Arts of the 19th Century

First published in French by 'Editions Citadelles & Mazenod, with whom Abrams holds the translation copyright, and authored by a team of scholars associated with the Mus?e d'Orsay, this is a media-based survey of the arts of the last half of the 19th century. More heavily illustrated than the Anglophone standard work by H.W. Janson and Robert Rosenblum (19th-Century Art, 1984), this book is awkward to use or even to read. Each of the five areasApainting, sculpture, photography, the decorative arts, and architectureAis followed by a selection of fairly good color plates, but there are no references to the plates in the text. At the back, in a section called ''Documentation,'' are another 450 or so black-and-white illustrations grouped by medium but again otherwise without reference. Although the essays read well (and it can be a pleasure to read text without interruption), finding the works mentioned can be maddening, and some of those mentioned are not illustrated. An example of the perils of copublishing and inadequate production