Discover the history of design with this gorgeous visual celebration of key pieces, movements, and designers, from the Arts and Craft movement to the digital age. Arranged chronologically, Design traces the evolution of design from its roots to the present day, from early chairs, pottery, and homewares to cars, graphic design, and product design. It introduces all the key designers, manufacturers, and objects, illustrating how and why different styles emerged and became popular. It also provides a fascinating insight into design movements, showing how each one began and explaining its philosophy and visual style, from the Arts and Crafts movement to mid-century modern and contemporary. Featuring expert analysis, stunning photography, and a huge range of objects both familiar and extraordinary, Design explains what makes a truly great design and reveals the hidden stories behind the everyday things all around us. With profiles of famous designers and manufacturers, such as William Morris, the Bauhaus, Alvar Aalto, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Vitra, and stunning images of iconic buildings and interiors, it provides a glorious and comprehensive view of classic design across the last two centuries.

Migrating the Black Body explores how visual media-from painting to photography, from global independent cinema to Hollywood movies, from posters and broadsides to digital media, from public art to graphic novels-has shaped diasporic imaginings of the individual and collective self. How is the travel of black bodies reflected in reciprocal black images? How is blackness forged and remade through diasporic visual encounters and reimagined through revisitations with the past? And how do visual technologies structure the way we see African subjects and subjectivity? This volume brings together an international group of scholars and artists who explore these questions in visual culture for the historical and contemporary African diaspora. Examining subjects as wide-ranging as the appearance of blackamoors in Russian and Swedish imperialist paintings, the appropriation of African and African American liberation images for Chinese Communist Party propaganda, and the role of YouTube videos in establishing connections between Ghana and its international diaspora, these essays investigate routes of migration, both voluntary and forced, stretching across space, place, and time.

Who is "German"? What defines "Germanness"? These questions about national identity have continued to confound both Germans and foreign observers in light of Germany's complex history: its changing borders between 1871 and 1989 make even a geographic definition of the nation complex, let alone allowing for a clear definition of the national character. Questions about German identity continue to play out not only in political discussions but also in visual cultural forms. This essay collection examines the multi-faceted nature of German identity through the lens of myriad forms of visual representation. The contributors explore the nature of German national identity in different historical periods from the Middle Ages to the present and consider how conceptions of that identity have been depicted across the broad spectrum of visual culture: from painting to sculpture, advertising to architecture, television and film to installation art. Because of the unusual approach, the essays address broad questions about identity formation, authenticity, and affirmation in the German context. Together, the essays in this volume demonstrate the complexities of identity construction and offer new insights into the "German Question" from the perspective of visual culture.

Details of Consequence examines a trait that is taken for granted and rarely investigated in fin-de-siecle French music: ornamental extravagance. Considering why such composers as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Gabriel Faure, Igor Stravinsky, and Erik Satie, turned their attention to the seemingly innocuous and allegedly superficial phenomenon of ornament at pivotal moments of their careers, this book shows that the range of decorative languages and unusual ways in which ornament is manifest in their works doesn't only suggest a willingness to decorate or render music beautiful. Rather, in keeping with the sorts of changes that decorative expression was undergoing in the work of Eugene Grasset, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and other painters, composers also invested their creative energies in re-imagining ornament, relying on a variety of decorative techniques to emphasize what was new and unprecedented in their treatment of form, meter, rhythm, melody, and texture. Furthermore, abundant displays of ornament in their music served to privilege associations that had been previously condemned in Western philosophy such as femininity, sensuality, exoticism, mystery, and fantasy. Alongside specific visual examples, author Gurminder Kaur Bhogal offers analyses of piano pieces, orchestral music, chamber works, and compositions written for the Ballets Russes to highlight the disorienting effect of musical experiments with ornament. Acknowledging the willingness of listeners to borrow vocabulary from the visual arts when describing decorative music, Bhogal probes the formation of art-music metaphors, and studies the cognitive impetus behind tendencies to posit stylistic parallels. She further illustrates that the rising expressive status of ornament in music and art had broad social and cultural implications as evidenced by its widespread involvement in debates on French identity, style, aesthetics, and progress. Drawing on a range of recent scholarship in the humanities at large, including studies in feminist theory, nationalism, and orientalism, Details of Consequence is an intensely interdisciplinary look at an important facet of fin-de-siecle French music.

The Cleghorn Collection reproduces more than 200 of the drawings from the Cleghorn Collection in colour, for the first time. These include drawings from nature, copies based on European prints, and Nature Prints made from herbarium specimens. They are the work of several South Indian artists and of pupils of the pioneering Madras School of Art.

Arthur Melville was arguably the most innovative and modernist Scottish artist of his generation and one of the finest British watercolourists of the nineteenth century, yet he avoided categorisation. In 1943 that the Scottish Colourist John Duncan Fergusson confessed that although they never met, "his work opened up to me the way to free painting - not merely freedom in the use of paint, but freedom of outlook". This book offers a comprehensive survey of Arthur Melville's (1855-1904) rich and varied career as artist-adventurer, Orientalist, forerunner of The Glasgow Boys, painter of modern life and re-interpreter of the landscape of Scotland. His travels inspired spectacular watercolours and paintings. This book illustrates around sixty of his works, each with a catalogue entry, and an essay by Kenneth McConkey, which discusses Melville's art and career.

Amid the background of social turbulence in the mid-nineteenth century, Gustave Courbet's unconventional paintings of real people in everyday scenes came to embody values with radical political implications. James Rubin addresses the entire range of Courbet's work: from his hunting scenes and spirited landscapes, to his portraits and erotic nudes. He combines a clear reading of the artist's paintings with a rigorous discussion of the unique personal, political and social framework within which they were created.

Once considered an outsider artist, after her show at the Guggenheim Museum was seen by more than half-a-mil-lion visitors, Hilma af Klint firmly established her place in art history. She has also been the subject of documenta-ry films and biographies. In 2013, Iris Muller-Westermann organized the first institutional exhibition of af Klint's work. Now she presents us with the latest information and research in an extensive survey show at the Moder-na Museet in Malmoe. Of crucial importance is the issue of spirituality in af Klint's painting-how she managed to translate both the material and the immaterial world into a pictorial vision. The accompanying exhibition catalogue is the first to investigate, from a variety of perspectives, the question of how this trailblazing abstract artist linked her painting to a higher consciousness. Essays by leading historians of theosophy and a quantum physicist, among others, provide enlightening insight into a world in which both the visualization of atoms and spiritual seances alike became artistic material-a world that fascinates us even more than ever.

A wide-ranging collection of essays written for the William Morris Society exploring the various intersections between the life, work and achievements of William Morris (1834-1896) and that of John Ruskin (1819-1900). Subjects covered include Ruskin's connection with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, the promotion of craft skills and meaningful work, Morris and the division of labour, Ruskin's engagement with education and the environment, Ruskin and the art and architecture of Red House, the parallels between Ruskin's support for Laxey Mill and Morris's Merton Abbey Works, the illustrated manuscript and the contrasts between Ruskin's Tory paternalism and Morris's revolutionary socialism. The book includes articles first published in The Journal of William Morris Studies between 1977 and 2012 and new pieces written especially for this volume. Ruskin's beliefs had a profound and lasting impact on Morris who wrote, upon first reading Ruskin whilst at Oxford University, that his views offered a "new road on which the world should travel" - a road that led Morris to social and political change.

This book explores Symbolist artists' fascination with ancient Greek art and myth, and how the erotic played a major role in this. For a brief period at the end of the 19th century the Symbolist movement inspired artists to turn inwards to the unconscious mind, endeavouring to unveil the secrets of human nature through their symbolic art. But above all their greatest interest, and fear, was man (and woman's) sexuality. Building upon the traditions of Academic neoclassicism, but fired with a new zeal, they turned back to Greek art and myth for inspiration. That classical legacy was once again a vehicle for artists to express their dreams, ideas and revelries. And so too their anxieties. For at times the frightening spectre of the sexual unconscious drove them to a new and innovative engagement with antiquity, including in ways never before tried in the history of the classical tradition. The unnerving sirens of Gustave Moreau, unearthly heroines of Odilon Redon, or leering fauns of Felicien Rops all played their role, among others, in this novel and unprecedented chapter in that tradition. This book shows how in their painting, drawing and sculpture the Symbolists re-invented Greek statuary and transposed it to new and unwonted contexts, as the imaginary inner worlds of artists were mapped onto the landscapes of Greek myth. It shows how they made of the Greek body, whether female, male, androgyne or sexual other, at once an object of beauty, desire, fear, and - at times - of horror.

Art Nouveau presents a new overview of the international Art Nouveau movement. Art Nouveau represented the search for a new style for a new age, a sense that the conditions of modernity called for fundamentally new means of expression. Art Nouveau emerged in a world transformed by industrialisation, urbanisation and increasingly rapid means of transnational exchange, bringing about new ways of living, working and creating. This book is structured around key themes for understanding the contexts behind Art Nouveau, including new materials and technologies, colonialism and imperialism, the rise of the 'modern woman', the rise of the professional designer and the role of the patron-collector. It also explores the new ideas that inspired Art Nouveau: nature and the natural sciences, world arts and world religions, psychology and new visions for the modern self. Ashby explores the movement through 41 case studies of artists and designers, buildings, interiors, paintings, graphic arts, glass, ceramics and jewellery, drawn from a wide range of countries.

Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934), the father of modern neuroscience and a Nobel laureate, was an exceptional artist. He devoted his life to the anatomy of the brain, the body's most complex and mysterious organ. His superhuman feats of visualisation, based on fanatically precise techniques and countless hours at the microscope, resulted in some of the most remarkable illustrations in the history of science. Beautiful Brain presents a selection of his exquisite drawings of brain cells, brain regions and neural circuits with accessible descriptive commentary. An art book at the crossroads of art and science, Beautiful Brain describes Cajal's contributions to neuroscience, explores his artistic roots and achievement and looks at his work in relation to contemporary neuroscience imaging techniques.

How can art, how can prose and poetry originate in spite of the restraints of manipulation, propaganda, and censorship? This study explores such issues by focusing on the cultural trajectory of Japanese American internment, both during and after World War II. Previously unknown documents as well as interviews with friends and family reveal new aspects of John Okada's (1923-1971) life and writing, providing a comprehensive biographical outline of the author. The book refutes the assumption that Okada's novel No-No Boy was all but shunned when first published in 1957. A close reading as well as a comparative study involving Italo Calvino's (1923-1985) Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1985) position Okada's only book as world literature.

Manet, Pissarro, Morisot, Cezanne, Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh and their colleagues made some of the most beautiful drawings in the history of art. This book sets drawings by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists in the context of late nineteenth-century France and explains why these particular works are as important as their paintings in the representation of modernity. A new approach to materials and a wholly inclusive attitude to exhibitions gave drawings a more elevated status in this period than ever before, which avant-garde artists welcomed in their preference for scenes from contemporary life. For the first time also, painting and drawing shared the same stylistic principles of spontaneity, freer handling and lack of finish. Pastels by Degas, watercolors by Cezanne, pen-and-ink drawings by Van Gogh and mixed media works by Toulouse-Lautrec have an autonomy of their own, which proved instrumental in the development of modern art. The distinguished art historian Christopher Lloyd examines the drawings of twenty of the leading Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists, highlighting an aspect of French avant-garde art that remains relatively unexplored and was of immense importance for the art movements that followed

George Stow was a Victorian man of many parts--poet, historian, ethnographer, artist, cartographer, and prolific writer. A geologist by profession, he became acquainted, through his work in the field, with the extraordinary wealth of rock paintings in the caves and shelters of the South African interior. Enchanted and absorbed by them, Stow set out to create a record of this creative work of the people who had tracked and marked the South African landscape decades and centuries before him.
"Unconquerable Spirit "reveals the scope and the beauty of his labors. Stow's paintings are more than just copies of what he found on the rocks. They are interpretations of the art of the San, informed by his own understanding of a particularly turbulent time in South African history and his sense of the tragic demise of the San way of life. This book celebrates his pioneering achievement and reminds us, too, of the richness of the imaginative universe of the San.

Mary Greensted tells the story of the birth and development of the Arts and Craft movement in Britain with the help of numerous illustrations showing the buildings, furniture, metalwork, and the people who influenced it. The movement was concerned with the revival of traditional crafts, and a return to the vernacular, and it had socialist ideals at its heart. This movement, which flourished in the early twentieth century, has not only bequeathed us with a wealth of fine objects and buildings, but also a way of thinking about life and craft that continues to influence many today.
Contains information on dozens of designers, artists, architects and thinkers, including:
William Morris
CFA Voysey
Charles Rennie Mackintosh
AH Mackmurdo
CR Ashbee
Ernest Gimson

Novel Craft explores an intriguing and under-studied aspect of cultural life in Victorian England: domestic handicrafts, the decorative pursuit that predated the Arts and Crafts movement. Talia Schaffer argues that the handicraft movement served as a way to critique the modern mass-produced commodity and the rapidly emerging industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century. Her argument is illustrated with the four pivotal novels that form her study's core-Gaskell's Cranford, Yonge's The Daisy Chain, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, and Oliphant's Phoebe Junior. Each features various handicrafts that subtly aim to subvert the socioeconomic changes being wrought by industrialization. Schaffer goes beyond straightforward textual analysis by shaping each chapter around the individual craft at the center of each novel (paper for Cranford, flowers and related arts in The Daisy Chain, rubbish and salvage in Our Mutual Friend, and the contrasting ethos of arts and crafts connoisseurship in Phoebe Junior). The domestic handicraft also allows for self-referential analysis of the text itself; in scenes of craft production (and destruction), the authors articulate the work they hope their own fictions perform. The handicraft also becomes a locus for critiquing contemporary aesthetic trends, with the novels putting forward an alternative vision of making value and understanding art. A work that combines cultural history and literary studies, Novel Craft highlights how attention to the handicraft movement's radically alternative views of materiality, consumption, production, representation, and subjectivity provides a fresh perspective on the major changes that shaped the Victorian novel as a whole.

This book constitutes the first comprehensive history of the network of women who worked at the heart of the English Arts and Crafts movement from the 1870s to the 1930s. Challenging the long-standing assumption that the Arts and Crafts simply revolved around celebrated male designers like William Morris, it instead offers a new social and cultural account of the movement, which simultaneously reveals the breadth of the imprint of women art workers upon the making of modern society. Thomas provides unprecedented insight into how women navigated authoritative roles as 'art workers' by asserting expertise across a range of interconnected cultures: from the artistic to the professional, intellectual, entrepreneurial and domestic. Through examination of newly discovered institutional archives and private papers, Thomas elucidates the critical importance of the spaces around which women conceptualised alternative creative and professional lifestyles. -- .

This book is a compendium of texts by international authors which reflect on Tadeusz Kantor's art in a broad range of contexts. The studies include works of prominent art historians, theatrologists and artists. The present revisiting of Kantor's artistic oeuvre reflects a contemporary historiographic approach. The authors place value on individual memory and consider contemporary art outside the traditional boundaries of particular artistic genres. The studies employ the latest strategies for researching theatrical performance as autonomous statements, without a literary anchor. Thanks to this approach, the eschatological and historical issues, crucial to the sphere of reference of Kantor's Theatre of Death, have acquired a new presence - as art that liberates thinking in the here-and-now.

This survey asks a seemingly simple question: Is there an affinity between the emergence of modern art and various Avant-Garde movements such as Russian Suprematism and Polish or Hungarian Constructivism around about the turn of the last century and the process of Jewish assimilation in the Habsburg empire and Russian tsardom respectively? What about the possible connection between "Hebraism", Jewish Messianism, Talmudic philosophy, and Kabbalistic speculations and the most radical, Utopian Avant-Garde movements of the region? Was Russian Cubo-Futurism, Suprematism, Productivism, Polish and Hungarian Constructivism actually fostered by ideas and practices articulated in Eastern Jewry? And what was the impact of Anti-Semitism on how the artists related to stylistic purity and their own cultural identity in the region already prior to the emergence of Avant-Gardism? And how did the supposed biblical ban on "graven images" influence the approach of the Jewish artists?

(Re)discover Art Nouveau at the heart of Brussels. At the end of the 19th century, the anti-academic movement pushed Brussels' architects towards Art Nouveau. Both Victor Horta, in an organic style, and Paul Hankar, in a more geometrical tendency, created an architecture that quickly gained an international reputation. In a little more than a decade, from 1893 on, hundreds of Art Nouveau-fashioned buildings appeared in Brussels, elaborated first by the great pioneers and later by their students and imitators who are also influenced by the Vienna Secession and other trends of European Art Nouveau. At first, this style fulfilled industrial bourgeoisie's dreams, yearning to assert itself in the city's structure through this new, and sometimes exuberant, architecture. This book offers nine walks to discover - in different districts - the multiple aspects of architectural Art Nouveau in Brussels. Witness the personal style of the most important architects as well as decorative methods such as sgraffito. Through interviews with owners, custodians and restorers of Art Nouveau-styled buildings, Brussels Art Nouveau describes the fundamental guardians of this remarkable heritage.

A study of three controversies that illuminate the changing cultural role of art exhibition in the nineteenth century From the antebellum era through the Gilded Age, New York City's leading art institutions were lightning rods for conflict. In the decades before the Civil War, art promoters believed that aesthetic taste could foster national unity and assuage urban conflicts; by the 1880s such hopes had faded, and the taste for art assumed more personal connotations associated with consumption and domestic decoration. Art Wars chronicles three protracted public battles that marked this transformation. The first battle began in 1849 and resulted in the downfall of the American Art-Union, the most popular and influential art institution in North America at mid-century. The second erupted in 1880 over the Metropolitan Museum's massive collection of Cypriot antiquities, which had been plundered and sold to its trustees by the man who became the museum's first paid director. The third escalated in the mid-1880s and forced the Metropolitan Museum to open its doors on Sunday-the only day when working people were able to attend. In chronicling these disputes, Rachel N. Klein considers cultural fissures that ran much deeper than the specific complaints that landed protagonists in court. New York's major nineteenth-century art institutions came under intense scrutiny not only because Americans invested them with moral and civic consequences but also because they were part and parcel of explosive processes associated with the rise of industrial capitalism. Elite New Yorkers spearheaded the creation of the Art-Union and the Metropolitan, but those institutions became enmeshed in popular struggles related to slavery, immigration, race, industrial production, and the rights of working people. Art Wars examines popular engagement with New York's art institutions and illuminates the changing cultural role of art exhibition over the course of the nineteenth century.

This book aims to present trompe-l'oeil painting, which epitomizes the myth of the illusionistic image - an early modern way of thinking about pictures, according to which it is possible to create an image identical to what it represents that at the same time preserves its own pictorial identity. Trompe-l'oeil, despite being a marginal genre, embodied an ideal that painting should attain, and therefore is a good point of departure for analyzing issues such as (aesthetic) illusion in art. As the myth undermines Plato's aesthetics, it is his philosophy of art, with its dichotomies of appearance/reality or mimesis/diegesis that offers the most useful context for the discussion of this topic and shows that trompe-l'oeil is a playful and ironic genre, which has cognitive value as well.