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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850-1950 portrays the history of romantic love between men in hundreds of moving and tender vernacular photographs taken between the years 1850 and 1950. This visual narrative of astonishing sensitivity brings to light an until-now-unpublished collection of hundreds of snapshots, portraits, and group photos taken in the most varied of contexts, both private and public. Taken when male partnerships were often illegal, the photos here were found at flea markets, in shoe boxes, family archives, old suitcases, and later online and at auctions. The collection now includes photos from all over the world: Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Japan, Greece, Latvia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Serbia. The subjects were identified as couples by that unmistakable look in the eyes of two people in love - impossible to manufacture or hide. They were also recognised by body language - evidence as subtle as one hand barely grazing another - and by inscriptions, often coded. Included here are ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, glass negatives, tin types, cabinet cards, photo postcards, photo strips, photomatics, and snapshots - over 100 years of social history and the development of photography. Loving will be produced to the highest standards in illustrated book publishing, The photographs - many fragile from age or handling - have been digitised using a technology derived from that used on surveillance satellites and available in only five places around the world. Paper and other materials are among the best available. And Loving will be manufactured at one of the world's elite printers. Loving, the book, will be up to the measure of its message in every way. In these delight-filled pages, couples in love tell their own story for the first time at a time when joy and hope - indeed human connectivity - are crucial lifelines to our better selves. Universal in reach and overwhelming in impact, Loving speaks to our spirit and resilience, our capacity for bliss, and our longing for the shared truths of love.

This volume explores the characteristics of the art and literature of the Second Empire in France; it examines the attitudes and positioning of artists and writers of the period in relation to a regime of dubious legitimacy, and the ways in which that regime exploited to its advantage the artistic capital available to it. -- .

This book offers a path-breaking analysis of the transformations that occurred in the art and aesthetic values of Bengal during the colonial and nationalist periods. Tapati Guha-Thakurta moves beyond most existing assumptions and narratives to explore the complexities and diversities of the changes generated by Western contacts and nationalist preoccupations in art. She examines the shifts both in the forms and practices of painting as well as in the ideas and opinions about Indian art during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author investigates the complex processes of westernisation of Calcutta's art world: the shifting status of artisans and artists, the emergence of new professional and commercial opportunities and the permeation of Western standards and techniques that both created a new Indian 'high art' and transformed popular commercial art. Against this background, she analyses the role and nature of nationalist ideology in art, tracing its changing priorities over the period and the multiplicity of attitudes and convictions about 'Indian' art. The study deals particularly with the ways in which a dominant nationalist discourse evolved in the Swadeshi period and was mobilised to the cause of a new movement. Led by the reformist art teacher, E. B. Havell, and the pioneer artist, Abanindranath Tagore, it staked its exclusive claim to artistic regeneration, the recovery of tradition and the creation of a new 'national art'. The author shows how the flourishing of an alternative 'Indian-style' painting was tied to the reconstruction of an Indian aesthetic, to a new vocabulary of art criticism and a new language of aesthetic discourse. These orientalist andnationalist formulations of Indian art, she argues, operated within a wider milieu of aesthetic self-awareness and a thriving middle-class art culture in Bengal. The making of a new 'Indian' art will be widely read by students and specialists of South Asian studies and art history as well as by Orientalists.

It was in The Germ (1850), the first British magazine with an aesthetic manifesto, that the interart theories of the Pre-Raphaelites took shape. The thirteen young contributors advocated an ethical approach to art while at the same time acknowledging self-referentiality and meta-discoursivity. They defined the specificity of each mode of artistic expression while exploring the dynamic between word and image, moving from realism towards Symbolism and even anticipating Surrealism. The Aesthetes and Decadents were fascinated; the Modernists felt challenged. Later in the twentieth century a succession of reappraisals transformed the Pre-Raphaelites into a well-marketed group of eccentrics, but neglected the complexity of their cross-cultural, verbal/visual art. This study aims to explain why claims about the autonomy and interrelatedness of the arts, expressed in the form of a provocative monthly journal, proved so influential as to be a source of inspiration for the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The Century Guild Hobby Horse, The Yellow Book, The Savoy, and even for Modernist periodicals. Often regarded as a juvenile venture, The Germ was in fact a laboratory for expressive forms, themes, and ideas that had an enormous impact on the history of British culture.

Spiritualism emerged in western New York in 1848 and soon achieved a wide following due to its claim that the living could commune with the dead. In "Haunted Visions: Spiritualism and American Art," Charles Colbert focuses on the ways Spiritualism imbued the making and viewing of art with religious meaning and, in doing so, draws fascinating connections between art and faith in the Victorian age.Examining the work of such well-known American artists as James Abbott McNeill Whistler, William Sydney Mount, and Robert Henri, Colbert demonstrates that Spiritualism played a critical role in the evolution of modern attitudes toward creativity. He argues that Spiritualism made a singular contribution to the sanctification of art that occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The faith maintained that spiritual energies could reside in objects, and thus works of art could be appreciated not only for what they illustrated but also as vessels of the psychic vibrations their creators impressed into them. Such beliefs sanctified both the making and collecting of art in an era when Darwinism and Positivism were increasingly disenchanting the world and the efforts to represent it. In this context, Spiritualism endowed the artist's profession with the prestige of a religious calling; in doing so, it sought not to replace religion with art, but to make art a site where religion happened.

Writing the Lives of Painters explores the development of artists' biographies in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. During this period artists gradually distanced themselves from artisans and began to be recognised for their imaginative and intellectual skills. The development of the art market and the burgeoning of an exhibition culture, as well as the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, all contributed to redefining the rank of artists in society. This social redefinition of the status of artists in Britain was shaped by a thriving print culture. Contemporary artists were discussed in a wide range of literary forms, including exhibition reviews, art-critical pamphlets, and journalistic gossip-columns. Biographical accounts of modern artists emerged in a dialogue with these other types of writing. This book is an account of a new literary genre, tracing its emergence in the cultural context of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It considers artistic biography as a malleable generic framework for investigation. Indeed, while the lives of painters in Britain did not completely abandon traditional tropes, the genre significantly widened its scope and created new individual and social narratives that reflected and accommodated the needs and desires of new reading audiences. Writing the Lives of Painters also argues that the proliferation of a myriad biographical forms mirrored the privileging of artistic originality and difference within an art world that had yet to generate a coherent 'British School' of painting. Finally, by focusing on the emergence of individual biographies of British artists, the book examines how and why the art historiographic model established by Georgio Vasari was gradually dismantled in the hands of British biographers during the Romantic period.

In a narrative gracefully combining intellectual and cultural history, Richard Candida Smith unfolds the legacy of Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898), the poet who fathered the symbolist movement in poetry and art. The symbolists found themselves in the midst of the transition to a world in which new media devoured cultural products and delivered them to an ever-growing public. Their goal was to create and oversee a new elite culture, one that elevated poetry by removing it from a direct relationship to experience. Instead, symbolist poetry was dedicated to exploring discourse itself, and its practitioners to understanding how language shapes consciousness.
Candida Smith investigates the intellectual context in which symbolists came to view artistic practice as a form of knowledge. He relates their work to psychology, especially the ideas of William James, and to language and the emergence of semantics. Through the lens of symbolism, he focuses on a variety of subjects: sexual liberation and the erotic, anarchism, utopianism, labor, and women's creative role. Paradoxically, the symbolists' reconfiguration of elite culture fit effectively into the modern commercial media. After Mallarme was rescued from obscurity, symbolism became a valuable commodity, exported by France to America and elsewhere in the market-driven turn-of-the-century world. "Mallarme's Children" traces not only how poets regarded their poetry and artists their art but also how the public learned to think in new ways about cultural work and to behave differently as a result.

The Grosvenor Gallery was the most progressive exhibition space of the Victorian age. The paintings and works of art shown there - by Burne-Jones, Watts, Whistler and a host of other figures associated with the aesthetic movement - challenged artistic convention and were the cause of virulent debate about the means and purpose of modern art, while the very existence of a gallery which attracted so much fashionable attention and which lent such great prestige to the artists who exhibited there served to overthrow the stultifying influence of the contemporary Royal Academy. Christopher Newall's book tells the story of the rise and fall of the Grosvenor Gallery, and his invaluable index of exhibitors, compiled from the now very rare original catalogues, allows the reader to discover which artists showed which works and what they were during the fourteen years of the Grosvenor's summer exhibitions.

As historical analyses of Diaspora Jewish visual culture blossom in quantity and sophistication, this book analyzes 19th-20th-century developments in Jewish Palestine and later the State of Israel. In the course of these approximately one hundred years, Zionist Israelis developed a visual corpus and artistic lexicon of Jewish-Israeli icons as an anchor for the emerging "civil religion." Bridging internal tensions and even paradoxes, artists dynamically adopted, responded to, and adapted significant Diaspora influences for Jewish-Israeli purposes, as well as Jewish religious themes for secular goals, all in the name of creating a new state with its own paradoxes, simultaneously styled on the Enlightenment nation-state and Jewish peoplehood.

Barbara Novak is one of America's premier art historians, the author of the seminal books American Painting of the Nineteenth Century and Nature and Culture. Now, with the paperback of Voyages of the Self, this esteemed critic completes the trilogy begun with the two earlier works, offering once again an exhilarating exploration of American art and culture. In this book, Novak explores several inspired pairings of key writers and painters, drawing insightful parallels between such masters as John Singleton Copley and Jonathan Edwards, Winslow Homer and William James, Frederic Edwin Church and Walt Whitman, and Jackson Pollock and Charles Olson. Through these and other groupings, Novak tracks the varied meanings of the self in America, in which the most salient characteristics of each artist or writer is shown to draw from--and in turn influence--the larger map of American life. Two major threads weaving through the book are the American preoccupation with the "object" and our continuing return to pragmatism. Through fruitful comparisons--whether between 29 ley and Edwards, or Lane and Emerson, or Ryder and Dickinson--Novak sheds unmatched light on our nation's artistic heritage.

In his study of the journalist George Augustus Sala, Peter Blake discusses the way Sala's personal style, along with his innovations in form, influenced the New Journalism at the end of the nineteenth century. Blake places Sala at the centre of nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals and examines his prolific contributions to newspapers and periodicals in the context of contemporary debates and issues surrounding his work. Sala's journalistic style, Blake argues, was a product of the very different mediums in which he worked, whether it was the visual arts, bohemian journalism, novels, pornographic plays, or travel writing. Harkening back to a time when journalism and fiction were closely connected, Blake's book not only expands our understanding of one of the more prominent and interesting journalists and personalities of the nineteenth century, but also sheds light on prominent nineteenth-century writers and artists such as Charles Dickens, Mathew Arnold, William Powell Frith, Henry Vizetelly, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

Beginning with the premise that the portrait was undergoing a shift in both form and function during the Romantic age, Joe Bray examines how these changes are reflected in the fiction of writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Elizabeth Hamilton and Amelia Opie. Bray considers portraiture in a broad sense as encompassing caricature and the miniature, as well as the classic portraits of Sir Joshua Reynolds and others. He argues that the portrait in fiction often functions not as a transparent index to character or as a means of producing a straightforward likeness, but rather as a cue for misreading and a sign of the slipperiness and subjectivity of interpretation. The book is concerned with more than simply the appearance of portraits in Romantic fiction, however. More broadly, The Portrait in Fiction of the Romantic Period investigates how the language of portraiture pervades the novel in this period and how the two art forms exert mutual stylistic influence on each other.

Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pictorial Text explores the genesis, production and the critical appreciation of the illustrations to the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson is one of the most copied and interpreted authors of the late nineteenth century, especially his novels Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. These interpretations began with the illustration of his texts in their early editions, often with Stevenson's express consent, and this book traces Stevenson's understanding and critical responses to the artists employed to illustrate his texts. In doing so, it attempts to position Stevenson as an important thinker and writer on the subject of illustrated literature, and on the marriage of literature and visual arts, at a moment preceding the dawn of cinema, and the rejection of such popular tropes by modernist writers of the early twentieth century.

Although Coleridge's thinking and writing about the fine arts was both considerable and interesting, this has not been the subject of a book before.
Coleridge owed his initiation into art to Sir George Beaumont. In 1803-4 he had frequent opportunities to learn from Beaumont, to study Beaumont's small but elegant collection and to visit private collections. Before leaving for Malta in April 1804, Coleridge wrote "I have learnt as much fr[om] Sir George Beaumont respecting Pictures & Painting and Paint[ers as] I ever learnt on any subject from any man in the same Space of Time."
In Italy in 1806, Coleridge's experience of art deepened, thanks to the American artist Washington Allston, who taught him to see the artistic sights of Rome with a painter's eye. Coleridge also visited Florence and Pisa, and later said of the frescoes in Pisa's Camp Santo: "The impression was greater, I may say, than that any poem ever made upon me."
Back in England, Coleridge visited London exhibitions, country house collections, and even artists' studios. In 1814, both Coleridge and Allston were in Bristol--Coleridge lecturing, Allston exhibiting. Coleridge's "On the Principles of Genial Criticism" began as a defense of Allston's paintings but became a statement about all the arts.
This book, an important contribution to Coleridge's intellectual biography, will make readers aware of a dimension of his thinking that has been largely ignored until now.

This is the story of Faberge's Imperial Easter eggs - of their maker, of the tsars who commissioned them, of the middlemen who sold them and of the collectors who fell in love with them. It's a story of meticulous craftsmanship and unimaginable wealth, of lucky escapes and mysterious disappearances, and ultimately of greed, tragedy and devotion. Moreover, it is a story that mirrors the history of twentieth-century Russia - a satisfying arc that sees eggs made for the tsars, sold by Stalin, bought by Americans and now, finally, returned to post-communist Russia. There is also an intriguing element of mystery surrounding the masterpieces. Of the fifty 'Tsar Imperial' eggs known to have been made, eight are currently unaccounted for, providing endless scope for speculation and forgeries. This is the first book to tell the complete history of the eggs, encompassing the love and opulence in which they were conceived, the war and revolution that scattered them, and the collectors who preserved them.

As a result of Napoleon's campaigns in Italy, Old Master art flooded into Britain and its acquisition became an index of national prestige. Maureen McCue argues that their responses to these works informed the writing of Romantic period authors, enabling them to forge often surprising connections between Italian art, the imagination and the period's political, social and commercial realities. Dr McCue examines poetry, plays, novels, travel writing, exhibition catalogues, early guidebooks and private experiences recorded in letters and diaries by canonical and noncanonical authors, including Felicia Hemans, William Buchanan, Henry Sass, Pierce Egan, William Hazlitt, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Anna Jameson, Maria Graham Callcott and Samuel Rogers. Her exploration of the idea of connoisseurship shows the ways in which a knowledge of Italian art became a key marker of cultural standing that was no longer limited to artists and aristocrats, while her chapter on the literary production of post-Waterloo Britain traces the development of a critical vocabulary equally applicable to the visual arts and literature. In offering cultural, historical and literary readings of the responses to Italian art by early nineteenth-century writers, Dr McCue illuminates the important role they played in shaping the themes that are central to our understanding of Romanticism.