Antosha and Levitasha is the first book in English devoted to the complex relationship between Anton Chekhov and Isaac Levitan, one of Russia's greatest landscape painters. Outside of Russia, a general lack of familiarity with Levitan's life and art has undermined an appreciation of the cultural significance of his friendship with Chekhov. Serge Gregory's highly readable study attempts to fill that gap for Western readers by examining a friendship that may have vacillated between periods of affection and animosity, but always reflected an unwavering shared aesthetic. In Russia, where entire rooms of galleries in Moscow and St. Petersburg are devoted to Levitan's paintings, the lives of the famous writer and the equally famous artist have long been tied together. To those familiar with the work of both men, it is evident that Levitan's "landscapes of mood" have much in common with the way that Chekhov's characters perceive nature as a reflection of their emotional state. Gregory focuses on three overarching themes: the artists' similar approach to depicting landscape; their romantic and social rivalries within their circle of friends, which included many of Moscow's leading cultural figures; and the influence of Levitan's personal life on Chekhov's stories and plays. He emphasizes the facts of Levitan's life and his place in late nineteenth-century Russian art, particularly with respect to his dual loyalties to the competing Itinerant and World of Art movements. Accessible and engaging, Antosha and Levitasha will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in art history, late nineteenth-century Russian culture, and biographies.

In Fashioning Spaces, Heidi Brevik-Zender argues that in the years between 1870 and 1900 the chroniclers of Parisian modernity depicted the urban landscape not just in public settings such as boulevards and parks but also in "dislocations," spaces where the public and the intimate overlapped in provocative and subversive ways. Stairwells, theatre foyers, dressmakers' studios, and dressing rooms were in-between places that have long been overlooked but were actually marked as indisputably modern through their connections with high fashion. Fashioning Spaces engages with and thinks beyond the work of critics Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin to arrive at new readings of the French capital.

Examining literature by Zola, Maupassant, Rachilde, and others, as well as paintings, architecture, and the fashionable garments worn by both men and women, Brevik-Zender crafts a compelling and innovative account of how fashion was appropriated as a way of writing about the complexities of modernity in fin-de-siecle Paris.

This volume of thirteen essays presents rigorous new research by western and Russian scholars on Russian art of the nienteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Over More than three decades after the publication of Elizabeth Valkenier's pioneering monograph, Russian Realist Art, this impressive collection showcases the latest methodology and subjects of inquiry, expanding the parameters of what has become an area of enormous intellectual and popular appeal. Major artists including Ilia Repin, Valentin Serov, and Wassily Kandinsky are considered afresh, as are the Peredvizhnik and Mir iskusstva movements and the Abramtsevo community. The book also breaks new ground to embrace subjects such as Russian graphic satire and children's book illustration, as well as stimulating aspects of patronage and display. Collectively, the essays include a range of approaches, from close textual readings to institutional critique. They also develop major themes inspired by Valkenier's work, among them: the emergence and evolution of cultural institutions, the development of aesthetic discourse and artistic terminology, debates between the Academy of Arts and its challengers, art criticism and the Russian press, and the resonance of various forms of nationalism within the art world. These and other questions engage multiple disciplines-those of art history, Slavic Russian studies, and cultural history, among others-and promise to fuel a vibrant and ascendant field.

From the time the word kul'tura entered the Russian language in the early nineteenth century, Russian arts and letters have thrived on controversy. At any given time several versions of culture have coexisted in the Russian public sphere. The question of what makes something or someone distinctly Russian was at the core of cultural debates in nineteenth-century Russia and continues to preoccupy Russian society to the present day. When Art Makes News examines the development of a public discourse on national self-representation in nineteenth-century Russia, as it was styled by the visual arts and popular journalism. Katia Dianina tells the story of the missing link between high art and public culture, revealing that art became the talk of the nation in the second half of the nineteenth century in the pages of mass-circulation press. At the heart of Dianina's study is a paradox: how did culture become the national idea in a country where few were educated enough to appreciate it? Dianina questions the traditional assumptions that culture in tsarist Russia was built primarily from the top down and classical literature alone was responsible for imagining the national community. When Art Makes News will appeal to all those interested in Russian culture, as well as scholars and students in museum and exhibition studies.

In the act of enclosing space and making rooms, we make and define our aspirations and identities. Taking a room by room approach, this fascinating volume explores how representations of domestic space have embodied changing spatial configurations and values, and considers how we see modern individuals in the process of making themselves 'at home'. Scholars from the US, UK and Australasia re-visit and re-think interiors by Bonnard, Matisse, Degas and Vuillard, as well as the great spaces of early modernity; the drawing room in Rossetti's house, hallways in Hampstead Garden Suburb, the Paris attic of the Brothers Goncourt; Schutte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt Kitchen, to explore how interior making has changed from the Victorian to the modern period. From the smallest room - the bathroom - to the spacious verandas of Singapore Deco, Domestic Interiors focuses on modern rooms 'imaged' and imagined, it builds a distinct body of knowledge around the interior, interiority, representation and modernity, and creates a rich resource for students and scholars in art, architecture and design history.

William Morris was one of the outstanding writers, artists and political activists of the nineteenth century. This book examines the significance of his legacy and his continuing influence in the twenty-first century. Currently many of Morris's primary concerns are once again at the forefront of social, political and academic debate, and his work continues to attract interest across a range of academic disciplines. Now is a particularly apt time for the publication of this collection of new essays, which opens up original areas of debate and encourages innovative ways of approaching and understanding William Morris in a new century. The book contains essays from scholars and professionals researching and working in fields relevant to Morris's diverse interests. The contributors offer a reappraisal of his achievements and influence in areas such as literature, art, architecture, politics, environmentalism, science and technology. The essays provide a comprehensive introduction for those new to Morris Studies whilst presenting a series of fresh perspectives for those already familiar with Morris's work.

Visual Genesis of Japanese National Identity offers an entirely new perspective on the concept of constructing nation-states. The book explores the nature of national identity constructs produced in pre-modern Japan by examining two aspects of its cultural production, the sphere of fine arts and the sphere of literature inter-twined with a genre of poetry pictorialization. The discussion is centered on the artistic practice of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and contextualizes his woodblock print series entitled Hyakunin isshu uba ga etoki in a wider perspective of Japanese historical, political, social, cultural and artistic phenomena emerging prior to the birth of the modern Japanese nation. Hokusai's work, oscillating between the domain of text and the domain of image, transposes the classical Japanese poetry into late Edo period (1603-1868) popular culture. Machotka argues that in the process of text/image translation Hokusai projected a new image of «Japaneseness, thereby contributing to the development of national identity prior to the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state.

A lively and distinctive look at realism in great modern books and art Realist Vision exploresthe claim to represent the world "as it is." Peter Brooks takes a new look at the realist tradition and its intense interest in the visual. Discussing major English and French novels and paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Brooks provides a lively and perceptive view of the realist project. Centering each chapter on a single novel or group of paintings, Brooks examines the "invention" of realism beginning with Balzac and Dickens, its apogee in the work of such as Flaubert, Eliot, and Zola, and its continuing force in James and modernists such as Woolf. He considers also the painting of Courbet, Manet, Caillebotte, Tissot, and Lucian Freud, and such recent phenomena as "photorealism" and "reality TV."

These etchings depict the major themes and grandeur of Goya's incomparable work, The Bible, human folly, the brutal pageantry of bullfighting, while the accompanying text sheds light on the life and times of the Spanish master.

This is the first major study of the Italian painter Girolamo Pieri Nerli, who spent the last two decades of the nineteenth century in Australia and New Zealand and is best known as a teacher of Frances Hodgkins. The fruit of many years of research, this careful and thoughtful book will be of considerable interest to art historians and the general public. Nerli painted a wide range of subjects in a wide range of styles and is associated with the introduction of Impressionism to the Antipodes. T hough he returned to Italy his most important work, which shows an appealing liveliness with paint, was done in the South Pacific and most of it remains here. His best paintings, full of colour and warmth often with attractive human subjects, have continuing appeal and relevance to both Australia and New Zealand at an important turning point in their cultures. The book includes an introductory text of two chapters, the first on Nerli's life and personality, the second on his painting, accompanied by black and white photographs and reproductions setting the context and evoking the era. This is followed by 40 full-page full-colour reproductions of the most important paintings, each with commentary on the facing page. There will also be a chronology, a bibliography, an appendix reproducing some vivid letters written by Nerli and his wife, and a list of exhibitions.

"At last, Charles Willson Peale is revealed, compleat and complex: as the familiar and essential artist and scientist, to be sure, but also as the patriot, parent, publicist, and more. David Ward's astute examination of this unique polymath introduces unexpected aspects of the man and, in so doing, sheds new light on the genius of the American Enlightenment. A masterly portrait, and an interpretive tour de force."--Charles C. Eldredge, author of "Tales from the Easel: American Narrative Paintings

"This is an invaluable critical study of Charles Willson Peale--clear, erudite, and imaginative. Ward shows what went wrong as well as right in Peale's lifelong attempts at self-fashioning, giving us a richer picture than ever before of this restless American figure."--Alexander Nemerov, author of "The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824

"One of the hallmarks of public life after the Revolution was the desire of notable Americans to fashion their own enduring reputations. This exquisite book lucidly and compellingly investigates how Charles Willson Peale expressed and controlled his image--in his ostensibly private autobiographical writing as well as in public forums such as self-portraiture and the production of spectacles and events. David C. Ward reassembles the visual and verbal conversations Peale conducted with and within himself over the course of five decades, and in doing so takes us on a remarkable journey through the labyrinth of a major artist's evolving self-consciousness during the early Republic."--Paul Staiti, Professor of Fine Arts on the Alumnae Foundation, Mount Holyoke College

Thousands of women pursued artistic careers in the United States during the late nineteenth century. According to census figures, the number of women among the ranks of professional artists rose from 10 percent to nearly 50 percent between 1870 and 1890. Examining the effects of this change, Kirsten Swinth explores how women's growing presence in the American art world transformed both its institutions and its ideology.

Swinth traces the careers of women painters in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, opening and closing her book with discussion of the two most famous women artists of the period--Mary Cassatt and Georgia O'Keeffe. Perhaps surprisingly, Swinth shows that in the 1870s and 1880s men and women easily crossed the boundaries separating conventionally masculine and feminine artistic territories to compete with each other as well as to join forces to professionalize art training, manage a fluid and unpredictable art market, and shape the language of art criticism. By the 1890s, however, women artists faced a backlash. Ultimately, Swinth argues, these gender contests spilled beyond the world of art to shape twentieth-century understandings of high culture and the formation of modernism in profound ways.

In a narrative gracefully combining intellectual and cultural history, Richard Candida Smith unfolds the legacy of Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898), the poet who fathered the symbolist movement in poetry and art. The symbolists found themselves in the midst of the transition to a world in which new media devoured cultural products and delivered them to an ever-growing public. Their goal was to create and oversee a new elite culture, one that elevated poetry by removing it from a direct relationship to experience. Instead, symbolist poetry was dedicated to exploring discourse itself, and its practitioners to understanding how language shapes consciousness.
Candida Smith investigates the intellectual context in which symbolists came to view artistic practice as a form of knowledge. He relates their work to psychology, especially the ideas of William James, and to language and the emergence of semantics. Through the lens of symbolism, he focuses on a variety of subjects: sexual liberation and the erotic, anarchism, utopianism, labor, and women's creative role. Paradoxically, the symbolists' reconfiguration of elite culture fit effectively into the modern commercial media. After Mallarme was rescued from obscurity, symbolism became a valuable commodity, exported by France to America and elsewhere in the market-driven turn-of-the-century world. "Mallarme's Children" traces not only how poets regarded their poetry and artists their art but also how the public learned to think in new ways about cultural work and to behave differently as a result.

Nearly every artist under the age of 50 in the United States in the late-20th century has a Master of Fine Arts degee. This study places that degree in its proper historical framework and ideological context. Arguing that where artists are trained makes a difference in the forms and meanings they produce, he shows how the university, with its disciplined organization of knowledge and demand for language, played a critical role in the production of modernism in the visual arts. Now it is shaping what we call postmodernism - like postmodernist art, the graduate university stresses theory and research over manual skills and traditional techniques of representation. The text begins by examining the first campus-based art schools in the 1870s and goes on to consider the structuring role of women art educators and women students; the shift from the "fine arts" to the "visual arts"; the fundamental grammar of art laid down in the schoolroom; and the development of professional art training in the American university. The book reveals the ways we have conceived of art in the past hundred years and have institutionalized that conception as atelier activity, as craft, and finally as theory a

This study of colonialism and art examines the intersection of visual culture and political power in late-eighteenth-century British painting. Focusing on paintings from British America, the West Indies, and India, Beth Fowkes Tobin investigates the role of art in creating and maintaining imperial ideologies and practices--as well as in resisting and complicating them.
Informed by the varied perspectives of postcolonial theory, Tobin explores through close readings of colonial artwork the dynamic middle ground in which cultures meet. Linking specific colonial sites with larger patterns of imperial practice and policy, she examines paintings by William Hogarth, Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, Arthur William Devis, and Agostino Brunias, among others. These works include portraits of colonial officials, conversation pieces of British families and their servants, portraits of Native Americans and Anglo-Indians, and botanical illustrations produced by Calcutta artists for officials of the British Botanic Gardens. In addition to examining the strategies that colonizers employed to dominate and define their subjects, Tobin uncovers the tactics of negotiation, accommodation, and resistance that make up the colonized's response to imperial authority. By focusing on the paintings' cultural and political engagement with imperialism, she accounts for their ideological power and visual effect while arguing for their significance as agents in the colonial project.
Pointing to the complexity, variety, and contradiction within colonial art, "Picturing Imperial Power" contributes to an understanding of colonialism as a collection of social, economic, political, and epistemological practices that were not monolithic and inevitable, but contradictory and contingent on various historical forces. It will interest students and scholars of colonialism, imperial history, postcolonial history, art history and theory, and cultural studies.

Art historians have in the past narrowly defined primitivism, limiting their inquiry to examples of direct stylistic borrowing from African, Oceanic, or Native American imagery. The drawbacks of such an approach have become increasingly apparent, the most problematic being its perpetuation of the notion that certain traditions are indeed "primitive." Frances Connelly argues that "primitive" art was not a style at all, but a cultural construction by modern Europeans, a cluster of concepts principally forged during the Enlightenment concerning the nature of the origins of artistic expression. She contends that, instead of the paintings of Gauguin, the publication of Vico's New Science in 1725 lies much closer to the origins of primitivism because it first articulated the essential framework of ideas through which Europeans would understand "primitive" expression.

Based upon a close reading of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources, including voyage accounts, ethnographies, aesthetic theories, and popular journals, The Sleep of Reason establishes that the term "primitive" art did not refer so much to actual stylistic traditions but to a collection of visual attributes that Europeans construed to be universal characteristics of "primitive" expression, specifically the hieroglyph, the grotesque, and the ornamental. Connelly provides case studies of artists and aestheticians who advocated, attempted, or realized the assimilation of these "primitive" characteristics, including some artists never before associated with primitivism as well as significant re-evaluations of Gauguin and Picasso.

What is kitsch? What is behind its appeal? More important, what is wrong with kitsch? Though central to our modern and postmodern culture, kitsch has not been seriously and comprehensively analyzed; its aesthetic worthlessness has been generally assumed but seldom explained. Kitsch and Art seeks to give this phenomenon its due by exploring the basis of artistic evaluation and aesthetic value judgments.

Tomas Kulka examines kitsch in the visual arts, literature, music, and architecture. To distinguish kitsch from art, Kulka proposes that kitsch depicts instantly identifiable, emotionally charged objects or themes, but that it does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the depicted objects or themes. He then addresses the deceptive nature of kitsch by examining the makeup of its artistic and aesthetic worthlessness. Ultimately Kulka argues that the mass appeal of kitsch cannot be regarded as aesthetic appeal, but that its analysis can illuminate the nature of art appreciation.

The eighteenth-century French philosophe Denis Diderot—the principal intelligence behind the Encyclopédie and the author of idiosyncratic fictional works such as Jacques the Fatalist and Rameau's Nephew—was also the first great art critic. Until now, however, Diderot's treatises on the visual arts have been available only in French. This two-volume edition makes the most important of his art-critical texts available in English for the first time. Diderot's works are among the most provocative and engaging products of the French Enlightenment. Moreover, their ruminations on many issues of perennial interest (invention versus convention, nature versus culture, and technique versus imagination; the complex relations between economic reality and artistic achievement) give them a rare pertinence to current debates on the nature and function of representation. All the celebrated pieces are here: the rhapsodic dream meditation inspired by Fragonard's Corésus and Callierhoé; the incident-packed "excursion" through a set of landscapes by Joseph Vernet; the evocative consideration of the nature of ruins and historical nostalgia prompted by the first showing of works by Hubert Robert. But these famous passages can now be considered in their proper context, surrounded by meditations that are less well known but equally sparkling. The book also includes brief introductory texts and annotations by John Goodman that clarify the many references to contemporary Parisian culture, as well as an introduction by Thomas Crow that sets the texts in their historical and art-historical context.

The life of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), who abandoned his wife, five children, and a successful career as a stockbroker to paint in poverty in exotic Tahiti, is one of the legendary tales of the art world. Today he is recognized as a highly influential founding father of modern art, who emphasized the use of flat planes and bright, nonnaturalistic color in conjunction with symbolic or primitive subjects. Familiarity with Gauguin the writer is essential for a complete understanding of the artist. "The Writings of a Savage" collects the very best of his letters, articles, books, and journals, many of which are unavailable elsewhere. In brilliantly lucid discussions of life and art Gauguin paints a triumphant self-portrait of a volcanic artist and the tormented man within.

In "The Painter's Practice," James Cahill reveals the intricacies of the painter's life with respect to payment and patronage--an approach that is still largely absent from the study of East Asian art. Drawing upon such unofficial archival sources as diaries and letters, Cahill challenges the traditional image of the disinterested amateur scholar-artist, unconcerned with material rewards, that has been developed by China's literati, perpetuated in conventional biographies, and abetted by the artists themselves. His work fills in the hitherto unexplored social and economic contexts in which painters worked, revealing the details of how painters in China actually made their living from the sixteenth century onward. Considering the marketplace as well as the studio, Cahill reviews the practices and working conditions of artists outside the Imperial Court such as the employment of assistants and the use of sketchbooks and prints by earlier artists for sources of motifs. As loose, flamboyant brushwork came into vogue, Cahill argues, these highly imitable styles ironically facilitated the forger's task, flooding the market with copies, sometimes commissioned and signed by the artists themselves. In tracing the great shift from seeing the painting as a picture to a concentration on the painter's hand, Cahill challenges the archetype of the scholar-artist and provides an enlightened perspective that profoundly changes the way we interpret familiar paintings.

Was the Royal Academy of San Carlos, founded in 1785 by the King of Spain, beneficial or detrimental to the development of a valid, living art in Mexico? The answer lies in the archives of the school, but nobody thought about constructing an aesthetic history from them until Jean Charlot accidentally discovered their extent and interest while searching for other material.

In this straightforward, documented account he presents not merely opinions and criticism but evidence, including curricula and contemporary drawings by students and teachers.

Since Pre-Conquest art there have been, it is usually assumed, two periods in Mexican art: the Colonial and the Modern. Between these peaks lies the dark Academy-dominated hiatus called Neo-Classicism, an episode that this treatise makes the first attempt to under-stand. The academic canons imported from Europe during this period were undeniably wrong for the indigenous people, and especially wrong at a time when a revolutionary Mexico was struggling for its own identity. But instead of throwing out this strange episode as foreign and imitative, it now becomes possible to see it as a period of acculturation through which the Mexican spirit emerged.

Aside from its interest as aesthetic history, this book makes an important contribution to the social history of Mexico. Some provocative ideas emerge: the interrelations between cultural and political attitudes, the historical impact of events and personalities on ideology. In the seesaw of political and financial fortunes, the worst moments of confusion were often the most pregnant artistically, with mexicanidad rising inevitably when official guidance weakened. As social history this account constitutes an interesting parallel to similar cultural experiences in the United States and in other countries of the Americas.

Charlot presents this material without special pleading, but not without appraisal. He writes: ..". in the periods when the Academy was most strictly run along academic lines, it helped the young, by contrast, to realize the meaning of freedom. When the school was manned by men blind to the Mexican tradition, and sensitive only to European values, their stubborn stand became a most healthy invitation to artistic revolution."

A celebration of the work and lives of women artists who shaped the art world of 19th-century Paris In the second half of the 19th century, Paris attracted an international gathering of women artists, drawn to the French capital by its academies and museums, studios and salons. Featuring thirty-six artists from eleven different countries, this beautifully illustrated book explores the strength of these women's creative achievements, through paintings by acclaimed Impressionists such as Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, and extraordinary lesser-known artists such as Marie Bashkirtseff, Anna Bilinska-Bohdanowicz, Paula Modersohn-Becker, and Hanna Pauli. It examines their work against the sociopolitical background of the period, when women were mostly barred from formal artistic education but cleverly navigated the city's network of ateliers, salons, and galleries. Essays consider the powerfully influential work of women Impressionists, representations of the female artist in portraiture, the unique experiences of Nordic women artists, and the significant presence of women artists throughout the history of the Paris Salon. By addressing the long-undervalued contributions of women to the art of the later 19th century, Women Artists in Paris pays tribute to pioneers who not only created remarkable paintings but also generated momentum toward a more egalitarian art world. Published in association with the American Federation of Arts Exhibition Schedule: Denver Art Museum (10/22/17-01/14/18) Speed Art Museum (02/17/18-05/13/18) Clark Art Institute (06/09/18-09/03/18)

The topicality of Hanns Hoffmann-Lederer's (1899-1970) design doctrine, with its claim to a comprehensive aesthetic education, lies in the fact that it represents an important counterbalance to today's euphoria for digitalisation. For a long time the young Bauhaus Master and design pedagogue opposed the publication of his concept for a fundamental artistic education, one which united and expanded the content of many different trends within the Bauhaus teachings. For him the risk that his exercises could be misunderstood as prescriptive was too great. Yet greater still was the drive of his enthusiastic students, who compiled exemplar images, edited teaching notes, and in 1958 conceived the first draft for a potential publication. Here Justus Theinert and Rainer K. Wick trace the moving life and the distinct pedagogical attributes of this fascinating personality. Text in German.