Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Rachel Klein's compelling, beautifully written, and insightful study adds importantly to our understanding of the complex historical relationship between art, nation-building, and the rise of individual-oriented consumer culture in nineteenth-century America. A smart, nuanced work that is also highly engaging and readable,
Art Wars shows us that ideas of art and democracy have long been intertwined." * Alice Fahs, University of California, Irvine *
"
Art Wars provides a welcome addition to cultural and intellectual histories of New York in the nineteenth century by bringing together the history of antebellum art institutions like the American Art-Union and museums like the Metropolitan that came into being in the 1870s. Rachel Klein links these institutional stories to larger political and cultural transformations that accompanied the rise of industrial capitalism that so dramatically changed a city like New York.
Art Wars will be a very important addition to the history of art institutions and the historiography of taste in the United States as well as to the intellectual and cultural histories of cities in the nineteenth century." * Jeffrey Trask,
Things American: Art Museums and Civic Culture in the Progressive Era *
Table of ContentsIntroduction. The Importance of Taste: Intellectual Roots 1
Chapter 1. Paintings in Public Life: The Rise of the American Art-Union
Chapter 2. The Limits of Cultural Stewardship: The Fall of the American Art-Union
Chapter 3. Art and Industry: Debates of the 1850s
Chapter 4. The Art of Decoration and the Transformation of Stewardship: The Making of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Chapter 5. Metropolitan Museum on Trial: Antiquities, Expertise and the Problem of Race
Chapter 6. The Battle for Sundays at the Museum
Epilogue. Edith Wharton's Museum
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
