Academics, Pompiers, Official Artists and the Arrière-garde: Defining Modern and Traditional in France, 1900-1960 is a collection of eight essays and a scholarly introduction by established and emerging scholars that challenges the continuing modernist slant of twentieth-century art history. The intention is not to perpetuate the vulgar opposition between avant-garde and reactionary art that characterized early-twentieth-century discourse and has marked much subsequent historical writing, but rather to investigate the complex relationship that both innovative and conservative artists had to the concept of tradition. How did artists and art critics conceive of tradition in relation to modernity? What was the role of an artist’s institutional positioning in determining expectations for his or her art? What light is thrown on the structure of the French art world by considering artists from abroad who worked in Paris? How did the war alter modernist and avant-garde paradigms and force crucial changes upon art production in the postwar period to 1960? Particular attention is paid to the terms academic, pompier, official, and arrière-garde, originally used to situate the more conservative artists and works as second-rate or as the negative foil to the assumed radicalism of the avant-garde. By re-evaluating the work of artists pushed to the historical margins by such polemical descriptors, and by proposing alternative understandings of the aesthetic, economic, institutional and political factors that drive our ideas of avant-gardism and the modernist narrative in France, this collection of essays offers new routes to explore the terrain of twentieth-century art in France.

Romanticism is multifaceted, and a wide range of nostalgic, emotional, and exotic concerns were expressed in such styles and movements as the Gothic Revival, Classical Revival, Orientalism, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Some movements were regional and subject-specific, such as the Hudson River School of landscape painting in the United States and the German Nazarene movement, which focused primarily on religious art in Rome. The movements range across Western Europe and include the United States. This dictionary will provide a fuller historical context for Romanticism and enable the reader to identify major trends and explore artists of the period. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Romantic Art and Architecture contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on major artists of the romantic era as well as entries on related art movements, styles, aesthetic philosophies, and philosophers. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Romantic art.

An examination of how modern art was impacted by the concept of prehistory and the prehistoric Prehistory is an invention of the late nineteenth century. In that moment of technological progress and acceleration of production and circulation, three major Western narratives about time took shape. One after another, these new fields of inquiry delved into the obscure immensity of the past: first, to surmise the age of the Earth; second, to find the point of emergence of human beings; and third, to ponder the age of art. Maria Stavrinaki considers the inseparability of these accounts of temporality from the disruptive forces of modernity. She asks what a history of modernity and its art would look like if considered through these three interwoven inventions of the longue durée. Transfixed by Prehistory attempts to articulate such a history, which turns out to be more complex than an inevitable march of progress leading up to the Anthropocene. Rather, it is a history of stupor, defamiliarization, regressive acceleration, and incessant invention, since the “new” was also found in the deep sediments of the Earth. Composed of as much speed as slowness, as much change as deep time, as much confidence as skepticism and doubt, modernity is a complex phenomenon that needs to be rethought. Stavrinaki focuses on this intrinsic tension through major artistic practices (Cézanne, Matisse, De Chirico, Ernst, Picasso, Dubuffet, Smithson, Morris, and contemporary artists such as Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Hirschhorn), philosophical discourses (Bataille, Blumenberg, and Jünger), and the human sciences. This groundbreaking book will attract readers interested in the intersections of art history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, mythology, geology, and archaeology.

Impressionism has always been one of the public’s favourite styles of art and Impressionist works continue to enchant beholders with their amazing play of colours and forms. This book offers a well-chosen selection of the most impressive works of artists such as Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley. Mega Square Impressionism pays tribute to the subject’s popularity.