Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-garde: Defining Modern and Traditional in France, 1900-1960 is a collection of eight essays and a scholarly introduction by established and emerging scholars that challenges the continuing modernist slant of twentieth-century art history. The intention is not to perpetuate the vulgar opposition between avant-garde and reactionary art that characterized early-twentieth-century discourse and has marked much subsequent historical writing, but rather to investigate the complex relationship that both innovative and conservative artists had to the concept of tradition. How did artists and art critics conceive of tradition in relation to modernity? What was the role of an artist’s institutional positioning in determining expectations for his or her art? What light is thrown on the structure of the French art world by considering artists from abroad who worked in Paris? How did the war alter modernist and avant-garde paradigms and force crucial changes upon art production in the postwar period to 1960? Particular attention is paid to the terms academic, pompier, official, and arrière-garde, originally used to situate the more conservative artists and works as second-rate or as the negative foil to the assumed radicalism of the avant-garde. By re-evaluating the work of artists pushed to the historical margins by such polemical descriptors, and by proposing alternative understandings of the aesthetic, economic, institutional and political factors that drive our ideas of avant-gardism and the modernist narrative in France, this collection of essays offers new routes to explore the terrain of twentieth-century art in France.

Romanticism is multifaceted, and a wide range of nostalgic, emotional, and exotic concerns were expressed in such styles and movements as the Gothic Revival, Classical Revival, Orientalism, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Some movements were regional and subject-specific, such as the Hudson River School of landscape painting in the United States and the German Nazarene movement, which focused primarily on religious art in Rome. The movements range across Western Europe and include the United States. This dictionary will provide a fuller historical context for Romanticism and enable the reader to identify major trends and explore artists of the period. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Romantic Art and Architecture contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on major artists of the romantic era as well as entries on related art movements, styles, aesthetic philosophies, and philosophers. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Romantic art.

Partha Mitter's book is a pioneering study of the history of modern art on the Indian subcontinent from 1850 to 1922. The author tells the story of Indian art during the Raj, set against the interplay of colonialism and nationalism. The work addresses the tensions and contradictions that attended the advent of European naturalism in India, as part of the imperial design for the westernisation of the elite, and traces the artistic evolution from unquestioning westernisation to the construction of Hindu national identity. Through a wide range of literary and pictorial sources, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India balances the study of colonial cultural institutions and networks with the ideologies of the nationalist and intellectual movements which followed. The result is a book of immense significance, both in the context of South Asian history and in the wider context of art history.

Mere clothing is transformed into desirable fashion by the way it is represented in imagery. Fashion's Double examines how meanings are projected onto garments through their representation, whether in painting, photography, cinema or online fashion film, conveying identity and status, eliciting fascination and desire. With in-depth case studies including the work of Nick Knight and Helmut Newton, film examples such as The Hunger Games, music video Girl Panic by Duran Duran, and much more, this book analyses the interrelationship between clothing, identity, embodiment, representation and self-representation. Written for students and scholars alike, Fashion's Double will appeal to anyone studying fashion, cultural studies, art theory and history, photography, sociology, and film.

This one-volume edition contains both text and plates and includes corrections in the text and bibliography made since the books publication in 1987. There are concise monographic chapters on the important artists and movements of the period, with material on each artists life and work, characteristics of style, and the relationship of the artistic movements to historical and intellectual currents of the time. The author covers a wide range of material and his presentation is lucid and perceptive. Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, Academics and Salon Painters, and Impressionism are covered, and the following artists are included: David, Gros, Girodet, Grard, Gurin, Prudhon, Goya, Fuseli, Blake, Runge, Friedrich, Turner, Constable, Igres, Gricault, Delacroix, Corot, Rousseau, Daumier, Millet, Courbet, Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, and Czanne.

Ideas of national identity, nationalism and transnationalism are now a central feature of contemporary film studies, as well as primary concerns for film-makers themselves. Embracing a range of national cinemas including Scotland, Poland, France, Turkey, Indonesia, India, Germany and America, Cinema and Nation considers the ways in which film production and reception are shaped by ideas of national belonging and examines the implications of globalisation for the concept of national cinema. In the first three Parts, contributors explore sociological approaches to nationalism, challenge the established definitions of 'national cinema', and consider the ways in which states - from the old Soviet Union to contemporary Scotland - aim to create a national culture through cinema. The final two Parts address the diverse strategies involved in the production of national cinema and consider how images of the nation are used and understood by audiences both at home and abroad.

Another fascinating book by the author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling: a saga of artistic rivalry and cultural upheaval in the decade leading to the birth of Impressionism. If there were two men who were absolutely central to artistic life in France in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were Edouard Manet and Ernest Meissonier. While the former has been labelled the “Father of Impressionism” and is today a household name, the latter has sunk into obscurity. It is difficult now to believe that in 1864, when this story begins, it was Meissonier who was considered the greatest French artist alive and who received astronomical sums for his work, while Manet was derided for his messy paintings of ordinary people and had great difficulty getting any of his work accepted at the all-important annual Paris Salon. Manet and Meissonier were the Mozart and Salieri of their day, one a dangerous challenge to the establishment, the other beloved by rulers and the public alike for his painstakingly meticulous oil paintings of historical subjects. Out of the fascinating story of their parallel careers, Ross King creates a lens through which to view the political tensions that dogged Louis-Napoleon during the Second Empire, his ignominious downfall, and the bloody Paris Commune of 1871. At the same time, King paints a wonderfully detailed and vivid portrait of life in an era of radical social change. When Manet painted Dejeuner sur l’herbe or Olympia, he shocked not only with his casual brushstrokes but with his subject matter: top-hatted white-collar workers (and their mistresses) were not considered suitable subjects for ‘Art.’ Ross King shows how, benign as they might seem today, these paintings changed the course of history. The struggle between Meissonier and Manet to see their paintings achieve pride of place at the Salon was not just about artistic competitiveness, it was about how to see the world. Full of fantastic tidbits of information and a colourful cast of characters that includes Baudelaire, Courbet and Zola, with walk-on parts for Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cezanne, The Judgment of Paris casts new light on the birth of Impressionism and takes us to the heart of a time in which the modern French identity was being forged.

An examination of how modern art was impacted by the concept of prehistory and the prehistoric Prehistory is an invention of the late nineteenth century. In that moment of technological progress and acceleration of production and circulation, three major Western narratives about time took shape. One after another, these new fields of inquiry delved into the obscure immensity of the past: first, to surmise the age of the Earth; second, to find the point of emergence of human beings; and third, to ponder the age of art. Maria Stavrinaki considers the inseparability of these accounts of temporality from the disruptive forces of modernity. She asks what a history of modernity and its art would look like if considered through these three interwoven inventions of the longue durée. Transfixed by Prehistory attempts to articulate such a history, which turns out to be more complex than an inevitable march of progress leading up to the Anthropocene. Rather, it is a history of stupor, defamiliarization, regressive acceleration, and incessant invention, since the “new” was also found in the deep sediments of the Earth. Composed of as much speed as slowness, as much change as deep time, as much confidence as skepticism and doubt, modernity is a complex phenomenon that needs to be rethought. Stavrinaki focuses on this intrinsic tension through major artistic practices (Cézanne, Matisse, De Chirico, Ernst, Picasso, Dubuffet, Smithson, Morris, and contemporary artists such as Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Hirschhorn), philosophical discourses (Bataille, Blumenberg, and Jünger), and the human sciences. This groundbreaking book will attract readers interested in the intersections of art history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, mythology, geology, and archaeology.

This volume provides a lively and authoritative synthesis of recent work on the social history of France and is now thoroughly updated to cover the 'long nineteenth century' from 1789-1914. Peter McPhee offers both a readable narrative and a distinctive, coherent argument about this remarkable century and explores key themes such as: - Peasant interaction with the environment - The changing experience of work and leisure - The nature of crime and protest - Changing demographic patterns and family structures - The religious practices of workers and peasants - The ideology and internal repercussions of colonisation. At the core of this social history is the exercise and experience of 'social relations of power' - not only because in these years there were four periods of protracted upheaval, but also because the history of the workplace, of relations between women and men, adults and children, is all about human interaction. Stimulating and enjoyable to read, this indispensable introduction to nineteenth-century France will help readers to make sense of the often bewildering story of these years, while giving them a better understanding of what it meant to be an inhabitant of France during that turbulent time.