Modernitalia provides a map of the Italian twentieth century in the form of twelve essays by the celebrated cultural historian Jeffrey T. Schnapp. Shuttling back and forth between literature, architecture, design, and the visual arts, the volume explores the metaphysics of speed, futurist and dada typography, real and imaginary forms of architecture, shifting regimes of mass spectacle, the iconography of labour, exhibitions as modes of public mobilization and persuasion, and the emergence of industrial models of literary culture and communication. The figures featured in the book include Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Mario Morasso, Julius Evola, Piero Portaluppi, Giuseppe Terragni, Alessandro Blasetti, Massimo Bontempelli, Giorgio de Chirico, Bruno Munari, Curzio Malaparte, and Henry Furst. Alongside these human protagonists appear granite blocks that drive the design of modern monuments, military searchlights that animate civilian shows, worker armies viewed as machines, sunglasses that tiptoe along the boundary of the private and public, newsreels as twentieth-century interpretations of Trajan's column, and book covers and bindings that act as authorial self-portraits. The volume captures the Italian path to cultural modernity in all of its brilliance and multiplicity.

Museum Bodies provides an account of how museums have staged, prescribed and accommodated a repertoire of bodily practices, from their emergence in the eighteenth century to the present day. As long as museums have existed, their visitors have been scrutinised, both formally and informally, and their behaviour calibrated as a register of cognitive receptivity and cultural competence. Yet there has been little sustained theoretical or practical attention given to the visitors' embodied encounter with the museum. In Museum Bodies Helen Rees Leahy discusses the politics and practice of visitor studies, and the differentiation and exclusion of certain bodies on the basis of, for example, age, gender, educational attainment, ethnicity and disability. At a time when museums are more than ever concerned with size, demographic mix and the diversity of their audiences, as well as with the ways in which visitors engage with and respond to institutional space and content, this wide-ranging study of visitors' embodied experience of the museum is long overdue.

The first English-language monograph on the French dancer and model, Cleo de Merode and the Rise of Modern Celebrity Culture explores the haunting legacy of this intriguing and glamorous figure, an international celebrity at the dawn of modern celebrity culture. Situating Merode at a pivotal moment in the history of fame and visual culture, this study analyzes how technological and societal changes led to our star-struck modernity. Merode was one of the earliest examples of fame born from mass visual culture, as newly available postcards circulated her image around the globe. Through Merode, Michael D. Garval illuminates broader trends of the Belle A0/00poque: persistent statue fetishism within a vibrant monumental culture, rampant exoticism amid unprecedented colonial expansion, the rapid growth of the illustrated press, the rise of female show business personalities, the advent of cinema and x-rays, and a burgeoning sense of new visual possibilities. The volume examines how Merode heralded modern celebrity icons; problematizes the status of women and women's bodies under intense public scrutiny; and exposes the paradoxes of a society captivated by a mass media-driven dream of intimacy from afar.Cleo de Merode and the Rise of Modern Celebrity Culture probes the neglected prehistory of a visual culture obsessed with celebrities and their images.

Even before the upheaval of the Revolution, France sought a new formal language for a regenerated nation. Nowhere is this clearer than in its tombs, some among its most famous modern sculpture-rarely discussed as funerary projects. Unlike other art-historical studies of tombs, this one frames sculptural examples within the full spectrum of the material funerary arts of the period, along with architecture and landscape. This book further widens the standard scope to shed new and needed light on the interplay of the funerary arts, tomb cult, and the mentalities that shaped them in France, over a period famous for profound and often violent change. Suzanne Glover Lindsay also brings the abundant recent work on the body to the funerary arts and tomb cult for the first time, confronting cultural and aesthetic issues through her examination of a celebrated sculptural type, the recumbent effigy of the deceased in death. Using many unfamiliar period sources, this study reinterprets several famous tombs and funerals and introduces significant enterprises that are little known today to suggest the prominent place held by tomb cult in nineteenth-century France. Images of the tombs complement the text to underline sculpture's unique formal power in funerary mode.

Sculpture was no occupation for a lady in Victorian Britain. Yet between 1837 and 1901 the number of professional female sculptors increased sixteen-fold. The four principal women sculptors of that era are the focus of this book. Once known for successful careers marked by commissions from the royal family, public bodies and private individuals, they are forgotten now. This book brings them back to light, addressing who they were, how they negotiated middle-class expectations and what kind of impact they had on changing gender roles. Based on their unpublished letters, papers and diaries coupled with contemporary portrayals of female sculptors by novelists, critics, essayists and colleagues, this is an unprecedented picture of the women sculptors' personal experience of preparing for and conducting careers as well as the public's perception of them. The author examines each woman's ability to use her position within the historical and cultural context as a platform from which to instigate change. The analytical emphasis throughout is on the art of negotiation and the result is an interdisciplinary work that delves deeply into the experience of an undervalued cohort of artists who had a disproportionate influence on Victorian social norms.

Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916), art critic, poet and homme de lettres, was a man whose vision transcended his native Belgium. With close ties to Mallarme in France and Rilke in Germany, Verhaeren, a peripatetic student of the arts, readily traveled to Paris, Berlin, Cassel, Vienna and Amsterdam. From the mid-1880s until his death in 1916, his many trips abroad resulted in a raft of essays and short monographs on the arts of the Northern Renaissance. Yet, despite the insights, scholarship and markedly precise and revealing descriptions of these studies, they have long been neglected in art historical circles, overshadowed, perhaps, by Verhaeren's own poetic outpourings and his numerous essays on contemporary art. In this book, Albert Alhadeff translates, edits, annotates and contextualizes these often brilliant and always revealing studies on artists such as Rembrandt, Rubens, Memling, Bruegel and Grunewald, masters from the North who worked mostly in Flanders, Holland and Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Alhadeff reveals, Verhaeren's studies of the masters of old in Germany, Flanders and the newly born Dutch Republic are as much about Verhaeren the man as they are about the subjects of his inquiries.

The first monograph to examine the depiction of reading women in French art of the early Third Republic, Women Readers in French Painting 1870-1890 evaluates the pictorial significance of this imagery, its critical reception, and its impact on notions of femininity and social relations. Covering a broad range of paintings, prints, and sculptures, this book shows how the liseuse was subjected to unprecedented levels of pictorial innovation by artists with widely differing aesthetic aims and styles. Depictions of readers are interpreted as contributions to changing notions of public and private life, female agency, and women's participation in cultural and political debates beyond the domestic household. This highly original book explores images of women readers from a range of social classes in both urban and rural settings. Such images are shown to have articulated concerns about the impact of female literacy on labour environments and family life while, in many cases, challenging conventions of gendered reading. Kathryn Brown also presents an alternative way of conceiving of modernity in relation to nineteenth-century art, a methodological departure from much recent art historical literature. Artists discussed range from Manet, Cassatt and Degas, to less familiar figures such as Lavieille, Carriere, Toulmouche and Tissot.

In a reevaluation of that period in Victorian illustration known as 'The Sixties,' a distinguished group of international scholars consider the impact of illustration on the act of reading; its capacity to reflect, construct, critique and challenge its audience's values; its response to older graphic traditions; and its assimilation of foreign influences. While focused on the years 1855 to 1875, the essays take up issues related to the earlier part of the nineteenth century and look forward to subsequent developments in illustration. The contributors examine significant figures such as Ford Madox Brown, Frederick Sandys, John Everett Millais, George John Pinwell, and Hablot Knight Browne in connection with the illustrated magazine, the mid-Victorian gift book, and changing visual responses to the novels of Dickens. Engaging with a number of theories and critical debates, the collection offers a detailed and provocative analysis of the nature of illustration: its production, consumption, and place within the broader contexts of mid-Victorian culture.

Examining colonial art through the lens of transculturation, the essays in this collection assess painting, sculpture, photography, illustration and architecture from 1770 to 1930 to map these art works' complex and unresolved meanings illuminated by the concept of transculturation. Authors explore works in which transculturation itself was being defined, formed, negotiated, and represented in the British Empire and in countries subject to British influence (the Congo Free State, Japan, Turkey) through cross-cultural encounters of two kinds: works created in the colonies subject over time to colonial and to postcolonial spectators' receptions, and copies or multiples of works that traveled across space located in several colonies or between a colony and the metropole, thus subject to multiple cultural interpretations.

This book explores interaction and competition between painting and literature in France, from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth, offering new readings of works by key figures including Paul Gauguin, Stephane Mallarme, Pablo Picasso and Andre Gide. Combining close visual and literary analysis with a broader examination of critical discourse, the volume uncovers a mutual but often contentious exchange of ideas. The author challenges habits of periodisation, drawing attention to the links between Symbolist and Cubist criticism. Issues such as the debate about 'literary' painting, the role of art criticism and artists' writings, as well as themes such as newspapers and gold, alchemy and forgery, are shown to connect the two centuries. In examining how the rejection of mimesis in painting affected literary responses to the visual arts, the book explores a shift in power from the verbal to the visual in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Focusing on an era that both inherited and irretrievably altered the form and the content of earlier art production, The Art-Journal and Fine Art Publishing in Victorian England, 1850-1880 argues that fine art practices and the audiences and markets for them were influenced by the media culture of art publishing and journalism in substantial and formative ways, perhaps more than at any other time in the history of English art. The study centers on forms of Victorian picture-making and the art knowledge systems defining them, and draws on the histories of art, literature, journalism, and publishing. The historical example employed in the book is that of the more than 800 steel-plate prints after paintings published in the London-based Art-Journal between 1850 and 1880. The cultural phenomenon of the Art Journal print is shown to be a key connector in mid-Victorian art appreciation by drawing out specific tropes of likeness. This study also examines the important links between paint and print; the aesthetic values and domestic aspirations of the Victorian middle class; and the inextricable intertwining of fine art and 'trade' publishing.

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Notebooks. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed then foil stamped. And they're powerfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example is based on 'Wheat Field with a Lark', 1887 by Vincent van Gogh (1853-90), and printed on silver.

This book examines illustrations created to accompany fictions written by several of the most popular authors published in Britain and America between 1885 and 1920. By studying the lavish illustrations that complemented not only initial serializations, but also subsequent publications of fictions by H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, James De Mille, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. G. Wells, the book demonstrates the significance of images to the fin de siecle romance form. In order to make fantastic plots seem possible, graphic artists worked hand in hand with authors to not only fill gaps in audience understanding, but also expand and deepen the meaning of these marvels. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, illustration studies, British and American history, and British and American literature.

This book offers an interpretative key to Virginia Woolf's visual and spatial strategies by investigating their nature, role and function. The author examines long-debated theoretical and critical issues with their philosophical implications, as well as Woolf's commitment to contemporary aesthetic theories and practices. The analytical core of the book is introduced by a historical survey of the interart relationship and significant critical theories, with a focus on the context of Modernism. The author makes use of three investigative tools: descriptive visuality, the widely debated notion of spatial form, and cognitive visuality. The cognitive and remedial value of Woolf's visual and spatial strategies is demonstrated through an inter-textual analysis of To the Lighthouse, The Waves and Between the Acts (with cross-references to Woolf's short stories and Jacob's Room). The development of Woolf's literary output is read in the light of a quest for unity, a formal attempt to restore parts to wholeness and to rescue Being from Nothingness.

Empty treasure chests dumped from departed ships is a quotation taken from David Dabydeen's poem The Old Map in which the hope of a new world is green but green symbolizes also the gangrene of the sailors. Such rather unsavory paradoxes can be found in the works of contemporary (post)postcolonial writers, who engage in a dialogue with literary history while actively re-shaping contemporary culture. Far from seeking easy reconciliations, the contemporary (post)postcolonial writers rewrite the colonial experiences in relation to art and literary works. The theme of this volume are the works by and about David Dabydeen, a Guianese British writer, poet and literary scholar, whose efforts have always been directed toward re-creating the lives forever lost; those of nameless slaves and coolies of the West Indies. His inspiration, in turn were, among others, the paintings of William Hogarth and Joseph Mallord William Turner. Accordingly, the papers collected in this book address the question of (post)colonialism in a contemporary (post)postcolonial reality.

Bringing forth fresh perspectives on Manet's art by established scholars, this volume places this compelling and elusive artist's painted A"uvre within a broader cultural context, and links his artistic preoccupations with literary and musical currents. Rather than seeking consensus on his art through one methodology, or focusing on one crucial work or period, this collection investigates the range of Manet's art in the context of his time and considers how his vision has shaped subsequent interpretations. Specific essays explore the relationship between Manet and Whistler; Emile Zola's attitude toward the artist; Manet's engagement with moral and ethical questions in his paintings; and the heritage of Charles Baudelaire and Clement Greenberg in critical responses to Manet. Through these and other analyses, this volume illuminates the scope of Manet's career, and indicates the crucial position the artist held in generating a modernist avant-garde aesthetic.

This is the first publication that narrates the significant contributions of Greek women in the various genres of the arts in a historical perspective from antiquity to contemporary Greece. It discusses Greek women in the disciplines of music, the visual arts, poetry and literature, film and theatre, and history. The historical roles of Greek women in music are examined including the first woman composer with preserved music that is a Byzantine-Greek. Readers will discover that it was a Greek woman philosopher who influenced the formation of Socrates' thinking and that the Iliad and Odyssey were actually written by a Hellenic woman but were later appropriated by Homer. Classic and contemporary Greek female writers are in the foreground as well as the modern art music and popular music by Greek women composers. The roles of Greek women in drama are examined and the significant works of contemporary Greek women artists are recognized.

Revealing that nineteenth-century photography goes beyond the functional to reflect the aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural concerns of the time, this study proposes that each photographic image of architecture be studied both as a primary visual document and an object of aesthetic inquiry. This multi-faceted approach drives Architecture in Nineteenth-Century Photographs: Essays on Reading a Collection. Despite three decades of post-colonial, post-structuralist and gender-conscious criticism, the study of architectural photography continues to privilege technical virtuosity. This volume offers a thematic exploration of the material, and a socio-historical examination that allows consideration of questions that have not been addressed comprehensively before in a single publication. Themes include exoticism and "armchair tourism"; the absence of women from architectural photography; the role of photographs as commodities; vernacular architecture and the picturesque; and historic preservation, urban renewal, and nationalism. Micheline Nilsen analyzes photographs from France and England"the two countries where photography was invented"and from around the world, representing a corpus of over 10,000 photographs from the Janos Scholz Collection of Nineteenth-Century Photographs of the Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame.

The Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti participated in Parisian literary and cultural circles from the early meetings of the Surrealists to existentialism and the diverse currents in art and poetry that followed. Numerous writers were inspired to respond to his sculpture, drawing, painting and publications during his lifetime and after his death in 1966. This book considers examples of poesie critique devoted to Giacometti's work by major French poets and thinkers from Andre Breton to Yves Bonnefoy. Through close readings of key texts, it discusses the extent to which each writer has succeeded in overcoming the dichotomy between a text and its visual stimulus that so often leads to a hierarchical relationship. Many of these writers focus on the materiality of Giacometti's works of art and of the written word. Examination of their writings thus allows new understandings of poesie critique and ekphrasis to be developed.

In 1874 Claude Monet's painting Impression, Sunrise caused uproar among the critics and a revolution in painting. His inventiveness was inexhaustible: with paintings of haystacks, poplars and, finally, the enchanting water-lilies of Giverny, Monet captured light in all its fleeting qualities. At last, almost blind - 'I fear the dark more than death' - he feverishly produced near-abstract landscapes of water and reflection, a vision of nature that paved the way for the art of our own times. Including hundreds of beautiful reproductions and contemporary illustrations, comprehensive text, documentary witness accounts and letters, this pocket-sized book is perfect both for the lover of Monet and of the history of Impressionism.

Where, how, by whom and for what were the first museums of contemporary art created? These are the key questions addressed by J. Pedro Lorente in this new book. In it he explores the concept and history of museums of contemporary art, and the shifting ways in which they have been imagined and presented. Following an introduction that sets out the historiography and considering questions of terminology, the first part of the book then examines the paradigm of the Musee des Artistes Vivants in Paris and its equivalents in the rest of Europe during the nineteenth century. The second part takes the story forward from 1930 to the present, presenting New York's Museum of Modern Art as a new universal role model that found emulators or 'contramodels' in the rest of the Western world during the twentieth century. An epilogue, reviews recent museum developments in the last decades. Through its adoption of a long-term, worldwide perspective, the book not only provides a narrative of the development of museums of contemporary art, but also sets this into its international perspective. By assessing the extent to which the great museum-capitals - Paris, London and New York in particular - created their own models of museum provision, as well as acknowledging the influence of such models elsewhere, the book uncovers fascinating perspectives on the practice of museum provision, and reveals how present cultural planning initiatives have often been shaped by historical uses.

Based on meticulous archival research, Dennis M. Read's study offers the most accurate and thorough account to date of the engraver, editor, and arts enthusiast R. H. Cromek. Though he is best known today as William Blake's nemesis, Cromek made significant contributions to the vitality of the arts in nineteenth-century Britain. Read traces Cromek's early years as an accomplished engraver, his collaborations and falling out with Blake, and his editing and publishing ventures, showing him to be a pioneer who recognized the opportunities of the emerging market economy. Read's descriptions of Cromek's disastrous associations with the Chalcographic Society, his publication of Robert Burns's unpublished works, and his duping by the perpetrator of a literary hoax make for fascinating reading and tell us much about the commercial art and publishing scenes in England and Scotland. Perhaps most important, Read salvages Cromek's reputation as an unscrupulous exploiter of Blake and others. A fuller and more balanced portrait emerges that shows Cromek's efforts to bring the arts to emerging cities of the midlands and beyond, describes his friendships and associations with luminaries of the fine arts and literature such as Leigh Hunt and Benjamin West, and challenges more biased reports of his successes and failures as an entrepreneur.

Through his intense vision Van Gogh was able to create paintings that speak directly to us all, and today this disturbed and rejected misfit is the most universally loved of all artists. The story of his thirty seven years of poverty, loneliness and failure is in fact a triumphant saga of absolute dedication and the final realization of genius. This extravagantly illustrated volume in the hugely popular New Horizons series, includes the story of his life; his relationships with his brother Theo and contemporaries such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro and Gauguin; his descent into madness and his eventual suicide. As well as the many reproductions of paintings and drawings by Van Gogh and his contemporaries, extensive documentary evidence includes extracts from his letters, critical writings and documentary photographs.

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.