This book establishes a fresh and expansive view of the grotesque in Western art and culture, from 1500 to the present day. Following the non-linear evolution of the grotesque, Frances S. Connelly analyzes key works, situating them within their immediate social and cultural contexts, as well as their place in the historical tradition. By taking a long historical view, the book reveals the grotesque to be a complex and continuous tradition comprised of several distinct strands: the ornamental, the carnivalesque and caricatural, the traumatic, and the profound. The book articulates a model for understanding the grotesque as a rupture of cultural boundaries that compromises and contradicts accepted realities. Connelly demonstrates that the grotesque is more than a style, genre, or subject; it is a cultural phenomenon engaging the central concerns of the humanistic debate today. Hybrid, ambivalent, and changeful, the grotesque is a shaping force in the modern era.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi, which has aroused great curiosity since plans were first announced for the groundbreaking museum in 2007, will unveil a selected part of its nascent collection in April 2013. While the building that will house the museum collection, designed by architect Jean Nouvel, is already well- known, this book -the first to be dedicated to the museum's collection - allows the reader to discover the universal spirit that permeates and incarnates the birth of this new museum. The growing collection, presented here for the first time, best captures and expresses the essence and spirit of the museum itself. These 300 works, reproduced in exceptionally high-quality photographs commissioned for the publication, open a dialogue between the diverse world cultures and their artistic expressions, from the most antiquated to the ultra contemporary, ranging from archaeological treasures to groundbreaking works of contemporary art. All artistic traditions are present, from Ancient Egypt and Greco-Roman art to Islamic art and grand Asian statuary, from works by Bellini and Murillo to Manet or Mondrian, and masterpieces from the European Renaissance or an Art Deco ensemble, to Indian miniatures or paintings by Yan Pei-Ming. The works are analyzed in their cultural context, highlighting their particularities, while simultaneously placing them at the crossroads of the great cultures that comprise the museum's collections.

Why are visual artworks experienced as having intrinsic significance or normative depth? Why are some works of art better able to manifest this significance than others? In this 2002 book Paul Crowther argues that we can answer these questions only if we have a full analytic definition of visual art. Crowther's approach focuses on the pictorial image, broadly construed to include abstract work and recent conceptually-based idioms. The significance of art depends, however, essentially on the transhistorical nature of the pictorial image, the way in which its illuminative power is extended through historical transformation of the relevant artistic medium. Crowther argues against fashionable forms of cultural relativism, while at the same time showing why it is important that an appreciation of the history of art is integral to aesthetic judgment.

Bringing to light little-known artistic traditions, the latest volume of Ars Judaica focuses on the local and temporal contexts of objects and their images and explores collective and personal memories and identities in art. Rivka Ben-Sasson examines modes of symbolic perception of nature prevalent in religious thought and art by analysing images of the lulav and etrog. Iwona Brzewska and Waldemar Deluga discuss the significance of Hebrew script in paintings and prints of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries originating from the borderland between the Catholic and Christian Orthodox domains of eastern Europe. Michelle Klein studies the typological development of the havdalah candle-holder, based on an analysis of 170 examples. Matthew Baigell suggests that American Jewish artists are characterized by concern for the betterment of humankind; his sources include Jewish postcards, photographs, and caricatures as well as the work of contemporary American Jewish artists. Astrid Schmetterling discusses how Else Lasker-Schuler's Orientalism offered a serious aesthetic-political challenge to both German and Jewish society. Mor Presiado argues that the contemporary use of sewing and embroidery by contemporary Jewish women artists to depict women's experience of the Holocaust initiates a new, feminist response to the Holocaust. The Special Item in this volume, an article by Shalom Sabar on the earliest illustrated Esther Scroll by Shalom Italia, is an illuminating insight into early modern Jewish art in the making. Also included are exhibition and book reviews. Ars Judaica is an annual publication of the Department of Jewish Art at Bar-Ilan University. It showcases the Jewish contribution to the visual arts and architecture from antiquity to the present from a variety of perspectives, including history, iconography, semiotics, psychology, sociology, and folklore. As such it is a valuable resource for art historians, collectors, curators, and all those interested in the visual arts. Volumes of Ars Judaica are distributed by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization throughout the world, except Israel. Orders and enquiries from Israeli customers should be directed to: Ars Judaica, Department of Jewish Art, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Telephone 03 5318413; Fax 036359241; Email [email protected]

A visionary new approach to the Americas during the age of colonization, made by engaging with the aural aspects of supposedly "silent" images Colonial depictions of the North and South American landscape and its indigenous inhabitants fundamentally transformed the European imagination-but how did those images reach Europe, and how did they make their impact? In Sound, Image, Silence, noted art historian Michael Gaudio provides a groundbreaking examination of the colonial Americas by exploring the special role that aural imagination played in visible representations of the New World. Considering a diverse body of images that cover four hundred years of Atlantic history, Sound, Image, Silence addresses an important need within art history: to give hearing its due as a sense that can inform our understanding of images. Gaudio locates the noise of the pagan dance, the discord of battle, the din of revivalist religion, and the sublime sounds of nature in the Americas, such as lightning, thunder, and the waterfall. He invites readers to listen to visual media that seem deceptively couched in silence, offering bold new ideas on how art historians can engage with sound in inherently "mute" media. Sound, Image, Silence includes readings of Brazilian landscapes by the Dutch painter Frans Post, a London portrait of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison's early Kinetoscope film Sioux Ghost Dance, and the work of Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of American landscape painting. It masterfully fuses a diversity of work across vast social, cultural, and spatial distances, giving us both a new way of understanding sound in art and a powerful new vision of the New World.

J. A. Green (1873-1905) was one of the most prolific and accomplished indigenous photographers to be active in West Africa. This beautiful book celebrates Green's photographs and opens a new chapter in the early photographic history of Africa. Soon after photography reached the west coast of Africa in the 1840s, the technology and the resultant images were disseminated widely, appealing to African elites, European residents, and travelers to the region. Responding to the need for more photographs, expatriate and indigenous photographers began working along the coasts, particularly in major harbor towns. Green, whose identity remained hidden behind his English surname, maintained a photography business in Bonny along the Niger Delta. His work covered a wide range of themes including portraiture, scenes of daily and ritual life, commerce, and building. Martha G. Anderson, Lisa Aronson, and the contributors have uncovered 350 of Green's images in archives, publications, and even albums that celebrated colonial achievements. This landmark book unifies these dispersed images and presents a history of the photographer and the area in which he worked.

The Oregon artist Nelson Sandgren (1917-2006) worked in three distinct media - oil painting, watercolor, and lithography - distinguishing himself in each of these modes throughout his sixty-five-year career. Nelson Sandgren: An Artist's Life is the first in-depth study of this mid-century Oregon modernist who was born in Canada, grew up in Chicago, and moved with his family to Oregon during the Depression. As a watercolorist who loved to paint on site, often on the Oregon coast, Sandgren worked in the tradition of Winslow Homer and John Marin. In oil painting, he combined modernist abstraction with Pacific Northwest landscape imagery, in this practice paralleling Louis Bunce, Carl Morris, and other Oregon moderns. As a lithographer, Sandgren was central to the printmaking culture that Gordon Gilkey promoted at Oregon State university, where Sandgren taught for thirty-eight years. Roger Hull provides a detailed biography and a close analysis of Sandgren's key artworks while demonstrating Sandgren's significant place in Pacific Northwest modernist tradition.

This lively, well-illustrated alternative history of painting reexamines the accepted ideas about fine art painting. It broadens the scope of painting from works on paper and canvas to include painted ceramics, stained glass. textiles. This history of Western painting is often reduced to the story of a tiny elite bunch of easel pictures, composed exclusively of old masters and avant-garde works. Three-dimensional objects, watercolors, miniatures, icons, and non-Western works, as well as modern paintings that are no longer perceived as "cutting edge," relate uneasily to this twin canon of old and modern masters. This new, richly illustrated account seeks to redress the balance by exploring the wider history of painting and including a broad range of painted works (often excluded as belonging to the realm of applied or decorative art) from stained glass to painted ceramics, furniture, textiles, and items of costume.

Donald Kuspit argues here that art is over because it has lost its aesthetic import. Art has been replaced by "postart," a term invented by Alan Kaprow, as a new visual category that elevates the banal over the enigmatic, the scatological over the sacred, cleverness over creativity. Tracing the demise of aesthetic experience to the works and theory of Marcel Duchamp and Barnett Newman, Kuspit argues that devaluation is inseparable from the entropic character of modern art, and that anti-aesthetic postmodern art is in its final state. In contrast to modern art, which expressed the universal human unconscious, postmodern art degenerates into an expression of narrow ideological interests. In reaction to the emptiness and stagnancy of postart, Kuspit signals the aesthetic and human future that lies with the old masters. The End of Art points the way to the future for the visual arts. Donald Kuspit is Professor of Art History at SUNY Stony Brook. A winner of the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism, Professor Kuspit is a Contributing Editor at Artforum, Sculpture and New Art Examiner. His most recent book is The Cult of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, 1994).

The ""blk alter"" of Avery R. Young's poetic vision makes its stunning debut in a multidisciplinary arsenal entitled, neckbone: visual verses. Young's years of supernatural fieldwork within the black experience and the gospel of his transitions between poetry, art and music, become the stitch, paint brush, metaphor, and narrative of arresting visual metaphors of childhood teachings and traumas, identity, and the personal reverence of pop culture's beauty and beast. A mastermind in a new language of poetry, that engages and challenges readers to see beyond the traditional spaces poems are shaped and exist, Young's neckbone extends tentacles in literature, art, and activism-redefining the collective and the sermon of the ""blk"" experience.

The Bauhaus school in Germany has long been understood through the writings of its founding director, Walter Gropius, and well-known artists who taught there such as Wassily Kandinsky and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Far less recognized are texts by women in the school's weaving workshop. In "Bauhaus Weaving Theory, " T'ai Smith uncovers new significance in the work the Bauhaus weavers did as writers.

From colorful, expressionist tapestries to the invention of soundproofing and light-reflective fabric, the workshop's innovative creations influenced a modernist theory of weaving. In the first careful examination of the writings of Bauhaus weavers, including Anni Albers, Gunta Stozl, and Otti Berger, Smith details how these women challenged assumptions about the feminine nature of their craft. As they harnessed the vocabulary of other disciplines like painting, architecture, and photography, Smith argues, the weavers resisted modernist thinking about distinct media. In parsing texts about tapestries and functional textiles, the vital role these women played in debates about medium in the twentieth century and a nuanced history of the Bauhaus comes to light.

"Bauhaus Weaving Theory" deftly reframes the Bauhaus weaving workshop as central to theoretical inquiry at the school. Putting questions of how value and legitimacy are established in the art world into dialogue with the limits of modernism, Smith confronts the belief that the crafts are manual and technical but never intellectual arts.

Focusing on what makes Jesus important in Christianity, Robert Cummings Neville, a leading philosophical theologian, presents and illustrates a theory of religious symbols wherein God is directly engaged in symbolically shaped thinking and practice. Moreover, Christian symbolism is shown to be entirely compatible with a late-modern scientific world view. This major work may affect belief in Jesus, and will be of value to students, academics, clergy with theological training, and others grappling with the meaning and importance of religious symbols in our age.

Focusing on what makes Jesus important in Christianity, Robert Cummings Neville, a leading philosophical theologian, presents and illustrates a theory of religious symbols wherein God is directly engaged in symbolically shaped thinking and practice. Moreover, Christian symbolism is shown to be entirely compatible with a late-modern scientific world view. This major work may affect belief in Jesus, and will be of value to students, academics, clergy with theological training, and others grappling with the meaning and importance of religious symbols in our age.

This volume gives voice to cultural institutions working with collections of Islamic art and material culture globally, including many from outside Western Europe and North America. The contributions inform a vibrant, ongoing global conversation around curatorship in this field, one that embraces the responsibilities, challenges and opportunities for those engaged in it. Contributors-including art historians, curators and education specialists-discuss curatorial methodologies in theoretical and practical terms, present new exhibitions of Islamic art and culture, and explore the role of educational and engagement practices related to Islamic collections and Muslim audiences.

On the African continent, images of mothers and children are found wherever the visual arts are, from early rock-art sites in Egypt and the Sahara to the contemporary arts of South Africa. Discovered in a variety of materials, from stone, ivory, and metals to beadwork, wood, and even paintings, images of maternity enliven virtually every type of object made in the region. Defining maternity as a biological and cultural phenomenon, the author goes beyond obvious notions of fertility to consider the importance of maternity in thought, ritual action, and worldview. Maternity images of all eras evoke deep and significant messages - well beyond what meets the eye. Distributed for Mercatorfonds

Who was responsible for the crimes of the Nazis? Party leaders and members? Rank-and-file soldiers and bureaucrats? Ordinary Germans? This question looms over German disputes about the past like few others. It also looms over the art and architecture of postwar Germany in ways that have been surprisingly neglected. In The Nazi Perpetrator, Paul B. Jaskot fundamentally reevaluates pivotal developments in postwar German art and architecture against the backdrop of contentious contemporary debates over the Nazi past and the difficulty of determining who was or was not a Nazi perpetrator. Like their fellow Germans, postwar artists and architects grappled with the Nazi past and the problem of defining the Nazi perpetrator—a problem that was thoroughly entangled with contemporary conservative politics and the explosive issue of former Nazis living in postwar Germany. Beginning with the formative connection between Nazi politics and art during the 1930s, The Nazi Perpetrator traces the dilemma of identifying the perpetrator across the entire postwar period. Jaskot examines key works and episodes from West Germany and, after 1989, reunified Germany, showing how the changing perception of the perpetrator deeply impacted art and architecture, even in cases where artworks and buildings seem to have no obvious relation to the Nazi past. The book also reinterprets important periods in the careers of such major figures as Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Daniel Libeskind. Combining political history with a close analysis of specific works, The Nazi Perpetrator powerfully demonstrates that the ongoing influence of Nazi Germany after 1945 is much more central to understanding a wide range of modern German art and architecture than cultural historians have previously recognized.

From rock art to Australian modernism, from bark paintings to the Heidelberg School, The Cambridge Companion to Australian Art provides a wide-ranging overview of the movements, themes and media found in Australian art. This Companion features essays that explore the influence of different cultures on Australian art, written by some of the leading scholars and professionals working in the field. Generously illustrated with over 200 colour images, from more than 40 collections and sites throughout Australia, this Companion provides a comprehensive exploration of the artistic identity of past and present Australia.

Women have consistently been left out of the official writing of Lebanese history, and nowhere is this more obvious than in writing on the Lebanese Civil War. As more and more histories of the war begin to circulate, few include any in-depth discussion of the multiple roles women played in wartime Lebanon. Fewer still address the essential issues of women's work and their creative production, such as literature, performance art, and filmmaking. Developed out of a larger oral history project collecting and archiving the ways in which women narrated their experiences of the Lebanese Civil War, this book focuses on a wide range of subjects, all framed as women telling their "war stories." Each of the six chapters centers on women who worked or created art during the war, revealing, in their own words, the challenges, struggles, and resistance they faced during this tumultuous period of Lebanese history.

Outsider art is work produced outside the mainstream of modern art by self-taught visionaries, spiritualists, eccentrics, recluses, psychiatric patients, criminals and others beyond the perceived margins of society. Coined in 1972 the term is derived from art brut', which the artist Jean Dubuffet began promoting just after the Second World War. Both focus on the idea of a raw', untaught creativity, which is still a contentious and much-debated issue. Is this a natural phenomenon, requiring only the right circumstances (isolation or alienation) to be revealed; or is it more like a mirage projected by the very culture it is supposed to be escaping from? Behind the polemic and the commercial hype lies a cluster of assumptions about creative drives, the expression of inner worlds, radical originality and the artist's social or psychological eccentricity. Although Outsider art is often presented as a recent discovery, these ideas belong to a tradition that goes back to the Renaissance, when the modern image of the artist began to take shape. If Outsiders are in some way outside' the conventional art world, what happens to them, and to the works they create, when they are introduced to it? David Maclagan has been writing on Outsider art for over twenty-five years, and this book sets out to challenge many of the received ideas in the field. This book will be of interest to the growing number of people interested in the field of Outsider art, and all those studying concepts of artistic creativity and their cultural background.

Mandala museum-quality postcard books feature some of the best art to come out of India. Benjamin Franklin Award finalist B.G. Sharma depicts the God of Love with subtle brush-strokes in "Krishna Art Postcard Book, while "Gods and Goddesses Postcard Book profiles individual personalities from the pantheon through the mystic art of Indra Sharma. In addition, various contributors, from both past and present, show us the fierce face of the goddess Kali and scenes from the famous battle where the Bhagavad Gita was spoken.

Cynthia Freeland explains why innovation and controversy are valued in the arts, weaving together philosophy, art theory, and many engrossing examples. She discusses blood, beauty, culture, money, sex, web sites, and research on the brain's role in perceiving art. This clear, lively book will engage the public, introductory students, and teachers in the arts.

Hop on the tram with Milli Ennium, Quincy, and their cohorts as they set out to explore the Getty Center. This children's book--from the creators of the popular Mr. Lunch character--takes a delightful tour through the Getty Museum, adjancent gardens, conservation laboratories and other sites at the Getty Center. Featuring the wonderful illustrations of J.otto Seibold and the beloved characters created by Seibold and coauthor Vivian Walsh, Going to the Getty is a colorful, humorous visit to the new center and sure to be enjoyed by children as well as the adult fans of Seibold and Walsh.