"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.

"This handsome publication, which accompanies a major exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a lively and engaging account of the artistic scene in Paris in the 1860s, the years that witnessed the beginnings of Impressionism. For the first time the interactions and relationships among the group of painters who became known as the Impressionists are examined without the overworn art historical polarities commonly evoked: academic versus avant-garde, classicist versus romantic, realist versus impressionist. A host of strong personalities contributed to this history, and their style evolved into a new way of looking at the world. These artists wanted above all to give an impression of truth and to have an impact on or even to shock the public. And they wanted to measure up to or surpass their elders. This complex and rich environment is presented here - the grand old men and the young turks encounter each other, the Salon pontificates, and the new generation moves fitfully ahead, benignly but always with determination." "Origins of Impressionism gives a day-by-day, year-by-year study of the genesis of an epoch-making style." "Bibliographies and provenances are provided for each of the almost two hundred works in the exhibition, and there is an illustrated chronology. With more than two hundred superb colorplates, this informative survey is an essential work for both the general reader and the scholar."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors explores how a diverse, pan-European group of eighteenth-century patrons - among them bankers, bishops, bluestockings, and courtesans - used architectural space and décor to shape and express identity. Eighteenth-century European architects understood the client's instrumental role in giving form and meaning to architectural space. In a treatise published in 1745, the French architect Germain Boffrand determined that a visitor could "judge the character of the master for whom the house was built by the way in which it is planned, decorated and distributed." This interdisciplinary volume addresses two key interests of contemporary historians working in a range of disciplines: one, the broad question of identity formation, most notably as it relates to ideas of gender, class, and ethnicity; and two, the role played by different spatial environments in the production - not merely the reflection - of identity at defining historical and cultural moments. By combining contemporary critical analysis with a historically specific approach, the book's contributors situate ideas of space and the self within the visual and material remains of interiors in eighteenth-century Europe. In doing so, they offer compelling new insight not only into this historical period, but also into our own.

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