Could the self-interested pursuit of beauty actually help to establish the moral and political norms that enable democratic society to flourish? In this book, Lucy Hartley identifies a new language for speaking about beauty, which begins to be articulated from the 1830s in a climate of political reform and becomes linked to emerging ideals of equality, liberty, and individuality. Examining British art and art writing by Charles Lock Eastlake, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Edward Poynter, William Morris, and John Addington Symonds, Hartley traces a debate about what it means to be interested in beauty and whether this preoccupation is necessary to public political life. Drawing together political history, art history, and theories of society, and supplemented by numerous illustrations, Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain offers a fresh interdisciplinary understanding of the relation of art to its publics.

ONE OF THE TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES' BEST BOOKS FOR 2022 'Eye-opening and full of surprises . . . A treasure' Sunday Times 'A biography as rich with colourful characters as any novel' Telegraph John Constable, the revolutionary nineteenth-century painter of the landscapes and skies of southern England, is Britain's best-loved but perhaps least understood artist. His paintings reflect visions of landscape that shocked and perplexed his contemporaries: attentive to detail, spontaneous in gesture, brave in their use of colour. What we learn from his landscapes is that Constable had sharp local knowledge of Suffolk, a clarity of expression of the skyscapes above Hampstead, an understanding of the human tides in London and Brighton, and a rare ability in his late paintings of Salisbury Cathedral to transform silent suppressed passion into paint. Yet Constable was also an active and energetic correspondent. His letters and diaries - there are over one thousand letters from and to him - reveal a man of passion, opinion and discord, while his character and personality is concealed behind the high shimmering colour of his paintings. They reveal too the lives and circumstances of his brothers and his sisters, his cousins and his aunts, who serve to define the social and economic landscape against which he can be most clearly seen. These multifaceted reflections draw a sharp picture of the person, as well as the painter. James Hamilton's biography reveals a complex, troubled man, and explodes previous mythologies about this timeless artist, and establishes him in his proper context as a giant of European art.

In this volume, emerging and established scholars bring ethical and political concerns for the environment, nonhuman animals and social justice to the study of nineteenth-century visual culture. They draw their theoretical inspiration from the vitality of emerging critical discourses, such as new materialism, ecofeminism, critical animal studies, food studies, object-oriented ontology and affect theory. This timely volume looks back at the early decades of the Anthropocene to query the agency of visual culture to critique, create and maintain more resilient and biologically diverse local and global ecologies.

In 1883 Paul Gauguin abandons his prominent banking career and decides that "from now on I will pai nt every day". The co - founder of Synthetism and trailblazer of Expressionism turns his back on the bourgeois world, leaves his wife and children, and, in 1891, sets out for the South Sea, financing his journey through the sale of thirty paintings. His thou ghts on art, his existential worries, his discovery of color and his search for paradise come to life again in the excerpts from his letters and statements compiled in this volume. Together with some forty color reproductions of his works, his biography, a nd a preface by an expert, the book introduces readers in a very special way to Gauguin's universe.

Original compilation of 41 full-page and six half-page drawings-some finished sketches; others, studies for future works-depict dancers on stage, in the classroom, and at rehearsals. Charming, spirited views of dancers pirouetting, executing grand battements and ports de bras, practicing at the barre, adjusting their costumes in moments of repose, and more. Delightful drawings to be enjoyed by lovers of art or the dance.

A landmark compendium - the first authoritative publication to cover in its entirety one of the most significant holdings of Matisse in the world. Here is a vibrant celebration - slipcased and beautifully produced - of the Barnes's extraordinary Matisse collection. Composed of fifty-nine works from every stage of the artist's career, it is among the most important in the world. At its heart are Matisse's most historically significant paintings, Le Bonheur de vivre, also called The Joy of Life, and The Dance, the monumental mural that Albert C. Barnes commissioned to fill the lunettes of the Foundation's main gallery, transforming both the space and the artist's career. An essay by Yve-Alain Bois addresses the evolution of The Dance and its role in Matisse's career; Karen Butler looks at what Barnes thought of Matisse; and Claudine Grammont's considers how and why he collected his work. The artworks themselves, sumptuously reproduced, are the subjects of interpretive analyses that tell the stories of their acquisition and address their critical reception. The book includes major contributions by Barbara Buckley and Jennifer Mass on the artist’s technique and a report on the latest findings on the pigments used in Le Bonheur de vivre.

Known as the master of French Romanticism for his energetic paintings, Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) was also a consummate draftsman. This handsome book, one of the few to explore this topic in depth, provides new insight into Delacroix's drawing practice, paying particular attention to his materials and techniques and the ways in which the artist pushed the boundaries of the medium. The remarkable group of nearly 130 drawings featured here, many of which have been rarely seen, include academic and anatomical studies, sketches from nature, and preparatory drawings related to many of Delacroix's most renowned canvases, among them The Massacre at Chios and Liberty Leading the People.

En 1901, deprimido por el suicidio de su intimo amigo, Carles Casagemas, Picasso se sumerge en los lienzos austeros y melancolicos del Periodo Azul. Con solo veintidos anos de edad y desesperadamente pobre, decide restringir su paleta a colores predominantemente frios, sugerentes de la nocturnidad, el misterio y la muerte. Su creciente obsesion con estos temas alcanza su punto culminante con La vie, un lienzo emblematico de la relacion del pintor con la muerte, considerada una fuerza malefica con la que uno debe enfrentarse mediante el poder del exorcismo que le ha sido otorgado como artista/chaman. Esta pintura se ha interpretado como una referencia al ciclo de la vida, existiendo en ella referencias autobiograficas inequivocas. Los bosquejos preliminares muestran sin la menor duda que la figura masculina es un autorretrato del artista. Picasso posteriormente reemplazaria su imagen con la de Casagemas. El critico John Richardson ha sugerido que al sustituir la imagen del suicida por la de un autorretrato, Picasso se conmemora a si mismo, disfrazado como el amigo muerto. Al igual que todas las mascaras, la que Picasso coloca sobre el propio rostro en La vie tiene una funcion metamorfica, revelando al mismo tiempo que oculta. En la carrera artistica picassiana, la mascara se constituye en un objeto que de forma intencionada desestabiliza la identidad del sujeto: llevar una puesta, literal o simbolicamente, significa dejar de ser uno mismo; despojarse de ella supone mostrar una verdad potencialmente mas profunda. El libro analiza el concepto de la mascara desde una perspectiva lacaniana y describe diferentes periodos en la carrera artistica de Picasso con el fin de definir, en lo posible, la compleja personalidad del artista.

The image of Eugene Delacroix as an august artist with an august oeuvre was initially frozen into place by posthumous tributes and it has continued to the present. He was one of the finest yet least understood painters of the nineteenth century, the golden age of the French Romantic movement. He is remembered best for his masterpiece, La Liberte guidant le people, but few of his works have received the kind of constant, fascinated revisiting that has sealed the iconic status of Theodore Gericault's Le Radeau de la Meduse, for example. This book is one of the first to look carefully at individual paintings by Delacroix, especially at one of his most important works - a key but often overlooked painting from early Romanticism's heyday, Scene des massacres de Scio.

'A nourishing, occasionally provoking hybrid of group biography, cultural criticism and travelogue that seeks to restore to Romanticism its radicalism, and also show just how much the countryside shaped its manifesto' Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday We think we know the Romantic countryside: that series of picturesque landscapes familiar from paintings, poems and music that are still part of Britain's idea of itself today. But for the Romantics themselves, the countryside was a place where radical change was underway both within and around them. 'Romanticism isn't a cultural artefact; it's a way for thought to move,' writes highly acclaimed biographer and poet Fiona Sampson in this transporting and vividly evocative book, in which she spends a year walking in the Romantics' footsteps, from Kent to Kintyre. Setting out across ten landscapes, as the Romantics once did as they wrote, travelled, settled, or tried to define the rural environment, Fiona Sampson walks not with a sense of nostalgic cliche, but radically alive to interaction between the human and the natural world. So how were poets, writers, artists and philosophers of the time shaped by their natural environment? And how can we return to the vividness with which they experienced it? Starlight Wood is part group biography, part cultural history, and part an essay about place. In it, we find Percy Bysshe Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning using diet as a symbol of radicalism, and John Constable revealing the emptiness of the post-Enclosure British countryside; while the young William Wordsworth follows the ideal of radical sensibility into the heart of Revolutionary France, and the biggest military structure in Britain since Hadrian's Wall is engineered on Romney Marsh to keep Napoleon at bay. Moving intuitively between art, politics, agriculture, science and philosophy, and punctuated by the author's personal reflections - most movingly on the death during the pandemic of her artist father, whose line-and-wash drawings act as gateways through which we embark on each walk - Starlight Wood brilliantly examines the importance of the countryside in shaping Romantic attitudes, and offers a gripping insight into the lives of some of the most influential figures of the age.

Is there such a thing as "Impressionist sculpture"? Since 1881 when Edgar Degas presented Little Dancer Aged Fourteen at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition in Paris, the term has existed along with the discourse around it. This book is dedicated to the extensive examination of the question what it would mean to translate the characteristics of Impressionist painting, such as light, colour, ephemerality, and the ethereal, into sculpture. The book features a selection of artists including Edgar Degas, Auguste Rodin, and Medardo Rosso and examines the artistic processes that traverse genres in which one medium is enhanced by others. This valuable, fascinating resource offers a unique addition to the scholarship on the Impressionist era.

Featuring works by Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein and Robert Longo, Proof offers insight into the singularity of vision through which artists can reflect the social, cultural and political complexities of their times. Spanning eras and continents, each of these artists witnessed the turbulent transition from one century to another, experiencing the seismic impacts of revolution, civil rights movements and war. While Goya served church and king, Eisenstein the state, and Longo emerged during the rise of the contemporary art market--the dominant benefactors of each period--they all rose to prominence through developing nuanced practices that challenged expectations. With commissioned essays by journalist, activist and author Chris Hedges, artist Vadim Zakharov and Garage Chief Curator Kate Fowle, plus an interview with Longo, this book is published to accompany the exhibition of the same name.

Comprehensive compilation of elegant, imaginative two-letter monograms-ideal for enhancing scrolls, certificates, awards and other graphic projects in need of calligraphic excitement. Easily reproduced, copyright-free letters are also perfect for use in art, needlework, crafts and other decorative projects.

Women - as warriors, workers, mothers, sensual women,even absent women - haunt 19th- and 20th-century Western painting: their representation is one of its most common subjects. Representing Women brings together Linda Nochlin's most important writings on the subject, as she considers work by Miller, Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Seurat, Cassatt and Kollwitz, among many others. In her riveting, partly autobiographical, extended introduction, Nochlin documents her own pioneering approach to art history; throughout the seven essays in this book, she argues for the honest virtues of an art history that rejects methodological assumptions, and for art historians who investigate the work before their eyes while focusing on its subject matter, informed by a sensitivity to its feminist spirit.

Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media -- from poetry and screen painting to tea ceremonies, flower arrangements, and annual observances. In Japan and the "Culture of the Four Seasons," Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery.

Refuting the belief that this tradition reflects Japan's agrarian origins and supposedly mild climate, Shirane traces the establishment of seasonal topics to the poetry composed by the urban nobility in the eighth century. After becoming highly codified and influencing visual arts in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the seasonal topics and their cultural associations evolved and spread to other genres, eventually settling in the popular culture of the early modern period. Contrasted with the elegant images of nature derived from court poetry was the agrarian view of nature based on rural life. The two landscapes began to intersect in the medieval period, creating a complex, layered web of competing associations. Shirane discusses a wide array of representations of nature and the four seasons in many genres, originating in both the urban and rural perspective: textual (poetry, chronicles, tales), cultivated (gardens, flower arrangement), material (kimonos, screens), performative (noh, festivals), and gastronomic (tea ceremony, food rituals). He reveals how this kind of "secondary nature," which flourished in Japan's urban architecture and gardens, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment it was disappearing.

Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane clarifies the use of natural images and seasonal topics and the changes in their cultural associations and function across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this fascinating book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world.

Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale (1872-1945) was an accomplished painter, illustrator and designer whose artistic life bridged the Victorian and modern worlds. Her work was much influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite artists whose love of detail, colour, symbolism, storytelling and nature was so hugely influential on mid Victorian Britain. Eleanor's own work carried the Pre-Raphaelite style forward into the 20th century. Indeed she became known as 'the last Pre-Raphaelite'. Despite her huge popularity in her own time, Eleanor's work has been neglected since her death in 1945. This book is the first monograph on the artist. It is the result of extensive research by Pamela Gerrish Nunn, whose work on Pre-Raphaelite women artists has done so much to re-assess the art history of the Victorian period. Here, the author takes us on a journey through Eleanor's training, career and achievements to re-establish her as an important and fascinating figure in the history of Pre-Raphaelite art. Published by Liverpool University Press with National Museums Liverpool.

In this unprecedentedly wide-ranging account of art, design, and architecture in the complex Central Europe of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during its momentous last decades, Elizabeth Clegg achieves a forceful integration of political and cultural developments. Comparing the situation in eight cities2;among them Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Cracow, and Zagreb2;the author highlights contrasts, rivalries, parallels, and interconnections across this colorful and important region. The book deals with all the chief ethnic/national categories of Austria-Hungary and embraces all the visual arts. Focusing on their public display, appraisal, and consumption, Clegg shows how the harmonious/antagonistic coexistence of institutions, publications, and events gave rise to the dynamic art life of a period that would end in a turning point for Central Europe. As vividly revealed, this was a time and place marked by a simultaneous fear and celebration of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity that has enormous international resonance a century later.

Germany developed a large colonial empire over the last thirty years of the 19th century, spanning regions of the west coast of Africa to its east coast and beyond. Largely forgotten for many years, recent intense debates about Africa's cultural heritage in European museums have brought this period of African and German history back into the spotlight. German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies brings much-needed context to these debates, exploring perspectives on the architecture, art, urbanism, and visual culture of German colonialism in Africa, and its legacies in postcolonial and present-day Namibia, Cameroon, and Germany. The first in-depth exploration of the designed and visual aspects of German colonialism, the book presents a series of essays combining formal analyses of painting, photography, performance art, buildings, and space with the discourse analysis approach associated with postcolonial theory. Covering the entire period from the build-up to colonialism in the early-19th century to the present, subjects covered range from late-19th-century German colonial paintings of African landscapes and people to German land appropriation through planning and architectural mechanisms, and from indigenous African responses to colonial architecture, to explorations of the legacies of German colonialism by contemporary artists today. This powerful and revealing collection of essays will encourage new research on this under-explored topic, and demonstrate the importance of historical research to the present, especially with regards to ongoing debates about the presence of material legacies of colonialism in Western culture, museum collections, and immigration policies.

Within a few years of the invention of the first commercially successful photography process in 1839, American slaveholders had already begun commissioning photographic portraits of their slaves. Ex-slaves-turned-abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass also came to see how sitting for a portrait could help them project humanity and dignity amidst northern racism. In the first decade of the medium, enslaved people had begun entering southern daguerreotype saloons of their own volition, posing for cameras, and leaving with visual treasures they could keep in their pockets. And, as the Civil War raged, Union soldiers would orchestrate pictures with fugitive slaves that envisioned racial hierarchy as slavery fell. In these ways and others, from the earliest days of the medium to the first moments of emancipation, photography powerfully influenced how bondage and freedom were documented, imagined, and contested. By 1865, it would be difficult for many Americans to look back upon slavery and its fall without thinking of a photograph. This book explores how photography altered, and was in turn shaped by, conflicts over bondage. Drawing upon an original source base that includes hundreds of unpublished and little-studied photographs of slaves, ex-slaves, and abolitionists as well as written archival materials, it puts visual culture at the center of understanding the experience of late slavery. It assesses how photography helped southerners to defend slavery, slaves to shape their social ties, abolitionists to strengthen their movement, and soldiers to imagine and pictorially enact an interracial society during the Civil War. With diverse goals, these peoples transformed photography from a scientific curiosity (in the early 1840s) into a political tool (by the 1860s). While this project sheds new light on conflicts over late American slavery, it also reveals a key moment in the much broader historical relationship between modern visual culture and racialized forms of power and resistance.

Art of the United States is a landmark volume that presents three centuries of US art through a broad array of historical texts, including writings by artists, critics, patrons, literary figures, and other commentators. Combining a wide-ranging selection of texts with high-quality reproductions of artworks, it offers a resource for the study and understanding of the visual arts of the United States. With contextual essays, explanatory headnotes, a chronology of US historical landmarks, maps, and full-color illustrations of key artworks, the volume will appeal to national and international audiences ranging from undergraduates and museum visitors to art historians and other scholars. Texts by a range of artists and cultural figures-including John Adams, Thomas Cole, Frederick Douglass, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, Clement Greenberg, and Cindy Sherman-are grouped according to historical era alongside additional featured artists. A sourcebook of unprecedented breadth and depth, Art of the United States brings together multiple voices throughout the ages to provide a framework for learning and critical thinking on US art.

ON MY MODERN MET'S TOP TEN LIST OF BEST CREATIVE BOOKS TO CELEBRATE THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF MOON LANDING The moon—its face, color, and power—threads through the tapestry of American landscape painting, holding timeless allure for artists and beloved by viewers of paintings everywhere. The Hudson River Museum has organized The Color of the Moon: Lunar Painting in American Art—the first major museum examination of the moon in American visual arts from the nineteenth through the twentieth centuries for a 2019 exhibition. This timely presentation also celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission when, in 1969, American astronauts first stepped onto the surface of the moon. From the romantic silvery moonscapes of nineteenth-century artists to the abstractions by artists of the twentieth century who explored the moon, the perfect orb, and tapped into its spiritual possibilities, this celestial body, closest to Earth, remains constant in our sky, though our relationship to it and our home planet changes, as technology extends our reach toward space. The Hudson River Museum, Fordham University Press, and the James A. Michener Art Museum are joint publishers of the lavishly illustrated catalog The Color of the Moon: Lunar Painting in American Art. In engaging essays, author Stella Paul maps the colors of the moon; catalog co-editors Bartholomew F. Bland and Laura Vookles explore Hudson River School and Modernist moonscapes and their cultural resonance; and curators Melissa Martens Yaverbaum and Ted Barrow sight the moon’s passage in art of both the Gilded and Space ages. The exhibition and catalog have been made possible by a generous grant by the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, Inc. The Color of the Moon: Lunar Painting in American Art Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY | February 8 - May 12, 2019 James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, PA | June 1 – September 8, 2019

Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media-from poetry and screen painting to tea ceremonies, flower arrangements, and annual observances. In Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery. Refuting the belief that this tradition reflects Japan's agrarian origins and supposedly mild climate, Shirane traces the establishment of seasonal topics to the poetry composed by the urban nobility in the eighth century. After becoming highly codified and influencing visual arts in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the seasonal topics and their cultural associations evolved and spread to other genres, eventually settling in the popular culture of the early modern period. Contrasted with the elegant images of nature derived from court poetry was the agrarian view of nature based on rural life. The two landscapes began to intersect in the medieval period, creating a complex, layered web of competing associations. Shirane discusses a wide array of representations of nature and the four seasons in many genres, originating in both the urban and rural perspective: textual (poetry, chronicles, tales), cultivated (gardens, flower arrangement), material (kimonos, screens), performative (noh, festivals), and gastronomic (tea ceremony, food rituals). He reveals how this kind of "secondary nature," which flourished in Japan's urban architecture and gardens, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment it was disappearing. Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane clarifies the use of natural images and seasonal topics and the changes in their cultural associations and function across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this fascinating book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world.

Hudson River School artists shared an awe of the magnificence of nature as well as a belief that the untamed American scenery reflected the national character. In this new work, color reproductions of more than 115 paintings capture the beauty and illuminate the aesthetic and philosophical principles of the Hudson River School painters. The pieces included in this volume reflect a period (1825-1875) when American landscape painting was most thoroughly explored and formalized with personal, artistic, cultural, and national identifications. Judith Hansen O'Toole reveals the subtleties and quiet majesty of the works and discusses their shared iconography, the ways in which artists responded to one another's paintings, and how the paintings reflected nineteenth-century American cultural, intellectual, and social milieus. Different Views is also the first major study to examine closely the Hudson River School artists' practice of creating thematically related pairs and series of paintings. O'Toole considers painters' use of this method to express different moods and philosophical concepts. She observes artists' representations of landscape and their nuanced depictions of weather, light, and season. By comparing and contrasting Hudson River School paintings, O'Toole reveals differences in meaning, emotion, and cultural connotation. Different Views in Hudson River School Painting contains reproductions of works from a range of prominent and lesser-known artists, including Jasper Francis Cropsey, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Asher B. Durand, Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, John Frederic Kensett, and John William Casilear. The works come from a leading private collection and were recently exhibited at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art.

The Swiss-born artist Albert von Keller (1844-1920) was a founding member of the Munich Secession, one of Europe's most influential artists' associations. Highly regarded as an artist in both Europe and America at the turn of the last century, Keller was a flamboyant figure known for his fascination with the occult.

Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker places Keller's modern treatment of enigmatic subjects within the cultural mileau of "fin de siecle" Germany, particularly the investigation of the occult undertaken by scientists, artists andintellectuals. She also documents for the first time the critical reception to Keller's work in America, tracing the artist's participation in exhibitions in Boston, Chicago, Indianapolis, New york, and Saint Louis and his presence in important private collections of German art in America. Swiss art historian Gian Casper Bott examines each painting by Keller in depth and places the artist's works in the art-historical context of the era. The book includes magnificent color reproductions of Keller's paintings from the collection of the Kunsthaus Zurich. It includes key works by Keller from the late 1870s to the beginning of the First World War, a period that coincided with the scandal of his elopement with the beautiful banker's daughter Irene von Eichthal, the tragic death of his only child, and the death of his wife only months later in a state of profound grief.