Ingres
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Painting Reimagined
Susan L. Siegfried
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Format: ClothPrice: $75.00
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) produced a body of work that strongly appealed to his contemporaries while disconcerting them. Even today, the odd qualities of his work continue to fascinate scholars, critics, and artists.
In this handsomely illustrated and elegantly written book, Susan L. Siegfried argues that the strangeness associated with Ingres’s paintings needs to be located in the complex and richly invested nature of the work itself, as well as in the artist’s very powerful—if often perverse—sense of artistic project. She shows that his major re-thinking of pictorial narrative – in his classical literary, historical, and religious subjects – was as central to his achievement as his distinctive rendering of the female figure in classical nudes and portraits. He was engaged in a complex process of giving visual form to narrative, which he did in new and unusual ways that involved him in a close reading of the texts on which he drew, including authors such as Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, and Dante, as well as religious narratives and stories about medieval and early modern French history.
Susan L. Siegfried is Professor of Art History and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly: Modern Life in Napoleonic France, co-author of Staging Empire: Napoleon, Ingres, and David , and co-editor of Fingering Ingres.
‘Dozens of stimulating observations, ideas and interpretations or narrative, colour, borrowing and subsidiary objects are hidden in her text.’ — Brian Sewell, Evening Standard
‘This long-awaited study, full of illuminations, is the work of a mature scholar at the height of her powers, who continues to delight in the intellectual and aesthetic challenges the wily old Master of Montauban so cunningly prepared for us 200 years ago.’ — Christopher Riopelle, The Art Newspaper
Publication Date: November 10, 2009
100 b/w + 40 color illus.
