Where Would the Button Be Without the Button Hole?
This book is about designs born of necessity; often spontaneously, always pragmatically. It is also about the particular sensibility of graphic designer George Tscherny and his ability to find beauty or art in the most ordinary things, and to communicate this appreciation to others. Experience his infectious enthusiasm for what could be called "anonymous", "ad hoc", or "vernacular" design; for objects that have an aesthetic appeal in spite of themselves; for creations that are both ingenious and ingenuous. Tscherny heavily illustrates the book with items from his personal collection, analyzing everything from the folding lunch box, to the vintage re-closeable bottle, to the artlessly fashioned paper clip, safety pin and wire hanger. These are just a sampling of the many objects he has collected. This book gives the reader a glimpse into his world. George Tscherny began his professional career as a graphic designer in New York in 1950. He served two terms as president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). In 1997, he was inducted into the New York Art Directors Hall of Fame. A comprehensive selection of his work is included in the Graphic Design Archives at RIT.
French Baroque Ornament
Meticulously reproduced from a valuable portfolio by a notable 19th-century French artist, 124 black-and-white illustrations capture the lavish devices and grand sweep of Louis IV-era Baroque design. A gorgeous population of elaborate architectural ornaments, decorative motifs, and border elements, this collection of royalty-free art will inspire ideas for -- and immediately embellish -- a host of craft, design, and graphics projects. An exhaustive reference for artists and Baroque design enthusiasts.
The Native American Curio Trade in New Mexico
Drawing from archival resources and original research and interviews, this book tells the rich and complex story of the Indian curio trade in New Mexico. Starting with the arrival of the railroad in 1880, Pueblo and Navajo artisans collaborated with non-Indian traders and dealers to invent artifacts and souvenirs that had no purpose but to satisfy the growing demand for Native-made objects. From its inception, the curio trade comprised cottage industries, retail spaces, and a vast mail-order trade, selling items ranging from silver and turquoise jewelry, pottery, to handbags and toys. The curio trade had a lasting impact and helped popularize Native American art in the Southwest.
The Cave Painters
The Cave Painters is a vivid introduction to the spectacular cave paintings of France and Spain--the individuals who rediscovered them, theories about their origins, their splendor and mystery. Gregory Curtis makes us see the astonishing sophistication and power of the paintings and tells us what is known about their creators, the Cro-Magnon people of some 40,000 years ago. He takes us through various theories--that the art was part of fertility or hunting rituals, or used for religious purposes, or was clan mythology--examining the ways interpretations have changed over time. Rich in detail, personalities, and history, The Cave Painters is above all permeated with awe for those distant humans who developed--perhaps for the first time--both the ability for abstract thought and a profound and beautiful way to express it.
Talking With the Clay
When you hold a Pueblo pot in your hands, you feel a tactile connection through the clay to the potter and to centuries of tradition. You will find no better guide to this feeling than Talking with the Clay. Stephen Trimble's photographs capture the spirit of Pueblo pottery in its stunning variety, from the glittering micaceous jars of Taos Pueblo to the famous black ware of San Ildefonso Pueblo, from the bold black-on-white designs of Acoma Pueblo to the rich red and gold polychromes of the Hopi villages. His portraits of potters communicate the elegance and warmth of these artists, for this is the potters' book. Revealed through dozens of conversations, their stories and dreams span seven generations and more than a century, revealing how pottery making helps bridge the gap between worlds, between humans and clay, springing from old ways but embracing change. In this revised, expanded, and redesigned edition, Trimble brings his classic into the twenty-first century with interviews and photographs from a new generation of potters working to preserve the miraculous balance between tradition and innovation.
Visual Culture in Spain and Mexico
Visual culture in Spain and Mexico analyses films, paintings and museum exhibitions to show how aspects of hispanic visual culture 'manage' or 'mediate' risk, as articulated stylistically and ideologically in the visual artefact. The book is divided into six chapters plus an Introduction. The first three chapters deal with Mexico or more accurately aspects of life in Mexico City; the other three with Spain or more precisely with the Basque Country and aspects of cultural appropriation which include but also exceed Basque cultural politics. The book is at one and the same time a fine set of specific, detailed essays on visual cultural artefacts and their histories/modes of consumption and reception, and a broader meditation on the role of visual culture in an age increasingly characterised by doom-laden analyses of global panics, pandemics and jihads. The study also reflects the continuing hybridization of Hispanic Studies into the eclecticism of Cultural and Visual Studies, and the re-siting of well known cultural objects and institutions - such as the Guggenheim and Picasso's Guernica - into new frames of reference, generating new approaches, ideas and modes of understanding.
Impressionist Giverny
Lured by the ineffable beauty represented in Claude Monet's artwork and the promise of painting en plein air, artists from America and across Europe flocked to the French village of Giverny in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, transforming it from a sleepy hamlet to a colorful and thriving artists' community. Impressionist Giverny: A Colony of Artists, 1885-1915 evokes the longevity of impressionism and highlights the role Giverny played in the movement's ascendance, placing Giverny in the context of other European artists' colonies of its era. Making use of reproductions of period postcards, paintings, photographs, and previously unpublished documents, editor Katherine M. Bourguignon traces the evolution of the impressionist style in this idyllic and international setting. Fellow contributors address the interactions of the artists of Giverny with Monet, the utopian experiment of a collective artistic enterprise, the emergence of the rural innkeeper as a new class of patron, and the American impressionists who, inspired by their experience in France, often formed artists' colonies back in the United States and participated in the ongoing tradition of French-American cultural exchange. Accompanying exhibitions at the Mus矇e d'Art Am矇ricain Giverny and at the San Diego Museum of Art, Impressionist Giverny: A Colony of Artists, 1885-1915 captures the creative spirit and aesthetic that enlivened this artistic haven a century ago.
Tehran Studio Works
Khosrow Hassanzadeh's rich, colorful, and uncompromising oeuvre has made him one of Iran's leading contemporary artists. Working primarily with photography, collage, painting, and mixed media, he unflinchingly examines harsh political realities by treating subjects such as the Iran-Iraq war, murdered prostitutes, and women in chadors. Includes essays by leading scholars and critics contextualizing his work. Published in association with KIT Tropenmuseum. Khosrow Hassanzadeh has had solo shows in Amsterdam, Beirut, Dubai, London, Phnom Penh, and Tehran. Mirjam Shatanawi is curator of the Middle East and North African collections at the Tropenmuseum.
Art & Physics
Art interprets the visible world. Physics charts its unseen workings. The two realms seem completely opposed. But consider that both strive to reveal truths for which there are no words--with physicists using the language of mathematics and artists using visual images. In Art & Physics, Leonard Shlain tracks their breakthroughs side by side throughout history to reveal an astonishing correlation of visions. From the classical Greek sculptors to Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, and from Aristotle to Einstein, artists have foreshadowed the discoveries of scientists, such as when Monet and Cezanne intuited the coming upheaval in physics that Einstein would initiate. In this lively and colorful narrative, Leonard Shlain explores how artistic breakthroughs could have prefigured the visionary insights of physicists on so many occasions throughout history. Provicative and original, Art & Physics is a seamless integration of the romance of art and the drama of science--and an exhilarating history of ideas.
Contemporary British Women Artists
In this illuminating collection of new interviews, some of the most important women artists practising in Britain today talk about their work, their influences and their relationships, sometimes ambivalent, with the art historical canon. Enlightening and frequently entertaining, the interviews, with artists spanning different generations and working in media as diverse as performance art, painting, sculpture, video and installation, give fascinating first-hand insights into both the artists' lives and the creative process. Fortnum speaks to: Tacita Dean, Tanya Kovats, Christine Borland, Jane Harris, Vanessa Jackson, Tracey Emin, Maria Lalic, Hayley Newman, Sonia Boyce, Emma Kay, Gillian Ayres, Lucy Gunning, Claire Barclay, Maria Chevska, Anya Gallacio, Jemima Stehli, Runa Islam and Paula Rego.
At a Distance
The theory and practice of networked art and activism, including mail art, sound art, telematic art, fax art, Fluxus, and assemblings.Networked collaborations of artists did not begin on the Internet. In this multidisciplinary look at the practice of art that takes place across a distance--geographical, temporal, or emotional--theorists and practitioners examine the ways that art, activism, and media fundamentally reconfigured each other in experimental networked projects of the 1970s and 1980s. By providing a context for this work--showing that it was shaped by varying mixes of social relations, cultural strategies, and political and aesthetic concerns--At a Distance effectively refutes the widely accepted idea that networked art is technologically determined. Doing so, it provides the historical grounding needed for a more complete understanding of today's practices of Internet art and activism and suggests the possibilities inherent in networked practice. At a Distance traces the history and theory of such experimental art projects as Mail Art, sound and radio art, telematic art, assemblings, and Fluxus. Although the projects differed, a conceptual questioning of the "art object," combined with a political undermining of dominant art institutional practices, animated most distance art. After a section that sets this work in historical and critical perspective, the book presents artists and others involved in this art "re-viewing" their work--including experiments in "mini-FM," telerobotics, networked psychoanalysis, and interactive book construction. Finally, the book recasts the history of networks from the perspectives of politics, aesthetics, economics, and cross-cultural analysis.
Icons And Saints of the Eastern Orthodox Church
Explore the extensive imagery and fascinating stories of hundreds of Orthodox Christian icons and saints. An icon (from the Greek word eikon, "image") is a wooden panel painting of a holy person or scene from Orthodox Christianity, the religion of the Byzantine Empire that is practiced today mainly in Greece and Russia. It was believed that these works acted as intermediaries between worshipers and the holy personages they depicted. Their pictorial language is stylized and primarily symbolic, rather than literal and narrative. Indeed, every attitude, pose, and color depicted in an icon has a precise meaning, and their painters―usually monks―followed prescribed models from iconographic manuals. Featuring over 400 color images, this book catalogues the vast heritage of images according to iconographic type and subject, from the most ancient at the Monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai to those from Greece, Constantinople, and Russia. Chapters focus on the role of icons in the Orthodox liturgy and on common iconic subjects, including the fathers and saints of the Eastern Church and the life of Jesus and his followers.
Portrait of a Nation
This volume brings together the faces of Americans who have made a profound mark on the history of the United States, from the nation's earliest days to the present. Selected from American's National Museum of Portraiture and Biography, these influential figures include men and women from all walks of life.
Industry in Art
Industry in Art examines the artists, contexts, and societal factors that influenced the depiction of Pittsburgh industry and labor from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century through a variety of art forms that include illustration, painting, and graphic art. In the early nineteenth century, most fine artists avoided depicting industry, though David Gilmore Blythe and William C. Wall portrayed the environmental changes caused by industrial growth. By the last quarter of the century, however, national weekly magazines illustrated Pittsburgh's smoking industrial complexes as symbols of industrial might populated by stoic, working-class heroes working with fire. Commercial artists created graphic images of modern technology for topographic prints, advertising, and national magazines that helped shape America's perception of Pittsburgh as both an industrial giant and the "City of the Future." Depictions in Harper's Weekly and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper renderings of the railroad strike of 1877 and the Homestead strike of 1892, and Joseph Stella's and Lewis Hine's portrayals of mill workers for the Pittsburgh Survey in the early twentieth century focused on industrial workers as angry strikers and as immigrants struggling to earn a living. It was not until the end of the century that industry became acceptable in high art, as the Carnegie Institute brought European art and artists to Pittsburgh with its yearly International exhibits and Aaron Gorson discovered the dramatic effect of steel mills at night. Industry in Art presents an in-depth analysis of how sociological elements affected both artists and imagery. As perceptions of industry changed over time, artists reflected and shaped America's attitudes toward industry and labor in the nineteenth century.
Between Luxury And the Everyday
This collection brings together studies on the French decorative arts in the eighteenth century, extending from bookbinding, typography and engraving to those related specifically to the domestic interior: porcelain, upholstery and furniture. A collection of studies on the French decorative arts in the eighteenth century. Covers an extensive range of subjects from bookbinding, typography and engraving to porcelain, upholstery and furniture. Demonstrates how the advancement of knowledge in porcelain and loom technology resulted in new luxury goods to the glory of Absolutism. Looks at how Revolution demanded that political change be reflected in the details of everyday life, such as dress and furniture.
Lincoln Perry’s Charlottesville
Lincoln Perry is justly celebrated for his murals and edgy narrative figure paintings, with their saturated palette and multifaceted architectural compositions--Poussin refracted through de Chirico. This beautiful new book showcases his images of Charlottesville, Virginia--many of them multipanel compositions featuring the University of Virginia and its environs--accompanied by an essay and interview by his wife, the writer Ann Beattie.Perry's mural The Student's Progress, which depicts a woman's education and social experience from matriculation through graduation, is familiar to U.Va. students, faculty, and visitors, but Perry has been painting Charlottesville subjects on and off since 1985, when he first moved to town. From his early explorations of the complex relationships between professors and students, played out against the backdrop of Jefferson's Lawn, through his intriguing depictions of the city's domestic interiors, buildings, and streets, Perry illuminates a different side of a place widely appreciated for its history and natural beauty.Charlottesville, writes Beattie, "both disturbs and calls to [Perry]: it's a paradoxically comfortable and uncomfortable not-quite-home he has been drawn to many times for reasons he can't easily articulate.... I think that Lincoln likes the town's quirkiness and its lack of uniformity. It's also a place that allows him to practice the x-ray vision so many visual people have for underpinnings: the contradictions that can be drawn upon and aesthetically dramatized.... The place sparks his imagination, and with his paintbrush, he sparks it, charging the air with a bit of unexpected--but very recognizable--light."Together, Perry and Beattie give us a view of Charlottesville, of place and artistic production, that carries with it the warmth of recognition and the thrill of discovery.Publication made possible by generous support from the W. L. Lyons Brown Jr. Charitable Foundation
Enlightenment And the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture
"Louis Dupr矇's study of the Enlightenment, ranging as it does over art, morality, religion, science, philosophy, social theory, and a good deal besides, is a marvel of scholarly erudition. . . . A formidably well-researched book, which would make an excellent introduction to Enlightenment ideas for the general reader."--Terry Eagleton, Harper's Magazine An eminent scholar of modern culture argues that the Enlightenment―the importance of which has been vigorously debated in recent years―was a more complex phenomenon than either its detractors or advocates assume.
Irrational Modernism
A revisionist history of New York Dada, with appearances by Baroness Elsa as the embodiment of irrational modernism.In Irrational Modernism, Amelia Jones gives us a history of New York Dada, reinterpreted in relation to the life and works of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Jones enlarges our conception of New York Dada beyond the male avant-garde heroics of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia to include the rebellious body of the Baroness. If they practiced Dada, she lived it, with her unorthodox personal life, wild assemblage objects, radical poetry and prose, and the flamboyant self-displays by which she became her own work of art. Through this reinterpretation, Jones not only provides a revisionist history of an art movement but also suggests a new method of art history. Jones argues that the accepted idea of New York Dada as epitomized by Duchamp's readymades and their implicit cultural critique does not take into consideration the contradictions within the movement--its misogyny, for example--or the social turmoil of the period caused by industrialization, urbanization, and the upheaval of World War I and its aftermath, which coincided with the Baroness's time in New York (1913-1923). Baroness Elsa, whose appearances in Jones's narrative of New York Dada mirror her volcanic intrusions into the artistic circles of the time, can be seen to embody a new way to understand the history of avant-gardism--one that embraces the irrational and marginal rather than promoting the canonical. Acknowledging her identification with the Baroness (as a "fellow neurasthenic"), and interrupting her own objective passages of art historical argument with what she describes in her introduction as "bursts of irrationality," Jones explores the interestedness of all art history, and proposes a new "immersive" understanding of history (reflecting the historian's own history) that parallels the irrational immersive trajectory of avant- gardism as practiced by Baroness Elsa.
The Potter’s Eye
Classic North Carolina stoneware pots -- with their rich textures, monochromatic glazes, and minimal decoration -- belong to one of America's most revered stoneware pottery traditions. In a lavishly illustrated celebration of that tradition, Mark Hewitt and Nancy Sweezy trace the history of North Carolina pottery from the nineteenth century to the present day. They demonstrate the intriguing historic and aesthetic relationships that link pots produced in North Carolina to pottery traditions in Europe and Asia, in New England, and in the neighboring state of South Carolina.With hundreds of color photographs highlighting the shapes and surfaces of carefully selected pots, The Potter's Eye honors the keen focus vernacular potters bring to their materials, tools, techniques, and history. It is an evocative guide for anyone interested in the art of North Carolina pottery and the aesthetic majesty of this resilient and long-standing tradition.
Modern Art: A Very Short Introduction
Public interest in modern art continues to grow, as witnessed by the spectacular success of the Tate Modern in London and the Bilbao Guggenheim. Modern Art: A Very Short Introduction engages general readers, offering them not only information and ideas about modern art, but also explaining its contemporary relevance and history. The book focuses on interrogating the idea of "modern" art by asking such questions as: What makes a work of art qualify as modern, or fail to? How has this selection been made? What is the relationship between modern and contemporary art? Is "postmodernist" art no longer modern, or just no longer modernist? In either case, why--and what does this claim mean, both for art and the idea of "the modern?" Cottingham examines many key aspects of this subject, including the issue of controversy in modern art, from Manet's Dejeuner sur L'Herbe (1863) to Picasso's Les Demoiselles, and Tracey Emin's Bed (1999). He also looks at the role of the dealer from the main Cubist art dealer Kahnweiler, to Charles Saatchi. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam
Isms
Revised Edition, Updated 2017 Isms: Understanding Art is the perfect pocket-sized guide for gallery and museum lovers who have a general interest in the arts, but not necessarily any formal education in the visual arts. With this portable and indispensable tool in hand, anyone can guide themselves through the world's prestigious museums and major art collections and recognize and intelligently discuss the significant movements that have shaped the world of art.Using an informative and engaging style with informal and direct tone, each of the numerous "isms" that are used to define-but often misleadingly cloud-art movements are explained in simple terms and made accessible to the casual art lover. Readers are encouraged to think of styles as useful tools for conversation and exploration rather than as hard and fast academic definitions, and to relate to the art itself rather than to a merely conceptual idea.Each spread is devoted to a single art historical period and begins with an introduction that explains when the movement first emerged, the historical period to which it applies, and the principal disputes over its applicability, usefulness, or significance. The rest of the chapter is divided into several sections illustrating the most important artists and works within the period, related key words, and illustrations that best represent the distinctive features. This comprehensible structure makes it possible for any reader to gain a clear understanding of Classicism or Cubism while sitting in a cafe or visiting a gallery.
Latin American Art of the 20th Century
"Richly illustrated...brings to life the work of many lesser-known artists throughout the continent." Choice This comprehensive survey introduces an exceptionally rich, fascinating, and complex art that has gained great popularity in recent years. Edward Lucie-Smith discusses all the major subjects and issues: magic realism, expressionism, and other concepts shared with Latin American literature; the great muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco; the interaction of politics, society, and art; the continuing interest in folk art; and the dialogue between avant-garde European and North American movements and "indigenist" thinking in the work of artists such as Wifredo Lam, Matta, Rufino Tamayo, and Frida Kahlo. Many other artists from the 1900s to the present day are included in this compelling look at a great body of brilliantly original and imaginative art. For the second edition, the text has been updated and a new final section introduces some of Latin America's leading contemporary artists: Jose Bedia (Cuba/USA), Doris Salcedo (Colombia), Ruben Ortiz Torres (Mexico), Miguel Calderan (Mexico), Ernesto Neto (Brazil), Diana Domingues (Brazil), and Beatriz Milhazes (Brazil). Several of these artists make use of the latest in modern technology, including interactive installations, photographs, and video art. 178 illustrations, 45 in color.
Dada and Surrealism
The avant-garde movements of Dada and Surrealism continue to have a huge influence on cultural practice, especially in contemporary art, with its obsession with sexuality, fetishism, and shock tactics. In this new treatment of the subject, Hopkins focuses on the many debates surrounding these movements: the Marquis de Sade's Surrealist deification, issues of quality (How good is Dali?), the idea of the 'readymade', attitudes towards the city, the impact of Freud, attitudes to women, fetishism, and primitivism. The international nature of these movements is examined, covering the cities of Zurich, New York, Berlin, Cologne, Barcelona, Paris, London, and recently discovered examples in Eastern Europe. Hopkins explores the huge range of media employed by both Dada and Surrealism (collage, painting, found objects, performance art, photography, film), whilst at the same time establishing the aesthetic differences between the movements. He also examines the Dadaist obsession with the body-as-mechanism in relation to the Surrealists' return to the fetishized/eroticized body.
Winslow Homer in the Adirondacks
In this lavishly illustrated volume, David Tatham turns his eye to Winslow Homer's Adirondack oils, drawings, prints, and watercolors--more than a hundred pieces from the artist's many visits to the region between 1870 and 1910. Homer's affinity for this remote region of New York State lasted for forty years. No other place--not even Prout's Neck in Maine--held his attention as an artist for so long a period. Nearly every time he set out for the Adirondacks he went to the same two places--the environs of Keene Valley and a group of rustic buildings in a forest clearing in the Essex County township of Minerva, south of the High Peaks. Tatham casts Homer's early Adirondack works as postbellum pastorals and explores the impact of Darwinian thought on Homer's later works. He examines the concepts of landscape and wilderness, the development of the Adirondack park, and the forest preservation movement, as well as Homer's contemporaneous work in Maine, the Caribbean, and England.
Reading Buddhist Art
Buddhism has a history of over 2,500 years, and its arts have existed for almost as long, weaving their way with monks and pilgrims through broad areas of Asia and across seas, intermingling with the arts and styles of indigenous cultures. Not surprisingly, the teachings and imagery of this international religion are vast and complex, and the task of deciphering Buddhist symbolism can seem as challenging as the search for enlightenment itself. All the principal symbols, objects, and figures of Buddhist worship are gathered here in a rich, informative, and easy-to-use book that will serve equally well as an art-lover's reference tool and as an introduction to the principles of the religion. Photographs and two-color line drawings and maps accompany the explanatory texts. With a comprehensive glossary of key Buddhist terms and a well-researched bibliography, this book will prove indispensable to anyone with an interest in Buddhism and its arts.
Toward a Geography of Art
Art history traditionally classifies works of art by country as well as period, but often political borders and cultural boundaries are highly complex and fluid. Questions of identity, policy, and exchange make it difficult to determine the "place" of art, and often the art itself results from these conflicts of geography and culture. Addressing an important approach to art history, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann's book offers essays that focus on the intricacies of accounting for the geographical dimension of art history during the early modern period in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Toward a Geography of Art presents a historical overview of these complexities, debates contemporary concerns, and completes its exploration with a diverse collection of case studies. Employing the author's expertise in a variety of fields, the book delves into critical issues such as transculturation of indigenous traditions, mestizaje, the artistic metropolis, artistic diffusion, transfer, circulation, subversion, and center and periphery. What results is a foundational study that establishes the geography of art as a subject and forces us to reconsider assumptions about the place of art that underlie the longstanding narratives of art history.
I Claudia II
I, Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome--an exhibition and catalog produced by the Yale University Art Gallery--provided the first comprehensive study of the lives of Roman women as revealed in Roman art. Responding to the popular success of the exhibit and catalog, Diana E. E. Kleiner and Susan B. Matheson here gather ten additional essays by specialists in art history, history, and papyrology to offer further reflections on women in Roman society based on the material evidence provided by art, archaeology, and ancient literary sources. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Cornelius C. Vermeule, Rolf Winkes, Mary T. Boatwright, Susan Wood, Eve D'Ambra, Andrew Oliver, Diana Delia, and Ann Ellis Hanson. Their essays, illustrated with black-and-white photos of the art under discussion, treat such themes as mothers and sons, marriage and widowhood, aging, adornment, imperial portraiture, and patronage.
The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance: How Brunelleschi and Ghiberti Changed the
Joining the bestsellers Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, a lively and intriguing tale of two artists whose competitive spirit brought to life one of the world's most magnificent structures and ignited the Renaissance The dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore, the great cathedral of Florence, is among the most enduring symbols of the Renaissance, an equal to the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo. Its designer was Filippo Brunelleschi, a temperamental architect and inventor who rediscovered the techniques of mathematical perspective. Yet the completion of the dome was not Brunelleschi's glory alone. He was forced to share the commission with his archrival, the canny and gifted sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti. In this lush, imaginative history--a fascinating true story of artistic genius and personal triumph--Paul Robert Walker breathes life into these two talented, passionate artists and the competitive drive that united and dived them. As it illuminates fascinating individuals from Donatello and Masaccio to Cosimo de'Medici and Leon Battista Alberti, The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance offers a glorious tour of 15th-century Florence, a bustling city on the verge of greatness in a time of flourishing creativity, rivalry, and genius.
Art, Crime and Madness
Art, Crime and Madness explores the relationship between creative innovation, deviance and morbidity. To innovate, one has to be able to view the medium and the object of creativity in a different, hitherto unexplored manner. The essence of art is creative innovation, coupled with an ability, in varying degrees, to transcend the boundaries of consciousness. But this 'ability' is also the prerogative of the mentally deranged. Likewise, the criminal and the deviant are more likely to transcend normative barriers while creating, hence the wide range of criminal and deviant behaviour in society. Although the inverse hypothesis does not hold -- the mere existence of deviance or morbidity does not predispose the individual to creativity -- nevertheless criminal and mad behaviour are often very innovative. This thesis is illustrated by historical case histories of creative deviance and genius madness, and contemporary observations. The painter Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio killed a man while still a teenager, and a second victim during a ball game. In his lifetime he was considered degenerate, but today he is considered the greatest painter of the Italian Settecento, and his portrait adorns the Hundred-Thousand Lira note. Jean Genet the homosexual thief was born out of wedlock and as a teenager he transgressed almost all the paragraphs of the French criminal code. But he became a famous French playwright, the mouthpiece for criminals and deviants. His plays built up a philosophical apology for the raison d'etre of the criminal group.
Under the Sign of Saturn
This third essay collection by America's leading essayist brings together her most important critical writing from 1972 to 1980, in which she explores some of the most influential artists and thinkers of our time.
Eva Hesse
A critical primer on the work of artist Eva Hesse.Eva Hesse's distinctive process-based art exerted a powerful influence on minimalist artists of the 1960s and continues to inspire artists today. Using industrial materials such as latex and fiberglass, she exploited their flexibility to produce works with an unsettling psychic and corporeal resonance. Hesse, who was born in Germany in 1936 and raised in New York City, died of cancer in New York in 1970. Eva Hesse focuses on the body of criticism that has developed since the last major retrospective of Hesse's work, at the Yale University Art Gallery in 1992. The book's publication coincides with a major exhibition organized jointly by the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Wiesbaden Museum. Eva Hesse contains a 1970 interview by Cindy Nemser, a discussion between Mel Bochner and Joan Simon, and essays by Briony Fer, Rosalind Krauss, Mignon Nixon, and Anne M. Wagner.
Mosaics of the Greek and Roman World
Mosaics reached their fullest development under the Romans who used them to decorate the floors of their houses and public buildings. This book gives a comprehensive and fully illustrated history of mosaics in the Greek and Roman world, and studies their development over a thousand years throughout the Roman Empire. Chapters are devoted to technique, to the role of mosaics in architecture, and to their social implications and the role of patrons. This book is the only complete study in depth of this rich material.
The Highwaymen
"For the first time, the real story behind the Highwaymen has emerged . . . a well-researched, lively, and comprehensive overview of the development and contribution of these African-American artists and their place in the history of Florida's popular culture."--Mallory McCane O'Connor, author of Lost Cities of the Ancient SoutheastThe Highwaymen introduces a group of young black artists who painted their way out of the despair awaiting them in citrus groves and packing houses of 1950s Florida. As their story recaptures the imagination of Floridians and their paintings fetch ever-escalating prices, the legacy of their freshly conceived landscapes exerts a new and powerful influence on the popular conception of the Sunshine State.While the value of Highwaymen paintings has soared in recent years, until now no authoritative account of the lives and work of these black Florida artists has existed. Emerging in the late 1950s, the Highwaymen created idyllic, quickly realized images of the Florida dream and peddled, by some estimates, 200,000 of them from the trunks of their cars. Working with inexpensive materials, the Highwaymen produced an astonishing number of landscapes that depict a romanticized Florida--a faraway place of wind-swept palm trees, billowing cumulus clouds, wetlands, lakes, rivers, ocean, and setting sun. With paintings still wet, they loaded their cars and traveled the state's east coast, selling the images door-to-door and store-to-store, in restaurants, offices, courthouses, and bank lobbies. Sometimes characterized as motel art, the work is a hybrid form of landscape painting, corrupting the classically influenced ideals of the Highwaymen's white mentor, A. E. "Bean" Backus. At first, the paintings sold like boom-time real estate. In succeeding decades, however, they were consigned to attics and garage sales. Rediscovered in the mid-1990s, today they are recognized as the work of American folk artists. Gary Monroe tells the story behind the Highwaymen, a loose association of 25 men and 1 woman from the Ft. Pierce area--a fascinating mixture of individual talent, collective enterprise, and cultural heritage. He also offers a critical look at the paintings and the movement's development. Added to this are personal reminiscences by some of the artists, along with a gallery of 63 full-color reproductions of their paintings.
The Art of Shen Ku
Irreverent and quirky, yet serious and 100% straightforward, The Art of Shen Ku is a unique kind of illustrated survival guide, exploring hundreds of topics and giving ingeniously simple advice on how to cope with them, overcome them, use them, and benefit from them. What is Shen Ku? Roughly translated: "Pure Traveler″ or "Phantom Passenger.″ What exactly is the "art of...?″ Mastering the skill and knowledge of practically everything anyone comes across while on Earth, including: - Tying knots and enhancing sex- Numerology and self hypnosis- Herbal therapy and forecasting weather- Curing nosebleeds and removing stains- Kung fu and magic tricks- Isometric and breathing exercises of monks- Self defense and catching fish And this is only the beginning.
Colombia
Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society is a comprehensive history of the third most populous country of Latin America. It offers the most extensive discussion available in English of the whole of Colombian history-from pre-Columbian times to the present. The book begins with an in-depth look at the earliest years in Colombia's history, emphasizing the role geography played in shaping Colombia's economy, society, and politics and in encouraging the growth of distinctive regional cultures and identities. It includes a thorough discussion of Colombian politics that looks at the ways in which historical memory has affected political choices, particularly in the formation and development of the country's two traditional political parties. The authors explore the factors that have contributed to Colombia's economic troubles, such as the delay in its national economic integration and its relative ineffectiveness as an exporter. The three concluding chapters offer an authoritative and up-to-date examination of the impact of coffee on Colombia's economy and society, the social and political effects of urban growth, and the multiple dimensions of the violence that has plagued the country since 1946. Written in clear, vigorous prose, Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society is essential for students of Latin American history and politics, and for anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the history of this fascinating and tumultuous country.
Infinite Regress
In Infinite Regress, David Joselit considers the plurality of identities and practices within Duchamp's life and art between 1910 and 1941, conducting a synthetic reading of his early and middle career.There is not one Marcel Duchamp, but several. Within his oeuvre Duchamp practiced a variety of modernist idioms and invented an array of contradictory personas: artist and art dealer, conceptualist and craftsman, chess champion and dreamer, dandy and recluse. In Infinite Regress, David Joselit considers the plurality of identities and practices within Duchamp's life and art between 1910 and 1941, conducting a synthetic reading of his early and middle career. Taking into account underacknowledged works and focusing on the conjunction of the machine and the commodity in Duchamp's art, Joselit notes a consistent opposition between the material world and various forms of measurement, inscription, and quantification. Challenging conventional accounts, he describes the readymade strategy not merely as a rejection of painting, but as a means of producing new models of the modern self.
William Morris
This volume presents some of the more recent work in glass by American artist, William Morris. The sculptures explore themes related to archaeology, animals, and the hunt combining Morris' interest in myth and ancient history with his keen understanding of the natural world.
Hindu Art and Architecture
The art of Hinduism constitutes one of the world's great traditions, as alive today as when the first images of Hindu gods were fashioned out of stone more than two thousand years ago. George Michell's invaluable survey looks at the entire period, covering shrines consecrated to Hindu cults as well as works of art that portray Hindu divinities, semidivine personalities, and mythological narratives. Michell outlines the development of Hinduism and the principal iconic forms of its pantheon (the symbolic basis for Hindu religious architecture), and explains the system of royal patronage that led to the construction of so many temples and the commissioning of their attendant works of art. Then, in a broad chronological sweep, he demonstrates artistic continuities down to the present day in the different regions of the country, confirming the vibrancy of the visual world of Hinduism. The illustrations include Mamallapuram and other great temples, profound and beautiful works of sculpture such as Shiva dancing the eternal dance of creation and destruction, and exquisite paintings of the loves of Krishna. 185 illustrations, 100 in color.
Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin De Siecle
This is a comparative and interdisciplinary book exploring a variety of perspectives on the artistic culture of France, and its neighbours, in the period 1870-1914. Part One centres on France, and assembles essays on the prose, poetry and painting of Symbolism and Decadence, on avant-garde dance and performance, on women's writing and on early cinema. Part Two explores the relations between France and several cultures in which the debt to France was amply and originally repaid-ranging from the Anglo-Celtic "Rhymers' Club" to the Italian "Crepusculari". The essays consistently point beyond the late nineteenth-century and into the twentieth, as they explore the multiple beginnings-as well as the false starts-that characterize the period. All foreign language quotations are translated.
Chiparus
Born in Romania, Demetre Chiparus (1886-1947) studied in Italy and France before settling in Paris, where he perfected the chryselephantine technique of combining ivory with bronze. Produced as multiples, his works were greatly admired as small-scale decorative objects and today are among the most coveted objects from the Art Deco period, capturing the lively and sensuous spirit of the time.This lavishly illustrated volume examines Chiparus's work as an embodiment of the Art Deco style. The author explores the various contemporary inspirations for the sculptor's art, including haute couture, the music hall, Diaghilev's ballets, and the stage designs of Leon Bakst. Focusing on Chiparus's bronze and ivory pieces, he outlines their development from idea through finished piece, with illustrations of plasteline models that document the artist's working methods. The book provides much previously unknown information about Chiparus's life; and this new edition also offers an appendix devoted to his newly rediscovered paintings.
The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs
For artists, designers, and all with an interest in Buddhist and Tibetan art, this is the first exhaustive reference to the seemingly infinite variety of symbols found throughout Tibetan art in line drawings, paintings, and ritual objects. Hundreds of the author's line drawings depict all the major Tibetan symbols and motifs--landscapes, deities, animals, plants, gurus, mudras (ritual hand gestures), dragons, and other mythic creatures--ranging from complex mythological scenes to small, simple ornaments.
Sublime Poussin
"Art history and art theory are inseparable. A history of art can be achieved only through the simultaneous construction of a theory of art." These words of the eminent scholar and critic Louis Marin suggest why he considered the paintings and the writings of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), painter and theoretician of painting, an enduring source of inspiration. Poussin was the artist to whom Marin returned most faithfully over the years. Since Marin did not live to write his proposed book on Poussin, the ten major essays in this volume will remain his definitive statement on the painter who inspired his most eloquent and probing commentary. At the center of Marins inquiry into Poussins art are the theory and practice of "reading" paintings. Rather than explicate Poussins work through systematic textual and iconographic analysis, he sets out to explore a cluster of speculative questions about the meaning of pictorial art: Can painting be a discourse? If so, how can that discourse be deciphered? Marins horizon for interpreting Poussin depends more on the concepts of aesthetic philosophy and the insights of cultural history than on an account of the painters career or his relationship with his artistic predecessors. For example, he positions several of Poussins best-known landscapes with respect both to French seventeenth-century debates on the question of the sublime and to the philosophical tradition of reflection on the sublime. Among the topics Marin studies are the tempest as a major figure of the sublime in Poussins work, the presence of ruins in the paintings, Poussins use of the concept of metamorphosis, and the frequent presence of sleeping bodies in the work. The Poussin who emerges in these essays is preeminently a philosopher-artist whose painterly discourse embodies the limits of thought and of representation.
Native American Art in the Twentieth Century
Tracing the political context of Native American art production from the 1890s to the present and engaging with a range of concepts and issues such as the influence of spirituality in Native art and the struggle for artistic self-determination.
Ottonian Book Illumination
The seminal work, originally published in two seperate clothbound volumes, is now made available in a revised one-volume edition, both in hardback and in paperback. It brings to light an aesthic passage of European history which has never before received full-scale treatment in English. It explains, historically and with a rich body of illustrations, the origins and momentum of a magnificent movement of German art, and shows, through this powerful and expressive art, how religion and political ideaology were interwined in Ottonian culture from about 950 to 1050. Besides dealing with the great imperials books such as the Gospels of Otto III and the Pericopes Book of Henry II, as well as other splendid liturgical manuscripts, the author also writes with penetrating insight about the great art-loving bishops such as Egbert of Trier and Bernard of Hildesheim, whose aims ans personalitites are express in the books they commissioned. In addition, the most important art centres of the Ottonian Empire - Reichenau, Cologne, Fulda and Corvey - are discussed in detail.
Spirit Faces
Spirit Faces presents an outstanding collection of 75 masks by 23 contemporary Native American artists. These breathtakingly beautiful and powerful masks, all illustrated in color, depict creatures such as Eagle or Killer Whale, natural elements and forces such as Moon or Weather, humans, and supernatural beings such as Thunderbird or the Chief of the Undersea.Masks are an important part of ceremonial life on the Northwest Coast; they make the supernatural world visible and bring it to life in dance dramas performed at feasts and potlatches, or at winter ceremonies held by secret societies.Some masks embody mythology or history. Others depict shamanic experiences, or are portrait masks that represent personal experience. The most elaborate are transformation masks, which are used to display the transition from one form to another, such as Wolf to Human. At the high point of the dance, the dancer will open the outer mask to reveal another one inside.The introduction by Gary Wyatt outlines the place of art inside Northwest Coast societies and the place of Northwest Coast art in the outside art world. He also explains the importance, meaning, and ceremonial use of masks. Each mask is accompanied by the artist's own words describing its creation and meaning.
Cimabue
Creator of brilliant devotional paintings and mosaics, Cimabue (c. 1240-1302) represented the transition from medieval to early Renaissance art; his legacy is revealed in this authoritative volume, the first new monograph in 30 years. Cimabue is credited with bringing a naturalistic style to the stiff Byzantine forms of 13th-century art. The appeal of his work is undeniable: his trademark elements -- gilt thrones for the Madonna and angels with great multicolored wings -- were echoed by generations of artists, and even today his pieces speak with immediacy and power.In the absence of surviving documentation, many elegant, classical works are convincingly attributed to Cimabue, works in the collections of the Uffizi, the Louvre, and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. Other of his saints and Madonnas still decorate the churches for which they were created: paintings in Arezzo, Bologna, Florence, and Pisa, as well as the frescoes in the church of St. Francis in Assisi that were severely damaged in the earthquakes of 1997 (the frescoes are reproduced here as they looked just before the tremors). Luciano Bellosi's text examines the written and painted documentary evidence -- not only of Cimabue's work but that of the artists he influenced -- to create a vivid portrait of the artist in the historical, political, and cultural context of Tuscany and central Italy.
True Colors
The last quarter century has been an extraordinary and turbulent period in the art world. It was a time of creative intensity during which a handful of artists, like Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, managed, in their different ways, to cross over from the rarefied world of high art into popular culture. It was also a time when other promising careers and even whole movements, like Graffiti, spurted to life and then just as suddenly disappeared. During the astonishing boom years of the 1980s, the newly vigorous art market transformed the role of dealers and collectors to give them unprecedented power as tastemakers and the dangerous glamour of Hollywood power agents. And then came the bust. Writer Anthony Haden-Guest has moved within the art world, known the players, and reported on the scene for this entire span of time. True Colors draws on two decades of reporting to deliver an authoritative and deliciously inside account of the contemporary art world that will be the most talked-about book on art since The Shock of the New. Haden-Guest gives vivid portraits of the art world's key players and dramatizes the pivotal moments in the always evolving scene. Skillfully conveying a sense of the intricate geography of the art world, he tells of its clashes of ambition, its intrigues, its power plays. This is how artists survive, or don't survive. True Colors is filled with telling anecdotes and expertly told stories that cohere to give a sense of how the art world works, its current state, and where it may be going.
California Impressionism
In recent years, the richly colored, exuberantly painted canvases by artists such as Franz Bischoff, Alson Clark, Joseph Raphael, Guy Rose, and William Wendt have attracted an expanding circle of admirers all across the country. In addition to the work of these established West Coast masters, many less-known California Impressionists are presented here, including John Frost, Evelyn McCormick, Bruce Nelson, and others whose work has not yet been widely discovered.In his far-ranging introductory essay, Dr. Gerdts explores the context of California Impressionism, surveying the movement's sources abroad, the most influential exhibitions in America, and the critical responses to the art and the artists. He introduces the work of an almost entirely forgotten foursome--Helena Dunlap, Detlef Sammann, Ernest Browning Smith, and Jack Gage Stark--who were the first local painters to be identified as Impressionists in Los Angeles and who contributed to an important but long-overlooked moment in the city's cultural history.Will South supplies an enlightening chronological narrative of the California Impressionists, starting with their often-ignored roots in the Hudson River school and other American realist art. Tracing the trajectory of their work from the innovations of the late 1800s to the style's final days in the 1920s and '30s, he offers vital new information and insight about their training and careers, as well as their ideas about art, nature, and the Golden State. Dr. South also provides detailed artists' biographies and an extensive bibliography.At a time when interest in all aspects of regional Impressionism continues to flourish, California Impressionism commands the greatest interest of all. This book will be an invaluable resource and source of pleasure for the innumerable collectors, scholars, and art lovers who find this work--with its wind-swept coasts, majestic mountains, and poppy-strewn fields--irresistibly appealing.
