Losing Your Head: Abjection, Aesthetic Conflict, and Psychoanalytic Criticism looks at the subject of beheading in art as a trope of the destruction of the mind. This book discusses both psychoanalytic theory and art criticism. It addresses critics, readers, and spectators interested in the keys of interpretation that psychoanalysis can offer, and analysts who are curious to know if artists can help them refine the tools they use every day. It asks whether artists have something to say about the concepts of reverie and negative reverie or about change as aesthetic transformation, and about aesthetic experience as a paradigm of what is most true and most profound in analysis. Why write about beheading? Many art galleries feature paintings of heroines performing this cruel act: Delilah, Salome, Judith, Yael, and others. At the antithesis to this, there is another theme to be found in painting that consistently garners attention: namely, the so-called "Sacred Conversation," in which the Madonna holds a small child in her lap and their gazes cross. The first scene depicts how a mind is destroyed, the second how it is born. Losing Your Head analyzes well-known artwork from classical literature, cinema, and contemporary art to enhance psychoanalytic understanding.

The "Song" series of artbooks have covered the sky and the earth - it was only a matter of time before we explored the seas for some inspiration! Mermaid Song Volume One contains an exquisite collection of portraits that celebrate the fabled water-breathers in all their sea-foam sexiness! Any fisherman would gladly crash his boat on the reef for a peek at these aquatic creations, as seen by artists like Arantza, Fastner & Larson, Bruce Colero, Pelaez, James Hottinger, David Dunstan, Malachi Maloney, and many more. Follow the call of these sirens -- their song is the sweetest yet!

Portraits of Queen Marie Leszczinska (1703-1768) were highly visible in eighteenth-century France. Appearing in royal chateaux and, after 1737, in the Parisian Salons, the queen's image was central to the visual construction of the monarchy. Her earliest portraits negotiated aspects of her ethnic difference, French gender norms, and royal rank to craft an image of an appropriate consort to the king. Later portraits by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Carle Van Loo, and Jean-Marc Nattier contributed to changing notions of queenship over the course of her 43 year tenure. Whether as royal wife, devout consort, or devoted mother, Marie Leszczinska's image mattered. While she has often been seen as a weak consort, this study argues that queenly images were powerful and even necessary for Louis XV's projection of authority. This is the first study dedicated to analyzing the queen's portraits. It engages feminist theory while setting the queen's image in the context of portraiture in France, courtly factional conflict, and the history of the French monarchy. While this investigation is historically specific, it raises the larger problem of the power of women's images versus the empowerment of women, a challenge that continues to plague the representation of political women today.

The evil villainess Madame Santina has created an unstoppable army of megasexual zombies, and it's up to Magenta and her faithful sidekick Lucrezia to save the day! Or have one hell of a wild night -- whichever seems the most fun! Retro fun and naughtiness from the minds of Celestino Pes and Nik Guerra.

Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus and Medusa, one of Renaissance Italy's most complex sculptures, is the subject of this study, which proposes that the statue's androgynous appearance is paradoxical. Symbolizing the male ruler overcoming a female adversary, the Perseus legitimizes patriarchal power; but the physical similarity between Cellini's characters suggests the hero rose through female agency. Dr. Corretti argues that although not a surrogate for powerful Medici women, Cellini's Medusa may have reminded viewers that Cosimo I de' Medici's power stemmed in part from maternal influence. Drawing upon a vast body of art and literature, Dr. Corretti concludes that Cellini and his contemporaries knew the Gorgon as a version of the Earth Mother, whose image is found in art for Medici women.

In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

"Europe and the World Beyond" focuses geographically on peoples of South America and the Mediterranean as well as Africa but conceptually it emphasizes the many ways that visual constructions of blacks mediated between Europe and a faraway African continent that was impinging ever more closely on daily life, especially in cities and ports engaged in slave trade.

"The Eighteenth Century "features a particularly rich collection of images of Africans representing slavery s apogee and the beginnings of abolition. Old visual tropes of a master with adoring black slave gave way to depictions of Africans as victims and individuals, while at the same time the intellectual foundations of scientific racism were established.

This book examines how African-American writers and visual artists interweave icon and inscription in order to re-present the black female body, traditionally rendered alien and inarticulate within Western discursive and visual systems. Brown considers how the writings of Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Andrea Lee, Gloria Naylor, and Martha Southgate are bound to such contemporary, postmodern visual artists as Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, Betye Saar, and Faith Ringgold. While the artists and authors rely on radically different media-photos, collage, video, and assembled objects, as opposed to words and rhythm-both sets of intellectual activists insist on the primacy of the black aesthetic. Both assert artistic agency and cultural continuity in the face of the oppression, social transformation, and cultural multiplicity of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book examines how African-American performative practices mediate the tension between the ostensibly de-racialized body politic and the hyper-racialized black, female body, reimagining the cultural and political ground that guides various articulations of American national belonging. Brown shows how and why black women writers and artists matter as agents of change, how and why the form and content of their works must be recognized and reconsidered in the increasingly frenzied arena of cultural production and political debate.

The premise of this volume is that the ubiquity of lactation imagery in early modern visual culture and the discourse on breastfeeding in humanist, religious, medical, and literary writings is a distinct cultural phenomenon that deserves systematic study. Chapters by art historians, social and legal historians, historians of science, and literary scholars explore some of the ambiguities and contradictions surrounding the issue, and point to the need for further study, in particular in the realm of lactation imagery in the visual arts. This volume builds on existing scholarship on representations of the breast, the iconography of the Madonna Lactans, allegories of abundance, nature, and charity, women mystics' food-centered practices of devotion, the ubiquitous practice of wet-nursing, and medical theories of conception. It is informed by studies on queer kinship in early modern Europe, notions of sacred eroticism in pre-tridentine Catholicism, feminist investigations of breastfeeding as a sexual practice, and by anthropological and historical scholarship on milk exchange and ritual kinship in ancient Mediterranean and medieval Islamic societies. Proposing a variety of different methods and analytical frameworks within which to consider instances of lactation imagery, breastfeeding practices, and their textual references, this volume also offers tools to support further research on the topic.

Drawing on a panorama of materials from 1930s France, Eroticism and Photography in 1930s French Magazines takes a new approach to studying a certain type of image from a certain time. Previously untapped by historians, magazines such as Paris Magazine, Paris Sex Appeal, Pages Folles, Pour lire a deux, and Scandale are inscribed in the context of the interwar years. They reflect that context through a bawdy style, an audacious and multifaceted aesthetic - from kitsch to modern - and permeability to reproducibility. With a focus on the photographs as components of the magazines' layout, Alix Agret critically examines their interrelations with texts and graphics without neglecting the history surrounding them, which forms a backdrop to the analyses of this previously unstudied source material. The first study of its kind, this is a timely scholarly contribution to the field of the history of photographs. This book will be of interest to scholars in the field of history of photography, French history, and twentieth-century art history.

A vibrant survey of visual culture in Golden Age Denmark (1801-1864) Following the disastrous outcome of the Napoleonic Wars and national bankruptcy, Denmark affected a remarkable cultural renaissance, spawning such major talents as Hans Christian Andersen, Soren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Orsted. The Golden Age, roughly spanning the first half of the nineteenth century, produced defining images of a peaceful and ordered society as the emerging Copenhagen bourgeoisie asserted a taste for portraits, urban scenes and landscapes that embraced their lifestyles. Artists such as Christen Kobke and C. W. Eckersberg turned their attentions to the people, traditions and customs of their land, encapsulating the quintessence of this celebrated period of cultural richness. Danish Golden Age Painting examines the vital role played by the visual arts within the wider context of the era's social, political, intellectual, scientific, artistic and cultural achievements. Drawing on the best of established and contemporary Danish scholarship, it presents an innovative survey of Danish Golden Age art.

This wide-ranging collection of 50 iconic portraits includes works by many of the world's most renowned artists, each with their own style, technique, and story to tell. Throughout the history of art, most of the world's greatest artists have produced portraits at some point in their careers, whether commissioned by rulers or magnates; created to preserve a cherished friend or relation; or even to capture the artist's own likeness. Arranged chronologically, each of the 50 masterworks in this book exemplifies a moment in history, or a turning point in the artist's career. Van Eyck's A Man in a Turban, Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Sargent's Madame X, Kahlo's Self-Portrait with Necklace, Warhol's Marilyn, and many more world-famous paintings are featured in exquisite full-page reproductions accompanied by engaging and enlightening texts. An introductory essay on the history and importance of the portrait in art history and brief biographies of each artist round out this survey that provides valuable information in an attractive and affordable package.

Whether you re an aspiring artist or new to the medium, seasoned instructor and accomplished artist Nathan Fowkes makes drawing portraits in charcoal not only accessible, but also a real pleasure! From stocking the best supplies to using them effectively, and composing a portrait while avoiding common mistakes, How to Draw Portraits in Charcoal by Nathan Fowkes will place you firmly on the path to producing the charcoal portraits you've dreamed of creating. His easy-to-follow tips, in-depth tutorials, and valuable exercises make this guide your first step toward building an understanding and appreciation for every face you draw. This handy book will equip you with the skills to capture them in beautiful charcoal fashion."

Representations of Renaissance monarchy analyses the portraits and personal imagery of Francis I, one of the most frequently portrayed rulers of sixteenth-century Europe. The distinctive likeness of the Valois king was widely disseminated and perceived by his French subjects, and Tudor and Habsburg rivals abroad. Complementing studies on the representation of Henry VIII, this book makes a dynamic contribution to scholarship on the enterprise of royal image-making in early-modern Europe. The discussion not only highlights the inventiveness of the visual arts in Renaissance France but also alludes to the enduring politics of physical appearance and seductive power of the face and body in modern visual culture. Coinciding with the five hundredth anniversary of Francis I's accession, this book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval and Renaissance art, the history of portraiture or anyone interested in images of monarchy and the history of France. -- .

Erotic encounters have been celebrated by artists from the beginning of time. This irresistible volume presents 120 of the most engagingly erotic paintings, sculptures, prints, and drawings from diverse eras and cultures, coupled with revealing commentaries about their sexual and aesthetic content. Organised unlike any other collection of erotic images, The Art of Arousal traces the course of a sensual relationship. It begins by examining the elements of eroticism, and then progresses from flirtation and seduction through kisses and other foreplay before ultimately arriving at consummation and blissful exhaustion. The irrepressible Dr. Ruth explores every element of sexuality in these provocative works of art, including the pleasures of looking, creative fantasising, and the effects on male and female pleasure of the various positions depicted. All the works in this book have been chosen to meet two essential criteria: everyone portrayed must be having a good time, and each image must satisfy the high aesthetic standards of Dr. Ruth and an art historian friend, who writes with witty scholarship about the artistic and biographical aspects of these remarkable images. Now available in a revised edition that includes stimulating new works by contemporary creators, The Art of Arousal is the perfect gift for your lover who loves art.

This book examines how African-American writers and visual artists interweave icon and inscription in order to re-present the black female body, traditionally rendered alien and inarticulate within Western discursive and visual systems. Brown considers how the writings of Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Andrea Lee, Gloria Naylor, and Martha Southgate are bound to such contemporary, postmodern visual artists as Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, Betye Saar, and Faith Ringgold. While the artists and authors rely on radically different media photos, collage, video, and assembled objects, as opposed to words and rhythm both sets of intellectual activists insist on the primacy of the black aesthetic. Both assert artistic agency and cultural continuity in the face of the oppression, social transformation, and cultural multiplicity of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book examines how African-American performative practices mediate the tension between the ostensibly de-racialized body politic and the hyper-racialized black, female body, reimagining the cultural and political ground that guides various articulations of American national belonging. Brown shows how and why black women writers and artists matter as agents of change, how and why the form and content of their works must be recognized and reconsidered in the increasingly frenzied arena of cultural production and political debate.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2019 SELECTED AS BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES, DAILY TELEGRAPH, NEW STATESMAN, SUNDAY TIMES, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT AND SPECTATOR 'A compendium of high-grade gossip about everyone from Princess Margaret to the Krays, a snapshot of grimy London and a narrative of Freud's career and rackety life and loves ... Leaves the reader itching for more' SUNDAY TIMES, ART BOOK OF THE YEAR Though ferociously private, Lucian Freud spoke every week for decades to his close confidante and collaborator William Feaver - about painting and the art world, but also about his life and loves. The result is this a unique, electrifying biography. In Youth, Feaver conjures Freud's early childhood: Sigmund Freud's grandson, born into a middle-class Jewish family in Weimar Berlin, escaping Nazi Germany in 1934. Following Freud through art school, his time in the Navy during the war, his post-war adventures in Paris and Greece, and his return to Soho - consorting with duchesses and violent criminals, out on the town with Greta Garbo and Princess Margaret - Feaver traces a brilliant, difficult young man's coming of age. 'Brilliant ... Freud would have approved' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Superlative ... packed with stories' GUARDIAN 'Anyone interested in British art needs it' ANDREW MARR, NEW STATESMAN

What makes a classic so timeless? The exquisite curves? The overall design? The ability to go from zero to sixty in neck-snapping seconds? And no, we're NOT talking about cars! Baron Von Lind knows how to create pin-up art that's as bewitching and alluring as anything created in the last century! This second gallery of new pieces celebrates the Baron's need for luscious ladies in lingerie and not-so-innocent smiles on beautiful faces!

Cleopatra has been dead for twenty centuries, but her name still resonates in the west. Her story has the status of a foundation myth. As such, artists of all periods have drawn on it in order to raise questions concerned with the world in which they found themselves living.
This study chooses a number of key occasions from European history on which writers and painters re-imagined Cleopatra. In doing so Mary Hamer takes the reader on a pleasurable intellectual treasure hunt through the ages. In addition, by restoring these works to their original context - political, philosophical and aesthetic - the author opens up unexpected new readings of images and texts which had previously appeared to be self-explanatory.
The purpose of this book is to raise questions about how these images of a dead Egyptian queen were read. Through careful analysis Hamer traces attempts to manipulate attitudes to women and power, women and sexuality and to desire itself. In the case of Tiepolo's Cleopatra, for example, the Queen embodies the desire for knowledge; in post-Revolutionary France, she symbolises political freedom. In the new introductory essay we discover that Cleopatra's role as a focus for cultural debate continues, and that, as previously, much is at stake: it is now the question of her race that is highly contested.

This book reveals how art and sex promoted the desire for the genetically perfect body. Its eight chapters demonstrate that before eugenics was stigmatized by the Holocaust and Western histories were sanitized of its prevalence, a vast array of Western politicians, physicians, eugenic societies, family leagues, health associations, laboratories and museums advocated, through verbal and visual cultures, the breeding of 'the master race'. Each chapter illustrates the uncanny resemblances between models of sexual management and the perfect eugenic body in America, Britain, France, Communist Russia and Nazi Germany both before and after the Second World War. Traced back to the eighteenth-century anatomy lesson, the perfect eugenic body is revealed as athletic, hygienic, 'pure-blooded' and sexually potent. This paradigm is shown to have persisted as much during the Bolshevik sexual revolution, as in democratic nations and fascist regimes. Consistently posed naked, these images were unashamedly exhibitionist and voyeuristic. Despite stringent legislation against obscenity, not only were these images commended for soliciting the spectator's gaze but also for motivating the spectator to act out their desire. An examination of the counter-archives of Maori and African Americans also exposes how biologically racist eugenics could be equally challenged by art. Ultimately this book establishes that art inculcated procreative sex with the Corpus Delecti - the delectable body, healthy, wholesome and sanctioned by eugenicists for improving the Western race.

In 2011, adhering to his mentor Henri Cartier-Bresson's mantra to 'photograph the truth', animation filmmaker Ishu Patel embarks on a photographic journey in southeast Asia. Abandoning moving images to secure a series of still images that capture a uniquely human gesture or powerful thought-provoking story, he prowls both urban and rural areas armed only with a Leica M9 with 35 and 50mm fast lenses. The result is a collection of elusive still images - photographs, mainly in black and white, that tell a story, seize a moment in life or are a witness to joy, struggle or human dignity. Never political or judgmental, the collection comprises Patel's homage to the unsung lives of ordinary Asians, many of whom are increasingly overlooked in today's fast- changing world. Patel also contributes thoughtful essays on the various countries and peoples he has so powerfully photographed.

As one of the first books to treat portraits of early modern women as a discrete subject, this volume considers the possibilities and limits of agency and identity for women in history and, with particular attention to gender, as categories of analysis for women's images. Its nine original essays on Italy, the Low Countries, Germany, France, and England deepen the usefulness of these analytical tools for portraiture. Among the book's broad contributions: it dispels false assumptions about agency's possibilities and limits, showing how agency can be located outside of conventional understanding, and, conversely, how it can be stretched too far. It demonstrates that agency is compatible with relational gender analysis, especially when alternative agencies such as spectatorship are taken into account. It also makes evident the importance of aesthetics for the study of identity and agency. The individual essays reveal, among other things, how portraits broadened the traditional parameters of portraiture, explored transvestism and same-sex eroticism, appropriated aspects of male portraiture to claim those values for their sitters, and, as sites for gender negotiation, resistance, and debate, invoked considerable relational anxiety. Richly layered in method, the book offers an array of provocative insights into its subject.

"The Nude" explores some of the principal ways that paintings of the nude function in the conflicted terrain of culture and society in Europe and America from the fifteenth through twentieth centuries, as set against questions about human sexuality that emerge around differences of class, gender, age, and race. Author Richard Leppert relates the visual history of how the naked body intersects with the foundational characteristics of what it is to be human, measured against a range of basic emotions (happiness, delight, and desire; fear, anxiety, and abjection) and read in the context of changing social and cultural realities. The bodies comprising the Western nude are variously pleasured or tormented, ecstatic or bored, pleased or horrified. In short, as this volume amply demonstrates, the nude in Western art is a terrain on whose surface is written a summation of Western history: its glory but also its degradation.

Figure Drawing for Artists: Making Every Mark Count is not a typical drawing instruction book; it explains the two-step process behind juggernauts like DreamWorks, WB and Disney. Though there are many books on drawing the human figure, none teach how to draw a figure from the first few marks of the quick sketch to the last virtuosic stroke of the finished masterpiece, let alone through a convincing, easy-to-understand method. That changes now! In Figure Drawing for Artists: Making Every Mark Count, award-winning fine artist Steve Huston shows beginners and pros alike the two foundational concepts behind the greatest masterpieces in art and how to use them as the basis for their own success. Embark on a drawing journey and discover how these twin pillars of support are behind everything from the Venus De Milo, to Michelangelo's Sibyl, to George Bellow's Stag at Sharkey's, and how they're the fundamental tools for animation studios around the world. Not to mention how the best comic book artists since the beginnings of the art form use them whether they know it or not. Figure Drawing for Artists: Making Every Mark Count sketches out the same two-step method taught to the artists of DreamWorks, Warner Brothers, and Disney Animation, so pick up a pencil and get drawing. The For Artists series expertly guides and instructs artists at all skill levels who want to develop their classical drawing and painting skills and create realistic and representational art.

Commemorating twenty years of manga, FEMME FATALE showcases of all of the full color artwork from New York Time's Best Selling artist Shuzo Oshimi. Featuring cover art, posters, promotional materials and never before translated comics, this is a definitive compilation of character art from one of the best known manga artists in the 21st Century. Concept art and promotional illustrations from FLOWERS OF EVIL, INSIDE MARI, DRIFTING NET CAFE and BLOOD ON THE RAILS are also included giving readers a deeper look into Oshimi's processes and artistic mind. This collection also includes dozens of never before published in English comic pages that are a must have for Oshimi completionists.