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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Pre-Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show

Pre-Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show

Mancini, J. M.

Hardcover

19th Century United States HistoryAmerican Art - GeneralArt & Popular Culture

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0691118132
ISBN13: 9780691118130
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Mar 14 2005
Pages: 256
Weight: 1.77
Height: 0.74 Width: 8.20 Depth: 10.36
Language: English

Speaking of the emergence of modernism, author Virginia Woolf famously said: On or about December 1910, human character changed. But was the shift to modernism really so revolutionary? J. M. Mancini argues that it was not. She proposes that the origins of the movement can in fact be traced well into the nineteenth century.

Several cultural developments after the Civil War gradually set the stage for modernism, Mancini contends. New mass art media appeared on the scene, as did a national network of museums and groundbreaking initiatives in art education.These new institutions provided support for future modernists and models for the creators of the avant-garde. Simultaneously, art critics began to embrace abstraction after the Civil War, both for aesthetic reasons and to shore up their own nascent profession. Modernism was thus linked, Mancini argues, to the emergence of cultural hierarchy.

A work of impeccable scholarship and unusual breadth, the book challenges some of the basic ideas about both the origins of twentieth-century modernism and the character of Gilded-Age culture. It will appeal not only to art historians but also to scholars in American history and American studies.

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