Published in 1981: This is two-hundred catalogues of the Major Exhibitions reproduced in facsimile in forty-seven volumes.

Annie Holt identifies the roots of contemporary Euro-American practices of costume design, in which costumes are an integrated part of the dramaturgy rather than a reflection of an individual performer's taste or status. She argues that in the period 1820-1920, as part of the larger project of modernism across the artistic and cultural field, the functions of "clothing" and "costume" diverged. Onstage apparel took on a more specific semiotic task, acting as a fresh channel for the flow of information between the performer, the literary text, and the spectator. Modernizing Costume Design traces how five kinds of artists - directors, performers, writers, couturiers, and painters - made key contributions to this new model of costume design. Holt shows that by 1920, costume design shifted in status from craft to art.

Race, Representation & Photography in 19th-Century Memphis: from Slavery to Jim Crow presents a rich interpretation of African American visual culture. Using Victorian era photographs, engravings, and pictorial illustrations from local and national archives, this unique study examines intersections of race and image within the context of early African American communities. It emphasizes black agency, looking at how African Americans in Memphis manipulated the power of photography in the creation of free identities. Blacks are at the center of a study that brings to light how wide-ranging practices of photography were linked to racialized experiences in the American south following the Civil War. Jenkins' book connects the social history of photography with the fields of visual culture, art history, southern studies, gender, and critical race studies.

Light Touches: Cultural Practices of Illumination, 1800-1900 explores how urban lives in the nineteenth century were increasingly touched by innovations in the technologies and aesthetics of illumination. Dramatic changes in qualities of light - and darkness - became acutely palpable to the human sensorium; using, seeing, feeling, and being in light were now matters of intense personal and cultural concern. Light gave meaningful vitality to the period's material culture, and light itself became something to be perceptually consumed. Over the course of six chapters Alice Barnaby traces how light was used in amateur artistic pastimes, interior design and clothing fashions, spectacular public amusements, volatile street demonstrations, and art gallery designs. From these previously unexplored examples a more complex history of light in the period emerges. Society's fascination with illumination, its desire to work with it and make meaning from it gave rise to a distinctly new set of cultural practices. Through these practices unexpected discoveries about the modern world were revealed. Light proved to be instrumental in everyday acts of experimentation and imaginative enquiry. Barnaby offers an intervention into the dominant scholarly narrative of the nineteenth century which traditionally reads modernity as synonymous with the formation of a spectacular, disembodied visuality. Light Touches, in contrast, returns vision to the body and foregrounds the actively felt - as well as seen - sensation of light. In coming to understand these cultural practices of illumination, the book reconsiders many assumptions about nineteenth-century modernity.

"Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century?" The question that guides this volume stems from Walter Benjamin's studies of nineteenth-century Parisian culture as the apex of capitalist aesthetics. Thirteen scholars test Benjamin's ideas about the centrality of Paris, formulated in the 1930s, from a variety of methodological perspectives. Many investigate the underpinnings of the French capital's reputation and mythic force, which was based largely upon the city's capacity to put itself on display. Some of the authors reassess the famed centrality of Paris from the vantage point of our globalized twenty-first century by acknowledging its entanglements with South Africa, Turkey, Japan, and the United States. The volume equally studies a broader range of media than Benjamin did himself: from modernist painting and printmaking, photography, and illustration to urban planning. The essays conclude that Paris did in many ways function as the epicenter of modernity's international reach, especially in the years from 1850 to 1900, but did so only as a consequence of the idiosyncratic force of its mythic image. Above all, the essays affirm that the study of late nineteenth-century Paris still requires nimble and innovative approaches commensurate with its legend and global aura.

This book is about taking an image- a drawing, painting, digital photograph, computer design or photocopy- and, using simple methods, turning it into a piece of textile art. The author takes you through a variety of techniques for creating the image, such as scanning mixed-media artwork and digital photographs, or using imaging software to create exciting patterns and effects. No technical knowledge is required to use this book, as it offers easy-to-follow instructions, and the materials, technology and equipment are all readily available. But at the centre of the book lies the use of stitch. Having produced the image and transferred it to fabric, the next step is to enhance it with hand or machine embroidery. Innovative methods, both in the image transfer and the stitch, are simplified and broken down into the easy stages. Throughout the book, inspirational ideas are offered to get your creativity going. From books to bangles, panels, bags and vessels, the book offers all textile artists ideas to expand their creative work.

Searing disputes over caricature have recently sparked flames across the world"the culmination, not the beginning, of the story of one of modernity's definitive artistic practices. Modern visual satire erupts during a period marked by reform and revolution, by cohering nationalisms and expanding empires, and by the emerging discipline of art history. This has long been recognized as its Golden Age. It is time to look anew. In The Efflorescence of Caricature, 1759-1838, an international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational team of scholars reconfigures the geography of modern visual satire, as the expansive narrative reaches from North America to Europe, to China and the Ottoman Empire. Caricature's specific visual cultures are also laid bare, its iconographic means and material support, as well as the diverse milieu of its making"the military, the art academy, diplomacy, politics, art criticism, and popular entertainment. Some of its greatest practitioners"James Gillray and Honore Daumier"are seen in a new light, alongside some of their far flung and opportunistic pastichers. Most trenchantly, assumptions about the consequences of caricature's rise come under intense scrutiny, interrogated for its cherished and long-vaunted civilizational claims on individual character, artistic supremacy, political liberty, and global domination.

This book investigates how identities have been constructed in Australian art from 1788 onwards. Ian McLean shows that Australian art, and the writing of its history, has, since settlement, been in a dialogue (although often submerged) with Aboriginal art and culture; and that this dialogue is inextricably interwoven with the struggle to find an identity in the antipodes. Beginning with a discussion of how Australia was imagined by Europeans before colonisation, McLean traces the representation of indigeneity through the history of Australian art, and the concomitant invention of an Australian subjectivity. He argues that the colonising culture invested far more in indigenous aspects of the country and its inhabitants than it has been willing to admit. McLean considers artists and their work within a cultural context, and also provides a contemporary theoretical and critical context for his claims.

Fleshing out surfaces is the first English-language book on skin and flesh tones in art. It considers flesh and skin in art theory, image making and medical discourse in seventeenth to nineteenth-century France. Describing a gradual shift between the early modern and the modern period, it argues that what artists made when imitating human nakedness was not always the same. Initially understood in terms of the body's substance, of flesh tones and body colour, it became increasingly a matter of skin, skin colour and surfaces. Each chapter is dedicated to a different notion of skin and its colour, from flesh tones via a membrane imbued with nervous energy to hermetic borderline. Looking in particular at works by Fragonard, David, Girodet, Benoist and Ingres, the focus is on portraits, as facial skin is a special arena for testing painterly skills and a site where the body and the image become equally expressive. -- .

The first half of this fascinating book contains a detailed exploration of Van Gogh's life, including his background, early career, influences and relationships. Beginning with his birth in 1853, it details his childhood, family life, education and work-life before he began painting in 1880. The second half of the book comprises an illustrated and comprehensive gallery, presenting over 280 representations of his significant works, from his early sketches and paintings to the hugely famous Sunflowers, Irises and The Starry Night. These superb reproductions are accompanied by thorough analysis within the context of Van Gogh's life and technique.

In the work of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) lies an impact akin to a sudden acquisition of sight. His landscapes and seascapes scorch the eye with such ravishing light and color, with such elemental force, it is as if the sun itself were gleaming out of the frame. Appropriately known as "the painter of light," Turner worked in print, watercolor, and oils to transform landscape from serene contemplative scenes to pictures pulsating with life. He anchored his work to the River Thames and to the sea, but in the historical context of the Industrial Revolution, also integrated boats, trains, and other markers of human activity, which juxtaposes the thrust of civilization against the forces of nature. This book covers Turner's illustrious, wide-ranging repertoire to introduce an artist who combined a traditional genre with a radical modernism. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

A vivid tour of the town of Arles, guided by one of its most famous visitors: Vincent van Gogh. Once admired as "a little Rome" on the banks of the Rhone, the town of Arles in the south of France had been a place of significance long before the painter Vincent van Gogh arrived in February of 1888. Aware of Arles's history as a haven for poets, van Gogh spent an intense fifteen months there, scouring the city's streets and surroundings in search of subjects to paint when he wasn't thinking about other places or lamenting his woeful circumstances. In Vincent's Arles, Linda Seidel serves as a guide to the mysterious and culturally rich town of Arles, taking us to the places immortalized by van Gogh and cherished by innumerable visitors and pilgrims. Drawing on her extensive expertise on the region and the medieval world, Seidel presents Arles then and now as seen by a walker, visiting sites old and new. Roman, Romanesque, and contemporary structures come alive with the help of the letters the artist wrote while in Arles. The result is the perfect blend of history, art, and travel, a chance to visit a lost past and its lingering, often beautiful, traces in the present.

This book is about encounters between art and industry in nineteenth-century Britain. It looks beyond the oppositions established by later interpretations of the work of John Ruskin, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement to reveal surprising examples of collaboration - between artists, craftspeople, designers, inventors, curators, engineers and educators - during a crucial period in the formation of the cultural and commercial identity of Britain and its colonies. Across thirteen chapters by fourteen contributors, Art versus industry? explores such diverse subjects as the production of lace, the mechanical translation of sculpture, the display of stained glass, the use of the kaleidoscope in painting and pattern design, the emergence of domestic electric lighting and the development of art and design education and international exhibitions in India. -- .

Painters Robert Duncanson (ca. 1821-1872) and Edward Bannister (1828-1901) and sculptor Mary Edmonia Lewis (ca. 1844-1907) each became accomplished African American artists. But as emerging art makers of color during the antebellum period, they experienced numerous incidents of racism that severely hampered their pursuits of a profession that many in the mainstream considered the highest form of social cultivation. Despite barriers imposed upon them due to their racial inheritance, these artists shared a common cause in demanding acceptance alongside their white contemporaries as capable painters and sculptors on local, regional, and international levels. Author Naurice Frank Woods Jr. provides an in-depth examination of the strategies deployed by Duncanson, Bannister, and Lewis that enabled them to not only overcome prevailing race and gender inequality, but also achieve a measure of success that eventually placed them in the top rank of nineteenth-century American art. Unfortunately, the racism that hampered these three artists throughout their careers ultimately denied them their rightful place as significant contributors to the development of American art. Dominant art historians and art critics excluded them in their accounts of the period. In this volume, Woods restores their artistic legacies and redeems their memories, introducing these significant artists to rightful, new audiences.

Martha Banta reaches across several disciplines to investigate America's early quest to shape an aesthetic equal to the nation's belief in its cultural worth. Marked by an unusually wide-ranging sweep, the book focuses on three major "testing grounds" where nineteenth-century Americans responded to Ralph Waldo Emerson's call to embrace "everything" in order to uncover the theoretical principles underlying "the idea of creation." The interactions of those who rose to this urgent challenge--artists, architects, writers, politicians, and the technocrats of scientific inquiry--brought about an engrossing tangle of achievements and failures. The first section of the book traces efforts to advance the status of the arts in the face of the aspersion that America lacked an Art Soul as deep as Europe's. Following that is a hard look at heated political debates over how to embellish the architecture of Washington, D.C., with the icons of cherished republican ideals. The concluding section probes novels in which artists' lives are portrayed and aesthetic principles tested.

Each year between 1819 and 1825, John Constable (1776-1837) submitted a monumental canvas to the Royal Academy of Arts in London for display in the annual Exhibition. These so-called six-footers vividly captured the life of the River Stour in Suffolk, where Constable grew up and where he returned to paint each year. The Leaping Horse, the last of these, now a major work in the Academy's collection, is the subject of this fascinating new book. Humphreys explores Constable's often avant-garde working methods, as well as his struggle to gain full acceptance within the art establishment of the early nineteenth century. With reproductions of his full-scale preliminary sketches as well as brand new photography of the painting itself, this book is the ideal companion for art lovers who seek a deeper appreciation of Constable's iconic depictions of the English countryside.

Winslow Homer was the antithesis of the unkempt bohemian artist of the nineteenth century. Yet he is ranked as one of America's greatest painters. The reason is not hard to discover, for Winslow Homer's powerful epic statements spoke for America with a breadth that few other artists have achieved. This is a lively, intimate, and immensely readable portrait of the artist that throws a new light on Homer's life and puts it in fresh perspective, concentrating on Homer's years at Prout's Neck on Maine's rugged coast, where he would create his finest paintings, from 1883 until his death in 1920.

Without question, the tache (blot, patch, stain) is a central and recurring motif in nineteenth-century modernist painting. Manet's and the Impressionists' rejection of academic finish produced a surface where the strokes of paint were presented directly, as patches or blots, then indirectly as legible signs. Cezanne, Seurat, and Signac painted exclusively with patches or dots. Through a series of close readings, this book looks at the tache as one of the most important features in nineteenth-century modernism. The tache is a potential meeting point between text and image and a pure trace of the artist's body. Even though each manifestation of tacheism generates its own specific cultural effects, this book represents the first time a scholar has looked at tacheism as a hidden continuum within modern art. With a methodological framework drawn from the semiotics of text and image, the author introduces a much-needed fine-tuning to the classic terms index, symbol, and icon. The concept of the tache as a 'crossing' of sign-types enables finer distinctions and observations than have been available thus far within the Peircean tradition. The 'sign-crossing' theory opens onto the whole terrain of interaction between visual art, art criticism, literature, philosophy, and psychology.

"Radical and inspiring ... Yanagi's vision puts the connection between heart and hand before the transient and commercial" - Edmund de Waal The daily lives of ordinary people are replete with objects, common things used in commonplace settings. These objects are our constant companions in life. As such, writes Soetsu Yanagi, they should be made with care and built to last, treated with respect and even affection. They should be natural and simple, sturdy and safe - the aesthetic result of wholeheartedly fulfilling utilitarian needs. They should, in short, be things of beauty. In an age of feeble and ugly machine-made things, these essays call for us to deepen and transform our relationship with the objects that surround us. Inspired by the work of the simple, humble craftsmen Yanagi encountered during his lifelong travels through Japan and Korea, they are an earnest defence of modest, honest, handcrafted things - from traditional teacups to jars to cloth and paper. Objects like these exemplify the enduring appeal of simplicity and function: the beauty of everyday things.

Create innovative and imaginative wooden cane handles in a wide variety of shapes. The 169 clear color photos detail the process and provide examples sure to inspire wood carvers, cane makers, and cane collectors alike. \nFeatured are examples in zebra, Colorplay, and holly woods in the female form, as birds, animals, lips, and low relief decoration. Wood carving canes can be fun with this book.

The remarkable popularity of political likenesses in the Victorian period is the central theme of this book, which explores how politicians and publishers exploited new visual technology to appeal to a broad public. The first study of the role of commercial imagery in nineteenth-century politics, Politics personified shows how visual images projected a favourable public image of politics and politicians. Drawing on a vast and diverse range of sources, this book highlights how and why politics was visualised. Beginning with an examination of the visual culture of reform, the book goes on to study how Liberals, Conservatives and Radicals used portraiture to connect with supporters, the role of group portraiture, and representations of Victorian MPs. The final part of the book examines how major politicians, including Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli, interacted with mass commercial imagery. The book will appeal to a broad range of scholars and students across political, social and cultural history, art history and visual studies, cultural and media studies and literature. -- .

The late nineteenth-century Biloxi potter, George Ohr, was considered an eccentric in his time but has emerged as a major figure in American art since the discovery of thousands of examples of his work in the 1960s. Currently, Ohr is celebrated as a solitary genius who foreshadowed modern art movements. While an intriguing narrative, this view offers a narrow understanding of the man and his work that has hindered serious consideration. Ellen J. Lippert, in her expansive study of Ohr and his Gilded Age context, counters this fable. The tumultuous historical moment that Ohr inhabited was a formative force in his life and work. Using primary documentation, Lippert identifies specific cultural changes that had the most impact on Ohr. Developments in visual display and the altered role of artists, the southerner redefined in the wake of the Civil War, interest in handicraft as an alternative to rampant mass production, emerging tenets of social thought seeking to remedy worker exploitation, and new assessments of morals and beauty as a result of collapsed ideals all played into the positioning Ohr purposefully designed for himself. The second part of Lippert's study applies these observations to Ohr's body of work, interpreting his stylistic originality to be expressions of the contradictions and oppositions particular to late nineteenth-century America. Ohr threw his inspiration into being both the sophisticate and the ""rube,"" the commercial huckster and the selfless artist, the socialist and the individualist, the ""old-fashioned"" craftsman and the ""artist-genius."" He created art pottery as both a salable commodity and a priceless creation. His work could be ugly and deformed (or even obscene) and beautiful. Lippert reveals that far from isolated, Ohr and his creations were very much products of his inspired engagement with the late nineteenth century.

Varied and deliberately diverse, this group of essays provides a reassessment of the life and work of the popular nineteenth-century artist Samuel Palmer. While scholarly publications have been published recently which reassess Palmer's achievement, those works primarily consider the artist in isolation. This volume examines his work in relation to a wider art world and analyses areas of his life and output that have until now received little attention, reinstating the study of Palmer's work within broader debates about landscape and cultural history. In Samuel Palmer Revisited, the contributors provide a fresh perspective on Palmer's work, its context and its influence.