Oscar E. Vázquez – författare

The pace and scale of the exchange of cultural goods of all sorts—paintings, furniture, even ladies' fans—increased sharply in nineteenth-century Spain, and new institutions and practices for exhibiting as well as valorizing "art" were soon formed. Oscar Vázquez maps this cultural landscape, tracing the connections between the growth of art markets and changing patterns of collecting. Unlike many earlier students of collecting, he focuses not upon questions of taste but rather upon the discursive and institutional frameworks that came to regulate art's economic and symbolic worth at all levels of Spanish society.Drawing upon sources that range from newspaper reviews to notarial documents, Vázquez shows how collecting acquired the power to mediate debates over individual, regional, and national identity. His book also looks at the emergence of a new state apparatus for arts administration and situates these social and political changes in the broader European context. Inventing the Art Collection will be of interest to historians and sociologists of Spain and Europe, as well as art historians and cultural theorists.

As fin de siglo Spain struggled with perceived decadence and decline, the visual arts reflected the debate and influenced the outcome. This volume argues that the way artists understood and depicted the concepts of degeneration and regeneration is essential to understanding the broader societal conversation and is inseparable from definitions of Spanish modernism.Oscar E. Vázquez examines how painting, sculpture, drawing, and popular illustrated materials approached “endings” and “beginnings” during the Bourbon monarchy’s restoration. Throughout this period, people inside and outside the art world came to associate degeneration with certain types of artistic productions, spaces, and human bodies, imbuing them with backwardness, violence, criminality, and disease. Pictorial representations contributed to this understanding that specific things, actions, attitudes, and ways of being were degenerative and backward or, alternatively, regenerative and modern. Vázquez explores the significance of these disparate perceptions and how their visual representations reflected Spanish national identity and modernism.An in-depth study of the ideas of degeneration and regeneration in modernist Spain, The End Again is an insightful look at how art can affect the social and cultural debates at the heart of a nation.

A 300-year history of influential artist training academies in more than a dozen countries  This ambitious volume delves into the institutional history of art academies. These academies provided practical training for artists as well as spaces for theoretical discussions and debates as they emerged across Europe and the Americas around 1600 and through their proliferation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many were founded under official auspices, with state, ecclesiastical, or monarchical support for the teaching of “fine arts.” Others originated through private patronage or expanded beyond painting, sculpture, and architecture, competing or merging with trade schools. Complex models for teaching art evolved around the world across an array of institutions, as the European academy model responded to differing regional conditions, including colonial contexts.  Seventeen essays from leading and emerging scholars examine academies from Brazil, Colombia, Italy, France, Germany, Mexico, Turkey, the United States, and beyond. In examining academies of art both within specific political and historical moments and across transnational boundaries, the authors ask nuanced questions about the institutions’ goals and rules around membership, addressing issues of race, class, and gender. The picture of art academies that emerges is one of malleable institutions that wrote, reformed, and adapted policies according to local needs.  Published by the National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts/Distributed by Yale University Press

This edited volume’s chief aim is to bring together, in an English-language source, the principal histories and narratives of some of the most significant academies and national schools of art in South America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries.The book highlights not only issues shared by Latin American academies of art but also those that differentiate them from their European counterparts. Authors examine issues including statutes, the influence of workshops and guilds, the importance of patronage, discourses of race and ethnicity in visual pedagogy, and European models versus the quest for national schools. It also offers first-time English translations of many foundational documents from several significant academies and schools.This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, Latin American and Hispanic studies, and modern visual cultures.