Material inspirations : the interests of the art object in the nineteenth century and after

Author:

Siegel, Jonah

Format:

Book

Language:

English

Imprint:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2020

Subject:

Material culture - History - 19th century
Art and society - History - 19th century
Material culture in literature
Literature, Modern - 19th century - History and criticism

ISBN:

9780198858003 and 0198858000

Description:

xxviii, 373 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Bibliographic Note:

Includes bibliographical references and index

Contents:

Preface : what goes without saying -- Introduction : feeling for things, or what really matters -- Part I. Interesting -- Transfiguration -- Desire and the body of inspiration -- "Strange Aphrodite" -- Part II. Remains -- Matter, form, abstraction : Mediation and the reception of antiquities -- The experience of form (bewilderment at the Vatican in George Eliot and Vernon Lee) -- Failure and revision at the Vatican : some evidence from the Baedeker (an interchapter) -- Ruin and allegory in Benjamin -- Part III. Things, personally -- The ruined cathedral, black arts, and the grave in engraving : Ruskin and the fatal excess of art -- Pater at the museum / Raphael's fortune

Summary:

This book is a study of the complex relationship between matter and idea that shaped the nineteenth-century culture of art, and that in turn determined the course of still-current accounts of art's nature and value. Fundamental questions about the effects of material conditions on the creation and reception of art arose as early as the nineteenth century, and put important pressures on later eras. The place of class distinctions in the making and reception of art,the relationship between copy and original, the effects of display on art appreciation, even the role of pleasure itself: this book treats these and related issues as productive conceptual challenges with an unresolved relationship to matter at their core. Drawing on recent scholarship on the history of art and its institutions, Material Inspirations places cultural developments such as the emergence of new sites for exhibition and the astonishing proliferation of printed reproductions alongside a wide range of texts including novels, poems, travel guidebooks, compendia of antiquities, and especially the great line of critical writing that emerged in the period. The study vivifies a dynamic era, which is still too often seen as static and unchanging, by emphasizing the transformations taking place throughout the period in precisely those areas that have appeared to promise little more than repetition or continuity: collection, exhibition, and reproduction. The book culminates with the two great critics of the period, John Ruskin and Walter Pater, but it also includes close analysis of other prose writers, as well as poets and novelists ranging from William Blake to Robert Browning, George Eliot to Henry James. Significant developments addressed include the vogue for the representation of Old Masters in the first half of the century, ongoing innovations in the creation and diffusion of reproductions, and the emergence of the field of art history itself

Collection:

BGC Monograph Stacks

Call Number:

N72.S6 S54 2020

Available

c.1