Bringing the rich Japanese Shinto artistic tradition to life, this handsome volume explores the significance of calligraphy, painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts within traditional kami veneration ceremonies A central feature of Japanese culture for many centuries, the veneration of kami deities-a practice often referred to as Shinto-has been a driving force behind a broad swath of visual art. Focusing on the Heian period (795-1185) through the Edo period (1615-1868), this generously illustrated volume brings the rich Shinto artistic tradition to life through works of calligraphy, painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts. Thematic essays authored by both American and Japanese scholars explore different dimensions of kami veneration and examine the significance of these objects-many of which have never been seen outside of Japan-in Shinto ceremonies.

Professor Sullivan is a leading authority on the art of China, and has published a number of standard works on both traditional and modern Chinese art. These two volumes bring together for the first time his papers on the subject, and include a number of important studies on the related art of South-East Asia. The first volume concentrates on traditional Chinese art. In its long and relatively uninterrupted development over a period of two thousand years, Chinese art can only be compared with the art of ancient Egypt. The author gives a resume of the stages of this development in his first paper, and isolates certain recurrent themes and attitudes in the four studies that follow. Other papers deal with screen and scroll painting in the early period, and with the excavation of a T'ang emperor's tomb. The period of the Ming and Ch'ing emperors is also covered, leading up to the first contacts with Western art in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the work of European artists in China. The volume concludes with a number of Professor Sullivan's reviews of works by other scholars on Chinese art, and of exhibitions, and an appreciation of the work of Arthur Waley. There is a new preface and index, and the author has supplied additional notes to the original articles which draw attention to subsequent research. Contents: Preface The Heritage of Chinese Art Some Notes on the Social History of Chinese Art The Magic Mountain Fantastics and Eccentrics in Chinese Painting Pictorial Art and the Attitude toward Nature in Ancient China Notes on Early Chinese Screen Painting On Painting the Yuen-t'ai-shan A Further Note on the Admonitions Scroll A Forgotten T'ang Master of Landscape Painting The Excavation of the Royal Tomb of Wang Chien The Night Market at Yang-ch'eng The Ch'ing Scholar-Painters and their World The Chinese Art of Water Printing, Shui-yin Art and Politics in Seventeenth-century China Some Possible Sources of European Influence on Late Ming and Early Ch'ing Painting The Chinese Response to Western Art Sandrart on Chinese Painting Chinnery the Portrait Painter The Barlow Collection of Chinese Bronzes, Jades and Ceramics Reviews of Books and Exhibitions Reaching Out Additional Notes Index.

Artist, teacher, and Red Progressive, Angel De Cora (1869-1919) painted Fire Light to capture warm memories of her Nebraska Winnebago childhood. In this biography, Linda M. Waggoner draws on that glowing image to illuminate De Cora's life and artistry, which until now have been largely overlooked by scholars.One of the first American Indian artists to be accepted within the mainstream art world, De Cora left her childhood home on the Winnebago reservation to find success in the urban Northeast at the turn of the twentieth century. Despite scant documentary sources that elucidate De Cora's private life, Waggoner has rendered a complete picture of the woman known in her time as the first "real Indian artist." She depicts De Cora as a multifaceted individual who as a young girl took pride in her traditions, forged a bond with the land that would sustain her over great distances, and learned the role of cultural broker from her mother's MEtis family. After studying with famed illustrator Howard Pyle at his first Brandywine summer school, De Cora eventually succeeded in establishing the first "Native Indian" art department at Carlisle Indian School. A founding member of the Society of American Indians, she made a significant impact on the American Arts and Crafts movement by promoting indigenous arts throughout her career. Waggoner brings her broad knowledge of Winnebago culture and history to this gracefully written book, which features more than forty illustrations. Fire Light shows us both a consummate artist and a fully realized woman, who learned how to traverse the borders of Red identity in a white man's world.

Images of crosses, the Virgin Mary, and Christ, among other devotional objects, pervaded nearly every aspect of public and private life in early modern Spain, but they were also a point of contention between Christian and Muslim cultures. Writers of narrative fiction, theatre, and poetry were attuned to these debates, and religious imagery played an important role in how early modern writers chose to portray relations between Christians and Muslims. Drawing on a wide variety of literary genres as well as other textual and visual sources - including historical chronicles, travel memoirs, captives' testimonies, and paintings - Catherine Infante traces the references to religious visual culture and the responses they incited in cross-confessional negotiations. She reveals some of the anxieties about what it meant to belong to different ethnic or religious communities and how these communities interacted with each other within the fluid boundaries of the Mediterranean world. Focusing on the religious image as a point of contact between individuals of diverse beliefs and practices, The Arts of Encounter presents an original and necessary perspective on how Christian-Muslim relations were perceived and conveyed in print.

In the late 1790s, British Prime Minister William Pitt created a crisis of representation when he pressured the British Parliament to relieve the Bank of England from its obligations to convert paper notes into coin. Paper quickly became associated with a form of limitless reproduction that threatened to dematerialize solid bodies and replace them with insubstantial shadows. Media Critique in the Age of Gillray centres on printed images and graphic satires which view paper as the foundation for the contemporary world. Through a focus on printed, visual imagery from practitioners such as James Gillray, William Blake, John Thomas Smith, and Henry Fuseli, the book addresses challenges posed by reproductive technologies to traditional concepts of subjective agency. Joseph Monteyne shows that the late eighteenth-century paper age's baseless fabric set the stage for contemporary digital media's weightless production. Engagingly written and abundantly illustrated, Media Critique in the Age of Gillray highlights the fact that graphic culture has been overlooked as an important sphere for the production of critical and self-reflective discourses around media transformations and the visual turn in British culture.

For millennia, Native artists on Olympic Peninsula, in what is now northwestern Washington, have created coiled and woven baskets using tree roots, bark, plant stems--and meticulous skill. "From the Hands of a Weaver" presents the traditional art of basket making among the peninsula's Native peoples--particularly women--and describes the ancient, historic, and modern practices of the craft. Abundantly illustrated, this book also showcases the basketry collection of Olympic National Park.
Baskets designed primarily for carrying and storing food have been central to the daily life of the Klallam, Twana, Quinault, Quileute, Hoh, and Makah cultures of Olympic Peninsula for thousands of years. The authors of the essays collected here, who include Native people as well as academics, explore the commonalities among these cultures and discuss their distinct weaving styles and techniques. Because basketry was interwoven with indigenous knowledge and culture throughout history, alterations in the art over time reflect important social changes.
Using primary-source material as well as interviews, volume editor Jacilee Wray shows how Olympic Peninsula craftspeople participated in the development of the commercial basket industry, transforming useful but beautiful objects into creations appreciated as art. Other contributors address poaching of cedar and native grasses, and conservation efforts--contemporary challenges faced by basket makers. Appendices identify weavers and describe weaves attributed to each culture, making this an important reference for both scholars and collectors.
Featuring more than 120 photographs and line drawings of historical and twentieth-century weavers and their baskets, this engaging book highlights the culture of distinct Native Northwest peoples while giving voice to individual artists, masters of a living art form.

Conventional wisdom holds that Judaism is indifferent or even suspiciously hostile to the visual arts due to the Second Commandment's prohibition on creating "graven images," the dictates of monotheism, and historical happenstance. This intellectual history of medieval and modern Jewish attitudes toward art and representation overturns the modern assumption of Jewish iconophobia that denies to Jewish culture a visual dimension.

Kalman Bland synthesizes evidence from medieval Jewish philosophy, mysticism, poetry, biblical commentaries, travelogues, and law, concluding that premodern Jewish intellectuals held a positive, liberal understanding of the Second Commandment and did, in fact, articulate a certain Jewish aesthetic. He draws on this insight to consider modern ideas of Jewish art, revealing how they are inextricably linked to diverse notions about modern Jewish identity that are themselves entwined with arguments over Zionism, integration, and anti-Semitism.

Through its use of the past to illuminate the present and its analysis of how the present informs our readings of the past, this book establishes a new assessment of Jewish aesthetic theory rooted in historical analysis. Authoritative and original in its identification of authentic Jewish traditions of painting, sculpture, and architecture, this volume will ripple the waters of several disciplines, including Jewish studies, art history, medieval and modern history, and philosophy.