A Visitable Past

Fülszöveg

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A Visitable Past
views of venice by american artists 1860-1915
Margaretta M. Lovell
In this ambitious and imaginative study, Margaretta M. Lovell analyzes the large body of accomplished, sometimes startling, often brilliant work of American artists drawn to Venice's ragged splendor in the last century. Including major works by such diverse and talented painters as James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and Maurice Prendergast, these richly varied paintings portray sleepy canals, architectural monuments, and scenes of picturesque everyday life while they also reveal surprising aspects of American culture.
A city seemingly untouched by the modern age, Venice afforded her visitors the rare sense of walking into an historic as well as an exotic and elegant tableau. This study sets out to understand the ways in which nineteenth-century Americans responded to their own belatedness when faced directly with this palpable (or to use Henry James's... Tovább

Fülszöveg

''if
.'lí I M

i' il
• ,
A Visitable Past
views of venice by american artists 1860-1915
Margaretta M. Lovell
In this ambitious and imaginative study, Margaretta M. Lovell analyzes the large body of accomplished, sometimes startling, often brilliant work of American artists drawn to Venice's ragged splendor in the last century. Including major works by such diverse and talented painters as James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, and Maurice Prendergast, these richly varied paintings portray sleepy canals, architectural monuments, and scenes of picturesque everyday life while they also reveal surprising aspects of American culture.
A city seemingly untouched by the modern age, Venice afforded her visitors the rare sense of walking into an historic as well as an exotic and elegant tableau. This study sets out to understand the ways in which nineteenth-century Americans responded to their own belatedness when faced directly with this palpable (or to use Henry James's phrase, visitable) past, lb do so, Lovell focuses with intensity and insight on the artist's manipulation of point of view and, borrowing freely from the techniques of literary criticism, constructs a new model of image-reading based on the posture and persona with which the artist endows simultaneously his viewers and his subject.
Lovell's work presents a compelling argument for the importance of Venice—and the anxiety-fraught political, economic, and social "case" it was thought to represent—to Americans in the brief period between the Civil War and World War I. In addition, A Visitable Past investigates the strategies that artists deploy to construct meaning in their interpretive fictions when faced with a critical (and potentially overwhelming) conundrum concerning personal and cultural history
(Continued on back flap)
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