Making a strong case for a revaluation of Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), this collection argues that significant aspects of Lewis's writing, painting, and thinking have not yet received the attention they deserve. The contributors explore Lewis's contributions to the production and circulation of modernism and assess the links between Lewis's writing and painting and the work of other key contemporary figures, to position Lewis not only as one of the first twentieth-century cultural critics but also as one who anticipated the work of the Frankfurt School and other social theorists. Familiar topics and themes such as Vorticism receive fresh appraisals, and Lewis's significance as a philosopher-critic, novelist, and artist becomes fully realized in the context of his associations with important figures such as John Rodker, Charlie Chaplin, Evelyn Waugh, Naomi Mitchison, and Rebecca West. Lewis emerges as a figure whose writings on politics, corporate patronage, shell shock, anthropology, art, and cinema extend their influence into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The reader Art and its global histories represents an invaluable teaching tool, offering content ranging from academic essays and excerpts, new translations, interviews with curators and artists, to art criticism. The introduction sets out the state of art history today as it undergoes the profound shift of a 'global turn'. Particular focus is given to British India, which represents a shift from the usual attention paid to Orientalism and French art in this period. The sources and debates on this topic have never before been brought together in a satisfactory way and this book will represent a particularly significant and valuable contribution for postgraduate and undergraduate art history teaching. -- .

Pictures are often admired for their aesthetic merits but they are rarely treated as if they had as much to offer as the written word. They are often overlooked as objects of analysis themselves, and tend to be seen simply as adjuncts to the text. Images, however, are not passive, and have a direct impact that engages attention in ways independent of any specific text. Advertising, entertainment and propaganda have realised the extent of this power to shape ideas, but the scientific community has hitherto neglected the ways in which visual material conditions the ways in which we think. With subjects including prehistoric artworks, excavation illustrations, artists' impressions of ancient sites and peoples and contemporary landscapes, photographs and drawings, this study explores how pictures shape our perceptions and our expectations of the past. This volume is not concerned with the accuracy of pictures from the past or directly about the past itself, but is interested instead in why certain subjects are selected, why they are depicted the way they are, and what effects such images have on our idea of the past. This collection constitutes a ground-breaking study in historiography which radically reassesses the ways that history can be written.

A member of the art history generation from the golden age of the 1920s and 1930s, Millard Meiss (1904-1975) developed a new and multi-faceted methodological approach. This book lays the foundation for a reassessment of this key figure in post-war American and international art history. The book analyses his work alongside that of contemporary art historians, considering both those who influenced him and those who were receptive to his research. Jennifer Cooke uses extensive archival material to give Meiss the critical consideration that his extensive and important art historical, restoration and conservation work deserves. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, historiography and heritage management and conservation.

Where, how, by whom and for what were the first museums of contemporary art created? These are the key questions addressed by J. Pedro Lorente in this new book. In it he explores the concept and history of museums of contemporary art, and the shifting ways in which they have been imagined and presented. Following an introduction that sets out the historiography and considering questions of terminology, the first part of the book then examines the paradigm of the Musee des Artistes Vivants in Paris and its equivalents in the rest of Europe during the nineteenth century. The second part takes the story forward from 1930 to the present, presenting New York's Museum of Modern Art as a new universal role model that found emulators or 'contramodels' in the rest of the Western world during the twentieth century. An epilogue, reviews recent museum developments in the last decades. Through its adoption of a long-term, worldwide perspective, the book not only provides a narrative of the development of museums of contemporary art, but also sets this into its international perspective. By assessing the extent to which the great museum-capitals - Paris, London and New York in particular - created their own models of museum provision, as well as acknowledging the influence of such models elsewhere, the book uncovers fascinating perspectives on the practice of museum provision, and reveals how present cultural planning initiatives have often been shaped by historical uses.

"A Companion volume to James Hall's perennial seller Dictionary of Subjects & Symbols in Art. which deals with the subject matter of Christian and Western art, the present volume includes the art of Egypt, the ancient Near East, Christian and classical Europe, India and the Far East. Flail explores the language of symbols in art showing how paintings, drawings and sculpture express man shades of meaning from simple, everyday hopes and fears to the profoundest philosophical and religious aspirations. The book explains and interprets symbols from many cultures, and over 600 illustrations clarify and complement the text. There are numbered references throughout the text to the sacred Iitcra-1 ture, myths and legends in which the symbols had their origins. Details of English translations of the works are in the bibliography. The book includes an appendix of the transcription of Chinese, notes and references, bibliography, chronological tables and index."

This title was first published in 2003. The essay collection explores the conjunctions of nation, gender, and visual representation in a number of countries-including Ireland, Scotland, Britain, Canada, Finland, Russia and Germany-during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors show visual imagery to be a particularly productive focus for analysing the intersections of nation and gender, since the nation and nationalism, as abstract concepts, have to be "embodied" in ways that make them imaginable, especially through the means of art. They explore how allegorical female figures personify the nation across a wide range of visual media, from sculpture to political cartoons and how national architectures may also be gendered. They show how through such representations, art reveals the ethno-cultural bases of nationalisms. Through the study of such images, the essays in this volume cast new light on the significance of gender in the construction of nationalist ideology and the constitution of the nation-state. In tackling the conjunctions of nation, gender and visual representation, the case studies presented in this publication can be seen to provide exciting new perspectives on the study of nations, of gender and the history of art. The range of countries chosen and the variety of images scrutinised create a broad arena for further debate.

What is cultural about vision--or visual about culture? In this ambitious book, Whitney Davis provides new answers to these difficult and important questions by presenting an original framework for understanding visual culture. Grounded in the theoretical traditions of art history, A General Theory of Visual Culture argues that, in a fully consolidated visual culture, artifacts and pictures have been made to be seen in a certain way; what Davis calls "visuality" is the visual perspective from which certain culturally constituted aspects of artifacts and pictures are visible to informed viewers. In this book, Davis provides a systematic analysis of visuality and describes how it comes into being as a historical form of vision. Expansive in scope, A General Theory of Visual Culture draws on art history, aesthetics, the psychology of perception, the philosophy of reference, and vision science, as well as visual-cultural studies in history, sociology, and anthropology. It provides penetrating new definitions of form, style, and iconography, and draws important and sometimes surprising conclusions (for example, that vision does not always attain to visual culture, and that visual culture is not always wholly visible). The book uses examples from a variety of cultural traditions, from prehistory to the twentieth century, to support a theory designed to apply to all human traditions of making artifacts and pictures--that is, to visual culture as a worldwide phenomenon.

Title first published in 2003. In this detailed study of the landscapes and rural scenes of Britain and France made by artists like George Clausen, Philip Wilson Steer, Augustus John, Laura Knight, J. D. Fergusson and Spencer Gore, Ysanne Holt investigates the imaginary geographies behind the pictures and reconsiders the relationship between national identity, 'Englishness' and the native landscape. Combining close investigation of important works with a broader enquiry into the appeal of the Mediterranean for an age preoccupied with cultural degeneracy and bodily health, Ysanne Holt draws fascinating conclusions about the impact of modernism on the British tradition of landscape painting.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Workerism and Autonomia were prominent Marxist currents. However, it is rarely acknowledged that these movements inspired many visual artists such as the members of Archizoom, Gordon Matta-Clark and Gianfranco Baruchello. This book focuses on the aesthetic and cultural discourse developed by three generations of militants (including Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Bifo and Silvia Federici), and how it was appropriated by artists, architects, graphic designers and architectural historians such as Manfredo Tafuri. Images of Class signposts key moments of this dialogue, ranging from the drawings published on classe operaia to Potere Operaio's exhibition in Paris, the Metropolitan Indians' zines, a feminist art collective who adhered to the Wages for Housework Campaign, and the N group's experiments with Gestalt theory. Featuring more than 140 images of artworks, many published here for the first time, this volume provides an original perspective on post-war Italian culture and new insights into some of the most influential Marxist movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries worldwide.

An Invitation to Biblical Poetry is an accessibly written introduction to biblical poetry that emphasizes the aesthetic dimensions of poems and their openness to varieties of context. It demonstrates the irreducible complexity of poetry as a verbal art and considers the intellectual work poems accomplish as they offer aesthetic experiences to people who read or hear them. Chapters walk the reader through some of the diverse ways biblical poems are organized through techniques of voicing, lineation, and form, and describe how the poems' figures are both culturally and historically bound and always dependent on later reception. The discussions consider examples from different texts of the Bible, including poems inset in prose narratives, prophecies, psalms, and wisdom literature. Each chapter ends with a reading of a psalm that offers an acute example of the dimension under discussion. Students and general readers are invited to richer and deeper readings of ancient poems and the subjects, problems, and convictions that occupy their imagination.

Alchemy in Contemporary Art analyzes the manner in which twentieth-century artists, beginning with French Surrealists of the 1920s, have appropriated concepts and imagery from the western alchemical tradition. This study examines artistic production from 1920 to the present, with an emphasis on the 1970s to 2000, discussing familiar names such as Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, and Anselm Kiefer, as well as many little known artists of the later twentieth century. It provides a critical overview of the alchemical tradition in 20th-century art, and of the use of occultist imagery as a code for political discourse and polemical engagement. This study is the first to examine the influence of alchemy and the Surrealist tradition in Australian art as well as also in Eastern European and Mexican art. In addition, the text considers the manner in which women artists such as Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, and Rebecca Horn have critically revised the traditional sexist imagery of alchemy and occultism for their own feminist purposes.

Contemporary Art in Latin America, the second book in Black Dog Publishing's ARTWORLD series, is a bold and rousing exploration of the most significant art being created by Latin American's today. Emerging from complex cultural roots, Latin American art is extraordinarily diverse and original. This book covers a variety of contemporary art methods, looking at photography, installation art, sculpture, painting, textiles, and examines the styles, current perceptions and culture of this region. Contemporary Art in Latin America is an engaging, challenging and inspiring comprehensive survey of the most important art being made in the region today. With essays by esteemed writers and practitioners, and profiles of both established and emerging artists, this volume delves into the region's past, present and future, to examine its position within the contemporary global art world. The work featured shatters stereotypes and clear-cut distinction of the area, blending the personal and the political, the local and the global. Artists featured include Helio Oiticica, Doris Salcedo, Cildo Meireles, Lygia Clark, Jesus Rafael Soto, Lygia Pape, Gabriel Orozco, Oscar Munoz and Miguel Calderon. With beautiful images and an equally impressive list of contributors, this volume is the ultimate resource for anyone interested in art produced in Latin America today.

This book examines the art of Cobra, a network of poets and artists from Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam (1948-1951). Although the name stood for the organizers' home cities, the Cobra artists hailed from countries in Europe, Africa, and the United States. This book investigates how a group of struggling young artists attempted to reinvent the international avant-garde after the devastation of the Second World War, to create artistic experiments capable of facing the challenges of postwar society. It explores how Cobra's experimental, often collective art works and publications relate to broader debates in Europe about the use of images to commemorate violent events, the possibility of free expression in an art world constrained by Cold War politics, the breakdown of primitivism in an era of colonial independence movements, and the importance of spontaneity in a society increasingly dominated by the mass media. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, 20th-century modern art, avant-garde arts, and European history.

Everything you need to know to put your drawings and paintings into perspective! If the concept of perspective makes you think of confusing angles, fancy measuring gadgets and complicated theories, get ready for a very pleasant surprise. In this comprehensive guide, Phil Metzger demystifies perspective, presenting it simply as a matter of mimicking the way we see--like the way a distant mountain appears blue, or a road seems to narrow in the distance. The Art of Perspective offers simple but powerful techniques for achieving a convincing illusion of depth and distance, whether it's a few inches in a still life or miles in a landscape. Start simple, with atmospheric perspective and intuitive techniques, and gradually progress to linear perspective and more complex challenges such as stairways, curves and reflections. Use the engaging, step-by-step demonstrations and exercises to try out each essential concept for yourself, making lessons clearer and more memorable. Learn theories that apply to all mediums, with specific advice for achieving effects using acrylic, oil, watercolor and pencil. Get the inside scoop on professional tricks and shortcuts that make perspective easier than ever! Forget everything you think you know (or don't know) about perspective. This book builds an easy-to-follow, ground-up understanding of how to turn a flat painting or drawing surface into a living, breathing, dimensional scene that lures viewers in. No matter how you look at it, it's the ultimate guide to perspective for artists of every medium and skill level.

Cross-Cultural Issues in Art provides an engaging introduction to aesthetic concepts, expanding the discussion beyond the usual Western theorists and Western examples. Steven Leuthold discusses both contemporary and historical issues and examples, incorporating a range of detailed case studies from African, Asian, European, Latin American, Middle Eastern and Native American art. Individual chapters address broad intercultural issues in art, including Art and Culture, Primitivism and Otherness, Colonialism, Nationalism, Art and Religion, Symbolism and Interpretation, Style and Ethnicity, A Sense of Place, Art and Social Order, Gender, and the Self, considering these themes as constructs that frame our understanding of art. Cross-Cultural Issues in Art draws upon ideas and case studies from cultural and critical studies, art history, ethno-aesthetics and area studies, visual anthropology, and philosophy, and will be useful for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in these fields.

Philosophy of art is traditionally concerned with the definition, appreciation and value of art. Through a close examination of art from recent centuries, Art and Phenomenology is one of the first books to explore visual art as a mode of experiencing the world itself, showing how in the words of Merleau-Ponty Painting does not imitate the world, but is a world of its own .

An outstanding series of chapters by an international group of contributors examine the following questions:

• Paul Klee and the body in art
• colour and background in Merleau-Ponty 's phenomenology of art
• self-consciousness and seventeenth-century painting
• Vermeer and Heidegger
• philosophy and the painting of Rothko
• embodiment in Renaissance art
• sculpture, dance and phenomenology.

Art and Phenomenology is essential reading for anyone interested in phenomenology, aesthetics, and visual culture.

This title was first published in 2002. This really is a text that will fill a long-felt want. A key figure in that history is Amedee Ozenfant, painter, critic and friend of Le Corbusier, who in the first half of this century founded a school in London where he conducted experiments and wrote about color in architecture. Those experiments have been reconstructed for the book, which also includes reprints of his most important articles on the subject. This book provides a fascinating survey of this most contemporary topic that will inspire and inform designers and architects. Color has often been regarded as the final dressing of a building, subject to the vagaries of fashion and left to the client to select. There have been a number of studies of polychromy in the architecture of the more distant past, particularly in relation to modern conservation practices, but there is little or nothing on the architectural color of recent times, and especially within Modernism.

This book traces the ideal of total environmental control through the intellectual and geographic journey of Knud Loenberg- Holm, a forgotten Danish architect who promoted a unique systemic, cybernetic, and ecological vision of architecture in the 1930s. A pioneering figure of the new objectivity and international constructivism in Germany in 1922 and a celebrated peer of radical figures in De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and Russian constructivism, when he emigrated to Detroit in 1923 he introduced the vanguard theory of productivism through his photography, essays, designs, and pedagogy. By following Loenberg- Holm's ongoing matrix of relations until the postwar era with the European vanguards in CIAM and former members of the Structural Study Associates (SSA), especially Fuller, Frederick Kiesler, and C. Theodore Larson, this study shows how their definition of building as a form of environmental control anticipated the contemporary disciplines of industrial ecology, industrial metabolism, and energy accounting.

The phenomenon of iconoclasm, expressed through hostile actions towards images, has occurred in many different cultures throughout history. The destruction and mutilation of images is often motivated by a blend of political and religious ideas and beliefs, and the distinction between various kinds of 'iconoclasms' is not absolute. In order to explore further the long and varied history of iconoclasm the contributors to this volume consider iconoclastic reactions to various types of objects, both in the very recent and distant past. The majority focus on historical periods but also on history as a backdrop for image troubles of our own day. Development over time is a central question in the volume, and cross-cultural influences are also taken into consideration. This broad approach provides a useful comparative perspective both on earlier controversies over images and relevant issues today. In the multimedia era increased awareness of the possible consequences of the use of images is of utmost importance. 'Iconoclasm from Antiquity to Modernity' approaches some of the problems related to the display of particular kinds of images in conflicted societies and the power to decide on the use of visual means of expression. It provides a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of the phenomenon of iconoclasm. Of interest to a wide group of scholars the contributors draw upon various sources and disciplines, including art history, cultural history, religion and archaeology, as well as making use of recent research from within social and political sciences and contemporary events. Whilst the texts are addressed primarily to those researching the Western world, the volume contains material which will also be of interest to students of the Middle East.

For the past century psychoanalysts have attempted to understand the psychology of art, artists and aesthetic experience. This book examines how contemporary psychoanalytic theory provides insight into understanding the psychological sources of creativity, Modern Art and modern artists.

The Artist s Mind revisits the lives of eight modern artists including Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, from a psychoanalytical viewpoint. It looks at how opportunities for a new approach to art at the turn of the twentieth century offered artists a chance to explore different forms of creativity and artistic ambition. Key areas of discussion include:

• developmental sources of the aesthetic sense
• psychological functions of creativity and art
• psychology of beauty, ugliness and the Sublime.
• co-evolution of the modern self, modernism and art.
• cultural context of creativity, artistic identify and aesthetic experience.

Through the examination of great artists lives and psychological dynamics, the author articulates a new psychoanalytic aesthetic model that has both clinical and historical significance. As such this book is essential reading for all those with an interest in the origins and fate of Modern Art.

Through a carefully curated selection of quotations, images and interviews, Artists on Art reveals what matters most to the masters. You'll discover how the giants of the different artistic genres developed their distinctive visual styles, the core ideas that underpin their practice and, most importantly, what art means to you.

Challenging the notion that fashion and furniture were or are separate enterprises and distinct material aesthetic traditions, this collection focuses on three material and conceptual links central to understanding the relationship between interior design and fashion-the body, fabric, and space. The volume considers the changing visual, material and spatial character, methodological challenges posed by, and formal, political and historiographical significance of, a wide range of British, European and North American case studies since the eighteenth century. The volume's eleven case studies allow the reader to understand connecting notions behind the formation of interiors and fashionable clothing. The essays combine a wide range of significant and challenging new examples alongside powerful reversionary analyses of the various periods, artists, designers, and their best and significant objects. Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity is concerned not only with fabric, but also with the body and the implications of embodiment in the practices of both design domains which are equally invested in the comfort, aesthetic pleasure, extension and support of the body in different and yet seemingly identical ways.

Over the course of her career, Barbara Stafford has established herself the preeminent scholar of the intersections of the arts and sciences, articulating new theories and methods for understanding the sublime, the mysterious, the inscrutable. Omnivorous in her research, she has published work that embraces neuroscience and philosophy, biology and culture, pinpointing connections among each discipline's parallel concerns. Ribbon of Darkness is a monument to the scope of her work and the range of her intellect. At times associative, but always incisive, the essays in this new volume take on a distinctly contemporary purpose: to uncover the ethical force and moral aspects of overlapping scientific and creative inquiries. This shared territory, Stafford argues, offers important insights into--and clarifications of--current dilemmas about personhood, the supposedly menial nature of manual skill, the questionable borderlands of gene editing, the potentially refining value of dualism, and the limits of a materialist worldview. Stafford organizes these essays around three concepts that structure the book: inscrutability, ineffability, and intuitability. All three, she explains, allow us to examine how both the arts and the sciences imaginatively infer meaning from the "veiled behavior of matter," bringing these historically divided subjects into a shared intellectual inquiry and imbuing them with an ethical urgency. A vanguard work at the intersection of the arts and sciences, this book will be sure to guide readers from either realm into unfamiliar yet undeniably fertile territory.