Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting

Hardback

Main Details

Title Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Bridget Alsdorf
Physical Properties
Format:Hardback
Pages:352
Dimensions(mm): Height 254,Width 178
Category/GenreArt and design styles - c 1800 to c 1900
Painting and paintings
ISBN/Barcode 9780691153674
ClassificationsDewey:759.409034
Audience
Tertiary Education (US: College)
Professional & Vocational
Illustrations 42 color illus. 122 halftones.

Publishing Details

Publisher Princeton University Press
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publication Date 9 December 2012
Publication Country United States

Description

Focusing on the art of Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904) and his colleagues Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Frederic Bazille, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Fellow Men argues for the importance of the group as a defining subject of nineteenth-century French painting. Through close readings of some of the most ambitious paintings of the realist and impressionist generation, Bridget Alsdorf offers new insights into how French painters understood the shifting boundaries of their social world, and reveals the fragile masculine bonds that made up the avant-garde. A dedicated realist who veered between extremes of sociability and hermetic isolation, Fantin-Latour painted group dynamics over the course of two decades, from 1864 to 1885. This was a period of dramatic change in French history and art--events like the Paris Commune and the rise and fall of impressionism raised serious doubts about the power of collectivism in art and life. Fantin-Latour's monumental group portraits, and related works by his friends and colleagues from the 1850s through the 1880s, represent varied visions of collective identity and test the limits of association as both a social and an artistic pursuit. By examining the bonds and frictions that animated their social circles, Fantin-Latour and his cohorts developed a new pictorial language for the modern group: one of fragmentation, exclusion, and willful withdrawal into interior space that nonetheless presented individuality as radically relational.

Author Biography

Bridget Alsdorf is an assistant professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.

Reviews

"[S]cholarly, exact, and closely argued ..."--Julian Barnes, London Review of Books "[Fellow Men] is a most meticulous and wide-ranging study."--Choice