Brussels is well known for its wide variety of buildings in the Art Deco style, which were built in the aftermath of the Great War in the 1920s and 1930s. In this book, the authors have created seven walking (or biking) itineraries that explore Art Deco and modernist architecture in neighbourhoods throughout the city. Several key architects are profiled, and the historical context of the period is discussed, offering readers new insights into the living heritage that lines the streets of Brussels. Also available: Brussels Art Nouveau ISBN 9782390250456.

The man behind the paintings: the extraordinary life of J. M. W Turner, one of Britain's most admired, misunderstood and celebrated artists J. M. W. Turner is Britain's most famous landscape painter. Yet beyond his artistic achievements, little is known of the man himself and the events of his life: the tragic committal of his mother to a lunatic asylum, the personal sacrifices he made to effect his stratospheric rise, and the bizarre double life he chose to lead in the last years of his life. A near mythical figure in his own lifetime, Franny Moyle tells the story of the man who was considered visionary at best and ludicrous at worst. A resolute adventurer, he found new ways of revealing Britain to the British, astounding his audience with his invention and intelligence. Set against the backdrop of the finest homes in Britain, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, this is an astonishing portrait of one of the most important figures in Western art and a vivid evocation of Britain and Europe in flux.

No century in modern European history has built monuments with more enthusiasm than the 19th. Of the hundreds of monuments erected, those which sprang from a nation-wide initiative and addressed themselves to a nation, rather than part of a nation, we may call national monuments. Nelson's Column in London or the Arc de Triomphe in Paris are obvious examples. In Germany the 19th century witnessed a veritable flood of monuments, many of which rank as national monuments. These reflected and contributed to a developing sense of national identity and the search for national unity; they also document an unsuccessful effort to create a «genuinely German style. They constitute a historical record, quite apart from aesthetic appeal or ideological message. As this historical record is examined, German national monuments of the 19th century are described and interpreted against the background of the nationalism which gave birth to them.

Lust for Life is the classic fictional re-telling of the incredible life of Vincent Van Gogh. "Vincent is not dead. He will never die. His love, his genius, the great beauty he has created will go on forever, enriching the world... He was a colossus... a great painter... a great philosopher... a martyr to his love of art. " Walking down the streets of Paris the young Vincent Van Gogh didn't feel like he belonged. Battling poverty, repeated heartbreak and familial obligation, Van Gogh was a man plagued by his own creative urge but with no outlet to express it. Until the day he picked up a paintbrush. Written with raw insight and emotion, follow the artist through his tormented life, struggling against critical discouragement and mental turmoil and bare witness to his creative journey from a struggling artist to one of the world's most celebrated artists.

Jean Simeon Chardin (1699-1779) was arguably the most talented French painter of the eighteenth century, best known for his original still lifes. Composed of simple, everyday objects, these works glow with warmth and magic, from the dull iron of the kitchen pans, to the glaze of the green earthenware jug or the shining copper of the cauldron. There is no superfluous detail or search for decorative effect; the beauty of his paintings lies in their minimalism. His contemporary, the philosopher Diderot, looking at The Olive Jar exclaimed: 'All you have to do is take these biscuits and eat them ... pick up the glass of wine and drink it ... O Chardin! It's not white, red or black pigment that you crush on your palette: it's the very substance of the objects.' Chardin received early recognition for his work, becoming an Associate of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and full Academician in 1728 at the age of almost 29. Following the success of his early still lifes and inspired by Dutch seventeenth-century artists, whose work was very much in vogue in Paris at the time, Chardin went on to paint some exquisite genre scenes and portraits, remarkable for their realism and honesty as well as for their skilful technique. His works had a tremendous influence on subsequent artists, inspiring painters as diverse as Manet and Cezanne.

This book examines the entwined and simultaneous rise of graphic satire and cultures of paper money in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Asking how Britons learned to value both graphic art and money, the book makes surprising connections between these two types of engraved images that grew in popularity and influence during this time. Graphic satire grew in visual risk-taking along, while paper money became a more standard carrier of financial value, courting controversy as a medium, moral problem, and factor in inflation. Through analysis of satirical prints, as well as case studies of monetary satires beyond London, this book demonstrates several key ways that cultures attach value to printed paper, accepting it as social reality and institutional fact. Thus, satirical banknotes were objects that broke down the distinction between paper money and graphic satire altogether.

Where Is My Home?: The Art and Life of the Russian-Jewish Sculptor Mark Antokolskii, 1843 1902 is the first full-length study in English of the art and life of Mark Antokolskii, the widely recognized Russian and European sculptor of the late 19th century. An originator of novel trends in sculpture in its transition to modernism, Antokolskii was the first artist of Jewish origin to attend the Academy of Art in St. Petersburg and to become an honorable member of the Russian and Western intellectual milieu. Participating in many International World Exhibitions, he received numerous awards, including the Legion d'Honneur (1878, Paris). Antokolskii was a member of many European academies of art, and his works are in museums and private collections worldwide. Where Is My Home? focuses on Antokolski's artistic uniqueness and his fate as a Jewish intellectual who belongs to distinct cultures. Musya Glants pays particular attention to Antokolski's constant struggle between his devotion to Russia and the lifelong commitment to his people. This opens ways to discuss less known aspects of the notions of national identity and spiritual duality. It is an attempt to give an account of the artist as a notable Jewish social and cultural figure, a thinker and essayist whose art reveals his longing for people's reconciliation and overcoming of historical alienation.

Employs an innovative approach by "stages" to offer a unified vision of European Romanticism over the half-century of its growth and decline. Romanticism was a truly European phenomenon, extending roughly from the French Revolution to the 1848 revolutions and embracing not only literature and drama but also music and visual arts. Because of Romanticism's vast scope, most treatments have restricted themselves to single countries or to specific forms, notably literature, art, or music. This book takes a wider view by considering in each of six chapters representative examples of works - from across Europe and across a range of the arts - that were created in a single year. For instance, in the first chapter, focusing on the year 1798, Beethoven's Pathetique sonata, Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads,Tieck's novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, and Goya's painting El sueno de la razon. The following chapters treat works from the years 1808, 1818, 1828, 1838, and 1848. This approach by "stages" makes it possible to determine characteristics of six stages of Romanticism in its historical and intellectual context and to note the conspicuous differences between these stages as European Romanticism developed-for example, the waxing and waning of religious themes, the shifting visions of landscape, the gradual ironic detachment from early Romanticism. In sum, the volume offers a unified vision of European Romanticism in all its aesthetic forms over the half-centuryof its growth and decline. Theodore Ziolkowski is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature, Princeton University.

This book examines the entwined and simultaneous rise of graphic satire and cultures of paper money in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Asking how Britons learned to value both graphic art and money, the book makes surprising connections between these two types of engraved images that grew in popularity and influence during this time. Graphic satire grew in visual risk-taking along, while paper money became a more standard carrier of financial value, courting controversy as a medium, moral problem, and factor in inflation. Through analysis of satirical prints, as well as case studies of monetary satires beyond London, this book demonstrates several key ways that cultures attach value to printed paper, accepting it as social reality and institutional fact. Thus, satirical banknotes were objects that broke down the distinction between paper money and graphic satire ​altogether. 

Henry James criticized the impressionism that was revolutionizing French painting and fiction. He satirized the British aesthetic movement whose keystone was impressionist criticism. So why, time and again in important parts of his literary work, did James use the word 'impression'? Henry James and the Art of Impressions argues that James tried to wrest the impression from the impressionists and to recast it in his own art of the novel. Interdisciplinary in its range, philosophical and literary in its focus, the book shows the place of James's work within the wider cultural history of impressionism. It draws on painting, philosophy, psychology, literature, and critical theory to examine James's art criticism, early literary criticism, travel writing, reflections on his own fiction, and the three great novels of his major phase, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. It shows how the language of impressions enables James to represent the most intense moments of consciousness of his characters. It argues that the Jamesian impression is best understood as a family of related ideas bound together by James's attempt to reconcile the novel's value as a mimetic form with its value as a transformative creative activity.

The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, holds stunning examples of jewellery and metalwork from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This exceptional period of design covers the neo-Gothic and historicist designs of the mid- to late nineteenth century, the groundbreaking work of British Arts & Crafts designers, sinuous curves influenced by the European Art Nouveau movement and the structural modernity of the 1930s. The collection contains jewellery by some of the finest historicist designers, including the Castellani and Giuliano families and John Brogden, as well as a spectacular decanter by William Burges. There are important pieces of jewellery and silver by the most famous of Arts & Crafts designers, including C.R. Ashbee, Henry Wilson, Gilbert Marks and John Paul Cooper. Unique pieces designed by the artist Charles Ricketts hold a special place in the history of queer art in Britain, having been designed for his friends Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, a couple known collectively as Michael Field. Modernist silver is represented by leaders of the field Omar Ramsden and H.G. Murphy. This beautifully illustrated volume reproduces 70 of the Museum's most important pieces from this period, many previously unpublished, with comparative illustrations of some of the original designs. Importantly, the book is arranged chronologically by designer and includes biographies, a description of their work and how it changed over time, as well as commentary about the specific works in the Museum's collection. The resulting book therefore brings together for the first time the Fitzwilliam's exceptionally fine holdings of jewellery and metalwork from this highly popular and fruitful period of design.

Keren Rosa Hammerschlag's Frederic Leighton: Death, Mortality, Resurrection offers a timely reexamination of the art of the late Victorian period's most institutionally powerful artist, Frederic Lord Leighton (1830-1896). As President of the Royal Academy from 1878 to 1896, Leighton was committed to the pursuit of beauty in art through the depiction of classical subjects, executed according to an academic working-method. But as this book reveals, Leighton's art and discourse were beset by the realisation that academic art would likely die with him. Rather than achieving classical perfection, Hammerschlag argues, Leighton's figures hover in transitional states between realism and idealism, flesh and marble, life and death, as gothic distortions of the classical ideal. The author undertakes close readings of key paintings, sculptures, frescos and drawings in Leighton's oeuvre, and situates them in the context of contemporaneous debates about death and resurrection in theology, archaeology and medicine. The outcome is a pleasurably macabre counter-biography that reconfigures what it meant to be not just a late-Victorian neoclassicist and royal academician, but President of the Victorian Royal Academy.

Art historian Henry M. Sayre traces the origins of the term "value" in art criticism, revealing the politics that define Manet's art. How did art critics come to speak of light and dark as, respectively, "high in value" and "low in value"? Henry M. Sayre traces the origin of this usage to one of art history's most famous and racially charged paintings, Edouard Manet's Olympia. Art critics once described light and dark in painting in terms of musical metaphor-higher and lower tones, notes, and scales. Sayre shows that it was Emile Zola who introduced the new "law of values" in an 1867 essay on Manet. Unpacking the intricate contexts of Zola's essay and of several related paintings by Manet, Sayre argues that Zola's usage of value was intentionally double coded-an economic metaphor for the political economy of slavery. In Manet's painting, Olympia and her maid represent objects of exchange, a commentary on the French Empire's complicity in the ongoing slave trade in the Americas. Expertly researched and argued, this bold study reveals the extraordinary weight of history and politics that Manet's painting bears. Locating the presence of slavery at modernism's roots, Value in Art is a surprising and necessary intervention in our understanding of art history.

This book is a wide-ranging exploration of the production of Victorian art autograph replicas, a painting's subsequent versions created by the same artist who painted the first version. Autograph replicas were considered originals, not copies, and were highly valued by collectors in Britain, America, Japan, Australia, and South Africa. Motivated by complex combinations of aesthetic and commercial interests, replicas generated a global, and especially transatlantic, market between the 1870s and the 1940s, and almost all collected replicas were eventually donated to US public museums, giving replicas authority in matters of public taste and museums' modern cultural roles. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, museum studies, and economic history.

Revolutionary essays on design, aesthetics and materialism - from one of the great masters of modern architecture Adolf Loos, the great Viennese pioneer of modern architecture, was a hater of the fake, the fussy and the lavishly decorated, and a lover of stripped down, clean simplicity. He was also a writer of effervescent, caustic wit, as shown in this selection of essays on all aspects of design and aesthetics, from cities to glassware, furniture to footwear, architectural training to why 'the lack of ornament is a sign of intellectual power'. Translated by Shaun Whiteside With an epilogue by Joseph Masheck

Rather than the customary focus on the activities of individual collectors, The Emergence of the Antique and Curiosity Dealer in Britain 1815-1850: The Commodification of Historical Objects illuminates the less-studied roles played by dealers in the nineteenthcentury antique and curiosity markets. Set against the recent 'art market turn' in scholarly literature, this volume examines the role, activities, agency and influence of antique and curiosity dealers as they emerged in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. This study begins at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when dealers began their wholesale importations of historical objects; it closes during the 1850s, after which the trade became increasingly specialised, reflecting the rise of historical museums such as the South Kensington Museum (V&A). Focusing on the archive of the early nineteenth-century London dealer John Coleman Isaac (c.1803-1887), as well as drawing on a wide range of other archival and contextual material, Mark Westgarth considers the emergence of the dealer in relation to a broad historical and cultural landscape. The emergence of the antique and curiosity dealer was part of the rapid economic, social, political and cultural change of early nineteenth-century Britain, centred around ideas of antiquarianism, the commercialisation of culture and a distinctive and evolving interest in historical objects. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, histories of collecting, museum and heritage studies and nineteenth-century culture.

This book reveals a new history of the imagination told through its engagement with the body. Even as they denounced the imagination's potential for inviting luxury, vice, and corruption, American audiences avidly consumed a transatlantic visual culture of touring paintings, dioramas, gift books, and theatrical performances that pictured a preindustrial-and largely imaginary-European past. By examining the visual, material, and rhetorical strategies artists like Washington Allston, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, and others used to navigate this treacherous ground, Catherine Holochwost uncovers a hidden tension in antebellum aesthetics. The book will be of interest to scholars of art history, literary and cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, and media studies.

This book deals with the theme of landscape in a transversal way, by presenting a set of important works by Gustave Courbet (mainly from the collections of the Gustave Institute and the Courbet d'Ornans Museum) and other 19th century artists - collaborators or friends of Courbet - who have fully embraced nature and the landscape, putting them at the heart of their artistic approaches. Among other things, will be revealed the involvement of Saint-Claude's George Besson (1882- 1971), who worked for the acquisition of Courbet's birthplace - which would later house the museum - then that of Guy Bardone (1927-2015), donor of the collection preserved by the Abbey Museum, who would then be General Secretary of the Courbet Institute for nearly 15 years. Text in English and French.

This book brings together thirteen scholars to introduce the newest and most cutting-edge research in the field of Russian and East European art history. Reconsidering canonical figures, re-examining prevalent debates, and revisiting aesthetic developments, the book challenges accepted histories and entrenched dichotomies in art and architecture from the nineteenth century to the present. In doing so, it resituates the artistic production of this region within broader socio-cultural currents and analyzes its interconnections with international discourse, competing political and aesthetic ideologies, and continuous discussions over identity.

First published in 1960.
Patterns in Shakespearian Tragedy is an exploration of man's relation to his universe and the way in which it seeks to postulate a moral order. Shakespeare's development is treated accordingly as a growth in moral vision. His movement from play to play is carefully explored, and in the treatment of each tragedy the emphasis is on the manner in which its central moral theme shapes the various elements of drama

Rozsika Parker's re-evaluation of the reciprocal relationship between women and embroidery has brought stitchery out from the private world of female domesticity into the fine arts, created a major breakthrough in art history and criticism, and fostered the emergence of today's dynamic and expanding crafts movements. The Subversive Stitch is now available again with a new Introduction that brings the book up to date with exploration of the stitched art of Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin, as well as the work of new young female and male embroiderers. Rozsika Parker uses household accounts, women's magazines, letters, novels and the works of art themselves to trace through history how the separation of the craft of embroidery from the fine arts came to be a major force in the marginalisation of women's work. Beautifully illustrated, her book also discusses the contradictory nature of women's experience of embroidery: how it has inculcated female subservience while providing an immensely pleasurable source of creativity, forging links between women.

Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica is among the first Slavery Studies books - and the first in Art History - to juxtapose temperate and tropical slavery. Charmaine A. Nelson explores the central role of geography and its racialized representation as landscape art in imperial conquest. One could easily assume that nineteenth-century Montreal and Jamaica were worlds apart, but through her astute examination of marine landscape art, the author re-connects these two significant British island colonies, sites of colonial ports with profound economic and military value. Through an analysis of prints, illustrated travel books, and maps, the author exposes the fallacy of their disconnection, arguing instead that the separation of these colonies was a retroactive fabrication designed in part to rid Canada of its deeply colonial history as an integral part of Britain's global trading network which enriched the motherland through extensive trade in crops produced by enslaved workers on tropical plantations. The first study to explore James Hakewill's Jamaican landscapes and William Clark's Antiguan genre studies in depth, it also examines the Montreal landscapes of artists including Thomas Davies, Robert Sproule, George Heriot and James Duncan. Breaking new ground, Nelson reveals how gender and race mediated the aesthetic and scientific access of such - mainly white, male - artists. She analyzes this moment of deep political crisis for British slave owners (between the end of the slave trade in 1807 and complete abolition in 1833) who employed visual culture to imagine spaces free of conflict and to alleviate their pervasive anxiety about slave resistance. Nelson explores how vision and cartographic knowledge translated into authority, which allowed colonizers to 'civilize' the terrains of the so-called New World, while belying the oppression of slavery and indigenous displacement.

In January 2006 a man tried to break Marcel Duchamp's Fountain sculpture with a small hammer. The sculpted foot of Michelangelo's David was damaged in 1991 by a purportedly mentally ill artist. Each such incident confronts us with the unsettling dynamic between destruction and art. Renowned art historian Dario Gamboni is the first to tackle this weighty issue in depth. Starting with the sweeping obliteration of architecture and art under the Communist regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, Gamboni investigates other instances of destruction around the globe, uncovering a surprisingly widespread phenomenon. As he demonstrates through analyses of nineteenth- and twentieth-century incidents in the U.S. and Europe, a complex relationship exists between the evolution of modern art and a long history of iconoclasm. Gamboni probes the concept of artists' rights, the power of political protest and the ways in which iconoclasm offers a unique interpretation of society's relationship to art and material culture. This compelling and thought-provoking study, now in B-format paperback and with a new preface by the author, forces us to rethink the ways in which we interact with art and its power to shock or subdue.

As the official architects of Napoleon, Charles Percier (1764-1838) and Pierre-Francois-Leonard Fontaine (1762-1853) designed interiors that responded to the radical ideologies and collective forms of destruction that took place during the French Revolution. The architects visualized new forms of imperial sovereignty by inverting the symbols of monarchy and revolution, constructing meeting rooms resembling military encampments and gilded thrones that replaced the Bourbon lily with Napoleonic bees. Yet in the wake of political struggle, each foundation stone that the architects laid for the new imperial regime was accompanied by an awareness of the contingent nature of sovereign power. Contributing fresh perspectives on the architecture, decorative arts, and visual culture of revolutionary France, this book explores how Percier and Fontaine's desire to build structures of permanence and their inadvertent reliance upon temporary architectural forms shaped a new awareness of time, memory, and modern political identity in France.

Offering an examination of the paragone, meaning artistic rivalry, in nineteenth-century France and England, this book considers how artists were impacted by prevailing aesthetic theories, or institutional and cultural paradigms, to compete in the art world. The paragone has been considered primarily in the context of Renaissance art history, but in this book readers will see how the legacy of this humanistic competitive model survived into the late nineteenth century.