The End of the Salon
Art and the State in the Early Third Republic

A 1993 study of the demise of the most important exhibition centre for art in Europe and America.

Patricia Mainardi (Author)

9780521469210, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 30 September 1994

226 pages
25.4 x 17.8 x 1.2 cm, 0.4 kg

The End of the Salon examines the cultural forces that contributed to the demise of the most important exhibition centre for art in Europe and America in the late nineteenth century. Tracing the history of the salon from the French Revolution, when it was taken away from the Academy and opened to all artists, to the 1880s, Patricia Mainardi shows that its contradictory purposes, as didactic exhibition venue and art market place, resulted in its collapse. She also situates the salon within the shifting currents of art movements, from modern to traditional, and the evolving politics of the Third Republic, when France definitively chose a republican over a monarchic form of government. The book, which was originally published in 1993, demonstrates how all artists were forced to function within the framework of the social, economic and cultural changes then taking place and how art and social history are inextricably linked.

Introduction
1. Pictures to see and pictures to sell
2. Moral order in the fine arts: 1870–1878
3. Turbulance in the salon system, 1878–1882
4. Aesthetic painting
5. Consolidation and collapse
6. The republic of the arts
7. The third republic arts administration
Notes
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], European history [HBJD], History of art & design styles: c 1800 to c 1900 [ACV]