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"Unequivocally a modern, Francois Boucher (1703-70) defined the French artistic avant-garde throughout his career. Yet the triumph of modernist aesthetics - with its focus on the self-critical, the autonomous, and the intellectually challenging - has long discouraged art historians and other viewers from taking Boucher's playful and alluring works seriously. Rethinking Boucher revisits the cultural meanings and reception of his diverse oeuvre, inviting us to revise the interpretive cliches by which we have sought to tame this artist and his epoch."--BOOK JACKET.
A fresh interpretation of the group of Fragonard?s paintings known as the ?figures de fantaisie?, Fragonard and the Fantasy Figure: Painting the Imagination reconnects the fantasy figures with neglected visual traditions in European art and firmly situates them within the cultural and aesthetic contexts of eighteenth-century France. Prior scholarship has focused on the paintings? connections with portraiture, whereas this study relocates them within a tradition of fantasy figures, where resemblance was ignored or downplayed. The book defines Fragonard as a painter of the imagination and foregrounds the imaginary at a time when Enlightenment rationalism and Classical aesthetics contrived to d...
In The Portrait Bust and French Cultural Politics in the Eighteenth Century, Ronit Milano probes the rich and complex aesthetic and intellectual charge of a remarkably concise art form, and explores its role as a powerful agent of epistemological change during one of the most seismic moments in French history. The pre-Revolutionary portrait bust was inextricably tied to the formation of modern selfhood and to the construction of individual identity during the Enlightenment, while positioning both sitters and viewers as part of a collective of individuals who together formed French society. In analyzing the contribution of the portrait bust to the construction of interiority and the formulation of new gender roles and political ideals, this book touches upon a set of concerns that constitute the very core of our modernity.
Figures of Thought: Poseuses and the Controversy of the Grande Jatte -- Beethoven's Farewell: The Creative Genius "in the Claws of the Secession" -- The Mise-en-scène of Dreams: L'Après-midi d'un faune.
We tend to accept that German cities and states run their own cultural institutions (concert halls, theatres, museums). This book shows how this now “self-evident” fact became a reality in the course of the long nineteenth century.
Rewriting German History offers striking new insights into key debates about the recent German past. Bringing together cutting-edge research and current discussions, this volume examines developments in the writing of the German past since the Second World War and suggests new directions for scholarship in the twenty-first century.
Portraiture and Politics in Revolutionary France challenges widely held assumptions about both the genre of portraiture and the political and cultural role of images in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century. After 1789, portraiture came to dominate French visual culture because it addressed the central challenge of the Revolution: how to turn subjects into citizens. Revolutionary portraits allowed sitters and artists to appropriate the means of representation, both aesthetic and political, and articulate new forms of selfhood and citizenship, often in astonishingly creative ways. The triumph of revolutionary portraiture also marks a turning point in the history of art, when seriousness of purpose and aesthetic ambition passed from the formulation of historical narratives to the depiction of contemporary individuals. This shift had major consequences for the course of modern art production and its engagement with the political and the contingent.
Erased de Kooning Drawing ist ein Kunstwerk, das auf radikale Weise die Definition von Kunst und das Verständnis von Autorschaft herausfordert. Drei amerikanische Künstler waren 1953 an seiner Erschaffung beteiligt: Robert Rauschenberg radierte eine Zeichnung Willem de Koonings aus, der mit einem gewissen Widerwillen sein Einverständnis gegeben hatte. Jasper Johns versah es anlässlich seiner ersten Präsentation mit einem Label, das maßgeblich zu seiner Wahrnehmung als eigenständigem Werk beitrug. Das zu etwas Neuem transformierte Blatt wurde in den 1950er-Jahren als Neo-Dada aufgefasst, in den 1960ern als Beginn der Konzeptkunst und in den 1980er-Jahren als Aufbruch in die Postmoderne. Zahlreiche Künstler*innen bezogen sich auf das Werk und Rauschenberg selbst griff es immer wieder auf. Es erwies sich als Testfall für Bestimmungen von Modernismus, Literalismus und Postmodernismus. Gregor Stemmrichs kenntnisreiche kunsttheoretische Betrachtung arbeitet die anhaltende Relevanz des Werks für die Theorie des Bildes, des Index, der Spur, des Allegorischen und der Frage nach Appropriation heraus.
Long neglected by art historians, Anna-Eva Bergman (1909–87) was a painter of major importance who invested her work with an almost mystical ambition. The story of her life, told for the first time in this meticulously researched biography, is extraordinary: a Norwegian childhood that was constantly overshadowed by fear; a bohemian and adventurous youth that spanned much of Europe; a career as an illustrator; encounters in Nazi Germany; increasingly severe health problems; three marriages, two of which were to the same man (Bergman’s fellow artist Hans Hartung); and a tragic end in the splendour of their villa in Antibes. But above all Bergman’s was a life dedicated to creation, often ...