"This volume, the fifteenth in the series Issues & debates, evolved from "Everything except the truth? Rethinking Boucher," a symposium organized by the Getty Research Institute and held at the Getty Center, Los Angeles, 23-25 January 2003"--Title page verso.

"Unequivocally a modern, Francois Boucher (1703-70) defined the French artistic avant-garde throughout his career. Yet the triumph of modernist aesthetics - with its focus on the self-critical, the autonomous, and the intellectually challenging - has long discouraged art historians and other viewers from taking Boucher's playful and alluring works seriously. Rethinking Boucher revisits the cultural meanings and reception of his diverse oeuvre, inviting us to revise the interpretive cliches by which we have sought to tame this artist and his epoch."--Jacket