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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2009
Arguably, art history has always had an interdisciplinary vocation, though this was at times underplayed during its establishment as an academic subject. Recent intellectual trends have tended to work in the opposite sense, encouraging art historians to highlight the relationship between visual art and a range of cultural and economic discourses. This has often involved discussion of specifically urban contexts, since cities have been the principal sites for the production, distribution and interpretation of works of art, and their fabric a means by which cultural practices have been allied to political, class and gender interests in modern society. The language and approaches currently adopted for this enterprise are often deeply marked by excursions into literary theory, psychoanalysis, anthropology and urban history and geography.
1 An important work in this context is Clark, T. J., The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (London, 1985).Google Scholar
2 Described by Williams, R. in Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1982).Google Scholar
3 Green, N., The Spectacle of Nature (Manchester, 1990).Google Scholar
4 Herbert, R., Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven and London, 1988).Google Scholar
5 Silverman, D., Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychlology and Style (Los Angeles, 1990).Google Scholar
6 Schorske, Carl E., Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Cambridge, 1980).Google Scholar
7 As is also argued by Russell Berman in ‘The Vienna fascination’, first published in 1986 and now republished in Berman, R., Modem Culture and Critical Theory: Art, Politics and the Legacy of the Frankfurt School (London, 1989).Google Scholar
8 Werkner, P. (ed.), Egon Schiele: Art, Sexuality and Viennese Modernism (Paolo Alto, 1994).Google Scholar
9 Berman, , Modern Culture and Critical Theory, 210.Google Scholar
10 See Lenman, R., ‘A community in transition: painters in Munich 1886–1924’, Central European History, 1 (1982), 1–33Google Scholar; Lenman, R., ‘Painters, patronage and the art market in Germany, 1850–1914’, Past and Present, 123 (1989), 109–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jelavich, P., Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting and Performance 1890–1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).Google Scholar
11 Beller, S., Vienna and the Jews (Cambridge, 1989).Google Scholar
12 See the essay by Paret in Mai, E. and Paret, P. (eds), Sammler, Stifter, und Museen: Kunstforderung in Deutschland im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Cologne, 1993).Google Scholar
13 Paret, P.'s study, The Berlin Secession; Modernism and its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, Mass., 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, remains a key work on this topic although a raft of recent German publications has greatly enriched our knowledge – notably: Brühl, G., Die Cassirers (Leipzig, 1991)Google Scholar; , G. and Braun, W. (eds), Mazenatentum in Berlin (Berlin, 1993)Google Scholar; Gaehtgens, T., Die Berliner Museumsinsel im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich, 1992)Google Scholar; Junge, H. (ed.), Avantgarde und Publikum: Zur Rezeption Avantgardischer Kunst in Deutschland 1905–1933 (Cologne, 1992)Google Scholar; Paul, B., Hugo von Tschudi und die Moderne Französische Kunst im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Berlin, 1993)Google Scholar; Mai and Paret, Sammler, Stifter, und Museen.
14 Simmel's work figures largely in J. Lloyd's important study, German Expressionism, Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven and London, 1991).Google Scholar It surfaces at several points in the collection Berlin: Culture and Metropolis edited by C. Haxthausen and H. Suhr (Minnesota, 1990). Frisby, D., ‘Social theory, the metropolis and expressionism’, in Benson, T. (ed.), Expressionist Utopias (Los Angeles, 1994)Google Scholar is also a notable contribution to the field.
15 See Lloyd, , German Expressionism;Google Scholar Haxthausen, and Suhr, , Berlin: Culture and Metropolis.Google Scholar
16 Indicated by Bergius, H., ‘Berlin als Hure Babylon’, in Boberg, J., Fichte, T. and Gillen, E. (eds), Die Metropole: Industriekulture in Berlin im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1986).Google Scholar
17 See Jelavich, P., The Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).Google Scholar
