Ingres Then, and Now (Re Visions: Critical Studies in the History and Theory of Art)

"Ingres Then, and Now is an innovative study of one of the best-known French artists of the nineteenth century, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Adrian Rifkin re-evaluates Ingres' work in the context of a variety of literary, musical and visual cultures which are normally seen as alien to him. Reviewing Ingres' paintings as a series of fragmentary symptoms of the commodity cultures of nineteenth-century Paris, Adrian Rifkin draws the artist away from his familiar association with the Academy and the Salon. This book transforms the popular image we have of Ingres. It argues that the figure of the artist is fixed in neither time nor place - there is neither an essential man named Ingres, nor a singular body of his work - but is an effect of many complex and overlapping historical processes."--Jacket.