Landscape Between Ideology and the Aesthetic: Marxist Essays on British Art and Art Theory, 1750-1850

by Andrew Hemingway

Overview

This collection brings together for the first time many of the influential Marxist art-historian Andrew Hemingway’s most important works on Romantic landscape painting. With a careful eye for both the ideological and aesthetic aspects of a wide range of pieces, Hemingway’s keen insights offer stunning new perspectives on some of the most important painters of the era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608468317
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	12/26/2017
Series:	Historical Materialism
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	520
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Andrew Hemingway is Emeritus Professor in History of Art at UniversityCollege London. His books include Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge UniversityPress, 1992) and The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting and Machine Age America (Periscope Publishing, 2013).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ... vii
Acknowledgements ... xi
Sources and Occasions ... xii

Introduction: Theoretical Apologia ... 1

Aesthetics and Ideology

1 The Science of Taste in the Eighteenth Century: Philosophical Criticism and the Scottish Historical School ... 41
2 Academic Theory versus Association Aesthetics: The Ideological Forms of a Conflict of Interests in the Early Nineteenth Century ... 86
3 Bourgeois Critiques of the Monopoly of Taste ... 114
4 Genius, Gender, and Progress: Benthamism and the Arts in the 1820s ... 150
5 Cultural Philanthropy and the Invention of the Norwich School ... 181

Landscape and Ideology

6 Meaning in Cotman’s Norfolk Subjects ... 217
7 Sheep as a Pictorial Motif: Pastoral and Counter-Pastoral ... 246
8 Artisanal Worldview in the Paintings of John Crome ... 297
9 John Crome’s ‘Local Scenery’: Iconography and the Ideology of the Picturesque ... 336
10 Constable and his Audience: An Argument for Iconography ... 387
11 The Field of Waterloo Exposed: Turner, Byron, and the Politics of Reaction ... 420

Coda: Regarding Art History ... 459
Bibliography ... 464
Index ... 492

Editorial Reviews

"This remarkable book on the complex, contradictory relations between aesthetics, politics and the art of landscape painting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the product of more than three decades' patient, perceptive thinking about their constellation. Its probing, historically nuanced interpretations of individual canvases and their ideological accretions are as elegant as they are rigorous; and its ongoing attempt to map the theoretical and political contours of Marxist theories of art and aesthetics, to which it represents a signal contribution itself, is commanding. Landscape between Ideology and the Aesthetic is a fascinating as well as fitting testament to Andrew Hemingway's influential career as an unapologetically Marxist art historian."

—Matthew Beaumont, author of Nightwalking

"Andrew Hemingway’s collection of essays on eighteenth-century aesthetics and Romantic landscape painting, written over many years, demonstrates vividly the contribution that Marxism has made to both subjects.”

—David Bindman

“This exceptionally fine study offers a nuanced and profound historical analysis of varieties of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British art. Wearing his learning lightly, Hemingway integrates the finest detail of close empirical research into an enjoyably readable narrative. He demonstrates conclusively how a critically-sophisticated Marxist approach opens up extraordinarily rewarding insights into a cultural history where the pictorial interplayed with the economic, literary, and political. He offers as outstanding an account of the ideas of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers as of the Norwich painters and along the way resoundingly demonstrates quite how much of actual value is to be had from the disciplined and multidisciplinary interrogation of historical art.”

—Michael Rosenthal

From the Publisher