Prettejohn E. Beauty and Art: 1750-2000

Oxford University Press, 2005. — 224 p. — (Oxford History of Art).What do we mean when we call a work of art `beautiful`? How have artists responded to changing notions of the beautiful? Which works of art have been called beautiful, and why? Fundamental and intriguing questions to artists and art lovers, but ones that are all too often ignored in discussions of art today. Prettejohn argues that we simply cannot afford to ignore these questions. Charting over two hundred years of western art, she illuminates the vital relationship between our changing notions of beauty and specific works of art, from the works of Kauffman to Whistler, Ingres to Rossetti, Cezanne to Jackson Pollock, and concludes with a challenging question for the future: why should we care about beauty in the twenty-first century?Eighteenth-century Germany: Winckelmann and Kant
Laocoön
Apollo Belvedere and Venus de’Medici
Winckelmann and contemporary art
Kant’s Critique of Judgement
Kant and art
Genius and originality
Nineteenth-century France: From Staël to Baudelaire
Aesthetics and art theory in France: Staël, Cousin, Quatremère
Ingres and Delacroix
Ingres, Gautier, and l’art pour l’art
Baudelaire and modern beauty
Victorian England: Ruskin, Swinburne, PaterRuskin, Venetian painting, and Rossetti
Swinburne, Pater, and art for art’s sake
The worship of the body
Form and content
Modernism: Fry and Greenberg
Discarding beauty
Fry’s formalism
From disinterest to ‘aesthetic emotion’
Clement Greenberg and American abstraction