“Realism in the Age of Impressionism represents a major intervention in understandings of late nineteenth-century art, making newly apparent the significance of the late realist or naturalist work. . . a compelling account.”—Alex Potts, H-France Review
Won an honorable mention for the 2016 Robert Motherwell Book Award given by the Dedalus Foundation.
“Young’s total saturation in, and mastery of, the extremely rich body of contemporary art criticism enables him to recreate, to a remarkable degree, the reception of his chosen paintings by the most informed and sophisticated viewers of the time. The richness of 19th-century French art criticism is a gift to the historian, but only a handful of scholars have made the most of it; T. J. Clark, Martha Ward, Marc Gotlieb, and Stephen Bann come at once to mind, and Young in this book joins their rather exclusive club.”—Michael Fried, Johns Hopkins University
“What emerges is a very unusual bringing together of what is usually dealt with separately, by those dedicated to different methodological frameworks: a Marxist-inspired social history of art as exemplified in the work of T.J. Clark, versus a Friedian phenomenology of “absorption and theatricality,” and their different ways of combining an address to both form and content, facture and iconography. Thus Marnin Young’s text manages to nuance and complicate very usefully all the existing narratives of this period of ‘avant-garde’ art as well as the standard divisions in art historical methodology associated with it.”—Carol Armstrong, Yale University
“Young’s total saturation in, and mastery of, the extremely rich body of contemporary art criticism enables him to recreate, to a remarkable degree, the reception of his chosen paintings by the most informed and sophisticated viewers of the time. The richness of 19th-century French art criticism is a gift to the historian, but only a handful of scholars have made the most of it; T. J. Clark, Martha Ward, Marc Gotlieb, and Stephen Bann come at once to mind, and Young in this book joins their rather exclusive club.”—Michael Fried, Johns Hopkins University
~Michael Fried
“What emerges is a very unusual bringing together of what is usually dealt with separately, by those dedicated to different methodological frameworks: a Marxist-inspired social history of art as exemplified in the work of T.J. Clark, versus a Friedian phenomenology of “absorption and theatricality,” and their different ways of combining an address to both form and content, facture and iconography. Thus Marnin Young’s text manages to nuance and complicate very usefully all the existing narratives of this period of ‘avant-garde’ art as well as the standard divisions in art historical methodology associated with it.”—Carol Armstrong, Yale University
~Carol Armstrong
Won an honorable mention for the 2016 Robert Motherwell Book Award given by the Dedalus Foundation.
~Robert Motherwell Book Award, Dedalus Foundation
“Amid the endless stream of images that come our way as part of the twenty-first-century visual economy, Young’s book provides a lesson in the value of slow looking.” —Andrea Korda, RACAR: revue d'art canadienne
~Andrea Korda, RACAR: revue d'art canadienne