Brilliant and controversial, art critic Sadakichi Hartmann wrote copiously about American and European art and the shaping of American culture during the decades from 1890 to 1910. Jane Weaver has recovered and assembled over fifty of Hartmann's critical writings from influential, though often obscure, turn-of-the-century journals. These reviews and theoretical essays not only provide some of the earliest known criticism of important artists and photographers of the period, but also make Hartmann's fundamental--and uniquely American--definition of modernism available to students of art and cultural history. A most useful adjunct to the text is a complete bibliography of Hartmann's writings on art, as well as an annotated checklist of all the artists treated by Hartmann in this book. Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944), half German, half Japanese, learned the American cast of mind and heart as a beloved young disciple of the aged Walt Whitman. Reflecting the poet's zealous vision, Hartmann's piercing commentaries on the art centers of Boston and New York offer unparalleled documentation of the years before and after 1900.

The depiction of historical humanitarian disasters in art exhibitions, news reports, monuments and heritage landscapes has framed the harrowing images we currently associate with dispossession. People across the world are driven out of their homes and countries on a wave of conflict, poverty and famine, and our main sites for engaging with their loss are visual news and social media. In a reappraisal of the viewer's role in representations of displacement, Niamh Ann Kelly examines a wide range of commemorative visual culture from the mid-nineteenth-century Great Irish Famine. Her analysis of memorial images, objects and locations from that period until the early 21st century shows how artefacts of historical trauma can affect understandings of enforced migrations as an ongoing form of political violence. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of museum and heritage studies, material culture, Irish history and contemporary visual cultures exploring dispossession.

Since 2010 Greece has been experiencing the longest period of austerity and economic downturn in its recent history. Economic changes may be happening more rapidly and be more visible than the cultural effects of the crisis which are likely to take longer to become visible, however in recent times, both at home and abroad, the Greek arts scene has been discussed mainly in terms of the crisis. While there is no shortage of accounts of Greece's economic crisis by financial and political analysts, the cultural impact of austerity has yet to be properly addressed. This book analyses hitherto uncharted cultural aspects of the Greek economic crisis by exploring the connections between austerity and culture. Covering literary, artistic and visual representations of the crisis, it includes a range of chapters focusing on different aspects of the cultural politics of austerity such as the uses of history and archaeology, the brain drain and the Greek diaspora, Greek cinema, museums, music festivals, street art and literature as well as manifestations of how the crisis has led Greeks to rethink or question cultural discourses and conceptions of identity.

An elaborately illustrated A to Z of the face, from historical mugshots to Instagram posts. By turns alarming and awe-inspiring, Face offers up an elaborately illustrated A to Z-from the didactic anthropometry of the late-nineteenth century to the selfie-obsessed zeitgeist of the twenty-first. Jessica Helfand looks at the cultural significance of the face through a critical lens, both as social currency and as palimpsest of history. Investigating everything from historical mugshots to Instagram posts, she examines how the face has been perceived and represented over time; how it has been instrumentalized by others; and how we have reclaimed it for our own purposes. From vintage advertisements for a "nose adjuster" to contemporary artists who reconsider the visual construction of race, Face delivers an intimate yet kaleidoscopic adventure while posing universal questions about identity.

As a woman wielding public authority, Elizabeth I embodied a paradox at the very center of sixteenth-century patriarchal English society. Louis Montrose's long-awaited book, "The Subject of Elizabeth, "illuminates the ways in which the Queen and her subjects variously exploited or obfuscated this contradiction.
Montrose offers a masterful account of the texts, pictures, and performances in which the Queen was represented to her people, to her court, to foreign powers, and to Elizabeth herself. Retrieving this "Elizabethan imaginary" in all its richness and fascination, Montrose presents a sweeping new account of Elizabethan political culture. Along the way, he explores the representation of Elizabeth within the traditions of Tudor dynastic portraiture; explains the symbolic manipulation of Elizabeth's body by both supporters and enemies of her regime; and considers how Elizabeth's advancing age provided new occasions for misogynistic subversions of her royal charisma.
This book, the remarkable product of two decades of study by one of our most respected Renaissance scholars, will be welcomed by all historians, literary scholars, and art historians of the period.

In recent years, many prominent and successful artists have claimed that their primary concern is not the artwork they produce but the artistic process itself. In this volume, Kim Grant analyzes this idea and traces its historical roots, showing how changing concepts of artistic process have played a dominant role in the development of modern and contemporary art. This astute account of the ways in which process has been understood and addressed examines canonical artists such as Monet, Cezanne, Matisse, and De Kooning, as well as philosophers and art theorists such as Henri Focillon, R. G. Collingwood, and John Dewey. Placing "process art" within a larger historical context, Grant looks at the changing relations of the artist's labor to traditional craftsmanship and industrial production, the status of art as a commodity, the increasing importance of the body and materiality in art making, and the nature and significance of the artist's role in modern society. In doing so, she shows how process is an intrinsic part of aesthetic theory that connects to important contemporary debates about work, craft, and labor. Comprehensive and insightful, this synthetic study of process in modern and contemporary art reveals how artists' explicit engagement with the concept fits into a broader narrative of the significance of art in the industrial and postindustrial world.

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) is best known as a media theorist-many consider him the founder of media studies-but he was also an important theorist of art. Though a near-household name for decades due to magazine interviews and TV specials, McLuhan remains an underappreciated yet fascinating figure in art history. His connections with the art of his own time were largely unexplored, until now. In Distant Early Warning, art historian Alex Kitnick delves into these rich connections and argues both that McLuhan was influenced by art and artists and, more surprisingly, that McLuhan's work directly influenced the art and artists of his time. Kitnick builds the story of McLuhan's entanglement with artists by carefully drawing out the connections among McLuhan, his theories, and the artists themselves. The story is packed with big names: Marcel Duchamp, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, and others. Kitnick masterfully weaves this history with McLuhan's own words and his provocative ideas about what art is and what artists should do, revealing McLuhan's influence on the avant-garde through the confluence of art and theory. The illuminating result sheds light on new aspects of McLuhan, showing him not just as a theorist, or an influencer, but as a richly multifaceted figure who, among his many other accolades, affected multiple generations of artists and their works. The book finishes with Kitnick overlaying McLuhan's ethos onto the state of contemporary and post-internet art. This final channeling of McLuhan is a swift and beautiful analysis, with a personal touch, of art's recent transgressions and what its future may hold.

The fact that the entire history of culture and technology could represent a single, continuous expulsion of mankind from the original, paradiese state of nature was already described visionarilyin the Bible and predicted with all its positive and negative consequences. Everyone knows the story of Adam and Eve, of their 'Fall' and their 'Expulsion from Paradise'. Even as a non-Christian it is worth taking a look at the fairytale-like-mythic text of the Old Testament, although the picture and the process completely contradict our current scientific findings. One would almost be inclined to assume that the idea of a primeval paradise is innate in all human beings and that every human being with his becoming, his birth, his childhood and his adulthood experiences something like a Genesis. He is born innocent and helpless, wakes up, looks around, believes to be free, gets to know his time, his surroundings, his life. The final expulsion of every human being from life is his death. He is a sentenced to death. Despite all religious promises, man has always been aware of this fact, also of the fact that he has only this one life and that he ultimately cannot count on the hope that beyond this life there is something that could be called 'salvation', a happy return to the Garden of Eden. As the book shows with numerous, primarily European examples, the history of man is therefore full of efforts to regain here and now the lost paradise, no matter how precarious the result may be. In search of the lost paradises: a somewhat unusual history of man in his relationship to nature, followed by a description of the current state of landscape planning and garden design. In the third, concluding part of the book, the author develops new, strangely surreal and poetic concepts of the treatment of nature, inspired by literature, film, theatre and tourism.Hans Dieter Schaal, born in Ulm in 1943, is an architect, landscape architect, stage designer and exhibition designer. His works, the majority of which have been published by the Axel MengesEdition, have meanwhile reached an audience far beyond his in my homeland. The author lives and works in a village near Biberach an der Riss.

This book, a collection of Alex Danchev's essays on the theme of art, war and terror, offers a sustained demonstration of the way in which works of art can help us to explore the most difficult ethical and political issues of our time: war, terror, extermination, torture and abuse.It takes seriously the idea of the artist as moral witness to this realm, considering war photography, for example, as a form of humanitarian intervention. War poetry, war films and war diaries are also considered in a broad view of art, and of war. Kafka is drawn upon to address torture and abuse in the war on terror; Homer is utilised to analyse current talk of 'barbarisation'. The paintings of Gerhard Richter are used to investigate the terrorists of the Baader-Meinhof group, while the photographs of Don McCullin and the writings of Vassily Grossman and Primo Levi allow the author to propose an ethics of small acts of altruism.This book examines the nature of war over the last century, from the Great War to a particular focus on the current 'Global War on Terror'. It investigates what it means to be human in war, the cost it exacts and the ways of coping. Several of the essays therefore have a biographical focus.

It is astonishing how deeply the figure of Ophelia has been woven into the fabric of Spanish literature and the visual arts - from her first appearance in eighteenth-century translations of Hamlet, through depictions by seminal authors such as Espronceda, Becquer and Lorca, to turn-of-the millennium figurations. This provocative, gendered figure has become what both male and female artists need her to be - is she invisible, a victim, mad, controlled by the masculine gaze, or is she an agent of her own identity? This well-documented study addresses these questions in the context of Iberia, whose poets, novelists and dramatists writing in Spanish, Catalan and Galician, as well as painters and photographers, have brought Shakespeare's heroine to life in new guises. Ophelia performs as an authoritative female author, as new perspectives reflect and authorise the gender diversity that has gained legitimacy in Spanish society since the political Transition.

From antiquity, when the gods and goddesses were commonly featured in works of art, through to the twentieth century, when Surrealists drew on archetypes from the unconscious, artists have embedded symbols in their works. As with previous volumes in the Guide to Imagery series, the goal of this book is to provide contemporary readers and museum visitors with the tools to read the hidden meanings in works of art.
This latest volume is divided thematically into four sections featuring symbols related to time, man, space (earth and sky), and allegories or moral lessons. Readers will learn, for instance, that night, the primordial mother of the cosmos, was often portrayed in ancient art as a woman wrapped in a black veil, whereas day or noon was often represented in Renaissance art as a strong, virile man evoking the full manifestation of the sun's energy.
Each entry in the book contains a main reference image in which details of the symbol or allegory being analyzed are called out for discussion. In the margin, for quick access by the reader, is a summary of the essential characteristics of the symbol in question, the derivation of its name, and the religious tradition from which it springs.

In a book made especially timely by the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill in March 1989, Joseph Jorgensen analyzes the impact of Alaskan oil extraction on Eskimo society. The author investigated three communities representing three environments: Gambell (St. Lawrence Island, Bering Sea), Wainwright (North Slope, Chukchi Sea), and Unalakleet (Norton Sound). The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which facilitated oil operations, dramatically altered the economic, social, and political organization of these villages and others like them. Although they have experienced little direct economic benefit from the oil economy, they have assumed many environmental risks posed by the industry. Jorgensen provides a detailed reminder that the Native villagers still depend on the harvest of naturally-occurring resources of the land and sea-birds, eggs, fish, plants, land mammals and sea mammals. Oil Age Eskimos should be read by all those interested in Native American societies and the policies that affect those societies. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

In a book made especially timely by the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill in March 1989, Joseph Jorgensen analyzes the impact of Alaskan oil extraction on Eskimo society. The author investigated three communities representing three environments: Gambell (St. Lawrence Island, Bering Sea), Wainwright (North Slope, Chukchi Sea), and Unalakleet (Norton Sound). The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which facilitated oil operations, dramatically altered the economic, social, and political organization of these villages and others like them. Although they have experienced little direct economic benefit from the oil economy, they have assumed many environmental risks posed by the industry. Jorgensen provides a detailed reminder that the Native villagers still depend on the harvest of naturally-occurring resources of the land and sea-birds, eggs, fish, plants, land mammals and sea mammals. Oil Age Eskimos should be read by all those interested in Native American societies and the policies that affect those societies. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

A history of the evolving field of African art. This book examines the invention and development of African art as an art historical category. It starts with a simple question: What do we mean when we talk about African art? By confronting the historically shifting answers to this question, Peter Probst identifies "African art" as a conceptual vessel that manifests wider societal transformations. What Is African Art? covers three key stages in the field's history. Starting with the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, the book first discusses the colonial formation of the field by focusing on the role of museums, collectors, and photography in disseminating visual cultures as relations of power. It then explores the remaking of the field at the dawn of African independence with the shift toward contemporary art and the rise of Black Atlantic studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, it examines the post- and decolonial reconfiguration of the field driven by questions of representation, repair, and restitution.