Using the tools of the "new" art history (feminism, Marxism, social context, etc.) An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art offers a richly textured, yet clear and logical, introduction to nineteenth-century art and culture. This textbook will provide readers with a basic historical framework of the period and the critical tools for interpreting and situating new and unfamiliar works of art. Michelle Facos goes beyond existing histories of nineteenth-century art, which often focus solely on France, Britain, and the United States, to incorporate artists and artworks from Scandinavia, Germany, and Eastern Europe. The book expertly balances its coverage of trends and individual artworks: where the salient trends are clear, trend-setting works are highlighted, and the complexity of the period is respected by situating all works in their proper social and historical context. In this way, the student reader achieves a more nuanced understanding of the way in which the story of nineteenth-century art is the story of the ways in which artists and society grappled with the problem of modernity. Key pedagogical features include: <ul>
<li>Data boxes provide statistics, timelines, charts, and historical information about the period to further situate artworks.</li> <li>Text boxes highlight extracts from original sources, citing the ideas of artists and their contemporaries, including historians, philosophers, critics, and theorists, to place artists and works in the broader context of aesthetic, cultural, intellectual, social, and political conditions in which artists were working.</li> <li>Beautifully illustrated with over 250 color images.</li> <li>Margin notes and glossary definitions.</li> <li>Online resources at www.routledge.com/textbooks/facos with access to a wealth of information, including original documents pertaining to artworks discussed in the textbook, contemporary criticism, timelines and maps to enrich your understanding of the period and allow for further comparison and exploration.</li> </ul> Chapters take a thematic approach combined within an overarching chronology and more detailed discussions of individual works are always put in the context of the broader social picture, thus providing students with a sense of art history as a controversial and alive arena of study. Michelle Facos teaches art history at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research explores the changing relationship between artists and society since the Enlightenment and issues of identity. Prior publications include Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination: Swedish Painting of the 1890s (1998), Art, Culture and National Identity in Fin-de-Siècle Europe, co-edited with Sharon Hirsh (2003), and Symbolist Art in Context (2009).

An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art

Arts & Photography

Facos, Michelle

History & Criticism

Routledge

This richly illustrated book is a lucid introduction to a largely neglected manifestation of Modernism that came out of fin-de-siècle Sweden. Michelle Facos presents the first study in English to seriously examine the movement known as Swedish National Romanticism. Her work is especially valuable in showing how the movement's primitivist tendencies were related to, but different from, similar cultural forces in Germany and other parts of Europe at that time. Facos shows how a small group of Swedish artists espoused a politically progressive, culturally conservative form of nationalism. These artists―among them Carl Larsson, Bruno Liljefors, and Hanna Hirsch Pauli―produced a specifically national Swedish art by focusing on indigenous history, legends, and folk tales as well as uniquely Swedish-Nordic values, geography, and ethnography. Their breathtaking images of the Nordic landscape shaped a communal "Folk" identity that accented regionalism, solidarity, and attachment to the past and protested against the perceived dangers of capitalist industrialism and urban expansion. By 1900 Sweden was on its way to realizing a society of social, economic, and political equality, and the National Romantic painters were no longer renegades. Facos's portrayal of their movement will attract readers in the arts, historians, folklorists, cultural anthropologists, and sociologists.

Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination: Swedish Art of the 1890s

University of California Press

Symbolist Art in Context

The Symbolist art movement of the late nineteenth century forms an important bridge between Impressionism and Modernism. But because Symbolism, more than the two movements it links, emphasizes ideas over objects and events, it has suffered from vague and conflicting definitions. In Symbolist Art in Context, Michelle Facos offers a clearly written, comprehensive, and accessible description of this challenging subject. Reaching back into Romanticism for Symbolism's origins, Facos argues that Symbolism enabled artists (including Munch and Gauguin) to confront an increasingly uncertain and complex world—one to which pessimists responded with themes of decadence and degeneration and optimists with idealism and reform.

The Symbolist art movement of the late nineteenth century forms an important bridge between Impressionism and Modernism. But because Symbolism, more than the two movements it links, emphasizes ideas over objects and events, it has suffered from vague and conflicting definitions. In Symbolist Art in Context, Michelle Facos offers a clearly written, comprehensive, and accessible description of this challenging subject. Reaching back into Romanticism for Symbolism's origins, Facos argues that Symbolism enabled artists (including Munch and Gauguin) to confront an increasingly uncertain and complex world―one to which pessimists responded with themes of decadence and degeneration and optimists with idealism and reform.

Urged on by a powerful ideological and political movement, George W. Bush committed the United States to a quest for empire. American values and principles were universal, he asserted, and should guide the transformation of the world. Claes Ryn sees this drive for virtuous empire as the triumph of forces that in the last several decades acquired decisive influence in both the American parties, the foreign policy establishment, and the media. Public intellectuals like William Bennett, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Michael Novak, Richard Perle, and Norman Podhoretz argued that the United States was an exceptional nation and should bring "democracy," "freedom," and "capitalism" to countries not yet enjoying them. Ryn finds the ideology of American empire strongly reminiscent of the French Jacobinism of the eighteenth century. He describes the drive for armed world hegemony as part of a larger ideological whole that both expresses and aggravates a crisis of democracy and, more generally, of American and Western civilization. America the Virtuous sees the new Jacobinism as symptomatic of America shedding an older sense of the need for restraints on power. Checks provided by the US Constitution have been greatly weakened with the erosion of traditional moral and other culture.

America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire

Literature & Fiction

Ryn, Claes G.

Humor & Satire

Book by Ambrosini, Lynne, Facos, Michelle

Rodin: The Cantor Gift to the Brooklyn Museum

Ambrosini, Lynne

Individual Artists

Brooklyn Museum Bookshop

The Symbolist Roots of Modern Art

With the words ’A new manifestation of art was ... expected, necessary, inevitable,’ Jean Moréas announced the advent of the Symbolist movement in 1886. When Symbolist artists began experimenting in order to invent new visual languages appropriate for representing modern life in all its complexity, they set the stage for innovation in twentieth-century art. Rejecting what they perceived as the superficial descriptive quality of Impressionism, Naturalism, and Realism, Symbolist artists delved beneath the surface to express feelings, ideas, scientific processes, and universal truths. By privileging intangible concepts over perceived realities and by asserting their creative autonomy, Symbolist artists broke with the past and paved the way for the heterogeneity and penchant for risk-taking that characterizes modern art. The essays collected here, which consider artists from France to Russia and Finland to Greece, argue persuasively that Symbolist approaches to content, form, and subject helped to shape twentieth-century Modernism. Well-known figures such as Kandinsky, Khnopff, Matisse, and Munch are considered alongside lesser-known artists such as Fini, Gyzis, Koen, and Vrubel in order to demonstrate that Symbolist art did not constitute an isolated moment of wild experimentation, but rather an inspirational point of departure for twentieth-century developments.

Mednick, Thor J.

Reference

America the Virtuous

History

Americas

With the words ’A new manifestation of art was ... expected, necessary, inevitable,’ Jean Moréas announced the advent of the Symbolist movement in 1886. When Symbolist artists began experimenting in order to invent new visual languages appropriate for representing modern life in all its complexity, they set the stage for innovation in twentieth-century art. Rejecting what they perceived as the superficial descriptive quality of Impressionism, Naturalism, and Realism, Symbolist artists delved beneath the surface to express feelings, ideas, scientific processes, and universal truths. By privileging intangible concepts over perceived realities and by asserting their creative autonomy, Symbolist artists broke with the past and paved the way for the heterogeneity and penchant for risk-taking that characterizes modern art. The essays collected here, which consider artists from France to Russia and Finland to Greece, argue persuasively that Symbolist approaches to content, form, and subject helped to shape twentieth-century Modernism. Well-known figures such as Kandinsky, Khnopff, Matisse, and Munch are considered alongside lesser-known artists such as Fini, Gyzis, Koen, and Vrubel in order to demonstrate that Symbolist art did not constitute an isolated moment of wild experimentation, but rather an inspirational point of departure for twentieth-century developments.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Facos, Michelle. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Facos, Michelle

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Facos, Michelle. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art

An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art

Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination: Swedish Art of the 1890s

Symbolist Art in Context

Symbolist Art in Context

America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire

Rodin: The Cantor Gift to the Brooklyn Museum

The Symbolist Roots of Modern Art

America the Virtuous

The Symbolist Roots of Modern Art