Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History, hailed as 'one of the most engrossing and stimulating art history texts to come along for years' by The Times Higher Education Supplement, embraces many aspects of the so-called 'new' art history - attention to issues of class and gender, reception and spectatorship, racism and Eurocentrism, popular and élite culture - while at the same time recovering the remarkable vitality, salience and subversiveness of the era's best art. This new fourth edition includes four revised chapters together with a substantially expanded chapter on 'Photography, Modernity and Art'. With 245 illustrations now in colour, including over a dozen brand new images, this rich and diverse volume will interest students, specialists and anyone fascinated by this dynamic period.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

The political, industrial, and cultural revolutions that punctuated the 19th century were reflected in the fine arts, though not always consciously. Art was no longer the sole domain of the upper classes, and the complexity of the new social order became evident in the works of artists like Blake and Goya early in the century and Cassatt and Eakins later on. In this first comprehensive reconsideration of 19th-century art from the viewpoint of the ``new'' art history, Eisenman and four other art historians examine issues of class, gender, racism, and Eurocentrism as they pertain to North American and European art. This handsomely produced volume, rich in ideas and illustrations, complements the works of Albert Boime (e.g., The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century, Smithsonian, 1990). Of interest to scholars and art enthusiasts alike.-Daniel J. Lombardo, Jones Lib., Amherst, Mass. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Described as a "radical reconstruction" of 19th-century art history, this is a collection of essays that is somewhat predictable in its postmodern methodologies; thus, there are essays on a 19th-century female artist, 19th-century pictorializations of Native and African Americans, the myth of the avant-garde, and so on. Little attempt has been made to render language and writing style consistent, and some essays are inevitably more readable than others. However, the volume is both valuable and interesting on at least two fronts: in serving as an introduction to the new and varied lenses through which art is now seen, firmly embedded in historic moment and shaped by race, class, gender, and rhetoric; and in applying these approaches to works within the traditional canon of "great" 19th-century art and artists. In other words, the authors hold on firmly to the now-suspect notions that artistic genius exists, and that a part of art historical responsibility is "the discrimination of major from minor, primary from secondary." As such, the book has its feet in both camps, the old art history and the new. An excellent follow-up volume to a survey text like that by Robert Rosenblum and H.W. Janson (19th-century Art, CH, Jun'84) to introduce critical thinking and the work of several significant art historians. Upper-division undergraduate; graduate; faculty. D. J. Johnson; Providence College

Booklist Review

In Europe and America, the nineteenth century was an epoch of revolutions and radical social and political change, a ferment reflected in the visual arts. Traditional art history rarely explores the interplay between art and ideology in any depth, but that is exactly what this critical survey makes a point of doing. As Eisenman explains in his somewhat fussy introduction, this includes the study of "artistic representation of sexuality, social class, gender, and ethnicity." If these sound like contemporary concerns, that's because many parallels can be drawn between the turbulent present and this not so distant past, a convergence that ultimately illuminates both eras. Eisenman and his distinguished contributors--Thomas Crow, Brian Lukacher, Linda Nochlin, and Frances K. Pohl--consider the work of Ingres, Delacroix, Goya ("the archetypical artist of his age"), Blake, Courbet, van Gogh, Cassatt, Eakins, and C{{‚}}ezanne, and a host of other seminal figures in relationship to such concepts as patriotism, authoritarianism, idealization of antiquity and nature, mysticism, enlightenment, and romanticism. Many discussions consider the gap between the visions of avant-garde artists and the expectations of their audience, while one particularly useful section focuses on the representation of cultural encounters in America. (Reviewed May 1, 1994)0500236757Donna Seaman

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Linda Nochlin was born Linda Natalie Weinberg in Brooklyn, New York on January 30, 1931. She graduated from Vassar College in 1951 with a major in philosophy and a double minor in Greek and art history. She received a master's degree in 17th-century English literature at Columbia University and a doctorate at the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. She went on to teach at Vassar College, the Graduate Center in Manhattan, Stanford University, Williams College, Yale University, and New York University Institute of Fine Arts, where she taught from 1992 until retiring in 2013.

Nochlin was an art historian whose feminist approach permanently altered her field. She wrote several books including Realism, Gustave Courbet: A Study of Style and Society, and Misère: Representations of Misery in 19th-Century Art. She spent lots of time writing essays for magazines including The Art Bulletin, Art in America, and ARTnews. Her essay collections included The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth Century Art and Society; Women, Art and Power; and Representing Women. She also co-edited books including Woman as Sex Object: Studies in Erotic Art, 1730-1970 with Thomas B. Hess and The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity with Tamar Garb. She died from cancer on October 29, 2017 at the age of 86.

(Bowker Author Biography)