A captivating historical look at the cultural and artistic significance of shells in early modern Europe Among nature's most artful creations, shells have long inspired the curiosity and passion of artisans, artists, collectors, and thinkers. Conchophilia delves into the intimate relationship between shells and people, offering an unprecedented account of the early modern era, when the influx of exotic shells to Europe fueled their study and representation as never before. From elaborate nautilus cups and shell-encrusted grottoes to delicate miniatures, this richly illustrated book reveals how the love of shells intersected not only with the rise of natural history and global trade but also with philosophical inquiry, issues of race and gender, and the ascent of art-historical connoisseurship. Shells circulated at the nexus of commerce and intellectual pursuit, suggesting new ways of thinking about relationships between Europe and the rest of the world. The authors focus on northern Europe, where the interest and trade in shells had its greatest impact on the visual arts. They consider how shells were perceived as exotic objects, the role of shells in courtly collections, their place in still-life tableaus, and the connections between their forms and those of the human body. They examine how artists gilded, carved, etched, and inked shells to evoke the permeable boundary between art and nature. These interactions with shells shaped the ways that early modern individuals perceived their relation to the natural world, and their endeavors in art and the acquisition of knowledge. Spanning painting and print to architecture and the decorative arts, Conchophilia uncovers the fascinating ways that shells were circulated, depicted, collected, and valued during a time of remarkable global change.

Over 700 images create a portal into the architectural style of Oaxaca, Mexico's most colonial city. Oaxaca's Spanish Colonial architecture dates back to the early sixteenth century, and these images explore an aesthetic that has hardly altered in all that time. Great wooden doors, studded with hand wrought iron hardware, create punctuation in walls of desert-hued sandstone. Oaxaca is celebrated as the cultural and artistic center of Mexico, and this book will help illustrate why. The rich textures and colors of the diverse doorways will inspire anyone in search of a Southwestern palette.

The beautiful and varied glassware lines produced by the Central Glass Works of Wheeling, West Virginia, from the 1910s through 1939, are presented in 470 eye-catching images. Distributed throughout the United States, Continental Europe, and Australia, they include the company's depression era stemware and tumblers, compotes, marmalades, covered candy dishes, dresser and vanity trays, pitchers, tankards, jugs, candlesticks, and barware in a striking variety of colors and forms. Close attention is paid to the many etched patterns Central Glass Works produced. The text provides an informative history of the company, descriptions of the product lines, colors, and etched patterns. Values are found both in the captions and in tables spread throughout the text. This book is an essential reference for all who appreciate glassware produced during the early twentieth century.

Icons of Sound: Voice, Architecture, and Imagination in Medieval Art brings together art history and sound studies to offer new perspectives on medieval churches and cathedrals as spaces where the perception of the visual is inherently shaped by sound. The chapters encompass a wide geographic and historical range, from the fifth to the fifteenth century, and from Armenia and Byzantium to Venice, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela. Contributors offer nuanced explorations of the intangible sonic aura produced in these places by the ritual music and harness the use of digital technology to reconstruct historical aural environments. Rooted in a decade-long interdisciplinary research project at Stanford University, Icons of Sound expands our understanding of the inherently intertwined relationship between medieval chant and liturgy, the acoustics of architectural spaces, and their visual aesthetics. Together, the contributors provide insights that are relevant across art history, sound studies, musicology, and medieval studies.

This book uses intermedial theories to study collage and montage, tracing the transformation of visual collage into photomontage in the early avant-garde period. Magda Dragu distinguishes between the concepts of collage and montage, as defined across several media (fine arts, literature, music, film, photography), based on the type of artistic meaning they generate, rather than the mechanical procedures involved. The book applies theories of intermediality to collage and montage, which is crucial for understanding collage as a form of cultural production. Throughout, the author considers the political implications, as collages and montages were often used for propagandistic purposes. This book combines research methods used in several areas of inquiry: art history, literary criticism, analytical philosophy, musicology, and aesthetics.

This volume explores how Italian institutions, dealers, critics, and artists constructed a modern national identity for Italy by exporting - literally and figuratively - contemporary art to the United States in key moments between 1929 and 1969. From artist Fortunato Depero opening his Futurist House in New York City to critic Germano Celant launching Arte Povera in the United States, Raffaele Bedarida examines the thick web of individuals and cultural environments beyond the two more canonical movements that shaped this project. By interrogating standard narratives of Italian Fascist propaganda on the one hand and American Cold War imperialism on the other, this book establishes a more nuanced transnational approach. The central thesis is that, beyond the immediate aims of political propaganda and conquering a new market for Italian art, these art exhibitions, publications, and the critical discourse aimed at American audiences all reflected back on their makers: they forced and helped Italians define their own modernity in relation to the world's new dominant cultural and economic power. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, social history, exhibition history, and Italian studies.

GARDNER'S ART THROUGH THE AGES: A CONCISE GLOBAL HISTORY, 4th Edition provides you with a comprehensive, beautifully illustrated tour of the world's great artistic traditions, and, with MindTap, all of the online study tools you need to excel in your art history course! Easy to read and understand, the fourth edition includes new artists and provides a rich cultural backdrop for each of the covered periods and geographical locations.

Uniquely bridges the aesthetics of imperfection with areas of philosophy, music, literature, urban environment, architecture, art theory, and cultural studies. Divided into seven thematic sections to offer a comprehensive study of how imperfectionist aesthetics connect to art and everyday life. As an interdisciplinary study, this book will appeal to a broad range of scholars and advanced students working in philosophical aesthetics, cultural studies, and across the humanities.

Praised throughout the cartoon industry by such luminaries as Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening, and Will Eisner, this innovative comic book provides a detailed look at the history, meaning, and art of comics and cartooning.

This volume critically investigates how art historians writing about Central and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries engaged with periodization. At the heart of much of their writing lay the ideological project of nation-building. Hence discourses around periodization - such as the mythicizing of certain periods, the invention of historical continuity and the assertion of national specificity - contributed strongly to identity construction. Central to the book's approach is a transnational exploration of how the art histories of the region not only interacted with established Western periodizations but also resonated and 'entangled' with each other. In their efforts to develop more sympathetic frameworks that refined, ignored or hybridized Western models, they sought to overcome the centre-periphery paradigm which equated distance from the centre with temporal belatedness and artistic backwardness. The book thus demonstrates that the concept of periodization is far from neutral or strictly descriptive, and that its use in art history needs to be reconsidered. Bringing together a broad range of scholars from different European institutions, the volume offers a unique new perspective on Central and Eastern European art historiography. It will be of interest to scholars working in art history, historiography and European studies.

This book presents the latest research that shows how design thinking, making, and acting contribute to the co-designing and development of products, spaces, and services with people living with dementia. We know that there is currently no cure for the 130+ kinds of dementia that millions of people live with all over the world, but the designed interventions such as the products, spaces, and services described in this book can address stigma, isolation, loss of confidence, and raise awareness and greater understanding of dementia. This book showcases a range of innovative and creative design interventions that have been developed to break the cycle of well-established opinions, strategies, mindsets, and ways of doing that tend to remain unchallenged in the health and social care of people living with dementia. The book will be of interest to scholars working in product design, service design, experience design, architecture, design research, information design, user-centred design, and design for health.

A growing awareness of climate change and looming planetary crisis has put unprecedented pressure on the near future, leading to an increasing amount of fiction being set there. But what do these disparate works have in common, other than their temporal setting? And what can the imagination of the near future tell us about where we live now? The Near Future in 21st Century Fiction ranges across novels and films to reveal how our contemporary near future splits between two divergent paths. One seeks to retreat from climate change and the disruption it threatens to affluent lifestyles; the other tries to imagine new forms of community, and radical change, but struggles to locate a genre adequate to the task. It in this struggle, however, that we begin to glimpse the outlines of an emergent near future form: a revolution fit for the Anthropocene.

Japan's Meiji Restoration brought swift changes through Japanese adoption of Western-style modernization and imperial expansion. Fanning the Flames brings together a range of scholarly essays and collected materials from the Hoover Institution Library & Archives detailing how Japanese propaganda played an active role in fostering national identity and mobilizing grassroots participation in the country's transformation and wartime activities, starting with the First Sino-Japanese War to the end of World War II.

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the social practice of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of taste. For the first time, this book unites sociologists and other social scientists with artists and curators, art theorists and art educators, and art, design and cultural historians who engage with the practice of taste as it relates to encounters with art, cultural institutions and the practices of everyday life, in national and transnational contexts. The volume is divided into four sections. The first section on 'Taste and art', shows how art practice was drawn into the sphere of 'good taste', contrasting this with a post-conceptualist critique that offers a challenge to the social functions of good taste through an encounter with art. The next section on 'Taste making and the museum' examines the challenges and changing social, political and organisational dynamics propelling museums beyond the terms of a supposedly universal institution and language of taste. The third section of the book, 'Taste after Bourdieu in Japan' offers a case study of the challenges to the cross-cultural transmission and local reproduction of 'good taste', exemplified by the complex cultural context of Japan. The final section on 'Taste, the home and everyday life' juxtaposes the analysis of the reproduction of inequality and alienation through taste, with arguments on how the legacy of ideas of 'good taste' have extended the possibilities of experience and sharpened our consciousness of identity. As the first book to bring together arts practitioners and theorists with sociologists and other social scientists to examine the legacy and continuing validity of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of taste, this publication engages with the opportunities and problems involved in understanding the social value and the cultural dispositions of taste 'after Bourdieu'. It does so at a moment when the practice of taste is being radically changed by the global expansion of cultural choices, and the emergence of deploying impersonal algorithms as solutions to cultural and creative decision-making.

John Fleming and Hugh Honour were giants of the art world. To Susanna Johnston, however, they were simply John and Hugh, an inseparable couple and two of her closest friends. They had met in the 1950s at Gli Scafari, the opulent villa on the Italian Riviera of the blind writer Percy Lubbock - one of Henry James' inamoratos and Iris Origo's step father - when she was twenty one, on holiday and penniless. Originally part of the Anglo-Italian world orbiting Bernard Berenson's I Tatti and Harold Acton's La Pietra in Tuscany, John Fleming and Hugh Honour were bemused by being lionised themselves by the super-rich who beat a path to their Villa Marchio. This candid memoir, full of private anecdotes, illuminates these two celebrated, passionate, and very English geniuses, through a close-up of a well-seasoned friendship of over 60 years.

• Showcases today's most influential architectural voices who have been instrumental in shifting the direction of design in the last decade • Includes perspectives of influential architects, practitioners and academics, as well as critics including philosophers • Case studies and essays engage and deploy a range of topics and technologies from speculative realism and Object Oriented Ontology to high computation, Big Data, parametricism, digital fabrication, artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality • A rigorous account of architecture's theoretical and technological concerns over the last decade

Social groups formed around shared religious beliefs encountered significant change and challenges between the 1860s and the 1970s. This book is the first collection of essays of its kind to take a broad, thematically-driven case study approach to this genre of architecture and its associated visual culture and communal experience. Examples range from Nuns' holy spaces celebrating the life of St Theresa of Lisieux to utopian American desert communities and their reliance on the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin. Modern religious architecture converses with a broad spectrum of social, anthropological, cultural and theological discourses and the authors engage with them rigorously and innovatively. As such, new readings of sacred spaces offer new angles and perspectives on some of the dominant narratives of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries: empire, urban expansion, pluralism and modernity. In a post-traditional landscape, religious architecture suggests expansive ways of exploring themes including nostalgia and revivalism; engineering and technological innovation; prayer and spiritual experimentation; and the beauty of holiness for a brave new world. Shaped by the tensions and anxieties of the modern era and powerfully expressed in the space and material culture of faith, the architecture presented here creates a set of new turning points in the history of the built environment.

- Presents novel framing of contemporary problems of design - Includes historical examples drawn from every continent and time period - Proposes specific reforms - Richly illustrated with over 80 black and white images

Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body brings together cutting-edge scholarship examining the myriad ways that architects, urban planners, medical practitioners, and everyday people have applied modern ideas about health and the body to the spaces in which they live, work, and heal. The book's contributors explore North American and European understandings of the relationship between physical movement, bodily health, technological innovation, medical concepts, natural environments, and architectural settings from the nineteenth century through the heyday of modernist architectural experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s and onward into the 1970s. Not only does the book focus on how professionals have engaged with the architecture of healing and the body, it also explores how urban dwellers have strategized and modified their living environments themselves to create a kind of vernacular modernist architecture of health in their homes, gardens, and backyards. This new work builds upon a growing interdisciplinary field incorporating the urban humanities, geography, architectural history, the history of medicine, and critical visual studies that reflects our current preoccupation with the body and its corresponding therapeutic culture.

Art can be fun and so should be speaking about it. This alphabetically-organised book is an excellent introduction to the arts for kids. Designed in an engaging, colourful style, the selection nurtures children's interest in artistic creation at large. It not only delivers basic knowledge but also acts like a good jumping-off point for exploring art. To match the shorter attention span of many children, the book has a dynamic structure. The definitions are short but comprehensive and each word or concept is attractively illustrated.

Spanning 25 projects in as many years, Walls and Boxes charts the remarkable commitment to Modernist design principles that characterise the practice of Guard Tillman Pollock Architects. Mark Guard, Steven Pollock and Keith Tillman present a body of residential work that combines contemporary technology with the ethos of the heroic period of Modern architecture. The practice builds contemporary homes that are full of space and light without compromising their function or form. This book chronicles the results, a transformable architecture of exceptional practicality and great beauty, with many bespoke details developed by the firm over the years. . Through a rich combination of photography, before-and-after plans, and axonometrics, Walls and Boxes illustrates 25 projects built between 1990 and 2015. Each demonstrates the application of the practice's rigorous design attitude to different building types, ranging from modest apartments to new-build houses. At a time when specialisation is being met with a general scepticism, Walls and Boxes presents a studio whose devotion to a particular aesthetic and sense of space shows an insight and building expertise that borders on the philosophical. The office's wealth of experience fuses British, North American and European training to bring about elegant residential projects on an international scale that are as functional as they are stylish. As much a nuanced exploration of Guard Tillman Pollock's practice as it is a powerful manifesto on the timeless principles of form, space and light, Walls and Boxes can be utilised as a guidebook into producing transformative residential spaces that resist the constraints and limitations so often imposed by twenty-first-century urban life. Walls and Boxes is about design for modern times, a book for anyone interested in both the creative process of architecture and in looking for new ways of improving the spaces we inhabit.