THE ACADEMY AND THE AVANT-GARDE IN FRANCE The artists of the French Academy and the artists of the French avant-garde are often presented as being protagonists, but, in fact, each group defined itself in terms of the other. The French Academy was the bastion of the...
NEOCLASSICISM AND THE ANTIQUE The Rediscovery of the Past Classicism, since the Renaissance, had been the foundation of an expression of all that was superior and exhaled in the fine arts. Capable of morphing, the classicism of the Renaissance, of Raphael and...
The Industrial Revolution An English Invention For the artist of the modern period, the most essential problem was how to depict the modern: as a new style, as new content, as a new attitude? Each generation would find its own answer, only to have the next generation...
ROMANTICISM AND NATIONALISM Romanticism was a form of modern consciousness that was expressed as art style, as an attitude of individualism, as a political stance, and as a new way of being an artist. In the nineteenth century, modern nations were beginning to take...
Napoléon and the Birth of Modern France Napoléonic Art The small island of Corsica lies just below the Mediterranean coast of France but it was long under the sway of the Italian region. After the war with Genoa, the Treaty of Versailles of 1768 ceded the island of...
THE AESTHETICS OF ROMANTICISM Part One With the decline of religious commissions and with the end of aristocratic patronage, the modern artist was left dependent upon the State and the new art public. In the past, it had been sufficient to define “art” as...
