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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1800 to 1900 > General
Nearly every artist under the age of 50 in the United States in the late-20th century has a Master of Fine Arts degee. This study places that degree in its proper historical framework and ideological context. Arguing that where artists are trained makes a difference in the forms and meanings they produce, he shows how the university, with its disciplined organization of knowledge and demand for language, played a critical role in the production of modernism in the visual arts. Now it is shaping what we call postmodernism - like postmodernist art, the graduate university stresses theory and research over manual skills and traditional techniques of representation. The text begins by examining the first campus-based art schools in the 1870s and goes on to consider the structuring role of women art educators and women students; the shift from the "fine arts" to the "visual arts"; the fundamental grammar of art laid down in the schoolroom; and the development of professional art training in the American university. The book reveals the ways we have conceived of art in the past hundred years and have institutionalized that conception as atelier activity, as craft, and finally as theory a
Hailed by her contemporaries as the most popular animal-painter, male or female, of the nineteenth century, the French artist Rosa Bonheur (1822-99) lived to see her name become a household word. In a century that did its best to keep women in their place, Bonheur, like George Sand--to whom she was often compared--defined herself outside of the social and legal codes of her time. To the horror and bewilderment of many, she earned her own money, managed her own property, wore trousers, hunted, smoked, and lived in retreat with female companions in a little chateau near Fountainebleau named The Domain of Perfect Affection. Rosa Bonheur: The Artist's (Auto)Biography brings this extraordinary woman to life in a unique blend of biography and autobiography. Coupling her own memories with Bonheur's first-person account, Anna Klumpke, a young American artist who was Bonheur's lover and chosen portraitist, recounts how she came to meet and fall in love with Bonheur. Bonheur's account of her own life story, set nicely within Klumpke's narrative, sheds light on such topics as gender formation, institutional changes in the art world, governmental intervention in the arts, the social and legal regulation of dress codes, and the perceived transgressive nature of female sexual companionship in a repressive society, all with the distinctive flavor of Bonheur's artistic personality. Gretchen van Slyke's translation provides a rare glimpse into the unconventional life of this famous French painter, and renders accessible for the first time in English this public statement of Bonheur's artistic credo. More importantly, whether judged by her century's standards (or perhaps even our own), it details a story of lesbian love that is bold, unconventional, and courageous. The remarkable life of Rosa Bonheur, one of the most highly decorated artists and certainly the best known female artist of her time in nineteenth-century France, is long overdue for further scrutiny. --Therese Dolan, Temple University Gretchen van Slyke is Associate Professor of French, University of Vermont.
What is kitsch? What is behind its appeal? More important, what is wrong with kitsch? Though central to our modern and postmodern culture, kitsch has not been seriously and comprehensively analyzed; its aesthetic worthlessness has been generally assumed but seldom explained. Kitsch and Art seeks to give this phenomenon its due by exploring the basis of artistic evaluation and aesthetic value judgments. Tomas Kulka examines kitsch in the visual arts, literature, music, and architecture. To distinguish kitsch from art, Kulka proposes that kitsch depicts instantly identifiable, emotionally charged objects or themes, but that it does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the depicted objects or themes. He then addresses the deceptive nature of kitsch by examining the makeup of its artistic and aesthetic worthlessness. Ultimately Kulka argues that the mass appeal of kitsch cannot be regarded as aesthetic appeal, but that its analysis can illuminate the nature of art appreciation.
This illustrated catalog of Thomas Moran's field sketches includes
an interpretive essay tracing the artist's seventy-year career in
the field; a chronological, stylistic, and geographical survey of
his fieldwork; an illustrated checklist of the 1080 sketches in
public collections.
The life of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), who abandoned his wife, five children, and a successful career as a stockbroker to paint in poverty in exotic Tahiti, is one of the legendary tales of the art world. Today he is recognized as a highly influential founding father of modern art, who emphasized the use of flat planes and bright, nonnaturalistic color in conjunction with symbolic or primitive subjects. Familiarity with Gauguin the writer is essential for a complete understanding of the artist. "The Writings of a Savage" collects the very best of his letters, articles, books, and journals, many of which are unavailable elsewhere. In brilliantly lucid discussions of life and art Gauguin paints a triumphant self-portrait of a volcanic artist and the tormented man within.
The eighteenth-century French philosophe Denis Diderot—the principal intelligence behind the Encyclopédie and the author of idiosyncratic fictional works such as Jacques the Fatalist and Rameau's Nephew—was also the first great art critic. Until now, however, Diderot's treatises on the visual arts have been available only in French. This two-volume edition makes the most important of his art-critical texts available in English for the first time. Diderot's works are among the most provocative and engaging products of the French Enlightenment. Moreover, their ruminations on many issues of perennial interest (invention versus convention, nature versus culture, and technique versus imagination; the complex relations between economic reality and artistic achievement) give them a rare pertinence to current debates on the nature and function of representation. All the celebrated pieces are here: the rhapsodic dream meditation inspired by Fragonard's Corésus and Callierhoé; the incident-packed "excursion" through a set of landscapes by Joseph Vernet; the evocative consideration of the nature of ruins and historical nostalgia prompted by the first showing of works by Hubert Robert. But these famous passages can now be considered in their proper context, surrounded by meditations that are less well known but equally sparkling. The book also includes brief introductory texts and annotations by John Goodman that clarify the many references to contemporary Parisian culture, as well as an introduction by Thomas Crow that sets the texts in their historical and art-historical context.
In "The Painter's Practice," James Cahill reveals the intricacies of the painter's life with respect to payment and patronage--an approach that is still largely absent from the study of East Asian art. Drawing upon such unofficial archival sources as diaries and letters, Cahill challenges the traditional image of the disinterested amateur scholar-artist, unconcerned with material rewards, that has been developed by China's literati, perpetuated in conventional biographies, and abetted by the artists themselves. His work fills in the hitherto unexplored social and economic contexts in which painters worked, revealing the details of how painters in China actually made their living from the sixteenth century onward. Considering the marketplace as well as the studio, Cahill reviews the practices and working conditions of artists outside the Imperial Court such as the employment of assistants and the use of sketchbooks and prints by earlier artists for sources of motifs. As loose, flamboyant brushwork came into vogue, Cahill argues, these highly imitable styles ironically facilitated the forger's task, flooding the market with copies, sometimes commissioned and signed by the artists themselves. In tracing the great shift from seeing the painting as a picture to a concentration on the painter's hand, Cahill challenges the archetype of the scholar-artist and provides an enlightened perspective that profoundly changes the way we interpret familiar paintings.
The eighteenth century was a true golden age for the visual arts in Portugal. The discovery of fabulous deposits of gold, diamonds, and emeralds in Brazil suddenly made Portugal's court the wealthiest in all of Europe, enabling patronage of the arts on a lavish scale. This handsome volume is the first major work in English to be devoted to this period of Portuguese art and history. Written by historians such as Kenneth Maxwell and specialists in art and architectural history such as Hellmut Wohl and Jennifer Montagu, the book tells the story of this unique age-its politics, society, and history. Focusing on the reigns of King Joao V, who ruled from 1706 to 1750, and King Jose I, who ruled from 1750 to 1777, the book reproduces and discusses more than one hundred works of art-including paintings, architecture, sculpture, furniture, ceramics, silver, jewelry, and textiles-that illustrate the extraordinary quality of Portuguese artistic production and patronage. National Gallery Publications, Washington
Sketches & Measurings - Danish Architects in Greece 1818-1862
Dr. Niko Tinbergen was well known as a naturalist and a student of animal behaviour in England, on the Continent and in the United States. Ever since he was a young student in Holland he had been curious about nature, and in this book he sets out some of the facts that 25 years of curiosity gave him. As a biologist, anything living was his province-the bee-killing wasps and the digger wasps of the Dutch sand dunes; the Snow Bruntings and Phalaropes of Greenland; Hobbies and other hawks; moths and butterflies in various parts of England and Holland; Black-headed Gulls of the Ravenglass nature reserve, Cumberland, the Kittiwakes and Eider Ducks of the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumberland. Readers cannot fail to be struck-and possibly sometimes amused-by the patience and ingenuity shown in the field studies undertaken by Dr. Tinbergen and his fellow naturalists-and which are now passed on for the benefit and interest of his readers. The studies were always undertaken seriously, but this did not prevent Dr. Tinbergen from writing about them in the liveliest way; he realised that quite often he and his friends must have seemed to onlookers to be very curious naturalists indeed.
Was the Royal Academy of San Carlos, founded in 1785 by the King of Spain, beneficial or detrimental to the development of a valid, living art in Mexico? The answer lies in the archives of the school, but nobody thought about constructing an aesthetic history from them until Jean Charlot accidentally discovered their extent and interest while searching for other material. In this straightforward, documented account he presents not merely opinions and criticism but evidence, including curricula and contemporary drawings by students and teachers. Since Pre-Conquest art there have been, it is usually assumed, two periods in Mexican art: the Colonial and the Modern. Between these peaks lies the dark Academy-dominated hiatus called Neo-Classicism, an episode that this treatise makes the first attempt to under-stand. The academic canons imported from Europe during this period were undeniably wrong for the indigenous people, and especially wrong at a time when a revolutionary Mexico was struggling for its own identity. But instead of throwing out this strange episode as foreign and imitative, it now becomes possible to see it as a period of acculturation through which the Mexican spirit emerged. Aside from its interest as aesthetic history, this book makes an important contribution to the social history of Mexico. Some provocative ideas emerge: the interrelations between cultural and political attitudes, the historical impact of events and personalities on ideology. In the seesaw of political and financial fortunes, the worst moments of confusion were often the most pregnant artistically, with mexicanidad rising inevitably when official guidance weakened. As social history this account constitutes an interesting parallel to similar cultural experiences in the United States and in other countries of the Americas. Charlot presents this material without special pleading, but not without appraisal. He writes: ..". in the periods when the Academy was most strictly run along academic lines, it helped the young, by contrast, to realize the meaning of freedom. When the school was manned by men blind to the Mexican tradition, and sensitive only to European values, their stubborn stand became a most healthy invitation to artistic revolution."
A revolutionary figure throughout his career, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's work provides a distinctly revolutionary lens through which the Victorian period can be viewed. Suggesting that Rossetti's work should be approached through his poetry, Brian Donnelly argues that it is both inscribed by and inscribes the development of verbal as well as visual culture in the Victorian era. In his discussions of modernity, aestheticism, and material culture, he identifies Rossetti as a central figure who helped define the terms through which we approach the cultural productions of this period. Donnelly begins by articulating a method for reading Rossetti's poetry that highlights the intertextual relations within and between the poetry and paintings. His interpretations of such poems as the 'Mary's Girlhood' sonnets, the sonnet sequence The House of Life, and 'The Orchard-Pit' in relationship to paintings such as The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini! shed light on Victorian ideals of femininity, on consumer culture, and on the role of gender hierarchies in Victorian culture. Situating Rossetti's poetry as the key to all of his work, Donnelly also makes a case for its centrality in its representation of the dominant discourses of the late Victorian period: faith, sex, consumption, death, and the nature of representation itself.
This beautiful book, companion publication to the exhibition of the same name, presents a complex overview of the life and career of the pioneering African American artist Henry O. Tanner (1859-1937). Recognized as the patriarch of African American artists, Tanner forged a path to international success, powerfully influencing younger black artists who came after him. Following a preface by David Driskell, the essays in this book - written by international scholars including Alan Braddock, Michael Leja, Jean-Claude Lesage, Richard Powell, Marc Simpson, Tyler Stovall, and Helene Valance - explore many facets of Tanner's life, including his upbringing in post-Civil War Philadelphia, his background as the son of a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal church, and his role as the first major academically trained African American artist. Additional essays discuss Tanner's expatriate life in France, his depictions of the Holy Land and North Africa, and the scientific and technical innovations reflected in his oeuvre. Edited and introduced by Anna O. Marley, this volume expands our understanding of Tanner's place in art history, showing that his status as a painter was deeply influenced by his race but not decided by it. Contributors include: Brian Baade; Alan Braddock; Marcus Bruce; Adrienne L. Childs; Robert Cozzolino; David Driskell; Amber Kerr-Allison; Michael Leja; Jean-Claude Lesage; Anna O. Marley; Olivier Meslay; Richard Powell; Marc Simpson; Tyler Stovall; and, Helene Valance.
Art is often appreciated for its ability to delight our eyes and refresh our minds. But it can also serve as a powerful vehicle for exploring darker emotions, such as fear, sadness, and grief. And while these themes have an artistic history dating back to the ancients, the ways in which they have been represented in art have changed dramatically over time. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art, "The Tragic Muse: Art and Emotion, 1700-1900" draws on the work of several distinguished scholars to examine the richly varied representation of tragedy in the European artistic tradition over the course of two centuries. This catalog is generously illustrated with full-color reproductions of all the works contained in the exhibition, and the fascinating contributions offer new insights into the approaches taken by the visual arts, as well as literature and drama, in expressing and eliciting strong emotions.
Products of modernity, postcards continue to provoke comment today as in the nineteenth century. With their unique status as interdisciplinary image-objects that cross lines of geography, economy, and gender, postcards epitomize the complex history of visual culture. These often sweet, nostalgic, inexpensive mementos of commercial culture have also been carriers, even instigators, of colonialist exoticism and political propaganda. They straddle the by now largely obliterated line between "high" and "low" art, between an earlier modernist art history and more recent work in visual culture. This fully illustrated volume is the first of its kind to bring together the latest interdisciplinary research on postcards as a significant area of scholarly inquiry. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Rebecca J. DeRoo, Ellen Handy, Elizabeth B. Heuer, Timothy Van Laar, Annelies Moors, Cary Nelson, John O'Brian, Naomi Schor, Kimberly A. Smith, Rachel Snow, Nancy Stieber, and Andres Mario Zervigon.
This book follows the life of Ivan Agueli, the artist, anarchist, and esotericist, notable as one of the earliest Western intellectuals to convert to Islam and to explore Sufism. This book explores different aspects of his life and activities, revealing each facet of Agueli's complex personality in its own right. It then shows how esotericism, art, and anarchism finally found their fulfillment in Sufi Islam. The authors analyze how Agueli's life and conversion show that Islam occupied a more central place in modern European intellectual history than is generally realized. His life reflects several major modern intellectual, political, and cultural trends. This book is an important contribution to understanding how he came to Islam, the values and influences that informed his life, and-ultimately-the role he played in the modern Western reception of Islam.
Woven coverlets have appeared in several guises within the history of folk textiles. Created on four-harness looms, coverlets made in the nineteenth-century American South typically featured colored wool and cotton threads woven into striking geometric patterns. Although they are not as well known as other textiles and domestic objects, "overshot" coverlets were, and continue to be, significant examples of material culture that require tremendous skill and creativity to produce. They also express currents of conformity and dissent. In addition to being pleasing to the eye and hand, "overshot" coverlets have advanced a variety of social and political ends. At times exhibited in slave quarters along the seaboard in Georgia and South Carolina in association with plantation properties, they also appear in piedmont areas attached to the antebellum yeomanry, in the context of nationalist craft revivals, and in white-box contemporary art. With Overshot, Susan Falls and Jessica R. Smith analyze what we can learn by examining the exhibition and interpretation of these materials within American public history. By showing how geometric overshot coverlets can be understood in relationship to the global economy and within politicized cultural movements, Falls and Smith demonstrate how these erstwhile domestic, utilitarian objects explode the art/craft dichotomy, belong to a rich narrative of historical art forms, and tell us far more about American culture today than simply representing a nostalgic past, particularly with regard to ideas about race, class, nationalism, women's labor, and the separation of private versus public spaces.
Major General Sir Isaac Brock is remembered as the Hero of Upper Canada for his defence of what is now Ontario during the War of 1812, and also for his noble death at the Battle of Queenston Heights. In the more than two centuries since then, Brock's likeness has been lost in a confusing array of portraits-most of which are misidentified or conceptual. The 1824 monument constructed to honour Brock's sacrifice was destroyed in 1840 by Benjamin Lett, a disgruntled disciple of William Lyon Mackenzie and critic of the Upper Canadian elite. The replacement and subsequent commemorations emphasized a patriotic desire to visualize the hero's appearance. But despite uncovering an authentic portrait painted only a few years before Brock's death, a series of false faces were promoted to serve competing claims and agendas. St-Denis situates Brock's portraits within an emerging English Canadian imperial nationalism that sought a heroic past which reflected their own aspirations and ambitions. A work of detailed scholarship and a fascinating detective story, The True Face of Sir Isaac Brock details the sometimes petty world of self-proclaimed guardians of the past, the complex process of identification and misidentification that often occurs even at esteemed Canadian institutions, and St-Denis' own meticulous work as he separates fact from fiction to finally reveal Brock's true face.
From the beginning of the exciting century that saw a small nation expand into a mighty world power, the famous lithographic firm of Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives produced over 7,000 prints, capturing scenes of American life in vivid detail. Currier & Ives prints were each coloured individually, by hand, and collectors have prized their skilled craftsmanship and keen sense of composition for generations. This timeless collection, complete with more than three hundred illustrations in full colour and a masterful text by historian Walton Rawls, captures a beloved piece of Americana. With festive holiday scenes, watershed historical moments, and idyllic depictions of the American countryside, this book will hold perennial appeal for lovers of history, art, and a classic take on the American experience.
How does museum location shape the interpretation of an art object by critics, curators, art historians, and others? To what extent is the value of a work of art determined by its location? Providing a close examination of individual works of American art in relation to gallery and museum location, this anthology presents case studies of paintings, sculpture, photographs, and other media that explore these questions about the relationship between location and the prescribed meaning of art. It takes an alternate perspective in that it provides in-depth analysis of works of art that are less well known than the usual American art suspects, and in locations outside of art museums in major urban cultural centers. By doing so, the contributors to this volume reveal that such a shift in focus yields an expanded and more complex understanding of American art. Close examinations are given to works located in small and mid-sized art museums throughout the United States, museums that generally do not benefit from the resources afforded by more powerful cultural establishments such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Works of art located at institutions other than art museums are also examined. Although the book primarily focuses on paintings, other media created from the Colonial Period to the present are considered, including material culture and craft. The volume takes an inclusive approach to American art by featuring works created by a diverse group of artists from canonical to lesser-known ones, and provides new insights by highlighting the regional and the local.
Since the mid-1970s, the colloquial term zone has often been associated with the troubled post-war housing estates on the outskirts of large French cities. However, it once referred to a more circumscribed space: the zone non aedificandi (non-building zone) which encircled Paris from the 1840s to the 1940s. This unusual territory, although marginal in a social and geographical sense, came to occupy a central place in Parisian culture. Previous studies have focused on its urban and social history, or on particular ways in which it was represented during particular periods. By bringing together and analysing a wider range of sources from the duration of the zone's existence, this study offers a rich and nuanced account of how the area was perceived and used by successive generations of Parisian novelists (including Zola and Flaubert), poets, songwriters, artists, photographers, film-makers, politicians and town-planners. More generally, it aims to raise awareness of a neglected aspect of Parisian cultural history while pointing to links between current and past perceptions of the city's periphery.
Speed, acceleration and rapid change characterize our world, and as we design and construct buildings that are to last at least a few decades and sometimes even centuries, how can architecture continue to act as an important cultural signifier? Focusing on how an important nineteenth-century architect addressed the already shifting relation between architecture, time and history, this book offers insights on issues still relevant today-the struggle between imitation and innovation, the definition (or rejection) of aesthetic experience, the grounds of architectural judgment (who decides and how), or fundamentally, how to act (i.e. build) when there is no longer a single grand narrative but a plurality of possible histories. Six drawings provide the foundation of an itinerary through Charles Robert Cockerell's conception of architecture, and into the depths of drawings and buildings. Born in England in 1788, Cockerell sketched as a Grand Tourist, he charted architectural history as Royal Academy Professor, he drew to build, to exhibit, to understand the past and to learn from it, publishing his last work in 1860, three years before his death. Under our scrutiny, his drawings become thresholds into the nineteenth century, windows into the architect's conception of architecture and time, complex documents of past and projected constructions, great examples that reveal a kinetic approach to ornamentation, and the depth of architectural representation.
British Models of Art Collecting and the American Response - Reflections Across the Pond presents 14 essays by distinguished art - and cultural - historians. Collectively, they examine points of similarity and difference in the approaches to art collecting practiced in Britain and the United States. Unlike most of their Continental European counterparts, the English and Americans have historically been exceptionally open to collecting the art made by and for other cultures. At the same time, they developed a tradition of opening private collections to a public eager for educational and cultural advancement. Approximately half the essays examine the trends and market forces that dominated the British art collecting scene of the nineteenth century, such as the Orleans sale and the shift away from aristocratic collections to those of the new urban merchant class. The essays that focus on American collectors use biographical sketches of collectors and dealers, as well as case studies of specific transactions to demonstrate how collectors in the United States embraced and embellished on the British model to develop their own, often philanthropic approach to art collecting. |
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