Contents:
Introduction 1. Antiquity; Attitudes of the Bible; Classical Antiquity; Causes of blindness; Blindness and guilt; The blind seer; Ate 2. The Blind in the Early Christian World; The healing of the blind; Blindness and revelation; the story of Paul; A concluding observation 3. The Middle Ages; The Antichrist; Allegorical blindness; The blind beggar; The blind and his guide 4. The Renaissance and its Sequel; The blind beggar; Metaphocial blindness; The revival of the blind seer; Early secularization of the blind; The blind beggar in the seventeenth century 5. The Disenchantment of Blindness: Diderot's Lettre sur les aveugles

Issues of identity and authenticity present perennial challenges to both Native Americans and critics of their art. Vickers examines the long history of dehumanizing depictions of Native Americans while discussing such purveyors of stereotypes as the Puritans, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Hollywood. These stereotypes abetted a national policy robbing Indians of their cultural identity. As a contrast to these, he examines the work of white authors and artists such as Helen Hunt Jackson, Oliver La Farge, the Taos Society of Artists, and Frank Waters, who created more archetypal fictional Indian characters. In the second half of the book, Vickers explores the work of Indian artists and writers, such as Edgar Heap of Birds, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Linda Hogan, and Sherman Alexie who craft humanizing new images of authenticity and legitimacy, bridging the gap between stereotype and archetype. This is an essential book for all readers with an interest in the tragic history of Indian-white conflict. ""Vickers is one of the few to consider artists and writers in relation to each other. He offers a refreshingly commonsensical approach.""-Herta Wong, University of California, Berkley

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.

An anthology of Pablo Picasso's statements about art

During the late Soviet period, the art collective known as the Mitki emerged in Leningrad. Producing satirical poetry and prose, pop music, cinema, and conceptual performance art, this group fashioned a playful, emphatically countercultural identity with affinities to European avant-garde and American hippie movements. More broadly, Alexandar Mihailovic shows, the Mitki pioneered a form of political protest art that has since become a centerpiece of activism in post-Soviet Russia, most visibly today in groups such as Pussy Riot. He draws on extensive interviews with members of the collective and illuminates their critique of the authoritarian state, militarism, and social strictures from the Brezhnev years to the present.

Contrary to critics who have called it the "undecade," the 1970s were a time of risky, innovative art-and nowhere more so than in Britain, where the forces of feminism and labor politics merged in a radical new aesthetic. In Art Labor, Sex Politics Siona Wilson investigates the charged relationship of sex and labor politics as it played out in the making of feminist art in 1970s Britain. Her sustained exploration of works of experimental film, installation, performance, and photography maps the intersection of feminist and leftist projects in the artistic practices of this heady period. Collective practice, grassroots activism, and iconoclastic challenges to society's sexual norms are all fundamental elements of this theoretically informed history. The book provides fresh assessments of key feminist figures and introduces readers to less widely known artists such as Jo Spence and controversial groups like COUM Transmissions. Wilson's interpretations of two of the best-known (and infamous) exhibitions of feminist art-Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document and COUM Transmissions' Prostitution-supply a historical context that reveals these works anew. Together these analyses demonstrate that feminist attention to sexual difference, sex, and psychic formation reconfigures received categories of labor and politics. How-and how much-do sexual politics transform our approach to aesthetic debates? What effect do the tropes of sexual difference and labor have on the very conception of the political within cultural practice? These are the questions that animate Art Labor, Sex Politics as it illuminates an intense and influential decade of intellectual and artistic experimentation.

Before porcelain became commonplace, tin-glazed earthenware was, for a time, the preferred material for home use, produced as fashionable tableware and ornaments. The golden age of tin glaze products was the 1700s with more than 300 workshops throughout Europe. By the end of the century, tin glaze wares had practically been driven out by Chinese and European porcelain and the cheaper English creamware. Today, we still find the beauty of tin-glazed earthenware compelling: its brilliant white glaze and decorations in bright, intense colours while details of original use and significance may be obscure. This book recounts the story of tin-glazed earthenware with special focus on the production in the Netherlands, France, and Germany. It is the first publication of its kind in Denmark since Emil Hannover wrote Keramisk Haandbog (Pottery & Porcelain: a Handbook for Collectors) almost one hundred years ago. Much has happened in ceramics research since then, and the survey is made in light of recent research in this field as are the authors own conclusions in this book. Commentaries are based on Designmuseum Danmarks large collection of faience, the most extensive and finest in Denmark with magnificent pieces collected over a period of 125 years. The book contains detailed descriptions of the tin glaze production techniques and decoration of the finished wares with anything from naturalistic floral decorations to the blue decorations inspired by Chinese porcelain. Furthermore, it outlines how new types of tableware including large tureens, sauce boats, wine coolers, and special dessert tableware were gaining ground on well-laid tables. Finally, there is focus on the distribution of tin glaze wares and how many ceramicists would travel from one factory to the next thus quickly spreading new fashion trends. The catalogue raisonne contains more than 250 items, most of which are described and photographed for the first time. The publication was made possible with generous support from the New Carlsberg Foundation.

This book examines the overlapping worlds of art and medicine in late-nineteenth-century France. It sheds new light on the relevance of the visual in medical and scientific cultures, and on the relationship between artistic and medical practices and imagery. By examining previously unstudied sources that traverse disciplinary boundaries, this original study rethinks the politics of medical representations and their social impact. Through a focused examination of paintings from the 1886 and 1887 Paris Salons that portray famous men from the medical and scientific elite - Louis Pasteur, Jules-Emile Pean and Jean-Martin Charcot - along with the images and objects that these men made for personal and occupational purposes, Hunter argues that artworks and medical collections played a key role in forming the public face of scientific medicine. -- .

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.

An introduction to the theatrical art of comic storytelling that originated in the Edo period, Rakugo sheds light on Japanese culture as a whole: its aesthetics, social relations, and learning styles. Enriched with personal anecdotes, Rakugo explicates the art's contemporary performance culture: the image, training and techniques of the storytellers, the venues where they perform, and the role of the audience in sustaining the art. Laurie Brau inquires into how this comic art form participates in the discourse of heritage, serving as a symbol of the Edo culture, while continuing to appeal to Japanese today. Written in an accessible manner, this book is appropriate for all levels of student or researcher.

This is a truly encyclopedic survey of artists' responses - both 'official' and personal - to 'the horrors of war'. "Art and War" reveals the sheer diversity of artists' portrayals of this most devastating aspect of the human condition - from the 'heroic' paintings of Benjamin West and John Singer Sargent to brutal and iconic works by artists from Goya to Picasso, and the equally oppositional work of Leon Golub, Nancy Spero and others who reacted with fury to the Vietnam War. Laura Brandon pays particular attention to work produced in response to World War I and World War II, as well as to more recent art and memorial work by artists as diverse as Barbara Kruger, Alfredo Jarr and Maya Lin. She looks finally to the reactions of contemporary artists such as Langlands and Bell to the US invasion in 2001 of Afghanistan and the 'War on Terror'.

This eclectic collection of academic essays, creative writing, and mixed media photo-images focuses on myriad representations of disability. In its various components, the volume covers time periods from the seventeenth century to the contemporary era, diverse geographic areas, and genres from plays to novels to short stories to poems to visual depictions. The essays gathered here are grounded in analyses from disability studies, postcolonial studies, and trauma studies, among others, and will be of interest not only to scholars working in these fields, but also to Hispanists and those who pursue interdisciplinary studies.

Healthy spirit in a healthy body was the foundational slogan of the physical culture campaign. By the beginning of the 1930s, sports had become one of the most frequently pictured subjects of art. Images of beautiful sportswomen and muscular athletes were widely used by the Soviet mass media. Sportsmen were found on every « collective portrait of Soviet people; they appeared on almost every significant officially commissioned work, be it a large-scale oil painting for the Soviet exhibition pavilion or decoration in a theater, club, place of culture, or metro station. They were featured on posters, covers of Soviet magazines, on television news, and even in movies. Soviet textile and porcelain designers widely used sport motifs. In fact, the amount of the sport-related visual material suggests that the images of sports constituted a genre on its own in official Stalinist art. The primary focus of this research is the representation of the sporting body, and the social and ideological forces to which the athlete's body was exposed. This is also an attempt to position the body of the Soviet athlete in the context of Soviet mythology and reconnect it with the greater context of body representation in pre-Bolshevik and late Stalinist traditions.