Description
Between 1830 and 1910, more than 3,000 artists left the established centers of art production for communities in the European countryside; a substantial proportion of all artists practicing in Europe and North America spent at least one season at a colony. Lnbbren (Anglia Polytechnic U., UK) provides a comparative analysis of the colonies, which were a fixture in contemporary critical discourse and in many cases popular tourist attractions. While other historians have focused on the urban avant-garde, Lnbbren finds that "the rural communities hatched some of the most exciting innovations of late 19th-century painting and interacted with the concerns of the canonical modernists in unexpected ways." Printed on coated stock with 60 b&w illustrations and eight color plates. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Read More
Why did thousands of nineteenth-century artists leave the established urban centers of culture to live and work in the countryside? By 1900, there were over eighty rural artists’ communities across northern and central Europe. This is the first book to offer a critical analysis of this important phenomenon on a Europe-wide basis. Nina Lübbren combines close visual readings of little-known paintings with an innovative multidisciplinary approach, drawing on sociology, geography, and theories of tourism.Rural artists’ colonies have been unjustly neglected by an art history preoccupied with the urban avant-garde. Yet these communities hatched some of the most exciting innovations of late nineteenth-century painting. Moreover, the practices and images of rural artists articulated central concerns of urban middle-class audiences, in particular the yearning for a nostalgia-imbued life that was considered authentic, premodern, and immersed in nature. Paradoxically, it was precisely this perception that placed artists’ colonies firmly within modernity, mainly through their contribution to an emergent mass tourism.
Read Less