Compelling and troubling, colorful and dark, black figures served as the quintessential image of difference in nineteenth-century European art; the essays in this volume further the investigation of constructions of blackness during this period. This collection marks a phase in the scholarship on images of blacks that moves beyond undifferentiated binaries like 'negative' and 'positive' that fail to reveal complexities, contradictions, and ambiguities. Essays that cover the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century explore the visuality of blackness in anti-slavery imagery, black women in Orientalist art, race and beauty in fin-de-siecle photography, the French brand of blackface minstrelsy, and a set of little-known images of an African model by Edvard Munch. In spite of the difficulty of resurrecting black lives in nineteenth-century Europe, one essay chronicles the rare instance of an American artist of color in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. With analyses of works ranging from Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, to portraits of the American actor Ira Aldridge, this volume provides new interpretations of nineteenth-century representations of blacks.

Featuring more than 500 photos and maps, this is the first comprehensive, research-based history of Navajo weavings with imagery inspired by tribal sacred practices. These Yei, Yeibichai, and sandpainting textiles have been the most sought after by collectors and the least studied by scholars. In spite of their iconography, they never served a ceremonial function. They were created by Navajo women at the instigation of Anglo traders, for sale to wealthy collectors willing to pay premium prices for their perceived spiritual symbolism. This book describes the historical and artistic development of the genre from its controversial emergence around 1900, to the 1920-1940 period of intense creativity, and concluding with the contemporary search for innovative patterns. Never-before-published weavings, detailed annotations, and an extensive bibliography make this an invaluable reference for scholars and collectors, and a fascinating exploration for all who are interested in the Southwest and its native cultures.

Surrealism and the Exotic is the story of the obsessive relationship between surrealist and non-western culture. Describing the travels across Africa, Oceania, Mexico and the Caribbean made by wealthy aesthetes, it combines an insight into the mentality of early twentieth century collectors with an overview of the artistic heritage at stake in these adventures. Featuring more than 70 photographs of artefacts, exhibitions and expeditions-in-progress, it brings to life the climate of hedonism enjoyed by Breton, Ernst, Durkheim, and Mauss, It is an unparalleled introduction to the Surrealist movement and to French thought and culture in the 1920s and 1930s.

Providing an overall interpretation of the Buddhist monument Borobudur in Indonesia, this book looks at Mahayana Buddhist religious ideas and practices that could have informed Borobudur, including both the narrative reliefs and the Buddha images. The author explores a version of the classical Mahayana that foregrounds the importance of the visual in relation to Buddhist philosophy, meditation, devotion, and ritual. The book goes on to show that the architects of Borobudur designed a visual world in which the Buddha appeared in a variety of forms and could be interpreted in three ways: by realizing the true nature of his teaching, through visionary experience, and by encountering his numinous presence in images. Furthermore, the book analyses a particularly comprehensive and programmatic expression of Mahayana Buddhist visual culture so as to enrich the theoretical discussion of the monument. It argues that the relief panels of Borobudur do not passively illustrate, but rather creatively "picture" selected passages from texts. Presenting new material, the book contributes immensely to a new and better understanding of the significance of the Borobudur for the field of Buddhist and Religious Studies.

A one-of-a-kind book of pop-ups based on the works of the Japanese artist Hokusai

Hokusai (1760–1849) was an extraordinarily prolific Japanese master artist and printmaker of the ukiyo-e (‘pictures of the floating world’) genre. More than 150 years after his death, his legacy remains as important as any Western painter’s. His work inspired a roll-call of great artists including Van Gogh, Renoir, Monet, Gauguin, Manet, Degas and Klimt as well as craftsmen and architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright.

This book features six meticulously crafted pop-ups of some of his most famous works: 'The Great Wave'; 'Chrysanthemums and Horsefly'; 'The Poem of Ariwara no Narihira or Autumn Leaves'; 'Kirituri Waterfall'; 'Phoenix'; and 'A Sudden Gust of Wind'.

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris examines a history of contact between modern Europe and East Asia through three collectors: Henri Cernuschi, Emile Guimet, and Edmond de Goncourt. Drawing on a wealth of material including European travelogues of the East and Asian reports of the West, Ting Chang explores the politics of mobility and cross-cultural encounter in the nineteenth century. This book takes a new approach to museum studies and institutional critique by highlighting what is missing from the existing scholarship -- the foreign labors, social relations, and somatic experiences of travel that are constitutive of museums yet left out of their histories. The author explores how global trade and monetary theory shaped Cernuschi's collection of archaic Chinese bronze. Exchange systems, both material and immaterial, determined Guimet's museum of religious objects and Goncourt's private collection of Asian art. Bronze, porcelain, and prints articulated the shifting relations and frameworks of understanding between France, Japan, and China in a time of profound transformation. Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris thus looks at what Asian art was imagined to do for Europe. This book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in art history, travel imagery, museum studies, cross-cultural encounters, and modern transnational histories.

The Grimms called them The Quiet Folk, in Maori they are Patupaiarehe, in Wales Y Tylwyth Teg: hidden people who live unseen, speak their own languages and move around like migrants, shrouded from our eyes - like those who lived in the utopian world of Plant Rhys Ddwfn off the west Welsh coast, where this book begins. In mythology, lost lands are coral castles beneath the sea, ancient forests where spirits live, and mountain swamps where trolls lurk. Strip away the mythology, and they become valleys and villages flooded to provide drinking water to neighbouring kingdoms, campsites where travellers are told they can't travel, and reservations where the rights of first nations people are ignored. The folk tales in this book tell of these lost lands and hidden people, remembered through migrations, dreams and memories.

In the 1890s, the Danish lieutenant Ole Olufsen set out to lead two expeditions to Tsarist Central Asia. Exploring areas that were still blank on European and Russian maps, the participants spent more than a year traveling on horseback in the pamirs and adjacent valleys bordering Afghanistan, China, and British India. Esther Fihl offers an in-depth study of these Danish expeditions and presents the magnificent collection of objects brought back to the National Museum of Denmark. Drawing on diaries, reports, and published works and a scrutiny of the guiding principles for their collecting of objects, she demonstrates how these explorers portrayed the cultures encountered. This work is a treasure for anyone interested in Central Asia, early anthropological theory, material culture, or European travel literature. They lived with Kyrgyz nomads who carved out an existence for themselves above the tree line with their sheep, goats, and yaks. Traveling along the river Pandsh, they were the first Europeans to collect ethnographical information on the transhumant pastoralists in the elevated valleys bordering Afghanistan. On the steppes of the western lowlands, the Danish expeditions stopped in Samarkand, Khiva, and Bukhara, commercial hubs on the old Silk Road. As official guests of both the emir of Bukhara and the khan of Khiva, they studied the handicrafts of the bazaars and the irrigation agriculture practiced by the Tajiks and Uzbeks. On visits to Merv they also spent time with Turkmen nomadic tribes who had only recently been fighting the Russian colonial power.

The complexity and confusion of styles and intentions are true characteristics of modern Chinese art. Just as the definition of “modernity” was subjected to reinterpretations at various points in China’s recent history, current notions of the canon are likewise subjected to change. This book — consisting of ten articles by art historians, artist, historian, and curator — explores the developments of Chinese art in the 20th century, applying critical theories to question and reinterpret concepts that are normally taken for granted. Their writings also reveal the thought processes in which the authors filtered what they considered to be important information, especially regarding people, events, dates, and artworks. As such, the topic of each article is, in itself, a result of judicious selection. This volume demonstrates how modern Chinese art history has been — and can be — written.

"Presented alongside Hiroshige's prints, with descriptions and context, Delord's work offers an absorbing contemplation of Japan's past and present via one legendary travel route, and shows how thoroughly upended our surroundings have been in what was, in wider perspective, only a short time." -- The New York Times Journey along the famed Tokaido Road--an ancient thoroughfare with a modern twist. The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido is the best-known work of the great 19th century Japanese woodblock artist Utagawa Hiroshige. The series of 53 masterful woodblock prints depicts stops along the ancient Tokaido Road--which, from the eleventh to the nineteenth century, was the main thoroughfare between Tokyo and Kyoto. Though the road itself is now submerged under Japan's twenty-first-century urban landscape, French artist Philippe Delord set out to see if he could find the original locations, with just a moped, sketchbook, watercolors and a book of Hiroshige's prints. Hiroshige's Japan allows readers to make the journey alongside Delord, venturing from Tokyo and Mount Fuji to mountain passes and rugged coastlines. Inside are all 53 original scenery prints made by Hiroshige, alongside their modern-day equivalent by Delord. A lively commentary about his experiences as he tries to locate each of the 53 scenes (without speaking Japanese!) offers readers an insightful, and often humorous, look into both modern and historical Japan. Part travelogue, part work of art, this book is sure to delight armchair travelers, history buffs, art enthusiasts and Japanophiles alike!

Despite the importance of Chen Hongshou (1599-1652) as an artist and scholar of the Ming period, until now no full length study in English has focused on his work. Author Tamara H. Bentley takes a broadly interdisciplinary approach, treating Chen's oeuvre in relation to literary themes and economic changes, and linking these larger concerns to visual analyses. Considering Chen's paintings and prints alongside Chen's romance drama commentaries and prefaces and his collected writings (particularly poetry), Bentley sheds new light not only on Chen, but also on an important cultural moment in the first half of the seventeenth century. Through analysis of Chen's figure paintings and print designs, Bentley examines the artist's engagement with the values of "authenticity" and "emotion," which were part of a larger discourse stressing idiosyncrasy, the individual voice, and vernacular literature. She contrasts these values with the commercial aspects of his production, geared at an expanding art market of well-to-do buyers, excavating the apparent contradiction inherent in the two pursuits. In the end, she suggests, the emphasis on the "authentic" voice was marketed to a broad field of anonymous buyers. Though her primary focus is on Chen Hongshou, Bentley's investigation ultimately concerns not only this individual artist, but also the effect of early modern changes on an artist's mode of working and his self-image, in the West as well as the East. The study touches upon expanding international trade and the rise of middle class art markets (including print markets), not only in China but also in the Dutch Republic in circa 1630-1650. Bentley investigates the specific rhetoric of different categories of images, including Chen's non-literal figurative works; literal commemorative portraits; his printed romance-drama illustrations; and his printed playing cards. Bentley's investigation takes in issues of studio practice (including various types of image replicati

Conservation of Easel Paintings, Second Edition provides a much-anticipated update to the previous edition, which has come to be known internationally as an invaluable and comprehensive text on the history, philosophy and methods of the treatment of easel paintings. Including 49 chapters written by more than 90 respected authors from around the world, this volume offers the necessary background knowledge in technical art history, artists' materials and scientific methods of examination and documentation. Later sections of the book provide information about the varying approaches and methods for treatment and issues of preventive conservation, as well as valuable reflections on storage, shipping, and exhibition. Including exciting developments that have taken place since the last edition was published, the book also covers new techniques of examination, especially MacroXRF scanning and Reflectance Transmission Imagery. Drawing on research presented at recent professional conferences, information about innovative methods for cleaning modern and contemporary paintings and insights into modern oil paints is also included. Incorporating the latest regulations and understanding of health and safety practices and integrating theory with practice throughout, Conservation of Easel Paintings, Second Edition will continue to be an indispensable reference for practicing conservators. It will also be an essential resource for students taking conservation courses around the world.

How science changed the way artists understand reality Exploring the Invisible shows how modern art expresses the first secular, scientific worldview in human history. Now fully revised and expanded, this richly illustrated book describes two hundred years of scientific discoveries that inspired French Impressionist painters and Art Nouveau architects, as well as Surrealists in Europe, Latin America, and Japan. Lynn Gamwell describes how the microscope and telescope expanded the artist's vision into realms unseen by the naked eye. In the nineteenth century, a strange and exciting world came into focus, one of microorganisms in a drop of water and spiral nebulas in the night sky. The world is also filled with forces that are truly unobservable, known only indirectly by their effects-radio waves, X-rays, and sound-waves. Gamwell shows how artists developed the pivotal style of modernism-abstract, non-objective art-to symbolize these unseen worlds. Starting in Germany with Romanticism and ending with international contemporary art, she traces the development of the visual arts as an expression of the scientific worldview in which humankind is part of a natural web of dynamic forces without predetermined purpose or meaning. Gamwell reveals how artists give nature meaning by portraying it as mysterious, dangerous, or beautiful. With a foreword by Neil deGrasse Tyson and a wealth of stunning images, this expanded edition of Exploring the Invisible draws on the latest scholarship to provide a global perspective on the scientists and artists who explore life on Earth, human consciousness, and the space-time universe.

New Perspectives on Brucke Expressionism: Bridging History brings together highly-renowned international art historians in a scholarly work that offers the first full-length reassessment in English of the importance of the Brucke group to German modernism specifically and to international modernism more generally. It challenges, interrogates and updates existing orthodoxies in the field of Brucke studies by deploying new research combined with innovative interpretative approaches. This is an exciting volume of essays with an interlinking tripartite structure that charts the significance of this pioneering German avant-garde group in relation to various critical themes, namely, 'cultural and material identity', 'collectivity and selfhood', as well as 'defamation and rehabilitation'. The book is unique in the field in that it seeks to excavate specific historical research relating to the activities of the Brucke as a bohemian yet nonetheless enterprising artists' community, and considers the contributions of the key members in relation to the dynamics of that group rather than simply on an individual basis. It thoroughly explores the historiography of the Brucke artists' reception throughout the turbulent history of the twentieth century up until the present day.

The 1876 events known as Custer's Last Stand, Battle of Little Big Horn, or Battle of Greasy Grass have been represented over 1000 times in various artistic media, from paintings to sculpture to fast food giveaways. Norman Denzin shows how these representations demonstrate the changing perceptions--often racist--of Native America by the majority culture, juxtaposed against very different readings shown in works composed by Native American artists. Consisting of autobiographical reminiscences, historical description, artistic representations, staged readings, and snippets of documents, this multilayered performance ethnography examines questions of memory, race, and violence against Native America, as symbolized by the changing interpretations of General Custer and his final battle.

Focusing on early nineteenth-century England?and on the works and texts of the inventor of paper photography, William Henry Fox Talbot?Singular Images, Failed Copies historicizes the conceptualization of photography in that era as part of a major historical change. Treating photography not merely as a medium or a system of representation but also as an epistemology, Vered Maimon challenges today's prevalent association of the early photograph with the camera obscura. Instead, she points to material, formal, and conceptual differences between those two types of images by considering the philosophical and aesthetic premises linked with early photography. Through this analysis she argues that the emphasis in Talbot's accounts on the removal of the "artist's hand" in favor of "the pencil of nature" did not mark a shift from manual to "mechanical" and more accurate or "objective" systems of representation. In Singular Images, Failed Copies, Maimon shows that the perception of the photographic image in the 1830s and 1840s was in fact symptomatic of a crisis in the epistemological framework that had informed philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic thought for two centuries.

Providing an overall interpretation of the Buddhist monument Borobudur in Indonesia, this book looks at Mahayana Buddhist religious ideas and practices that could have informed Borobudur, including both the narrative reliefs and the Buddha images. The author explores a version of the classical Mahayana that foregrounds the importance of the visual in relation to Buddhist philosophy, meditation, devotion, and ritual. The book goes on to show that the architects of Borobudur designed a visual world in which the Buddha appeared in a variety of forms and could be interpreted in three ways: by realizing the true nature of his teaching, through visionary experience, and by encountering his numinous presence in images. Furthermore, the book analyses a particularly comprehensive and programmatic expression of Mahayana Buddhist visual culture so as to enrich the theoretical discussion of the monument. It argues that the relief panels of Borobudur do not passively illustrate, but rather creatively "picture" selected passages from texts. Presenting new material, the book contributes immensely to a new and better understanding of the significance of the Borobudur for the field of Buddhist and Religious Studies.

After the death of Joseph Stalin, Soviet-era Russia experienced a flourishing artistic movement due to relaxed censorship and new economic growth. In this new atmosphere of freedom, Russia's satirical magazine Krokodil (The Crocodile) became rejuvenated. John Etty explores Soviet graphic satire through Krokodil and its political cartoons. He investigates the forms, production, consumption, and functions of Krokodil, focusing on the period from 1954 to 1964. Krokodil remained the longest-serving and most important satirical journal in the Soviet Union, unique in producing state-sanctioned graphic satirical comment on Soviet and international affairs for over seventy years. Etty's analysis of Krokodil extends and enhances our understanding of Soviet graphic satire beyond state-sponsored propaganda. For most of its life, Krokodil consisted of a sixteen-page satirical magazine comprising a range of cartoons, photographs, and verbal texts. Authored by professional and nonprofessional contributors and published by Pravda in Moscow, it produced state-sanctioned satirical comment on Soviet and international affairs from 1922 onward. Soviet citizens and scholars of the USSR recognized Krokodil as the most significant, influential source of Soviet graphic satire. Indeed, the magazine enjoyed an international reputation, and many Americans and Western Europeans, regardless of political affiliation, found the images pointed and witty. Astoundingly, the magazine outlived the USSR but until now has received little scholarly attention.

**AS SEEN ON BBC2's BETWEEN THE COVERS** A Guardian Book of the Year Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation - Olivia Laing Bluets winds its way through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting along the way with famous blue figures, including Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Yves Klein, Leonard Cohen and Andy Warhol. While its narrator sets out to construct a sort of 'pillow book' about her lifelong obsession with the colour blue, she ends up facing down both the painful end of an affair and the grievous injury of a dear friend. The combination produces a raw, cerebral work devoted to the inextricability of pleasure and pain, and to the question of what role, if any, aesthetic beauty can play in times of great heartache or grief. Much like Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse, Bluets has passed between lovers in the ecstasy of new love, and been pressed into the hands of the heartbroken. Visceral, learned, and acutely lucid, Bluets is a slim feat of literary innovation and grace, never before published in the UK.

Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully was the great-granddaughter of respected nineteenth-century portraitist Thomas Sully, who captured the personalities of America's first generation of celebrities (including the figure of Andrew Jackson immortalized on the twenty-dollar bill). Born on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota in 1896, she was largely self-taught. Steeped in the visual traditions of beadwork, quilling, and hide painting, she also engaged with the experiments in time, space, symbolism, and representation characteristic of early twentieth-century modernist art. And like her great-grandfather Sully was fascinated by celebrity: over two decades, she produced hundreds of colorful and dynamic abstract triptychs, a series of "personality prints" of American public figures like Amelia Earhart, Babe Ruth, and Gertrude Stein. Sully's position on the margins of the art world meant that her work was exhibited only a handful of times during her life. In Becoming Mary Sully, Philip J. Deloria reclaims that work from obscurity, exploring her stunning portfolio through the lenses of modernism, industrial design, Dakota women's aesthetics, mental health, ethnography and anthropology, primitivism, and the American Indian politics of the 1930s. Working in a complex territory oscillating between representation, symbolism, and abstraction, Sully evoked multiple and simultaneous perspectives of time and space. With an intimate yet sweeping style, Deloria recovers in Sully's work a move toward an anti-colonial aesthetic that claimed a critical role for Indigenous women in American Indian futures-within and distinct from American modernity and modernism.

Geishas and the Floating World returns readers to a lost world of sensuality and seduction, rich with hedonism, abandon, and sexual and personal politics. "Floating World" refers to Japan's traditional Geisha pleasure districts, but also to the artistic and literary worlds associated with them. At the heart of the "Floating World" and the system it supported was an extensive network of talented courtesans and entertainers, typified by the still fascinating, enigmatic Geisha. Stephen and Ethel Longstreet bring the reader on an in-depth tour of the original and most infamous red-light district in Japan--the Yoshiwara district of old Tokyo that underwent tremendous changes during the more than three centuries of its existence. Beyond the erotic allure the district held, the Yoshiwara also fostered a rich culture and a much studied and revered artistic and literary tradition. This account is adorned with examples of fine woodblock prints and quotations from often bawdy, and always colorful, original sources that offer a gripping portrait of life within the pleasure zone. Geishas and the Floating World balances scholarly insights with a master storyteller's flair for the exploits and intrigues of people operating outside the confines of polite society. Stephen Mansfield's new introduction bridges time, examining gender realities and the Yoshiwara through contemporary eyes, highlighting often overlooked subtleties and the harsh realities associated with this glittering world.

This book aims to redefine Australia's earliest art history by chronicling for the first time the birth of the category "Aboriginal art," tracing the term's use through published literature in the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Susan Lowish reveals how the idea of "Aboriginal art" developed in the European imagination, manifested in early literature, and became a distinct classification with its own criteria and form. Part of the larger story of Aboriginal/European engagement, this book provides a new vision for an Australian art history reconciled with its colonial origins and in recognition of what came before the contemporary phenomena of Aboriginal art.