A fascinating look at the genesis and meaning of Van Gogh's famed paintings of his bedroom Vincent van Gogh's The Bedroom, a painting of his room in Arles, is arguably the most famous depiction of a bedroom in the history of art. The artist made three versions of the work, now in the collections of the Van Gogh Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Musee d'Orsay. This book is the first in-depth study of their making and their meaning to the artist. In Van Gogh's Bedrooms, an international team of art historians, scientists, and conservators investigates the psychological and emotional significance of the bedroom in Van Gogh's oeuvre, surveying dwellings as a motif that appears throughout his work. Essays address the context in which the bedroom was first conceived, the uniqueness of the subject, and the similarities and differences among the three works both on and below the painted surface. The publication reproduces more than 50 paintings, drawings, and illustrated letters by the artist, along with other objects that evoke his peripatetic life and relentless quest for "home." Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: Art Institute of Chicago (02/14/16-05/10/16)

Sculptors Against the State considers the relation of anarchist ideology to avant-garde sculpture through an examination of three iconic artists whose work transformed European modernism: Umberto Boccioni, Jacob Epstein, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Addressing such complex subjects as sexual liberation, homosexuality, the history of emotions, the ethics of violence, and tactics of nonviolent resistance, Mark Antliff demonstrates how sculptural processes were shaped by forms of anarchism calculated to foster a radical community. The anarchist view that the State is a state of mind and a set of social relationships is a central theme Antliff uses to explore not only the art of Boccioni, Epstein, and Gaudier-Brzeska but the associated aesthetics of radical luminaries such as Oscar Wilde, F. T. Marinetti, and Ezra Pound. Taking Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Epstein’s Tomb of Oscar Wilde, and Gaudier-Brzeska’s Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound as a starting point, Antliff argues that these sculptors saw the arts as a radical catalyst for an entirely new constellation of interpersonal relations and psychological dispositions—ones antithetical to those propagated by the State. Powerfully argued and informed by extensive archival research, Sculptors Against the State provides a new understanding of these artists, even as it sheds light on why contemporary anarchist theory is necessary for understanding the profound cultural impact modernism had during the twentieth century. Antliff’s work will be of interest to students and scholars of modernist art and literature, and particularly those who study the intersections between artistic practice and politics.

Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894), the son of a wealthy businessman, is perhaps best known as the painter who organised and funded several of the groundbreaking exhibitions of the Impressionist painters, collected their works, and ensured the Impressionists' presence in the French national museums by bequeathing his own personal collection. Trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and sharing artistic sympathies with his renegade friends, Caillebotte painted a series of extraordinary pictures inspired by the look and feel of modern Paris that also grappled with his own place in the Parisian art scene. Michael Marrinan's ambitious study draws upon new documents and establishes compelling connections between Caillebotte's painting and literature, commerce, and technology. It offers new ways of thinking about Paris and its changing development in the nineteenth century, exploring the cultural context of Parisian bachelor life and revealing layers of meaning in upscale privilege ranging from haute cuisine to sport and relaxation. Marrinan has written what is sure to be a central text for the study of nineteenth-century art and culture.

Over 300 spectacular pendants, combs, buckles, rings, bracelets, brooches, umbrella handles, penknives, buttons, clasps and scissors in detailed photographs reprinted from rare, turn-of-the-century folio. Elegant, copyright-free illustrations exquisitely detailed with flower, foliage and butterfly motifs. Readily adaptable to any design use.

Culled from two popular American women's magazines of the Victorian era, here are alphabets, initials, monograms, and common names in various letter forms-script, floral, geometric, Old English, block, ornamental, etc. No practicing needleworker can afford to be without it.

This engaging volume describes the creation and restoration of the extraordinary large-scale drawing The Temptation of Saint Anthony-a work by late 19th-century Belgian artist James Ensor (1860-1949)-on the occasion of its first public showing in more than 60 years. The piece is composed of 51 separate sheets of paper collaged into a hallucinatory social critique and artist's manifesto. Each sheet of the nearly six-foot-high work is reproduced at actual size, revealing Ensor's remarkable technique and fertile imagination. Here, Saint Anthony is surrounded not with nature, as customary, but with the moral decay of society. Replete with tiny scenes depicting both sexual temptation and spiritual piety, Ensor splices potent imagery from travelogues, popular science, and technology magazines into a Symbolist masterpiece. Susan M. Canning, Patrick Florizoeone, and Nancy Ireson analyze the drawing's meaning; Herwig Todts details its origins and early history; and Kimberly J. Nichols recounts the work's restoration. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: The J. Paul Getty Museum (06/10/14-08/31/14) The Art Institute of Chicago (11/23/14-01/25/15)

Photography, one of the most influential inventions of the nineteenth century, has been shaped by Canadian innovators. Among them are two Quebec men who have flown beneath the radar in studies of the history of photography: the Smeaton brothers. Out of the Studio documents the life, oeuvre, and achievement of Charles Smeaton and his younger brother, John. Launched by the opening of their "photographic gallery" in 1861, they developed a reputation in Quebec for images of contemporaneous people, places, and events taken in challenging outdoor settings. Smeaton pictures of the aftermath of the Great Fire of Quebec in 1866 helped bring an understanding of the disaster to an international audience; images featuring the gold mining industry were displayed at the Exposition universelle in Paris the following year. When Charles travelled to Europe in 1866, he accomplished a feat previously thought impossible, taking the first successful photographs in the Roman catacombs. John moved to Montreal in 1869, where he worked for newspapers and developed techniques for the direct transfer of photographs into print without the necessity of intermediary engravings. Out of the Studio is the first comprehensive biographical study detailing the innovation and imagination of the Smeaton brothers and their legacy of images across two continents.

This revelatory book traces how the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their close associates put scientific principles into practice across their painting, poetry, sculpture, and architecture. In their manifesto, The Germ, the Pre-Raphaelites committed themselves to creating a new kind of art modeled on science, in which precise observation could lead to discoveries about nature and humanity. In Oxford and London, Victorian scientists and Pre-Raphaelite artists worked together to design and decorate natural history museums as temples to God's creation. At the same time, journals like Nature and the Fortnightly Review combined natural science with Pre-Raphaelite art theory and poetry to find meaning and coherence within a worldview turned upside down by Darwin's theory of evolution. Offering reinterpretations of well-known works by John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, and William Morris, this major revaluation of the popular Victorian movement also considers less-familiar artists who were no less central to the Pre-Raphaelite project. These include William Michael Rossetti, Walter Deverell, James Collinson, John and Rosa Brett, John Lucas Tupper, and the O'Shea brothers, along with the architects Benjamin Woodward and Alfred Waterhouse. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

She is famous throughout the world, but how many know her name? You can admire her figure in Washington, Paris, London, New York, Dresden or Copenhagen but where is her grave? She danced as a 'petit rat' at the Paris Opera. She was also a model, she posed for painters and sculptors - among them Edgar Degas. Taking us through the underbelly of the Belle Epoque, Laurens casts a light on those who have traditionally been overlooked in the study of art, and opens a space for essential questions. She paints a compelling portrait of Marie van Goethem and the world she inhabited, in the 1880s; a time when art unsettled the hypocrisy of society.

The Symbolist art movement of the late nineteenth century forms an important bridge between Impressionism and Modernism. But because Symbolism, more than the two movements it links, emphasizes ideas over objects and events, it has suffered from vague and conflicting definitions. In "Symbolist Art in Context", Michelle Facos offers a clearly written, comprehensive, and accessible description of this challenging subject. Reaching back into Romanticism for Symbolism's origins, Facos argues that Symbolism enabled artists (including Munch and Gauguin) to confront an increasingly uncertain and complex world - one to which pessimists responded with themes of decadence and degeneration and optimists with idealism and reform.

From Hogarth to Reynolds, from Gainsborough to Turner, the great protagonists of English painting between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is the first comprehensive overview of the extraordinary development of British painting during the eighteenth century, which anticipated themes, styles, and techniques that later became paradigms of modernity. This volume focuses on the English context at a time when the growth of artistic standing was accompanied by the country's conquest of hegemony on a historical, political, and economic plane. The volume is arranged chronologically in seven sections, which include a selection of over 100 masterpieces by the most significant English painters. The main objective is to enable readers to rediscover the genres of portrait and landscape, which have always characterized British art. Readers can admire the work of artists like William Hogarth, Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Fussli), Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Joseph Wright of Derby, George Stubbs, John Constable, and William Turner, who offer a completely original cross section of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century painting in Great Britain.

The Art Nouveau movement became an international phenomenon at the beginning of the twentieth century that ushered in the era of modernity in almost every aspect of cultural life. For decades critics have argued that Art Nouveau was not an artistic period in its own right, but an amalgam of artists and styles that served as a bridge between neoclassicism and modernism. In this comprehensive, authoritative and copiously illustrated book, art historian Norbert Wolf explores Art Nouveau as a logical outgrowth of the historic forces in which it arose. This book focuses on the movement's wide variety of applications and reclaims its prominence in the pantheon of modern art history. Chapters on aesthetics, spirituality and the cult of beauty offer luminous examples of works by Mucha, Gaudi, Hoffmann, Klimt, Horta, Munch and Tiffany, among many others. Wolf's text is both informed and accessible, providing an exciting narrative that brings the Art Nouveau movement into clear focus. Beautifully produced to appeal to a wide range of readers, this new edition gives one of the world's most popular styles the serious consideration it deserves.

Published in conjunction with the second major exhibition The Museum of Modern Art is organizing for the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Van Gogh to Richter: People, Places and Things is an exploration of the myriad innovative ways modern artists have reinvented the traditional genres of portrait, still life and landscape from the 1880s to today. By looking closely at works in a range of media, the catalogue shows how these long-established categories have expanded and transformed from Post-Impressionism to Photorealism, reflecting changes in our conceptions of individuals, objects and spaces. The selection of works range from Frida Kahlo's confident selfrepresentation to Gerhard Richter's blurred likeness; from Paul Cezanne's iconic tabletop arrangements to Jeff Koons's commodified objects; from Vincent van Gogh's roiling olive trees to Richard Long's land art, each demonstrating how modernism's radical new forms have continuously revitalized art history's conventional subjects. An introductory text reflects on how these artists both inherit and reject the traditions of their adopted genres, and three essays provide close readings of a key portrait (Henri de Toulouse Lautrec's La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge), still-life (Paul Cezanne's Still Life with Ginger Jar, Sugar Bowl and Oranges), and landscape (Van Gogh's The Olive Trees) from the dawn of modernism, and expand to consider subsequent works.

Blake engaged with the legacy of Milton all his life. These watercolours, made around 1816-20 to illustrate the most perfect of Milton's shorter poems, are some of the finest of all his works. All 12 watercolours are reproduced here actual size.

In a brilliant collaboration between writer and subject, the bestselling author of Home and City Life illuminates Frederick Law Olmsted's role as a major cultural figure and a man at the epicenter of nineteenth-century American history.

We know Olmsted through the physical legacy of his stunning landscapes -- among them, New York's Central Park, California's Stanford University campus, Boston's Back Bay Fens, Illinois's Riverside community, Asheville's Biltmore Estate, and Louisville's park system. He was a landscape architect before that profession was founded, designed the first large suburban community in the United States, foresaw the need for national parks, and devised one of the country's first regional plans.

Olmsted's contemporaries knew a man of even more extraordinarily diverse talents. Born in 1822, he traveled to China on a merchant ship at the age of twenty-one. He cofounded The Nation magazine and was an early voice against slavery. He wrote books about the South and about his exploration of the Texas frontier. He managed California's largest gold mine and, during the Civil War, served as general secretary to the United States Sanitary Commission, the precursor of the Red Cross.

Olmsted was both ruthlessly pragmatic and a visionary. To create Central Park, he managed thousands of employees who moved millions of cubic yards of stone and earth and planted over 300,000 trees and shrubs. In laying it out, "we determined to think of no results to be realized in less than forty years," he told his son, Rick. "I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future." To this day, Olmsted's ideas about people, nature, and society are expressed across the nation -- above all, in his parks, so essential to the civilized life of our cities.

Rybczynski's passion for his subject and his understanding of Olmsted's immense complexity and accomplishments make this book a triumphant work. In A Clearing in the Distance, the story of a great nineteenth-century American becomes an intellectual adventure.

Alexander Gardner is best known for his innovative photographic history of the Civil War. What is less known is the extent to which he was involved in the international workers’ rights movement. Tying Gardner’s photographic storytelling to his transatlantic reform activities, this book expands our understanding of Gardner’s career and the work of his studio in Washington, DC, by situating his photographic production within the era’s discourse on social and political reform. Drawing on previously unknown primary sources and original close readings, Makeda Best reveals how Gardner’s activism in Scotland and photography in the United States shared an ideological foundation. She reads his Photographic Sketch Book of the War as a politically motivated project, rooted in Gardner’s Chartist and Owenite beliefs, and illuminates how its treatment of slavery is primarily concerned with the harm that the institution posed to the United States’ reputation as a model democracy. Best shows how, in his portraiture, Gardner celebrated Northern labor communities and elevated white immigrant workers, despite the industrialization that degraded them. She concludes with a discussion of Gardner’s promotion of an American national infrastructure in which photographers and photography played an integral role. Original and compelling, this reconsideration of Gardner’s work expands the contribution of Civil War photography beyond the immediate narrative of the war to comprehend its relation to the vigorous international debates about democracy, industrialization, and the rights of citizens. Scholars working at the intersection of photography, cultural history, and social reform in the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic will find Best’s work invaluable to their own research.

Erika Szivos places the fine arts and their practitioners in the political, cultural, and social context of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. She investigates the influence of European patterns on the public role of the arts and the changing status of the artist in fin-de-si?cle Hungary.

Stretching from Paris to Le Havre, the Seine river and the valley flanking it afford some of France's loveliest views. The ports, holiday homes and artists' houses, the boats, the washerwomen, the windmills, the open-air cafes, the picnics and the bathing supplied French painting with some of its most iconic images, particularly during the Impressionist era, when painting stepped out of the studio and into the world. It was in this period, as the industrial revolution began to get underway and the landscape began to alter accordingly, through the development of railways, ports and factories, that the rural world it threatened became an increasingly popular subject for painting. This volume brings together 60 paintings painted on the banks of the Seine, retracing the history of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism to Fauvism, from Eugene Boudin to Henri Matisse. En route we encounter such familiar figures as Manet, Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley and Caillebotte, but also lesser-known figures such as Armand Guillaumin, Henri Rouart and Maximilien Luce.

Delacroix's Journal is one of the great documents in art history, a magnificent work of literature as well as vital documentary source for scholars and students. In it the artist discusses his own paintings, his life, his sorrow and hopes; the paintings and sculptures of Rubens, Michelangelo, Constable, Bonington and others: old and new literature and the music of Mozart, Rossini and Chopin, the events of his time.

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.

Henri Dorra, in his comprehensive new book, presents the development and the aesthetic theories of the symbolist movement in art and literature. Included are writings (many never before translated or reprinted) by artists, designers, architects, and critics, along with Dorra's learned commentary. Fifty photographs of symbolist works complement his encyclopedic coverage. Dorra traces symbolism and its roots from artist to artist and critic to critic from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The decorative arts and architecture are examined as well as painting and sculpture. The Arts and Crafts movement, art nouveau, the work of Eiffel in France, and that of Sullivan in the United States are well represented. The close relations between symbolist poets and artists are reflected in the chapter on literary developments. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarme are here, but so, too, are writers less well known. A section on the post-impressionists and the "artists of the soul" rounds out Dorra's rich and varied text, and his Epilogue lays the groundwork for what was to follow symbolism. Here Dorra discusses, on the one hand, the new trend toward abstraction and the related development of formalist criticism and, on the other, the new stress on interplay between the tangible and the intangible, fact and dream, that eventually led to surrealism. Dorra beautifully integrates the different aesthetic branches of symbolism, the different media, and national variations, without ever losing sight of the whole. The historical context provided makes this a particularly appealing collection for students and scholars of art history and literature, as well as for anyone interested inthe evolution of symbolism.

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.

Sculptors Against the State considers the relation of anarchist ideology to avant-garde sculpture through an examination of three iconic artists whose work transformed European modernism: Umberto Boccioni, Jacob Epstein, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Addressing such complex subjects as sexual liberation, homosexuality, the history of emotions, the ethics of violence, and tactics of nonviolent resistance, Mark Antliff demonstrates how sculptural processes were shaped by forms of anarchism calculated to foster a radical community. The anarchist view that the State is a state of mind and a set of social relationships is a central theme Antliff uses to explore not only the art of Boccioni, Epstein, and Gaudier-Brzeska but the associated aesthetics of radical luminaries such as Oscar Wilde, F. T. Marinetti, and Ezra Pound. Taking Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Epstein’s Tomb of Oscar Wilde, and Gaudier-Brzeska’s Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound as a starting point, Antliff argues that these sculptors saw the arts as a radical catalyst for an entirely new constellation of interpersonal relations and psychological dispositions—ones antithetical to those propagated by the State. Powerfully argued and informed by extensive archival research, Sculptors Against the State provides a new understanding of these artists, even as it sheds light on why contemporary anarchist theory is necessary for understanding the profound cultural impact modernism had during the twentieth century. Antliff’s work will be of interest to students and scholars of modernist art and literature, and particularly those who study the intersections between artistic practice and politics.

In this second volume of his classic essays on the Renaissance, E H Gombrich focuses on a theme of central importance: visual symbolism. He opens with a searching introduction ('The Aims and Limits of Iconology'), and follows with detailed studies of Botticelli, Mantegna, Raphael, Poussin and others. The volume concludes with an extended study of the philosophies of symbolism, demonstrating that the ideas which preoccupied the philosophers of the Renaissance are still very much alive today. Like its predecessor, Norm and Form, this volume is indispensable for all students of Renaissance art and thought as a work that has itself helped to shape the evolving discipline of art history. Reflecting the author's abiding concern with standards, values and problems of method, it also has a wider interest as an introduction to the fundamental questions involved in the interpretation of images.

A novel look at the relationship between Impressionist painting and photography and the forging of a national identity in France between 1850 and 1880 Between 1850 and 1880, Impressionist landscape painting and early forms of photography flourished within the arts in France. In the context of massive social and political change that also marked this era, painters and photographers composed competing visions of France as modern and industrialized or as rural and anti-modern. Impressionist France explores the resonances between landscape art and national identity as reflected in the paintings and photographs made during this period, examining and illustrating in particular the works of key artists such as Edouard Baldus, Gustave Le Gray, the Bisson Freres, Edouard Manet, Jean-Francois Millet, Claude Monet, Charles Negre, and Camille Pissarro. This ambitious premise focuses on the whole of France, exploring the relationship between landscape art and the notion of French nationhood across the country's varied and spectacular landscapes in seven geographical sections and four scholarly essays, which provide new information regarding the production and impact of French Impressionism. Distributed for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Saint Louis Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (10/19/13-02/09/14) Saint Louis Art Museum (03/16/14-07/06/14)