Synopses & Reviews
This collection reasserts the importance of class analysis to a critical art history by studying artistic practices in the key phase of bourgeois history from 1790-1850. A group of specialist scholars examine related developments in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Themes covered include exhibitions, art criticism, patronage, taste, and the political resonances of specific artworks. Each section of the book has an introduction sketching bourgeois class formation in the society concerned, and reviewing the historical literature about it.
Synopsis
The importance of class analysis in a key phase of bourgeois history.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Marxism and art history after the fall of Communism Andrew Hemingway; Part I. Britain: Introduction Andrew Hemingway; 1. Public goods or private interests? The British institution in the early nineteenth century Ann Pullan; 2. The watercolour as commodity: the exhibitions of the Society of Painters in Watercolours, 1805-1812 Greg Smith; 3. French glitter or English nature? Representing Englishness in landscape painting, c. 1790-1820 Kay Dian Kriz; 4. 'Art is cheaper and goes lower in France': the language of the Parliamentary Select Committee on the Arts and Principles of Design of 1835-6 Thomas Gretton; 5. The impossible ideal: romantic conceptions of the Parthenon sculptures in early nineteenth-century Britain and Germany Alex Potts; Part II. France: Introduction Andrew Hemingway; 6. The class of '89?: cultural aspects of Bourgeois identity in the aftermath of the French Revolution Richard Wrigley; 7. Working for a Bourgeois republic: Prud'hon, patronage and the distribution of wealth under the Directoire and Consulate Helen Weston; 8. 'Les marchands sont plus que jamais dans le temple': the revival of monumental decorative painting in France during the July monarchy Andrew C. Shelton; Part III. Germany: Introduction William Vaughan; 9. Correcting Friderich (Friedrich); Nature and society in post-Napoleonic Germany William Vaughan; 10. The frescoes of Peter Cornelius in the Munich Ludwigskirche and contemporary criticism Frank Büttner; 11. Conservatism and innovation in Moritz von Schwind Werner Busch; 12. The German experience of 1848: imaging the Vormärz, the revolution and its aftermath Françoise Forster-Hahn; Part IV. United States: Introduction Andrew Hemingway; 13. Long-term visions, short-term failures: art institutions in the United States 1800-1860 Alan Wallach; 14. The American art-union as patron for expansionist ideology in the 1840s Patricia Hills; 15. Landscape taste as an indicator of class identity in Antebellum America Angela Miller.