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University of California Press

Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France

Politics, Psychology, and Style
by Debora L. Silverman (Author)
Paperback eBook
Publication Date: Dec 2023
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: Omit Europe
Pages: 450
ISBN: 9780520913288
Series:
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About the Book

Winner, 1990 Berkshire Conference Book AwardArt Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style explores the shift in the locus of modernity from technological monument to private interior. It examines the political, economic, social, intellectual and artistic factors, specific to late 19th century France, that interacted in the development of art nouveau.


Winner, 1990 Berkshire Conference Book AwardArt Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style explores the shift in the locus of modernity from technological monument to private interior. It examines the political, economic, social, int

About the Author

Debora L. Silverman is Distinguished Professor and University of California Presidential Chair in Modern European History, Art and Culture at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Reviews

"Explores the highly complex patterns of political pressures, cultural and intellectual formations, and creative initiatives which underlie this period; it moves purposefully between medical and art history, via social or diplomatic or museum history, as the intricately interlocking arguments require."
— Times Literary Supplement
"Ever so rarely a book appears that is destined to establish new parameters for intellectual discourse as it challenges and dissects old views through its interpretations. Art Nouveau inFin-de-Siecle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style by Debora Silverman is such a work. . . . Undoubtedly, this superb volume will become an essential text on turn-of-the-century art and its social implications."
— Art Journal
"The sophisticated interdisciplinary nature of Silverman's work should make it of interest to political, social, intellectual, and feminist historians, not to mention art historians; but at the same time, it illustrates the very fluid boundaries separating these disciplines."
— Nineteenth Century Studies
"A rich, fascinating, and detailed study. . . . The work is a courageous foray, an attempt at real cultural history in a field too often given over to mere gasps of admiration with little intellectual effort."
— Art History
"An intricate and rich work. . . . In short, an absolute tour de force, a 'compleat' history of the sort historians are constantly talking about and rarely producing. . . . No reader who makes the effort will end up less than what the French call ebloui—blown away. 
— Milwaukee Journal
"Debora Silverman has produced a work of great originality, weaving the seemingly disparate strands of French Republican politics, the New Psychology, and the vanguard stule of the fin de siecle into a coherent but complex and multilayered intellectual tonality . . . Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siecle France represents the new cultural history at its invigorating and provocative best."—Linda Nochlin, Yale University

Awards

  • Berkshire Conference of Women Historians annual book award 1990, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians