Desire and Excess: The Nineteenth-century Culture of Art

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Princeton University Press, 20/08/2000 - 352 páginas

In this fascinating look at the creative power of institutions, Jonah Siegel explores the rise of the modern idea of the artist in the nineteenth century, a period that also witnessed the emergence of the museum and the professional critic. Treating these developments as interrelated, he analyzes both visual material and literary texts to portray a culture in which art came to be thought of in powerful new ways. Ultimately, Siegel shows that artistic controversies commonly associated with the self-consciously radical movements of modernism and postmodernism have their roots in a dynamic era unfairly characterized as staid, self-satisfied, and stable.

The nineteenth century has been called the Age of the Museum, and yet critics, art theorists, and poets during this period grappled with the question of whether the proliferation of museums might lead to the death of Art itself. Did the assembly and display of works of art help the viewer to understand them or did it numb the senses? How was the contemporary artist to respond to the vast storehouses of art from disparate nations and periods that came to proliferate in this era?

Siegel presents a lively discussion of the shock experienced by neoclassical artists troubled by remains of antiquity that were trivial or even obscene, as well as the anxious aesthetic reveries of nineteenth-century art lovers overwhelmed by the quantity of objects quickly crowding museums and exhibition halls. In so doing, he illuminates the fruitful crises provoked when the longing for admired art is suddenly satisfied. Drawing upon neoclassical art and theory, biographies of early nineteenth-century writers including Keats and Scott, and the writings of art critics such as Hazlitt, Ruskin, and Wilde, this book reproduces a cultural matrix that brings to life the artistic passions and anxieties of an entire era.

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Índice

David and Fuseli The Artist in the Museum the Museum in the Work of Art
17
The Oaths
18
Before Ruins
28
Monuments of Pure Antiquity The Challenge of the Object in Neoclassical Theory and Pedagogy
40
The Statue and the Penis
47
The Penis and the Statue
64
United Completer Knowledge Barry Blake and the Search for the Artist
73
Blake and the Work of Art
76
ABSENCE AND EXCESS THE PRESENCE OF THE OBJECT
165
Outline Collection City Hazlitt Ruskin and the Encounter with Art
167
Asking for the Old Pictures Hazlitts Dream of the Louvre
168
Art Treasure Exhibition
180
Hazlitt and Ruskin on Flaxman
189
Vast KnowledgeNarrow Space The Stones of Venice
197
The Natures of Gothic
209
THE DEATHS OF THE CRITICS
225

Stupendous Originals
80
THE AUTHOR AS WORK OF ART ACCUMULATION DISPLAY AND DEATH IN LITERARY BIOGRAPHY
91
Hazlitt Scott Lockhart Intimacy Anonymity and Excess
93
Hazlitt on Contemporary Life
102
The Life of Scott
113
Keats In the Library in the Museum
130
Accommodating Art
133
The Museum of the Mind
150
Modernity as Resurrection in Pater and Wilde
227
A Pomegranate Cut with a Knife of Ivory
251
Las Meninas as Cover Foucault Velazquez and the Reflection of the Museum
263
NOTES
279
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
337
INDEX
339
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Jonah Siegel has taught at Columbia and Harvard Universities. He is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University.

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