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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1800 to 1900 > General

Louis C. Tiffany and the Art of Devotion (Hardcover, Tion): Patricia C. Pongracz Louis C. Tiffany and the Art of Devotion (Hardcover, Tion)
Patricia C. Pongracz
R825 Discovery Miles 8 250 Ships in 4 - 6 working days

'Louis C. Tiffany and the Art of Devotion' is the first volume to explore the vast assortment of church decorations and memorials produced by Louis C. Tiffany (1848-1933) and the Tiffany Studios. For over 50 years Tiffany oversaw the production and marketing of a multitude of decorative elements for numerous chapels, churches and synagogues, afforded by the late 19th century American boom in religious building. Although an important part of the ecclesiastical business consisted of the vibrantly coloured leaded-glass windows most famously associated with his name, Tiffany was interested in the bigger picture and employed designers, draftsmen, and craftspeople to produce a complete interior design, including mosaics, windows, floors,lighting, furniture, altarpieces, pulpits, candlesticks, headstones and mausolea, vestments and jewellery. This beautifully illustrated volume includes preliminary designs, cartoons, watercolour sketches and archival photographs designs and products, many never published before. In numerous cases these are the only surviving remnants of buildings which have long since been demolished.

Nebraska's Post Office Murals - Born of the Depression, Fostered by the New Deal (Hardcover): L. Robert Puschendorf Nebraska's Post Office Murals - Born of the Depression, Fostered by the New Deal (Hardcover)
L. Robert Puschendorf
R659 R589 Discovery Miles 5 890 Save R70 (11%) Ships in 18 - 22 working days
From El Greco to Goya - Painting in Spain 1561-1828 (Paperback): Janis A. Tomlinson From El Greco to Goya - Painting in Spain 1561-1828 (Paperback)
Janis A. Tomlinson
R325 Discovery Miles 3 250 Ships in 4 - 6 working days

This richly illustrated book covers 250 years of painting in Spain, opening with art created at the splendid16th-century court of Philip II, before turning to art and patronage in the cities of Toledo, Valencia and Seville. It then returns to Madrid to explore the work at the 17th-century Habsburg court, before introducing the transitions brought by the Bourbon monarchy. Janis Tomlinson traces the myriad influences reflected in the paintings of generations of artists from Sofonisba Anguissola, El Greco, Velazquez, and Zubaran to the unique accomplishment of Francisco Goya.

The Snake and the Lightning - Aby Warburg's American Journey (Hardcover): Uwe Fleckner The Snake and the Lightning - Aby Warburg's American Journey (Hardcover)
Uwe Fleckner
R934 Discovery Miles 9 340 Ships in 10 - 15 working days

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.

Gauguin's Intimate Journals (Paperback): Paul Gauguin Gauguin's Intimate Journals (Paperback)
Paul Gauguin
R346 R325 Discovery Miles 3 250 Save R21 (6%) Ships in 18 - 22 working days

Revealing documents, reprinted from rare, limited edition, throw much light on the painter's inner life, his tumultuous relationship with van Gogh, evaluations of Degas, Monet, and other artists; hatred of hypocrisy and sham, life in the Marquesas Islands, much more. Twenty-seven full-page illustrations by Gauguin. Preface by Emil Gauguin.

Sir John Gilbert - Art and Imagination in the Victorian Age (Hardcover, New Ed): Spike Bucklow, Sally Woodcock Sir John Gilbert - Art and Imagination in the Victorian Age (Hardcover, New Ed)
Spike Bucklow, Sally Woodcock; Contributions by Mark Bills, Nicola Bown, Spike Bucklow, …
R866 Discovery Miles 8 660 Ships in 4 - 6 working days

Perhaps the most prolific artist of the nineteenth century, Sir John Gilbert (1817-97) was President of the Royal Watercolour Society, a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy and illustrator for numerous illustrated papers, novels and children's books. Yet despite his impressive list of achievements, his name has become lost among figures such as Leighton, Watts, Millais and Burne-Jones who dominated the Victorian art world of which he was a part. Re-assessment of Gilbert's contribution to British art history reveals an artist who created powerful images - strong on narrative, romantic, illustrative and escapist - that have much to offer the viewer today. In addition, Gilbert is an interesting figure, both for what his story can tell us about Victorian taste and the vagaries of the art market, and because of his unusual practice of working contemporaneously in oils, watercolour and as an illustrator; blurring the boundaries between these media and using them interchangeably. Bringing together a selection of large-scale historical paintings, modest and rarely seen landscape watercolours, illustrated novels and children's books, newspaper illustrations and ephemera from both public and private sources, this groundbreaking publication explores both an unduly neglected figure and some important aspects of Victorian life. Offering first-class, original research, Sir John Gilbert is essential reading for all those with a particular interest in Victorian art, literature and society.

50 Modern Artists You Should Know (Paperback): Christiane Weidemann 50 Modern Artists You Should Know (Paperback)
Christiane Weidemann
R288 Discovery Miles 2 880 Ships in 4 - 6 working days

A century and a half of masterpieces is covered in this chronologically arranged volume that beautifully captures the development of art in a new age. Starting with James Abbott McNeill Whistler and ending with Matthew Barney, nearly every prominent figure in Modern art is represented in vibrant double-page spreads that show how these artists continued to redefine norms and challenge tradition. Fascinating biographical and anecdotal information about each artist is provided alongside large reproductions of their most celebrated works, stunning details, and images of the artists themselves. A color-coded timeline spans the entire volume, showing overlapping careers and important historical dates. From the impressionists to the surrealists, the cubists to the pop-artists-readers will find a wealth of information as well as hours of enjoyment learning about this popular and prolific period in art history.

Romantic Paris - Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800-1850 (Hardcover): Michael Marrinan Romantic Paris - Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800-1850 (Hardcover)
Michael Marrinan
R4,175 Discovery Miles 41 750 Ships in 18 - 22 working days

"Romantic Paris" is a richly illustrated survey of cultural life in Paris during some of the most tumultuous decades of the city's history. Between the coups d'etat of Napoleon Bonaparte and of his nephew, Louis-Napoleon, Paris weathered extremes of political and economic fortune. Once the shining capital of a pan-European empire, it was overrun by foreign armies. Projects for grand public works were delayed and derailed by plague, armed uprisings, and civil war.
At the same time, Paris was the theater of a revolution in the arts that challenged classical culture by depicting the vagaries of contemporary life and the thrill of unbridled experimentation. "Romantic Paris" produced Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People" and Courbet's "Burial at Ornans." It was both the setting and inspiration for Hugo's "Les Miserables" and "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame." Meyerbeer's "Robert le Diable" set new standards for operatic productions, and audiences thrilled to the virtuoso performances of Paganini and Liszt, Talma and Taglioni. Established patterns of living, eating, dressing, and sociability were retooled for new urban spaces, new modes of personal mobility, and new forms of public self-presentation.
The cultural legacy of Romantic Paris includes a museum that shelters fragments rescued from the rubble of the Revolution, as well as the display of masterpieces, open to one and all, that we visit today as the Louvre.. In addition, this period contributed an architectural legacy that now gives Paris its distinct and world-renowned reputation as a cultural and artistic center. In "Romantic Paris, " Michael Marrinan plots the zigzag trajectory of the monuments, spaces, and habits of a city that looks both to the past and the future with all the optimism, self-doubts, and creative energy of a culture poised at the threshold of modernity.

Child of the Fire - Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History's Black and Indian Subject (Paperback): Kirsten Buick Child of the Fire - Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History's Black and Indian Subject (Paperback)
Kirsten Buick
R694 R623 Discovery Miles 6 230 Save R71 (10%) Ships in 18 - 22 working days

"Child of the Fire" is the first book-length examination of the career of the nineteenth-century artist Mary Edmonia Lewis, best known for her sculptures inspired by historical and biblical themes. Throughout this richly illustrated study, Kirsten Pai Buick investigates how Lewis and her work were perceived, and their meanings manipulated, by others and the sculptor herself. She argues against the racialist art discourse that has long cast Lewis's sculptures as reflections of her identity as an African American and Native American woman who lived most of her life abroad. Instead, by seeking to reveal Lewis's intentions through analyses of her career and artwork, Buick illuminates Lewis's fraught but active participation in the creation of a distinct "American" national art, one dominated by themes of indigeneity, sentimentality, gender, and race. In so doing, she shows that the sculptor variously complicated and facilitated the dominant ideologies of the vanishing American (the notion that Native Americans were a dying race), sentimentality, and true womanhood.

Buick considers the institutions and people that supported Lewis's career--including Oberlin College, abolitionists in Boston, and American expatriates in Italy--and she explores how their agendas affected the way they perceived and described the artist. Analyzing four of Lewis's most popular sculptures, each created between 1866 and 1876, Buick discusses interpretations of Hiawatha in terms of the cultural impact of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem "The Song of Hiawatha"; "Forever Free "and" Hagar in the Wilderness" in light of art historians' assumptions that artworks created by African American artists necessarily reflect African American themes; and "The Death of Cleopatra" in relation to broader problems of reading art as a reflection of identity.

Corot to Monet - French Landscape Painting (Paperback): Sarah Herring Corot to Monet - French Landscape Painting (Paperback)
Sarah Herring; Technical editing by Antonio Mazzotta
R220 Discovery Miles 2 200 Ships in 4 - 6 working days

By the late 18th century, the practice of painting outdoors ("en plein air") was widespread, especially in Italy, where picturesque views of Tivoli and the Campagna were irresistible to French and British artists. Fifty years later in France, the Barbizon group--including Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Theodore Rousseau, and Charles-Francois Daubigny--eagerly escaped the studio to paint landscapes, rivers, and beach scenes of their native land. These painters were a crucial influence on a new generation of artists who would eventually become known as the Impressionists. In this delightful and accessible exploration of the National Gallery's collection of 18th- and 19th-century landscape paintings, Sarah Herring introduces and explains the enduring appeal of these charming small works of art, both to their original collectors and to the present-day viewer.

Romantic Paris - Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800–1850 (Paperback): Michael Marrinan Romantic Paris - Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800–1850 (Paperback)
Michael Marrinan
R1,040 R918 Discovery Miles 9 180 Save R122 (12%) Ships in 18 - 22 working days

"Romantic Paris" is a richly illustrated survey of cultural life in Paris during some of the most tumultuous decades of the city's history. Between the coups d'etat of Napoleon Bonaparte and of his nephew, Louis-Napoleon, Paris weathered extremes of political and economic fortune. Once the shining capital of a pan-European empire, it was overrun by foreign armies. Projects for grand public works were delayed and derailed by plague, armed uprisings, and civil war.
At the same time, Paris was the theater of a revolution in the arts that challenged classical culture by depicting the vagaries of contemporary life and the thrill of unbridled experimentation. "Romantic Paris" produced Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People" and Courbet's "Burial at Ornans." It was both the setting and inspiration for Hugo's "Les Miserables" and "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame." Meyerbeer's "Robert le Diable" set new standards for operatic productions, and audiences thrilled to the virtuoso performances of Paganini and Liszt, Talma and Taglioni. Established patterns of living, eating, dressing, and sociability were retooled for new urban spaces, new modes of personal mobility, and new forms of public self-presentation.
The cultural legacy of Romantic Paris includes a museum that shelters fragments rescued from the rubble of the Revolution, as well as the display of masterpieces, open to one and all, that we visit today as the Louvre.. In addition, this period contributed an architectural legacy that now gives Paris its distinct and world-renowned reputation as a cultural and artistic center. In "Romantic Paris, " Michael Marrinan plots the zigzag trajectory of the monuments, spaces, and habits of a city that looks both to the past and the future with all the optimism, self-doubts, and creative energy of a culture poised at the threshold of modernity.

Lewis Foreman Day (1845-1910): Unity in Design and Industry (Hardcover, New): Joan Maria Hansen Lewis Foreman Day (1845-1910): Unity in Design and Industry (Hardcover, New)
Joan Maria Hansen
R1,076 R880 Discovery Miles 8 800 Save R196 (18%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

Lewis Foreman Day (1845-1910) is one of the most neglected figures in late nineteenth-century design. In exploring Day's dual career as an industrial designer of extraordinary range and versatility and a major writer and critic, this well-illustrated book restores his place among the influential figures of his time. Day's relationships with colleagues William Morris, Walter Crane, W.A.S. Benson and others situated him in the vortex of developments of design in Britain. Design historian Joan Maria Hansen examines Day's work as a prolific industrial designer whose mastery of pattern, colour, ornament and superb draughtsmanship resulted in tiles and art pottery, clocks and furniture, wallpapers, textiles, stained glass, and interiors of remarkable diversity and beauty. Day embraced modern technology. His views on the role of the designer for industry, along with his unshakable belief that a marriage of design and industrial processes was essential to produce beautiful furnishings for the majority of p

Oriental Dreams (English, French, Hardcover): Mathias Ary-Jan, Claire Maingon Oriental Dreams (English, French, Hardcover)
Mathias Ary-Jan, Claire Maingon
R1,963 R1,600 Discovery Miles 16 000 Save R363 (18%) Ships in 10 - 15 working days

This beautifully illustrated book, with over 300 colour reproductions, showcases many of the greatest masterpieces of 19th century Orientalist art. During this period, colonization, and a revolution in means of transportation allowed artists to visit countries from North Africa to the Middle East that had previously been relatively inaccessible. The patterns, colours, and light of this region influenced artists such as Delacroix, Decamps, Berche re, Bridgman, Ziem, Ge ro me, Corrodi, Dinet, Matisse, Majorelle and many others. Upon returning to Europe, these artists captured the atmosphere of these distant and exotic lands in painted scenes of daily life and wrote memoirs of their travels. Some returned to settle there, including painters like Dinet, who spent a large part of his life in Algeria, and Majorelle, known as the "painter of Marrakech." This book offers insight into the Orientalist aesthetic that inspired the movement, and lays the groundwork for a deeper understanding of these vibrant works of art. Text in English and French.

The Moon as a Shoe - Drawings of the Sun (Hardcover): Miklos Szalay The Moon as a Shoe - Drawings of the Sun (Hardcover)
Miklos Szalay
R870 Discovery Miles 8 700 Ships in 4 - 6 working days

The San people have lived for thousands of years on the harsh plains of Kalahari in southern Africa and are the oldest indigenous people of the region. At the end of the nineteenth century, anthropologists Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd traveled to southern Africa to document the San's language and culture through their drawings. Now assembled for the first time in "The Moon as Shoe," the drawings of the San come together in a striking visual essay of San history and culture.
The diverse array of colorful watercolors and sketches were primarily created by six San men interviewed by Bleek and Lloyd. Augmenting the brilliant image reproductions are expert essays by distinguished contributors such as Elias Canetti and Megan Biesele. The volume also features additional contemporary works by Ivory Coast artist Frederic Bruly Bouabre and South African artist Keith Dietrich. A wholly original and compelling collection of indigenous art, "The Moon as Shoe "is essential for all collectors and scholars of African art.

Design in the USA (Paperback): Jeffrey L. Meikle Design in the USA (Paperback)
Jeffrey L. Meikle
R273 Discovery Miles 2 730 Ships in 4 - 6 working days

From the Cadillac to the Apple Mac, the skyscraper to the Tiffany lampshade, the world in which we live has been profoundly influenced for over a century by the work of American designers. But the product is only the end of a story that is full of fascinating questions. What has been the social and cultural role of design in American society? To produce useful things that consumers need? Or to persuade them to buy things that they don't need? Where does the designer stand in all this? And how has the role of design in America changed over time, since the early days of the young Republic? Jeffrey Meikle explores the social and cultural history of American design spanning over two centuries, from the hand-crafted furniture and objects of the early nineteenth century, through the era of industrialization and the mass production of the machine age, to the information-based society of the present, covering everything from the Arts and Crafts movement to Art Deco, modernism to post-modernism, MOMA to the Tupperware bowl.

Dore's Illustrations for the Fables of La Fontaine (Paperback, Dover ed): Gustav Dore Dore's Illustrations for the Fables of La Fontaine (Paperback, Dover ed)
Gustav Dore
R194 Discovery Miles 1 940 Ships in 4 - 6 working days

At the height of his powers, Dore produced these magnificent illustrations for La Fontaine's" Fables." This volume includes all 84 full-page plates plus a selection of 39 vignettes from a rare, early edition and depicts, among others, scenes from "The Wolf and the Lamb," "Tircis and Amarante," and "Ulysses' Companions."

Orientalism's Interlocutors - Painting, Architecture, Photography (Paperback): Jill Beaulieu, Mary Roberts Orientalism's Interlocutors - Painting, Architecture, Photography (Paperback)
Jill Beaulieu, Mary Roberts
R990 Discovery Miles 9 900 Ships in 18 - 22 working days

Until now, Orientalist art--exemplified by paintings of harems, slave markets, or bazaars--has predominantly been understood to reflect Western interpretations and to perpetuate reductive, often demeaning stereotypes of the exotic East. "Orientalism's Interlocutors" contests the idea that Orientalist art simply expresses the politics of Western domination and argues instead that it was often produced through cross-cultural interactions. Focusing on paintings and other representations of North African and Ottoman cultures, by both local artists and westerners, the contributors contend that the stylistic similarities between indigenous and Western Orientalist art mask profound interpretive differences, which, on examination, can reveal a visual language of resistance to colonization. The essays also demonstrate how marginalized voices and viewpoints--especially women's--within Western Orientalism decentered and destabilized colonial authority.

Looking at the political significance of cross-cultural encounters refracted through the visual languages of Orientalism, the contributors engage with pressing recent debates about indigenous agency, postcolonial identity, and gendered subjectivities. The very range of artists, styles, and forms discussed in this collection broadens contemporary understandings of Orientalist art. Among the artists considered are the Algerian painters Azouaou Mammeri and Mohammed Racim; Turkish painter Osman Hamdi; British landscape painter Barbara Bodichon; and the French painter Henri Regnault. From the liminal "Third Space" created by mosques in postcolonial Britain to the ways nineteenth-century harem women negotiated their portraits by British artists, the essays in this collection force a rethinking of the Orientalist canon.

This innovative volume will appeal to those interested in art history, theories of gender, and postcolonial studies.

"Contributors." Jill Beaulieu, Roger Benjamin, Zeynep celik, Deborah Cherry, Hollis Clayson, Mark Crinson, Mary Roberts

Victorian Alphabets, Monograms and Names for Needleworkers (Paperback): Godey's Lady's Book Victorian Alphabets, Monograms and Names for Needleworkers (Paperback)
Godey's Lady's Book
R303 Discovery Miles 3 030 Ships in 18 - 22 working days

Culled from two popular American women's magazines of the Victorian era, here are alphabets, initials, monograms, and common names in various letter forms-script, floral, geometric, Old English, block, ornamental, etc. No practicing needleworker can afford to be without it.

At Home in the Studio - The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Hardcover): Laura R. Prieto At Home in the Studio - The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Hardcover)
Laura R. Prieto
R2,508 Discovery Miles 25 080 Ships in 18 - 22 working days

This engaging cultural history examines the emergence of a professional identity for American women artists. By focusing on individual sculptors, painters, and illustrators, Laura Prieto gives us a compelling picture of the prospects and constraints faced by women artists in the United States from the late eighteenth century through the 1930s.

Prieto tracks the transformation from female artisans and ladies with genteel "artistic accomplishments" to middle-class professional artists. Domestic spaces and familial metaphors helped legitimate the production of art by women. Expression of sexuality and representation of the nude body, on the other hand, posed problems for these artists. Women artists at first worked within their separate sphere, but by the end of the nineteenth century "New Women" grew increasingly uncomfortable with separatism, wanting ungendered recognition. With the twentieth century came striking attempts to reconcile domestic lives and careers with new expectations; these decades also ruptured the women's earlier sense of community with amateur women artists in favor of specifically professional allegiances. This study of a diverse group of women artists--diverse in critical reception, geographic location, race, and social background--reveals a forgotten aspect of art history and women's history.

Victorian Needlework - Techniques and Designs (Paperback): Flora Klickman Victorian Needlework - Techniques and Designs (Paperback)
Flora Klickman
R261 R247 Discovery Miles 2 470 Save R14 (5%) Ships in 18 - 22 working days

Rare and authentic, this vintage guide to the intricacies of Victorian needlecraft features step-by-step instructions for mastering an array of techniques and patterns. Scores of diagrams and photos illustrate a rich and varied repertoire of needlework projects and related crafts. Aspiring or accomplished, needleworkers at every level of expertise will find many projects here to love, all abounding in old-fashioned charm. Featured projects include Bulgarian, Catalan, Hungarian, and Baro embroidery; a lesson in netting; hemstitching; making fringes; Berlin wool-work; Rhodes embroidery and punched work; Bohemian, Carrickmacross, Innishmacsaint; and reticella lace; and beads and beadwork. Approx. 87 b/w illustrations.

Bodies of Art - French Literary Realism and the Artist's Model (Hardcover): Marie Lathers Bodies of Art - French Literary Realism and the Artist's Model (Hardcover)
Marie Lathers
R1,660 Discovery Miles 16 600 Ships in 18 - 22 working days

To the time-honored myth of the artist creating works of genius in isolation, with nothing but inspiration to guide him, art historians have added the mitigating influences of critics, dealers, and the public. "Bodies of Art" completes the picture by adding the model. This lively look at atelier politics through the lens of literature focuses in particular on the female model, with special attention to her race, ethnicity, and class. The result is a suggestive account of the rise and fall of the female model in nineteenth-century realism, with a final emphasis on the passage of the model into photography at the turn of the century. This history of the model begins in nineteenth-century Paris, where the artist-model dynamic was regularly debated by writers and where the most important categories of models appear to be Jewish, Italian, and Parisian women. "Bodies of Art" traces an evolution in the representation of this model in realist and naturalist literary works from her "birth" in Balzac to her "death" in Maupassant, in the process revealing how she played a key role in theories of representation advanced by writers. Throughout the book, Marie Lathers connects the artist's work to the social realities and actual bodies that surround and inhabit the atelier. Her work shows how much the status of the model can tell us about artistic practices during the century of the birth of modernity.

Sickert, Walter (British Artists) (Paperback): David Peters Corbett Sickert, Walter (British Artists) (Paperback)
David Peters Corbett
R215 Discovery Miles 2 150 Ships in 4 - 6 working days
The Golden Avant-garde - Idolatry, Commercialism and Art (Hardcover): Raphael Sassower, Louis Cicotello The Golden Avant-garde - Idolatry, Commercialism and Art (Hardcover)
Raphael Sassower, Louis Cicotello
R1,890 Discovery Miles 18 900 Ships in 18 - 22 working days

Since the eighteenth century, artists--especially so-called avant-garde artists--have played a conflicting role in society. Part of the reason for their complex position, argue Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello, is the survival of the culture of idolatry in the modern age. In the twentieth century, artists can criticize the worship of material things or they can produce the things themselves. They can paint the scenes of worship of the golden calf--as the German expressionist Emil Nolde did in "Dance Around the Golden Calf" (1910), in which garish exaggerations reflect a condemnation of materialistic culture--or they can be the ones fabricating the idol for a fee.

Part radical critics, part celebrity servants of bourgeois tastes, avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Rene Magritte, Andy Warhol, the Christos, and Keith Haring have captured the twentieth-century imagination and inspired the artistic community to reconsider its social, political, and cultural roles. Charting the uneasy middle ground occupied by these artists and their work, Sassower and Cicotello argue that their success has as much to do with their complicity with capitalist forces as it does with their defiance of them. Indeed, the major theme of The Golden Avant-Garde is the inability of any cultural subgroup to withstand the overwhelming power of capitalism, commercialism, and science and technology.

While some artists are paid by governments and institutions to construct national and religious monuments that express and honor society's most valuable principles and goals, the same society has fabricated a romantic myth of artists as revolutionary heroes who defy the authorities and pay dearly for their passion and vision. The Golden Avant-Garde is a unique collaboration between a philosopher and an artist, who bring their different perspectives to bear on how the avant-garde navigates the cultural, financial, and technological challenges presented by this postmodern dilemma. Often, Sassower and Cicotello conclude, avant-garde artists have become adept at manipulating the same forces that they seek to exaggerate and articulate in their work.

The Golden Avant-garde - Idolatry, Commercialism and Art (Paperback): Raphael Sassower, Louis Cicotello The Golden Avant-garde - Idolatry, Commercialism and Art (Paperback)
Raphael Sassower, Louis Cicotello
R1,245 Discovery Miles 12 450 Ships in 18 - 22 working days

Since the eighteenth century, artists--especially so-called avant-garde artists--have played a conflicting role in society. Part of the reason for their complex position, argue Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello, is the survival of the culture of idolatry in the modern age. In the twentieth century, artists can criticize the worship of material things or they can produce the things themselves. They can paint the scenes of worship of the golden calf--as the German expressionist Emil Nolde did in "Dance Around the Golden Calf" (1910), in which garish exaggerations reflect a condemnation of materialistic culture--or they can be the ones fabricating the idol for a fee.

Part radical critics, part celebrity servants of bourgeois tastes, avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Rene Magritte, Andy Warhol, the Christos, and Keith Haring have captured the twentieth-century imagination and inspired the artistic community to reconsider its social, political, and cultural roles. Charting the uneasy middle ground occupied by these artists and their work, Sassower and Cicotello argue that their success has as much to do with their complicity with capitalist forces as it does with their defiance of them. Indeed, the major theme of The Golden Avant-Garde is the inability of any cultural subgroup to withstand the overwhelming power of capitalism, commercialism, and science and technology.

While some artists are paid by governments and institutions to construct national and religious monuments that express and honor society's most valuable principles and goals, the same society has fabricated a romantic myth of artists as revolutionary heroes who defy the authorities and pay dearly for their passion and vision. The Golden Avant-Garde is a unique collaboration between a philosopher and an artist, who bring their different perspectives to bear on how the avant-garde navigates the cultural, financial, and technological challenges presented by this postmodern dilemma. Often, Sassower and Cicotello conclude, avant-garde artists have become adept at manipulating the same forces that they seek to exaggerate and articulate in their work.

A Clearing in the Distance - Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century (Hardcover): Witold Rybczynski A Clearing in the Distance - Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century (Hardcover)
Witold Rybczynski
R1,428 R1,350 Discovery Miles 13 500 Save R78 (5%) Ships in 18 - 22 working days

In a brilliant collaboration between writer and subject, the bestselling author of Home and City Life illuminates Frederick Law Olmsted's role as a major cultural figure and a man at the epicenter of nineteenth-century American history.

We know Olmsted through the physical legacy of his stunning landscapes -- among them, New York's Central Park, California's Stanford University campus, Boston's Back Bay Fens, Illinois's Riverside community, Asheville's Biltmore Estate, and Louisville's park system. He was a landscape architect before that profession was founded, designed the first large suburban community in the United States, foresaw the need for national parks, and devised one of the country's first regional plans.

Olmsted's contemporaries knew a man of even more extraordinarily diverse talents. Born in 1822, he traveled to China on a merchant ship at the age of twenty-one. He cofounded The Nation magazine and was an early voice against slavery. He wrote books about the South and about his exploration of the Texas frontier. He managed California's largest gold mine and, during the Civil War, served as general secretary to the United States Sanitary Commission, the precursor of the Red Cross.

Olmsted was both ruthlessly pragmatic and a visionary. To create Central Park, he managed thousands of employees who moved millions of cubic yards of stone and earth and planted over 300,000 trees and shrubs. In laying it out, "we determined to think of no results to be realized in less than forty years," he told his son, Rick. "I have all my life been considering distant effects and always sacrificing immediate success and applause to that of the future." To this day, Olmsted's ideas about people, nature, and society are expressed across the nation -- above all, in his parks, so essential to the civilized life of our cities.

Rybczynski's passion for his subject and his understanding of Olmsted's immense complexity and accomplishments make this book a triumphant work. In A Clearing in the Distance, the story of a great nineteenth-century American becomes an intellectual adventure.

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