‘One of the most engrossing and stimulating art history texts to come along for years’ – The Times Higher Education Supplement

‘Essential reading...[it] will help to re-define the shifting boundaries of the art-historical survey’ – The Guardian

‘It should be compulsory reading’ – Art Book Review Quarterly

A rich and diverse volume, 'Nineteenth Century Art: 
A  Critical History' will interest students, specialists, and anyone fascinated by this dynamic period.

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In the arenas of art and representation, the nineteenth century was a time of questioning, experimentation, discovery and modernization; artists and designers challenged, as never before, prevailing definitions of art and the social order.

Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History embraces many aspects of the so-called ‘new’ art history – attention to issues of class and gender, reception and spectatorship, racism and Eurocentrism – while at the same time recovering the remarkable vitality, salience and subversiveness of the era’s best art. Indeed, the authors insist that there is a profound sympathy between these new perspectives and the art under examination. For it was nineteenth-century artists who first addressed the issues that preoccupy audiences and scholars today: the relation between popular and élite culture, the legacy of the Enlightenment, the question of the canon, and the representation of workers, women and non-whites.

In this edition, two completely new chapters examine the varied facets of architecture and design from 1790 to 1851, and from mid-century leading into the early twentieth century. In addition, there are new sections on challenges to academic painting in Russia and on the Vienna Secession, and Pre-Raphaelitism in England and the rise of naturalism in Germany are considered in greater depth. Many more illustrations are now in colour.

Stephen F. Eisenman teaches art history at Northwestern University. He is also the author of Gauguin’s Skirt (Thames & Hudson, 1997). Thomas Crow is Professor of Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Brian Lukacher is Associate Professor of Art History at Vassar College. Linda Nochlin is the Lila Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. David L. Phillips is Senior Lecturer in Visual Theory at the University of East London. Frances K. Pohl is Professor of Art History at Pomona College, California.

Also of interest
Romanticism and Art
The Body in Pieces by Linda Nochlin
Mary Cassatt by Griselda Pollock
Framing America: A Social History of American Art