Critical Shift

Rereading Jarves, Cook, Stillman, and the Narratives of Nineteenth-Century American Art Karen Georgi

Publish Date: Expected 7/30/2013
Dimensions: 6 x 9
Page Count: 152 pages

Illustrations:

Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-06066-8

“Karen Georgi’s Critical Shift argues that the Civil War was less a disruptive dividing line between radically different artistic eras than a blip on an aesthetic continuum from the antebellum decades to the Gilded Age. To make the case, Georgi closely examines the influential writings of prominent art critics James Jackson Jarves, Clarence Cook, and William James Stillman and finds that the war had little or no impact on their ideas about what art should be and what role it should play in society. With its bold new challenge to the model of periodization that has shaped the history, and historiography, of nineteenth-century American art in the modern era, Critical Shift is a provocative contribution to the history of American art theory and criticism in the nineteenth century.” —Sarah Lea Burns, Indiana University

Guest Lecturer, University of Rome

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Rereading James Jackson Jarves’s Art-Idea

2 Clarence Cook and Jarves: Fact, Feeling, and the Discourse of Truthfulness in Art

3 A Further Look at Clarence Cook and the “Revolution” in Art

4 William J. Stillman’s Ruskinian Criticism: Metaphor and Essential Meaning

5 Art Discourse After Ruskin: Time and History in Art

Notes

Bibliography