Author Description

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.