The premise of Anna Green's timely and original book, is that nineteenth-century representations of childhood and adolescence-in paintings, but also in other forms of visual culture and in diverse written discourses of the period-are critical for understanding modernity. Whilst such well-worn signifiers for modernity as the city, the dandy and the prostitute have been well mined, childhood and adolescence have not. Paintings of the young produced in France from 1848 to 1886, Green contends, inform not only our understanding of modern life but also our perception of modernist or avant-garde painting. Figuring largely are Manet and the Impressionists, as well as a gamut of more traditional painters of children who are crucial in providing context for the avant garde. Because modernity is an essentially urban phenomenon, Green's focus is primarily on the city, usually Parisian, child. The painted youth of her study are organized initially by class and gender. Then the chapters are structured according to themes (parent-child relations, modes of discipline, work, education, and play, the spectacle, sexuality) that straddle the congruences among the book's triple trajectory: the young, their modernist representations, and the experience of modernity. Green's interdisciplinary approach ensures that this book will be of interest not only to art historians but to all those concerned with the cultural and social history of childhood.

About the Author
Anna Green is Lecturer in Art History at the University of East Anglia, and at Department of Art History, Norwich University College of the Arts, UK

Reviews

'Green deals systematically with the emerging categories of childhood and youth, examined according to variables of gender and class. Never content with easy cultural and art historical cliches, she shows throughout a refreshing penchant for turning the tables and complicating expected revisionist readings. Her intelligent, original, and well-written and researched book makes an extremely important contribution to our field.' Norma Broude, American University

'Starting with the bold and convincingly argued thesis that childhood was as critical a sign of modernity as other better known tropes, Anna Green moves skillfully between images and texts. Her book is conceptually sophisticated and deeply researched, both in terms of contemporary theoretical writings and historical material'. Susan Sidlauskas, Rutgers University, USA

'... [a] rigorous, provocative study... Throughout French Paintings of Childhood and Adolescence, Green clearly demonstrates that although later nineteenth-century Paris has been heavily mapped and minutely charted by art historians, the city and the period have had their areas of scholarly neglect. While adding to the interpretations of works by familiar painters such as Manet and Renoir, she also brings forward the works of countless lesser-knowns. In doing so, she avoids an art history that cleaves artists into modernist or reactionary figures, and the breadth of her approach is such that the boundaries between the two groups often lose clear-cut demarcation. In some cases, works by canonical modernists prove to have their reactionary elements, while images by dust-bin reactionaries prove to be informed by modernist attitudes. This is yet one more aspect of Green's study that makes it such a valuable read.' Caa.Reviews

Book Information
ISBN 9781138275768
Author Anna Green
Format Paperback
Page Count 342
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 453g