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.

Fired Clay in Four Porcelain Clusters examines how energy use in the ceramics-making industry has evolved as a result of technological advancements and changing social norms and ideas in environmental conservation. Three main research themes are highlighted. First, the book examines how the evolving use of energy fuels has impacted the developmental history of the ceramics-making industry, especially with regard to productive output. The second theme focuses on energy use by networks of specialists and technicians in ceramics-making artistic clusters and how ceramicist communities in the world organize themselves institutionally to maximize resource-sharing. Third, at a cognitive level, the volume studies changes in production and design, environmental thinking, energy use, and aesthetic trends among ceramicists and consumers. The four cities or towns of Arita, Hong Kong, Jingdezhen, and Yingge are the settings for this research.

This innovative book narrates the history of a single object--a tea-leaf storage jar created in southern China during the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries--and describes how its role changed after it was imported to Japan and passed from owner to owner there. In Japan, where the jar was in constant use for more than seven hundred years, it was transformed from a humble vessel into a celebrated object used in chanoyu (often translated in English as tea ceremony), renowned for its aesthetic and functional qualities, and awarded the name Chigusa.

Few extant tea utensils possess the quantity and quality of the accessories associated with Chigusa, material that enables modern scholars and tea aficionados to trace the jar U s evolving history of ownership and appreciation. Tea diaries indicate that the lavish accessories--the silk net bag, cover, and cords--that still accompany the jar were prepared in the early sixteenth century by its first recorded owner.

Louise Allison Cort is curator of ceramics, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. She received the 2012 Secretary U s Distinguished Research Lecture Award, Smithsonian Institution, and the 2012 Koyama Fujio Memorial Prize for her research on historical Japanese ceramics. Andrew M. Watsky is professor of Japanese art at Princeton University. His book, "Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan," received the John Whitney Hall Book Prize (Association for Asian Studies) and the Shimada Prize (Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution)."

This is a richly-illustrated study of 'The Oracles of the Three Shrines', the name given to a hanging scroll depicting three important Japanese shrine-deities and their respective oracle texts. The scroll has evolved continuously in Japan for 600 years, so different examples of it offer a series of 'windows' on developments in Japanese religious belief and practice.

Painting Stories explores the accomplishments, struggles, and livelihoods of traditional artisans in Raghurajpur, a village known for its patta chitra painters. In this collection, Helle Bundgaard weaves thirty years of observations and experiences into a tapestry of stories, which together present a poignant image of the lives of Indian craft makers and their personal connections to the art that they create. The painters' stories are situated in a rich cultural environment and steeped in social relations. For them, painting is more than a livelihood or an aesthetic expression - it is a way of life. Painting Stories is a window into a part of our world rarely seen, reminding us of both our rich diversity and our shared humanity. Written with the painters, students, and laypersons in mind, the book includes a discussion of ethnographic storytelling and resources for ethnographic writing, as well as color photographs that bring the stories to life.

In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aisha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences. Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasised the possibility of progress while trying to destroy what came before, and voraciously sought out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums. By practising what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas to the Congo ruled by Belgium's brutal King Leopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions - an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums - to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics. Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as "past" and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.

This title was first published in 2000: John Petts (1914-1991) is one of the outstanding wood-engravers of the twentieth century. His stunning prints featuring Welsh mountains and the people who live amongst them reflect his deep concern for the history of the land and are distinguished by his profound understanding of the physical and psychological properties of light. Extensively illustrated, John Petts and the Caseg Press spans the entire career of this reclusive artist and offers the first account of the private press he founded in Snowdonia in 1937. In 1935, John Petts and Brenda Chamberlain abandoned their studentships at the Royal Academy Schools, London for a rundown farmhouse in the rugged terrain of Snowdonia. They started the Caseg Press in 1937 in the hope that it might finance their freedom to work. At first dedicated to saleable ephemera such as Christmas cards and bookplates, the press later became involved in the broader Welsh cultural scene, providing illustrations for the Welsh Review, a monthly literary periodical. In 1941, with the writer Alun Lewis, the Caseg press produced a series of broadsheets designed to express continuity and identification with the life of rural Wales in the face of social change precipitated by the second world war. John Petts and the Caseg Press is the first monograph on this artist. It covers both his work for the Caseg Press and for other publishers such as the Golden Cockerel Press. The volume offers a unique insight into an important chapter in the history of private presses in Britain and the development of neo-romanticism in art and literature during the inter-war period.

An annotated index and general orientation of Islamic art collections in museums, libraries, other institutions and on private hands. Includes a short description of each collection, its main characteristics, documentation, publications and exhibitions.

First published in 1997, this volume will revolutionise the study of watercolour painting in Britain. The Royal Watercolour Society archive constitutes a major academic resource covering two hundred years of the history of watercolour painting in Britain. The rediscovery in 1980 of 'the Jenkins Papers', the early records of the Society, was a major find for the history of British art. The archives are substantial and remarkably comprehensive. Minutes of annual general meetings, Council and committees, are all intact; extraordinarily, the Society's catalogues for its own exhibitions have also survived, with details of who bought the pictures and for how much. It contains biographical information on several hundred artists who practised throughout the United Kingdom from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day. Prepared by the archivist to the RWS, Simon Fenwick, this is not just a work of reference, but an absorbing book to dip into again and again. The Society of Painters in Water Colours, as it was then titled, was founded in 1804 to promote the interests of painters using watercolour and to provide a platform for members to sell their work. As such, its archives provide an excellent insight into the evolving debate on the status of the artists and their medium, and an authoritative account of the way in which watercolour paintings were sold, distributed and acquired. The substantial introduction by Greg Smith surveys some of the purposes and practices of watercolour from 1750 to the present day and highlights key issues, many yet to be examined, relating to the study of watercolour. His survey is arranged around a number of topics including the notion of watercolour as a British art, collecting and display, book illustration, architectural drawing, map-making and topography, antiquarian studies, decorative arts, printmaking, portrait miniatures and drawings, amateur practices and the changing status of the sketch.

Published in 1981: This book is an illustrated catologue of Fine Art paintings from 1789-1889.

Drawing attention to the ways in which creative practices are essential to the health, well-being, and healing of Indigenous peoples, The Arts of Indigenous Health and Well-Being addresses the effects of artistic endeavour on the "good life", or mino-pimatisiwin in Cree, which can be described as the balanced interconnection of physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental well-being. In this interdisciplinary collection, Indigenous knowledges inform an approach to health as a wider set of relations that are central to well-being, wherein artistic expression furthers cultural continuity and resilience, community connection, and kinship to push back against forces of fracture and disruption imposed by colonialism. The need for healing-not only individuals but health systems and practices-is clear, especially as the trauma of colonialism is continually revealed and perpetuated within health systems. The field of Indigenous health has recently begun to recognize the fundamental connection between creative expression and well-being. This book brings together scholarship by humanities scholars, social scientists, artists, and those holding experiential knowledge from across Turtle Island to add urgently needed perspectives to this conversation. Contributors embrace a diverse range of research methods, including community-engaged scholarship with Indigenous youth, artists, Elders, and language keepers. The Arts of Indigenous Health and Well-Being demonstrates the healing possibilities of Indigenous works of art, literature, film, and music from a diversity of Indigenous peoples and arts traditions. This book will resonate with health practitioners, community members, and any who recognize the power of art as a window, an entryway to access a healthy and good life.

This richly illustrated book examines the changing significance of ruins as vehicles for cultural memory in Chinese art and visual culture from ancient times to the present. Leading scholar of Chinese art Wu Hung shows how the story of ruins in China is different from but connected to "ruin culture" in the West. He investigates indigenous Chinese concepts of ruins and their visual manifestations, as well as the complex historical interactions between China and the West since the eighteenth century.

Analyzing a broad variety of traditional and contemporary visual materials, including painting, architecture, photography, prints, and cinema, Wu also embraces a wide variety of subjects--from indigenous methods of recording damage and decay in ancient China, to realistic images of architectural ruins in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the strong interest in urban ruins in contemporary China, as shown in the many artworks that depict demolished houses and decaying industrial sites. The result is an original interpretation of the development of Chinese art, as well as a unique contribution to global art history.

In 1979, a Kekchi Maya Indian accidentally discovered the entrance to Naj Tunich, a deep cave in the Maya Mountains of El Peten, Guatemala. One of the world's few deep caves that contain rock art, Naj Tunich features figural images and hieroglyphic inscriptions that have helped to revolutionize our understanding of ancient Maya art and ritual. In this book, Andrea Stone takes a comprehensive look at Maya cave painting from Preconquest times to the Colonial period. After surveying Mesoamerican cave and rock painting sites and discussing all twenty-five known painted caves in the Maya area, she focuses extensively on Naj Tunich. Her text analyzes the images and inscriptions, while photographs and line drawings provide a complete visual catalog of the cave art, some of which has been subsequently destroyed by vandals. This important new body of images and texts enlarges our understanding of the Maya view of sacred landscape and the role of caves in ritual. It will be important reading for all students of the Maya, as well as for others interested in cave art and in human relationships with the natural environment.

"The site is the result of a careful study of the river-banks, and commands so many views of varied beauty, that all the glories of the Hudson may be said to circle it." H. W. French, Art and Artists in Connecticut, 1879

In 1609, Henry Hudson sailed up the river that now bears his name. The exhibition and its accompanying publication Glories of the Hudson: Frederic Edwin Church's Views from Olana mark the quadricentennial of his discovery by highlighting Frederic Church's sketches of the prospect from his hilltop home overlooking the river. Church made his first sketch of the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains from Red Hill the south end of the property that became his home, Olana in 1845, on a sketching expedition suggested by his teacher Thomas Cole. Returning to the Hudson Valley in 1860 as the nation's most famous and best-paid artist, Church settled on a farm on the lower slope of the Sienghenbergh, securing for himself and his new wife a splendid vantage point for studying, sketching, and painting the river.

Church continued to add land to his property, attaining new and varied vistas of the river, and crowned the estate with a Persian-inspired house designed to frame splendid views of the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains. Church never tired of his views of the river, documenting his passion for the Hudson in paintings, oil sketches, and drawings. From Olana, he observed the transformations wrought by the changing seasons, weather, and light, capturing chilly winter snows, brilliant sunsets, and passing storms in sketches executed with a few brushstrokes or autumn colors and clear winter light in more finished easel paintings. The best of these are reproduced here, in eighty-three illustrations, sixty-nine in full color, some of them published for the first time. The essay by Evelyn D. Trebilcock and Valerie A. Balint, the introduction by Kenneth John Myers, and the foreword by John K. Howat together provide an absorbing narrative of the development of the Hudson River School and its most successful artist.

The Olana Partnership, Hudson, New York, and New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, Albany, New York, organized Glories of the Hudson: Frederic Edwin Church's Views from Olana, held from May 23 to October 12, 2009"

Women, Gender and Art in Asia, c. 1500-1900 brings women's engagements with art into a pan-Asian dialogue with essays that examine women as artists, commissioners, collectors, and subjects from India, Southeast Asia, Tibet, China, Korea, and Japan, from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. The artistic media includes painting, sculpture, architecture, textiles, and photography. The book is broadly concerned with four salient questions: How unusual was it for women to engage directly with art? What factors precluded more women from doing so? In what ways did women's artwork or commissions differ from those of men? And, what were the range of meanings for woman as subject matter? The chapters deal with historic individuals about whom there is considerable biographical information. Beyond locating these uncommon women within their socio-cultural milieux, contributors consider the multiple strands that twined to comprise their complex identities, and how these impacted their works of art. In many cases, the woman's status-as wife, mother, widow, ruler, or concubine (and multiple combinations thereof), as well as her religion and lineage-determined the media, style, and content of her art. Women, Gender and Art in Asia, c. 1500-1900 adds to our understanding of works of art, their meanings, and functions.

Bringing together established and emerging specialists in seventeenth-century Italian sculpture, Material Bernini is the first sustained examination of the conspicuous materiality of Bernini's work in sculpture, architecture, and paint. The various essays demonstrate that material Bernini has always been tied (whether theologically, geologically, politically, or in terms of art theory) to his immaterial twin. Here immaterial Bernini and the historiography that sustains him is finally confronted by material Bernini. Central to the volume are Bernini's works in clay, a fragmentary record of a large body of preparatory works by a sculptor who denied any direct relation between sketches of any kind and final works. Read together, the essays call into question why those works in which Bernini's bodily relation to the material of his art is most evident, his clay studies, have been configured as a point of unmediated access to the artist's mind, to his immaterial ideas. This insight reveals a set of values and assumptions that have profoundly shaped Bernini studies from their inception, and opens up new and compelling avenues of inquiry within a field that has long remained remarkably self-enclosed.

One of the largely untold stories of Orientalism is the degree to which the Middle East has been associated with "deviant" male homosexuality by scores of Western travelers, historians, writers, and artists for well over four hundred years. And this story stands to shatter our preconceptions of Orientalism. To illuminate why and how the Islamicate world became the locus for such fantasies and desires, Boone deploys a supple mode of analysis that reveals how the cultural exchanges between Middle East and West have always been reciprocal and often mutual, amatory as well as bellicose. Whether examining European accounts of Istanbul and Egypt as hotbeds of forbidden desire, juxtaposing Ottoman homoerotic genres and their European imitators, or unlocking the homoerotic encoding in Persian miniatures and Orientalist paintings, this remarkable study models an ethics of crosscultural reading that exposes, with nuance and economy, the crucial role played by the homoerotics of Orientalism in shaping the world as we know it today. A contribution to studies in visual culture as well as literary and social history, The Homoerotics of Orientalism draws on primary sources ranging from untranslated Middle Eastern manuscripts and European belles-lettres to miniature paintings and photographic erotica that are presented here for the first time.

When the body is foregrounded in artwork - as in much contemporary performance, sculptural installation and video work - so is gendered and sexualised difference. Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes looks to interactions between art history, theory, curation, and studio-based practices to theorise the phenomenological import of this embodied gender difference in contemporary art. The essays in this collection are rooted in a wide variety of disciplines, including art-making, curating, and art history and criticism, with many of the authors combining roles of curator, artist and writer. This interdisciplinary approach enables the book to bridge the theory-practice divide and highlight new perspectives emerging from creative arts research. Fresh insights are offered on feminist aesthetics, women's embodied experience, curatorial and art historical method, art world equity, and intersectional concerns. It engages with epistemological assertions of 'how the body feels', how the land has creative agency in Indigenous art, and how the use of emotional or affective registers may form one's curatorial method. This anthology represents a significant contribution to a broader resurgence of feminist thought, methodology, and action in contemporary art, particularly in creative practice research. It will be of particular value to students and researchers in art history, visual culture, cultural studies, and gender studies, in addition to museum and gallery professionals specialising in contemporary art.

First published in 1935, this book was intended to provide westerners with a more definite and comprehensive understanding of Chinese Art and its achievements. Newly available opportunities to study authentic examples, such as the Royal Academy exhibition that provided the impetus for this volume, allowed for greater opportunities to conduct in-depth examination than had previously been possible. Following an introduction giving an overview of Chinese art and its history in the west, six chapters cover painting and calligraphy, sculpture and lacquer, 'the potter's art', bronzes and cloisonne enamel, jades, and textiles - supplemented by a chronology of Chinese epochs, a selected bibliography and 25 images.

This book examines a famous series of sculptures by the German artist Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736-1783) known as his "Character Heads." These are busts of human heads, highly unconventional for their time, representing strange, often inexplicable facial expressions. Scholars have struggled to explain these works of art. Some have said that Messerschmidt was insane, while others suggested that he tried to illustrate some sort of intellectual system. Michael Yonan argues that these sculptures are simultaneously explorations of art's power and also critiques of the aesthetic limits that would be placed on that power.