"Fried put forward a highly original, beholder-centered account of the evolution of a central tradition in French painting from Chardin to Courbet."--P. [4] of cover.

Bradford Collins has assembled here a collection of twelve essays that demonstrates, through the interpretation of a single work of art, the abundance and complexity of methodological approaches now available to art historians. Focusing on Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, each contributor applies to it a different methodology, ranging from the more traditional to the newer, including feminism, Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and semiotics. By demonstrating the ways that individual practitioners actually apply the various methodological insights that inform their research, Twelve Views of Manet's "Bar" serves as an excellent introduction to critical methodology as well as a provocative overview for those already familiar with the current discourse of art history. In the process of gaining new insight into Manet's work, and into the discourse of methodology, one discovers that it is not only the individual painting but art history itself that is under investigation. An introduction by Richard Shiff sets the background with a brief history of Manet scholarship and suggestions as to why today's accounts have taken certain distinct directions. The contributors, selected to provide a broad and balanced range of methodological approaches, include: Carol Armstrong, Albert Boime, David Carrier, Kermit Champa, Bradford R. Collins, Michael Paul Driskel, Jack Flam, Tag Gronberg, James D. Herbert, John House, Steven Z. Levine, and Griselda Pollock.

This prize-winning book offers the only comprehensive discussion available on materials, techniques, and condition issues in Western easel paintings from medieval times to the present. “An essential handbook for the pro, and also a beautifully illustrated primer for the layperson. Kirsh and Levenson teach the most valuable lessons about painting of all: how meanings, material, and techniques are bound up together.”—John Walsh, former director, J. Paul Getty Museum “Every element of Kirsh and Levenson's book is smart, concise, and informative. . . . [It is] the essential book on its subject.”—Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle “A long overdue book with direct relevance for modern students of the history of art.”—Libby Sheldon, Burlington Magazine

Working Girls: Fiction, Sexuality, and Modernity investigates the significance of a new form of sexual identity at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Young women of the lower-middle and working classes were increasingly abandoning domestic service in favour of occupations of contested propriety. They inspired both moral unease and erotic fascination. Working Girls considers representations of four highly glamorised yet controversial types of women worker: telegraphists and typists (in newly-feminised offices), shop assistants (in the new department stores), and barmaids (in the new 'gin palaces' of major British cities). Economically emancipated (more or less) and liberated (more or less) from the protection and constraints of home and family, shop-girls, barmaids, typists, and telegraphists became mass media sensations. They energised a wide range of late-Victorian and Modernist fiction. This study will bring late-Victorian and Modernist British writers into intimate conversation with a substantial new archive of ephemeral sources often regarded as remote from high art and its concerns: popular fiction; music hall and musical comedy; beauty pageants and fairground exhibitions; visual art and early film; careers manuals; magazine and periodical journalism; moral reform crusades, Royal Commissions, and attempts at protective legislation. Working Girls argues that these seductive yet perilous young women helped writers negotiate anxieties about the state of literary culture in the United Kingdom. Crucially, they preoccupy novelists who were themselves beleaguered by anxieties over cultural capital, the shifting pressures of the literary marketplace, or controversies about the morality of fiction (often leading to the threat of censorship). In articulating questions about sexual integrity, Working Girls articulate often submerged questions about textual integrity and the role of the modern novel.

Ill. on lining papers.

Bringing forth fresh perspectives on Manet's art by established scholars, this volume places this compelling and elusive artist's painted ?uvre within a broader cultural context, and links his artistic preoccupations with literary and musical currents. Rather than seeking consensus on his art through one methodology, or focusing on one crucial work or period, this collection investigates the range of Manet's art in the context of his time and considers how his vision has shaped subsequent interpretations. Specific essays explore the relationship between Manet and Whistler; Emile Zola's attitude toward the artist; Manet's engagement with moral and ethical questions in his paintings; and the heritage of Charles Baudelaire and Clement Greenberg in critical responses to Manet. Through these and other analyses, this volume illuminates the scope of Manet's career, and indicates the crucial position the artist held in generating a modernist avant-garde aesthetic.