The Public Art Museum In Nineteenth Century Britain

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The Public Art Museum in Nineteenth Century Britain

Author : Christopher Whitehead
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351883429
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (518 download)

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Book Synopsis The Public Art Museum in Nineteenth Century Britain by : Christopher Whitehead

Download or read book The Public Art Museum in Nineteenth Century Britain written by Christopher Whitehead and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the mid-nineteenth century a debate arose over the form and functions of the public art museum in Britain. Various occurrences caused new debates in Parliament and in the press about the purposes of the public museum which checked the relative complacency with which London's national collections had hitherto been run. This book examines these debates and their influence on the development of professionalism within the museum, trends in collecting and tendencies in museum architecture and decoration. In so doing it accounts for the general development of the London museums between 1850 and 1880, with particular reference to the National Gallery. This involves analysis of art display and its relations with art historiography, alongside institutional and architectural developments at the British Museum, the South Kensington Museum and the National Gallery. It is argued that the underpinning factor in all of these developments was a reformulation of the public museum's mission, which was in turn related to the electoral reform movement. In a potential situation of mass enfranchisement, the 'masses' should be well educated; the museum was openly identified as a useful institution in this sense. This consideration also influenced approaches to collecting and arranging artworks and to configuring their architectural setting within the museum, allowing for displays to be instructive in specific ways. Dissatisfaction with the British Museum and National Gallery buildings and their locations led to proposals to move the national collections, possibly merging and redefining them. Again the socio-political usefulness of the museum was key in determining where the national collections should be housed and in what form of building. This rich debate is analysed with full references to the various forums in and out of Parliament. Part one covers these issues in a thematic structure, examining all of the national collections, their interrelationships and their gradual development of discrete (yet sometimes arbitrary) museological territories. Part two focuses on the individual case of the National Gallery, observing how museological debate was brought to bear on the development of a specific institution. Every architectural development and redisplay is closely analysed in order to gauge the extent to which the products of debate were carried through into practice, and to comprehend the reasons why no museological grand project emerged in London.

The First Modern Museums of Art

Author : Carole Paul
Publisher : Getty Publications
ISBN 13 : 1606061208
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (6 download)

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Book Synopsis The First Modern Museums of Art by : Carole Paul

Download or read book The First Modern Museums of Art written by Carole Paul and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2012-11-16 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the first modern, public museums of art—civic, state, or national—appeared throughout Europe, setting a standard for the nature of such institutions that has made its influence felt to the present day. Although the emergence of these museums was an international development, their shared history has not been systematically explored until now. Taking up that project, this volume includes chapters on fifteen of the earliest and still major examples, from the Capitoline Museum in Rome, opened in 1734, to the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, opened in 1836. These essays consider a number of issues, such as the nature, display, and growth of the museums’ collections and the role of the institutions in educating the public. The introductory chapters by art historian Carole Paul, the volume’s editor, lay out the relationship among the various museums and discuss their evolution from private noble and royal collections to public institutions. In concert, the accounts of the individual museums give a comprehensive overview, providing a basis for understanding how the collective emergence of public art museums is indicative of the cultural, social, and political shifts that mark the transformation from the early-modern to the modern world. The fourteen distinguished contributors to the book include Robert G. W. Anderson, former director of the British Museum in London; Paula Findlen, Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University; Thomas Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute; and Andrew McClellan, dean of academic affairs and professor of art history at Tufts University. Show more Show less

Museums and the Construction of Disciplines

Author : Christopher Whitehead
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1472521420
Total Pages : 161 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (725 download)

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Book Synopsis Museums and the Construction of Disciplines by : Christopher Whitehead

Download or read book Museums and the Construction of Disciplines written by Christopher Whitehead and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-11-20 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Museums and museum politics were important elements in the development of the disciplines of Archaeology and Art History in nineteenth-century Britain. Here Christopher Whitehead explores some of the key debates and events which led to the conceptual differentiation and physical separation of 'archaeological' and 'artistic' material culture, looking especially at the ways in which objects and histories were contested within museum politics. For example, in the 1850s, the status of Egyptian antiquities as 'art' or 'archaeology' was keenly debated, and this related closely to questions about which kinds of museum should house them and the possible histories and epistemologies in which they might figure. This concise study serves as a basis for a discussion of the continued intellectual legacy of this for our understanding, management and presentation of the past in the museum and in curricula. It is argued that by understanding the politics and circumstances through which the two disciplines were delimited and distinguished from one another we may be able to glimpse, retrospectively, the possibility of alternative art histories and alternative archaeologies.

Art Wars

Author : Rachel N. Klein
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812251946
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis Art Wars by : Rachel N. Klein

Download or read book Art Wars written by Rachel N. Klein and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2020-07-17 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of three controversies that illuminate the changing cultural role of art exhibition in the nineteenth century From the antebellum era through the Gilded Age, New York City's leading art institutions were lightning rods for conflict. In the decades before the Civil War, art promoters believed that aesthetic taste could foster national unity and assuage urban conflicts; by the 1880s such hopes had faded, and the taste for art assumed more personal connotations associated with consumption and domestic decoration. Art Wars chronicles three protracted public battles that marked this transformation. The first battle began in 1849 and resulted in the downfall of the American Art-Union, the most popular and influential art institution in North America at mid-century. The second erupted in 1880 over the Metropolitan Museum's massive collection of Cypriot antiquities, which had been plundered and sold to its trustees by the man who became the museum's first paid director. The third escalated in the mid-1880s and forced the Metropolitan Museum to open its doors on Sunday—the only day when working people were able to attend. In chronicling these disputes, Rachel N. Klein considers cultural fissures that ran much deeper than the specific complaints that landed protagonists in court. New York's major nineteenth-century art institutions came under intense scrutiny not only because Americans invested them with moral and civic consequences but also because they were part and parcel of explosive processes associated with the rise of industrial capitalism. Elite New Yorkers spearheaded the creation of the Art-Union and the Metropolitan, but those institutions became enmeshed in popular struggles related to slavery, immigration, race, industrial production, and the rights of working people. Art Wars examines popular engagement with New York's art institutions and illuminates the changing cultural role of art exhibition over the course of the nineteenth century.

Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850-1914

Author : Kate Hill
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351946870
Total Pages : 303 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (519 download)

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Book Synopsis Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850-1914 by : Kate Hill

Download or read book Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850-1914 written by Kate Hill and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nineteenth century witnessed a flowering of museums in towns and cities across Britain. As well as providing a focus for collections of artifacts and a place of educational recreation, this work argues that municipal museums had a further, social role. In a situation of rapid urban growth, allied to social and cultural changes on a scale hitherto unknown, it was inevitable that traditional class and social hierarchies would come under enormous pressure. As a result, urban elites began to look to new methods of controlling and defining the urban environment. One such manifestation of this was the growth of the public museum. In earlier centuries museums were the preserve of learned and respectable minority, yet by the end of the nineteenth century one of the principal rationales of museums was the education, or 'improvement', of the working classes. In the control of museums too there was a corresponding shift away from private aristocratic leadership, toward a middle-class civic directorship and a growing professional body of curators. This work is in part a study of the creation of professional authority and autonomy by museum curators. More importantly though, it is about the stablization of middle-class identities by the end of the nineteenth century around new hierarchies of cultural capital. Public museums were an important factor in constructing the identity and authority of certain groups with access to, and control over, them. By examining urban identities through the cultural lens of the municipal museum, we are able to reconsider and better understand the subtleties of nineteenth-century urban society.

The Emergence of the Modern Museum

Author : Jonah Siegel
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 412 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis The Emergence of the Modern Museum by : Jonah Siegel

Download or read book The Emergence of the Modern Museum written by Jonah Siegel and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What should a museum contain or exclude? Who does a museum hope to attract? What, in fact, is the purpose of a museum? The change from private collection to public museum is a crucial cultural development of the nineteenth century, but one that is bound to raise fundamental questions. The Emergence of the Modern Museum, a unique compendium of original sources, presents a detailed and dynamic account of the development of the institution and its practices during that critical period of inception. From poignant recollections of visits to stately homes to charged debates about the acquisition of the Elgin Marbles or the establishment of an Indian Museum; from early catalogue entries describing the curiosities discovered by Captain Cook to later ones organizing human skulls according to Darwinian principles--this volume offers a representative sample of the diverse, contentious, and often moving ideas that have shaped the public museum from its earliest history. The Emergence of the Modern Museum makes available a wide range of material, including proposals for reform laid out in parliamentary papers, essays by influential theorists and curators, and accounts of the experience of museum-going in the popular press. With its original selections, thematic organization, and careful apparatus, this collection makes newly-accessible the cultural moment that defined the complex institution we know today.

Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Author : Lucy Hartley
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107184088
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain by : Lucy Hartley

Download or read book Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain written by Lucy Hartley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-03 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines nineteenth-century interests in beauty, and considers whether these aesthetic pursuits were necessary to British public life.

Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain

Author : Helen Rutherford
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 9780429318832
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (188 download)

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Book Synopsis Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain by : Helen Rutherford

Download or read book Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain written by Helen Rutherford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This edited collection offers multi-disciplinary reflections and analysis on a variety of themes centred on nineteenth century executions in the UK, many specifically related to the fundamental change in capital punishment culture as the execution moved from the public arena to behind the prison wall. By examining a period of dramatic change in punishment practice, this collection of essays provides a fresh historical perspective on nineteenth century execution culture, with a focus on Scotland, Wales and the regions of England. Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual has two parts. Part 1 addresses the criminal body and the witnessing of executions in the nineteenth century, including studies of the execution crowd and executioners' memoirs, as well as reflections on the experience of narratives around capital punishment in museums in the present day. Part 2 explores the treatment of the execution experience in the print media, from the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The collection draws together contributions from the fields of Heritage and Museum Studies; History; Law; Legal History and Literary Studies, to shed new light upon execution culture in nineteenth century Britain. The volume will be of interest to students and academics, in the fields of criminology; heritage and museum studies; history; law; legal history; medical humanities, and socio-legal studies"--

Art Collecting and Middle Class Culture from London to Brighton, 1840–1914

Author : David Adelman
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1040052169
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis Art Collecting and Middle Class Culture from London to Brighton, 1840–1914 by : David Adelman

Download or read book Art Collecting and Middle Class Culture from London to Brighton, 1840–1914 written by David Adelman and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-28 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the interplay between money, status, politics and art collecting in the public and private lives of members of the wealthy trading classes in Brighton during the period 1840–1914. Chapters focus on the collecting practices of five rich and upwardly mobile Victorians: William Coningham (1815–84), Henry Hill (1813–82), Henry Willett (1823–1905) and Harriet Trist (1816–96) and her husband John Hamilton Trist (1812–91). The book examines the relationship between the wealth of these would-be members of the Brighton bourgeoisie and the social and political meanings of their art collections paid for out of fortunes made from sugar, tailoring, beer and wine. It explores their luxury lifestyles and civic activities including the making of Brighton museum and art gallery, which reflected a paradoxical mix of patrician and liberal views, of aristocratic aspiration and radical rhetoric. It also highlights the centrality of the London art world to their collecting facilitated by the opening of the London to Brighton railway line in 1841. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, museum studies and British history.

Spaces of Connoisseurship

Author : Alison Clarke
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004518908
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (45 download)

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Book Synopsis Spaces of Connoisseurship by : Alison Clarke

Download or read book Spaces of Connoisseurship written by Alison Clarke and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-07-18 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spaces of Connoisseurship explores the ‘who’, ‘where’ and ‘how’ of judging Old Master paintings in the nineteenth-century British art trade, via a comparison of family art dealers Thomas Agnew & Sons (“Agnew’s) and London’s National Gallery.

Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science

Author : David N. Livingstone
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226487296
Total Pages : 538 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (264 download)

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Book Synopsis Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science by : David N. Livingstone

Download or read book Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science written by David N. Livingstone and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science, David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers gather essays that deftly navigate the spaces of science in this significant period and reveal how each is embedded in wider systems of meaning, authority, and identity. Chapters from a distinguished range of contributors explore the places of creation, the paths of knowledge transmission and reception, and the import of exchange networks at various scales. Studies range from the inspection of the places of London science, which show how different scientific sites operated different moral and epistemic economies, to the scrutiny of the ways in which the museum space of the Smithsonian Institution and the expansive space of the American West produced science and framed geographical understanding. This volume makes clear that the science of this era varied in its constitution and reputation in relation to place and personnel, in its nature by virtue of its different epistemic practices, in its audiences, and in the ways in which it was put to work.

The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary

Author : Matthew Rampley
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271089067
Total Pages : 301 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary by : Matthew Rampley

Download or read book The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary written by Matthew Rampley and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important critical study of the history of public art museums in Austria-Hungary explores their place in the wider history of European museums and collecting, their role as public institutions, and their involvement in the complex cultural politics of the Habsburg Empire. Focusing on institutions in Vienna, Cracow, Prague, Zagreb, and Budapest, The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary traces the evolution of museum culture over the long nineteenth century, from the 1784 installation of imperial art collections in the Belvedere Palace (as a gallery open to the public) to the dissolution of Austria-Hungary after the First World War. Drawing on source materials from across the empire, the authors reveal how the rise of museums and display was connected to growing tensions between the efforts of Viennese authorities to promote a cosmopolitan and multinational social, political, and cultural identity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rights of national groups and cultures to self-expression. They demonstrate the ways in which museum collecting policies, practices of display, and architecture engaged with these political agendas and how museums reflected and enabled shifting forms of civic identity, emerging forms of professional practice, the production of knowledge, and the changing composition of the public sphere. Original in its approach and sweeping in scope, this fascinating study of the museum age of Austria-Hungary will be welcomed by students and scholars interested in the cultural and art history of Central Europe.

The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857

Author : ElizabethA. Pergam
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 135154280X
Total Pages : 397 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (515 download)

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Book Synopsis The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 by : ElizabethA. Pergam

Download or read book The Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 written by ElizabethA. Pergam and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overdue study of a groundbreaking event, this is the first book-length examination of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857. Intended to rehabilitate Manchester's image at a heady time of economic prosperity, the Exhibition became a touchstone for aesthetic, social, and economic issues of the mid-nineteenth century. Reverberations of this moment can be followed to the present day in the discipline of art history and its practice in public museums of Europe and America. Highlighting the tension between art and commerce, philanthropy and profit, the book examines the Exhibition's organization and the presentation of the works of art in the purpose-built Art Treasures Palace. Pergam places the Exhibition in the context of contemporary debates about museum architecture and display. With an analysis of the reception of both "Ancient" and "Modern" paintings, the book questions the function of exhibitions in the construction of an art historical canon. The book also provides an essential reference tool: a compiled list of all of the paintings exhibited in 1857 that are now in public collections throughout the world, with an analysis of the collecting trends manifest in their provenance.

Governing Cultures

Author : Colin Trodd
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351750313
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (517 download)

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Book Synopsis Governing Cultures by : Colin Trodd

Download or read book Governing Cultures written by Colin Trodd and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2000. London in the nineteenth century saw the founding of the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Other, less permanent, organisations flourished, among them the British Institution, water-colour societies and the Society of Female Artists. These worked alongside the schools such as the Royal Academy and the Slade School of Art. In this volume, eleven scholars, experts on the individual institutions, analyse their complex histories to investigate such issues as: How did they generate and redesign their publics? What identities did they create? What practice of art making, connoisseurship and spectatorship did they enshrine? These reports elucidate the values associated with the key institutions and describe the responses and adaptation over time to major cultural developments: new movements, political change and the development of the Empire. The volume as a whole offers a fascinating account of the interconnections between these key institutions. Challenging conventional readings of the subject, the Introduction, by Paul Barlow and Colin Trodd, offers a definition of public art during the Victorian period.

The Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake

Author : Julie Sheldon
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
ISBN 13 : 1789624215
Total Pages : 672 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (896 download)

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Book Synopsis The Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake by : Julie Sheldon

Download or read book The Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake written by Julie Sheldon and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. 2009 was the bicentenary of the birth of the English writer, translator, critic and amateur artist Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake (1809-1893). Bringing together a comprehensive collection of her surviving correspondence, the Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake reveals significant new material about this extraordinary figure in Victorian society. The scope of Lady Eastlake’s writing is wide and interdisciplinary, which recommends her as a significant figure in Victorian culture, giving rise to revelations about the ways in which different cultural activities were linked. Lady Eastlake lived for extended periods of time abroad in Germany and Estonia, and wrote an early work about her impressions of the Baltic, her subsequent writing took the form of reviews for the periodical press, including reviews of Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, Ruskin, Coleridge, and Madame de Stael. She also wrote on women’s subjects, including articles on the education of women. However, the great proportions of her publications are art-related reviews: she wrote one of earliest critical texts on photography and produced several essays on artists. The lively correspondence of Lady Eastlake not only contributes to a more holistic understanding of nineteenth-century culture, it also shows how a well connected woman could play an important role in the Victorian art world.

Science Museums in Transition

Author : Carin Berkowitz
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN 13 : 0822982757
Total Pages : 349 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (229 download)

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Book Synopsis Science Museums in Transition by : Carin Berkowitz

Download or read book Science Museums in Transition written by Carin Berkowitz and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2017-07-19 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic shift in the display and dissemination of natural knowledge across Britain and America, from private collections of miscellaneous artifacts and objects to public exhibitions and state-sponsored museums. The science museum as we know it—an institution of expert knowledge built to inform a lay public—was still very much in formation during this dynamic period. Science Museums in Transition provides a nuanced, comparative study of the diverse places and spaces in which science was displayed at a time when science and spectacle were still deeply intertwined; when leading naturalists, curators, and popular showmen were debating both how to display their knowledge and how and whether they should profit from scientific work; and when ideals of nationalism, class politics, and democracy were permeating the museum's walls. Contributors examine a constellation of people, spaces, display practices, experiences, and politics that worked not only to define the museum, but to shape public science and scientific knowledge. Taken together, the chapters in this volume span the Atlantic, exploring private and public museums, short and long-term exhibitions, and museums built for entertainment, education, and research, and in turn raise a host of important questions, about expertise, and about who speaks for nature and for history.

The Victorian Art School

Author : Ranald Lawrence
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 100016960X
Total Pages : 187 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis The Victorian Art School by : Ranald Lawrence

Download or read book The Victorian Art School written by Ranald Lawrence and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-02 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Victorian Art School documents the history of the art school in the nineteenth century, from its origins in South Kensington to its proliferation through the major industrial centres of Britain. Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art, together with earlier examples in Manchester and Birmingham demonstrate an unprecedented concern for the provision of plentiful light and air amidst the pollution of the Victorian city. As theories of design education and local governance converged, they also reveal the struggle of the provincial city for cultural independence from the capital. Examining innovations in the use of new technologies and approaches in the design of these buildings, The Victorian Art School offers a unique and explicitly environmental reading of the Victorian city. It examines how art schools complemented civic ‘Improvement’ programmes, their contribution to the evolution of art pedagogy, the tensions that arose between the provincial schools and the capital, and the role they would play in reimagining the relationship between art and public life in a rapidly transforming society. The architects of these buildings synthesised the potential of art with the perfection of the internal environment, indelibly shaping the future cultural life of Britain.