Jean-Leon Gerome and the Crisis of History Painting in the 1850s

Jean-Leon Gerome and the Crisis of History Painting in the 1850s
Author: Gulru Cakmak
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781800857155

This book demonstrates that by the 1850s the historical paintings no longer excited the French public. This provocative study reveals Gérôme, typically dismissed as a conservative painter, as a pioneering innovator who responded swiftly to this crisis in art. In a group of experimental paintings in the late 1850s, he devised a quintessentially modern mode of historical representation.

Art and the Historical Film

Art and the Historical Film
Author: Gillian McIver
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2022-11-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1501384740

Art and the Historical Film provides an important examination of fine art's impact on filmmaking, grappling with the question of authenticity. From Eugene Delacroix's interpretation of the 1830 French revolution to Uli Edel's version of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, artistic representations of historical subjects are appealing and pervasive. Movies often adapt imagery from art history, including paintings of historical events. Films and art shape the past for us and continue to affect our interpretation of history. While historical films are often argued over for their adherence to "the facts," their real problem is realism: how can the past be convincingly depicted? Realism in the historical film genre is often nourished and given credibility by its use of painterly references. This book examines how art-historical images affect historical films by going beyond period detail and surface design to look at how profound ideas about history are communicated through pictures. Art and the Historical Film: Between Realism and the Sublime is based on case studies that explore the links between art and cinema, including American independent Western Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010), British heritage film Belle (Amma Asante, 2013), and Dutch national epic Admiral (Roel Reiné, 2014). The chapters create immersive worlds that communicate distinct ideas about the past through cinematography, production design, and direction, as the films adapt, reference, and transpose paintings by artists such as Rubens, Albert Bierstadt, and Jacques-Louis David.

Representing the Past in the Art of the Long Nineteenth Century

Representing the Past in the Art of the Long Nineteenth Century
Author: Matthew C. Potter
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2021-09-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351004174

This edited collection explores the intersection of historical studies and the artistic representation of the past in the long nineteenth century. The case studies provide not just an account of the pursuit of history in art within Western Europe but also examples from beyond that sphere. These cover canonical and conventional examples of history painting as well as more inclusive, ‘popular’ and vernacular visual cultural phenomena. General themes explored include the problematics internal to the theory and practice of academic history painting and historical genre painting, including compositional devices and the authenticity of artefacts depicted; relationships of power and purpose in historical art; the use of historical art for alternative Liberal and authoritarian ideals; the international cross-fertilisation of ideas about historical art; and exploration of the diverse influences of socioeconomic and geopolitical factors. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of the histories of nineteenth-century art and culture.

Narrative painting in nineteenth-century Europe

Narrative painting in nineteenth-century Europe
Author: Nina Lübbren
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2023-05-23
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1526168561

This ground-breaking book presents a critical study of pictorial narrative in nineteenth-century European painting. Covering works from France, Germany, Britain, Italy and elsewhere, it traces the ways in which immensely popular artists like Jean-Léon Gérôme, Karl von Piloty and William Quiller Orchardson used unique visual strategies to tell thrilling and engaging stories. Regardless of genre, content or national context, these paintings share a fundamental modern narrative mode. Unlike traditional art, they do not rely on textual sources; nor do they tell stories through the human body alone. Instead, they experiment with objects, spaces, cause-and-effect relations and open-ended ambiguity, prompting viewers and reviewers to read for clues in order to weave their own elaborate tales.

Painting Antiquity

Painting Antiquity
Author: Stephanie Moser
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 625
Release: 2019-11-26
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0190697024

Inspired by newly discovered antiquities of the ancient world exhibited in the museums of Europe and celebrated in the illustrated press of the day, the leading British history painters Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sir Edward Poynter and Edwin Long created a striking body of artworks in which archaeology was a prime focus. Of the growing community of historicist and classicist painters in mid-nineteenth century Britain, these artists expressed a passion for archaeological detail, and their aesthetic engagement with ancient material culture played a key role in fostering the enthusiasm for antiquity with wider audiences. Painting Antiquity explores the archaeological dimension of their paintings in detail, addressing how the relationship these artists had with ancient objects represented a distinctive and important development in the cultural reception of the past. The book also considers the inspiration for the movement defined as "archaeological genre painting," the artistic and historic context for this new style, the archaeological sources upon which the artworks were based, and the critical reception of the paintings in the world of Victorian art criticism. Alongside extensive visual evidence, rendered here in both striking color and black-and-white imagery, Stephanie Moser shows how this artistic practice influenced our understanding of ancient Egypt. Further, she argues that these paintings affected the development of archaeology as a discipline, revealing how the painters had an intense engagement with archaeology, representing artefacts in extraordinary detail and promoting the use of ancient material culture according to an aesthetic agenda. The issues raised by placing importance on concepts of beauty and decoration, over values such as rarity, function, or historical use continue to divide archaeologists and art historians in the present day. Ultimately, by demonstrating how the artistic dialogue with antiquity contributed to defining it, Painting Antiquity sheds important new light on the two-way exchanges between visual representations of the past and knowledge formation.

Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean

Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean
Author: Margaret S. Graves
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 558
Release: 2022-04-19
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0253060362

The Islamic world's artistic traditions experienced profound transformation in the 19th century as rapidly developing technologies and globalizing markets ushered in drastic changes in technique, style, and content. Despite the importance and ingenuity of these developments, the 19th century remains a gap in the history of Islamic art. To fill this opening in art historical scholarship, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean charts transformations in image-making, architecture, and craft production in the Islamic world from Fez to Istanbul. Contributors focus on the shifting methods of production, reproduction, circulation, and exchange artists faced as they worked in fields such as photography, weaving, design, metalwork, ceramics, and even transportation. Covering a range of media and a wide geographical spread, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean reveals how 19th-century artists in the Middle East and North Africa reckoned with new tools, materials, and tastes from local perspectives.

Instead of modernity

Instead of modernity
Author: Andrew Ginger
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 597
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1526147831

This book revisits the claim that a key dimension of cultural modernity – understood as a turn to the autonomy of the signs and the erasure of the 'face of man' - arose in the mid-nineteenth century. It presents an alternative to that obsession, focusing instead on the aesthetic appreciation of forms through which connections are realised across place and time. The book is one of few to offer a comparative approach to numerous major writers and artists of this period over diverse countries. Specifically, the comparative approach overcomes the constitutively ambiguous relation between the modern and the Hispanic. The Hispanic is often imagined as at once foundational for and excluded from the modern world. Its reincorporation into the story of the mid-century unsettles the notion of modernity. The book offers instead an experiment in writing, tracing commonalities across place and time, and drawing on mid-century expressions of such likenesses.

Paul Delaroche

Paul Delaroche
Author: Patricia Smyth
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2022-06-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1802070850

Paul Delaroche: Painting and Popular Spectacle explores the connections between painting and an emergent popular visual culture in the early nineteenth century, which included new forms of optical entertainment such as Panoramas and Dioramas and innovation in fields such as illustration, art reproduction, and stage decor. Delaroche’s paintings caused a sensation at the Paris Salon, with critics comparing the emotional response they elicited to that of popular melodrama. Yet his appeal to a certain type of spectator lay behind the increasingly hostile criticism to which his works were subjected, and has in our own time led to his uncertain status in the art historical canon. This book focuses on Delaroche’s popularity with a newly expanded audience. Lacking in specialist knowledge, but nevertheless keen to engage with and deeply affected by art, the behaviour of this new public prompted lively discussions about who has the right to judge art and on what grounds. Working across disciplinary boundaries, this book proposes a new reading both of Delaroche and of the connections between the arts in this period. The artist emerges as a figure at the cutting edge of an emergent trans-medial popular visual culture in which we see the formation of modern spectatorship.

Reconsidering Gérôme

Reconsidering Gérôme
Author: Scott Allan
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2010
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1606060384

An unprecedented reexamination of Gérôme's career and his place in art history.

Pierrot and his world

Pierrot and his world
Author: Marika Takanishi Knowles
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2024-01-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526174073

Pierrot, a theatrical stock character known by his distinctive costume of loose white tunic and trousers, is a ubiquitous figure in French art and culture. This richly illustrated book offers an account of Pierrot’s recurrence in painting, printmaking, photography and film, tracing this distinctive type from the art of Antoine Watteau to the cinema of Occupied France. As a visual type, Pierrot thrives at the intersection of theatrical and marketplace practices. From Watteau’s Pierrot (c. 1720) and Édouard Manet’s The Old Musician (1862) to Nadar and Adrien Tournachon’s Pierrot the Photographer (1855) and the landmark film Children of Paradise (1945), Pierrot has given artists a medium through which to explore the marketplace as a form for both social life and creative practice. Simultaneously a human figure and a theatrical mask, Pierrot elicits artistic reflection on the representation of personality in the marketplace.