Realism in the Age of Impressionism

“Through its impressive command of the corpus of late nineteenth-century art criticism and its convincing articulation of the importance of temporality as an analytical and historical category, Realism in the Age of Impressionism is . . . an important contribution to nineteenth-century French art history.”—Samuel Raybone, Art History

“Young brings to bear a remarkable knowledge of the contemporary critical literature. . . . [The book's chapters] introduce a young scholar of rare penetration.”—Christopher Riopelle, Art Newspaper

“A fantastic book.”—Mary Hunter, CAA Reviews

“[Young’s] readers are always thought provoking; like the book as a whole, they challenge readers to look at art as complex historical evidence and in so doing to reconfigure our understandings of historical duration and the politics of time.”—Daniel Sherman, Journal of Modern History

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