The Neolithic saw the spread of the first farmers, and the formation of settled villages throughout Europe. Traditional archaeology has interpreted these changes in terms of population growth, economic pressures and social competition, but in The Domestication of Europe Ian Hodder works from a new, controversial theory focusing instead on the enormous expansion of symbolic evidence from the homes, settlements and burials of the period. Why do the figurines, decorated pottery, elaborate houses and burial rituals appear and what is their significance? The author argues that the symbolism of the Neolithic must be interpreted if we are to understand adequately the associated social and economic changes. He suggests that both in Europe and the Near East a particular set of concepts was central to the origins of farming and a settled mode of life. These concepts relate to the house and home - termed `domus' - and they provided a metaphor and a mechanism for social and economic transformation. As the wild was brought in and domesticated through ideas and practices surrounding the domus, people were brought in and settled into the social and economic group of the village. Over the following millennia cultural practices relating to the domus continued to change and develop, until finally overtaken by a new set of concepts which became socially central, based on the warrior, the hunter and the wild. This book is an exercise in interpretive prehistory. Ian Hodder shows how a contextual reading of the evidence can allow symbolic structures to be cautiously but plausibly identified, and sets out his arguments for complex dialectical relationships between long-term symbolic structures and economic causes of cultural change.

Rodin & Dance: The Essence of Movement is the first serious study of Rodin's late sculptural series known as the Dance Movements. Exploring the artist's fascination with dance and bodies in extreme acrobatic poses, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue give an account of Rodin's passion for new forms of dance - from south-asian dances to the music hall and the avant garde - which began appearing on the French stage around 1900. Rodin made hundreds of drawings and watercolours of dancers. From about 1911 he also gave sculptural expression to this fascination with dancers' bodies and movements in creating the Dance Movements, a series of small clay figure studies (each approx. 30 cm in height) that stretch and twist in unsettling ways. These leaping, turning figures in terracotta and plaster were found in the artist's studio after his death and were not exhibited during Rodin's lifetime or known beyond his close circle. Presented alongside the associated drawings and photographs of some of the dancers, they show a new side to Rodin's art, in which he pushed the boundaries of sculpture, expressing themes of flight and gravity. This exhibition catalogue aims to become the authoritative reference for Rodin's Dance Movements, comprising essays from leading scholars in the field of sculpture. It includes an introductory essay on the history of the bronze casting of the Dance Movements and the critical fortune of the series, an essay on the dancers Rodin admired, and an extensive technical essay. The Catalogue will comprise detailed entries on the works in the exhibition and new technical information on the drawings. Contributors include Alexandra Gerstein, Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Courtauld Institute of Art; Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Director, Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art, Paris; Juliet Bellow, Associate Professor of Art History, American University in Washington, DC and currently Resident Fellow, the Center for Ballet and the Arts, New York University; Francois Blanchetiere, Curator of Sculpture at the Musee Rodin; Agnes Cascio and Juliette Levy, distinguished sculpture conservators; Sophie Biass-Fabiani, Curator of Works on Paper at the Musee Rodin; and Kate Edmonson, Conservator of Works on Paper at The Courtauld Gallery.

On Weight and the Will: The Forces of Form in German Literature and Aesthetics, 1890-1930 charts a modern history of form as emergent from force. Offering a provocative alternative to the imagery of crisis and estrangement that has preoccupied scholarship on modernism, Malika Maskarinec shows that German modernism conceives of human bodies and aesthetic objects as shaped by a contest of conflicting and reciprocally-intensifying forces: the force of gravity and a self-determining will to form. Maskarinec thereby discloses, for the first time, German modernism's sustained preoccupation with classical mechanics and with how human bodies and artworks resist gravity. Considering canonical artists such as Rodin and Klee, seminal authors such as Kafka and Doeblin, and largely neglected thinkers in aesthetics and art history such as those associated with Empathy Aesthetics, Maskarinec unpacks the manifold anthropological and aesthetic concerns and historical lineage embedded in the idea of form as the precarious achievement of uprightness. On Weight and the Will makes a decisive contribution to our understanding of modernism and to contemporary discussions about form, empathy, materiality, and human embodiment.

Prophet, poet, painter and engraver -- Blake's uniqueness lies in no single achievement, but in the whole of what he was, which is more than the sum of all that he did. So writes Kathleen Raine in this classic study of William Blake, a man for whom the arts were not an end in themselves, but expressed his vision of the spiritual drama of the English national being. Profusely illustrated, this volume presents a comprehensive view of Blake's artistic achievements and a compelling and moving portrait of the life and thought of an extraordinary genius.

The charming painter of Endymion's Sleep, Atala's Funeral and Chateaubriand's Portrait was also a poet. Thanks to his classical education, Girodet (1767-1824) was the author of free translations of ancient Greek and Latin poets. In 1808 he tried the to imitate and at the same time illustrate the Odes of Anacreon, whose edition was published posthumously. The Musee du Louvre holds the precious manuscript of this intense and complex work, in which the poetic research and graphic invention - compositions or vignettes - intertwine with the text. Only a facsimile could restore this organic whole in its integrity. This book reconstructs the history of the manuscript, the various stages of the project and the posthumous versions, and analyses the artist's aesthetic sources. Girodet's handwriting is sometimes difficult to decode, but the complete transcription allows the reader to appreciate all the refinements and to rediscover the charm of Anacreontic poetry. Text in French.

Art critic Martin Gayford, author of The Yellow House, brings the Regency period to life in Constable in Love: Love, Landscape and the Making of a Great Painter his account of the life of English Romantic painter John Constable. Love, not landscape, was the making of Constable. . . John Constable and Maria Bicknell might have been in love but their marriage was a most unlikely prospect. Constable was a penniless painter who would not sacrifice his art for anything, while Maria's family frowned on such a penurious union. For seven long years the couple were forced to correspond and meet clandestinely. But it was during this period of longing that Constable developed as a painter. And by the time they'd overcome all obstacles to their marriage, he was on the verge of being recognised as a genius. Martin Gayford brings alive the time of Jane Austen in telling the tremendous story of Constable's formative years, as well as this love affair's tragic conclusion which haunted the artist's final paintings. 'Delightful...a small drama of love, frustration and despair played itself out with massive repercussions for the history of painting' Financial Times 'Gayford's nuanced narrative throws much-needed fresh light, as well as real understanding, on both Constable's painting and his love life' Sunday Telegraph 'A scrupulously observed tragical-comical tale' Evening Standard Martin Gayford is a celebrated art critic and journalist who has written for the Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph and is the current Chief European Art Critic for Bloomberg. In his other book The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles Gayford depicts the period in which artistic geniuses van Gogh and Gauguin shared a house in the small French town of Arles.

Anton Romako's painting of 'Admiral Tegetthoff in the Naval Battle of Lissa' is now celebrated as a visionary work, and is part of the canon of European art of the 19th century. This richly illustrated book traces the history of the picture and places it in the historical, military, and artistic context of its age.

Informed by the analytical practices of the interdisciplinary 'material turn' and social historical studies of childhood, Childhood By Design: Toys and the Material Culture of Childhood offers new approaches to the material world of childhood and design culture for children. This volume situates toys and design culture for children within broader narratives on history, art, design and the decorative arts, where toy design has traditionally been viewed as an aberration from more serious pursuits. The essays included treat toys not merely as unproblematic reflections of socio-cultural constructions of childhood but consider how design culture actively shaped, commodified and materialized shifting discursive constellations surrounding childhood and children. Focusing on the new array of material objects designed in response to the modern 'invention' of childhood-what we might refer to as objects for a childhood by design-Childhood by Design explores dynamic tensions between theory and practice, discursive constructions and lived experience as embodied in the material culture of childhood. Contributions from and between a variety of disciplinary perspectives (including history, art history, material cultural studies, decorative arts, design history, and childhood studies) are represented - critically linking historical discourses of childhood with close study of material objects and design culture. Chronologically, the volume spans the 18th century, which witnessed the invention of the toy as an educational plaything and a proliferation of new material artifacts designed expressly for children's use; through the 19th-century expansion of factory-based methods of toy production facilitating accuracy in miniaturization and a new vocabulary of design objects coinciding with the recognition of childhood innocence and physical separation within the household; towards the intersection of early 20th-century child-centered pedagogy and modernist approaches to nursery and furniture design; through the changing consumption and sales practices of the postwar period marketing directly to children through television, film and other digital media; and into the present, where the line between the material culture of childhood and adulthood is increasingly blurred.

Could the self-interested pursuit of beauty actually help to establish the moral and political norms that enable democratic society to flourish? In this book, Lucy Hartley identifies a new language for speaking about beauty, which begins to be articulated from the 1830s in a climate of political reform and becomes linked to emerging ideals of equality, liberty, and individuality. Examining British art and art writing by Charles Lock Eastlake, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Edward Poynter, William Morris, and John Addington Symonds, Hartley traces a debate about what it means to be interested in beauty and whether this preoccupation is necessary to public political life. Drawing together political history, art history, and theories of society, and supplemented by numerous illustrations, Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain offers a fresh interdisciplinary understanding of the relation of art to its publics.

Kathleen McCarthy here presents the first book-length treatment of the vital role middle- and upper-class women played in the development of American museums in the century after 1830. By promoting undervalued areas of artistic endeavor, from folk art to the avant-garde, such prominent individuals as Isabella Stewart Gardner, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller were able to launch national feminist reform movements, forge extensive nonprofit marketing systems, and "feminize" new occupations.

Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) was one of the leading British landscape painters of the 19th century. Inspired by his mentor, the artist and poet William Blake, Palmer brought a new spiritual intensity to his interpretation of nature, producing works of unprecedented boldness and fervency. Pre-eminent scholar William Vaughan-who organized the Palmer retrospective at the British Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005-draws on unpublished diaries and letters, offering a fresh interpretation of one of the most attractive and sympathetic, yet idiosyncratic, figures of the 19th century. Far from being a recluse, as he is often presented, Palmer was actively engaged in Victorian cultural life and sought to exert a moral power through his artwork. Beautifully illustrated with Palmer's visionary and enchanted landscapes, the book contains rich studies of his work, influences, and resources. Vaughan also shows how later, enthralled by the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Palmer manipulated his own artistic image to harmonize with it. Little appreciated in his lifetime, Palmer is now hailed as a precursor of modernism in the 20th century. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's triptychs and portrait series of the 1860s were predominatly musha-e ("warrior prints"), often with added mythological elements, and invariably drawn from Japanese military history, mostly from the 12th to 16th centuries. Yoshitoshi's major musha-e series, in terms of both its scope and its dynamic visual experimentation, remains Kaidai hyaku senso, or 100 Dogs Of War. Yoshitoshi was reputedly driven to create this series in 1868 after witnessing first-hand the bloody Battle of Ueno, a decisive clash of the civil war in Japan. Although inspired by recent events, the series again depicted warriors from Japanese history, showing some clasping bloody severed heads as trophies of war, others with their own viscera spilling out from the "belly cut" of seppuku (ritual suicide), others in the heat of battle firing guns, hurling spears, wielding swords or dodging bullets. Every aspect of war is represented. There are 65 known completed prints from the series, and several surviving drawings and sketches for designs which apparently never reached fruition; failure to complete the set is attributed both to censorship and to the nervous breakdown which Yoshitoshi reportedly experienced in 1869, an event which resulted in his virtual disappearance from the ukiyo-e scene for the following two years. This Ukiyo-e Master Special edition of Yoshitoshi's 100 Dogs Of War contains not only Yoshitoshi's full set of 65 completed battle prints, reproduced in full-size and full-colour, but also several fascinating preparatory drawings for unfinished designs. The collection also features an extensive illustrated introduction on Yoshitoshi's warrior prints from 1853 to 1889, bringing the total number of colour reproductions in the book to over 90. Ukiyo-e Master Specials: presenting individual art series by the greatest print-designers and painters of Edo-period and Meiji-period Japan.

A theory of art may be many things, from a complex philosophical treatise to a few basic observations jotted down by an artist that illumine the direction of his work. The late eighteenth-and nineteenth-century writings gathered here were selected not because they completely formulate systems governing art, but because they were closely allied with artists responded, and some were composed by critics or historians who were in close touch with the artists and sought to explain their artistic goals.

Expone la contribucion de Jorge Manach (1898-1961) a la teoria del arte cubano, mediante el examen de Historia y estilo (1944), contentivo de cuatro textos: ""La Nacion y la formacion historica"", ""Esquema historico del pensamiento cubano"", ""El estilo de la revolucion"" y ""El estilo en Cuba y su sentido historico"". Se emplean conceptos de analisis como Electivismo, Larga Duracion y Teoria de la circunstancialidad historica del estilo, en virtud de precisar el metodo empleado por Manach, la concepcion historiografica que respalda su propuesta y el empleo del ensayo como soporte textual. Se enuncia la logica de la sistematizacion teorica realizada, para propiciar niveles de actualizacion en torno al volumen y se legitima el aporte de Jorge Manach a la teoria del arte a partir de la enunciacion de su teoria de la circunstancialidad historica del estilo. Presenta Introduccion, capitulos I y II, Epilogo y Bibliografia.

In this beautifully illustrated overview, Renee Worringer provides a clear and comprehensive account of the longevity, pragmatism, and flexibility of the Ottoman Empire in governing over vast territories and diverse peoples. A Short History of the Ottoman Empire uses clear headings, themes, text boxes, primary source translations, and maps to assist students in understanding the Empire's complex history.

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.

James Tissot is best known for his paintings of fashionable women and society life in the late 19th century. Born in Nantes, France, he trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he befriended James McNeill Whistler and Edgar Degas. Tissot's career defies categorization and he never formally belonged to the Impressionist circle despite an invitation from Degas. An astute businessman, Tissot garnered commercial and critical success on both sides of the English Channel while defying traditional conventions. He received recognition at the time from patrons and peers, and even his society portraits reveal a rich and complex commentary on Victorian and fin-de-siecle culture. This lavishly illustrated book, featuring paintings, enamels, and works on paper, explores Tissot's life and career from his early period in Nantes to his later years when he made hundreds of spiritual and religious works. The volume also includes essays that introduce new scholarship to redefine Tissot's placement within the narratives of the 19th-century canon.

Best known today as the illustrator of Lewis Carroll's Alice books, John Tenniel was one of the Victorian era's chief political cartoonists. This extensively illustrated book is the first to draw almost exclusively on primary sources in family collections, public archives, and other depositories. Frankie Morris examines Tenniel's life and work, producing a book that is not only a definitive resource for scholars and collectors but one that can be easily enjoyed by everyone interested in Victorian life and art, social history, journalism and political cartoons, and illustrated books. In the first part of the book, Morris looks at Tenniel the man. From his sunny childhood and early enthusiasm for sports, theatre, and medievalism to his flirtation with high art and his fifty years with the London journal Punch, Tenniel is shown to have been the sociable and urbane humorist revealed in his drawings. Tenniel's countrymen thought his work would embody for future historians the 'trend and character' of Victorian thought and life. Morris assesses to what extent that prediction has been fulfilled. The biography is followed by three sections on Tenniel's work, consisting of thirteen independent essays in which the author examines Tenniel's methods and his earlier book illustrations, the Alice pictures, and the Punch cartoons. For lovers of Alice, Morris offers six chapters on Tenniel's work for Carroll. These reveal demonstrable links with Christmas pantomimes, Punch and Judy shows, nursery toys, magic lanterns, nineteenth-century grotesques, Gothic revivalism, and social caricatures. Morris also demonstrates how Tenniel's cartoons depicted the key political questions of his day, from the Eastern Question to Lincoln and the American Civil War, examining their assumptions, devices, and evolving strategies. The definitive study of both the man and the work, Artist of Wonderland gives an unprecedented view of the cartoonist who mythologized the world for generations of Britons.

Mary Crovatt Hambidge (1885-1973) was an aspiring actress and a professional whistler on Broadway when she met Canadian-born Jay Hambidge (1867-1924), an artist, illustrator, and scholar. Their relationship would prove to be both a romantic and an artistic partnership. Jay Hambidge formulated his own artistic concept, known as Dynamic Symmetry, which stipulated that the compositional rules found in nature's symmetry should be applied to the creation of art. Mary Hambidge pioneered new techniques of weaving and dyeing fabric that merged Greek methods with Appalachian weaving and spinning traditions. The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, formed during the mid-1930s, provides an artists' community situated on six hundred rural acres in the north Georgia mountains where hundreds of visual artists, writers, potters, composers, dancers, and other artists have pursued their crafts. Dynamic Design details Jay Hambidge and Mary Crovatt Hambidge's cross-cultural and cross-historical explorations and examines their lasting contributions to twentieth-century art and cultural history. Virginia Gardner Troy illustrates how Jay and Mary were important independently and collectively, providing a wider understanding of their lives within the larger context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art and design. They were from two different worlds, nearly a generation apart in age, and only together for ten years, but their lives intertwined at a pivotal moment in their development. They shared parallel goals to establish a place where they could integrate the arts and crafts around the principles of Dynamic Symmetry. Troy explores how this dynamic duo's ideas and artistic expressions have resonated with admirers throughout the decades and reflect the trends and complexities of American culture through various waves of cosmopolitanism, utopianism, nationalism, and isolationism. The Hambidges' prolific partnership and forward-thinking vision continue to aid and inspire generations of aspiring artists and artisans.

Artist in Exile is the first in-depth, illustrated exploration of the life and work of Anne Marguerite Josephine Henriette Rouille de Marigny, Baroness Hyde de Neuville (1771-1849), who arrived in America in 1807 as a refugee from Napoleonic France and embarked on an extraordinary journey of discovery. Her unparalleled, beguiling, watercolors and drawings--over 200, made while traveling through seven countries and on the high seas, published here together with previously unpublished documents and letters--provide an invaluable historical visual record of the early years of the American Republic and its racially diverse population. From this exciting material Henriette emerges as a cosmopolitan artist who exerted her influence in political and social circles on both sides of the Atlantic, courageously traversing the European continent, unescorted, to beg Napoleon to spare her husband's life.Neuville's status as a woman, and an outsider, made her a particularly keen and sympathetic observer of individuals from a range of socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. She drew the earliest ethnographically correct images of indigenous Americans, together with vistas predating the works of other traveler-artists, and long-vanished buildings. Although she arrived in America as an outcast, by the end of her second residency, as the celebrated wife of the French Minister Plenipotentiary, she was interacting with political leaders and making her mark on society in Washington, DC and New York City. Artist in Exile tells her compelling story.

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.

In 1921/22 Edouard Vuillard created a cycle of six paintings for the entrance hall of the Villa Bauer in Basel. Four large-format pictures show exhibition rooms in the Louvre from Antiquity to French Rococo painting. Two overdoors provide an intimate insight into the artist's art collection. The cycle of paintings is of outstanding quality as regards both content and form, but it to date has seldom been examined and exhibited. It was created immediately after the end of the First World War and the re-opening of the Louvre. Vuillard's Louvre pictures are a humanist manifesto for the social importance and responsibility of museums as places that preserve the evidence of human creativity for future generations.

Bringing together fourteen original essays, this collection opens up new perspectives on the architectural history of the nineteenth century by examining the buildings of the period through the lens of 'experience'. With a focus on the experience of the ordinary building user - rather than simply on the intentions of the designer - the book shows that new and important insights can be brought to our understanding of Victorian architecture. The chapters present a range of ideas and new research - some examining individual building case studies (from grand hotels and clubhouses in New York to the parliament buildings of Westminster), and others exploring conceptual questions about the nature of architectural experience, whether sensory or otherwise. Yet they share the premise that the idea of the 'experience of architecture' took on a new and particular significance with the rise of industrial modernity, and they examine what contemporary people - both architects and non-architects - understood by this idea. The insights in this volume extend beyond the study of Victorian architecture. Together they suggest how 'experience' might be used as a framework to produce a more convincingly historical account of the artefacts of architectural history.