As we approach the bicentennial, in 2017, of the birth of Henry David Thoreau, there is considerable debate and confusion as to what he may, or may not have, contributed to American life and culture. Almost every American has heard of Thoreau, but only a few are aware that he was deeply engaged with most of the important issues of his day, from slavery to "Manifest Destiny" and the rights of the individual in a democratic society. Many of these issues are still affecting us today, as we move toward the second quarter of the twenty-first century. By studying how various American artists have chosen to portray Thoreau over the years since the publication of Walden in 1854, we can gain a clear understanding of how he has been interpreted (or misinterpreted) throughout the years since his death in 1862. But along the way, we might also find something useful, for our times, in the insights that Thoreau gained as he wrestled with the most urgent problems being experienced by American society in his day.

Late nineteenth-century Britain experienced an unprecedented explosion of visual print culture and a simultaneous rise in literacy across social classes. New printing technologies facilitated quick and cheap dissemination of images—illustrated books, periodicals, cartoons, comics, and ephemera—to a mass readership. This Victorian visual turn prefigured the present-day impact of the Internet on how images are produced and shared, both driving and reflecting the visual culture of its time. From this starting point, Drawing on the Victorians sets out to explore the relationship between Victorian graphic texts and today’s steampunk, manga, and other neo-Victorian genres that emulate and reinterpret their predecessors. Neo-Victorianism is a flourishing worldwide phenomenon, but one whose relationship with the texts from which it takes its inspiration remains underexplored. In this collection, scholars from literary studies, cultural studies, and art history consider contemporary works—Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moto Naoko’s Lady Victorian, and Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies, among others—alongside their antecedents, from Punch’s 1897 Jubilee issue to Alice in Wonderland and more. They build on previous work on neo-Victorianism to affirm that the past not only influences but converses with the present. Contributors: Christine Ferguson, Kate Flint, Anna Maria Jones, Linda K. Hughes, Heidi Kaufman, Brian Maidment, Rebecca N. Mitchell, Jennifer Phegley, Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Peter W. Sinnema, Jessica Straley

The Life and Times of Moses Jacob Ezekiel: American Sculptor, Arcadian Knight tells the remarkable story of Moses Ezekiel and his rise to international fame as an artist in late nineteenth-century Italy. Sephardic Jew, homosexual, Confederate soldier, Southern apologist, opponent of slavery, patriot, expatriate, mystic, Victorian, dandy, good Samaritan, humanist, royalist, romantic, reactionary, republican, monist, dualist, theosophist, freemason, champion of religious freedom, proto-Zionist, and proverbial Court Jew, Moses Ezekiel was a riddle of a man, a puzzle of seemingly irreconcilable parts. Knighted by three European monarchs, courted by the rich and famous, Moses Ezekiel lived the life of an aristocrat with rarely a penny to his name. Making his home in the capacious ruins of the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, he quickly distinguished himself as the consummate artist and host, winning international fame for his work and consorting with many of the lions and luminaries of the fin-de-siecle world, including Giuseppe Garibaldi, Queen Margherita, Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Sarah Bernhardt, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Eleonora Duse, Annie Besant, Clara Schumann, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Alphonse Daudet, Mark Twain, Emile Zola, Robert E. Lee, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Isaac Mayer Wise. In a city besieged with eccentrics, he, a Southern Jewish homosexual sculptor, was outstanding, an enigma to those who knew him, a man at once stubbornly original and deeply emblematic of his times. According to Stanley Chyet in his introduction to Ezekiel's memoirs, "The contemporary European struggle between liberalism and reaction, between modernity and feudalism, between the democratic and the hierarchical is rather amply refracted in Ezekiel's account of his life in Rome." Indeed so many of the contentious cultural, political, artistic, and scientific struggles of the age converged in the figure of this adroit and prepossessing Jew.

Views of Albion is the first comprehensive study of the reception of British art and design in Central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. The author proposes a new map of European Art Nouveau, where direct contacts between peripheral cultures were more significant than the influence of Paris. These new patterns of artistic exchange, often without historic precedence, gave art during this period its unique character and dynamism. Beginning with an analysis of the concept of Central Europe, the book examines knowledge about British art and design in the region. In subsequent chapters the author looks at the reception of the Pre-Raphaelites in painting and graphic arts as well as analysing diverse responses to the Arts and Crafts Movement in Germany, Austria, Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia, Hungary and Southern Slavic countries. The epilogue reveals the British interest in Central Europe, echoed in the designs Walter Crane, Charles Robert Ashbee and publications of The Studio. The book questions the insularity of British culture and offers new insights into art and design of Central Europe at the fin de siècle. It presents the region as a vital part of the international Art Nouveau, but also shows its specific features, visible in the works of artists such as Alfons Mucha, Gustav Klimt and Stanisław Wyspiański.

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.

The Tanenbaum gift of over two hundred works of internationally significant nineteenth-century European art is one of the most important art donations to a Canadian gallery. A diverse and original collection, it features works by Leon Bonnat, Frank Brangwyn, Charles Cordier, Gustave Dore, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Kathe Kollwitz, Henry Raeburn, Joaquin Sorolla, James Tissot, and Anders Zorn. This beautifully illustrated volume presents seventy-five of the key highlights by fifty-nine international artists. It offers insight into a broad range of artistic production in the nineteenth century, encompassing painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. Author Alison McQueen provides an in-depth analysis of the social and historical context of each work, and full-color images illuminate her close study of the aesthetics of every piece. The artwork entries are accompanied by provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography. This book challenges many lasting misconceptions about nineteenth-century art. It includes a preface by collectors Joey and Toby Tanenbaum and an introductory essay on the collection by Alison McQueen.

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.

Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944) is best known for his painting "The Scream", painted in 1893, which has become one of the most iconic images in the modern world. Munch was clear about his own mission in exploring the portrayal of extreme human emotion. "Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied anatomy and dissected corpses", he wrote, "so I try to dissect souls". Perhaps because of the subsequent notoriety of "The Scream" and other works from his intensely productive early period, Munch is often presented as a 19th century figure, an inspiration for and precursor of the modern artists who succeeded him. In contrast, this important new survey, accompanying a major, touring exhibition, shows him to have been fully engaged with modernity, particularly by tracing his involvement with its key methods of representation: photography, cinematography and the theatrical mise-en-scene. In addition to a large number of instantly recognisable masterpieces, this lavishly illustrated book reproduces many lesser-known works, as well as a wide selection of Munch's photographs and sketches. Munch's photographs in particular will be a revelation to many; his moody and atmospheric self-portraits and the studio shots of models that are placed alongside finished paintings reveal the way one medium fed into another. With essays by an international selection of authorities, extracts of previously untranslated writings by the artist, a chronology and bibliography, this is the most comprehensive and revealing survey of Munch's work yet published.

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.

Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. This analysis of the historical formation of the observer is a compelling account of the prehistory of the society of the spectacle. In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision. Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

A thought-provoking analysis of Frederic Bazille that sheds new light on the origins and dilemmas of modernist painting.

Studio companion of Monet and Renoir, protege of Courbet, and friend of Manet, Frederic Bazille (1841-1870) is more often remembered for the financial assistance he provided to future Impressionists than for his own vivid and often unsettling work. In this first complete book in English devoted to Bazille, Dianne Pitman seeks to situate this often overlooked artist within the complex and contradictory art world of the 1860s. In the process, she greatly refines our understanding of the modernist tradition.

Pitman examines a series of major paintings and critical essays by Bazille and his contemporaries and frames them within the modernist discourse about purity, or respecting the proper limits of the medium. She stresses the problem of pose -- the way in which painted subjects seem to respond to the artist's presence and the implied presence of the beholder -- and explores his responses to the new medium of photography, the idea of painting without subject matter, the burden of tradition, and the problematic of self-portraiture. As these themes again come to the fore in much of the most controversial art and criticism of the late twentieth century, this study also represents an important contribution to the ongoing debate concerning the oppositions and continuities between modernism and postmodernism.

"The Culture of Love" interprets the sweeping change in loving that spanned a period when scientific discoveries reduced the terrors and dangers of sex, when new laws gave married women control over their earnings and their bodies, when bold novelists and artists shook off the prudishness and hypocrisy that so paralyzed the Victorians. As public opinion, family pressure, and religious conviction loosened, men and women took charge of their love. Stephen Kern argues that, in contrast to modern sex, Victorian sex was anatomically constricted, spatially confined, morally suspect, deadly serious, and abruptly over.

Kern divides love into its elements and traces profound changes in each: from waiting for love to ending it. Most revealing are the daring ways moderns began to talk about their current lovemaking as well as past lovers. While Victorians viewed jealousy as a "foreign devil," moderns began to acknowledge responsibility for it. Desire lost its close tie with mortal sin and became the engine of artistic creation; women's response to the marriage proposal shifted from mere consent to active choice. There were even new possibilities of kissing, beyond the sudden, blind, disembodied, and censored Victorian meeting of lips.

Kern's evidence is mainly literature and art, including classic novels by the Brontes, Flaubert, Hugo, Eliot, Hardy, Forster, Colette, Proust, Mann, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Musil as well as the paintings and sculptures of Millais, Courbet, Gerome, Rodin, Munch, Klimt, Schiele, Valadon, Chagall, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi. The book's conceptual foundation comes from Heidegger's existential philosophy, inparticular his authentic-inauthentic distinction, which Kern adapts to make his overall interpretation and concluding affirmation of the value of authenticity: "The moderns may have lost some of the Victorians' delicacy and poignancy, perhaps even some of their heroism, but in exchange became more reflective of what it means to be a human being in love and hence better able to make that loving more their very own."

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.

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)

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.