Overview

This is the first book to investigate the modern London art market, establishes the central importance of London for the development of the modern retail market in fine art. Leading experts track the emergence and development of the structures and practices that have come to characterize the commercial art system, including the commercial art gallery, the professional dealer, the exhibition cycle and its accompanying rhetoric of press coverage and publicity, and an international network for the circulation of goods. This new commercial system involved a massive transformation of the experience of viewing art; of the relationships between artists, dealers, collectors, art objects and audiences; and of the very criteria of aesthetic value itself. Its history is thus a vital part of the history of modern art, and this anthology will be of interest to art historians as well as scholars of Victorian Studies, Museum Studies, and Social History. -- .

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9780719084607

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Reviews

Andrew Stephenson contributes a gem of an essay, discussing the impact of social changes in the interwar period, the move of the prosperous middle classes into flats rather than houses, the rising demands of the newly independent single woman, and the way in which the art trade reacted to these demands. This is an important book, distinguished both by its detailed scholarship and by the breadth of its contextual understanding. Fletcher and Helmreich have opened many doors here, and one may hope that the art trade will join the currently favourite subject of Empire as a theme for fruitful academic research. -- Giles Waterfield. The Burlington Magazine

Author Information

Pamela Fletcher is Associate Professor of Art History at Bowdoin College Anne Helmreich is Associate Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve University

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