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.

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

This beautiful book brings you the very best of art throughout history - using a truly innovative timeline-led approach. Savour iconic paintings such as Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper and Monet's Waterlilies, and discover less well-known artists, styles, and movements the world over - from Indigenous Australian art to the works of Ming-era China. And explore recurring themes, such as love and religion, and important genres from Romanesque to Conceptual art, along the way. Timelines of Art provides detailed analysis of the works of key artists, showing details of their technique - such as Leonardo's use of light and shade. It tells the story of avant-garde works like Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Lunch on the Grass), which scandalised society, and it traces how certain artists, genres or movements informed the works of others - showing how the Impressionists were inspired by Gustave Courbet, for example, or how Van Gogh was influenced by Japanese prints. Comprehensive, accessible, and lavishly illustrated throughout, Timelines of Art is an essential guide to the pantheon of world art, so dive straight into discover: - An overview of each movement, including the social and cultural background of the period, grounds the works of art in the spirit of their times. - Turning-point paintings that triggered or epitomised each artistic movement are identified and explained, against a backdrop of influences - the technical advances, admired techniques of an earlier artist, and changes in society that enabled new directions in art. - Glossary of technical terms and comprehensive index help make this an indispensable work of reference for any art-lover. Timelines of Art is the perfect art history book for students of art and/or history, proving ideal for families, schools and libraries and doubling up as a great gift for the art lover in your life.

The story of their salt-glazed pottery that has a special place in the history of ceramic art.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Gauguin: Metamorphoses at The Museum of Modern Art, this volume explores the remarkable relationship between Paul Gauguin's rare and extraordinary prints and transfer drawings, and his better-known paintings and sculptures in wood and ceramic. Created in several discreet bursts of activity from 1889 until his death in 1903, these remarkable works on paper reflect Gauguin's experiments with a range of mediums, from radically 'primitive' woodcuts that extend from the sculptural gouging of his carved wood reliefs, to jewel-like watercolour monotypes and large, mysterious transfer drawings. Richly illustrated with approximately 190 works in a range of mediums, Gauguin: Metamorphoses explores the artist's radically experimental approach to techniques and his pivotal place in the history of art. An introductory essay by Starr Figura considers the significance of Gauguin's innovative printmaking and the relationship between his prints and works in painting and sculpture. Elizabeth Childs writes on Gauguin's radical wood sculptures, using them as a touchstone from which to further investigate his peripatetic practice. An essay by Hal Foster addresses Gauguin's 'primitivism' and its aesthetic and cultural implications. An essay by Erika Mosier offers a conservator's insights into Gauguin's unusual printmaking techniques.

This book is a study of the complex relationship between matter and idea that shaped the nineteenth-century culture of art, and that in turn determined the course of still-current accounts of art's nature and value. Fundamental questions about the effects of material conditions on the creation and reception of art arose as early as the nineteenth century, and put important pressures on later eras. The place of class distinctions in the making and reception of art, the relationship between copy and original, the effects of display on art appreciation, even the role of pleasure itself: this book treats these and related issues as productive conceptual challenges with an unresolved relationship to matter at their core. Drawing on recent scholarship on the history of art and its institutions, Material Inspirations places cultural developments such as the emergence of new sites for exhibition and the astonishing proliferation of printed reproductions alongside a wide range of texts including novels, poems, travel guidebooks, compendia of antiquities, and especially the great line of critical writing that emerged in the period. The study vivifies a dynamic era, which is still too often seen as static and unchanging, by emphasizing the transformations taking place throughout the period in precisely those areas that have appeared to promise little more than repetition or continuity: collection, exhibition, and reproduction. The book culminates with the two great critics of the period, John Ruskin and Walter Pater, but it also includes close analysis of other prose writers, as well as poets and novelists ranging from William Blake to Robert Browning, George Eliot to Henry James. Significant developments addressed include the vogue for the representation of Old Masters in the first half of the century, ongoing innovations in the creation and diffusion of reproductions, and the emergence of the field of art history itself. At the heart of each of these the book identifies a material pressure shaping concepts, texts, and works of art.

The modern media world came into being in the nineteenth century, when machines were harnessed to produce texts and images in unprecedented numbers. In the visual realm, new industrial techniques generated a deluge of affordable pictorial items, mass-printed photographs, posters, cartoons, and illustrations. These alluring objects of the Victorian parlor were miniaturized spectacles that served as portals onto phantasmagoric versions of 'the world.' Although new kinds of pictures transformed everyday life, these ephemeral items have received remarkably little scholarly attention. Picture World shines a welcome new light onto these critically neglected yet fascinating visual objects. They serve as entryways into the nineteenth century's key aesthetic concepts. Each chapter pairs a new type of picture with a foundational keyword in Victorian aesthetics, a familiar term reconceived through the lens of new media. 'Character' appears differently when considered with caricature, in the new comics and cartoons appearing in the mass press in the 1830s; likewise, the book approaches 'realism' through pictorial journalism; 'illustration' via illustrated Bibles; 'sensation' through carte-de-visite portrait photographs; 'the picturesque' by way of stereoscopic views; and 'decadence' through advertising posters. Picture World studies the aesthetic effects of the nineteenth century's media revolution: it uses the relics of a previous era's cultural life to interrogate the Victorian world's most deeply-held values, arriving at insights still relevant in our own media age.

French flower painter Pierre-Joseph Redoute (1759-1840) devoted himself exclusively to capturing the diversity of flowering plants in watercolor paintings which were then published as copper engravings, with careful botanical descriptions. The darling of wealthy Parisian patrons including Napoleon's wife Josephine, he was dubbed "the Raphael of flowers," and is regarded to this day as a master of botanical illustration. This elegant catalogue brings together all engravings from Redoute's illustrations of Roses and Choix des plus belles fleurs (Selection of the Most Beautiful Flowers) and the most astounding images from The Lilies. Offering a vibrant overview of Redoute's admixture of accuracy and beauty, it is also a privileged glimpse into the magnificent gardens and greenhouses of a bygone Paris.

""Desire and Excess" is one of the most exciting and sophisticated books I have read for some time. It is capaciously learned, sensitively researched, and wonderfully graceful and witty. By reconsidering the institutions and aesthetics responsible for the culture of the museum in modernity, it offers a new history of art-historical discourse."--Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, London

""Desire and Excess" tells about the time a dazzling company of poets got lost inside the Louvre, and only got out once they had together created the giant figure of the Artist. Jonah Siegel's brilliance is continually breathtaking, so it's lucky that he has placed such solid ground beneath our feet by his luxurious, intricately wrought scholarship."--Elaine Scarry, author of "On Beauty and Being Just"

"A timely book on the relationship of art and experience to the hallowed sanctuaries of museum collections. Jonah Siegel is right on target in dealing with this hugely important issue. I can only admire the vast range of themes and the quiet display of learning so apparent in this text. The book kept me constantly alert and informed."--Robert Rosenblum, New York University

"This ambitious and fascinating work traces the relations between the development of the museum, the history of taste, and the figure of the artist/author in nineteenth-century England. Here Jonah Siegel reads the long collapse of neoclassicism as a productive crisis in the modern conception of originality. His argument is remarkably rich, subtle, learned, and provocative."--Ian Duncan, University of Oregon

""Desire and Excess" marks the emergence of a powerful and distinctive critical sensibility, remarkable both for itsrange of erudition and for the extraordinary quality of reflection brought to bear on the works explored here. Jonah Siegel mingles exacting close analysis and broad, confident historical and cultural reference in a manner that is almost unfailingly persuasive. The book will appeal to readers interested in the intellectual, artistic, literary, and cultural histories of Britain from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, as well as to those engaged in postmodern critical reflection on art institutions and artistic agency."--James Eli Adams, Indiana University

Women - as warriors, workers, mothers, sensual women,even absent women - haunt 19th- and 20th-century Western painting: their representation is one of its most common subjects. Representing Women brings together Linda Nochlin's most important writings on the subject, as she considers work by Miller, Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Seurat, Cassatt and Kollwitz, among many others. In her riveting, partly autobiographical, extended introduction, Nochlin documents her own pioneering approach to art history; throughout the seven essays in this book, she argues for the honest virtues of an art history that rejects methodological assumptions, and for art historians who investigate the work before their eyes while focusing on its subject matter, informed by a sensitivity to its feminist spirit.

Inspired by newly discovered antiquities of the ancient world exhibited in the museums of Europe and celebrated in the illustrated press of the day, the leading British history painters Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sir Edward Poynter and Edwin Long created a striking body of artworks in which archaeology was a prime focus. Of the growing community of historicist and classicist painters in mid-nineteenth century Britain, these artists expressed a passion for archaeological detail, and their aesthetic engagement with ancient material culture played a key role in fostering the enthusiasm for antiquity with wider audiences. Painting Antiquity explores the archaeological dimension of their paintings in detail, addressing how the relationship these artists had with ancient objects represented a distinctive and important development in the cultural reception of the past. The book also considers the inspiration for the movement defined as "archaeological genre painting," the artistic and historic context for this new style, the archaeological sources upon which the artworks were based, and the critical reception of the paintings in the world of Victorian art criticism. Alongside extensive visual evidence, rendered here in both striking color and black-and-white imagery, Stephanie Moser shows how this artistic practice influenced our understanding of ancient Egypt. Further, she argues that these paintings affected the development of archaeology as a discipline, revealing how the painters had an intense engagement with archaeology, representing artefacts in extraordinary detail and promoting the use of ancient material culture according to an aesthetic agenda. The issues raised by placing importance on concepts of beauty and decoration, over values such as rarity, function, or historical use continue to divide archaeologists and art historians in the present day. Ultimately, by demonstrating how the artistic dialogue with antiquity contributed to defining it, Painting Antiquity sheds important new light on the two-way exchanges between visual representations of the past and knowledge formation.

Iconic Designs is a beautifully designed and illustrated guide to fifty classic 'things' - designs that we find in the city, in our homes and offices, on page and screen, and in our everyday lives. In her introduction, Grace Lees-Maffei explores what makes a design 'iconic', and fifty essays by leading design and cultural critics tell the story of each iconic 'thing', its innovative and unique qualities, and its journey to classic status. Subjects range from the late 19th century to the present day, and include the Sydney Opera House, the Post-It Note, Coco Chanel's classic suit, the Sony Walkman (TM), Hello Kitty (TM), the typeface Helvetica, the Ford Model T, Harry Beck's diagrammatic map of the London Underground and the Apple iMac G3. This handsome volume provides a treasure trove of 'stories' that will shed new light on the iconic designs that we use without thinking, aspire to possess, love or hate (or love to hate) and which form part of the fabric of our everyday lives.

Germany developed a large colonial empire over the last thirty years of the 19th century, spanning regions of the west coast of Africa to its east coast and beyond. Largely forgotten for many years, recent intense debates about Africa's cultural heritage in European museums have brought this period of African and German history back into the spotlight. German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies brings much-needed context to these debates, exploring perspectives on the architecture, art, urbanism, and visual culture of German colonialism in Africa, and its legacies in postcolonial and present-day Namibia, Cameroon, and Germany. The first in-depth exploration of the designed and visual aspects of German colonialism, the book presents a series of essays combining formal analyses of painting, photography, performance art, buildings, and space with the discourse analysis approach associated with postcolonial theory. Covering the entire period from the build-up to colonialism in the early-19th century to the present, subjects covered range from late-19th-century German colonial paintings of African landscapes and people to German land appropriation through planning and architectural mechanisms, and from indigenous African responses to colonial architecture, to explorations of the legacies of German colonialism by contemporary artists today. This powerful and revealing collection of essays will encourage new research on this under-explored topic, and demonstrate the importance of historical research to the present, especially with regards to ongoing debates about the presence of material legacies of colonialism in Western culture, museum collections, and immigration policies.

Throughout the nineteenth century, hand-painted plaster replicas of historical objects were manufactured for use in museums that sought to bring together all the world's masterpieces under one roof. Among the oldest and largest manufacturers was the Replica Workshop in Berlin, whose supply of plaster casts now comprises more than seven thousand sculptures that continue to be produced for museums and private collections through the use of artistry and workmanship handed down over generations. "Plasterwork Masterpieces" pays tribute to the art of plaster casting through a carefully curated catalog of the workshop's most admired sculptures from art and archaeology, including the "Laocoon Group" and Rodin's famed "The Thinker." Opening an important Berlin institution to the public, the works included here offer a fascinating journey through the various cultures from antiquity to the present.

Thanks to its very nature, performance enters into natural dialogue with art, new media, politics, and the social sphere as a whole. Always happening in the here and now, and with a unique freedom and openness to the unknown, performance is a medium with a special ability to question its own subjects, materials, and languages. As a result, it is often best reflected in the dynamic character of contemporary art and contemporaneity in the broadest sense of the word. Points of Convergence explores these ideas and investigates critical approaches to performance, ultimately aiming to stimulate new discussion between theorists and practitioners. With twelve essays by leading figures in the field of performance arts, this illustrated volume is structured in two parts. The first, authored by academics in the discipline, features an introduction to key areas of scholastic research. The second part, authored by curators and other researchers, then focuses on an account of individual traditions of performance. Taken together, the contributions identify new possibilities for interaction between the theoretical aspects of performance art and the ways performance plays out within local contexts.

One of the most important British graphic artists of the nineteenth century, George Cruikshank (1792-1878) illustrated over 860 books, including several by Charles Dickens, and produced a vast number of etchings, paintings, and caricatures. The ten essays collected here first appeared in a special limited edition. In a new preface written for this paperback edition, Robert Patten shows how the insights of these seminal essays have been amplified by recent exhibitions and scholarship. The introduction by John Fowles has been retained and an index has been added. In addition to the many Cruikshank illustrations reproduced in the volume, there are original drawings by contemporary artists David Levine and Ronald Searle.

A Cultural History of Color in the Age of Industry covers the period 1800 to 1920, when the world embraced color like never before. Inventions, such as steam power, lithography, photography, electricity, motor cars, aviation, and cheaper color printing, all contributed to a new exuberance about color. Available pigments and colored products - made possible by new technologies, industrial manufacturing, commercialization, and urbanization - also greatly increased, as did illustrated printed literature for the mass market. Color, both literally and metaphorically, was splashed around, and became an expressive tool for artists, designers, and writers. Color shapes an individual's experience of the world and also how society gives particular spaces, objects, and moments meaning. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Color examines how color has been created, traded, used, and interpreted over the last 5000 years. The themes covered in each volume are color philosophy and science; color technology and trade; power and identity; religion and ritual; body and clothing; language and psychology; literature and the performing arts; art; architecture and interiors; and artefacts. Alexandra Loske is Curator at the Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton, UK Volume 5 in the Cultural History of Color set. General Editors: Carole P. Biggam and Kirsten Wolf

Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932 examines an understudied visual language used to portray Latin Americans in mid-19th to early 20th-century Parisian popular visual media. The term 'Latinize' is introduced to connect France's early 19th-century endeavors to create "Latin America," an expansion of the French empire into the Latin-language based Spanish and Portuguese Americas, to its perception of this population. Latin-American elites traveler to Paris in the 1840s from their newly independent nations were denigrated in representations rather than depicted as equals in a developing global economy. Darkened skin, etched onto images of Latin Americans of European descent mitigated their ability to claim the privileges of their ancestral heritage. Whitened skin, among other codes, imposed on turn-of-the-20th-century Black Latin Americans in Paris tempered their Blackness and rendered them relatively assimilatable compared to colonial Africans, Blacks from the Caribbean, and African Americans. After identifying mid-to-late 19th-century Latinizing codes, the study focuses on shifts in latinizing visuality between 1890-1933 in three case studies: the depictions of popular Cuban circus entertainer Chocolat; representations of Panamanian World Bantamweight Champion boxer Alfonso Teofilo Brown; and paintings of Black Uruguayans executed by Pedro Figari, a Uruguayan artist, during his residence in Paris between 1925-1933.

'Magnificent. Beautifully written, immaculately researched and thoroughly absorbing from start to finish. A tour de force that explains how Europe's cultural life transformed during the course of the 19th century - and so much more' Peter Frankopan From the bestselling author of Natasha's Dance, The Europeans is richly enthralling, panoramic cultural history of nineteenth-century Europe, told through the intertwined lives of three remarkable people: a great singer, Pauline Viardot, a great writer, Ivan Turgenev, and a great connoisseur, Pauline's husband Louis. Their passionate, ambitious lives were bound up with an astonishing array of writers, composers and painters all trying to make their way through the exciting, prosperous and genuinely pan-European culture that came about as a result of huge economic and technological change. This culture - through trains, telegraphs and printing - allowed artists of all kinds to exchange ideas and make a living, shuttling back and forth across the whole continent from the British Isles to Imperial Russia, as they exploited a new cosmopolitan age. The Europeans is Orlando Figes' masterpiece. Surprising, beautifully written, it describes huge changes through intimate details, little-known stories and through the lens of Turgenev and the Viardots' touching, strange love triangle. Events which we now see as central to European high culture are made completely fresh, allowing the reader to revel in the sheer precariousness with which the great salons, premieres and bestsellers came into existence.

Systems theory emerged in the mid-20th century along with related theories such as Cybernetics and Information Theory. Recently it has included Complexity Theory, Chaos Theory and Social Systems Theory. Systems theory understands phenomena in terms of the systems of which they are part. This book is about a systems theoretical approach to thinking about art. It examines what it means to look to systems theory both for its implications for artistic practice and as a theory of art. This publication provides a sustained discussion on the application of systems theory to an account of art.

The importance of the late 18th century in the genesis of modern art emerges in these four essays on various aspects of the art and architecture of a neglected period.

Demonstrates how the textual output of settler emigration shapes the nineteenth-century literary and artistic imagination Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art is the first book to undertake a comprehensive survey of the literature produced by nineteenth-century settler emigration. Arguing that the demographic shift to settler colonies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand was supported and underpinned by a vast outpouring of text, this monograph brings printed emigrants' letters, manuscript shipboard newspapers and settler fiction into conversation with the works of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Catherine Helen Spence and Ford Madox Brown, amongst others. The monograph demonstrates how the textual cultures of settler emigration pervaded the nineteenth-century cultural imagination and provided authors and artists with a means of interrogating representations of space and place, home-making and colonial encounters. Key features First study to make the case for the literature arising from nineteenth-century settler emigration as the distinct genre of 'emigration literature' Interdisciplinary approach combining literary criticism, art history and cultural geography Studies canonical authors and artists (Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ford Madox Brown, James Collinson, Richard Redgrave, Abraham Solomon, and Thomas Webster) alongside ephemera, leading to an integrated and comprehensive study of settler culture

Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932 examines an understudied visual language used to portray Latin Americans in mid-19th to early 20th-century Parisian popular visual media. It charts how the term "Latinize" was introduced to connect France’s early 19th-century endeavors to create Latin America—an expansion of the French empire into the Latin-language speaking Spanish and Portuguese Americas—to its perception of the people who lived there. Elites who traveled to Paris from their newly independent nations in the 1840s were denigrated in visual media, rather than depicted as equals in a developing global economy. Darkened skin, brushed onto images of Latin Americans of European descent, mitigated their ability to claim the privileges of their ancestral heritage; whitened skin, among other codes, imposed on depictions of Black Latin Americans denied their Blackness and rendered them relatively assimilatable compared to colonial Africans, Black people from the Caribbean, and African Americans. In addition to identifying 19th-century Latinizing codes, this book focuses on shifts in latinizing visuality between 1890 and 1933 through three case studies: the depictions of popular Cuban circus entertainer Chocolat; representations of Panamanian World Bantamweight Champion boxer Alfonso Teofilo Brown; and paintings of Black Uruguayans created by Pedro Figari, a Uruguayan artist, during his residence in Paris between 1925 and 1933.

Aby Warburg in America: An Album When Aby Warburg left for the United States in September 1895, it was not foreseeable that his search for the symbolic foundations of art would become one of the most fascinating events in the history of his field. Warburg’s American journey lasted only months, and his stay in the Pueblo communities only a few weeks, but in 1923 he presented his findings in the groundbreaking lecture on the “Snake Ritual”. Using selected photographs, ethnologic drawings, and numerous documents, this story and picture book details a journey of discovery. It traverses a vast continent of research, showing Warburg’s diverse interlocutors — from chiefs to missionaries — and especially his records of dances, ritual objects, and artworks full of symbolic representations. The documents are evidence of the emerging shift in Warburg’s scholarly thinking, which would eventually lead to the cross-border cultural comparative methodology for which he is now held in worldwide esteem.

What is modern art? Why do we either love it or loathe it? And why is it worth so much damn money? Join Will Gompertz on a dazzling tour that will change the way you look at modern art forever. From Monet's water lilies to Van Gogh's sunflowers, from Warhol's soup cans to Hirst's pickled shark, hear the stories behind the masterpieces, meet the artists as they really were, and discover the real point of modern art. You will learn: not all conceptual art is bollocks; Picasso is king (but Cezanne is better); Pollock is no drip; Dali painted with his moustache; a urinal changed the course of art, why your five year-old really couldn't do it. Refreshing, irreverent and always straightforward, What Are You Looking At? asks all the basic questions that you were too afraid to ask. Your next gallery trip is going to be a little less intimidating and a lot more interesting.