This book examines the critical writing and journalistic reportage on Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres, from the time of his renunciation of the Salon in1834 until his large retrospective at the 1855 Universal Exposition, the crucial middle decades of his career. This massive body of writing demonstrates how Ingres shaped his career in the rapidly evolving art world of mid-nineteenth century Paris. Enjoying the benefits of his affiliation with the Academy, the artist also employed certain modes of presentation, most notably the single-artist exhibition and illustrated monograph, through which he distanced himself and his work from the embattled world of artistic officialdom.
Ingres Then, and Now is an innovative study of one of the best-known French artists of the nineteenth century, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Adrian Rifkin re-evaluates Ingres' work in the context of a variety of literary, musical and visual cultures which are normally seen as alien to him. Re-viewing Ingres' paintings as a series of fragmentary symptoms of the commodity cultures of nineteenth-century Paris, Adrian Rifkin draws the artist away from his familiar association with the Academy and the Salon. Rifkin sets out to show how, by thinking of the historical archive as a form of the unconscious, we can renew our understanding of nineteenth-century conservative or academic cultures by reading them against their 'other'. He situates Ingres in the world of the Parisian Arcades, as represented by Walter Benjamin, and examines the effect of this juxtaposition on how we think of Benjamin himself, following Ingres' image in popular cultures of the twentieth century. Rifkin then returns to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to find traces of the emergence of bizarre symptoms in Ingres' early work, symptoms which open him to a variety of conflicting readings and appropriations. It concludes by examining his importance for the great French art critic Jean Cassou on the one hand, and in making a bold, contemporary gay appropriation on the other. Ingres Then, and Now transforms the popular image we have of Ingres. It argues that the figure of the artist is neither fixed in time or place - there is neither an essential man named Ingres, nor a singular body of his work - but is an effect of many, complex and overlapping historical effects.
This book explores the puzzling phenomenon of new veiling practices among lower middle class women in Cairo, Egypt. Although these women are part of a modernizing middle class, they also voluntarily adopt a traditional symbol of female subordination. How can this paradox be explained? An explanation emerges which reconceptualizes what appears to be reactionary behavior as a new style of political struggle--as accommodating protest. These women, most of them clerical workers in the large government bureaucracy, are ambivalent about working outside the home, considering it a change which brings new burdens as well as some important benefits. At the same time they realize that leaving home and family is creating an intolerable situation of the erosion of their social status and the loss of their traditional identity. The new veiling expresses women's protest against this. MacLeod argues that the symbolism of the new veiling emerges from this tense subcultural dilemma, involving elements of both resistance and acquiescence.
The art world has become a point of contention within a range of debates and yet, strangely enough, while art criticism has been discussed at length, very little is said about art critics. Following in the footsteps of Lionello Venturi’s History of Art Criticism, in the current volume Lorente provides an updated reassessment of the great art critics from the Enlightenment down to the turn of the millennium. Conceived as a didactic handbook with a recommended bibliography at the end of each chapter, this concise work tells the history of a profession in permanent crisis, while also paying homage to its most infl uential practitioners in different cultural contexts.
The Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography is the first comprehensive encyclopedia of world photography up to the beginning of the twentieth century. It sets out to be the standard, definitive reference work on the subject for years to come. Its coverage is global – an important ‘first’ in that authorities from all over the world have contributed their expertise and scholarship towards making this a truly comprehensive publication. The Encyclopedia presents new and ground-breaking research alongside accounts of the major established figures in the nineteenth century arena. Coverage includes all the key people, processes, equipment, movements, styles, debates and groupings which helped photography develop from being ‘a solution in search of a problem’ when first invented, to the essential communication tool, creative medium, and recorder of everyday life which it had become by the dawn of the twentieth century. The sheer breadth of coverage in the 1200 essays makes the Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography an essential reference source for academics, students, researchers and libraries worldwide.
