This book follows the life of Ivan Agueli, the artist, anarchist, and esotericist, notable as one of the earliest Western intellectuals to convert to Islam and to explore Sufism. This book explores different aspects of his life and activities, revealing each facet of Agueli's complex personality in its own right. It then shows how esotericism, art, and anarchism finally found their fulfillment in Sufi Islam. The authors analyze how Agueli's life and conversion show that Islam occupied a more central place in modern European intellectual history than is generally realized. His life reflects several major modern intellectual, political, and cultural trends. This book is an important contribution to understanding how he came to Islam, the values and influences that informed his life, and-ultimately-the role he played in the modern Western reception of Islam.

From the walls of the Salon to the pages of weekly newspapers, war imagery was immensely popular in postrevolutionary France. This fascinating book studies representations of contemporary conflict in the first half of the 19th century and explores how these pictures provided citizens with an imaginative stake in wars being waged in their name. As she traces the evolution of images of war from a visual form that had previously been intended for mostly elite audiences to one that was enjoyed by a much broader public over the course of the 19th century, Katie Hornstein carefully considers the influence of emergent technologies and popular media, such as lithography, photography, and panoramas, on both artistic style and public taste. With close readings and handsome reproductions in various media, from monumental battle paintings to popular prints, Picturing War in France,1792-1856 draws on contemporary art criticism, war reporting, and the burgeoning illustrated press to reveal the crucial role such images played in shaping modern understandings of conflict.

With his distinctive paintings of landscapes, figures and still lifes, Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) profoundly influenced the Cubists and the direction of twentieth-century art in general. In this lively account of the artist's life and work, Mary Tompkins Lewis traces Cezanne's career from his early years in Aix-en-Provence, struggling to become a painter in the face of opposition from his father, through his time in Paris studying the Old Masters and working with the Impressionists, to his later, reclusive years back in Provence, when he produced the pictures that made him the precursor of a new art. However important Cezanne's work was for later generations, Lewis argues that his legacy can be fully understood only in the context of both the social and historical circumstances of late nineteenth-century France, and the regional aspirations and tensions of Provence. This is the first study of Cezanne to bring biographical, formal and larger contextual approaches to bear on the artist's full career. In doing so, Lewis has shed new light on Cezanne as an artist of his own time and place.

This multifaceted book reviews the vast range of types of printmaking that flourished in France during the 19th century. Studies of this period's printmaking tend to be confined to histories of individual processes, such as lithography or steel engraving. This study surveys the field as a whole and discusses the relationships between the various media in the context of an overall visual economy. Lithography, etching, and engraving are all examined through new research on noteworthy artists of the period, including Hyacinthe Aubry-Lecomte, Leopold Flameng, Ferdinand Gaillard, Aime de Lemud, Nadar, and Charles Waltner. Rather than simply tracing the rise of Modernism in the 19th century, Distinguished Images reconstitutes the period's cultural milieu through a series of case studies written with an eye to overarching forces at play. The result is the most original analysis of printmaking to appear in many years - a striking new account of a system in which printmaking, printmakers, and art critics played heretofore unrecognized or misunderstood roles.

An examination of the treatment of common land in the work of English painters, at a time when much of it was to disappear forever. A most elegantly written book that calmly knocked many entrenched but erroneous notions about British landscape painting firmly on the head. Longlisted and commended by the judges of the 2013 William M. B. Berger prize forBritish art history. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much of England's common land was eradicated by the processes of parliamentary enclosure. However, despite the fact that the landscape was frequentlyviewed as unproductive, outmoded and unsightly, many British landscape painters of the time - including Constable, Gainsborough and Turner - resolutely continued to depict it. This book is the first full study of how they did so, using evidence drawn not only from art-historical picture analysis, but from contemporary poems and novels, and the contemporary pamphlets, essays and reports that advanced the rhetoric of both agricultural improvement and new theories on landscape aesthetics. It highlights a deep-rooted social and cultural attachment to the common field landscape, and demonstrates that common land played a significant but - until now - underestimated role in both the history of English art and of the formation of an English national identity, reflecting what are still highly sensitive issues of progress, nostalgia and loss within the English countryside. Recasting common land as a recurrentfacet of English culture in the modern period, the numerous paintings, drawings and prints featured in this book give the reader a comprehensive and evocative sense of what this now almost wholly lost landscape looked like in itshey-day. Ian Waites is Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Design at the University of Lincoln.

Doceuments work of the most important names associated with 19th century cameo glass.

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.

After years of neglect, the variety, technical quality and imaginative content of Gilbert Bayes's work is receiving the appreciation it deserves. This is the first full study and catalogue raisonne of this 2Oth-century figurativist.

The career of Bayes spanned the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, Art Deco and Modernism. While figures were his specialty, Bayes also designed presentation cups, caskets, mirrors, stained glass and more. His best known works are the large scale low relief panels designed for architectural settings, some of which include the Saville Theatre and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904) was an undisputed professional success during his lifetime. Crowds flocked to see his vividly rendered historical and Orientalist compositions, and thanks to the mass marketing of his work through mechanical reproduction, he reached audiences on an unprecedented scale.From the outset, however, his success met with critical hostility. emile Zola, champion of edouard Manet, dismissed Gerome as a cynical manufacturer of anecdotal images for popular consumption--a critique repeatedly echoed by historians of modern art. In light of revisionist and postmodern trends over the past four decades, however, Gerome's work is now being approached with unprecedented seriousness and refreshing creativity. The ten essays in this volume go far in challenging critical biases against the artist and suggesting new avenues of research. These papers indeed suggest that we are just beginning to learn how to "read" Gerome's paintings in their full complexity.

An invaluable guide through the intricacies of the first century of modern art, ArtSpoke features the same lucid prose, thought-provoking ideas, user-friendly organization, and striking design as its predecessor, ArtSpeak: A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords. Chronicling international art from Realism through Surrealism, ArtSpoke explains such popular but often misunderstood movements and organizations as Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, the Salon, the Fauves, the Harlem Renaissance, and so on-as well as events ranging from the 1913 Armory Show to Brazil's little-known Semana de Arte Moderna. Concise explanations of potentially perplexing techniques, media, and philosophies of art making-including automatism, calotype, found object, Pictorialism, and Readymade-provide information essential to understanding how artists of this era worked and why the results look the way they do. Entries on concepts that were crucial to the development of modern art-such as androgyny, dandyism, femme fatale, spiritualism, and many others-distinguish this lively guide from any other art dictionary on the market. Also unique to this volume is the ArtChart, a handy one-page chronological diagram of the groups discussed in the book. In addition, there is a scene-setting timeline of world history and art history from 1848 to 1944, overflowing with invaluable information and illustrated with twenty-four color reproductions. Students, specialists, and casual art lovers will all find ArtSpoke an essential addition to their reference shelves and a welcome companion on visits to museums and galleries.

"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.

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.

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) is heralded as the greatest painter of the Romantic movement in Germany, and Europe's first truly modern artist. His mysterious and melancholy landscapes, often peopled with lonely wanderers, are experiments in a radically subjective artistic perspective--one in which, as Freidrich wrote, the painter depicts not "what he sees before him, but what he sees within him." This vulnerability of the individual when confronted with nature became one of the key tenets of the Romantic aesthetic. Now available in a compact, accessible format, this beautifully illustrated book is the most comprehensive account ever published in English of one of the most fascinating and influential nineteenth-century painters. "This is a model of interpretative art history, taking in a good deal of German Romantic philosophy, but founded always on the immediate experience of the picture. . . . It is rare to find a scholar so obviously in sympathy with his subject."--"Independent"

This book traces the origins and growth of modern art, assessing the intrinsic qualities of individual works and describing the social forces in play. It covers various areas including works of Impressionism, Cubism, Constructivism and Surrealism.

"Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970" is the first comprehensive study of the lives and artistic production of artists of Asian ancestry active in the United States before 1970. The publication features original essays by ten leading scholars, biographies of more than 150 artists, and over 400 reproductions of artwork, ephemera, and images of the artists.
Aside from a few artists such as Dong Kingman, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Isamu Noguchi, and Yun Gee, artists of Asian ancestry have received inadequate historical attention, even though many of them received wide critical acclaim during their productive years. This pioneering work recovers the extraordinarily impressive artistic production of numerous Asian Americans, and offers richly informed interpretations of a long-neglected art history. To unravel the complexity of Asian American art expression and its vital place in American art, the texts consider aesthetics, the social structures of art production and criticism, and national and international historical contexts.
Without a doubt, "Asian American Art" will profoundly influence our understanding of the history of art in America and the Asian American experience for years to come.

The new scholarly series, "Van Gogh Studies" offers an international platform for research into nineteenth century, West European art history. The contributions focus on Vincent van Gogh and his contemporaries and are written by internationally acclaimed scholars and provide a richly variegated impression of this area of study. The first issue reveals the diversity of the Eminence grise series. Robert Herbert presents a major study about decorative arts; the nineteenth century French art market and the Salon system is the centrepiece of Robert Jensen and David Galenson's contribution, while Elise Eckermann, June Hargrove and Caroline Boyle-Turner provide remarkable monographs about Gauguin as a painter and sculptor. Joan Greer elucidates in great detail on the publication of Van Gogh's letters in the Flemish journal "Van Nu en Straks" ("Today and Tomorrow") in 1893, while Louis van Tilborgh researches and dates Van Gogh's stay in French painter Fernand Cormon's studio.

Struggling to create an identity distinct from the European tradition but lacking an established system of support, early painting in America received little cultural acceptance in its own country or abroad. Yet despite the initial indifference with which it was first met, American art flourished against the odds and founded the aesthetic consciousness that we equate with American art today.

In this exhilarating study David Rosand shows how early American painters transformed themselves from provincial followers of the established traditions of Europe into some of the most innovative and influential artists in the world. Moving beyond simple descriptions of what distinguishes American art from other movements and forms, "The Invention of Painting in America" explores not only the status of artists and their personal relationship to their work but also the larger dialogue between the artist and society. Rosand looks to the intensely studied portraits of America's early painters -- especially Copley and Eakins and the landscapes of Homer and Inness, among others -- each of whom grappled with conflicting cultural attitudes and different expressive styles in order to reinvent the art of painting. He discusses the work of Davis, Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, and Motherwell and the subjects and themes that engaged them. While our current understanding of America's place in art is largely based on the astonishing success of a handful of mid-twentieth-century painters, Rosand unearths the historical and artistic conditions that both shaped and inspired the phenomenon of Abstract Expressionism.

The Boyd family is Australia's most remarkable artistic dynasty. Among the descendants of landscape painter Emma Minnie a Beckett and her husband Arthur Merric Boyd are talented painters, potters, sculptors, architects and writers, several of international standing. This 'family biography' by award-winning writer Brenda Niall traces the emergence of an extraordinary artistic tradition. She places the Boyds in their historical and personal contexts, tells the interwoven stories of their brilliant careers, and analyses the shaping influences on their lives. Most remarkable is the story, told here for the first time, of heiress Emma Mills - a convict's daughter who in 1855 married William a Beckett, son of Victoria's first Chief Justice. As the family's much-loved matriarch, Emma a Beckett promoted the artistic careers of her daughter Emma Minnie, son-in-law Arthur Merric Boyd and Boyd grandchildren. Niall's narrative focuses on a sequence of Boyd family houses in Australia and Europe. Her story moves from a Wiltshire manor house to a farm in Yarra Glen and a pottery in Murrumbeena, to Arthur Boyd's Suffolk retreat and David Boyd's olive grove in the South of France, and finally to Bundanon, near Nowra-the homestead that Arthur Boyd gave to the Australian people. This strategy enables her to shift the spotlight from one individual to another, and to show dramatic changes in the family fortunes in many different settings. Beautifully illustrated, ""The Boyds"" is based on family papers, letters and diaries and a wide range of interviews. Moving from 1840s Melbourne to the present day, it covers a vast territory while reading with the ease of a novel.

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.

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.

Speaking of the emergence of modernism, author Virginia Woolf famously said: "On or about December 1910, human character changed." But was the shift to modernism really so revolutionary? J. M. Mancini argues that it was not. She proposes that the origins of the movement can in fact be traced well into the nineteenth century.

Several cultural developments after the Civil War gradually set the stage for modernism, Mancini contends. New mass art media appeared on the scene, as did a national network of museums and groundbreaking initiatives in art education.These new institutions provided support for future modernists and models for the creators of the avant-garde. Simultaneously, art critics began to embrace abstraction after the Civil War, both for aesthetic reasons and to shore up their own nascent profession. Modernism was thus linked, Mancini argues, to the emergence of cultural hierarchy.

A work of impeccable scholarship and unusual breadth, the book challenges some of the basic ideas about both the origins of twentieth-century modernism and the character of Gilded-Age culture. It will appeal not only to art historians but also to scholars in American history and American studies.

This lively and erudite cultural history of Scotland, from the Jacobite defeat of 1745 to the death of an icon, Sir Walter Scott, in 1832, examines how Scottish identity was experienced and represented in novel ways. Weaving together previously unpublished archival materials, visual and material culture, dress and textile history, Viccy Coltman re-evaluates the standard cliches and essentialist interpretations which still inhibit Scottish cultural history during this period of British and imperial expansion. The book incorporates familiar landmarks in Scottish history, such as the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in August 1822, with microhistories of individuals, including George Steuart, a London-based architect, and the East India Company servant, Claud Alexander. It thus highlights recurrent themes within a range of historical disciplines, and by confronting the broader questions of Scotland's relations with the rest of the British state it makes a necessary contribution to contemporary concerns.

Randall Griffin's book examines the ways in which artists and critics sought to construct a new identity for America during the era dubbed the Gilded Age because of its leaders' taste for opulence. Artists such as Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Thomas Anshutz explored alternative "American" themes and styles, but widespread belief in the superiority of European art led them and their audiences to look to the Old World for legitimacy. This rich, never-resolved contradiction between the native and autonomous, on the one hand, and, on the other, the European and borrowed serves as the armature of Griffin's innovative look at how and why the world of art became a key site in the American struggle for identity.

Not only does Griffin trace the interplay of issues of nationalism, class, and gender in American culture, but he also offers insightful readings of key paintings by Eakins and other canonical artists. Further, Griffin shows that by 1900 the nationalist project in art and criticism had helped open the way for the formulation of American modernism.

Homer, Eakins, and Anshutz will be of importance to all those interested in American culture as well as to specialists in art history and art criticism.