Transformative Beauty
Transformative Beauty

Author: Amy Woodson-Boulton

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2012-03-21

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0804780536

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Why did British industrial cities build art museums? By exploring the histories of the municipal art museums in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, Transformative Beauty examines the underlying logic of the Victorian art museum movement. These museums attempted to create a space free from the moral and physical ugliness of industrial capitalism. Deeply engaged with the social criticism of John Ruskin, reformers created a new, prominent urban institution, a domesticated public space that not only aimed to provide refuge from the corrosive effects of industrial society but also provided a remarkably unified secular alternative to traditional religion. Woodson-Boulton raises provocative questions about the meaning and use of art in relation to artistic practice, urban development, social justice, education, and class. In today's context of global austerity and shrinking government support of public cultural institutions, this book is a timely consideration of arts policy and purposes in modern society.

Art in Museums
Art in Museums

Author: Susan Pearce

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2000-12-01

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 056740854X

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Canvasses past and contemporary problems of cultural representation and the relationship between the artist, the museum and society.

British and Irish Paintings in Public Collections
British and Irish Paintings in Public Collections

Author: Christopher Wright

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 950

ISBN-13: 9780300117301

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This book sets a new standard as a work of reference. It covers British and Irish art in public collections from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, and it encompasses nearly 9,000 painters and 90,000 paintings in more than 1,700 separate collections. The book includes as well pictures that are now lost, some as a consequence of the Second World War and others because of de-accessioning, mostly from 1950 to about 1975 when Victorian art was out of fashion. By listing many tens of thousands of previously unpublished works, including around 13,000 which do not yet have any form of attribution, this book becomes a unique and indispensable work of reference, one that will transform the study of British and Irish painting.