Simon Schama brings Britain to life through its portraits, as seen in the five-part BBC series The Face of Britain and the major National Portrait Gallery exhibition Churchill and his painter locked in a struggle of stares and glares; Gainsborough watching his daughters run after a butterfly; a black Othello in the nineteenth century; the poet-artist Rossetti trying to capture on canvas what he couldn't possess in life; a surgeon-artist making studies of wounded faces brought in from the Battle of the Somme; a naked John Lennon five hours before his death. In the age of the hasty glance and the selfie, Simon Schama has written a tour de force about the long exchange of looks from which British portraits have been made over the centuries: images of the modest and the mighty; of friends and lovers; heroes and working people. Each of them - the image-maker, the subject, and the rest of us who get to look at them - are brought unforgettably to life. Together they build into a collective picture of Britain, our past and our present, a look into the mirror of our identity at a moment when we are wondering just who we are. Combining his two great passions, British history and art history, for the first time, Schama's extraordinary storytelling reveals the truth behind the nation's most famous portrayals of power, love, fame, the self, and the people. Mesmerising in its breadth and its panache, and beautifully illustrated, with more than 150 images from the National Portrait Gallery, The Face of Britain will change the way we see our past - and ourselves.

This collection explores the creative responses of artists to the legacies of war, colonialism, genocide and oppression. Based on a major project of international collaboration supported by the European Science Foundation, it brings together professional art practices, art history and visual culture studies, social anthropology, literary studies, history, museology and cultural policy studies. Case studies are drawn from diverse contexts, including South Africa, Germany, Namibia, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Australia. The results reveal a courageous and carefully examined global picture, with a variety of new approaches to confronting dominant historical narratives and shaping alternative interpretations. -- .

Grafton Tyler Brown--whose heritage was likely one-eighth African American--finessed his way through San Francisco society by passing for white. Working in an environment hostile to African American achievement, Brown became a successful commercial artist and businessman in the rough-and-tumble gold rush era and the years after the Civil War. Best known for his bird's-eye cityscapes, he also produced and published maps, charts, and business documents, and he illustrated books, sheet music, advertisements, and labels for cans and other packaging.

This biography by a distinguished California historian gives an underappreciated artist and his work recognition long overdue. Focusing on Grafton Tyler Brown's lithography and his life in nineteenth-century San Francisco, Robert J. Chandler offers a study equally fascinating as a business and cultural history and as an introduction to Brown the artist.

Chandler's contextualization of Brown's career goes beyond the issue of race. Showing how Brown survived and flourished as a businessman, Chandler offers unique insight into the growth of printing and publishing in California and the West. He examines the rise of lithography, its commercial and cultural importance, and the competition among lithographic companies. He also analyzes Brown's work and style, comparing it to the products of rival firms.

Brown was not respected as a fine artist until after his death. Collectors of western art and Americana now recognize the importance of Californiana and of Brown's work, some of which depicts Portland and the Pacific Northwest, and they will find Chandler's checklist, descriptions, and reproductions of Brown's ephemera--including billheads and maps--as uniquely valuable as Chandler's contribution to the cultural and commercial history of California. In an afterword, historian Shirley Ann Wilson Moore discusses the circumstances and significance of passing in nineteenth-century America.

Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right challenges assumptions regarding "radical" and "experimental" performance that have long dominated thinking about the avant-garde. The essays bring to light vanguard performances rarely discussed: those that support totalitarian regimes, promote conservative values, or have been effectively snapped up by right-wing regimes they sought to oppose. The volume explores a central paradox, examining how innovative performances that challenge oppressive power structures can also be deployed in deliberate, passionate support of oppressive power. Essays by top international scholars pose engaging new questions about the historical avant-garde, vanguard acts, and the complex role of artistic innovation and live performance in global politics. Focusing on performances that work against progressive and democratic ideas, the book demonstrates how many compelling performance ideals-unification, exaltation, immersion-are, in themselves, neither moral nor immoral; they are only emotional and aesthetic urges that can be powerfully channelled into a variety of social and political outlets.

Popular art is a masculine and working-class genre, associated with Panama's black population. Its practitioners are self-taught, commercial painters, whose high-toned designs, vibrant portraits, and landscapes appear in cantinas, barbershops, and restaurants. The red devil buses are popular art's most visible manifestation. The old school buses are imported from the United States and provide public transportation in Colon and Panama City. Their owners hire the artists to attract customers with eye-catching depictions of singers and actors, brassy phrases, and vivid representations of both local and exotic panoramas. The red devils boast powerful stereo systems and dominate the urban environment with their blasting reggae, screeching brakes, horns, sirens, whistles, and roaring mufflers.

"Wolf Tracks" analyzes the origins of these practices, tying them to rebellious, Afro-American festival traditions, and to the rumba craze of the mid-twentieth century. During World War II, thousands of U.S. soldiers were stationed in Panama, and elaborately decorated cabarets opened to cater to their presence. These venues often featured touring Afro-Cuban musicians. Painters such as Luis "The Wolf" Evans exploited such moments of modernization to challenge the elite and its older conception of Panama as a country with little connection to Africa. While the intellectual class fled from modernization and asserted a romantic and mestizo (European-indigenous) vision of the republic, popular artists enthusiastically embraced the new influences to project a powerful sense of blackness. "Wolf Tracks" includes biographies of dozens of painters, as well as detailed discussions of mestizo nationalism, soccer, reggae, and other markers of Afro-Panamanian identity."

Built upon the politics of difference, The Sphinx Contemplating Napoleon examines artistic practice through an international lens. This vibrant collection of essays and writings – produced in different cultural contexts and collected over two decades – introduces the reader to the thought, method of analysis and everyday experiences that have emerged from an increasingly globalized world, presenting a potentially radical frame through which to understand contemporary art. Gilane Tawadros experiments with methodology to draw cultural difference to the surface: from traditional criticism to fictional narratives, this critical variety mirrors her embrace of different perspectives and hints to the myriad ways in which contemporary art is created and presented. Using these techniques she explores the work of leading artists such as Adel Abdessemed, Richard Avedon, Sonia Boyce and Frank Bowling, offering expert guidance on the rich cultural and historical contexts of global and contemporary art through intimate engagement with lived experience. Playing with forms of writing, from critical analyses to fictional narratives, The Sphinx Contemplating Napoleon functions as a practice-based meditation on how to write about contemporary art.

The essays in More than One examine sequentiality and serialism in the practice of photography from the medium's earliest years to the present. Contributors explore nuances of syntax and sense raised by works like photographic albums, books, thematic portfolios, journalistic photo features, and documentations of performance art. Fully illustrated essays discuss, among other topics, the little-known volume Beyond This Point (1929), a collaborative experiment by American photographer Francis Bruguiere and London radio producer Lance Sieveking; the evolving relationship between public space and sexual self-definition in the early work of Minor White; and an important performance work by artist Ana Mendieta. The title essay surveys the social conditions and expressive motives that have given rise to serial and sequential forms throughout the history of photography. Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum

For more than four centuries, communities of maroons (men and women who escaped slavery) dotted the fringes of plantation America, from Brazil through the Caribbean to the United States. Today their descendants still form semi-independent enclaves- in Jamaica, Brazil, Colombia, Belize, Suriname, Guyane, and elsewhere-remaining proud of their maroon origins and, in some cases, faithful to unique cultural traditions forged during the earliest days of Afro-American history. In 1986, expelled by the military regime of Suriname, anthropologists Richard and Sally Price turned to neighboring Guyane (French Guiana), where thousands of Maroons were taking refuge from the Suriname civil war. Over the next fifteen years, their conversations with local people convinced them of the need to replace the pervasive stereotypes about Maroons in Guyane with accurate information. In 2003, Les Marrons became a local best seller. In 2020, after a series of further visits, the Prices wrote a new edition taking into account the many rapid changes. Available for the first time in English, Maroons in Guyane reviews the history of Maroon peoples in Guyane, explains how these groups differ from one another, and analyzes their current situations in the bustling, multicultural world of this far-flung outpost of the French Republic. A gallery of the magnifi cent arts of the Maroons completes the volume.

The designs in this magnificent collection of beautifully engraved frames, scrollwork, and other motifs originate from an extremely rare mid-19th century source. Featuring a lavish selection of ornaments (decorated with flowers, mythological creatures, and other fanciful touches) this treasury of copyright-free art also includes striking designs incorporating classical columns, a rich selection of heraldic designs, and a variety of charming calligraphic alphabets. A priceless resource for artists and designers.

Romare Bearden (1911-1988), one of the most prolific, original, and acclaimed American artists of the twentieth century, richly depicted scenes and figures rooted in the American South and the Black experience. Bearden hailed from North Carolina but was forced to relocate to the North when a white mob harassed them in the 1910s. His family story is a compelling, complicated saga of Black middle-class achievement in the face of relentless waves of white supremacy. It is also a narrative of the generational trauma that slavery and racism inflicted over decades. But as Glenda Gilmore reveals in this trenchant reappraisal of Bearden's life and art, his work reveals his deep imagination, extensive training and rich knowledge of art history. Gilmore explores four generations of Bearden's family and highlights his experiences in North Carolina, Pittsburgh, and Harlem. She engages deeply with Bearden's art and considers it as an alternative archive that offers a unique perspective on the history, memory, and collective imagination of Black southerners who migrated to the North. In doing so, she revises and deepens our appreciation of Bearden's place in the artistic canon and our understanding of his relationship to southern, African American, and American cultural and social history.

The first global history of architecture to give equal attention to Western and non-Western structures and built landscapes, "Architecture since 1400" is unprecedented in its range, approach, and insight. From Tenochtitlan's Great Pyramid in Mexico City and the Duomo in Florence to Levittown's suburban tract housing and the Bird's Nest Stadium in Beijing, its coverage includes the world's most celebrated structures and spaces along with many examples of more humble vernacular buildings. Lavishly illustrated with more than 300 photographs, plans, and interiors, this book presents key moments and innovations in architectural modernity around the globe.

Deftly integrating architectural and social history, Kathleen James-Chakraborty pays particular attention to the motivations of client and architect in the design and construction of environments both sacred and secular: palaces and places of worship as well as such characteristically modern structures as the skyscraper, the department store, and the cinema. She also focuses on the role of patrons and addresses to an unparalleled degree the impact of women in commissioning, creating, and inhabiting the built environment, with Gertrude Jekyll, Lina Bo Bardi, and Zaha Hadid taking their place beside Brunelleschi, Sinan, and Le Corbusier.

Making clear that visionary architecture has never been the exclusive domain of the West and recognizing the diversity of those responsible for commissioning, designing, and constructing buildings, "Architecture since 1400" provides a sweeping, cross-cultural history of the built environment over six centuries.

In this classic text, James Elkins communicates the experience of painting beyond the traditional vocabulary of art history. Alchemy provides a strange language to explore what it is a painter really does in the studio-the smells, the mess, the struggle to control the uncontrollable, the special knowledge only painters hold of how colors will mix, and how they will look. Written from the perspective of a painter-turned-art historian, this anniversary edition includes a new introduction and preface by Elkins in which he further reflects on the experience of painting and its role in the study of art today.

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).

This richly illustrated volume highlights the history of Islamic cosmopolitanism as documented through works of art from the eighth century to the present; from the Mediterranean, North Africa, South Asia, and the United States; and including painting, architecture, textiles, calligraphy, photography, and animation. These essays examine Muslim artists, patrons, and collectors' engagement with global influences, as well as artistic exchange between Muslim and non-Muslim societies. Drawing on Kwame Anthony Appiah's view of cosmopolitanism as respect for the differences among people and acknowledgment of a shared community across those differences, leading scholars offer case studies of art objects that illustrate such dynamics in the Islamic cultural sphere. In doing so, they bring Islamic art history into dialogue with Western European medieval art, Byzantine art, African art, global modern art, and American art and architecture. This timely volume demonstrates the importance of cultivating coexistence, becoming citizens of the world, and recognizing the possibilities of cultural intersections. It offers historical examples of such intersections, for which works of art provide a visual testament.

The Annunciation: a specific event recounted in the Bible and often represented in artworks, but also the prototype of many other announcements throughout the history of Western culture. This volume proposes new readings of pictorial Annunciations from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period - treating aspects such as witnesses, inscriptions and architecture - as well as analyses of some visual echoes, reenactments of the announcement to Mary in sacred and profane contexts up to the twenty-first century. Among the latter are included Venetian decoration glorifying the state, a Jean-Luc Godard film, a video art piece by Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Lars von Trier's Melancholia and a saint's bedroom turned into a pilgrimage site.

This short book introduces the reader to the key concepts in art from ancient times to the present day. Unlike many previous publications, in which non-Western art is a mere add-on to the great artists and movements of the Western canon, this tells the story of art from a fresh perspective, integrating previously marginalised aspects of artistic creation into the principal narrative. The text focuses on illustrated examples, ranging from the iconic to the unusual, providing a stimulating and throught-provoking introduction to a complex and challenging subject. Concise and informative, the book is written in a clear, jargonfree style. While it is ideal for first-year students of art, art history and related subjects, it will also be invaluable for general readers wanting to know and understand more about art and culture.

In What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet? Madina Tlostanova traces how contemporary post-Soviet art mediates this human condition. Observing how the concept of the happy future—which was at the core of the project of Soviet modernity—has lapsed from the post-Soviet imagination, Tlostanova shows how the possible way out of such a sense of futurelessness lies in the engagement with activist art. She interviews artists, art collectives, and writers such as Estonian artist Liina Siib, Uzbek artist Vyacheslav Akhunov, and Azerbaijani writer Afanassy Mamedov who frame the post-Soviet condition through the experience and expression of community, space, temporality, gender, and negotiating the demands of the state and the market. In foregrounding the unfolding aesthesis and activism in the post-Soviet space, Tlostanova emphasizes the important role that decolonial art plays in providing the foundation upon which to build new modes of thought and a decolonial future.

Though Bartolomeo Scappi's Opera (1570), the first illustrated cookbook, is well known to historians of food, up to now there has been no study of its illustrations, unique in printed books through the early seventeenth century. In Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy, Krohn both treats the illustrations in Scappi's cookbook as visual evidence for a lost material reality; and through the illustrations, including several newly-discovered hand-colored examples, connects Scappi's Opera with other types of late Renaissance illustrated books. What emerges from both of these approaches is a new way of thinking about the place of cookbooks in the history of knowledge. Krohn argues that with the increasing professionalization of many skills and trades, Scappi was at the vanguard of a new way of looking not just at the kitchen-as workshop or laboratory-but at the ways in which artisanal knowledge was visualized and disseminated by a range of craftsmen, from engineers to architects. The recipes in Scappi's Opera belong on the one hand to a genre of cookery books, household manuals, and courtesy books that was well established by the middle of the sixteenth century, but the illustrations suggest connections to an entirely different and emergent world of knowledge. It is through study of the illustrations that these connections are discerned, explained, and interpreted. As one of the most important cookbooks for early modern Europe, the time is ripe for a focused study of Scappi's Opera in the various contexts in which Krohn frames it: book history, antiquarianism, and visual studies.

The gnarled branches of a beautiful old plum tree reach toward the sky. A mushroom hunter searches for morels among rolling hills. A small boat is tossed among the tumultuous waves of an angry sea. Striding Lines, an homage to Wisconsin artist and quilter Rumi O'Brien, presents these striking images of her work and many more, accompanied by descriptions that share the stories of each piece in the artist's own words. Each quilt represents a moment, often autobiographical, crafted with whimsy, revealing an inspired talent. Bobbie Malone reaches beyond the quilts to tell O'Brien's own story, from her initial foray into the quilting world to her developed dedication to the craft. Contributions from leaders in the art, textile and quilting community, including Melanie Herzog and Marin Hanson, contextualize O'Brien's work in the greater community of quiltmakers and artists. This book celebrates the life and ingenuity of a Japanese-born American immigrant whose oeuvre is equally Japanese and Wisconsinite-and entirely distinctive.

In A Fragile Inheritance Saloni Mathur investigates the work of two seminal figures from the global South: the New Delhi-based critic and curator Geeta Kapur and contemporary multimedia artist Vivan Sundaram. Examining their written and visual works over the past fifty years, Mathur illuminates how her protagonists' political and aesthetic commitments intersect and foreground uncertainty, difficulty, conflict, and contradiction. This book presents new understandings of the culture and politics of decolonization and the role of non-Western aesthetic avant-gardes within the discourses of contemporary art. Through skillful interpretation of Sundaram's and Kapur's practices, Mathur demonstrates how received notions of mainstream art history may be investigated and subjected to creative redefinition. Her scholarly methodology offers an impassioned model of critical aesthetics and advances a radical understanding of art and politics in our time.

A dynamic vision of medieval Castilian culture and the Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin strands that are woven into its fabric Named a Book of the Year by the Times Literary Supplement, this lavishly illustrated work explores the vibrant interaction among different and sometimes opposing cultures, and how their contacts with one another transformed them all. It chronicles the tumultuous history of Castile in the wake of the Christian capture of the Islamic city of Tulaytula, now Toledo, in the eleventh century and traces the development of Castilian culture as it was forged in the new intimacy of Christians with the Muslims and Jews they had overcome. The authors paint a portrait of the culture through its arts, architecture, poetry and prose, uniquely combining literary and visual arts. Concentrating on the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the book reveals the extent to which Castilian identity is deeply rooted in the experience of confrontation, interaction, and at times union with Hebrew and Arabic cultures during the first centuries of its creation. Abundantly illustrated, the volume serves as a splendid souvenir of southern Spain; beautifully written, it illuminates a culture deeply enriched by others.

Innovative and lavishly illustrated, Painting the Gospel offers an indispensable contribution to conversations about African American art, theology, politics, and identity in Chicago. Kymberly N. Pinder escorts readers on an eye-opening odyssey to the murals, stained glass, and sculptures dotting the city's African American churches and neighborhoods. Moving from Chicago's oldest black Christ figure to contemporary religious street art, Pinder explores ideas like blackness in public, art for black communities, and the relationship of Afrocentric art to Black Liberation Theology. She also focuses attention on art excluded from scholarship due to racial or religious particularity. Throughout, she reflects on the myriad ways private black identities assert public and political goals through imagery. Painting the Gospel includes maps and tour itineraries that allow readers to make conceptual, historical, and geographical connections among the works.