This collection reasserts the importance of class analysis to a critical art history by studying artistic practices in the key phase of bourgeois history from 1790-1850. A group of specialist scholars examine related developments in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Themes covered include exhibitions, art criticism, patronage, taste, and the political resonances of specific artworks. Each section of the book has an introduction sketching bourgeois class formation in the society concerned, and reviewing the historical literature about it.

The first comprehensive introduction to Marxist approaches to art history. 'The best in the field.' --Esther Leslie

The first comprehensive treatment in seventy years of the American Art-Union’s remarkable rise and fall For over a decade, the New York–based American Art-Union shaped art creation, display, and patronage nationwide. Boasting as many as 19,000 members from almost every state, its meteoric rise and its sudden and spectacular collapse still raise a crucial question: Why did such a successful and influential institution fail? The American Art-Union reveals a sprawling and fascinating account of the country’s first nationwide artistic phenomenon, creating a shared experience of visual culture, art news and criticism, and a direct experience with original works. For an annual fee of five dollars, members of the American Art-Union received an engraving after a painting by a notable US artist and the annual publication Transactions (1839–49) and later the monthly Bulletin (1848–53). Most importantly, members’ names were entered in a drawing for hundreds of original paintings and sculptures by most of the era’s best-known artists. Those artworks were displayed in its immensely popular Free Gallery. Unfortunately, the experiment was short-lived. Opposition grew, and a cascade of events led to an 1852 court case that proved to be the Art-Union’s downfall. Illuminating the workings of the American art market, this study fills a gaping lacuna in the history of nineteenth-century US art. Kimberly A. Orcutt draws from the American Art-Union’s records as well as in-depth contextual research to track the organization’s decisive impact that set the direction of the country’s paintings, sculpture, and engravings for well over a decade. Forged in cultural crosscurrents of utopianism and skepticism, the American Art-Union’s demise can be traced to its nature as an attempt to create and control the complex system that the early nineteenth-century art world represented. This study breaks the organization’s activities into their major components to offer a structural rather than chronological narrative that follows mounting tensions to their inevitable end. The institution was undone not by dramatic outward events or the character of its leadership but by the character of its utopianist plan.

Presented in conjunction with the September 2000 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, this volume presents the complex story of the proliferation of the arts in New York and the evolution of an increasingly discerning audience for those arts during the antebellum period. Thirteen essays by noted specialists bring new research and insights to bear on a broad range of subjects that offer both historical and cultural contexts and explore the city's development as a nexus for the marketing and display of art, as well as private collecting; landscape painting viewed against the background of tourism; new departures in sculpture, architecture, and printmaking; the birth of photography; New York as a fashion center; shopping for home decorations; changing styles in furniture; and the evolution of the ceramics, glass, and silver industries. The 300-plus works in the exhibition and comparative material are extensively illustrated in color and bandw. Oversize: 9.25x12.25". Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

An innovatory exploration of art and visual culture. Through carefully chosen themes and topics rather than through a general survey, the volumes approach the process of looking at works of art in terms of their audiences, functions and cross-cultural contexts. While focused on painting, sculpture and architecture, it also explores a wide range of visual culture in a variety of media and methods. "1600-1850 Academy to Avant-Garde" interrogates labels used in standard histories of the art of this period (Baroque, Rococo, Neo-Classicism and Romanticism) and examines both established and recent art-historical methodologies, including formalism, iconology, spectatorship and reception, identity and difference. Key topics include Baroque Rome, Dutch Painting of the Golden Age, Georgian London, the Paris Salon, and the impact of the discovery of the South Pacific.The second of three text books, published by Tate in association with the Open University, which insight for students of Art History, Art Theory and Humanities. Introduction Part 1: City and country 1600-1760 1: Bernini and Baroque Rome 2: Meaning and interpretation: Dutch painting of the golden age 3: The metropolitan urban renaissance: London 1660-1760 4: The English landscape garden 1680-1760 Part 2: New worlds of art 1760-1850 5: Painting for the public 6: Canova, Neo-classicism and the sculpted body 7: The other side of the world 8: Inventing the Romantic artist

The nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented increase in art forgery, caused both by the advent of national museums and by a rapidly growing bourgeois interest in collecting objects from the past. This rise had profound repercussions on notions of selfhood and national identity within and outside the realm of art. Although art critics denounced forgery for its affront to artistic traditions, they were fascinated by its power to shape the human and object worlds and adopted a language of art forgery to articulate a link between the making of fakes and the making of selves. The Deceivers explores the intersections among artistic crime, literary narrative, and the definition of identity. Literary texts joined more specialized artistic discourses in describing the various identities associated with art forgery: the forger, the copyist, the art expert, the dealer, the restorer. Built into new characters were assumptions about gender, sexuality, race, and nationality that themselves would come to be presented in a language of artistic authenticity. Aviva Briefel places special emphasis on the gendered distinction between male forgers and female copyists. "Copying," a benign occupation when undertaken by a woman, became "forgery," laden with criminal intent, when performed by men. Those who could successfully produce, handle, or detect spurious things and selves were distinguished from others who were incapable of distinguishing the authentic from the artistic and human forgeries. Through close reading of literary narratives such as Trilby and The Marble Faun as well as newspaper accounts of forgery scandals, The Deceivers reveals the identities—both authentic and fake—that emerged from the Victorian culture of forgery.