financing his journey through the sale of thirty paintings. His thou ghts on art, his existential worries, his discovery of color and his search for paradise come to life again in the excerpts from his letters and statements compiled in this volume. Together with some forty color reproductions of his works, his biography, a nd a preface by an expert, the book introduces readers in a very special way to Gauguin's universe.

In this ambitious study, Richard Wendorf establishes the grounds of comparison between two arts that have often been linked in a casual way but whose historical interrelations remain almost completely unexplored. By focusing on the great age of English portraiture - from the arrival of Van Dyck to the publication of Boswell's Life of Johnson - the author shows that, despite their obvious differences, visual and verbal portraits often shared similar assumptions about the representation of historical character. Grounded in modern theory devoted to the comparison of literature and painting and to the problem of representation, this book examines each form of portraiture in terms of the other. Among those writers considered are Izaak Walton, John Evelyn, John Aubrey, Roger North, Goldsmith, Johnson, Mrs Piozzi, Boswell; among the artists are Van Dyck, Lely, Samuel Cooper, Jonathan Richardson, Hogarth and Reynolds. The careers of `double agents' (painters, like Richardson and Reynolds, who experimented with biographical writing) are also discussed. The Elements of Life is a ground-breaking critical history of biography and portrait-painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Painted screens have long been synonymous in the popular imagination with the Baltimore row house. Picturesque, practical, and quirky, window and door screens adorned with scenic views simultaneously offer privacy and ventilation in crowded neighborhoods. As an urban folk art, painted screens flourished in Baltimore, though they did not originate there--precursors date to early eighteenth-century London. They were a fixture on fine homes and businesses in Europe and America throughout the Victorian era. But as the handmade screen yielded to industrial production, the whimsical artifact of the elite classes was suddenly transformed into an item for mass consumption. Historic examples are now a rarity, but in Baltimore the folk art is still very much alive.

"The Painted Screens of Baltimore" takes a first look at this beloved icon of one major American city through the words and images of dozens of self-taught artists who trace their creations to the capable and unlikely brush of one Bohemian immigrant, William Oktavec. In 1913, this corner grocer began a family dynasty inspired generations of artists who continue his craft to this day. The book examines the roots of painted wire cloth, the ethnic communities where painted screens have been at home for a century, and the future of this art form.

Fascinated by them, unable to ignore them, and imaginatively stimulated by them, Charles Dickens was an acute and unsentimental reporter on the dogs he kept and encountered during a time when they were a burgeoning part of the nineteenth-century urban and domestic scene. As dogs inhabited Dickens's city, so too did they populate his fiction, journalism, and letters. In the first book-length work of criticism on Dickens's relationship to canines, Beryl Gray shows that dogs, real and invented, were intrinsic to Dickens's vision and experience of London and to his representations of its life. Gray draws on an array of reminiscences by Dickens's friends, family, and fellow writers, and also situates her book within the context of nineteenth-century attitudes towards dogs as revealed in the periodical press, newspapers, and institutional archives. Integral to her study is her analysis of Dickens's texts in relationship to their illustrations by George Cruikshank and Hablot Knight Browne and to portraiture by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists like Thomas Gainsborough and Edwin Landseer. The Dog in the Dickensian Imagination will not only enlighten readers and critics of Dickens and those interested in his life but will serve as an important resource for scholars interested in the Victorian city, the treatment of animals in literature and art, and attitudes towards animals in nineteenth-century Britain.

The book is an analytical survey of the thought about painting and sculpture as it unfolded from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. This was the period during which theories of the visual arts, particularly of painting and sculpture, underwent a radical transformation, as a result of which the intellectual foundations of our modern views on the arts were formed. Because this transformation can only be understood when seen in a broad context of cultural, aesthetic and philosophical developments of the period, Moshe Barasch surveys the opinions of the artists, and also treats in some detail the doctrines of philosophers, poets and critics. Barasch thus traces for the reader the entire development of modernism in art and art theory.

The aesthetic and intellectual developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that changed our views of the artistic image emphasized some central problems of critical reflection that became the major themes of any thought on art. The artistic symbol, the comprehensive system of the arts, and the relationship of one art with another are discussed in detail. We see the origins of a new perception of the artist's position, as well as the rise of new values in art, such as the role of the grotesque and the ugly in art. In his discussion of Baudelaire's analysis of Goya's monsters, Barasch concludes that the modern world is reflected in art whose beauty is independent of the beauty of nature. The book includes thirty-one black and white illustrations.

In 1859, the historian Lord John Acton asserted: 'two great principles divide the world, and contend for the mastery, antiquity and the middle ages'. The influence on Victorian culture of the 'Middle Ages' (broadly understood then as the centuries between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance) was both pervasive and multi-faceted. This 'medievalism' led, for instance, to the rituals and ornament of the Medieval Catholic church being reintroduced to Anglicanism. It led to the Saxon Witan being celebrated as a prototypical representative parliament. It resulted in Viking raiders being acclaimed as the forefathers of the British navy. And it encouraged innumerable nineteenth-century men to cultivate the superlative beards we now think of as typically 'Victorian'—in an attempt to emulate their Anglo-Saxon forefathers. Different facets of medieval life, and different periods before the Renaissance, were utilized in nineteenth-century Britain for divergent political and cultural agendas. Medievalism also became a dominant mode in Victorian art and architecture, with 75 per cent of churches in England built on a Gothic rather than a classical model. And it was pervasive in a wide variety of literary forms, from translated sagas to pseudo-medieval devotional verse to triple-decker novels. Medievalism even transformed nineteenth-century domesticity: while only a minority added moats and portcullises to their homes, the medieval-style textiles produced by Morris and Co. decorated many affluent drawing rooms. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism is the first work to examine in full the fascinating phenomenon of 'medievalism' in Victorian Britain. Covering art, architecture, religion, literature, politics, music, and social reform, the Handbook also surveys earlier forms of antiquarianism that established the groundwork for Victorian movements. In addition, this collection addresses the international context, by mapping the spread of medievalism across Europe, South America, and India, amongst other places.

"Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century?" The question that guides this volume stems from Walter Benjamin's studies of nineteenth-century Parisian culture as the apex of capitalist aesthetics. Thirteen scholars test Benjamin's ideas about the centrality of Paris, formulated in the 1930s, from a variety of methodological perspectives. Many investigate the underpinnings of the French capital's reputation and mythic force, which was based largely upon the city's capacity to put itself on display. Some of the authors reassess the famed centrality of Paris from the vantage point of our globalized twenty-first century by acknowledging its entanglements with South Africa, Turkey, Japan, and the United States. The volume equally studies a broader range of media than Benjamin did himself: from modernist painting and printmaking, photography, and illustration to urban planning. The essays conclude that Paris did in many ways function as the epicenter of modernity's international reach, especially in the years from 1850 to 1900, but did so only as a consequence of the idiosyncratic force of its mythic image. Above all, the essays affirm that the study of late nineteenth-century Paris still requires nimble and innovative approaches commensurate with its legend and global aura.