"This is a reconsideration of the origins of modern painting, sculpture and photography in Europe and North America. In the arenas of art and representation, the nineteenth century was a time of questioning, experimentation, discovery and modernization; artists challenged, as never before, prevailing definitions of art and the social order.".

"The revised and expanded edition of Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History embraces many aspects of the so-called 'new' art history - attention to issues of class and gender, reception and spectatorship, racism and Eurocentrism - while at the same time recovering the remarkable vitality, salience and subversiveness of the era's best art. Indeed, the authors insist that there is a profound sympathy between these new perspectives and the art under examination.

For it was nineteenth-century artists who first addressed the issues that preoccupy audiences and scholars today: the relation between popular and elite culture, the legacy of the Enlightenment, the question of the canon, and the representation of workers, women and non-whites."--BOOK JACKET.