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Critical Exchange: Art Criticism in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Russia and Western Europe

This book is the developed research outcome of a conference on ‘Art Criticism in Europe and Russia’ (University of Exeter: 2003) and an international AHRC-funded network on ‘Russian Visual Arts and Art Criticism’. The resultant book, published in the internationally-excellent, peer-review series CISRA, comprises seventeen articles by world-leading scholars of art criticism, art writing and exhibitions histories, theories and contexts. Including an authors’ Introduction, substantial chronology of art-critical writings from Antiquity to the early 20th century (Adlam and Simpson), it is among the first such study to examine art criticism’s major contributions to emerging cosmopolitan contexts of encounter in art and its reception from the long eighteenth century, through extended, trans-national geopolitical, cultural and globalizing frameworks of art writing and debate. Critical Exchange has been peer-reviewed as ‘outstanding’, a ‘template for future scholars’ by ‘two of the leading international authorities on art criticism’ (Barrie Bullen, Emeritus Professor of English and Visual Culture, University of Reading) as well as ‘adventurous and ground-breaking’ in its ‘European-Russian polarities’ (Richard Thomson, Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art, University of Edinburgh). Spanning the ‘origins’ of art-critical discourse in late 18th-century France; expanded public art spheres; new viewing practices for sculpture by torchlight visits; Russian appropriations of French art and criticism; the science of Antiquity in transforming 19th-century museum displays; the cultural and economic capital of the ‘art critic’ (Simpson); problems and practices of ‘creative’ criticism, Critical Exchange makes two significant contributions to art and art reception studies. First, it sheds new light on the centrality of art criticism in fuelling expanding trans-cultural exchanges in object, print and exhibitions to develop discourses of modernity in the period 1780-1914. Second, it demonstrates compelling ways in which art-critical debate crossed national contexts of making and reception to communicate new trans-European political and cultural identities in the long nineteenth-century.