Following a spectacular surge in interest for Egyptian masters, Modern Art in Egypt fills the void in Egyptian art history, chronicling the lives and legacies of six pioneering artists working under the British occupation. Using Western-style academic art as a starting point, these artists championed cultural progress, re-appropriating Egyptian visual culture from European orientalists to found a neo-Pharaonic School of Realism. Modern Art in Egypt charts the years from Muhammad Ali's educational reforms to the mass influx of foreigners during the nineteenth-century. With a focus on the al-Nahda thought movement, this book provides an overview of the key policy-makers, reformists and feminists who founded the first School of Fine Arts in Egypt, as well as cultural salons, museums and arts collectives. By combining political and aesthetic histories, Fatenn Mostafa breaks the prevailing understanding that has preferred to see non-Western art as derivatives of Western art movements. Modern Art in Egypt re-establishes Egypt's presence within the global Modernist canon.

In the era of the Anthropocene, artists and scientists are facing a new paradigm in their attempts to represent nature. Seven chapters, which focus on art from 1780 to the present that engages with Nordic landscapes, argue that a number of artists in this period work in the intersection between art, science, and media technologies to examine the human impact on these landscapes and question the blurred boundaries between nature and the human. Canadian artists such as Lawren Harris and Geronimo Inutiq are considered alongside artists from Scandinavia and Iceland such as J.C. Dahl, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Toril Johannessen, and Bjoerk.

Incorporating over 250 illustrations, this is the first comprehensive study in English of French artist and caricaturist George Ferdinand Bigot (1860-1927) who, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, was renowned in Japan but barely known in his own country. Even today, examples of his cartoons appear in Japanese school textbooks. Inspired by what he saw of Japanese culture and way of life at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1878, Bigot managed to find his way to Japan in 1882 and immediately set about developing his career as an artist working in pen and ink, watercolours and oils. He also quickly exploited his talent as a highly skilled sketch artist and cartoonist. His output was prodigious and included regular commissions from The Graphic and various Japanese as well as French journals. He left Japan in 1899, never to return. The volume includes a full introduction of the life, work and artistry of Bigot by Christian Polak, together with an essay by Hugh Cortazzi on Charles Wirgman, publisher of Japan Punch. Wirgman was Bigot's 'predecessor' and friend (he launched his own satirical magazine Tobae in 1887, the year Japan Punch closed). Georges Bigot and Japan also makes a valuable contribution to Meiji Studies and the history of both Franco- and Anglo-Japanese relations, as well as the role of art in modern international relations.

In the work of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) lies an impact akin to a sudden acquisition of sight. His landscapes and seascapes scorch the eye with such ravishing light and color, with such elemental force, it is as if the sun itself were gleaming out of the frame. Appropriately known as "the painter of light," Turner worked in print, watercolor, and oils to transform landscape from serene contemplative scenes to pictures pulsating with life. He anchored his work to the River Thames and to the sea, but in the historical context of the Industrial Revolution, also integrated boats, trains, and other markers of human activity, which juxtaposes the thrust of civilization against the forces of nature. This book covers Turner's illustrious, wide-ranging repertoire to introduce an artist who combined a traditional genre with a radical modernism. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Reprinted for the first time since 1889, this is the first biography and considered appraisal of one of England's most prodigiously talented painters. Sir John Everett Millais, P. R. A. (1829-1896) was the most precociously talented artist England has ever produced. His astonishing facility gained him entry as the Royal Academy's youngest ever pupil. At just 19 he founded with six other painters the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which revolutionized the English art world with a visionary intensity of both subject matter and style. Millais was its most creative member; as Jason Rosenfeld says in the introduction to this volume, "the sheer quality and distinctness of each of Millais's paintings of the 1850s is unmatched by any Western artist of the period." Yet there is much more to Millais' career than Pre-Raphaelitism. Some of the most emotive narrative paintings of the Victorian era, its greatest portraits, and especially some of its most beautiful, if neglected, landscapes, came from his brush--as did some of its most notoriously successful paintings, like "Bubbles," the "fancy picture" that was made into an advertisement for Pears' Soap. This volume includes not only Millais's only published work of art criticism, the pithy "Thoughts on Our Art of Today," but also the first extended biography and appraisal of his work by the important critic M. H. Spielmann. This hugely engaging "Sketch "gives both a warm and personal picture of the man and a level-headed evaluation of the qualities--and defects--of his work as they appeared to contemporaries. Neither essay has been in print for more than a century.

'A crisis in historical representation unfolded in French visual culture in the first half of the nineteenth century, reaching its climax at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855, when artists and critics alike came to a troubling realization: depictions of past heroes that had once held exceptional influence over their viewers now left the public indifferent. This book shows that underneath this crisis was a mounting demand for empirical observation in art, and an emergent modern epistemology that posited the past as foundational and yet inaccessible to the physically and historically specific individual. Since neither the painter nor the viewer could have actually experienced a bygone historical incident as it unfolded, was history painting even feasible in modern times? When historical representation seemed all but impossible to critics and artists of various hues, Gerome came up with a momentous solution. A small group of paintings constitute the focus of this provocative study on the artist's early work, whose pivotal role in Gerome's oeuvre as well as in the broader history of modernization of art have been so far unrecognized in art historical scholarship. In these, the artist charted a new roadmap for the art of painting in response to the modern sensibility of history.'

The Wilhelmine Empire's opening decades (1870s - 1880s) were crucial transitional years in the development of German modernism, both politically and culturally. Here Marsha Morton argues that no artist represented the shift from tradition to unsettling innovation more compellingly than Max Klinger. The author examines Klinger's early prints and drawings within the context of intellectual and material transformations in Wilhelmine society through an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses Darwinism, ethnography, dreams and hypnosis, the literary Romantic grotesque, criminology, and the urban experience. His work, in advance of Expressionism, revealed the psychological and biological underpinnings of modern rational man whose drives and passions undermined bourgeois constructions of material progress, social stability, and class status at a time when Germans were engaged in defining themselves following unification. This book is the first full-length study of Klinger in English and the first to consistently address his art using methodologies adopted from cultural history. With an emphasis on the popular illustrated media, Morton draws upon information from reviews and early books on the artist, writings by Klinger and his colleagues, and unpublished archival sources. The book is intended for an academic readership interested in European art history, social science, literature, and cultural studies.

In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the life and work of Edvard Munch. Setting out to understand the enduring power of Munch's painting, Knausgaard reflects on the essence of creativity, on choosing to be an artist, experiencing the world through art and its influence on his own writing. As co-curator of a major new exhibition of Munch's work in Oslo, Knausgaard visits the landscapes that inspired him, and speaks with contemporary artists, including Vanessa Baird and Anselm Kiefer. Bringing together art history, biography and memoir, and drawing on ideas of truth, originality and memory, So Much Longing in So Little Space is a brilliant and personal examination of the legacy of one of the world's most iconic painters, and a meditation on art itself.

This volume explores the early history of the photographic studio and portrait in China and Japan. The institution of the photographic studio has received relatively little attention in the history of photography; contributors here investigate various manifestations of the studio as a place and as a space that was cultural, economic, and creative. Its authors also look closely at the studio portrait not as images alone, but also as collaborative ventures between studio operators and sitters, opportunities to invent new roles, images that merged the new medium with "traditional" visual practices, as well as the portrait's part in devising modern, gendered, nationalistic, and public identities for its subjects. As the first collection of its kind, Portraiture and Early Studio Photography in China and Japan analyzes the photographic likeness-its producers, subjects, viewers, and pictorial forms-and argues for the historical significance of the photographic studio as a specific and new space central to the formation of new identities and communities. Photography's identity as a transnational technology is thus explored through the local uses, adaptations, and assimilations of the imported medium, presenting modern images of their subjects in specific Japanese and Chinese contexts.

Edouard Vuillard was so secretive that he berated himself for betraying his emotions in conversation. He was a reticent, impassioned man, a timid stalker and a social climbing anarchist, caught in conflicting desires. From the 1880s until the advent of World War II, using styles from academic to Pointillist to Nabi to Fauve, he abundantly revealed his love and hatred in his paintings: models pose beside a plaster torso cast from the Venus of Milo, women appear without faces, anxiety radiates from many masterpieces, while other works were left unfinished for months or years. Drawing on insights and images from Vuillard's still unpublished diaries, Julia Frey takes the reader into Vuillard's private world of cabarets, experimental theatres, holiday resorts and intimate boudoirs, showing how his art reflects his fraught personal relations and his artistic struggles. Frey chooses many of his finest works, from the famous intimate interior scenes to book illustrations and poster designs, and examines his complex relationships with friends such as Pierre Bonnard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Stephane Mallarme, Felix Vallotton, and the women he loved: his mother and sister, penniless models and rich men's wives.

The first substantial Mexican colonial art historiography in English, this book examines the origin of the study of colonial art in Mexico as a symptom of the development of modern museum practice in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico City. Also an intellectual history, this study recognizes the role of nationalism in the initiation of art historical practice in what is understood today more broadly as Latin America. Although there has been a steady stream of scholarship produced about the subject, beginning in Mexico and increasingly in the United States, what is variably known as viceregal or colonial Mexican, Spanish colonial, and colonial Latin American art continues to be underplayed or overlooked by most art historians and is thus marginal in the field of art history. Ray Hernandez-Duran redresses that omission, presenting a detailed examination of the origin of the study of colonial art in Mexico. Drawing upon archival research, this volume touches upon the role of politics on the formation of the first gallery of Mexican painting in the Academy of San Carlos and the first comprehensive historical treatment of the material in the form of a dialogue. Furthermore, this study promotes further research in colonial art historiography and underlines the pivotal role that the Indo-Hispanic Americas played in the emergence of early modernity and the process of globalization.

John Leslie Breck (1860-1899) was one of the founders of the American art colony at Giverny and was among the earliest American artists to embrace the Impressionist style. He was also one of the first to exhibit his Impressionist paintings in America and helped to popularize the style during his years working in the Boston area in the 1890s. Between 1887 and 1888 he and a handful of his American colleagues began visiting the French village of Giverny, where they met Claude Monet and subsequently explored the new approach to painting that Monet had helped to pioneer. Breck's canvases from this period, loosely brushed and filled with light and color, are a marked departure from his earlier works that are characterized by darker tonalities and tighter brushwork that typified the preferred style of the era. When Breck returned to America in 1892, he applied what he had learned to paintings of the New England landscape and frequently exhibited his work. Inspired by The Mint Museum's 2016 acquisition of John Leslie Breck's canvas Suzanne Hoschede-Monet Sewing, this volume includes approximately 70 of Breck's finest works, drawn from public and private collections. Along with his scenes of Giverny and America, this volume features a selection of paintings from his sojourn in Venice in 1897. Always interested exploring in new ways of seeing the world, Breck had begun to explore aspects of post-Impressionism and Asian aesthetics in the years before his early death, at the age of 39, in 1899. This volume also features up to 36 additional comparative images, including details, photographs, and paintings by Monet and other leading American impressionists including Willard Metcalf, Theodore Robinson, Lila Cabot Perry, Childe Hassam, and Arthur Wesley Dow, presented throughout the main essays and chronology and appendices.

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris examines a history of contact between modern Europe and East Asia through three collectors: Henri Cernuschi, Emile Guimet, and Edmond de Goncourt. Drawing on a wealth of material including European travelogues of the East and Asian reports of the West, Ting Chang explores the politics of mobility and cross-cultural encounter in the nineteenth century. This book takes a new approach to museum studies and institutional critique by highlighting what is missing from the existing scholarship -- the foreign labors, social relations, and somatic experiences of travel that are constitutive of museums yet left out of their histories. The author explores how global trade and monetary theory shaped Cernuschi's collection of archaic Chinese bronze. Exchange systems, both material and immaterial, determined Guimet's museum of religious objects and Goncourt's private collection of Asian art. Bronze, porcelain, and prints articulated the shifting relations and frameworks of understanding between France, Japan, and China in a time of profound transformation. Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris thus looks at what Asian art was imagined to do for Europe. This book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in art history, travel imagery, museum studies, cross-cultural encounters, and modern transnational histories.

Art historian Henry M. Sayre traces the origins of the term "value" in art criticism, revealing the politics that define Manet's art. How did art critics come to speak of light and dark as, respectively, "high in value" and "low in value"? Henry M. Sayre traces the origin of this usage to one of art history's most famous and racially charged paintings, Edouard Manet's Olympia. Art critics once described light and dark in painting in terms of musical metaphor-higher and lower tones, notes, and scales. Sayre shows that it was Emile Zola who introduced the new "law of values" in an 1867 essay on Manet. Unpacking the intricate contexts of Zola's essay and of several related paintings by Manet, Sayre argues that Zola's usage of value was intentionally double coded-an economic metaphor for the political economy of slavery. In Manet's painting, Olympia and her maid represent objects of exchange, a commentary on the French Empire's complicity in the ongoing slave trade in the Americas. Expertly researched and argued, this bold study reveals the extraordinary weight of history and politics that Manet's painting bears. Locating the presence of slavery at modernism's roots, Value in Art is a surprising and necessary intervention in our understanding of art history.

Repainting the work of another into one's own canvas is a deliberate and often highly fraught act of reuse. This book examines the creation, display, and reception of such images. Artists working in nineteenth-century London were in a peculiar position: based in an imperial metropole, yet undervalued by their competitors in continental Europe. Many claimed that Britain had yet to produce a viable national school of art. Using pictures-within-pictures, British painters challenged these claims and asserted their role in an ongoing visual tradition. By transforming pre-existing works of art, they also asserted their own painterly abilities. Recognizing these statements provided viewers with pleasure, in the form of a witty visual puzzle solved, and with prestige, in the form of cultural knowledge demonstrated. At stake for both artist and audience in such exchanges was status: the status of the painter relative to other artists, and the status of the viewer relative to other audience members. By considering these issues, this book demonstrates a new approach to images of historic displays. Through examinations of works by J.M.W. Turner, John Everett Millais, John Scarlett Davis, Emma Brownlow King, and William Powell Frith, this book reveals how these small passages of paint conveyed both personal and national meanings.

The introduction of iron - and later steel - construction and decoration transformed architecture in the nineteenth century. While the structural employment of iron has been a frequent subject of study, this book re-directs scholarly scrutiny on its place in the aesthetics of architecture in the long nineteenth century. Together, its eleven unique and original chapters chart - for the first time - the global reach of iron's architectural reception, from the first debates on how iron could be incorporated into architecture's traditional aesthetics to the modernist cleaving of its structural and ornamental roles. The book is divided into three sections. Formations considers the rising tension between the desire to translate traditional architectural motifs into iron and the nascent feeling that iron buildings were themselves creating an entirely new field of aesthetic expression. Exchanges charts the commercial and cultural interactions that took place between British iron foundries and clients in far-flung locations such as Argentina, Jamaica, Nigeria and Australia. Expressing colonial control as well as local agency, iron buildings struck a balance between pre-fabricated functionalism and a desire to convey beauty, value and often exoticism through ornament. Transformations looks at the place of the aesthetics of iron architecture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period in which iron ornament sought to harmonize wide social ambitions while offering the tantalizing possibility that iron architecture as a whole could transform the fundamental meanings of ornament. Taken together, these chapters call for a re-evaluation of modernism's supposedly rationalist interest in nineteenth-century iron structures, one that has potentially radical implications for the recent ornamental turn in contemporary architecture.

Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943) was a pioneer of 20th-century avant-garde. Remarkably versatile and immensely gifted, she produced an oeuvre that encompasses the entire range of the modernist movement from applied and fine art and dance to architecture, interior design, and teaching. Equlibre, created in 1931, marks the beginning of Taeuber-Arp's career as an accomplished painter. She moves away from figuration to focus on shape and colour. Circle, square, and rectangle define her future vocabulary. While in her earlier textiles she used multiple shades and hues, she now reduces her palette to primary colours alongside black and white, signalling a markedly changed sense of colour. The painting's posthumous title emphasises Taeuber-Arp's constant striving for an ideal balance of colour, shape, and indeed all the elements in her paintings. From here, she sets out to explore movement, circles, and spaces, and later gradations and lines. Equilibre, a landmark of Taeuber-Arp's oeuvre, looks ahead to her future subject matter, while at the same time referencing her earlier work. Text in English and German.

This fascinating publication showcases the Saint Louis Art Museum’s collection of Japanese military prints and related materials—one of the largest collections of such works in the world. The 1,400 objects in the collection are mostly color woodblock prints, but the holdings also include paintings, lithographs, photographs, stereographs, books, magazines, maps, game boards, textiles, ceramics, toys, sketchbooks, and commemorative materials. This extraordinary body of visual works chronicles Japan’s rise as a modern nation from the beginning of the Meiji Restoration in 1868 through the aftermath of Pearl Harbor in 1942, with a focus on the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars. Conflicts of Interest will bring to light an important aspect of Japan’s visual culture and the narratives it circulated for its citizens, allies, and enemies on the world stage.

As the East India Company extended its sway across India in the late eighteenth century, many remarkable artworks were commissioned by Company officials from Indian painters who had previously worked for the Mughals. Published to coincide with the first UK exhibition of these masterworks at The Wallace Collection, this book celebrates the work of a series of extraordinary Indian artists, each with their own style and tastes and agency, all of whom worked for British patrons between the 1770s and the bloody end of the Mughal rule in 1857. Edited by writer and historian William Dalrymple, these hybrid paintings explore both the beauty of the Indian natural world and the social realities of the time in one hundred masterpieces, often of astonishing brilliance and originality. They shed light on a forgotten moment in Anglo-Indian history during which Indian artists responded to European influences while keeping intact their own artistic visions and styles. These artists represent the last phase of Indian artistic genius before the onset of the twin assaults - photography and the influence of western colonial art schools - ended an unbroken tradition of painting going back two thousand years. As these masterworks show, the greatest of these painters deserve to be remembered as among the most remarkable Indian artists of all time.

First published in 2005. Since the early nineteenth century, Byron, the man and his image, have captured the hearts and minds of untold legions of people of all political and social stripes in Britain, Europe, America, and around the world. This book focuses on the history and cultural significance for Federal America of the only portrait of Byron known to have been painted by a major artist. In private hands from 1826 until this day, Thomas Sulley's Byron has never before been the subject of scholarly study. Beginning with the discovery of the portrait in 1999 and a 200-year narrative of the portrait's provenance and its relation to other well-known Byron portraits, the author discusses the work within the broad context of British and American portraiture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Race, Representation & Photography in 19th-Century Memphis: from Slavery to Jim Crow presents a rich interpretation of African American visual culture. Using Victorian era photographs, engravings, and pictorial illustrations from local and national archives, this unique study examines intersections of race and image within the context of early African American communities. It emphasizes black agency, looking at how African Americans in Memphis manipulated the power of photography in the creation of free identities. Blacks are at the center of a study that brings to light how wide-ranging practices of photography were linked to racialized experiences in the American south following the Civil War. Jenkins' book connects the social history of photography with the fields of visual culture, art history, southern studies, gender, and critical race studies.

The art academy failed to recognise his talent; he rejected the contemporary art scene in Vienna; and his visionary work was largely neglected during his lifetime: the painter Richard Gerstl (1883-1908), whose creative period lasted for just four intensive years, is regarded today as one of the most important representatives of Austrian Expressionism for his portraits and landscapes. With his early pictures Self-Portrait against a Blue Background and The Sisters Karoline and Pauline Frey Richard Gerstl began to create an oeuvre which was well ahead of his times and which made him one of the pioneers of Abstract Expressionism. In 1906 Gerstl met the musician Arnold Schoenberg. He embarked upon an affair with the latter's wife Mathilde, who briefly left her husband but then returned to him in 1908. Gerstl not only lost his lover but was also socially isolated; he committed suicide during that same year. His work sank into oblivion

Vincent van Gogh continues to fascinate more than a century after his death in 1890. Yet how much of what is commonly known about this world-renowned artist is accurate? Though he left thousands of works and a trove of letters, the definitive Van Gogh remains elusive. Was he a madman who painted his greatest pieces in a passionate fury, or a lifelong student of art, literature and science who carefully planned each composition? Was he a loner dedicated only to his craft or an active collaborator with his contemporaries? Why is he best known for self-mutilation and ""The Starry Night""? This book has biographers, scriptwriters, lyricists, actors, museum curators and tour guides, among others, presenting diverse interpretations of his life and work, creating a mythic persona that may in fact help us in the search for the real van Gogh.

Japonisme, the 19th-century fascination for Japanese art, has generated an enormous body of scholarship since the beginning of the 21st-first century, but most of it neglects the women who acquired objects from the Far East and sold them to clients or displayed them in their homes before bequeathing them to museums. The stories of women shopkeepers, collectors, and artists rarely appear in memoirs left by those associated with the japoniste movement. This volume brings to light the culturally important, yet largely forgotten activities of women such as Clemence d'Ennery (1823-98), who began collecting Japanese and Chinese chimeras in the 1840s, built and decorated a house for them in the 1870s, and bequeathed the "Musee d'Ennery" to the state as a free public museum in 1893. A friend of the Goncourt brothers and a 50-year patron of Parisian dealers of Asian art, d'Ennery's struggles to gain recognition as a collector and curator serve as a lens through which to examine the collecting and display practices of other women of her day. Travelers to Japan such as the Duchesse de Persigny, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Laure Durand-Fardel returned with souvenirs that they shared with friends and family. Salon hostesses including Juliette Adam, Louise Cahen d'Anvers, Princesse Mathilde, and Marguerite Charpentier provided venues for the discussion and examination of Japanese art objects, as did well-known art dealers Madame Desoye, Madame Malinet, Madame Hatty, and Madame Langweil. Writers, actresses, and artists-Judith Gautier, Therese Bentzon, Sarah Bernhardt, and Mary Cassatt, to name just a few- took inspiration from the Japanese material in circulation to create their own unique works of art. Largely absent from the history of Japonisme, these women-and many others-actively collected Japanese art, interacted with auction houses and art dealers, and formed collections now at the heart of museums such as the Louvre, the Musee Guimet, the Musee Cernuschi, the Musee Unterlinden, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.