Using empathy, as established by the Vienna School of Art History, complemented by insights on how the mind processes visual stimuli, as demonstrated by late 19th-century psychologists and art theorists, this book puts forward an innovative interpretative method of decoding the forms and spaces of Modern buildings. This method was first developed as scholars realized that the new abstract art appearing needed to be analysed differently than the previous figurative works. Since architecture experienced a similar development in the 1920s and 30s, this book argues that the empathetic method can also be used in architectural interpretation. While most existing scholarship tends to focus on formal and functional analysis, this book proposes that Modern architecture is too diverse to be reduced to a few common formal or ornamental features. Instead, by relying on the viewer's innate psycho-physiological perceptive abilities, sensual and intuitive understandings of composition, form, and space are emphasized. These aspects are especially significant because Modern Architecture lacks the traditional stylistic signs. Including building analyses, it shows how, by visually reducing cubical forms and spaces to linear configurations, the exteriors and interiors of Modern buildings can be interpreted via human perceptive abilities as dynamic movement systems commensurate with the new industrial transportation age. This reveals an inner necessity these buildings express about themselves and their culture, rather than just an explanation of how they are assembled and how they should be used. The case studies highlight the contrasts between buildings designed by different architects, rather than concentrating on the few features that relate them to the zeitgeist. It analyses the buildings directly as the objects of study, not indirectly, as designs filtered through a philosophical or theoretical discourse. The book demonstrates that, with technology and science affecting culture

Widely considered to be the foundational text of the American landscape tradition, Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature urges Americans to value and immerse themselves in their country's landscape, to build American culture from America's nature. Nearly two centuries after the original publication of the essay Nature by Emerson, this captivating book by critic and historian Tyler Green brings together a selection of artistic works in dialog with Emerson's text for the first time. Green also offers his own fascinating take on Nature through new research into how the essay was informed by Emerson's experiences of art and, in turn, how it informed American art well into the twentieth century. The result is a unique melding of essay, art, and ideas that will draw new readers to Emerson's writings, while also introducing a fresh perspective on a critical contribution to the American canon and showing what impact Emerson's text still has for the US to this day.

The authenticity of visual art has always commanded the attention of experts, dealers, collectors, and the art-minded public. Is it "real" or "original" is a way of asking what am I buying? What do I own? What am I looking at? And today more sophisticated questions are being asked: How is authenticity determined and what weight does this determination have in court? This book of essays proposes to answer those questions.
Three lines of inquiry are basic to determining authenticity: a connoisseur's evaluation, historical documentation or provenance, and scientific testing. A connoisseur is an expert who evaluates the "rightness" of a work based on much careful scrutiny of many works by an artist and familiarity with that artist's usual manner of working with materials. In determining provenance, a researcher traces the physical object from the artist through a chain of ownership to the present owner--simple enough in concept, though it assumes that the documentation is not faked or inaccurate. The goal is to ensure that the object is the same one that left the artist's hand. Scientific testing, although sometimes useful, is often longer on promise than result. Dating paint or wood samples, for instance, can show that a painting was made in Rembrandt's lifetime, but it cannot prove that it is by Rembrandt's hand. If expert opinion is divided, and large sums of money are involved, a dispute over authenticity may end up in a court of law, where evaluation of expert opinion evidence can be problematic.
The essays in this book clarify the nature of the methods outlined above and explain, based on case law, the present status of authentication issues in court. Contributors include experts from Christie's, London; Sotheby's, New York; and the former director of the Frick Collection; as well as leading art historians and art dealers; an art conservator; a forensic graphologist; a philanthropist and collector; and a specialist in French art law. Their collective knowledge on issues of authenticity will be invaluable for anyone interested in the world of visual art.

In this book, well-known scholars describe new and exciting approaches to aesthetics, creativity and psychology of the arts, approaching these topics from a point of view that is biological or related to biology and answering new questions with new methods and theories. All known societies produce and enjoy arts such as literature, music and visual decoration or depiction. Judging from prehistoric archaeological evidence, this arose very early in human development. Furthermore, Darwin was explicit in attributing aesthetic sensitivity to lower animals. These considerations lead us to wonder whether the arts might not be evolutionarily based. Although such an evolutionary basis is not obvious on the face of it, the idea has recently elicited considerable attention. The book begins with a consideration of ten theories on the evolutionary function of specific arts such as music and literature. The theory of evolution was first drawn up in biology, but evolution is not confined to biology: genuinely evolutionary theories of sociocultural change can be formulated. That they need to be formulated is shown in several chapters that discuss regular trends in literature and scientific writings. Psychologists have recently rediscovered the obvious fact that thought and perception occur in the brain, so cognitive science moves ever closer to neuroscience. Several chapters give overviews of neurocognitive and neural network approaches to creativity and aesthetic appreciation. The book concludes with two exciting describing brain-scan research on what happens in the brain during creativity and presenting a close examination of the relationship between genetically transmitted mental disorder and creativity.

Leap into Action asks: "What happens when performative arts meet pedagogy?" and views performative teaching as building students' understanding of complex ideas and concepts "through action." It provides the theoretical, philosophical, and conceptual terrain by setting forth the scholarly rationale as to what performative pedagogy is at this moment across Art & Design education. Contributions are made from individuals and groups across art and design disciplines who deploy innovative pedagogic approaches with an emphasis on performativity. To underline that Art & Design does not only happen within the institution, Leap into Action provides rich intertextual material that draws upon the experiences of practitioners. Leap into Action is intended to prompt new angles from which to examine one's practice including and beyond pedagogy, mainly in terms of art, design and performance, and disciplines further afield. Whilst Leap into Action engages with performative pedagogies through disruptions, interruptions, tricksters, liminalities, affective bodies, sensory encounters, and technoparticipation, it calls into question what risk-taking means in an arts school context and the tension (even paradox) that exists between wanting to create a safe, welcoming, and inclusive environment and provoking students out of their comfort zones through experimental performative pedagogy and playfulness. Whilst engagement with performative strategies may be a 'risky' strategy, the rewards can be great. Enter the unknown, take a leap into action, and have fun.

What is it like to be an artist? Drawing on interviews with professional artists, this book takes the reader inside the creative process. The author, an artist and a psychotherapist, uses psychoanalytic theory to shed light on fundamental questions such as the origin of new ideas and the artist's state of mind while working. Based on interviews with 33 professional artists, who reflect on their experiences of creating new works of art, as well as her own artistic practice, Patricia Townsend traces the trajectory of the creative process from the artist's first inkling or 'pre-sense', through to the completion of a work, and its release to the public. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, particularly the work of Donald Winnicott, Marion Milner and Christopher Bollas, the book presents the artist's process as a series of interconnected and overlapping stages, in which there is a movement between the artist's inner world, the outer world of shared 'reality', and the spaces in-between. Creative States of Mind: Psychoanalysis and the Artist's Process fills an important gap in the psychoanalytic theory of art by offering an account of the full trajectory of the artist's process based on the evidence of artists themselves. It will be useful to artists who want to understand more about their own processes, to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in their clinical work, and to anyone who studies the creative process.

The essays collected here investigate art made by women in South Africa between 1910, the year of Union, and 1994, the year of the first democratic election. During this period, complex political circumstances and the impact of modernism in South Africa affected the production of images and objects. The essays explore the ways in which the socio-political circumstances associated with twentieth-century modernity had a paradoxical impact on women. If some were empowered, others were disadvantaged: while some were able to further their social and cultural development and expression, the advancement of others was impeded. The contributors study the lives and achievements of women - named and un-named, black and white, and from different cultural groups and social contexts - and consider objects and images that are historically associated with both 'art' and 'craft'. In all the essays, gender theory is related to South African circumstances. The volume explores gender theory in relation to twentieth-century visual culture and discusses economic conditions and regional geographies as well as notions of identity. It investigates the influence of educational and cultural institutions, the role of theory on art practice, debates about material culture, the power of nationalist ideologies and the role of feminist theories in a changing country. A wide range of visual images and objects provide the touchstone for debate and analysis - paintings, sculptures, photography, baskets, tapestries, embroideries and ceramics - so that the book is richly visual and celebrates the diversity of South African art made by women.

This is the first book to focus on Helhesten (The Hell-Horse), an avant-garde artists' collective active during the Nazi occupation of Denmark and one of the few tangible connections between radical European art groups from the 1920s to the 1960s. The Danes' deliberately unskilled painterly abstraction, embrace of the tradition of dansk folkelighed (the popular) and its iterations of egalitarianism and consensus reform, called for the political relevance of art and interrogated the ideologies underlying culture itself. The group's cultural activism presents an alternative trajectory of continuity, which challenges the customary view of World War II as a moment of artistic rupture.

Visual images and imagery, optical metaphors and iconic quotations are common features in the literary work of Antonio Tabucchi, along with references to the world of painting, photography, and cinema. This book explores the "iconic temptation" of the Italian author, pointing out his visual strategies of representation and poetic thought. By focusing on the visual intertextuality of his fiction, it discusses questions of style and content whilst also emphasizing the role of images as a privileged means of narrative knowledge and philosophical insight. Drawing on the visual studies and on postmodernist theory and criticism, this study offers a comprehensive inquiry into the visual poetics of one of Europe's most innovative writers.

The book is an analytical survey of the thought about painting and sculpture as it unfolded from the early eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. This was the period during which theories of the visual arts, particularly of painting and sculpture, underwent a radical transformation, as a result of which the intellectual foundations of our modern views on the arts were formed. Because this transformation can only be understood when seen in a broad context of cultural, aesthetic and philosophical developments of the period, Moshe Barasch surveys the opinions of the artists, and also treats in some detail the doctrines of philosophers, poets and critics. Barasch thus traces for the reader the entire development of modernism in art and art theory.

The aesthetic and intellectual developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that changed our views of the artistic image emphasized some central problems of critical reflection that became the major themes of any thought on art. The artistic symbol, the comprehensive system of the arts, and the relationship of one art with another are discussed in detail. We see the origins of a new perception of the artist's position, as well as the rise of new values in art, such as the role of the grotesque and the ugly in art. In his discussion of Baudelaire's analysis of Goya's monsters, Barasch concludes that the modern world is reflected in art whose beauty is independent of the beauty of nature. The book includes thirty-one black and white illustrations.

Since the nineteenth century, when art history became an established academic discipline, works of art have been "read" in a variety of ways. These different ways of describing and interpreting art are the methodologies of artistic analysis, the divining rods of meaning. Regardless of a work's perceived difficulty, an art object is, in theory, complex. Every work of art is an expression of its culture (time and place) and its maker (the artist) and is dependent on its media (what it's made of). The methodologies discussed here--formal analysis, iconology and iconography, Marxism, feminism, biography and autobiography, psychoanalysis, structuralism, race and gender--reflect the multiplicity of meanings in an artistic image. The second edition includes nineteen new images, new sections on race, gender, orientalism and colonialism, along with a new epilogue that approaches a single painting to illustrate the different methodological viewpoints.
Contents
1. What Is Art?
2. Formalism and Style
3. Iconography
4. Contextual Approaches I: Marxism, Orientalism, Colonialism, and Racial Iconography
5. Contextual Approaches II: Feminism and Gender
6. Biography and Autobiography
7. Semiotics I: Structuralism and Post-Structuralism
8. Semiotics II: Deconstruction
9. Psychoanalysis I: Freud
10. Psychoanalysis II: Winnicott and Lacan
11. Aesthetics and Psychoanalysis: Roger Fry and Roland Barthes

This important addition to our understanding of art history's masterworks puts some of the world's most famous paintings under a magnifying glass to uncover their most small and subtle elements and all they reveal about a bygone time, place, and culture. Guiding our eye to the minutiae of subject and symbolism, authors Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen allow even the most familiar of pictures to come alive anew through their intricacies and intrigues. Is the bride pregnant? Why does the man wear a beret? How does the shadow of war hang over a scene of dancing? Along the way, we travel from Ancient Egypt through to modern Europe, from the Renaissance to the Roaring Twenties. We meet Greek heroes and poor German poets and roam from cathedrals to cabaret bars, from the Garden of Eden to a Garden Bench in rural France. As we pick apart each painting and then reassemble it like a giant jigsaw puzzle, these celebrated canvases captivate not only in their sheer wealth of details but also in the witness they bear to the fashions and trends, people and politics, loves and lifestyles of their time. About the series Bibliotheca Universalis - Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe!

Featuring some of the major voices in the world of art history, this volume explores the methodological aspects of comparison in the historiography of the discipline. The chapters assess the strengths and weaknesses of comparative practice in the history of art, and consider the larger issue of the place of comparative in how art history may develop in the future. The contributors represent a comprehensive range of period and geographic command from antiquity to modernity, from China and Islam to Europe, from various forms of art history to archaeology, anthropology and material culture studies. Art history is less a single discipline than a series of divergent scholarly fields - in very different historical, geographic and cultural contexts - but all with a visual emphasis on the close examination of objects. These fields focus on different, often incompatible temporal and cultural contexts, yet nonetheless they regard themselves as one coherent discipline - namely the history of art. There are substantive problems in how the sub-fields within the broad-brush generalization called 'art history' can speak coherently to each other. These are more urgent since the shift from an art history centered on the western tradition to one that is consciously global.

In the middle of the electromagnetic spectrum between the binary extremes of black and white it’s not gray, as you might expect, but green. And within green’s bandwidth there are more tonal variations than any other colour can make. Maybe this is why - envy, naivete, and money aside - green is generally synonymous with good. Green is paradise for Islam, luck for the Irish, and a healthy planet for environmentalists. Whereas the industrial past was grey, the future is green. LA+ Green explores the green spectrum from plants to politics and from art to science, with contributions from: Noam Chomsky; Robert D. Bullard; Kassia St. Clair; Neil M. Maher; Rob Levinthal; Sonja Dümpelmann; Peder Anker; Robert Mcdonald; Parker Sutton; Tamara Toles O’Laughlin; Nicholas Pevzner; Michael Marder; Shannon Mattern; Michael Geffel; Brian Osborn; Julian Bolleter; Cristina Ramalho; Robert Freestone; Richard Weller; Michael Geffel; Brian Osborn; Julian Raxworthy.

First published in 1983. This anthology of sixty-nine essays drawn from fourteen different journals was assembled in order to reproduce in convenient form some of the more important articles on British painting published from 1849 to 1860 in Great Britain. Reviews of major exhibitions form a large part of the collection, but essays treating individual artists, discussions of the effect of state patronage of the arts and attempts to assess the uniqueness of the English tradition of painting are also included. This title will be of great interest to students of Art History.

When viewing the picture of a beautiful sunset, how many of us realise that, while we admire it as a work of art, we have just taken the very first step toward pornography? And that both the beauty in the sunset and the senses that recognise such beauty are very likely to be anti-art? Making a radical departure from the conventional wisdom on art and beauty, this book presents the startling thesis that things of beauty are not only unrelated to art but often responsible for pornography.

Emerging Landscapes brings together scholars and practitioners working in a wide range of disciplines within the fields of the built environment and visual arts to explore landscape as an idea, an image, and a material practice in an increasingly globalized world. Drawing on the synergies between the fields of architecture and photography, this collection takes a multidisciplinary approach, combining practice-based research with scholarly essays. It explores and critically reassesses the interface between representation - the imaginary and symbolic shaping of the human environment - and production - the physical and material changes wrought on the land. At a time of environmental crisis and the 'end of nature, 'shifting geopolitical boundaries and economic downturn, Emerging Landscapes reflects on the state of landscape and its future, mapping those practices that creatively address the boundaries between possibility, opportunity and action in imagining and shaping landscape.

Why does art matter to us, and what makes good art? Why is the role of imagination so important in art? Illustrated with carefully chosen color and black-and-white plates of examples from Michelangelo to Matisse and Poussin to Jackson Pollock, "Revealing Art" explores some of the most important questions we can ask about art. Matthew Kieran clearly but forcefully asks how art inspires us and disgusts us and whether artistic judgment is simply a matter of taste, and if art can be immoral or obscene, should it be censored? He brings such abstract issues to life with fascinating discussions of individual paintings, photographs and sculptures, such as Michelangelo's "Pieta," Andres Serrano's" Piss Christ" and Jackson Pollock's "Summertime."
He also suggests some answers to problems that any one in an art gallery or museum is likely to ask themselves: what is a beautiful work of art, and can art really reveal something true about our own nature?
"Revealing Art" is ideal for anyone interested in debates about art today, or who has simply stood in front of a painting and felt baffled.

Designing Modern Norway: A History of Design Discourse is an intellectual history of design and its role in configuring the modern Norwegian nation state. Rather than a conventional national design history survey that focuses on designers and objects, this is an in-depth study of the ideologies, organizations, strategies and politics that combined might be said to have "designed" the modern nation's material and visual culture. The book analyses main tropes and threads in the design discourse generated around key institutions such as museums, organisations and magazines. Beginning with how British and continental design reform ideas were mediated in Norway and merged with a nationalist sentiment in the late nineteenth century, Designing Modern Norway traces the tireless and wide-ranging work undertaken by enthusiastic and highly committed design professionals throughout the twentieth century to simultaneously modernise the nation by design and to nationalise modern design. Bringing the discussion up towards the present, the book concludes with an examination of how Norway's new-found wealth has profoundly changed the production, mediation and consumption of design.

The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture collects thirty essays from a transdisciplinary array of experts on biology in art and architecture. The book presents a diversity of hybrid art-and-science thinking, revealing how science and culture are interwoven. The book situates bioart and bioarchitecture within an expanded field of biology in art, architecture, and design. It proposes an emergent field of biocreativity and outlines its historical and theoretical foundations from the perspective of artists, architects, designers, scientists, historians, and theoreticians. Includes over 150 black and white images.

On the leading edge of trauma and archival studies, this timely book engages with the recent growth in visual projects that respond to the archive, focusing in particular on installation art. It traces a line of argument from practitioners who explicitly depict the archive (Samuel Beckett, Christian Boltanski, Art & Language, Walid Raad) to those whose materials and practices are archival (Miroslaw Balka, Jean-Luc Godard, Silvia Kolbowski, Boltanski, Atom Egoyan). Jones considers in particular the widespread nostalgia for 'archival' media such as analogue photographs and film. He analyses the innovative strategies by which such artefacts are incorporated, examining five distinct types of archival practice: the intermedial, testimonial, personal, relational and monumentalist.

If it is true that a painting can 'think visually', then it is also true that Diderot was the first to say so - and he has spelled out this concept better than anyone else. Diderot's Salons show that the 'imaginal' sense that arises from the engagement with a picture needs to be investigated using the concepts of ekphrasis and theatricality - the capacity to explore the power of pictures in relation to the composition of the scene, to the expressive and pantomimic gestures, and to what can be called a 'theory of affections'. The book will focus on an issue that pertains to the theory of pictures, on a question that is ground-breaking in the English-speaking academic context: how can we look at a picture in order to rethink aesthetics as a discipline that allows us to look at pictures from a philosophical point of view? The Salons demonstrate that the 'imaginal' process leading to knowledge always emerges from the picture itself, and that this process always needs to be supported by a method of inquiry that can rightly be called a philosophical method - as Diderot was a philosopher himself. Even when approaching this issue from a contemporary perspective, this method should always be related to the concepts of ekphrasis and theatricality. Fundamental, however, is also the 'pathetic', the emotionally stimulating, due to its essential relation to the enjoyment of pictures - something rooted in aesthetic disinterestedness, absorption and, conversely, voyeurism.

Art Fundamentals 2nd Edition is a fully revised and updated back-to-basics title, packed with the fundamental concepts, conventions, and theory every beginner artist needs to create successful work. This essential book is written by industry experts who thoroughly address key basics including color and light, composition, perspective and depth, and anatomy in a series of insightful chapters. As well as being the perfect introduction for newcomers, Art Fundamentals 2nd Edition also offers experienced artists the chance to brush up on their theory and discover new tricks, tips, and techniques to advance their art even further. Richly illustrated throughout for optimal learning, each section of the book is specifically designed to guide the reader through the essential yet often challenging elements that make up the foundations of art, no matter which medium or technique is used. As fascinating and illuminating as it is practical and essential, Art Fundamentals 2nd Edition contains the foundations of art, presented, taught, and completely demystified for the today's artist.

The influence of Roland Barthes on Burgin's work is well documented. Equally, Burgin's prominence as an artist and theorist concerned with text and image offers a productive dialogue with Barthes' work. Victor Burgin has long been considered both theorist and practitioner, while Barthes is more known as a theorist and writer. In bringing to the fore Barthes's practice of painting and drawing, Barthes/Burgin prompts a new critical consideration of Barthes/Burgin, theory/practice, writing/making and criticality/visuality. Barthes/Burgin features two new interviews with Burgin, one concerned with his turn to new digital practices and the other a reflection on his reading of Roland Barthes. Also included are images and texts from the artists and an essay critically examining Barthes' exercises in drawing and painting.