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Focusing on images of or produced by nineteenth-century European women, this volume explores genteel femininity as resistant to easy codification vis-à-vis the public. Attending to various iterations of the public as space, sphere and discourse, sixteen essays challenge the false binary construct that has held the public as the sole preserve of prosperous men. By considering works in a range of media by an array of canonical and understudied women artists, they demonstrate that definitions of both femininity and the public were mutually defining and constantly shifting.
This collection reconsiders the life and work of Emile Jean-Horace Vernet (1789-1863), presenting him as a crucial figure for understanding the visual culture of modernity. The book includes work by senior and emerging scholars, showing that Vernet was a multifaceted artist who moved with ease across the thresholds of genre and media to cultivate an image of himself as the embodiment of modern France. In tune with his times, skilled at using modern technologies of visual reproduction to advance his reputation, Vernet appealed to patrons from across the political spectrum and made works that nineteenth-century audiences adored. Even Baudelaire, who reviled Vernet and his art and whose judgment has played a significant role in consigning Vernet to art-historical obscurity, acknowledged that the artist was the most complete representative of his age. For those with an interest in the intersection of art and modern media, politics, imperialism, and fashion, the essays in this volume offer a rich reward.
"Examines the relationship between photography and medicine in American culture. Focuses on the American Civil War and postbellum Philadelphia to explore how medical models and metaphors helped establish the professional legitimacy of commercial photography while promoting belief in the rehabilitative powers of studio portraiture"--Provided by publisher.
Political and cultural history and the arts combine in this engaging account of 1790s France. In 1799, when the French artist Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) exhibited his Intervention of the Sabines, a history painting featuring the ancient heroine Hersilia, he added portraits of two contemporary women on either side of her—Henriette de Verninac, daughter of Charles-François Delacroix, minister of foreign affairs, and Juliette Récamier, a well-known and admired socialite. Drawing on many disciplines, Norman Bryson explains how such a combination of paintings could reveal the underlying nature of the Directoire, the period between the vicious and near-dictatorial Reign of Terror (1793...
A riveting exploration of the relationship between art and telegraphy, and its implications for understanding time and history in nineteenth-century France. In Time Machines Richard Taws examines the relationship between art and telegraphy in the decades following the French Revolution. The optical telegraph was a novel form of visual communication developed in the 1790s that remained in use until the mid-1850s. This pre-electric telegraph, based on a semaphore code, irrevocably changed the media landscape of nineteenth-century France. Although now largely forgotten, in its day it covered vast distances and changed the way people thought about time. It also shaped, and was shaped by, a proli...
Focusing on the art of Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) and his colleagues Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Frédéric Bazille, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Fellow Men argues for the importance of the group as a defining subject of nineteenth-century French painting. Through close readings of some of the most ambitious paintings of the realist and impressionist generation, Bridget Alsdorf offers new insights into how French painters understood the shifting boundaries of their social world, and reveals the fragile masculine bonds that made up the avant-garde. A dedicated realist who veered between extremes of sociability and hermetic isolation, Fantin-Latour painted group dynamics ov...
In his best-selling travel memoir, The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain punningly refers to the black man who introduces him to Venetian Renaissance painting as a “contraband guide,” a term coined to describe fugitive slaves who assisted Union armies during the Civil War. By means of this and similar case studies, Paul H. D. Kaplan documents the ways in which American cultural encounters with Europe and its venerable artistic traditions influenced nineteenth-century concepts of race in the United States. Americans of the Civil War era were struck by the presence of people of color in European art and society, and American artists and authors, both black and white, adapted and transformed Eur...
In Friendship and Politics in Post-Revolutionary France, Sarah Horowitz brings together the political and cultural history of post-revolutionary France to illuminate how French society responded to and recovered from the upheaval of the French Revolution. The Revolution led to a heightened sense of distrust and divided the nation along ideological lines. In the wake of the Terror, many began to express concerns about the atomization of French society. Friendship, though, was regarded as one bond that could restore trust and cohesion. Friends relied on each other to serve as confidants; men and women described friendship as a site of both pleasure and connection. Because trust and cohesion we...
A collection of essays and short object lessons on the composer Hector Berlioz, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival. Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) has long been a difficult figure to place and interpret. Famously, in Richard Wagner’s estimation, he hovered as a “transient, marvelous exception,” a composer woefully and willfully isolated. In the assessment of German composer Ferdinand Hiller, he was a fleeting comet who “does not belong in our musical solar system,” the likes of whom would never be seen again. For his contemporaries, as for later critics, Berlioz was simply too strange—and too noisy, too loud, too German, too literary, too cavalier with genre an...
COUNTERPRESERVATION -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Counterpreservation as a Concept -- 2. Living Projects: Collective Housing, Alternative Culture, and Spaces of Resistance -- 3. Cultural Centers: History, Architecture, and Public Space -- 4. Decrepitude and Memory in the Landscape -- 5. Counterpreservation in Reverse -- 6. Destruction and Disappearance: East German Ruins -- Conclusion: Toward an Architecture of Change -- Index