The Paris Salons of the mid-nineteenth century are famous today above all for the paintings that were rejected more than for those that were actually shown. The rejected works form today's canon of art history and are regarded as heralds of a modern age. This book looks to reassess the other side of the art history of the nineteenth century. Salon Painting has often been dismissed as overly academic or staid. Now art historian Norbert Wolf turns back the pages of history as he reintroduces readers to the artistry and excellence of the Salon Painting in Europe, Britain, Russia and the US. In an opulent new book, illustrated throughout with gorgeous reproductions, Wolf looks at Salon painting from a variety of perspectives, such as the rise of the bourgeoisie and Paris's position as Europe's cultural capitol. Wolf examines masterpieces by Cabanel, Manet, Bierstadt, The Pre-Raphaelites, and Sargent, demonstrating how classical subjects gave way to modern concerns.

From 1937 to 1944 the National Socialist regime organised a series of art exhibitions, Grosse Deutsche Kuntstausstellung, in Munich. This book traces the history of the exhibitions, characterises the artists and artworks shown and investigates how the local Munich tradition of displaying art was reinvented for national purposes.

This stunning examination of the last years of Édouard Manet's life and career is the first book to explore the transformation of his style and subject matter in the 1870s and early 1880s. The name Manet often evokes the provocative, heroically scaled pictures he painted in the 1860s for the Salon, but in the late 1870s and early 1880s the artist produced quite a different body of work: stylish portraits of actresses and demimondaines, luscious still lifes, delicate pastels, intimate watercolors, and impressionistic scenes of suburban gardens and Parisian cafés. Often dismissed as too pretty and superficial by critics, these later works reflect Manet’s elegant social world, propose a radical new alignment of modern art with fashionable femininity, and record the artist’s unapologetic embrace of beauty and visual pleasure in the face of death. Featuring nearly three hundred illustrations and nine fascinating essays by established and emerging Manet specialists, a technical analysis of the late Salon painting Jeanne (Spring), a selection of the artist’s correspondence, a chronology, and more, Manet and Modern Beauty brings a diverse range of approaches to bear on a little-studied area of this major artist’s oeuvre.

Wie kaum ein anderer Künstler hat Pierre-Auguste Renoir unser Verständnis von den stimmungsvollen Figurenbildern des Impressionismus geprägt. Sein Gemälde La fin du déjeuner, das sich seit 1910 im Städel Museum in Frankfurt befindet, ist nun Ausgangspunkt für eine weitreichende Auseinandersetzung mit einer für ihn zeitlebens bedeutenden Inspirationsquelle: dem Rokoko. Galt diese Malerei nach der französischen Revolution als frivol und unmoralisch, so erlebte sie im 19. Jahrhundert eine Renaissance und war zu Lebzeiten Renoirs überaus präsent. Dieser umfangreiche Band erscheint anlässlich der großangelegten Ausstellung des Städel Museums und untersucht Renoirs facettenreiche Traditionsverbundenheit ausgehend von erhellenden Gegenüberstellungen seiner Kunst mit Werken des 18. Jahrhunderts sowie von Zeitgenossen.