The Arts and Crafts Movement was a reaction to the brutality of working life and the sterility of industrial design in Victorian Britain. Although Arts and Crafts was initially a mediaeval revival, the movement was always about the artist craftsman and the appropriate use of materials, rather than any single design tradition. The movement was inspired and led by William Morris, whose company was founded in 1861 and produced a full range of interior furnishings, including tiles. These were designed by Morris himself, and also by leading artists and architects of the day such as Edward Burne Jones and Philip Webb. The term Arts and Crafts was formalised in the late 1880s, and many designers, artists and craftsmen joined Morris in this new movement, and leading designers including Walter Crane and C. F. A. Voysey produced distinctive and now highly collectable ceramic tiles that were used to decorate the bathrooms and the fireplaces of the wealthy and discerning. This book, with its companion on the work of William de Morgan, is the first complete introduction to British Arts and Crafts tiles from 1860 to 1920.

Spirited Prospect: A Portable History of Western Art from the Paleolithic to the Modern Era is a lively, scholarly survey of the great artists, works, and movements that make up the history of Western art. Within the text, important questions are addressed: What is art, and who is an artist? What is the West, and what is the Canon? Is the Western Canon closed or exclusionary? Why is it more important than ever for individuals to engage and understand it? Readers are escorted on a concise, chronological tour of Western visual culture, beginning with the first art produced before written history. They learn about the great ancient cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Italy; the advent of Christianity and its manifestations in Byzantine, Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art; and the fragmentation of old traditions and the proliferation of new artistic choices that characterize the Enlightenment and the Modern Era. The revised second edition features improved formatting, juxtaposition, sizing, and spacing of images throughout. Spirited Prospect is an ideal textbook for introductory courses in the history of art, as well as courses in studio art and Western civilization at all levels.

In this fundamental rethinking of the rise of modernism from its beginnings in the Impressionist movement, Robert Jensen reveals that market discourses were pervasive in the ideological defense of modernism from its very inception and that the avant-garde actually thrived on the commercial appeal of anti-commercialism at the turn of the century. The commercial success of modernism, he argues, depended greatly on possession of historical legitimacy. The very development of modern art was inseparable from the commercialism many of its proponents sought to transcend. Here Jensen explores the economic, aesthetic, institutional, and ideological factors that led to its dominance in the international art world by the early 1900s. He emphasizes the role of the emerging dealer/gallery market and of modernist art historiographies in evaluating modern art and legitimizing it through the formation of a canon of modernist masters.

In describing the canon-building of modern dealerships, Jensen considers the new "ideological dealer" and explores the commercial construction of artistic identity through such rhetorical concepts as temperament and "independent art" and through such institutional structures as the retrospective. His inquiries into the fate of the "juste milieu," a group of dissidents who saw themselves as "true heirs" of Impressionism, and his look at a new form of art history emerging in Germany further expose a linear, dealer- oriented history of modernist art constructed by or through the modernists themselves.

A comprehensive survey of The Phillips Collection's spectacular holdings in American art American art has been essential to The Phillips Collection since its founding by Duncan Phillips in 1921. Phillips's collecting interests were decidedly against the grain: he acquired the work of living American artists, especially those outside the mainstream, when it was unpopular to do so and promoted diversity, as seen in works by self-taught artists, artists of color, and naturalized Americans, resulting in a rich assembly of independent-minded artists, including Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, and Georgia O'Keeffe. The Phillips Collection's superb collection of American art, acquired over half a century, is presented here for the first time in a comprehensive overview, featuring 160 works from heroes of the late 19th century-such as William Merritt Chase, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer, who set the course for modern art in America-to abstract expressionists Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko, whose efforts to create a new visual language following World War II brought a new global significance to American art. A perennial guide to this important collection, the book includes scholarly essays on Phillips and on the Rothko Room, introductions to key groups of works in the collection, more than one hundred biographies of the most influential artists represented, and a chronology of Phillip's acquisitions and interactions with American artists. Published in association with The Phillips Collection Exhibition Schedule: The Phillips Collection (03/01/14-08/31/14)

The Body in Time looks at two different genres in relation to the construction of femininity in late nineteenth-century France: Degas's representation of ballet dancers and the transforming tradition of female portraiture. Class, gender, power, and agency are at stake in both arenas, but they play themselves out in different ways via different pictorial languages. Degas's depictions of anonymous young female ballerinas at the Paris Opera reflect his fascination with the physical exertions and prosaic setting of the dancer's sexualized body. Unlike the standard Romantic depictions of the ballerina, Degas's dancers are anonymous spread-legged workers on public display. Female portraiture and self-portraiture, in contrast, depicted the unique and the distinctive: privileged women, self-assured individuals transgressing gender conventions. Focusing on Degas's representation of the dancer, Tamar Garb examines the development of Degas's oeuvre from its early Realist documentary ambitions to the abstracted Symbolist renderings of the feminine as cypher in his later works. She argues that despite the apparent depletion of social significance and specificity, Degas's later works remain deeply enmeshed in contemporary gendered ways of viewing and experiencing art and life. Garb also looks at the transformation in the genre of portraiture heralded by the "new woman," examining the historical expectations of female portraiture and demonstrating how these expectations are challenged by new notions of female autonomy and interiority. Women artists such as Anna Klumpke, Rosa Bonheur, and Anna Bilinska deployed the language of Realism in their own self-representation. The figure of femininity remained central to the personal, political, and pictorial imperatives of artists across the spectrum of modern aesthetics. Gender and genre intersect throughout this book to show how these categories mutually impact one another.