Art, Power and Modernity: English Art Institutions, 1750-1950

How did the rise of metropolitan art institutions influence modernism and the modernisation of art in England? This volume explores the artist as creator, notions of class and taste, and the power of institutions to affect creativity and artistic expression. Topics discussed include the radicalism of engravers and how their claim to be artists is an important and negkected aspect of the nineteenth-century art world; and how the aesthetic dispute over the Chantrey Bequest epitomized conflicts of taste, cultural independence, and interdependence between opposed art institutions and the Treasury.

Gordon Fyfe is lecturer in sociology at the University of Keele.

1. Introduction: artists and institutions

2: Fugitive authorship: William Ivins and the reproduction of art

3: Art exhibitions and power during the nineteenth century

4: Auditing the RA: official dsicourse and the nineteenth ceintury Royal Academy

5: Art and reproduction: some aspects of the relations between painters and engravers in London, 1760 to 1850

6: Art classification and rituals of power: the resurgence of etching

7: A Trojan horse at the Tate: the Chantrey episode

8: Towards and historical typology of art museums

Bibliography

Index