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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1800 to 1900 > General
Algebraic Art explores the invention of a peculiarly Victorian account of the nature and value of aesthetic form, and it traces that account to a surprising source: mathematics. The nineteenth century was a moment of extraordinary mathematical innovation, witnessing the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the revaluation of symbolic algebra, and the importation of mathematical language into philosophy. All these innovations sprang from a reconception of mathematics as a formal rather than a referential practice-as a means for describing relationships rather than quantities. For Victorian mathematicians, the value of a claim lay not in its capacity to describe the world but its internal coherence. This concern with formal structure produced a striking convergence between mathematics and aesthetics: geometers wrote fables, logicians reconceived symbolism, and physicists described reality as consisting of beautiful patterns. Artists, meanwhile, drawing upon the cultural prestige of mathematics, conceived their work as a 'science' of form, whether as lines in a painting, twinned characters in a novel, or wavelike stress patterns in a poem. Avant-garde photographs and paintings, fantastical novels like Flatland and Lewis Carroll's children's books, and experimental poetry by Swinburne, Rossetti, and Patmore created worlds governed by a rigorous internal logic even as they were pointedly unconcerned with reference or realist protocols. Algebraic Art shows that works we tend to regard as outliers to mainstream Victorian culture were expressions of a mathematical formalism that was central to Victorian knowledge production and that continues to shape our understanding of the significance of form.
Sculpture Victorious highlights the diversity, originality, and ubiquity of sculptural production during the reign of Queen Victoria. This lavishly illustrated book examines how colorful marbles, bronzes, finely wrought silver, and exquisitely detailed electrotypes, as well as gems, cameos, and porcelain, related to and contributed to the contemporary world. In an age of unprecedented territorial expansion, sculpture reflected the power of the British empire; at the same time, increased access to materials and resources facilitated artistic production and innovation. The partnership between art and industry was equally generative and creative, enabling daring explorations of sculpture's possibilities, both political and aesthetic. Bringing to bear a range of materials including statuary, reliefs, models, drawings, and objets d'art, as well as prints, photographs, and paintings, this stunning tome assembles, for the first time, the vibrancy, inventiveness, and modernity of Victorian sculpture. Published in association with the Yale Center for British Art Exhibition Schedule: Yale Center for British Art (09/11/14-11/30/14) Tate Britain (02/24/15-05/24/15)
A new appraisal of intriguing and meditative figural works by one of the 19th century's great masters of landscape The women painted by Camille Corot (1796-1875) read, dream, and gaze at the viewer, conveying an independent spirit and a sense of their inner lives. Corot's handling of color and his deft, delicate touch applied to the female form resulted in pictures of quiet majesty. Although these figural paintings constitute a relatively small and little-known portion of his oeuvre, they were of great importance for the founders of modernist painting, such as Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque. This publication encompasses some forty paintings by Corot-from the single-figure bust and full-length images of the 1840s through the 1860s nudes and his allegorical series devoted to the model in the studio. Essays by leading experts in the field address Corot's debt to the old masters and the impact of his pictures on both 19th- and 20th-century painting, the relationship of his figural work to his more famous landscape practice, his response to the shifting social position of artists' models, and the incursion of photography into artistic practice in the Second Empire and early Third Republic. Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington Exhibition Schedule: National Gallery of Art, Washington (09/09/18-12/30/18)
Written by Marilyn Martin, a former director of the South African
National Gallery, Between Dreams and Realities is based on
extensive research and experience. This book revisits important
exhibitions, events and forgotten controversies; it highlights the
achievements of directors, who often faced political agendas and
strained relationships within and outside the institution. Between
Dreams and Realities considers the aspirations and role of civil
society in creating and maintaining a national institution for the
common good.
This is the third of three text books, published in association with the Open University, which offer an innovatory exploration of art and visual culture. Through carefully chosen themes and topics rather than through a general survey, the volumes approach the process of looking at works of art in terms of their audiences, functions and cross-cultural contexts. While focused on painting, sculpture and architecture, it also explores a wide range of visual culture in a variety of media and methods. "1850-2010: Modernity to Globalisation" includes essays which engage directly with topical issues around art and gender, globalisation, cultural difference and curating, as well as explorations of key canonical artists and movements and of some less well-documented work of contemporary artists.
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.
The transnational modernist Mina Loy (1882-1966) embodied the avant-garde in many literary and artistic media. This book positions her as a theorist of the avant-garde and of what it means to be an artist. Foregrounding Loy’s critical interrogation of Futurist, Dadaist, Surrealist, and “Degenerate†artisthood, and exploring her poetic legacies today, Curious Disciplines reveals Loy’s importance in an entirely novel way. Examining the primary texts produced by those movements themselves—their manifestos, magazines, pamphlets, catalogues, and speeches—Sarah Hayden uses close readings of Loy’s poetry, prose, polemics, and unpublished writings to trace her response to how these movements wrote themselves, collectively, into being.
British Musical Modernism explores the works of eleven key composers to reveal the rapid shifts of expression and technique that transformed British art music in the post-war period. Responding to radical avant-garde developments in post-war Europe, the Manchester Group composers - Alexander Goehr, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Harrison Birtwistle - and their contemporaries assimilated the serial-structuralist preoccupations of mid-century internationalism to an art grounded in resurgent local traditions. In close readings of some thirty-five scores, Philip Rupprecht traces a modernism suffused with the formal elegance of the 1950s, the exuberant theatricality of the 1960s, and - in the works of David Bedford and Tim Souster - the pop, minimalist, and live-electronic directions of the early 1970s. Setting music-analytic insights against a broader social-historical backdrop, Rupprecht traces a British musical modernism that was at once a collective artistic endeavor, and a sounding myth of national identity.
The Contextual Nature of Design and Everyday Things focuses on the history of industrial design beginning in the 18th century in principally in Europe and the United States but does so with a thematic twist. Instead of revealing the world of everyday things in a chronological manner as many books do, The Contextual Nature of Design and Everyday Things does so by way of different themes. This direction is taken for one principal reason: design never occurs out of context. In other words, the design of everyday things is a reflection of place, people and process. It cannot be otherwise. Consequently, these broader issues become the themes for the exploration of everyday things. There are ten themes in all. These are: World View of Design, which examines the very broad picture of industrial design as an everyday activity undertaken by everyone and throughout the world; Design and the Natural World, which explores the interdependence between the Natural World and the Artificial World; Design and Economics, which delves into industrial design as a force of both macro- and micro-economics; Design and Technology, which looks at the evolution of materials and processes and their impact on industrial design; Design and Transportation, which reviews the role that industrial design has played in the development of transportation, especially rail, road and air; Design and Communication, which situates the place of industrial design in communication, both human communication and technical innovations in communication; Design and Education, which covers the development of the teaching and training of industrial designers; Design and Material Culture, which considers several case studies in industrial design as contemporary examples of material culture; Design and Politics, which positions industrial design as an integral part albeit indirect of one political system or another; and Design and Society, in which the fruits of industrial design can be perceived as mirrors or reflections of societal values. The Contextual Nature of Design and Everyday Things is an ideal book for face-to-face courses in industrial design history as well as those offered as hybrid and online.
Gustave Le Gray's life was as romantic as any novel. A young
painter in Rome, then a fashionable portrait photographer in Paris,
Le Gray received commissions from Napoleon III, and astonished
viewers with his painterly landscapes and ravishing seascapes.
Facing bankruptcy, he fled Paris with Alexandre Dumas to Palermo,
traveled to the Middle East, and finally settled in Egypt, where he
became drawing master to the ruler's children and continued to make
photographs until his death in 1884.
Amateur Craft provides an illuminating and historically-grounded account of amateur craft in the modern era, from 19th century Sunday painters and amateur carpenters to present day railway modellers and yarnbombers. Stephen Knott's fascinating study explores the curious and unexpected attributes of things made outside standardised models of mass production, arguing that amateur craft practice is 'differential' - a temporary moment of control over work that both departs from and informs our productive engagement with the world. Knott's discussion of the theoretical aspects of amateur craft practice is substantiated by historical case studies that cluster around the period 1850-1950. Looking back to the emergence of the modern amateur, he makes reference to contemporary art and design practice that harnesses or exploits amateur conditions of making. From Andy Warhol to Simon Starling, such artistic interest elucidates the mercurial qualities of amateur craft. Invaluable for students and researchers in art and design, contemporary craft, material culture and social history, Amateur Craft counters both the marginalisation and the glorification of amateur craft practice. It is richly illustrated with 41 images, 14 in colour, including 19th century ephemera and works of contemporary art.
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.
Robin Veder's The Living Line is a radical reconceptualization of the development of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American modernism. The author illuminates connections among the histories of modern art, body cultures, and physiological aesthetics in early-twentieth-century American culture, fundamentally altering our perceptions about art and the physical, and the degree of cross-pollination in the arts. The Living Line shows that American producers and consumers of modernist visual art repeatedly characterized their aesthetic experience in terms of kinesthesia, the sense of bodily movement. They explored abstraction with kinesthetic sensibilities and used abstraction to achieve kinesthetic goals. In fact, the formalist approach to art was galvanized by theories of bodily response derived from experimental physiological psychology and facilitated by contemporary body cultures such as modern dance, rhythmic gymnastics, physical education, and physical therapy. Situating these complementary ideas and exercises in relation to enduring fears of neurasthenia, Veder contends that aesthetic modernism shared industrial modernity's objective of efficiently managing neuromuscular energy. In a series of finely grained and interconnected case studies, Veder demonstrates that diverse modernists associated with the Armory Show, the SocieteAnonyme, the Stieglitz circle (especially O'Keeffe), and the Barnes Foundation participated in these discourses and practices and that "kin-aesthetic modernism" greatly influenced the formation of modern art in America and beyond. This daring and completely original work will appeal to a broad audience of art historians, historians of the body, and American culture in general.
William Hogarth is a house-hold name across the country, his prints hang in our pubs and leap out from our history-books. He painted the great and good but also the common people. His art is comically exuberant, 'carried away by a passion for the ridiculous', as Hazlitt said. Jenny Uglow, acclaimed author of Elizabeth Gaskell, Nature's Engraver and In These Times, uncovers the man, but also the world he sprang from and the lives he pictured. He moved in the worlds of theatre, literature, journalism and politics, and found subjects for his work over the whole gamut of eighteenth century London, from street scenes to drawing rooms, and from churches to gambling halls and prisons. After striving years as an engraver and painter, Hogarth leapt into lasting fame with A Harlot's Progress and A Rake's Progress, but remained highly critical of the growing gulf between the luxurious lives of the ruling elite and the wretched poverty of the massess. William Hogarth was an artist of flamboyant, overflowing imagination, he was a satirist with an unerring eye; a painter of vibrant colour and tenderness; an ambitious professional who broke all the art-world taboos. Never content, he wanted to excel at everything - from engraving to history painting - and a note of risk runs through his life. Shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, Hogarth: A Life and a World brings art history to life in the voices of Hogarth's own age. The result is an unforgettable portrait of a great artist and a proud, stubborn, comic, vulnerable man.
This book provides the most comprehensive survey of contemporary Palestinian art to date. The development of contemporary practice, theory and criticism is understood as integral to the concomitant construction of Palestinian national identities. In particular the book explores the intricate relationship between art and nationalism in which the idea of origin plays an important and problematic role. The book deconstructs the existing narratives of the history of Palestinian art, which search for its origins in the 19th century, and argues that Palestinian contemporary art demonstrates pluralistic, politically and philosophically complex attitudes towards identity and nation that confound familiar narratives of origin and belonging. The book builds upon theories of art, nationalism and post-colonialism particularly in relation to the themes of fragmentation and dispersal. It takes the Arabic word for Diaspora Shatat (literally broken apart) as a central concern in contemporary understanding of Palestinian culture and develops it, along with Edward Said's paradoxical formula of a 'coherence of dispersal' as the organising concept of the book. This aspect of contemporary Palestinian art is peculiarly suited to the conditions produced by the globalisation of art and we show how Palestinian artists, despite not having a state, have developed an international profile.
This book provides the most comprehensive survey of contemporary Palestinian art to date. The development of contemporary practice, theory and criticism is understood as integral to the concomitant construction of Palestinian national identities. In particular the book explores the intricate relationship between art and nationalism in which the idea of origin plays an important and problematic role. The book deconstructs the existing narratives of the history of Palestinian art, which search for its origins in the 19th century, and argues that Palestinian contemporary art demonstrates pluralistic, politically and philosophically complex attitudes towards identity and nation that confound familiar narratives of origin and belonging. The book builds upon theories of art, nationalism and post-colonialism particularly in relation to the themes of fragmentation and dispersal. It takes the Arabic word for Diaspora Shatat (literally broken apart) as a central concern in contemporary understanding of Palestinian culture and develops it, along with Edward Said's paradoxical formula of a 'coherence of dispersal' as the organising concept of the book. This aspect of contemporary Palestinian art is peculiarly suited to the conditions produced by the globalisation of art and we show how Palestinian artists, despite not having a state, have developed an international profile.
John Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911) started his career as an architectural sculptor at the South Kensington Museum (today the Victoria and Albert Museum). Much of his life, however, was spent in British India, where his son Rudyard was born. He taught at the Bombay School of Art and later was appointed principal of the new Mayo School of Art (today Pakistan's National College of Art and Design) as well as curator of its museum in Lahore. Over several years, Kipling toured the northern provinces of India, documenting the processes of local craftsmen, a cultural preservation project that provides a unique record of 19th-century Indian craft customs. This is the first book to explore the full spectrum of artistic, pedagogical, and archival achievements of this fascinating man of letters, demonstrating the sincerity of his work as an artist, teacher, administrator, and activist. Published in association with Bard Graduate Center Exhibition Schedule: Victoria and Albert Museum, London (01/14/17-04/02/17) Bard Graduate Center, New York (09/15/17-01/07/18)
The fin de siecle not only designated the end of the Victorian epoch but also marked a significant turn toward modernism. Extraordinary Aesthetes critically examines literary and visual artists from England, Ireland, and Scotland whose careers in poetry, fiction, and illustration flourished during the concluding years of the nineteenth century. This collection draws special attention to the exceptional contributions that artists, poets, and novelists made to the cultural world of the late 1880s and 1890s. The essays illuminate a range of established, increasingly acknowledged, and lesser-known figures whose contributions to this brief but remarkably intense cultural period warrant close attention. Such figures include the critically neglected Mabel Dearmer, whose stunning illustrations appear in Evelyn Sharp's radical fairy tales for children. Equally noteworthy is the uncompromising short fiction of Ella D'Arcy, who played a pivotal role in editing the most famous journal of the 1890s, the Yellow Book. The discussion extends to a range of legendary writers, including Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats, whose works are placed in dialogue with authors who gained prominence during this period. Bringing women's writing to the fore, Extraordinary Aesthetes rebalances the achievements of artists and writers during the rapidly transforming cultural world of the fin de siecle.
How the history of art begins with the myth of the barbarian invasion-the romantic fragmentation of classical eternity. The history of art, argues Eric Michaud, begins with the romantic myth of the barbarian invasions. Viewed from the nineteenth century, the Germanic-led invasions of the Roman Empire in the fifth century became the gateway to modernity, seen not as a catastrophe but as a release from a period of stagnation, renewing Roman culture with fresh, northern blood-and with new art that was anti-Roman and anticlassical. Artifacts of art from then on would be considered as the natural product of "races" and "peoples" rather than the creation of individuals. The myth of the barbarian invasions achieved the fragmentation of classical eternity. This narrative, Michaud explains, inseparable from the formation of nation states and the rise of nationalism in Europe, was based on the dual premise of the homogeneity and continuity of peoples. Local and historical particularities became weapons aimed at classicism's universalism. The history of art linked its objects with racial groups-denouncing or praising certain qualities as "Latin" or "Germanic." Thus the predominance of linear elements was thought to betray a southern origin, and the "painterly" a Germanic or northern source. Even today, Michaud points out, it is said that art best embodies the genius of peoples. In the globalized contemporary art market, the ethnic provenance of works-categorized, for example, as "African American," "Latino," or "Native American"-creates added value. The market displays the same competition among "races" that was present at the foundation of art history as a discipline.
The theme of the erotic is ever present in the work of Auguste Rodin, both in his sculptures and in his many drawings. Throughout his career, he depicted sexual desire in all its facets, in every mood from delicate innocence to frank intensity, bearing witness to an endless fascination with the flesh and a love of the female form. Taking a chronological path through Rodin's life, this is an intimate approach to the many faces of sex and sensuality in his body of work and in the society within which his art was forged. The text discusses his relationships with women, his friendships with poets and artists, and the controversy that his sculptures caused in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when French society was marked by a hypocritical disparity between public morals and private desires. This witty and perceptive book, packed with beautiful images, will shed new light on this intriguing aspect of the artist's world and his skill at capturing the fleeting nature of pleasure in timeless art.
Business leader and arts patron Sir Edwin A. G. Manton (1909-2005) and his wife Florence, Lady Manton, assembled an outstanding collection of 18th- and 19th-century British art. A gift to the Clark Art Institute from the Manton Foundation in 2007, their collection features more than three hundred oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, including works by John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Gainsborough, and William Blake. In a series of wide-ranging essays, prominent scholars consider the major works and themes in the collection, relating them to larger issues within the field of British studies. Individual essays are devoted to Constable's oil sketches, cloud studies, and magisterial painting The Wheat Field; the growth of the watercolor tradition; print portfolios and narrative series; Thomas Rowlandson's satiric drawings; and Gainsborough's use of experimental materials as revealed through recent scientific analysis. The volume concludes with an illustrated checklist of the works in the collection. Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
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.
First published in 1913, Holbrook Jackson's "The Eighteen Nineties" is without doubt "the" authoritative work on the raffish, scandalous and tempestuous 'Yellow Nineties' of Beardsley, Wilde, Beerbohm and the rest. An exceptional prose stylist, Jackson reviews the awakening of the 1890s before the Great War. The realisation of new possibilities, and the intent to live life more fully and intensely, aroused quite new passions and enthusiasm. He interprets the decade in terms of personalities, arguing that the period has quite a distinct character. It is an extraordinarily self-contained and rich period in the arts and besides individual works of art, its relics are certain moods, attitudes, fantastic anticipations. Jackson synthesises the various movements and relates them to one another, to their foreign influences, and to the main trends of British national art and life. |
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