Art in an Age of Counterrevolution, 1815-1848 (Volume 3) (A Social History of Modern Art) - Hardcover

Boime, Albert

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9780226063379: Art in an Age of Counterrevolution, 1815-1848 (Volume 3) (A Social History of Modern Art)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226063372 ISBN 13: 9780226063379

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2004

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Art for art's sake. Art created in pursuit of personal expression. In Art in an Age of Counterrevolution, Albert Boime rejects these popular modern notions and suggests that history—not internal drive or expressive urge—as the dynamic force that shapes art.

This volume focuses on the astonishing range of art forms currently understood to fall within the broad category of Romanticism. Drawing on visual media and popular imagery of the time, this generously illustrated work examines the art of Romanticism as a reaction to the social and political events surrounding it. Boime reinterprets canonical works by such politicized artists as Goya, Delacroix, G�ricault, Friedrich, and Turner, framing their work not by personality but by its sociohistorical context. Boime's capacious approach and scope allows him to incorporate a wide range of perspectives into his analysis of Romantic art, including Marxism, social history, gender identity, ecology, structuralism, and psychoanalytic theory, a reach that parallels the work of contemporary cultural historians and theorists such as Edward Said, Pierre Bourdieu, Eric Hobsbawm, Frederic Jameson, and T. J. Clark.

Boime ultimately establishes that art serves the interests and aspirations of the cultural bourgeoisie. In grounding his arguments on their work and its scope and influence, he elucidates how all artists are inextricably linked to history. This book will be used widely in art history courses and exert enormous influence on cultural studies as well.

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About the Author:

Albert Boime is professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of fourteen books, including Art in an Age of Revolution, 1750-1800; Art in an Age of Bonapartism, 1800-1815; and The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

Review:

"The volume is copiously illustrated and firmly rooted in observation and research. Boime does not shy away from dissecting unconscious motivations and assumptions. . . . Enlightening, thought-provoking, and skillfully presented."

(R. K. Dickson Bloomsbury Review)

"In company with the first two volumes, it is a tour de force in the broader historical and sociocultural analysis of art practice and the uses of art in visual representation. The text is closely researched and highly informative. . . . The approach steers a steady course between traditional, sociological, theoretical, and discursive strategies while presenting astute critical appreciation of individual works of art. . . . Reinforced by effective endnotes and an exhaustive index, this book brings much new insight to the current literature and will certainly interest researchers, as well as provide reliable sources for students."

(Choice)

"Boime's study has many merits. It offers numerous stimulating readings of individual words as well as a synthesis and compilation of the vast pyramid of scholarship on which it depends." (Dorothy Johnson Nineteenth-Century French Studies)

"Like its predecessors . . . this book is rich, idiosyncratic, and unparalleled in the literature on nineteenth-century art. . . . It is a book to be appreciated not only in terms of the debates and allegiances that it brings back to life for a general reader as well as for specialists. . . . A book that offers this much new research belongs on every scholar's shelf." (Nancy Locke Sehepunkt)

"[Boime's] encyclopaedic cultural knowledge is the source of brilliant, often entirely original analyses, in which Art in the Age of Counterrevolution abounds." (Sebastien Allard Burlington Magazine)

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