Learn about key movements like impressionism, cubism and symbolism in The Art Book. Part of the fascinating Big Ideas series, this book tackles tricky topics and themes in a simple and easy to follow format. Learn about Art in this overview guide to the subject, brilliant for novices looking to find out more and experts wishing to refresh their knowledge alike! The Art Book brings a fresh and vibrant take on the topic through eye-catching graphics and diagrams to immerse yourself in. This captivating book will broaden your understanding of Art, with: - More than 80 of the world's most remarkable artworks - Packed with facts, charts, timelines and graphs to help explain core concepts - A visual approach to big subjects with striking illustrations and graphics throughout - Easy to follow text makes topics accessible for people at any level of understanding The Art Book is a captivating introduction to painting, drawing, printing, sculpture, conceptual art, and performance art - from ancient history to the modern day - aimed at adults with an interest in the subject and students wanting to gain more of an overview. Here you'll discover more than 80 of the world's most groundbreaking artworks by history's most influential painters, sculptors and artists, through exciting text and bold graphics. Your Art Questions, Simply Explained This fresh new guide examines the ideas that inspired masterpieces by Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Klimt, Matisse, Picasso, and dozens more! If you thought it was difficult to learn about the defining movements, The Art Book presents key information in a clear layout. Find out about subject matters, techniques, and materials, and learn about the talented artists behind the great works, through superb mind maps and step-by-step summaries. The Big Ideas Series With millions of copies sold worldwide, The Art Book is part of the award-winning Big Ideas series from DK. The series uses striking graphics along with engaging writing, making big topics easy to understand.

This book explores Symbolist artists' fascination with ancient Greek art and myth, and how the erotic played a major role in this. For a brief period at the end of the 19th century the Symbolist movement inspired artists to turn inwards to the unconscious mind, endeavouring to unveil the secrets of human nature through their symbolic art. But above all their greatest interest, and fear, was man (and woman's) sexuality. Building upon the traditions of Academic neoclassicism, but fired with a new zeal, they turned back to Greek art and myth for inspiration. That classical legacy was once again a vehicle for artists to express their dreams, ideas and revelries. And so too their anxieties. For at times the frightening spectre of the sexual unconscious drove them to a new and innovative engagement with antiquity, including in ways never before tried in the history of the classical tradition. The unnerving sirens of Gustave Moreau, unearthly heroines of Odilon Redon, or leering fauns of Felicien Rops all played their role, among others, in this novel and unprecedented chapter in that tradition. This book shows how in their painting, drawing and sculpture the Symbolists re-invented Greek statuary and transposed it to new and unwonted contexts, as the imaginary inner worlds of artists were mapped onto the landscapes of Greek myth. It shows how they made of the Greek body, whether female, male, androgyne or sexual other, at once an object of beauty, desire, fear, and - at times - of horror.

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833 98) emerged from a solitary, motherless childhood to form close friendships with William Morris and such other luminaries of the Victorian art world as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Ruskin. A second generation Pre-Raphaelite and founder member of the Morris firm, he was influential in many areas, from painting, stained glass and tapestry design to book illustration. His later work, including such iconic paintings as The Wheel of Fortune, The Golden Stairs (which caused a sensation when exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery) and The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon, influenced and exemplified the Aesthetic Movement, and inspired the European Symbolists. His wife, Georgiana Burne-Jones (1840 1920), published this engaging two-volume biography in 1904. Volume 1 describes his formative years, important early relationships, projects such as the murals for the Oxford Union debating chamber, and his arrival at full maturity with the St George series of 1865 7.

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (1833 98) emerged from a solitary, motherless childhood to form close friendships with William Morris and such other luminaries of the Victorian art world as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Ruskin. A second generation Pre-Raphaelite and founder member of the Morris firm, he was influential in many areas, from painting, stained glass and tapestry design to book illustration. His later work, including such iconic paintings as The Wheel of Fortune, The Golden Stairs (which caused a sensation when exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery) and The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon, influenced and exemplified the Aesthetic Movement, and inspired the European Symbolists. His wife, Georgiana Burne-Jones (1840 1920), published this engaging two-volume biography in 1904. Volume 2 hints at the emotional turmoil behind paintings like Love Among the Ruins, reveals the impact of his visits to Italy, and usefully contextualises the haunting masterpieces of his later years.

The Victorian Artist, first published in 2003, examines the origins, development, and explosion of biographical literature on artists in Britain between 1870 and 1910. Analyzing a variety of narrative modes, including gossip, anecdotes, and serialization, as well as the differences among genres - autobiographies, family biographies, biographical histories, and dictionaries - Julie Codell discerns and articulates the multiple, often conflicting identities that were ascribed to artists collectively and as individuals. Her study demonstrates how this body of literature, combined with images of artists' bodies, their works and their studios, reflected anxiety over economic exchanges in the art world, aestheticism, and the desire to tame artists in order to fit them into an emerging national identity as a way of socializing new audiences of readers and spectators. Her book provides a sociological and cultural overview of the art world in Britain in the decades before World War I.

The celebrated Victorian narrative painter William Powell Frith (1819-1909) was a born raconteur. His two-volume autobiography of 1887 ran to three editions in the same year. The third edition is reissued here, together with its supplementary volume of 1888. Frith was an ideal commentator on his age. He never lost his early interest in literary and historical subjects, and moved in the highest artistic and literary circles. Yet he also saw himself as a man of the people. His most famous works were his 'modern-life' panoramas, Ramsgate Sands (1854), Derby Day (1858) and The Railway Station (1862). Discussing such projects, he reflects on everything from costume to portraiture, art dealers to female artists, and even picture frames. Volume 1 covers his childhood, training, friendships with Dickens and others, and the phenomenal success of his first crowd scenes, up to and including The Marriage of the Prince of Wales (1865).

The celebrated Victorian narrative painter William Powell Frith (1819-1909) was a born raconteur. His two-volume autobiography of 1887 ran to three editions in the same year. The third edition is reissued here, together with its supplementary volume of 1888. Frith was an ideal commentator on his age. He never lost his early interest in literary and historical subjects, and moved in the highest artistic and literary circles. Yet he also saw himself as a man of the people. His most famous works were his 'modern-life' panoramas, Ramsgate Sands (1854), Derby Day (1858) and The Railway Station (1862). Discussing such projects, he reflects on everything from costume to portraiture, art dealers to female artists, and even picture frames. In Volume, 2 Frith discusses his Hogarthian subjects, 'Dickens and his Beard' (the story behind the famous portrait), and his last great crowd scene, A Private View at the Royal Academy (1883).

The celebrated Victorian narrative painter William Powell Frith (1819-1909) was a born raconteur. His two-volume autobiography of 1887 ran to three editions in the same year. The third edition is reissued here, together with its supplementary volume of 1888. Frith was an ideal commentator on his age. He never lost his early interest in literary and historical subjects, and moved in the highest artistic and literary circles. Yet he also saw himself as a man of the people. His most famous works were his 'modern-life' panoramas, Ramsgate Sands (1854), Derby Day (1858) and The Railway Station (1862). Discussing such projects, he reflects on everything from costume to portraiture, art dealers to female artists, and even picture frames. In particular, Volume 3 records the breakdown of the talented Richard Dadd, Frith's admiration for Daniel Maclise, John Tenniel and George du Maurier, and reflections on the vagaries of fashions in art.

How did Victorians, as creators and viewers of images, visualize the politics of franchise reform? This study of Victorian art and parliamentary politics, specifically in the 1840s and 1860s, answers that question by viewing the First and Second Reform Acts from the perspectives offered by Ruskin's political theories of art and Bagehot's visual theory of politics. Combining subjects and approaches characteristic of art history, political history, literary criticism and cultural critique, Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain treats both paintings and wood engravings, particularly those published in Punch and the Illustrated London News. Carlisle analyzes unlikely pairings - a novel by Trollope and a painting by Hayter, an engraving after Leech and a high-society portrait by Landseer - to argue that such conjunctions marked both everyday life in Victorian Britain and the nature of its visual politics as it was manifested in the myriad heterogeneous and often incongruous images of illustrated journalism.

This 1990 volume represented the first fully developed study of the eminent American artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872). It reveals his prodigious achievements in painting and technology, his passionate ambitions, and his key role in the development of American art. While covering the artist's entire career, Professor Staiti gives particular attention to three of his most extraordinary artistic achievements: the House of Representatives, the Gallery of the Louvre and the National Academy of Design. In a final chapter, on the electromagnetic telegraph, an invention that imprinted Morse's name on our language, there is a discussion of the conceptual relationship between artistic and mechanical invention. Also contained in the book is the first comprehensive listing of the three hundred works of art, both extant and lost, that Morse is known to have produced. This landmark book offers an arresting profile of an enormously complex figure.

Time and the visual sense were two essential preoccupations of the Victorians, and both were central to their presentations of Shakespeare's plays. In this extensive new study, Stuart Sillars examines multiple facets of this complex relationship. The desire for authenticity in production, in the work of Charles Kean and his followers, leads to elaborate sets that define and direct the performances' movement through time. Visual artists of all kinds fracture and extend the plays' movements, the Pre-Raphaelites through new techniques and approaches, illustrators through new forms of engraving and printing, and photographers through the emerging forms of the medium. The book also considers the multiple forms in which performances were recorded and re-created visually, and absorbed into the memories of their viewers. With many previously unpublished images, it draws together multiple fields to offer a new perspective on one of the most productive and various periods of Shakespeare activity.

How can art, how can prose and poetry originate in spite of the restraints of manipulation, propaganda, and censorship? This study explores such issues by focusing on the cultural trajectory of Japanese American internment, both during and after World War II. Previously unknown documents as well as interviews with friends and family reveal new aspects of John Okada's (1923-1971) life and writing, providing a comprehensive biographical outline of the author. The book refutes the assumption that Okada's novel No-No Boy was all but shunned when first published in 1957. A close reading as well as a comparative study involving Italo Calvino's (1923-1985) Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1985) position Okada's only book as world literature.

Novel Craft explores an intriguing and under-studied aspect of cultural life in Victorian England: domestic handicrafts, the decorative pursuit that predated the Arts and Crafts movement. Talia Schaffer argues that the handicraft movement served as a way to critique the modern mass-produced commodity and the rapidly emerging industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century. Her argument is illustrated with the four pivotal novels that form her study's core-Gaskell's Cranford, Yonge's The Daisy Chain, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, and Oliphant's Phoebe Junior. Each features various handicrafts that subtly aim to subvert the socioeconomic changes being wrought by industrialization. Schaffer goes beyond straightforward textual analysis by shaping each chapter around the individual craft at the center of each novel (paper for Cranford, flowers and related arts in The Daisy Chain, rubbish and salvage in Our Mutual Friend, and the contrasting ethos of arts and crafts connoisseurship in Phoebe Junior). The domestic handicraft also allows for self-referential analysis of the text itself; in scenes of craft production (and destruction), the authors articulate the work they hope their own fictions perform. The handicraft also becomes a locus for critiquing contemporary aesthetic trends, with the novels putting forward an alternative vision of making value and understanding art. A work that combines cultural history and literary studies, Novel Craft highlights how attention to the handicraft movement's radically alternative views of materiality, consumption, production, representation, and subjectivity provides a fresh perspective on the major changes that shaped the Victorian novel as a whole.

Amid the background of social turbulence in the mid-nineteenth century, Gustave Courbet's unconventional paintings of real people in everyday scenes came to embody values with radical political implications. James Rubin addresses the entire range of Courbet's work: from his hunting scenes and spirited landscapes, to his portraits and erotic nudes. He combines a clear reading of the artist's paintings with a rigorous discussion of the unique personal, political and social framework within which they were created.

Published soon after his untimely death, this spirited memoir of the artist and illustrator Randolph Caldecott (1846-1886) will appeal as much for its value as a portrait composed by a close acquaintance, as for the many drawings it contains. Written by Henry Blackburn (the editor of the London Society, 'an illustrated magazine of light and amusing literature' to which Caldecott contributed a number of drawings), it uses a style similar to that of Caldecott himself, who often peppered his papers, personal letters to family and friends, and even official documents with small sketches. These would take as their subject some humorous remark, or simply illustrate the content of the text. Beyond illustration (in which he was highly successful) Caldecott had a varied career as a sculptor and oil painter (exhibiting at the Royal Academy) and as a watercolourist, being elected to the Royal Institute of Watercolour Painting in 1872.

This survey asks a seemingly simple question: Is there an affinity between the emergence of modern art and various Avant-Garde movements such as Russian Suprematism and Polish or Hungarian Constructivism around about the turn of the last century and the process of Jewish assimilation in the Habsburg empire and Russian tsardom respectively? What about the possible connection between "Hebraism", Jewish Messianism, Talmudic philosophy, and Kabbalistic speculations and the most radical, Utopian Avant-Garde movements of the region? Was Russian Cubo-Futurism, Suprematism, Productivism, Polish and Hungarian Constructivism actually fostered by ideas and practices articulated in Eastern Jewry? And what was the impact of Anti-Semitism on how the artists related to stylistic purity and their own cultural identity in the region already prior to the emergence of Avant-Gardism? And how did the supposed biblical ban on "graven images" influence the approach of the Jewish artists?

This book is a compendium of texts by international authors which reflect on Tadeusz Kantor's art in a broad range of contexts. The studies include works of prominent art historians, theatrologists and artists. The present revisiting of Kantor's artistic oeuvre reflects a contemporary historiographic approach. The authors place value on individual memory and consider contemporary art outside the traditional boundaries of particular artistic genres. The studies employ the latest strategies for researching theatrical performance as autonomous statements, without a literary anchor. Thanks to this approach, the eschatological and historical issues, crucial to the sphere of reference of Kantor's Theatre of Death, have acquired a new presence - as art that liberates thinking in the here-and-now.

This book aims to present trompe-l'oeil painting, which epitomizes the myth of the illusionistic image - an early modern way of thinking about pictures, according to which it is possible to create an image identical to what it represents that at the same time preserves its own pictorial identity. Trompe-l'oeil, despite being a marginal genre, embodied an ideal that painting should attain, and therefore is a good point of departure for analyzing issues such as (aesthetic) illusion in art. As the myth undermines Plato's aesthetics, it is his philosophy of art, with its dichotomies of appearance/reality or mimesis/diegesis that offers the most useful context for the discussion of this topic and shows that trompe-l'oeil is a playful and ironic genre, which has cognitive value as well.

This book investigates how identities have been constructed in Australian art from 1788 onwards. Ian McLean shows that Australian art, and the writing of its history, has, since settlement, been in a dialogue (although often submerged) with Aboriginal art and culture; and that this dialogue is inextricably interwoven with the struggle to find an identity in the antipodes. Beginning with a discussion of how Australia was imagined by Europeans before colonisation, McLean traces the representation of indigeneity through the history of Australian art, and the concomitant invention of an Australian subjectivity. He argues that the colonising culture invested far more in indigenous aspects of the country and its inhabitants than it has been willing to admit. McLean considers artists and their work within a cultural context, and also provides a contemporary theoretical and critical context for his claims.

Inspired satire on religion and morality, including 70 aphorisms of "Proverbs of Hell." 27 full-color plates, full text.

This book offers a comprehensive description of how writers, in particular poets in nineteenth-century France, became increasingly aware of the visual element in writing from the point of view both of content and of the formal organisation of the words in the text. This interest encouraged writers such as Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud to recreate in language some of the vivid, sensual impact of the graphic or painterly image. This was to be achieved by organising texts according to aesthetic criteria so that as far as possible the form of the text as visually perceived would be closely interrelated to its content as reconstructed through the reading process. The result of this development was a radical redefinition of the scope and function of poetry, raising important general questions about the nature of the relationship between language and the visual image that are still very much of concern today.

One of England's most famous caricaturists, James Gillray, was an immensely successful and popular artist, yet there were no accounts of his work published in England during his lifetime. The single contemporary source on Gillray is a series of commentaries published in the German journal London und Paris between 1798 and 1806. Christine Banerji and Diana Donald have translated and edited selected commentaries, with accompanying illustrations, to reveal how Gillray's art was understood by his contemporaries. The edition offers a unique insight into the role of satire in British politics during the Napoleonic era and shows the subtle artistry of Gillray's designs. The volume also includes an informative introduction which places Gillray and his work in the context of a fascinating episode in Anglo-German relations at the turn of the eighteenth century.

This bibliography provides a source for reviews of the state-sponsored Parisian exhibitions of painting and sculpture (Salons) held during the July Monarchy and Second Republic (1831-1851). It includes an extensive list of references, each presented in a standard format, with titles, dates and ordering codes based upon the holdings of the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris. It is indexed both by authors and by periodicals. The essays and articles that are catalogued are of fundamental importance in establishing a picture of contemporary reactions to art in mid-nineteenth-century France and yet the standard work by Maurice Tourneux, Salons et expositions d'art a Paris, 1801-1870, has been out of print for several decades. By incorporating and correcting the relevant material from Tourneux and adding new references gathered from unpublished nineteenth-century manuscript bibliographies and a broad sample of the periodical press, this work offers a substantial increase in the volume and range of criticism available for analysis by cultural and literary historians.

This bibliography provides a source for reviews of the state-sponsored Parisian exhibitions of painting and sculpture (Salons) held during the period 1699-1827. It includes an extensive list of references, each presented in a standard format with titles, dates and ordering codes based upon the holdings of the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris. It is indexed both by authors and by periodicals. The essays and articles that are catalogued are of fundamental importance in establishing a picture of contemporary reactions to art in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France, and yet the standard work by Maurice Tourneux, Salons et expositions d'art a Paris, 1801-1870, has been out of print for several decades. By incorporating and correcting the relevant material from Tourneux, adding references from the Deloynes collection (together with full details of original sources) and incorporating a broad sample from the periodical press, the authors have achieved a substantial increase in the volume and range of criticism available for analysis by cultural and literary historians.

In 1883 Paul Gauguin abandons his prominent banking career and decides that "from now on I will pai nt every day". The co - founder of Synthetism and trailblazer of Expressionism turns his back on the bourgeois world, leaves his wife and children, and, in 1891, sets out for the South Sea, financing his journey through the sale of thirty paintings. His thou ghts on art, his existential worries, his discovery of color and his search for paradise come to life again in the excerpts from his letters and statements compiled in this volume. Together with some forty color reproductions of his works, his biography, a nd a preface by an expert, the book introduces readers in a very special way to Gauguin's universe.