The 19th century saw the emergence of numerous artistic brotherhoods - groups of artists bound together in communal production, sharing spiritual and aesthetic aims. This collection of essays explores the issue of artistic brotherhoods. Situating the brotherhoods in their historical context, this volume offers insight into the social, political, economic and cultural milieu of the 19th century. Its main focus is on celebrated and influential brotherhoods, but does include lesser-known or forgotten artists. The essays cover fraternities from a variety of perspectives, looking at issues of gender, identity, professional practices and artistic formations in Europe and the US. Brotherhoods investigated include: the Nazarenes; the Pre-Raphaelites; the Russian Abramatsova; the Primitifs; and the Nabis.

This title was first published in 2000. The nineteenth century saw the emergence of numerous artistic brotherhoods - groups of artists bound together in communal production, sharing spiritual and aesthetic aims. Although it is widely acknowledged that this is an unique feature of the period, there has not previously been a separate study of the phenomenon. This collection of essays provides a thorough and wide-ranging exploration of the issue. Situating artistic brotherhoods within their historical context, it offers unique insights into the social, political, economic and cultural milieu of the nineteenth century. It focuses on the most celebrated and influential brotherhoods, while also bringing to light lesser-known or forgotten artists. The essays explore the artistic fraternity from a wide variety of perspectives, probing issues of gender, identity, professional practices and artistic formation in Europe and the United States. This book investigates the Nazarenes, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Russian Abramatsova, the Primitifs, the Nabis as well as other leading groups. The book contains a substantial introduction, which establishes the key questions and issues surrounding the phenomena of the artistic brotherhood, including their relation to the larger artistic community, their association with other social and political organizations of the period, and the ways in which mythologies have been built around them in subsequent histories and recollections of the period.

Masculinities in nineteenth-century art through the lens of gender and queer history Male bonds were omnipresent in nineteenth-century European artistic scenes, impacting the creation, presentation, and reception of art in decisive ways. Men’s lives and careers bore the marks of their relations with other men. Yet, such male bonds are seldom acknowledged for what they are: gendered and historically determined social constructs. This volume shines a critical light on male homosociality in the arts of the long nineteenth century by combining art history with the insights of gender and queer history. From this interdisciplinary perspective, the contributing authors present case studies of men’s relationships in a variety of contexts, which range from the Hungarian Reform Age to the Belgian fin de siècle. As a whole, the book offers a historicizing survey of the male bonds that underpinned nineteenth-century art and a thought-provoking reflection on its theoretical and methodological implications.

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.

This book reframes the formative years of three significant artists: Henri Fantin-Latour, Alphonse Legros, and James McNeill Whistler. The trio’s coming together as the Société des trois occurred during the emergence of the artistic avant-garde—a movement toward individualism and self-expression. Though their oeuvres appear dissimilar, it is imperative that the three artists’ early work and letters be viewed in light of the Société, as it informed many of their decisions in both London and Paris. Each artist actively cultivated a translocal presence, creating artistic networks that transcended national borders. Thus, this book will serve as a comprehensive resource on the development, production, implications, and eventual end of the Société.

An authoritative re-definition of the social, cultural and visual history of the emergence of the "avant-garde" in Paris and London Over the past fifty years, the term "avant-garde" has come to shape discussions of European culture and modernity, ubiquitously taken for granted but rarely defined. This ground-breaking book develops an original and searching methodology that fundamentally reconfigures the social, cultural, and visual context of the emergence of the artistic avant-garde in Paris and London before 1915, bringing the material history of its formation into clearer and more detailed focus than ever before. Drawing on a wealth of disciplinary evidence, from socio-economics to histories of sexuality, bohemia, consumerism, politics, and popular culture, David Cottington explores the different models of cultural collectivity in, and presumed hierarchies between, these two focal cities, while identifying points of ideological influence and difference between them. He reveals the avant-garde to be at once complicit with, resistant to, and a product of the modernizing forces of professionalization, challenging the conventional wisdom on this moment of cultural formation and offering the means to reset the terms of avant-garde studies.

Focusing on the art of Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) and his colleagues Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Frédéric Bazille, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Fellow Men argues for the importance of the group as a defining subject of nineteenth-century French painting. Through close readings of some of the most ambitious paintings of the realist and impressionist generation, Bridget Alsdorf offers new insights into how French painters understood the shifting boundaries of their social world, and reveals the fragile masculine bonds that made up the avant-garde. A dedicated realist who veered between extremes of sociability and hermetic isolation, Fantin-Latour painted group dynamics over the course of two decades, from 1864 to 1885. This was a period of dramatic change in French history and art--events like the Paris Commune and the rise and fall of impressionism raised serious doubts about the power of collectivism in art and life. Fantin-Latour's monumental group portraits, and related works by his friends and colleagues from the 1850s through the 1880s, represent varied visions of collective identity and test the limits of association as both a social and an artistic pursuit. By examining the bonds and frictions that animated their social circles, Fantin-Latour and his cohorts developed a new pictorial language for the modern group: one of fragmentation, exclusion, and willful withdrawal into interior space that nonetheless presented individuality as radically relational.

This collection examines the development of art criticism across Russia and Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Art criticism articulated local ideas about functions of art but, more importantly, it also became one of the most responsive fields in which a larger, transnational European exchange of ideas about the role of critical discourse could take place. Art criticism of this period was also rich in rhetorical strategies and textual diversity. International contributors to this volume, who include art historians, cultural historians, and specialists in critical and philosophical discourse, examine the emergence of art critical discourse in a variety of cultural and geo-political contexts.

This book depicts the long rich life and wide ranging work of Count Athanasius Raczyński (1788–1874). By exploring his complex personality, his processes of thought and his accomplishments, it reveals a man at once a wealthy aristocrat, a Pole in the Prussian diplomatic service, an active participant in and perceptive observer and critical commentator on political life, a connoisseur and art collector of European renown, and the author of ground breaking studies on German and Portuguese art – in short a distinguished and fascinating nineteenth century figure.