Spectacle and Leisure in Paris: Degas to Mucha

Elizabeth C. Childs

2017

$30

Elizabeth C. Childs with contributions by Colin Burnett, Meg Galindo, Lauren A. Johnson, Kirsten Marples, Lindsay Sheedy, and Rachel Tuteur

Through the lens of seven scholars, this book examines fine art and commercial design as they both reflected and helped create the vibrant culture of public spectacle in late 19th-century Paris. Posters and prints circulated across the city, and the new art form of cinema flourished in a diverse urban climate of leisure that was particularly French. Art served to promote the careers and talents of such celebrities as Jane Avril, Sarah Bernhardt, and Loïe Fuller. Alphonse Mucha and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec developed the potential of color lithography to meet the demands of these stars, while fine artists ranging from Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet to Pablo Picasso and Édouard Vuillard focused on such spectacles as the racetrack, ballet, café-concert, theater, and opera, asserting them as defining elements of Parisian modernity in this image-saturated milieu.

Paper 96 pp.
ISBN 978-0-936316-43-7

Distributed by University of Chicago Press