Thomas E. Crow
Thomas E. Crow is Rosalie Solow Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
Crow, Thomas E.
Crow, Thomas E.
Crow@test.com
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Description: Emulation: David, Drouais, and Girodet in the Art of Revolutionary France
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00330
This fascinating and important book puts the life of artists at the center of innovative art history, narrating a biography of five painters at the heart of events in Revolutionary France: Jacques-Louis David and his extraordinarily precocious students Drouais, Girodet, Gérard, and Gros. Their shared ambition was to build an alternative, exalted life in art, one committed to rigorous classical erudition while suffused with the emotional depth of familiar bonds. In this experiment of enlightened teaching, the roles of master and pupil were frequently reversed.

Distinguished scholar Thomas Crow tells how the personal histories and aesthetic choices of these artists were played out within the larger arena in which a whole social order was being overturned, a king embodying all patriarchal authority was put to death, and a republic of equal male brotherhood was proclaimed.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date June 2006 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300117394
EISBN 9780300272390
Illustrations 204
Print Status out of print
Description: Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00329
It was at the free, open Salon exhibitions of the French Academy that artists were first consistently confronted by a "public"—a large and broadly based audience encouraged to look on works of art in an attitude of aesthetic contemplation. This book discusses the growth of public opinion about the arts in eighteenth-century France and the reciprocal effect of that opinion on official institutions and differing styles of painting.

As he analyzed the history of the Salon under the Old Regime, Crow discovers that it encompassed a complex process in which a number of groups of very different social character and political outlook sought to enlist painting as an expressive vehicle for their various agendas. Even the art of Watteau—seemingly so private in character—was decisively informed by new urban forms of artistic culture. The most important artists of the later eighteenth century—Greuze and David—were initially useful to the state in their common ability to grasp official priorities and embody them in a narrative art that was accessible to a broad public audience. But both artists, stimulated by the vigorous, new interest being shown in the Salons by Painters and public alike, also broke new ground with works that announced the advent of modernism.

Tracing the patterns and interplays between the ambitions of the artist and the wishes and tastes of the authorities, collectors, and crowds of salon visitors, Crow makes a fascinating and highly original contribution to art history.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date February 1985 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300033540
EISBN 9780300272376
Illustrations 125
Print Status out of print