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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1800 to 1900 > General
The practice of walking to a sacred space for personal and spiritual transformation has long held a place in the British imagination. Art and the Sacred Journey in Britain examines the intersections of the concept of pilgrimage and the visual imagination from the years 1790 to 1850. Through a close analysis of a range of interrelated written and visual sources, Kathryn Barush develops the notion of the transfer of 'spirit' from sacred space to representation, and contends that pilgrimage, both in practice and as a form of mental contemplation, helped to shape the religious, literary, and artistic imagination of the period and beyond. Drawing on a rich range of material including paintings and drawings, manuscripts, letters, reliquaries, and architecture, the book offers an important contribution to scholarship in the fields of religious studies, anthropology, art history, and literature.
The author presents a broad phenomenon known under the term of "Hollandism" as present in the European culture. Investigating various areas of 19th century painting, art criticism and literature, the author explains interpretation cliches attached to the culture of the Golden Age (e.g. its bourgeois and Protestant character, its realism and its genre character), which are entrenched in art history. She also presents those aspects of northern Netherlandish painting in the 17th century which were contrary to this image and which made many artists seek the sources of modernite in the art of Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer. The book offers an insight into the complex motivations and attitudes towards the artistic tradition not only of the great painters, but also of the little-known, almost forgotten imitators of the Dutch "Little Masters".
The Doppelganger - the double, twin, mirror image or alter ego of someone else - is an ancient and universal theme that can be traced at least as far back as Greek and Roman mythology, but is particularly associated with two areas of study: psychology, and German literature and culture since the Romantic movement. Although German language literature has been a nexus for writing on the Doppelganger, there is a paucity of scholarly work treating a broader selection of cultural products from the German-speaking world. The essays in this volume explore the phenomenon of the double in multiple aspects of German visual culture, from traditional art forms like painting and classical ballet to more contemporary ones like film, photography and material culture, and even puppet theatre. New ways of understanding the Doppelganger emerge from analyses of various media and time periods, such as the theme of the double in a series of portraits by Egon Schiele, the doubling of silk by rayon in Weimar Germany and its implications for class distinctions in Germany, and the use of the x-ray as a form of double in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain and Christoph Schlingensief's performance art.
Offering a broad and vivid survey of the culture of collecting from the French Revolution to the Belle Epoque, The Purchase of the Past explores how material things became a central means of accessing and imagining the past in nineteenth-century France. By subverting the monarchical establishment, the French Revolution not only heralded the dawn of the museum age, it also threw an unprecedented quantity of artworks into commercial circulation, allowing private individuals to pose as custodians and saviours of the endangered cultural inheritance. Through their common itineraries, erudition and sociability, an early generation of scavengers established their own form of 'private patrimony', independent from state control. Over a century of Parisian history, Tom Stammers explores collectors' investments - not just financial but also emotional and imaginative - in historical artefacts, as well as their uncomfortable relationship with public institutions. In so doing, he argues that private collections were a critical site for salvaging and interpreting the past in a post-revolutionary society, accelerating but also complicating the development of a shared national heritage.
The term "house of art" designates the cultural phenomenon and creative mode in modernity associated with an artist's residence as his own creation and as his product of a need to create which is unfulfilled in the painter's, writer's or composer's actual field. This book discusses the most important of these creations from the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th, including gardens as well as the artist's space, broadly understood, annexed by his imagination. An artist's shaping of his own residence was most commonly a secondary area of his creative work. The formula for a "house of art" is specific to the particular artist and does not have to fit within any given architectural or decorative style. It may conform to the traditions of a residence (artist's palace, cottage etc), but most often it forms an individual case.
Without question, the tache (blot, patch, stain) is a central and recurring motif in nineteenth-century modernist painting. Manet's and the Impressionists' rejection of academic finish produced a surface where the strokes of paint were presented directly, as patches or blots, then indirectly as legible signs. Cezanne, Seurat, and Signac painted exclusively with patches or dots. Through a series of close readings, this book looks at the tache as one of the most important features in nineteenth-century modernism. The tache is a potential meeting point between text and image and a pure trace of the artist's body. Even though each manifestation of tacheism generates its own specific cultural effects, this book represents the first time a scholar has looked at tacheism as a hidden continuum within modern art. With a methodological framework drawn from the semiotics of text and image, the author introduces a much-needed fine-tuning to the classic terms index, symbol, and icon. The concept of the tache as a 'crossing' of sign-types enables finer distinctions and observations than have been available thus far within the Peircean tradition. The 'sign-crossing' theory opens onto the whole terrain of interaction between visual art, art criticism, literature, philosophy, and psychology.
This collection of essays by musicologists and art historians explores the reciprocal influences between music and painting during the nineteenth century, a critical period of gestation when instrumental music was identified as the paradigmatic expressive art and theoretically aligned with painting in the formulation utpictura musica (as with music, so with painting). Under music's influence, painting approached the threshold of abstraction; concurrently many composers cultivated pictorial effects in their music. Individual essays address such themes as visualization in music, the literary vs. pictorial basis of the symphonic poem, musical pictorialism in painting and lithography, and the influence of Wagner on the visual arts. In these and other ways, both composers and painters actively participated in interarts discourses in seeking to redefine the very identity and aims of their art. Also includes 17 musical examples.
This volume presents a cross-disciplinary analysis of academic poster presentations, taking into consideration the text and visuals that posters display depending on the discipline within which they are created. As the academic poster is a multimodal genre, different modal aspects have been taken into consideration when analysing it, a fact that has somehow complicated the genre analysis conducted, but has also stimulated the research work involved and, in the end, provided interesting results. The analysis carried out here has highlighted significant cross-disciplinary differences in terms of word count, portrait/landscape orientation and layout of posters, as well as discipline and subdiscipline-specific patterns for what concerns the use of textual interactive and interactional metadiscourse resources and visual interactive resources. The investigation has revealed what textual and visual metadiscourse resources are employed, where and why, and as a consequence, what textual and visual metadiscourse strategies should be adopted by poster authors depending on the practices and expectations of their academic community.
Sung closely examines William Blake's extant engraved copper plates and arrives at a new interpretation of his working process. Sung suggests that Blake revised and corrected his work more than was previously thought. This belies the Romantic ideal that the acts of conception and execution are simultaneous in the creative process.
The importance of typology in the study of early modern literature has long been accepted, yet students of Victorian culture have paid little attention to it. First published in 1980, this study demonstrates how biblical typology, an apparently arcane interpretative mode, had profound effects on the secular culture of the Victorian age: its art, literature and thought. George Landow considers the way in which the average English believer learned to read their Bible in terms of the types and shadows of Christ, the various ways in which Victorian poetry and hymns employed certain imagery, and the use of typological symbolism in narrative poetry, prose fiction, dramatic monologue and non-fiction. In a concluding chapter, he investigates the particularly complex, and often ironic, combinations of typological image and typological structure.
The formative influences of Paris and France on the Anglo-Irish writer George Moore (1852-1933) cannot be underestimated. While the years Moore spent in Paris in the 1870s were seminal for his artistic awakening and development, the associations and friendships he formed in French literary and artistic circles exerted an enduring influence on his creative career. Moore maintained close ties with France throughout his life and his numerous contacts extended to social, musical and cultural spheres. He introduced the Impressionists to a British audience and his importation of French literary innovation into the English novel was remarkable. Exploring Moore's early years in Paris and his ongoing engagement with the experimental modernity of his French models, these essays offer new insights into this cosmopolitan writer's work. Moore emerges as a turn-of-the-century European artist whose eclectic writings reflect the complex evolution of literature from Naturalism to Modernism through Symbolism and Decadence.
The late nineteenth-century Biloxi potter, George Ohr, was considered an eccentric in his time but has emerged as a major figure in American art since the discovery of thousands of examples of his work in the 1960s. Currently, Ohr is celebrated as a solitary genius who foreshadowed modern art movements. While an intriguing narrative, this view offers a narrow understanding of the man and his work that has hindered serious consideration. Ellen J. Lippert, in her expansive study of Ohr and his Gilded Age context, counters this fable. The tumultuous historical moment that Ohr inhabited was a formative force in his life and work. Using primary documentation, Lippert identifies specific cultural changes that had the most impact on Ohr. Developments in visual display and the altered role of artists, the southerner redefined in the wake of the Civil War, interest in handicraft as an alternative to rampant mass production, emerging tenets of social thought seeking to remedy worker exploitation, and new assessments of morals and beauty as a result of collapsed ideals all played into the positioning Ohr purposefully designed for himself. The second part of Lippert's study applies these observations to Ohr's body of work, interpreting his stylistic originality to be expressions of the contradictions and oppositions particular to late nineteenth-century America. Ohr threw his inspiration into being both the sophisticate and the ""rube,"" the commercial huckster and the selfless artist, the socialist and the individualist, the ""old-fashioned"" craftsman and the ""artist-genius."" He created art pottery as both a salable commodity and a priceless creation. His work could be ugly and deformed (or even obscene) and beautiful. Lippert reveals that far from isolated, Ohr and his creations were very much products of his inspired engagement with the late nineteenth century.
This book provides the most comprehensive survey of contemporary Palestinian art to date. The development of contemporary practice, theory and criticism is understood as integral to the concomitant construction of Palestinian national identities. In particular the book explores the intricate relationship between art and nationalism in which the idea of origin plays an important and problematic role. The book deconstructs the existing narratives of the history of Palestinian art, which search for its origins in the 19th century, and argues that Palestinian contemporary art demonstrates pluralistic, politically and philosophically complex attitudes towards identity and nation that confound familiar narratives of origin and belonging. The book builds upon theories of art, nationalism and post-colonialism particularly in relation to the themes of fragmentation and dispersal. It takes the Arabic word for Diaspora Shatat (literally broken apart) as a central concern in contemporary understanding of Palestinian culture and develops it, along with Edward Said's paradoxical formula of a 'coherence of dispersal' as the organising concept of the book. This aspect of contemporary Palestinian art is peculiarly suited to the conditions produced by the globalisation of art and we show how Palestinian artists, despite not having a state, have developed an international profile.
This revolutionary interdisciplinary study argues that Monet's artistic practices and choices were the direct result of his political stance as a nineteenth-century libre penseur, a position characterized by radical republicanism, a progressive social agenda, and fierce anticlericalism. His efforts to create a style reflecting his personal political code led him to produce paintings proclaimed by like-minded free thinkers as "a science being constantly perfected" (Gustave Geffroy), that is, emphasizing only observable phenomena in the immediate present through scrupulous, insistent on-site observation, capturing the raw data of sensations and sensory experience, and purporting to record a world free of embedded meaning. Darwin's world similarly comes with no prepackaged reassurance of humankind's privileged place in it; it is instead a space in which all varieties of organisms and species compete for limited resources in a struggle for survival. The Darwinian model of nature appears to have influenced Monet's artistic production increasingly as his style evolved over several decades. In opposition to post-Renaissance art that privileged the human presence in both representation and the viewing act, Monet's later paintings create a sense of virtual and visual equality among all observable phenomena. The human - and the viewer, by extension - is thus represented as neither separate from nature as a disengaged observer nor superior to it but rather co-equal with all other organic life forms surrounding it. This approach, while echoing Darwin's admiration of nature and its laws, also reminds humankind of its own fragility and the hard choices it must make to avoid extinction.
Mining various archives and newspaper repositories, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Nineteenth-Century Pioneer of Modern Art Criticism provides the first full-length study of a remarkable woman and heretofore neglected art critic. Pennell, a prolific 'New Art Critic', helped formulate and develop formalist methodology in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, which she applied to her mostly anonymous or pseudonymous reviews published in numerous American and British newspapers and periodicals between 1883 and 1923. A bibliography of her art criticism is included as an appendix. In addition to advocating an advanced way in which to view art, Pennell used her platform to promote the work of 'new' artists, including Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas, which had only recently been introduced to British audiences. In particular, Pennell championed the work of James McNeill Whistler for whom she, along with her husband, the artist Joseph Pennell, wrote a biography. Examination of her contributions to the late Victorian art world also highlights the pivotal role of criticism in the production and consumption of art in general, a point which is often ignored.
Victorian churches were often of high quality, reflecting in physical terms the intense theological debates of the time. This highly-illustrated book by a leading authority describes many of the finest examples. Many churches were built in England during the reign of Queen Victoria: most were in various varieties of Gothic Revival. Often exquisitely furnished, they were visible expressions of the presence and importance of religion at the time. Their architectural qualities reflected aspirations of clergy, laity, and individual benefactors. The finest were the results of passionate commitment to an architecture soundly based on scholarly studies known as Ecclesiology. James Stevens Curl places English churches of the period in their complex social and denominational settings, giving comprehensive accounts of the religious atmosphere and controversies of the times. He charts the progress and development of the Gothic Revival, explains differences in the architecture of various denominations, outlines the influences of the chief protagonists involved, and describes the demands made on craftsmen and industry to produce the materials, furnishings, and fittings necessary in making some of the finest buildings ever created in England. He reveals something of the individuals and events that shaped the religious climate of the epoch, while specially commissioned illustrations reveal the rich variety found in Victorian churches.
Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914 examines Paris as a center of international culture that attracted artists from Western and Eastern Europe, Asia and the Americas during a period of burgeoning global immigration. Sixteen essays by a group of emerging and established international scholars - including several whose work has not been previously published in English - address the experiences of foreign exiles, immigrants, students and expatriates. They explore the formal and informal structures that permitted foreign artists to forge connections within and across national communities and in some cases fashion new, transnational identities in the City of Light. Considering Paris from an innovative global perspective, the book situates both important modern artists - such as Edvard Munch, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Marc Chagall and Gino Severini - and lesser-known American, Czech, Italian, Polish, Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Catalan, and Hungarian painters, sculptors, writers, dancers, and illustrators within the larger trends of international mobility and cultural exchange. Broadly appealing to historians of modern art and history, the essays in this volume characterize Paris as a thriving transnational arts community in which the interactions between diverse cultures, peoples and traditions contributed to the development of a hybrid and multivalent modern art.
Offering a wealth of perspectives on African modern and Modernist art from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, this new Companion features essays by African, European, and North American authors who assess the work of individual artists as well as exploring broader themes such as discoveries of new technologies and globalization. * A pioneering continent-based assessment of modern art and modernity across Africa * Includes original and previously unpublished fieldwork-based material * Features new and complex theoretical arguments about the nature of modernity and Modernism * Addresses a widely acknowledged gap in the literature on African Art
"Ut pictura poesis", Horace said, but through the two millennia in which "the sister arts" have been compared, little has been said about the nature of sight itself. What we see in "our mind's eye" as we read has not been explored, though by following the visual prompts in texts, one can anatomize the process of visualization. The Poetics of Sight analyses the role of sight in memory, dream and popular culture and demonstrates the structure of a complex sight within the metaphors of Shakespeare, Pope and Dickens; and within the visual metaphors of Picasso, Magritte and Bacon. This book explores the difference between the great and the failed works of the supreme poet-painter, William Blake, and tracks the migrations of the Satiric muse between verbal mockery and scabrous images in Persius, Pope, Gillray and Gogol. It records the rise, and partial decline, of the vividly "seen" novel in Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Proust and Hardy. The key concept throughout this book is visual metaphor, which in the twentieth century acquired overarching importance: in art from Picasso to Kapoor, in poetry from Eliot to Hughes, in aesthetics from Pound to Derrida. The book closes with a far-reaching definition of visual metaphor and with the great visual metaphor of the human body.
Filling a critical gap in Vienna 1900 studies, this book offers a new reading of fin-de-siecle culture in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy by looking at the unusual and widespread preoccupation with embroidery, fabrics, clothing, and fashion - both literally and metaphorically. The author resurrects lesser known critics, practitioners, and curators from obscurity, while also discussing the textile interests of better known figures, notably Gottfried Semper and Alois Riegl. Spanning the 50-year life of the Dual Monarchy, this study uncovers new territory in the history of art history, insists on the crucial place of women within modernism, and broadens the cultural history of Habsburg Central Europe by revealing the complex relationships among art history, women, and Austria-Hungary. Rebecca Houze surveys a wide range of materials, from craft and folk art to industrial design, and includes overlooked sources-from fashion magazines to World's Fair maps, from exhibition catalogues to museum lectures, from feminist journals to ethnographic collections. Restoring women to their place at the intersection of intellectual and artistic debates of the time, this book weaves together discourses of the academic, scientific, and commercial design communities with middle-class life as expressed through popular culture.
In this detailed and meticulously researched account of the life and work of Charles Michell, the first surveyor-general and civil engineer of the South African Cape Colony, author Gordon Richings examines in depth, the many interests and achievements of the man, as well as the essence of the time in which he lived, by referring to unpublished personal diaries, sketchbooks and letters. Born in Exeter, Devon in 1793, Michell showed artistic talent at a young age, but due to family circumstances, joined the British Army and served with distinction in the Napoleonic Wars in Portugal. He came to the Cape in 1829 and for the next twenty years played a crucial role in opening up the Cape interior to economic development and expansion, by designing roads, bridges and mountain passes, including Sir Lowry's, the Houw Hoek, Montagu and Michell's Passes. He also suggested improvements to Table Bay Harbour and designed lighthouses at Mouille Point, Cape Agulhas and Cape Recife in an effort to protect shipping along the Cape's notorious coastline. This first biography of Charles Michell is lavishly illustrated with his sketches, watercolours and engravings of Cape scenery, plants, insects and rock paintings, as well as Cape personalities, maps of the colony and architectural plans - the majority of which are published for the first time. New light is shed on the socio-economic life at the Cape, particularly the Tsitsikamma region of the southern Cape, the Frontier War of 1834-35, as well as on the personalities of Michell's colleagues and contemporaries in England and at the Cape.
Artists, scientists and the wider public of the Victorian era all seem to have shared a common interest in the myth of the Briar Rose and its contemporary implications, from the Pre-Raphaelites and late Victorian aesthetes to the fascinated crowds who visited Ellen Sadler, the real-life 'Sleeping Maid' who is reported to have slept from 1871 to 1880. The figure of the beautiful reclining female sleeper is a recurring theme in the Victorian imagination, invoking visual, literary and erotic connotations that contribute to a complex range of readings involving aesthetics, gender definitions and contemporary medical opinion. This book compiles and examines a corpus of Sleeping Beauties drawn from Victorian medical reports, literature and the arts and explores the significance of the enduring revival of the myth.
This book reveals a great untold story of enterprise and innovation based on the relationship between the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Elkington & Co., the renowned industrial art and design manufacturer of the 19th-century. The Birmingham-based company pioneered and patented the industrial art of electro-metallurgy to create original artworks, perfect replicas, and mass-reproduced luxury consumer goods that used electricity to 'grow' metal into shape at a molecular level. This technological revolution created a profound legacy, which continues to influence the way modern material culture looks and operates today. Elkington's syntheses of science and art into industrial manufacturing processes revolutionized the design and production, replication and reproduction of precious metalwork, metal sculpture, and ornamental art metalwork. Elkington & Co. gained huge public acclaim at the Great Exhibition of 1851. They subsequently produced artworks and luxury goods, including world-renowned sports trophies like the Wimbledon Singles Trophies, as well as luxury dining services for great steamships and railways, including tableware that sank with the Titanic. Elkington played a crucial role in shaping and building the V&A's permanent collection from its foundation in 1852 (following the Great Exhibition) until the First World War. The V&A's collections in turn had a profound influence on Elkington's output. The great success of their relationship cemented both the museum's status as a leading cultural institution, and the E&Co 'makers-mark' as one of the world's first truly multinational designer brands. Elkington's electrical alchemy helped spark the electrical revolution that founded the modern world.
Challenging distinctions between fine and decorative art, this book begins with a critique of the Rodin scholarship, to establish how the selective study of his oeuvre has limited our understanding of French nineteenth-century sculpture. The book's central argument is that we need to include the decorative in the study of sculpture, in order to present a more accurate and comprehensive account of the practice and profession of sculpture in this period. Drawing on new archival sources, sculptors and objects, this is the first sustained study of how and why French sculptors collaborated with state and private luxury goods manufacturers between 1848 and 1895. Organised chronologically, the book identifies three historically-situated frameworks, through which sculptors attempted to validate themselves and their work in relation to industry: industrial art, decorative art and objet d'art. Detailed readings are offered of sculptors who operated within and outside the Salon, including Sevin, Cheret, Carrier-Belleuse and Rodin; and of diverse objects and materials, from Sevres vases, to pewter plates by Desbois, and furniture by Barbedienne and Carabin. By contesting the false separation of art from industry, Claire Jones's study restores the importance of the sculptor-manufacturer relationship, and of the decorative, to the history of sculpture. |
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