Review
'Mainardi's The End of the Salon is important as a rare attempt to shift our attention from the independent commercial exhibitions, whence emerged the now canonised avantgarde, back to the establishment against which they appeared to rebel ! Mainardi's text is well-conceived and admirably researched !' Arts Review
Product Description
The End of the Salon examines the cultural forces that contributed to the demise of the most important exhibition centre for art in Europe and America in the late nineteenth century. Tracing the history of the salon from the French Revolution, when it was taken away from the Academy and opened to all artists, to the 1880s, Patricia Mainardi shows that its contradictory purposes, as didactic exhibition venue and art market place, resulted in its collapse. She also situates the salon within the shifting currents of art movements, from modern to traditional, and the evolving politics of the Third Republic, when France definitively chose a republican over a monarchic form of government. A rich overview of the spectrum of art production at the end of the nineteenth century, government attitudes toward the arts in the early Third Republic, and the institution of exhibitions as they were redefined by free-market economics in the nineteenth century, are also provided. The book demonstrates how all artists were forced to function within the framework of the social, economic and cultural changes then taking place and how art and social history are inextricably linked.
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