Susan L. Siegfried – författare

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.

A fascinating consideration of the dynamic relationship between fashion, art, and the modernizing forces of the early nineteenth century  Across the visual arts in France and Britain in the 1820s and 1830s a dynamic culture of fashion was taking shape. Wide-ranging in taste and driven by a quest for the new, fashion flourished in the period’s expansive print production, while the fine arts negotiated demands for novelty more paradoxically, partly by reviving styles from the past. Susan L. Siegfried argues that the intersections between fashion, costume, and art in these pivotal decades embody the fractured conditions of early nineteenth-century modernity.  The New Taste examines depictions of clothing and hairstyles in fashion plates, paintings, prints, and sculpture by artists including Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Horace Vernet, Achille Devéria, and Bertel Thorvaldsen, alongside texts by writers such as Honoré de Balzac and Thomas Carlyle. Siegfried reveals how both the commercial and the fine arts responded to social and economic transformations, including colonialism, changes in print technology and textile manufacture, as well as perceptions of the male dandy and the active role of women as consumers. Highlighting a largely overlooked period in art and fashion, this richly illustrated volume offers insights into the social, artistic, and gendered questions that troubled the shift from classicism to realism.