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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1800 to 1900 > General
Lucien Pissarro, the eldest son of Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, lived in England in 1883, then in Paris until 1890 when he finally settled in England. These travels gave rise to a substantial exchange of letters, most of which have survived. Camille Pissarro's letters are well known, but Lucien's replies, which describe the world of post-William Morris London, have hitherto lacked a full edition. Lucien, also a painter, exhibited only in the last of the Impressionist exhibitions in Paris; both he and his father were by then members of the neo-Impressionist group. To earn a living, Lucien turned to wood engraving, which led to his printing of rare books, illustrated and printed by him on his Eragny Press in London. He even ceased to paint for a period. The technical discussion of the translation of drawings to woodblocks engraved by Lucien gives a unique insight into the methods employed, while intimate views are expressed on the work of the Pissarros' now famous friends - mainly painters, writers or anarchist theoreticians in Paris, or contemporary painters reacting to the Pre-Raphaelites and the Private Press movement inspired by William Morris in England. Advice on painting methods mingle with views on current art trends, family matters, and the Pissarros' struggles for recognition and enough money even to post their letters.
This is a guide to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation of Villa Favorita in Lugano. The Foundation's collection includes masterpieces of 19th- and 20th-century American painting and European and Soviet Avantgardes. Works range from the Hudson River School (Bierstadt, Church, Cole) to the major American Expressionists (Hawthorne, Hassam, Wadsworth, Thomson), to the periods of Cubism (Leger), German Expressionism (Nolde, Schmidt-Rortluff, Schiele), the Russian avant-garde (Larionov, Malevich), the Dada and Surrealist movements (Man Ray, Ernst), up to Action Painting (Pollock) and Hyper-realism (Estes). This brief guidebook displays the new installation of the Foundation and features a section devoted to the sculpture and old master paintings belonging to this collection, as well as an essay on the history of the Villa Favorita and its gardens on the shores of Lake Lugano.
Two Literary Critics Romancing the Archive at London's National Portrait Gallery. Part biography, part detective novel, part love story, and part meditation on archival research, Love Among the Archives is an experiment in writing a life. This is the story of two literary critics' attempts to track down Sir George Scharf, the founding director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, famous in his day and strangely obscure in our own. After discovering Scharf's scrapbook of menus and invitations from England's most stately homes, the authors began their adventures in the archives of London, searching Scharf's diaries, sketchbooks, and letters for traces of the man who so loved dining out. Addicted to Victorian novels, the authors looked for a marriage plot, but found Scharf's passionate attachment to a younger man who had hidden from him a secret engagement; they looked for a Bildungsroman, but found that Scharf never left his beloved mother. Always short of money, self-educated, talented, irascible, gregarious, prolific, and snobbish, this son of a poor immigrant artist was to become the right-hand man of an earl he called "my best friend." The written record of his nightmares, debts, gifts, and dinner parties comes together to produce a rich Victorian character whose personal and professional lives challenge what we think we know about sex, class, and profession in his time. Helena Michie is Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor in Humanities and Professor of English at Rice University. She is the author of Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal (2006), Sororophobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture (1991) and The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies (1987) and co-editor with Ronald Thomas of Nineteenth-Century Geographies: From the Victorian Age to the American Century (2002). Robyn Warhol is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University, where she is a core faculty member of Project Narrative. She is the author of Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop Culture Forms (2003) and Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel (1989) and co-editor with Susan S. Lanser of Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (2015).
From the author of the bestselling phenomenon The Hare with Amber Eyes As you may have guessed by now, I am not in your house by accident. I know your street rather well. The Camondos lived just a few doors away from Edmund de Waal's forebears. Like de Waal's family, they were part of belle epoque high society. They were also targets of anti-Semitism. Count Moise de Camondo created a spectacular house filled with art for his son to inherit. Over a century later, de Waal explores the lavish rooms and detailed archives and, in a haunting series of letters addressed to Camondo, he tells us what happened next. 'Illuminating... A wonderful tribute to a family and to an idea' Guardian 'Letters to Camondo immerses you in another age... Dazzling' Financial Times
This lavishly illustrated book explores the aesthetic and cultural impact of New Mexico art from the 1880s to the present, and highlights a refreshing range of works representing European, native, ethnic, tourist, regional and commercial art. For the past 125 years, art in New Mexico has told a complex story of aesthetic interaction and cultural fusion. Southwest art began with 19th-century documentarians confronting a disappearing Native America and an exotic landscape. Artists who arrived in New Mexico beginning in the 1880s wrestled with the commercialisation of the region and the clash of cultural identities. Native peoples and expedition photographers, tourism and the railroad, artist colonies, the arrival of modernism, Trinity and the end of romanticism, a new generation of native artists challenging ethnic identity -- all have played a part in what we now call New Mexican art. "The Art of New Mexico" provides new perspectives on the evolution of art in the state, and highlights the outstanding collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, which is the repository for some of the finest works by renowned artists such as Adam Clark Vroman, Marsden Hartley, Robert Henri, John Sloan, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Luis Elijo Tapia. Curator and author Joseph Traugott discusses how Native American and Hispanic artists of the Southwest not only influenced the non-native artists who came to call New Mexico home, but how in turn their work was influenced by these newcomers. By organising key objects from the museum's collection with an intercultural history of New Mexico art, the book makes cogent connections between specific works, aesthetic movements, and cultural traditions. As a result, this book will engage readers who are well versed in the artistic traditions of New Mexico, as well as those new to its aesthetic heritage. The book is published to coincide with a reinstallation of the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe.
Elegant representations of nature and the four seasons populate a wide range of Japanese genres and media -- from poetry and screen painting to tea ceremonies, flower arrangements, and annual observances. In Japan and the "Culture of the Four Seasons," Haruo Shirane shows how, when, and why this practice developed and explicates the richly encoded social, religious, and political meanings of this imagery. Refuting the belief that this tradition reflects Japan's agrarian origins and supposedly mild climate, Shirane traces the establishment of seasonal topics to the poetry composed by the urban nobility in the eighth century. After becoming highly codified and influencing visual arts in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the seasonal topics and their cultural associations evolved and spread to other genres, eventually settling in the popular culture of the early modern period. Contrasted with the elegant images of nature derived from court poetry was the agrarian view of nature based on rural life. The two landscapes began to intersect in the medieval period, creating a complex, layered web of competing associations. Shirane discusses a wide array of representations of nature and the four seasons in many genres, originating in both the urban and rural perspective: textual (poetry, chronicles, tales), cultivated (gardens, flower arrangement), material (kimonos, screens), performative (noh, festivals), and gastronomic (tea ceremony, food rituals). He reveals how this kind of "secondary nature," which flourished in Japan's urban architecture and gardens, fostered and idealized a sense of harmony with the natural world just at the moment it was disappearing. Illuminating the deeper meaning behind Japanese aesthetics and artifacts, Shirane clarifies the use of natural images and seasonal topics and the changes in their cultural associations and function across history, genre, and community over more than a millennium. In this fascinating book, the four seasons are revealed to be as much a cultural construction as a reflection of the physical world.
Explores Samuel Beckett's relation to painting and the visual imagination that informs his theatrical work Beckett was deeply engaged with the visual arts and individual painters, including Jack B. Yeats, Bram van Velde, and Avigdor Arikha. In this monograph, David Lloyd explores what Beckett saw in their paintings. He explains what visual resources Beckett found in these particular painters rather than in the surrealism of Masson or the abstraction of Kandinsky or Mondrian. The analysis of Beckett's visual imagination is based on his criticism and on close analysis of the paintings he viewed. Lloyd shows how Beckett's fascination with these painters illuminates the 'painterly' qualities of his theatre and the philosophical, political and aesthetic implications of Beckett's highly visual dramatic work. Key Features Discusses Beckett's relationship with three painters crucial to his life-long dialogue with the visual arts The first book to examine the paintings that Beckett would have known and on which he based his critical remarks Accounts for the increasing visuality of Beckett's theatre in relation to his evolving appreciation of painting and the formal questions posed by that medium Explores Beckett's anticipation of European phenomenology and psychoanalysis in relation to Heidegger and Lacan
This volume examines the criticism of five influential British writers on the visual arts-John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, and Sir Herbert Read. Their works span a period in the history of art that "in productivity and significance is more impressive than any other period since the Renaissance." Each of these writers possesses extraordinary literary skills. Another common tie is their awareness of serving as spokesmen for art to an audience that was mainly indifferent or even hostile. Even though the aesthetic outlook of Pater, Fry, and Bell represents a violent reaction to Ruskin's moralistic and literary interpretation of art, they were no less concerned than he to overcome the national apathy toward art and to assert its cultural importance. Sir Herbert Read reconciles the oppositions in the work of his predecessors in an aesthetic philosophy that stresses the social and ethnical values of art without sacrificing the idea of individual expression. The major part of Solomon Fishman's study is an examination of the aesthetic theories embodied in the writings of each critic. He extracts the theoretical assumptions that form the basis of each writer's critical practice and traces the development of aesthetic doctrine as it was modified by the critic's experience of actual works of art. The body of work of these writers is representative of the whole development of modern art criticism and aesthetic theory. Although they display great diversity in ideas and taste, all five critics were instrumental in shaping the response of the public, first of all toward art in general, and finally toward modern art. Their work represents a unified segment of the larger enterprise to understand and illuminate art and will interest anyone who wishes to enlarge their own understanding. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.
Photography, one of the most influential inventions of the nineteenth century, has been shaped by Canadian innovators. Among them are two Quebec men who have flown beneath the radar in studies of the history of photography: the Smeaton brothers. Out of the Studio documents the life, oeuvre, and achievement of Charles Smeaton and his younger brother, John. Launched by the opening of their "photographic gallery" in 1861, they developed a reputation in Quebec for images of contemporaneous people, places, and events taken in challenging outdoor settings. Smeaton pictures of the aftermath of the Great Fire of Quebec in 1866 helped bring an understanding of the disaster to an international audience; images featuring the gold mining industry were displayed at the Exposition universelle in Paris the following year. When Charles travelled to Europe in 1866, he accomplished a feat previously thought impossible, taking the first successful photographs in the Roman catacombs. John moved to Montreal in 1869, where he worked for newspapers and developed techniques for the direct transfer of photographs into print without the necessity of intermediary engravings. Out of the Studio is the first comprehensive biographical study detailing the innovation and imagination of the Smeaton brothers and their legacy of images across two continents.
Responding to the decline of the monarchy and the church in post-revolutionary France, theorists representing a wide spectrum of leftist ideologies proposed comprehensive blueprints for society that assigned a crucial role to aesthetics. In this full-length investigation of social romanticism, Neil McWilliam explores the profound impact of radical philosophies on contemporary aesthetics and art criticism, and traces efforts to conscript the arts for doctrinal ends. He highlights the complexity and diversity of systems such as Saint-Simonianism, Fourierism, Republicanism, and Christian Socialism--movements that set out to exploit the ameliorative effect of aesthetic form on human consciousness--and challenges the previous linking of social art to narrow didacticism. This book seeks an understanding both of the conventions of artistic judgment and reception and of the aims and significance of radical political ideologies. Drawing on a broad spectrum of previously neglected journalistic criticism, visual material, and archival sources, together with key political texts by figures such as Saint-Simon, Philippe Buchez, and Pierre Leroux, this work reveals an important facet of radical history and modifies received understandings of French art in the wake of Romanticism. In the process it probes the role of culture within oppositional political practice, arguing that the ultimate failure to realize a social art exposes the limits of the radicals' break with dominant discourse and their hesitancy in forging links with a culturally disenfranchised working class. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
"Princeton and the Gothic Revival" investigates America's changing attitudes toward medieval art around the turn of the twentieth century through the lens of Princeton University and its role as a major patron of Gothic Revival art and architecture. Johanna Seasonwein charts a shift from eclecticism to a more unified, "authentic" approach to medieval art, and examines how the language of medieval forms was used to articulate a new model of American higher education in campus design and the classroom. The catalog for an exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum, "Princeton and the Gothic Revival" breaks new ground by addressing why universities, and Princeton in particular, were so effective at bringing together what had been disparate interests in the Middle Ages. Revivalists and Medievalists were often at odds, yet at Princeton they used the language of the Middle Ages to create a new identity for the American university, one that was steeped in the traditions of Oxford and Cambridge but also embraced the model of the German research university. "Princeton and the Gothic Revival" provides an overview of Princeton's Romanesque and Gothic Revival architecture and examines the changing approach to the idea of the "Gothic" by looking at three Princeton buildings and their stained glass windows: the Marquand Chapel, Procter Hall at the Graduate College, and the University Chapel.
This book demonstrates that numerous prominent artists in every period of the modern era were expressing spiritual interests when they created celebrated works of art. This magisterial overview insightfully reveals the centrality of an often denied and misunderstood element in the cultural history of modern art.
Two Literary Critics Romancing the Archive at London's National Portrait Gallery. Part biography, part detective novel, part love story, and part meta archival meditation, Love Among the Archives is an experiment in writing a life. Our subject is Sir George Scharf, the founding director of the National Portrait Gallery in London, well known and respected in the Victorian period, strangely obscure in our own. We tell of discovering Scharf's souvenirs of a social life among the highest classes, and then learning he was the self made son of an impoverished immigrant. As we comb through 50 years of daily diaries, we stumble against plots we bring to the archive from our reading of novels. We ask questions like, did Scharf have a beloved? Why did Scharf kick his aged father out of the family home? What could someone like Scharf mean when he referred to an earl as his "best friend"? The answers turn out never to be what Victorian fiction - or Victorianist Studies - would have predicted. Presents a unique approach to life writing that foregrounds the process of archival discovery; a contribution to sexuality studies of the Victorian period that focuses on domestic arrangements between middle class men; offers an intervention into identity studies going beyond class, gender, and sexuality to try out new categories like "extra man" or "perpetual son" and a humorous critique of what literary critics do when they turn to "the archive" for historical authenticity.
"Art in Theory 1815-1900" provides the most wide-ranging and
comprehensive collection of documents ever assembled on
nineteenth-century theories of art. Like its highly successful
companion volume, "Art in Theory 1900-1990," also edited by Charles
Harrison and Paul Wood, its primary aim is to provide students and
teachers with the documentary material for informed and up-to-date
study. Its 260 texts, clear organization and considerable editorial
content in this anthology furnish a vivid and indispensable
introduction to the history of the art of the period. The anthology
is also invaluable to anyone interested in the wider cultural
debates of the nineteenth century, and in the development of modern
aesthetic theories. Harrison, Wood and Gaiger collect writings by artists, critics, philosophers and literary figures, some reprinted in their entirety, others excerpted from longer works. Among the major themes treated are concepts of genius and originality, modes of landscape painting, approaches to Realism, the question of Modernity and debates over Impressionism, theories of optics and color, the aesthetics of photography, and the rise of photography. Each section is prefaced by an essay that situates the ideas of the period in their historical context, while relating theoretical concerns and debates to developments in the practice of art. Each text is briefly introduced by an outline giving the circumstances of its original appearance and indicating its relevance to the development of modern artistic theory. An extensive bibliography is also provided.
En 1901, deprimido por el suicidio de su intimo amigo, Carles Casagemas, Picasso se sumerge en los lienzos austeros y melancolicos del Periodo Azul. Con solo veintidos anos de edad y desesperadamente pobre, decide restringir su paleta a colores predominantemente frios, sugerentes de la nocturnidad, el misterio y la muerte. Su creciente obsesion con estos temas alcanza su punto culminante con La vie, un lienzo emblematico de la relacion del pintor con la muerte, considerada una fuerza malefica con la que uno debe enfrentarse mediante el poder del exorcismo que le ha sido otorgado como artista/chaman. Esta pintura se ha interpretado como una referencia al ciclo de la vida, existiendo en ella referencias autobiograficas inequivocas. Los bosquejos preliminares muestran sin la menor duda que la figura masculina es un autorretrato del artista. Picasso posteriormente reemplazaria su imagen con la de Casagemas. El critico John Richardson ha sugerido que al sustituir la imagen del suicida por la de un autorretrato, Picasso se conmemora a si mismo, disfrazado como el amigo muerto. Al igual que todas las mascaras, la que Picasso coloca sobre el propio rostro en La vie tiene una funcion metamorfica, revelando al mismo tiempo que oculta. En la carrera artistica picassiana, la mascara se constituye en un objeto que de forma intencionada desestabiliza la identidad del sujeto: llevar una puesta, literal o simbolicamente, significa dejar de ser uno mismo; despojarse de ella supone mostrar una verdad potencialmente mas profunda. El libro analiza el concepto de la mascara desde una perspectiva lacaniana y describe diferentes periodos en la carrera artistica de Picasso con el fin de definir, en lo posible, la compleja personalidad del artista.
Laugh Lines: Caricaturing Painting in Nineteenth-Century France is the first major study of Salon caricature, a kind of graphic art criticism in which press artists drew comic versions of contemporary painting and sculpture for publication in widely consumed journals and albums. Salon caricature began with a few tentative lithographs in the 1840s and within a few decades, no Parisian exhibition could open without appearing in warped, incisive, and hilarious miniature in the pages of the illustrated press. This broad survey of Salon caricature examines little-known graphic artists and unpublished amateurs alongside major figures like Edouard Manet, puts anonymous jokesters in dialogue with the essays of Baudelaire, and holds up the material qualities of a 10-centime album to the most ambitious painting of the 19th century. This archival study unearths colorful caricatures that have not been reproduced until now, drawing back the curtain on a robust culture of comedy around fine art and its reception in nineteenth-century France.
Photography, both in the form of contemporary practice and that of historical material, now occupies a significant place in the citadels of Western art culture. It has an institutional network of its own, embedded within the broader art world, with its own specialists including critics, curators, collectors, dealers and conservators. All of this cultural activity consolidates an artistic practice and critical discourse of photography that distinguishes what is increasingly termed 'art photography' from its commercial, scientific and amateur guises. But this long-awaited recognition of photography as high art brings new challenges. How will photography's newly privileged place in the art world affect how the history of creative photography is written? Modernist claims for the medium as having an aesthetic often turned on precedents from painting. Postmodernism challenged a cultural hierarchy organized around painting. Nineteenth-century photographs move between the symbolic spaces of the gallery wall and the archive: de-contextualized for art and re-contextualized for history. But what of the contemporary writings, images, and practices that negotiated an aesthetic status for 'the photographic'? Photography and the Arts revisits practices both celebrated and elided by the modernist and postmodernist grand narratives of art and photographic history in order to open up new critical spaces. Written by leading scholars in the fields of photography, art and literature, the book examines the metaphorical as well as the material exchanges between photography and the fine, graphic, reproductive and sculptural arts.
Best known for his depictions of fierce samurai warriors in battle, Utagawa Kuniyoshi also produced landscapes, portraits of Kabuki actors, and images of mythical animals. His dynamic action scenes and fantastic creatures are recognized today as precursors of manga and anime. This dazzling volume by Matthi Forrer, one of the leading experts on ukiyo-e art, traces Kuniyoshi's entire career. Chapters look at the major aspects of Kuniyoshi's oeuvre; his book illustrations and portraits of fashionable women; his enormously popular series featuring actors, warriors, and landscapes; and the influence of Western art on his career. Meticulous, large-scale reproductions highlight the work's clear outlines, elegantly muted palette, and precise details-from electrifying depictions of a tiger, mid-pounce, and light-hearted interpretations of Chinese folktales, to the terrifying figures of samurai swordsmen and romantic winter landscapes. A Japanese-style binding and box complete this luxurious package that promises an endlessly absorbing journey into the life of Kuniyoshi during the latter days of Japan's Edo period.
Glamour is one of the most tantalizing and bewitching aspects of contemporary culture - but also one of the most elusive. The aura of celebrity, the style of the fashion world, the vanity of the rich and beautiful, and the publicity-driven rites of cafe society are all imbued with its irresistible magnetism. But what exactly is glamour? Where does it come from? How old is it? And can anyone quite capture its magic? Stephen Gundle answers all these questions and more in this first ever history of the phenomenon, from Paris in the tumultuous final decades of the eighteenth century through to Hollywood, New York, and Monte Carlo in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from Napoleon to Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe, from Beau Brummell to Gianni Versace. Throughout, the book captures the excitement and sex appeal of glamour while exposing its mechanisms and exploring its sleazy and sometimes tragic underside. As Gundle shows, while glamour is exciting and magnetic, its promise is ultimately an illusion that can only ever be partially fulfilled.
The story of their salt-glazed pottery that has a special place in the history of ceramic art.
"A painting must stand as a painting, made by human hand," wrote Caspar David Friedrich, "not seek to disguise itself as Nature." One of his generation's most popular painters, Friedrich imagined landscapes of powerful beauty and spirituality from within the confines of his studios. This breathtaking monograph, filled with glorious reproductions and details of his paintings, argues for Friedrich's reputation as a sublime artist and interpreter of nature. In his thoughtful and well-researched commentary, author Johannes Grave explores Friedrich's approach to landscape painting as well as his revolutionary thoughts about how these paintings should be received by their viewers. Looking closely at pieces such as Monk by the Sea, Abbey in the Oakwood, and the Tetschener Altar, Grave shows how Friedrich developed an innovative approach to landscape painting, one that communicated a new sense of space and time, and which draws the viewer into a unique aesthetic experience. Highly readable, insightful, and copiously illustrated, this compelling book sheds crucial light on Friedrich's celebrated body of work. |
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