The notion that the practice of abstraction was confined to Western Europe while a stereotyped form of figuration defined the art of the Eastern bloc continues to dominate art historical accounts of public sculpture of the post-war period. This book offers a number of alternative readings, and demonstrates strategic uses of figuration and abstraction across East and West. Encompassing sites of memory (including war memorials and Holocaust memorials), state, civic and corporate sculpture, as well as temporary and unexecuted projects, the book shows that persuasive advocates of figuration were to be found in the West, while in the East imaginative experiments in abstraction were proposed in the name of Social Realism. Presenting fresh insights into sculptural practice in the period between 1945 and 1968, this book brings together a wide range of authors, some of whom have never before been published in English. Their essays are complemented by extracts from documentary texts, which give a flavour of contemporary debates, and a biographical section includes entries on many sculptors who will be unfamiliar to an English-speaking audience.

The institution of the pantheon has come a long way from its classical origins. Invented to describe a temple dedicated to many deities, the term later became so far removed from its original meaning, that by the twentieth century, it has been able to exist independently of any architectural and sculptural monument. This collection of essays is the first to trace the transformation of the monumental idea of the pantheon from its origins in Greek and Roman antiquity to its later appearance as a means of commemorating and enshrining the ideals of national identity and statehood. Illuminating the emergence of the pantheon in a range of different cultures and periods by exploring its different manifestations and implementations, the essays open new historical perspectives on the formation of national and civic identities.

Our understanding of art has undergone several major upheavals in the past thirty years. Postmodernism and mass media began the process of disruption in the 1980s. The explosion in the use of digital technologies since the 1990s has radically altered the way in which art is now created, perceived and made available. The recent shift towards regarding art as part of a broader "visual culture" has torn art theory from its roots in art history and placed it in the context of anthropological, cultural and media theory. Art: Histories, Theories and Exceptions confronts these different ideas by examining a range of different approaches to art - as ritual, as a form of diagrammatic writing, as a symptom of a cultural moment, as a commodity, and as an agent of change. Art: Histories, Theories and Exceptions explores what art in its broadest sense - from Aboriginal work to the Western art market, from the role of museums to new media interactivity, from the mainstream to the radical - means today. This provocative book will be invaluable to students, practicing artists and general readers alike.

The author contrasts primitive & naive painting through the life & work of 2 of Cornwall's distinctive artists. The survey concludes with brief profiles of a dozen other artists whose individual visions have enriched the life of this celebrated artist's c

This book attempts to expand the grounds and methodology of studying Japanese art history by focusing on the conditions, procedures, events, and social interplay that characterized the production of paintings in late-fifteenth-century Japan.
Though the book's ultimate concerns are art historical, its analysis also draws heavily from the insights of sociology and social history. At its core is a fresh examination of the major primary documents of the period in an attempt to liberate the study from assumptions long embedded in the historiography of late medieval Japanese painting history. Early chapters describe documents, methods, basic sites, and conditions of painting before turning to the main contribution of the book, painting considered as a body of social practices. The production of painting in the late fifteenth century was profoundly social, dynamically related to the circumstances of its agents. Painters, advisors, assistants, clients, and others did not exert themselves simply to bring paintings into existence. They sought advantages (such as wealth and prestige), met obligations, and satisfied the demands of custom.
Surviving documents from the period present rich evidence of the involvement of such persons in the imperial court, the Ashikaya-Gozan community, the great temples of Nara, and the halls of local lords. The author takes into account the patterns of expectation that existed at the various sites but does not construe them as static and mechanically determined. Rather, he shows that expectations evolved in response to changed conditions. Although this study specifically addresses the last quarter of the fifteenth century, it can aid future research in Japanese painting practice in other eras by serving as a model of how new interpretations can emerge from close documentary investigation.

Art and Public History: Approaches, Opportunities, and Challenges examines the relationship between art and public history, outlining opportunities, challenges, and insights drawn from recent initiatives. With a special eye towards audience engagement and challenging historical narratives, all of the case studies and projects combine historical interpretation with contemporary and historical forms of visual art in unique and insightful ways. In addition to emphasizing the kind of practical advice found in the best case studies, this volume also offers a critical discussion of the concepts, tools, skills and technologies that contribute to fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration. These issues are addressed through sections on projects related to historical artworks; contemporary art and artists; and public art and the built environment. It addresses how public historians can incorporate art into their practice by outlining opportunities, challenges, and insights drawn from recent projects in the United States and Britain. These projects have taken place across a variety of platforms, including local and national history museums; art galleries; digital archives; classrooms; historical markers; and public art projects. The case studies incorporate the perspectives of different stakeholders, including public historians, artists, and audiences. The book will provide both public history practitioners and academics with useful guidance on how art can be integrated into public history initiatives, through critical discussion of tools, strategies, and technologies that contribute to fruitful collaboration and audience engagement across a variety of platforms. Readers will walk away with new ideas, strategies, and practical considerations for interdisciplinary projects to attract audiences in new ways.

Bringing together a broad range of contributors including art, architecture, and design academic theorists and historians, in addition to practicing artists, architects, and designers, this volume explores the place of the sketchbook in contemporary art and architecture. Drawing upon a diverse range of theories, practices, and reflections common to the contemporary conceptualisation of the sketchbook and its associated environments, it offers a dialogue in which the sketchbook can be understood as a pivotal working tool that contributes to the creative process and the formulation and production of visual ideas. Along with exploring the theoretical, philosophical, psychological, and curatorial implications of the sketchbook, the book addresses emergent digital practices by way of examining contemporary developments in sketchbook productions and pedagogical applications. Consequently, these more recent developments question the validity of the sketchbook as both an instrument of practice and creativity, and as an educational device. International in scope, it not only explores European intellectual and artistic traditions, but also intercultural and cross-cultural perspectives, including reviews of practices in Chinese artworks or Islamic calligraphy, and situational contexts that deal with historical examples, such as Roman art, or modern practices in geographical-cultural regions like Pakistan.

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.

Textile artist Takaku Kuboku (1908-1993) is a paragon among modern artists of Japan, fusing rural and urban, traditional and innovative, and Asian and European influences in his life and work. This volume introduces his aesthetic ideas and artistic practice to an English-speaking audience for the first time. In a milieu where artists championed indigenous craft techniques as a vital component of authentic Asian artistic achievement, he specialized in wax-resist textile dyeing, or roketsuzome. His works on silk were among the most highly sought-after by the elite classes of Japanese society. With his daughter Hisako (b. 1944) he produced obi and kimono that combine the Japanese aesthetic of spontaneous inkbrush painting with modern Cubist and abstract designs, while maintaining ties with traditional Japanese painting. The subjects are predominantly drawn from nature, with a spiritual undertone indicating an awareness of and sensitivity to the idea of a life force that courses through and unifies all living things.

Constructing African Art Histories for the Lagoons of Cote d'Ivoire is an investigation of the methods employed by art historians who study creative production in Africa. While providing insights into the rich visual arts of the Lagoon Peoples of southeastern Cote d'Ivoire, this study is one of the few attempts by an Africanist to situate local and regional artistic practices in the context of the global art market, and to trace the varied receptions an African art work is given as it leaves a local context and enters an international one. Drawing on her three seasons of fieldwork among Akan populations in Cote d'Ivoire, Monica Blackmun Visona provides a comprehensive account of a major art-producing region of Africa, and explores such topics as gender roles in performance, the role of sculpture in divination, and the interchange of arts and ideas across ethnic boundaries. The book also addresses issues inherent in research practices, such as connoisseurship and participant observation, and examines theoretical positions that have had an impact on the discipline of African art history.

Just what do psychoanalysis and modern sculpture have to do with one another? The present collection of essays, unique in its field, shows how key metaphors of Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis - splitting, projection, sublimation, identification, the schizoid and reparative mechanisms - as well as Lacan's concepts of the stade du mirroir and the objet petit a, can be fruitfully applied to a range of modern three-dimensional art, from Surrealism to the present day. As these essays show, figures such as Barbara Hepworth, Eva Hesse, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Gilbert and George, Rebecca Horn and others have often approached the material of sculpture with something like these mechanisms in mind. The need to unlock the levels of psychoanalytic connection between artist, object and viewer in recent debate has fuelled the diverse proposals of this original and important book.

Vitrines and glass cabinets are familiar apparatuses that have in large part defined modern modes of display and visibility, both within and beyond the museum. They separate objects from their contexts, group them with other objects, both similar and dissimilar, and often serve to reinforce their intrinsic or aesthetic values. The vitrine has much in common with the picture frame, the plinth and the gallery, but it has not yet received the kind of detailed art historical and theoretical discussion that has been brought to these other modes of formal display. The twelve contributions to this volume examine some of the points of origin of the vitrine and the various relations it brokers with sculpture, first in the Wunderkammer and cabinet of curiosities and then in dialog with the development of glazed architecture beginning with Paxton's Crystal Palace (1851). The collection offers close discussions of the role of the vitrine and shop window in the rise of commodity culture and their apposition with Constructivist design in the work of Frederick Kiesler; as well as original readings of the use of vitrines in Surrealism and Fluxus, and in work by Joseph Beuys, Paul Thek, Claes Oldenburg and his collaborators, Jeff Koons, Mike Kelley, Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, Damien Hirst and Josephine Meckseper, among others. Sculpture and the Vitrine also raises key questions about the nature and implications of vitrinous space, including its fronts onto desire and the spectacle; transparency and legibility; and onto ideas and practices associated with the archive: collecting, preserving and ordering.

Indigenous museums and cultural centres have sprung up across the developing world, and particularly in the Southwest Pacific. They derive from a number of motives, ranging from the commercial to the cultural political (and many combine both). A close study of this phenomenon is not only valuable for museological practice but, as has been argued, it may challenge our current bedrock assumptions about the very nature and purpose of the museum. This book looks to the future of museum practice through examining how museums have evolved particularly in the non-western world to incorporate the present and the future in the display of culture. Of particular concern is the uses to which historic records are put in the service of community development and cultural renaissance.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays brings together scholars in the fields of art history, theatre, visual culture, and literature to explore intersections between the European avant-garde (c. 1880–1945) and themes of health and hygiene, such as illness, contagion, cleanliness, and contamination. Examining the artistic oeuvres of some of the canonical names of modern art – including Edgar Degas, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, George Orwell, Marcel Duchamp, and Antonin Artaud – this book investigates instances where the heightened political, social, and cultural currencies embedded within issues of hygiene and contagion have been mobilised, and subversively exploited, to fuel the critical strategy at play. This edited volume promotes an interdisciplinary and socio-historically contextualised understanding of the criticality of the avant-garde gesture and cultivates scholarship that moves beyond the limits of traditional academic subjects to produce innovative and thought-provoking connections and interrelations across various fields. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, literature, theatre, cultural studies, modern history, medical humanities, and visual culture.

Through meticulously researched case studies, this book explores the materiality of terracotta sculpture in early modern Europe. Chapters present a broad geographical perspective showcasing examples of modelling, firing, painting, and gilding of clay in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. The volume considers known artworks by celebrated artists, such as Luca della Robbia, Andrea del Verrocchio, Filipe Hodart, or Hans Reichle, in parallel with several lesser-studied terracotta sculptures and tin-glazed earthenware made by anonymous artisans. This book challenges arbitrary distinctions into the fine art and the applied arts, that obscured the image of artistic production in the early modern world. The centrality of clay in the creative processes of artists working with two- and three-dimensional artefacts comes to the fore. The role of terracotta figures in religious practices, as well as processes of material substitutions or mimesis, confirm the medium’s significance for European visual and material culture in general. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, and material culture.

This book provides a comprehensive assessment of Dürer’s depictions of human diversity, focusing particularly on his depictions of figures from outside his Western European milieu. Heather Madar contextualizes those depictions within their broader artistic and historical context and assesses them in light of current theories about early modern concepts of cultural, ethnic, religious and racial diversity. The book also explores Dürer’s connections with contemporaries, his later legacy with respect to his imagery of the other and the broader significance of Nuremberg to early modern engagements with the world beyond Europe. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies and Renaissance history.

Hominids have always been obsessed with representing their own bodies. The first "selfies" were prehistoric negative hand images and human stick figures, followed by stone and ceramic representations of the human figure. Thousands of years later, moving via historic art and literature to contemporary social media, the contemporary term "selfie" was self-generated. The book illuminates some "selfies". This collection of critical essays about the fixation on the human self addresses a multi-faceted geographic set of cultures -- the Iberian Peninsula to pre-Columbian America and Hispanic America -- analysing such representations from medical, literal and metaphorical perspectives over centuries. Chapter contributions address the representation of the body itself as subject, in both visual and textual manners, and illuminate attempts at control of the environment, of perception, of behaviour and of actions, by artists and authors. Other chapters address the body as subjected to circumstance, representing the body as affected by factors such as illness, injury, treatment and death. These myriad effects on the body are interpreted through the brushes of painters and the pens of authors for social and/or personal control purposes. The essays reveal critics' insights when "selfies" are examined through a focused "lens" over a breadth of cultures. The result, complex and unique, is that what is viewed -- the visual art and literature under discussion -- becomes a mirror image, indistinguishable from the component viewing apparatus, the "lens".

The city of Kyoto has undergone radical shifts in its significance as a political and cultural center, as a hub of the national bureaucracy, as a symbolic and religious center, and as a site for the production and display of art. However, the field of Japanese history and culture lacks a book that considers Kyoto on its own terms as a historic city with a changing identity. Examining cultural production in the city of Kyoto in two periods of political transition, this book promises to be a major step forward in advancing our knowledge of Kyoto's history and culture. Its chapters focus on two periods in Kyoto's history in which the old capital was politically marginalized: the early Edo period, when the center of power shifted from the old imperial capital to the new warriors' capital of Edo; and the Meiji period, when the imperial court itself was moved to the new modern center of Tokyo. The contributors argue that in both periods the response of Kyoto elites-emperors, courtiers, tea masters, municipal leaders, monks, and merchants-was artistic production and cultural revival. As an artistic, cultural and historical study of Japan's most important historic city, this book will be invaluable to students and scholars of Japanese history, Asian history, the Edo and Meiji periods, art history, visual culture and cultural history.

Focusing on the theme of warriorhood, Sidney Littlefield Kasfir weaves a complex history of how colonial influence forever changed artistic practice, objects, and their meaning. Looking at two widely diverse cultures, the Idoma in Nigeria and the Samburu in Kenya, Kasfir makes a bold statement about the links between colonialism, the Europeans image of Africans, Africans changing self representation, and the impact of global trade on cultural artifacts and the making of art. This intriguing history of the interaction between peoples, aesthetics, morals, artistic objects and practices, and the global trade in African art challenges current ideas about artistic production and representation."

Kanadehon Chushingura has been one of the most popular bunraku and kabuki plays. This fascinating study explores the full spectrum of ukiyo-e (floating world) representations of the Chushingura story. Essential reading for all students of Japanese theatre, the history of Japanese art and the social history of Japan.

Much has changed in the world of folk art since the millennium. Many of the recognized ""masters"" have died and new artists have emerged. Many galleries have closed but few new ones have opened, as artists and dealers increasingly sell through websites and social media. The growth and popularity of auction houses has altered the relationship between artists and collectors. In its third edition, this book provides updated information on artists, galleries, museums, auctions, organizations and publications for both experienced and aspiring collectors of self-taught, outsider and folk art. Gallery and museum entries are organized geographically and alphabetically by state and city.

"By 1966, the composer Virgil Thomson would write, "Truth is, there is no avant-garde today." How did the avant garde dissolve, and why? In this thought-provoking work, Stuart D. Hobbs traces the avant garde from its origins to its eventual appropriation by a conservative political agenda, consumer culture, and the institutional world of art.

Armed with speakers, turntables, light systems, and records, Filipino American mobile DJ crews, such as Ultimate Creations, Spintronix, and Images, Inc., rocked dance floors throughout the San Francisco Bay Area from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s. In Legions of Boom noted music and pop culture writer and scholar Oliver Wang chronicles this remarkable scene that eventually became the cradle for turntablism. These crews, which were instrumental in helping to create and unify the Bay Area's Filipino American community, gave young men opportunities to assert their masculinity and gain social status. While crews regularly spun records for school dances, weddings, birthdays, or garage parties, the scene's centerpieces were showcases-or multi-crew performances-which drew crowds of hundreds, or even thousands. By the mid-1990s the scene was in decline, as single DJs became popular, recruitment to crews fell off, and aspiring scratch DJs branched off into their own scene. As the training ground for a generation of DJs, including DJ Q-Bert, Shortkut, and Mix Master Mike, the mobile scene left an indelible mark on its community that eventually grew to have a global impact.