"Using words and works of both pupils and masters of the French Academy of Beaux-Arts, this fascinating book provides a wealth of information about the environment and studio practices of French official art from 1830 to 1890. Albert Boime describes the training of new pupils in the Academic ateliers, from the time they began and were set to copy engravings and casts to their copying of the old masters in the Louvre to their work before the live model and landscape painting out-of-doors. Boime's account includes not only a history of the transition from guild-controlled arts sanctioned by the church to an academic system sponsored by the state but also a reassessment of the positive role played by the Academy's teaching program in the evolution of the independent movements of the nineteenth century"--Publisher's description.

In the nineteenth century, the Académie des Beaux Arts, and institution of central importance to the artistic life of France for over two hundred years, yielded much of its power to the present system of art distribution, which is dependent upon critics, dealers, and small exhibitions. In Canvases and Careers, Harrison and Cynthia White examine in scrupulous and fascinating detail how and why this shift occurred. Assimilating a wide range of historical and sociological data, the authors argue convincingly that the Academy, by neglecting to address the social and economic conditions of its time, undermined its own ability to maintain authority and control. Originally published in 1965, this ground-breaking work is a classic piece of empirical research in the sociology of art. In this edition, Harrison C. White's new Foreword compares the marketing approaches of two contemporary painters, while Cynthia A. White's new Afterword reviews recent scholarship in the field.

First published in 1970. What is a work of art? What is the status of things in pictures and books? How are we to distinguish and ascertain the meaning of a literary work at various levels? This book is intended both to introduce the reader to classic philosophical accounts of art and beauty, and to bring out the significance for aesthetics of recent developments in philosophy.

The Academy and the Limits of Painting in Seventeenth-Century France is the first study in over a century devoted to the creation of one of the most important European institutions of art, the French Académie Royale. Founded in the mid-1660s, the Academy institutionalised the discourse around painting and thus had an immediate impact on the making of art in France, becoming a decisive influence on painting until the close of the nineteenth century. In the process of forging an identity for itself, the Academy redefined almost every aspect of art - the nature of art training, the sources of patronage, the social standing of the artist, and the place of the arts in national life.

Throughout the nineteenth century, academies functioned as the main venues for the teaching, promotion, and display of art. Contemporary scholars have, for the most part, denigrated academic art, calling it formulaic, unoriginal, and repetitious. The contributors to Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century challenge this entrenched notion and consider how academies worldwide have represented an important system of artistic preservation and transmission. Their essays eschew easy binaries that have reigned in academia for more than half a century and that simply oppose the avant-garde to academicism.

Between 1790 and 1910, Danish painters developed a national school of art that matched the artistic centres of France, Germany and Britain. The range of outstanding works created by Nicolai Abildgaard, Jens Juel, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Christen Købke, P. S. Krøyer and Vilhelm Hammershøi reflect and refract the great stylistic tendencies of European art of the 19th century, including Classicism, Romanticism, Impressionism and Symbolism. Illustrated with over two hundred key works of art drawn from the leading Danish collections, this is the only book available in English that surveys Danish painting across the 19th century. Written by a major scholar in the field, and featuring all the icons of the Danish Golden Age, this is an essential addition to all art libraries.

In this bold exploration of the political forces that shaped Impressionism, Albert Boime proposes that at the heart of the modern is a "guilty secret"--the need of the dominant, mainly bourgeois, classes in Paris to expunge from historical memory the haunting nightmare of the Commune and its socialist ideology. The Commune of 1871 emerged after the Prussian war when the Paris militia chased the central government to Versailles, enabling the working class and its allies to seize control of the capital. Eventually violence engulfed the city as traditional liberals and moderates joined forces with reactionaries to restore Paris to "order"--the bourgeois order. Here Boime examines the rise of Impressionism in relation to the efforts of the reinstated conservative government to "rebuild" Paris, to return it to its Haussmannian appearance and erase all reminders of socialist threat. Boime contends that an organized Impressionist movement owed its initiating impulse to its complicity with the state's program. The exuberant street scenes, spaces of leisure and entertainment, sunlit parks and gardens, the entire concourse of movement as filtered through an atmosphere of scintillating light and color all constitute an effort to reclaim Paris visually and symbolically for the bourgeoisie. Amply documented, richly illustrated, and compellingly argued, Boime's thesis serves as a challenge to all cultural historians interested in the rise of modernism.

"The revised and expanded edition of Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History embraces many aspects of the so-called 'new' art history - attention to issues of class and gender, reception and spectatorship, racism and Eurocentrism - while at the same time recovering the remarkable vitality, salience and subversiveness of the era's best art. Indeed, the authors insist that there is a profound sympathy between these new perspectives and the art under examination. For it was nineteenth-century artists who first addressed the issues that preoccupy audiences and scholars today: the relation between popular and elite culture, the legacy of the Enlightenment, the question of the canon, and the representation of workers, women and non-whites."--BOOK JACKET.