Imperial Animations in Transpacific Contemporary Art
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Imperial Animations in Transpacific Contemporary Artsituates the Japanese Empire as a world-historical event that persists today through pervasive and deep impacts on regional and global politics. Considering contemporary artwork from across the transpacific region, Namiko Kunimoto documents efforts to expose colonial trauma and reveal its presence in shaping political liberalism in Japan as well as the global rise of aspirational fascism. At the heart of these artistic endeavors is a drive to animate, both in the sense of digitalization and performance and in the urge to enliven, mobilize, and reveal the continuities of imperialism today. The animate art addressed in this book urges us to think critically about imperialism and its links to the digital age, land, racism, and violence, thereby inviting us to reenvision our collective future.
Dr. Keren Rosa Hammerschlag Dr.
The Chosen Race
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From the Realist canvases of the Pre-Raphaelites to the Aesthetic experiments of James McNeill Whistler, The Chosen Race confronts the complex negotiations of whiteness that played out across British art of the nineteenth century. Examining the representation of racial supremacy, difference, and indeterminacy in paintings produced in England during the reign of Queen Victoria, Keren Rosa Hammerschlag explores the many ways Victorian painters engaged with racial ideas at the height of British imperial dominance. While at times these painters reinforced racial hierarchies, at other times they problematized them, revealing race to be a fundamentally unstable organizing principle by which to build an empire and classify its subjects.
Namiko Kunimoto
Imperial Animations in Transpacific Contemporary Art
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Imperial Animations in Transpacific Contemporary Artsituates the Japanese Empire as a world-historical event that persists today through pervasive and deep impacts on regional and global politics. Considering contemporary artwork from across the transpacific region, Namiko Kunimoto documents efforts to expose colonial trauma and reveal its presence in shaping political liberalism in Japan as well as the global rise of aspirational fascism. At the heart of these artistic endeavors is a drive to animate, both in the sense of digitalization and performance and in the urge to enliven, mobilize, and reveal the continuities of imperialism today. The animate art addressed in this book urges us to think critically about imperialism and its links to the digital age, land, racism, and violence, thereby inviting us to reenvision our collective future.
Namiko Kunimoto
Imperial Animations in Transpacific Contemporary Art
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Imperial Animations in Transpacific Contemporary Artsituates the Japanese Empire as a world-historical event that persists today through pervasive and deep impacts on regional and global politics. Considering contemporary artwork from across the transpacific region, Namiko Kunimoto documents efforts to expose colonial trauma and reveal its presence in shaping political liberalism in Japan as well as the global rise of aspirational fascism. At the heart of these artistic endeavors is a drive to animate, both in the sense of digitalization and performance and in the urge to enliven, mobilize, and reveal the continuities of imperialism today. The animate art addressed in this book urges us to think critically about imperialism and its links to the digital age, land, racism, and violence, thereby inviting us to reenvision our collective future.
Keren Rosa Hammerschlag
The Chosen Race
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$60.00
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From the Realist canvases of the Pre-Raphaelites to the Aesthetic experiments of James McNeill Whistler, The Chosen Race confronts the complex negotiations of whiteness that played out across British art of the nineteenth century. Examining the representation of racial supremacy, difference, and indeterminacy in paintings produced in England during the reign of Queen Victoria, Keren Rosa Hammerschlag explores the many ways Victorian painters engaged with racial ideas at the height of British imperial dominance. While at times these painters reinforced racial hierarchies, at other times they problematized them, revealing race to be a fundamentally unstable organizing principle by which to build an empire and classify its subjects.
John Ott
Mixed Media
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Mixed Media investigates Black and white artists' efforts toward racial integration, from the infamous 1931 Scottsboro Boys trial until Brown v. Board's 1954 desegregation of public schools. Each chapter attends to a distinctive visual ecology fostered by institutions and individuals committed to desegregation to varying degrees, including the nationwide public art initiatives of the New Deal, the imagery and cultural programs of the multiracial Popular Front, graphics produced for CIO-member labor unions, Jacob Lawrence's war paintings and other visual propaganda of the armed forces, and the struggle of New York abstract painters of African descent to navigate the criticism, museums, and markets of the mainstream art world. Together, they explore the divergent approaches to conceptualizing and implementing racial integration along the liberal-radical axis.
John Ott
Mixed Media
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Mixed Media investigates Black and white artists' efforts toward racial integration, from the infamous 1931 Scottsboro Boys trial until Brown v. Board's 1954 desegregation of public schools. Each chapter attends to a distinctive visual ecology fostered by institutions and individuals committed to desegregation to varying degrees, including the nationwide public art initiatives of the New Deal, the imagery and cultural programs of the multiracial Popular Front, graphics produced for CIO-member labor unions, Jacob Lawrence's war paintings and other visual propaganda of the armed forces, and the struggle of New York abstract painters of African descent to navigate the criticism, museums, and markets of the mainstream art world. Together, they explore the divergent approaches to conceptualizing and implementing racial integration along the liberal-radical axis.
John Ott
Mixed Media
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$95.00
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Mixed Media investigates Black and white artists' efforts toward racial integration, from the infamous 1931 Scottsboro Boys trial until Brown v. Board's 1954 desegregation of public schools. Each chapter attends to a distinctive visual ecology fostered by institutions and individuals committed to desegregation to varying degrees, including the nationwide public art initiatives of the New Deal, the imagery and cultural programs of the multiracial Popular Front, graphics produced for CIO-member labor unions, Jacob Lawrence's war paintings and other visual propaganda of the armed forces, and the struggle of New York abstract painters of African descent to navigate the criticism, museums, and markets of the mainstream art world. Together, they explore the divergent approaches to conceptualizing and implementing racial integration along the liberal-radical axis.
Robin Lee Clark
Phenomenal
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During the 1960s and 1970s, a loosely affiliated group of Los Angeles artists--including Larry Bell, Mary Corse, Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Doug Wheeler--more intrigued by questions of perception than by the crafting of discrete objects, embraced light as their primary medium. Whether by directing the flow of natural light, embedding artificial light within objects or architecture, or playing with light through the use of reflective, translucent, or transparent materials, each of these artists created situations capable of stimulating heightened sensory awareness in the receptive viewer. Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface, companion book to the exhibition of the same name, explores and documents the unique traits of the phenomenologically engaged work produced in Southern California during those decades and traces its ongoing influence on current generations of international artists.
Foreword by Hugh M. Davies
Additional contributors:
Michael Auping
Stephanie Hanor
Adrian Kohn
Dawna Schuld
Artists:
Peter Alexander
Larry Bell
Ron Cooper
Mary Corse
Robert Irwin
Craig Kauffman
John McCracken
Bruce Nauman
Eric Orr
Helen Pashgian
James Turrell
De Wain Valentine
Doug Wheeler
Guillaume Apollinaire
The Cubist Painters
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Guillaume Apollinaire's only book on art, The Cubist Painters, was first published in 1913. This essential text in twentieth-century art presents the poet and critic's aesthetic meditations on nine painters: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Marie Laurencin, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp. As Picasso's closest friend and Marie Laurencin's lover, Apollinaire witnessed the development of Cubism firsthand. This collection of essays and reviews, written between 1905 and 1912, is a milestone in the history of art criticism, valued today as both a work of reference and a classic example of modernist creative writing.
In addition to a faithful and fluid translation of Apollinaire's text, Peter Read provides his own scholarly analysis of its importance in the history of modernism. He examines Apollinaire's art criticism, his relationship to the Cubist movement, and, more specifically, the genesis of Cubist Painters through its various revisions and proofs. Supported by all forty-five plates from the original edition, this new volume brings Apollinaire's vitality and vision to life for a new generation.
Jeff Kelley
Half-Life of a Dream
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Half-Life of a Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Logan Collection is a breathtaking and insightful survey of post-Tiananmen Square Chinese art and culture. As this richly illustrated work reveals, contemporary Chinese art—often discussed as a cynical reaction to emerging consumerism or as a satiric response to the academic patriotism of socialist realism—is more haunted than cynical, more a matter of a nation's suppressed psychic expression than of pop iconoclasm or ironic detachment. The paintings, sculptures, and installations of such Chinese artists as Ai Weiwei, Liu Xiaodong, Zhang Xiaogang, and Lin Tianmiao convey the shadows that trouble their nation as it undergoes a rapid process of modernization. Half-Life of a Dream, companion book to the exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is the museum's first sustained examination of Chinese artistic practice since the acclaimed publication of Inside Out: New Chinese Art. Beautiful in its presentation and fresh in its tone, Half-Life of a Dream gathers a distinguished group of art historians and critics to assess the Logan Collection and to capture this important moment in Chinese art.
Copub: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Bruce Grenville
KRAZY!
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Comics! Cartoons! Anime! Manga! Graphic novels! Video games! This vibrant and engaging book, catalog to a landmark exhibition, celebrates the variety and growing significance of visual pop culture. Stunningly illustrated with eye-popping art, KRAZY! investigates the uniqueness of these forms while considering the ways they interconnect. Curated by many of the artists who first brought these forms to the public's attention, this volume features commentary and interviews with Maus author Art Spiegelman, SimCity creator Will Wright, and Canadian comic book author and illustrator Seth, along with Tim Johnson (codirector of Antz and Over the Hedge), Kiyoshi Kusumi (a global authority on manga), and media theory critic Toshiya Ueno. This pathbreaking volume crosses boundaries between the printed arts, films, and video games and analyzes the reciprocal influences between fields, highlighting the best of each. The energy and intensity of the images leap off every page, and the full experience of the exhibit itself comes alive in behind-the-scenes commentary by the contributors. KRAZY! is a dizzying introduction to the art forms that will dominate the new century.
Copub: Douglas & McIntyre Limited
Samella Lewis
African American Art and Artists
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Samella Lewis has brought African American Art and Artists fully up to date in this revised and expanded edition. The book now looks at the works and lives of artists from the eighteenth century to the present, including new work in traditional media as well as in installation art, mixed media, and digital/computer art. Mary Jane Hewitt, an author, curator, and longtime friend of Samella Lewis's, has written an introduction to the new edition. Generously and handsomely illustrated, the book continues to reveal the rich legacy of work by African American artists, whose art is now included in the permanent collections of national and international museums as well as in major private collections.
Stephanie Barron
Made in California
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This opulent and expansive volume, published in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's monumental exhibition Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity,1900-2000, charts the dynamic relationship between the arts and popular conceptions of California. Displaying a dazzling array of fine art and material culture, Made in California challenges us to reexamine the ways in which the state has been portrayed and imagined. Unusually inclusive, visually intriguing, and beautifully produced, this volume is a delight throughout—both in image and in text—and will appeal to anyone who has lived in, visited, or imagined California.
Drawn from the exhibition, which gathers more than 1,200 artworks and pieces of ephemera from many public and private collections, Made in California is an image-driven look at the past century, featuring more than 400 works in a range of media, from painting, sculpture, prints, drawings, and photographs to furniture, fashion, and film. The book also includes more than 150 cultural artifacts such as tourist brochures, posters, labor union tracts, personal letters, and government reports that convey the richness and complexity of twentieth-century California. Arranged provocatively by theme, these objects take us on a visual tour of a state that was promoted as a bountiful paradise early in the century; as a glamour capital by Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s; as a suburban utopia in the late '40s and '50s; as a haven for counterculture in the '60s and '70s, and as a multicultural frontier in the '80s and '90s. The book's exploration of how these themes were reflected and contested in California's visual culture deepens our understanding of the state's artistic traditions as well as its fascinating history.
The volume is divided into five twenty-year sections, each including a narrative essay discussing the history of that era and highlighting topics particularly relevant to its visual culture. Two overarching themes emerge that have been crucial for how we imagine and understand California: first, the landscape, including both the natural and built environment, and second, the multifaceted relationships California has had with Latin America and Asia.
Geographer Michael Dear has contributed a sweeping overview of the social history of California that examines the vibrant and sometimes turbulent conditions out of which the culture emerged. Essayist Richard Rodriguez closes the volume with a uniquely personal meditation on the Golden State.
Rita Gonzalez
Phantom Sightings
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Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement is the first comprehensive consideration of Chicano art in almost two decades and the largest exhibition of cutting-edge Chicano art ever presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Traditionally described as work created by Americans of Mexican descent, Chicano art first emerged during the vibrant Chicano rights movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This catalog and exhibition explore the experimental tendencies within today's Chicano art, which is oriented less toward painting and polemical assertion and more toward conceptual art, performance, film, photography, and media-based art, as well as "stealthy" artistic interventions in urban spaces. Three essays by Rita Gonzalez, Howard N. Fox, and Chon A. Noriega explore the topic in depth. With more than two hundred color illustrations, twenty-five individual artist portfolios, and a wryly subversive chronology of significant moments in Chicano cultural history, Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement charts new territory and provides a conceptual sampling of Chicano art today.
Gordon S. Barrass
The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China
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Calligraphy is a defining feature of Chinese culture, both a means of communication and a revered form of art. It has changed more dramatically during the half century since Mao Zedong established the People's Republic in 1949 than over the preceding fifteen hundred years. At first the traditional art of calligraphy was transformed into an instrument of political power and protest, wielded on an unprecedented scale. Over the past three decades it has emerged as a more visually exciting modern genre, one that offers fascinating insights into the people of modern China.
For The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China, Gordon S. Barrass interviewed many prominent calligraphers. He focuses on twenty-five individuals who have been key figures in this process and who exemplify its main trends, from the grand tradition to the avant-garde. Lavishly illustrated, this sumptuous book charts the development of these calligraphers and makes their distinctive voices accessible to Western readers for the first time.
Janet Bishop
Robert Bechtle
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Tracing Robert Bechtle's career from his earliest paintings of the 1960s to the present day, this is the definitive book on one of the founders and foremost practitioners of American Photorealism. Created in close collaboration with the artist, Robert Bechtle will accompany the distinguished painter's first retrospective exhibition. Lavish plates feature reproductions of approximately ninety of Bechtle's most significant artworks, from large-scale oil paintings to intimate watercolors and drawings. These magnificent illustrations portray the range of the San Francisco-based painter's iconic imagery of California—the rows of palm trees, stucco houses, and the ubiquitous automobiles that spurred suburban expansion—as well as his lesser-known but equally compelling family scenes and stark interiors. Bechtle's preference for wide, empty spaces; his flat, sun-bleached palette; and his detached mode of recording random details impart a singular sense of alienation to his subjects. His deadpan paintings capture the essence of the postwar American experience, in which California often serves as the testing ground for the realization of national dreams.
Rudolf Arnheim
The Genesis of a Painting
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Rudolf Arnheim explores the creative process through the sketches executed by Picasso for his mural Guernica. The drawings and paintings shown herein, as well as the photographs of the stages of the final painting, represent the complete visual record of the creative stages of a major work of art.
Rudolf Arnheim
Visual Thinking
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For thirty-five years Visual Thinking has been the gold standard for art educators, psychologists, and general readers alike. In this seminal work, Arnheim, author of The Dynamics of Architectural Form, Film as Art, Toward a Psychology of Art, and Art and Visual Perception, asserts that all thinking (not just thinking related to art) is basically perceptual in nature, and that the ancient dichotomy between seeing and thinking, between perceiving and reasoning, is false and misleading. An indis-pensable tool for students and for those interested in the arts.
Mark di Suvero
Mark di Suvero
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This beautifully illustrated book—the definitive volume on American sculptor Mark di Suvero—features more than two hundred images of his most important works, interspersed with short texts by the artist and by other writers who have inspired his art-making practice, plus a contribution by François Barré. Humanist in approach and populist in sensibility, di Suvero's sculpture is accessible, inviting, and inclusive. Praised in particular for his monumental assemblages incorporating steel and wood, di Suvero emerged as a superstar in the 1960s. He was the first living artist to show his sculpture at the Tuileries Gardens, Paris, and the first honored with three major exhibitions at Storm King Art Center. His distinctive, bold pieces can be found in museums and public collections all over the world, and he continues to be the subject of numerous exhibitions both in the United States and in Europe. Mark di Suvero: Dreambook is a celebration of his artistic oeuvre and of his long, distinguished career.
Copub: Offsite
Rudolf Arnheim
Art and Visual Perception, Second Edition
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Since its publication fifty years ago, this work has established itself as a classic. It casts the visual process in psychological terms and describes the creative way one's eye organizes visual material according to specific psychological premises. In 1974 this book was revised and expanded, and since then it has continued to burnish Rudolf Arnheim's reputation as a groundbreaking theoretician in the fields of art and psychology.
Michel Foucault
This Is Not a Pipe
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What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? René Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambiguities of Magritte's visual critique of language, he finds the painter less removed than previously thought from the pioneers of modern abstraction.
Pratapaditya Pal
Himalayas
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This sweeping survey of the artistic achievements of Himalayan culture is the first major exhibition to include objects from all the major religions of the region. Created to accompany the landmark art exhibition that will include almost two hundred of the finest works of art created between the sixth and nineteenth centuries in India, Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan, this book explores the particular beauty that evolved from the spiritual traditions unique to the Himalayas. Lavishly illustrated with many rarely seen images, Himalayas conveys the spiritual aspirations of those who defied the physical hardships of an arduous mountain terrain to express their soaring creative spirit.
Currently held in private and public collections in North America and Europe, seventy percent of this art has never been published or publicly exhibited. The works include temple sculptures of stone and wood; works in terracotta; cast bronzes with inlaid gemstones, gilding, and paint; colorful paintings—from reverential portraits to depictions of awe-inspiring deities—on cloth, palm leaf, paper, and wood; and ritual objects in various media. Pratapaditya Pal provides a fascinating description of the cultural milieu in which these works of art were created.
Copublished with the Art Institute of Chicago
Henry Moore
Henry Moore
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Henry Moore's writings constitute a vivid and comprehensive record of his life and work, of the influences that shaped his vision, and of his reactions to the work of other artists, periods, and cultures. Spanning some seventy years, Moore's writings and conversations are much more than documentary records of his life and times: they have considerable literary merit in their own right.
This fascinating collection of Moore's written and spoken words is the most comprehensive yet compiled, and contains much previously unpublished material. It includes over 150 illustrations: photographs of the sculptures, drawings and prints discussed in the text, illustrations of works by other artists, and photographs of the sculptor and his environment at various stages of his life.
Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations completes and complements the catalogues of his sculpture, drawings, and prints. It will be indispensable for scholars and engrossing reading for Moore enthusiasts worldwide.
Madeleine Grynsztejn
Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco
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This sweeping overview of Ellsworth Kelly's fifty-year career is the first to bring together the twenty-two pieces the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art acquired from Kelly's personal collection in May 1999. The volume also includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, and reliefs from the Museum's previous holdings and private collections throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. The primary text by Madeleine Grynsztejn explores the evolution of Kelly's artwork, his longstanding interest in the phenomenology of vision, and his experimentation with compositions generated by the laws of chance. Additional essays by Julian Myers examine key issues and groupings of works, from Kelly's early figural paintings through the shaped panels and relief paintings for which the artist is best known. Produced to accompany the exhibition of the same name, Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco is an elegant presentation of the most significant collection of the artist's work. It secures Kelly's place as one of the most original of American artists.
Kelly's paintings and sculptures are recognized as vital to the evolution of postwar Modernism. One of the chief proponents of hard-edge abstraction during the 1950s, he is also celebrated for his large-scale monochrome canvases. In 1956, Kelly gained critical recognition when the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York purchased his work and the Betty Parsons gallery presented his first solo exhibition in the U.S. From the 1970s to the present, the scale of Kelly's work increased as he joined canvases of different sizes and shapes into asymmetrical formats and created totems in bronze, wood, and steel. From 1996 to 1998 the artist's work traveled to museums in Los Angeles, London, and Munich. Today Kelly's works are represented in museums and private collections worldwide, and he has received several prestigious awards and honorary degrees.
Edna R. Russmann
Eternal Egypt
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This sumptuously illustrated book is a wonderful introduction to the enormous and varied legacy of ancient Egypt. Created to accompany one of the greatest loan exhibitions ever to have been mounted from the collections of the British Museum, Eternal Egypt illustrates the development and achievements of ancient Egyptian art over a period of more than 3,000 years. Almost all of the artifacts have been drawn from the Museum's permanent exhibitions; many are among the finest examples of their kind to have survived from antiquity. Handsomely produced, this book reveals these objects—including sculpture, relief, papyri, hieroglyphic writing, jewelry, painting, cosmetic objects, and items of funerary equipment—as a means of extraordinary artistic expression rather than simply as historical documents. The book and the exhibit, which will travel to eight U.S. cities over the course of three years, provide a remarkable opportunity to explore the creative genius of one of the world's most extraordinary civilizations.
Eternal Egypt features the unique and innovative aspects of art from each period, as well as characteristic styles, forms, and genres. Edna Russmann, one of the world's leading authorities on ancient Egyptian art and curator of the exhibition, offers a wide-ranging and authoritative introductory essay that covers archaism, portraiture, and stylistic innovation in Egyptian art. The text also relates the history of the British Museum collection of Egyptian antiquities, showing how these exquisite art works came together. Each piece in the exhibition is given a separate explanatory entry in the book. With its superb color photographs and accessible yet informative text, Eternal Egypt marks a substantial step forward in scholarly understanding of its subject, embodying the results of the very latest research and containing many new and original insights and observations. It will be a must read for anyone with a passion for ancient Egypt.
Published in association with the American Federation of Arts by arrangement with the British Museum Press
Sylvia Yount
Cecilia Beaux
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At the turn of the twentieth century, the celebrated American artist William Merritt Chase named Cecilia Beaux “not only the greatest living woman painter, but the best that has ever lived.” While Beaux—unlike her contemporaries John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt—has not fared well in modernist-driven art history, her work has become the subject of renewed interest on the part of art historians, collectors, and general viewers on both sides of the Atlantic, and her forty-year career represents a compelling and under-examined chapter in the history of American art. Cecilia Beaux: American Figure Painter is the most comprehensive appraisal of Beaux’s talent in more than three decades. This handsomely illustrated book presents a range of the artist’s strongest work and offers a fresh understanding of her career by examining critical questions of gender, class, and the importance of place. It features substantive essays which examine Beaux’s participation in the international portrait market of the 1890s, explore the artist’s professional identity and changing fortunes through a close reading of key images, investigate Beaux’s sensitivity to the framing and display of her work. An illustrated chronology of Beaux’s life and work, compiled by Alison Bechtel Wexler, completes the study.
Copub: High Museum
Jan Tschichold
The New Typography
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Since its initial publication in Berlin in 1928, Jan Tschichold's The New Typography has been recognized as the definitive treatise on book and graphic design in the machine age. First published in English in 1995, with an excellent introduction by Robin Kinross, this new edition includes a foreword by Rich Hendel, who considers current thinking about Tschichold's life and work.
Matthew Spender
From a High Place
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An immigrant from a small Armenian village in eastern Turkey, Arshile Gorky (c. 1900-1948) made his way to the U.S. to become a painter in 1920. Having grown up haunted by memories of his alternately idyllic and terrifying childhood—his family fled the Turks' genocide of Armenians in 1915—he changed his name and created a new identity for himself in America. As an artist, Gorky bridged the generation of the surrealists and that of the abstract expressionists and was a very influential figure among the latter. His work was an inspiration to Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, among others. Matthew Spender illuminates this world as he tells the story of Gorky's life and career.
Barbara Rose
Monochromes
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The first comprehensive study of the modern history of monochrome art, Monochromes traces the development of single-color artwork—painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installations—up to the present. With almost 160 full-color reproductions, this stunning book examines fundamental aesthetic issues raised by the monochrome in a historical context. The authors ask whether the monochrome is the last and most radical phase of abstract painting or instead a point of departure for installations and environments. Among the many artists featured in this book are Alexander Rodchenko, Georgia O'Keeffe, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Robert Irwin, and Isamu Noguchi. The book includes writings on the monochrome by twenty-six artists, from Kasimir Malevich to Warhol, and from Carl Andre, Reinhardt, and Donald Judd to Ben Nicholson, Robert Ryman, and Anish Kapoor. In an engaging essay, Barbara Rose deftly surveys the divergent complex issues raised by the monochrome.
Additional Essays by Gladys Fabre, Christopher K. Ho, and Vincenzo Trione. Edited by Valerie Varas and Paula Rispa
Judith Kafka Maxwell
Anna Richards Brewster, American Impressionist
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Anna Richards Brewster, American Impressionist is the first in-depth study of an artist whose name is not well-known today but who was one of the most successful women artists of her time. This beautifully illustrated book, catalog to the exhibition of the same name, provides a fascinating look at the turn-of-the-twentieth-century art world as experienced by a woman artist. Anna Richards Brewster (1870-1952) began painting at age ten, studied with William Merritt Chase and John LaFarge, and trained at Académie Julian in Paris. She was a prolific painter of landscapes, portraits, and illustrations who showed her work regularly until the 1930s. In this volume, curator Judith Kafka Maxwell revives Brewster's work while exploring the contradictions common to women like her—those whose professional ambitions were neither supported nor encouraged by institutions or patrons. An introduction by Wanda M. Corn situates the artist in her social and cultural milieu, and essays by art historian Leigh Culver and American historian Kirsten Swinth explore the works themselves, the artist's education, and the post-Civil War rise of women artists. The result is a rich history of an artist and her time that makes vivid the obstacles faced by female artists in the early twentieth century.
Andrew Graham-Dixon
Renaissance
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The Renaissance was one of the great periods of creative and intellectual achievement. This "age of genius," from its origins in the thirteenth century to its zenith in sixteenth-century Rome, produced some of the most fascinating and dynamic artists of all time--Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Leonardo da Vinci. In his adventurous new book, lavishly illustrated with 125 color illustrations, acclaimed art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon takes a fresh look at this most exciting period in art history, challenging many of the myths and misconceptions surrounding the Renaissance.
The Italian scholars who first dreamed of a Renaissance wished to revive the spirit of classical antiquity after the darkness--as they saw it--of the medieval and Byzantine periods. Graham-Dixon argues, however, that the Renaissance represented a culmination rather than a complete rejection of those earlier influences. Starting in the Middle Ages with the impact of the Franciscan movement on painting in Italy, Graham-Dixon's reappraisal of the Renaissance takes us through the key moments of its development, focusing on the major artists and architects of the time: the Early Renaissance in Florence--Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, and Brunelleschi; the Northern Renaissance--Dürer, Cranach, and Brueghel; Venice--Titian, Palladio, and Tintoretto; and the High Renaissance in Rome--Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael.
Renaissance also outlines the historical context of this time of great social as well as artistic change. It reveals the social climate in which these artists worked: the power struggles between the Renaissance rulers of the Italian city-states, the French invasions of Italy, the invention of printing, and the Protestant Reformation. Along with his vivid, highly original, and often extremely entertaining descriptions of the works themselves, Graham-Dixon not only reassesses but also brings to life one of the most glorious periods in history.
Jeff Kelley
Childsplay
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Allan Kaprow has been described as an avant-garde revolutionary, a radical sociologist, a Zen(ish) monk, a progressive educator, and an anti-art theorist. But, above all, as this book reminds us, he has been an influential artist. Known for his "Happenings," Kaprow created vanguard performances in the early 1960s in which he collaged various art forms (painting, music, dance), disguised as ordinary things (newspaper, noise, body movement), into quasi-theatrical events. In the decades since, his works have remained open to the changing character of contemporary experience, always seeking the thresholds at which art and life converge. Because this art places such emphasis on direct experience, some people today think Kaprow's works were primarily transitory and immaterial. Childsplay corrects that misconception by providing a vivid description of Kaprow's Happenings and other art activities, clarifying their materiality, duration, and setting, as well as the ways in which people participated in them. Jeff Kelley brings the artist, his era, and his work to life by showing that Kaprow's artworks were physically present, socially engaged, and intellectually resonant in the moment of their enactment.
Jacquelynn Baas
Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art
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Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art documents the growing presence of Buddhist perspectives in contemporary culture. This shift began in the nineteenth century and is now pervasive in many aspects of everyday experience. In the arts especially, the increasing importance of process over product has promoted a profound change in the relationship between artist and audience. But while artists have been among the most perceptive interpreters of Buddhism in the West, art historians and critics have been slow to develop the intellectual tools to analyze the impact of Buddhist concepts. This timely, multi-faceted volume explores the relationships between Buddhist practice and the contemporary arts in lively essays by writers from a range of disciplines and in revealing interviews with some of the most influential artists of our time. Elucidating the common ground between the creative mind, the perceiving mind, and the meditative mind, the contributors tackle essential questions about the relationship of art and life.
Among the writers are curators, art critics, educators, and Buddhist commentators in psychology, literature, and cognitive science. They consider the many Western artists today who recognize the Buddhist notion of emptiness, achieved through focused meditation, as a place of great creative potential for the making and experiencing of art. The artists featured in the interviews, all internationally recognized, include Bill Viola, and Ann Hamilton. Extending earlier twentieth-century aesthetic interests in blurring the boundaries of art and life, the artists view art as a way of life, a daily practice, in ways parallel to that of the Buddhist practitioner. Their works, woven throughout the book, richly convey how Buddhism has been both a source for and a lens through which we now perceive art.
John Gage
Color and Meaning
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Is color just a physiological reaction, a sensation resulting from different wave lengths of light on receptors in our eyes? Does color have an effect on our feelings? The phenomenon of color is examined in extraordinary new ways in John Gage's latest book. His pioneering study is informed by the conviction that color is a contingent, historical occurrence whose meaning, like language, lies in the particular contexts in which it is experienced and interpreted.
Gage covers topics as diverse as the optical mixing techniques implicit in mosaic; medieval color-symbolism; the equipment of the manuscript illuminator's workshop, the color languages and color practices of Latin America at the time of the Spanish Conquest; the earliest history of the prism; and the color ideas of Goethe and Runge, Blake and Turner, Seurat and Matisse.
From the perspective of the history of science, Gage considers the bearing of Newton's optical discoveries on painting, the chemist Chevreul's contact with painters and the growing interest of experimental psychologists in the topic of color in the late nineteenth century, particularly in relation to synaesthesia. He includes an invaluable overview of the twentieth-century literature that bears on the historical interpretation of color in art. Gage's explorations further extend the concepts he addressed in his prize-winning book, Color and Culture.
Marsha Meskimmon
We Weren't Modern Enough
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Marsha Meskimmon furnishes a fresh perspective on the art of women in the Weimar Republic and in the process reclaims the lost history of a number of artists who have not received adequate attention—not only because they were women but also because they continued to align themselves with the modes of realistic representation the Expressionists regarded as reactionary. Reconsidering the traditional definitions of German modernism and its central issues of race politics, eugenics, and the city, Meskimmon explores the structures that marginalized the work of little known artists such as Lotte Laserstein, Jeanne Mammen, Gerta Overbeck and Grete Jurgens. She shows how these women's personal and professional experiences in the 1920s and 1930s relate to the visual imagery produced at that time. She also examines representations of different female roles—prostitute, mother, housewife, the "New Woman" and "garçonne"—that attracted the attention of these artists. Situating her exploration on a strong theoretical base, she ranges deftly over mass visual culture—from film to poster art and advertising—to create a vivid portrait of women living and creating in Weimar Germany.
James Christen Steward
Betye Saar
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Betye Saar, born in Los Angeles in 1926, emerged in the 1960s as a powerful figure in the redefinition of African American art. Over the past forty years, she has injected African American visual histories into mainstream visual culture by blending spiritual, political, and cultural iconography to create complex works with universal impact. This beautifully illustrated book accompanies an exhibition of Saar's work, showcasing the extraordinary depth and breadth of her achievement. It provides multiple vantage points from which to gain a richer understanding of Saar's career, American art of the 1960s, feminism, contemporary art, and California culture and politics.
Copub: University of Michigan Museum of Art
Carl Little
The Watercolors of John Singer Sargent
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John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) stands among the greatest of watercolor painters, along with J.M.W. Turner, Winslow Homer, and other masters of this difficult medium. Watercolor was more than a distraction from the portrait and mural commissions Sargent labored over; after 1900, watercolor became central to his artistic vision. His aquarelles are, simply stated, masterworks. Portraits, interiors, landscapes, architectural studies—Sargent's work in watercolor offers a great variety of subject matter, ranging from Arab gypsies to World War I soldiers, to masterful depictions of Venetian churches, to Florida swamp alligators.
Sargent carried his watercolors on his travels; They were ideally suited to capturing the scene, the light, the air, wherever he found himself. This book serves as a record of his travels, featuring the paintings he produced in Palestine, Northern Africa, the Canadian Rockies, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, and Greece. Among specific locales were the islands of Majorca and Corfu; Florence, Venice, Carrara, Lake Garda, and Rome; the Alps; Lake O'Hara; the coast of Maine and the Miami River.
Sargent's bold and often experimental use of the medium, which sometimes led to semi-abstract images, compels admiration among contemporary painters as well as museum goers today. In addition to placing Sargent's accomplishments in the context of his life and time, Carl Little discusses the artist's extraordinary watercolor technique.
Erle Loran
Cézanne's Composition
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This book had its provenance in the late 1920s, when Erle Loran, then a young artist who wanted to fathom the mysteries of Cézanne's structural form, took up residence in the master’s studio in Aix-en-Provence. For several years he lived there and painted, and when he came across familiar motifs in the countryside, he took snapshots of the setting. These photographs assisted Loran in his analysis of Cézanne's composition and served as the basis for this book, which analyzes over 30 of Cézanne's paintings. This new edition brings Loran’s milestone study up-to-date with a new foreword by art historian Richard Shiff, who places Loran’s work into today’s art historical context.
Michael Sullivan
The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art, Revised and Expanded Edition
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The meeting of Eastern and Western art is always more than a synthesis; it offers creative possibilities for interaction between East and West, a process in which the great civilizations preserve their own character while stimulating and enriching each other. In this book, Michael Sullivan leads the reader through four centuries of exciting interaction between the artists of China and Japan and those of Western Europe. From Hokusai to van Gogh, Sullivan shows how the study of artistic interpretation has significantly enlarged and enriched our vision of artists and their aims and ideals both East and West.
Margaret F. MacDonald
Palaces in the Night
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In September 1879, James McNeill Whistler boarded the Venice-bound night train in Paris. He was forty-five years old and bankrupt. What was to be a three-month stay in the Italian city—long enough to complete a set of twelve etchings—stretched to fourteen months. When Whistler returned to London, he brought back over fifty magnificent etchings and a hundred pastels, far in excess of the original commission. In Palaces in the Night, Margaret F. MacDonald looks at this key period in Whistler's career, examining his unique vision of Venice and his development of the medium of etching. She shows how he reestablished himself in the art world of London and Paris, turning disaster and disgrace into profit and prestige. Lavishly illustrated with some of the most beautiful and intriguing images Whistler ever produced, this book provides a fascinating account of a pivotal period in the artist's long and complicated career.
Whistler's aim was to restore both his fortune and reputation with the Venetian etchings. To that end he included views of familiar sights like the Riva degli Schiavoni and San Marco, but he also captured quiet backwaters, secret gardens, and lantern-lit windows that did not appear in any guidebook. His selection of views and compositions, plus the expressiveness of his line and printing, differentiated his work from that of others, and MacDonald shows the process by which Whistler selected, shaped, and edited his Venetian corpus. He drew figures in distinctively Italian costume, each an individual, moving, gesturing, and interacting with other real people.
An appendix of Whistler's letters from Venice provides an entertaining account of his time there and also deepens the reader's understanding of how the city challenged and inspired him.
Karin Breuer
An American Focus
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An American Focus celebrates the exceptional and extensive Anderson Graphic Arts Collection of prints, multiples, and monotypes by major contemporary American artists. The collection spans more than thirty years of print production from 1962 to 1998, surveying the American printmaking renaissance with outstanding examples of print processes—woodcut, intaglio, lithography, screenprint, and monotype—from major fine-art presses. "The best" was long held as a criterion by Mr. and Mrs. Harry Anderson in acquiring works of art, and this selection of 192 works from their collection—now housed with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco—admirably reflects their collecting strategy.
This volume and the exhibition it accompanies offer the public a rare opportunity to view works on paper by many of the best-known contemporary artists, including Richard Diebenkorn, Kiki Smith, Jasper Johns, Elizabeth Murray, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Josef Albers, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, and many others representing both the East and West Coasts. The works are presented in chronological order and organized into four sections, each corresponding to the decade in which the works were produced, from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Karin Breuer introduces each of the sections and describes important events and trends in American print history; she has also contributed an essay on the story behind the renowned Anderson Collection as well as an illustrated chronology of American printmaking from 1945 to the present. With the addition of a fully illustrated checklist of the 192 works, this volume is essential reading for everyone interested in contemporary American art and printmaking.
Timothy O. Benson
Expressionist Utopias
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The notion of utopia exists in every culture, capturing shared dreams and common goals. This book—prepared to accompany the exhibition Expressionist Utopias mounted at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1993—explores how the optimistic themes of utopia and fantasy sustained faith among artists and architects in the power of art to shape a better world during the tumultuous World War I era in Germany. The exhibition's curator, Timothy O. Benson along with David Frisby, Reinhold Heller, Anton Kaes, Wolf Prix, and Iain Boyd White present the diverse manifestations of the utopia metaphor in its progression throughout Expressionism from Arcadian to manmade utopias.
This work includes a new essay and an interview by Edward Dimenberg with Wolf Prix on the spectacular installation created for the exhibition by the Viennese architectural firm Coop Himmelblau.
Sophie Lévy
A Transatlantic Avant-Garde
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This landmark book is the first to capture the diversity of American artistic production of the interwar period in Paris. Assembling works from American and European collections to illustrate the presence of American artists at the heart of numerous avant-garde movements, including Purism, geometric abstraction, and surrealism, A Transatlantic Avant-Garde chronicles an uncertain time of transition when many American artists resisted the nationalist trends of Stieglitz and his circle and flooded the French capital seeking artistic exchange.
Abundantly illustrated, this book includes over 200 color reproductions of artwork by both American artists and those European artists with whom they came in contact, including Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Albert Eugene Gallatin, Jean Hélion, and Fernand Léger, as well as those from the surrealist circles, such as Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. It also includes portraits of the illustrious characters by Berenice Abbott, Lee Miller, and Edward Steichen.
This book reflects the transatlantic dialogue of the era by bringing together groundbreaking research in eight essays by both American and French authors. It is further enriched by a detailed chronology, bibliography, and illustrated insets that trace the incessant travel, encounters and ensuing friendships, exhibitions and publications of the American avant-garde.
A Transatlantic Avant-Garde: American Artists in Paris, 1918-1939 accompanies a major traveling exhibition organized by the Musée d'Art Américain Giverny.
Anne Hollander
Feeding the Eye
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Since the advent of cinema, visual art has tended to be perceived as if it were in motion. Artists now create less often in fresco or carved stone and more on film and tape, on the dance stage, or in the ever changing, ever moving medium of clothes. In this remarkable collection, Anne Hollander ranges over art of the twentieth and other centuries with unusual depth of historical insight to explore these rich, diverse visual treasures and the underlying themes that connect them.
Richard J. Powell
Rhapsodies in Black
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Harlem has captivated the imagination of writers, artists, intellectuals, and politicians around the world since the early decades of this century. Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance examines the cultural reawakening of Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s as a key moment in twentieth-century art history, one that transcended regional and racial boundaries. Published to coincide with the exhibition that opens in England and travels to the United States, this catalog reflects the Harlem Renaissance's impressive range of art forms—literature, music, dance, theater, painting, sculpture, photography, film, and graphic design. The participants included not only artists based in New York, but also those from other parts of the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe.
Richard J. Powell and David A. Bailey present selected works that focus on six themes: Representing "The New Negro;" Another Modernism; Blues, Jazz, and the Performative Paradigm; The Cult of the Primitive; Africa: Inheritance and Seizure; and Jacob Lawrence's Toussaint L'Ouverture series. The visual arts from 1919 to 1938 included in the book suggest the extraordinary vibrancy of the time when Harlem was a metaphor for modernity. In spite of the importance of the Harlem Renaissance to early twentieth-century American culture and to the artistic climate of "Jazz Age" Paris and Weimar Berlin, few art exhibitions have been devoted exclusively to the subject. Rhapsodies in Black will be welcomed for its unique presentation of this creative time.
John Gage
Color and Culture
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Color is fundamental to life and art yet so diverse that it has seldom been studied in a comprehensive way. This ground-breaking analysis of color in Western culture from the ancient Greeks to the late twentieth century is a John Gage triumph. With originality and erudition, he describes the first theories of color articulated by philosophers from Democritus to Aristotle and the subsequent attempts by the Romans and their Renaissance disciples to organize color systematically or endow it with symbolic power. The place of color in religion, Newton's analysis of the spectrum, Goethe's color theory, and the theories and practices that have attempted to unite color and music are among the intriguing topics this award-winning book illuminates.
With a large classified bibliography, discursive footnotes, and an exhaustive index, Color and Culture is an invaluable resource for artists, historians of art and culture, psychologists, linguists, and anyone fascinated by this most inescapable and evocative element of our perceptions.
Monica Bohm-Duchen
The Private Life of a Masterpiece
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The world's most well known works of art are both instantly familiar and profoundly mysterious. What has made these images so popular, and how did they come into existence? The Private Life of a Masterpiece answers these questions by delving into the secrets of iconic works of art dating from 1501 to 1950. Piecing together a trail of clues, it examines each work from conception through completion to afterlife, detailing how the commission came about, the preparation undertaken by the artist, the way the work was executed, how the finished work was received, and its influence on other artists. We learn, for example, that Leonardo devised a new form of perspective when painting the Mona Lisa, and that four centuries later Picasso was detained for stealing the portrait from the Louvre; that Goya painted The Third of May 1808 as a criticism of the monarchy but nonetheless offered it to the king as a gift; that Van Gogh's Sunflowers owes much to improvements in the postal system; that Munch's The Scream was influenced by the Incas; and that Jackson Pollock's paintings were promoted by the CIA. Along the way, we also learn about each artist's life, including the struggles with family, lovers, patrons, and critics.
The works featured in this book met with a variety of reactions when first unveiled, and the author details them all, from admiration and respect to horror and contempt. Now readers can judge for themselves.
Beautifully illustrated and lucidly written, The Private Life of a Masterpiece offers an innovative and compelling introduction to the extraordinary stories contained in the history of art. It will enthrall all those who wish to know more about this fascinating subject.
Steven Platzman
Cézanne
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Cézanne revolutionized the way we see and transcribe the essence of the material world. His position is pivotal: his style is part of the canon of early modernism and his iconic images, his still lifes, and landscapes are associated with a unique analytical approach that changed the face of modern art. But how did Cézanne see and portray himself? His self-portraits are a surprisingly neglected area of study and there has been no extended and in-depth analysis of how Cézanne's signature style was used to fashion his self-image. Steven Platzman's accessible and richly illustrated book fills this gap by examining the stylistic development of Cézanne's self-portraits in an effort to understand how the artist saw himself and others, and how he positioned himself in the art world and French society. Platzman's detailed analysis of the paintings offers new explanations and assessments of significant aspects of Cézanne's career and oeuvre. Abundant and exquisitely reproduced illustrations, including crucial details, make Cézanne: The Self-Portraits an essential resource for anyone interested in this French master.
Platzman demonstrates that the expectation of a self- portrait from a master artist goes beyond color and structural analysis. He questions whether a Cézanne self-portrait reveals something of the artist's emotions, or whether it obscures the feelings of the man whose celebrated and groundbreaking style altered the course of the history of art. The author also thoroughly and clearly fleshes out the historical and artistic contexts of mid-nineteenth century France and investigates Cézanne's complex relationship with the avant-garde in the 1860s and early 1870s. He provides a new explanation for Cézanne's flirtation with impressionism and his subsequent adoption of a more personal, idiosyncratic style. He also takes a new and radically different view of Cézanne's so-called "narrative self-portraits," exploring for the first time his relationship with the icon of the femme fatale. Through these close visual analyses, readers will come to a greater understanding of the concerns, ambitions, and relationships that shaped Cézanne's oeuvre.
Andrew McClellan
Inventing the Louvre
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Founded in the final years of the Enlightenment, the Louvre—with the greatest collection of Old Master paintings and antique sculpture assembled under one roof—became the model for all state art museums subsequently established. Andrew McClellan chronicles the formation of this great museum from its origins in the French royal picture collections to its apotheosis during the Revolution and Napoleonic Empire. More than a narrative history, McClellan's account explores the ideological underpinnings, pedagogic aims, and aesthetic criteria of the Louvre. Drawing on new archival materials, McClellan also illuminates the art world of eighteenth-century Paris.
Antony Griffiths
Prints and Printmaking
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A print is a pictorial image that has been produced by a process that enables it to be multiplied, and many of the best-known works by some of the world's greatest artists are prints. Yet little is understood about this popular art form. Now Antony Griffiths provides an excellent introduction for anyone who wishes to acquire a basic understanding of prints and printmaking. In succinct and lucid language, he explains the different printmaking techniques and shows both details and whole prints to demonstrate the effects that can be achieved. Woodcuts, engraving, etching, mezzotint, and lithography are among the many processes explained, illustrated, and placed within a historical context.
This fully revised and updated edition of the highly praised 1980 British publication is available for the first time in the United States. With its complete glossary, index, and helpful illustrations, Griffiths's book is the essential foundation for an intelligent appreciation of the printmaker's art.
David Mitchinson
Celebrating Moore
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This book is a celebration of The Henry Moore Foundation's collection—the most important and comprehensive single group of Moore's drawings, graphics, and sculpture.
More than 300 of Moore's acclaimed works are reproduced in full color, and extensive captions are provided by distinguished sculptors, art critics, and art historians, many of whom knew and worked with Moore. Their fresh insights and personal anecdotes provide a detailed and compelling analysis of Moore's artistry.
David Mitchinson's introductory essay traces the formation of The Henry Moore Foundation's collection, a fascinating story that has never been told before. He explains Moore's somewhat haphazard way of working, the confused ownership between the Foundation and its trading company, the strengths and weaknesses of the Collection itself, and the evolution of the Foundation's property at Perry Green in Hertfordshire. With a foreword by Sir Alan Bowness, Celebrating Moore will be a welcome addition to the study and appreciation of Henry Moore for years to come.
From the Foreword:"Henry Moore talked well and liked talking about sculpture, but he rarely gave any verbal explanation of his own works. That was for others to do: He was the man who had made the piece and put it out in the world. This is the form that the catalogue takes—twenty-five sculptors, art historians, critics, curators, and film makers write about sculptures and drawings that particularly interest them."
Stephanie Barron
Reading California
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This companion volume to the exhibition Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity,1900-2000 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art offers in-depth, illustrated essays on the making of California culture in the twentieth century. Written by a stellar cast of art historians and scholars in the humanities, the essays look closely at the forces that shaped fine art and material culture in California. The contributors weave their subjects around themes that are central to the milestone exhibition: the California landscape—both the natural and built environments—and the state's cultural and political relationships with Latin America and Asia.
These provocative essays cover topics such as counterculture architecture, Watts Towers, border culture, identity and gender issues, the role of schools in California art, auto tourism, Hollywood, music, Beat culture, politics, literature, photography, and much more. Accessibly written and intellectually engaging, these essays sharpen our understanding of California in the twentieth century and bring together many diverse, yet interrelated, aspects of its art and culture.
A. Richard Turner
Inventing Leonardo
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As he examines the changing views of Leonardo since the sixteenth century, A. Richard Turner both gives the reader a cultural history in brief of western Europe during this period and provides a context for examining Leonardo's relevance to our own ways of perceiving and interpreting the world.
Patrick Marnham
Dreaming with His Eyes Open
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This engrossing biography of Diego Rivera, the brilliant Mexican artist and revolutionary, captures the explosively passionate nature that made Rivera one of the twentieth-century's most gifted and controversial painters.
Lawrence Gowing
Vermeer
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Lawrence Gowing's classic study has long been treasured for the painterly sensibilities he brought to this greatly loved body of work. Finally the text is available again, with a new foreword and fresh reproductions of Vermeer's paintings.
Lucy Lippard
Six Years
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In Six Years Lucy R. Lippard documents the chaotic network of ideas that has been labeled conceptual art. The book is arranged as an annotated chronology into which is woven a rich collection of original documents—including texts by and taped discussions among and with the artists involved and by Lippard, who has also provided a new preface for this edition. The result is a book with the character of a lively contemporary forum that offers an invaluable record of the thinking of the artists—a historical survey and essential reference book for the period.
Hugo Ball
Flight Out of Time
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Hugo Ball—poet, philosopher, novelist, cabaret performer, journalist, mystic—was a man extremely sensitive to the currents of his time and carried in their wake. In February 1916 he founded the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The sound poems and performance art by Ball and the other artists who gathered there were the beginnings of Dada. Ball's extraordinary diaries, one of the most significant products of the Dada movement, are here available in English in paperback for the first time, along with the original Dada manifesto and John Elderfield's critical introduction, revised and updated for the paperback edition, and a supplementary bibliography of Dada texts that have appeared since the 1974 hardcover edition of this book.
Mary Kelly
Post-Partum Document
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Conceived as an installation in six consecutive sections, Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document has been widely exhibited and intensely debated since its first scandalous appearance in the 1970s. Now, more than twenty years later, the Document's initial challenge to conceptual art and its impact on the emerging discourse of sexual difference have taken on a new significance. For many younger artists and critics, the republication of Kelly's artwork in book form will provide the opportunity to engage directly with the visual and intertextual strategies that spawned a generation of "thinking bad girls."
JoAnn Wypijewski
Painting by Numbers
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What is art? Who defines it? And why is high art so remote from most people? With the same puckish humor and critical genius that made them the bêtes noires of Soviet cultural commissars, the Russian émigré art team of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid takes on not only the billion-dollar American art industry but also capitalism's most venerated tool: the market research poll. With the help of The Nation Institute and a professional polling team, they discovered that what Americans want in art, regardless of class, race, or gender, is exactly what the art world disdains—a tranquil, realistic, blue landscape.
Painting by Numbers includes the original questionnaire and reproductions of the "most wanted" and "most unwanted" paintings the artists made based on American survey results and on polls they commissioned in ten other countries—including Russia, China, France, and Kenya—representing almost one-third of the world's population. Essays by JoAnn Wypijewski and noted art critic Arthur Danto, as well as an interview with the artists, explore the crisis of modernism, the cultural meaning of polls, the significance of landscape, and the commodificaion of just about everything.
Gregory Battcock
Minimal Art
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Here with a new introduction and updated bibliography, is the definitive collection of writings by and about the work of the 1960s minimalists, generously illustrated with photographs of paintings, sculpture, and performance.
Barbara Rose
Art as Art
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Ad Reinhardt is probably best known for his black paintings, which aroused as much controversy as admiration in the American art world when they were first exhibited in the 1950s. Although his ideas about art and life were often at odds with those of his contemporaries, they prefigured the ascendance of minimalism. Reinhardt's interest in the Orient and in religion, his strong convictions about the value of abstraction, and his disgust with the commercialism of the art world are as fresh and valid today as they were when he first expressed them.
Arnold Skolnick
Paintings of California
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California embodies the American desire to explore frontiers. Collected here in Paintings of California are the works of more than sixty of America's finest artists, all of whom were drawn to the beauty of California's kaleidoscopic geography and the diversity of her people.
The more than ninety landscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes in the book are a revealing depiction not just of the changing topography but of the creation and persistence of the myth of the American dream. The images demonstrate the inspiration provided by sun, sky, and sea, and range from awe-inspiring renderings of giant sequoias to prophetic warnings about the costs of urbanization.
Among the painters included are Albert Bierstadt, George Bellows, Richard Diebenkorn, Childe Hassam, David Hockney, George Inness, David Park, Frank Romero, Ed Ruscha, Alexis Smith, Wayne Thiebaud, and Nicola Wood. Accompanying the paintings are brief selected writings from such authors as John Muir, Mark Twain, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, and John Steinbeck that echo the passion of the paintings. In her introduction, Ilene Susan Fort amplifies these excerpts, exploring the history of California and its art and also the unique qualities that have made the state so seductive to explorers, tourists, and artists alike. The book concludes with biographical notes on the artists and information about the collections of the major California museums.
Dore Ashton
The New York School
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With the emergence of Abstract Expressionism after World War II, the attention of the international art world turned from Paris to New York. Dore Ashton captures the vitality of the cultural milieu in which the New York School artists worked and argued and critiqued each other's work from the 1930s to the 1950s. Working from unsifted archives, from contemporary newspapers and books, and from extensive conversations with the men and women who participated in the rise of the New York School, Ashton provides a rich cultural and intellectual history of this period. In examining the complex sources of this important movement—from the WPA program of the 1930s and the influx of European ideas to the recognition in the 1950s of American painting on an international scale—she conveys the concerns of an extraordinary group of artists including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Philip Guston, Barnett Newman, Arshile Gorky, and many others. Rare documentary photographs illustrate Ashton's classic appraisal of the New York School scene.
Dore Ashton
Noguchi East and West
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The life of the Japanese-American sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) was an unending spiritual and physical voyage between the two cultures of his birthright. In this definitive biography and critical study, Dore Ashton maps Noguchi's spiritual journey both in the events of his life and in the milestones of his art: the sculptures, gardens, public spaces, and stage decors that gained force and significance from his double heritage.
Edward Snow
A Study of Vermeer, Revised and Enlarged edition
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Edward Snow's A Study of Vermeer, first published in 1979 and here presented in an expanded and elaborately revised version, starts from a single premise: that we respond so intensely to Vermeer because his paintings reach so deeply into our lives. Our desire for images, the distances that separate us, the validations we seek from the still world, the traces of ghostliness in our own human presence—these, the book proposes, are Vermeer's themes, which he pursues with a realism always in touch with the uncanny. As Snow traces the many counterpoised sensations that make up Vermeer's equanimity, he leads us into a world of nuances and surprise.
A Study of Vermeer is passionate and visual in its commitments. Snow works from the conviction that viewing pictures is a reciprocal act—symbiotic, consequential, real. His discussions of Vermeer's paintings are conducted in a language of patient observation, and they involve the reader in an experience of deepening relation and ongoing visual discovery. The book has been designed to facilitate this process: over eighty illustrations, fifty-nine in color (including two full-page foldouts), accompany the text so that the details Snow illuminates will be continally in view. Here is a book to enthrall not only students of Vermeer, but anyone who feels the exhilaration of what Cézanne called "thinking in images."
Anne Hollander
Seeing Through Clothes
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In this generously illustrated book, Anne Hollander examines the representation of the body and clothing in Western art, from Greek sculpture and vase painting through medieval and renaissance portraits, to contemporary films and fashion photography. First published ahead of its time, this book has become a classic.
Jan Tschichold
The New Typography
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Since its initial publication in Berlin in 1928, Jan Tschichold's The New Typography has been recognized as the definitive treatise on book and graphic design in the machine age. At once a key theoretical document of Central European modernism between the world wars and an invaluable source of working principles for the practicing designer, this classic work enjoys the reputation among book artists that Le Corbusier's Toward a New Architecture has long held among architects.
The book's legendary renown is certain to increase with the long-overdue appearance of this first English translation, published in a form that reflects Tschichold's original typography and design. Ranging from theoretical discussions of typography in the age of photography and mechanical standardization to practical considerations in the design of business forms, The New Typography remains essential reading for designers, art historians, and all those concerned with the evolution of visual communication in the twentieth century.
Richard Huelsenbeck
Memoirs of a Dada Drummer
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Huelsenbeck’s memoirs bring to life the concerns—intellectual, artistic, and political—of the individuals involved in the Dada movement and document the controversies within the movement and in response to it.
Meredith Parsons Lillich
The Armor of Light
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$175.00
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This landmark study is the first to look closely at the stained glass produced between 1250 and 1325 in western France during the late Capetian era. Generously illustrated with a wealth of color and black-and-white images never before published including many from French churches now closed to the public, Lillich greatly expands our knowledge of both the art and the society from which it emerged.
The period Lillich chronicles begins with the region's new vitality following the knights' return from the crusades and ends with the onset of economic uncertainty and unrest that preceded the Hundred Years' War. She reveals that the stained glass of this 75-year span is forceful and uninhibited, dramatic and dazzling, characteristic of what we now term expressionism. Lillich tracks and identifies painters, glazing shops, working methods, models, and sources to argue that the stained glass is a major style with its own developmental evolution and character, putting to rest the notion that this art is merely transitional and provincial.
Herschel B. Chipp
Theories of Modern Art
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Paul Klee
The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918
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Paul Klee was endowed with a rich and many-sided personality that was continually spilling over into forms of expression other than his painting and that made him one of the most extraordinary phenomena of modern European art. These abilities have left their record in the four intimate Diaries in which he faithfully recorded the events of his inner and outer life from his nineteenth to his fortieth year. Here, together with recollections of his childhood in Bern, his relations with his family and such friends as Kandinsky, Marc, Macke, and many others, his observations on nature and people, his trips to Italy and Tunisia, and his military service, the reader will find Klee's crucial experience with literature and music, as well as many of his essential ideas about his own artistic technique and the creative process.
Brian O'Doherty
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
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$55.00
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In September 1976, a curtain of shimmering white was unfurled across the hills of rural northern California, running unbroken for 24.5 miles from Sonoma County to the Pacific Ocean. The artistic vision of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence was 18 feet high and traversed the private properties of 59 ranchers. Although it remained in place for just two weeks, the process of planning it consumed nearly four years, and the installation required helicopters, barges, lawyers, and more than 300 Bay Area students and workers. This beautiful book, companion volume to the exhibition of the same name, tells the story of this legendary art installation. Illustrated throughout with graphic representations and stunning photographs, Christo and Jeanne-Claude recounts how two artists who were complete strangers to the area gradually enlisted the support of entire communities in order to make their vision a reality. Brian O’Doherty’s insightful essay considers the legacy of the Running Fence, while remembrances from other contributors, including the artists’ California attorney provide as full an experience of Running Fence as is possible, short of actually having been there.
Copub: Smithsonian American Art Museum
Jean Laude
The Arts of Black Africa
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Peter Selz
German Expressionist Painting
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Jonathan P. Binstock
Sam Gilliam
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Sam Gilliam established himself as a major artist in 1968 when he jettisoned the wooden stretcher bars that had previously determined the shape of his paintings and allowed his vivid, sometimes ecstatic, rushes of color-stained canvas to hang, billow, and swing through space. Yet Gilliam's contributions to art history extend far beyond these often monumental and always dramatic works. In this volume, the first in-depth book devoted to this major figure, Corcoran Gallery of Art Curator of Contemporary Art Jonathan P. Binstock explores four decades of work and establishes the artist’s place in the history of post-1960s art. Binstock’s wide-ranging and provocative inquiry into Gilliam’s groundbreaking achievements as a modernist and as an African American artist is supported with a wealth of beautifully produced illustrations—both full-color and black-and-white—as well as an annotated and illustrated chronology and an exhaustive bibliography. This thoughtful exploration and appraisal of Gilliam’s extraordinary oeuvre places the artist at the forefront of American abstract art.
Copub: Corcoran Gallery of Art
Jim Masselos
The Great Empires of Asia
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From the beginning of the modern era in 1500 CE, Western history has placed Europe at the center of worldwide political, economic, and cultural dynamism. But long before the European powers began to encroach upon the East, Asia itself was the locus of dozens of empires—some, like the Mongols, legendary. In this gorgeously illustrated, accessibly written volume, experts of art and history analyze the Asian imperial enterprise with an emphasis on the cultural and creative. In seven compelling chapters, plus an informative introduction and conclusion, these essays provide a decisive corrective to old myths about European dominance relative to Asia and show instead the polycentric nature of world power during the past five hundred years. Reaching across a vast swath of the continent, the book brings to life a thousand years of history, from the Khmer empire in Southeast Asia in the early ninth century to the end of Japan's Meiji Period in 1945. It shows how Asian kingdoms dominated global political geography and challenged the states of Europe rather than the reverse, and it provides fascinating insights into the characters, events, and influences that shaped them.
Rudolf Arnheim
Toward a Psychology of Art
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Amy Dempsey
Destination Art
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This stunningly illustrated book is the first critical guide to the two hundred most important modern and contemporary art sites around the world. Designed for the international art tourist as a key critical reference in an era where more and more art is found outside galleries or museums, Destination Art not only is packed with practical information for the traveler but also provides a highly accessible chronological survey of the world's most important large-scale and public works of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. Encompassing massive land and environmental works, extensive sculpture parks, magnificent architectural follies, site-specific installations, even whole towns turned over to the display of art, this book chronicles a wealth of works that have achieved near-mythical status since they were created. Among the many influential and popular artists included are Henri Matisse, Antoni GaudÌ, Jean Tinguely, Constantin Brancusi, James Turrell, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, and Antony Gormley. The book includes full visitor information, with hours and admissions fees, directions, contact details and websites, and further reading. Fifty key art destinations are featured in substantial essays, with accounts of their histories, descriptions of their sites, and spectacular photography. With destinations from around the world and special emphasis on Europe and the United States, this volume signals the coming of age of site-specific art and will inspire visitors from around the globe and armchair enthusiasts alike.
Copub: Thames & Hudson
Ilia Dorontchenkov
Russian and Soviet Views of Modern Western Art, 1890s to Mid-1930s
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From the first Modernist exhibitions in the late 1890s to the Soviet rupture with the West in the mid-1930s, Russian artists and writers came into wide contact with modern European art and ideas. Introducing a wealth of little-known material set in an illuminating interpretive context, this sourcebook presents Russian and Soviet views of Western art during this critical period of cultural transformation. The writings document complex responses to these works and ideas before the Russians lost contact with them almost entirely. Many of these writings have been unavailable to foreign readers and, until recently, were not widely known even to Russian scholars. Both an important reference and a valuable resource for classrooms, the book includes an introductory essay and shorter introductions to the individual sections.
Michael Doran
Conversations with Cezanne
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$17.95
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Michael Doran has gathered texts by contemporaries of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)—including artists, critics, and writers—that illuminate the influential painter's philosophy of art especially in his late years. The book includes historically important essays by a dozen different authors, including Emile Bernard, Joaquim Gasquet, Maurice Denis, and Ambroise Vollard, along with selections from Cézanne's own letters.
In addition to the material included in the original French edition of the book, which has also been published in German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, this edition contains an introduction written especially for it by noted Cézanne scholar Richard Shiff. The book closes with Lawrence Gowing's magisterial essay, "The Logic of Organized Sensations," first published in 1977 and long out of print.
Cézanne's work, and the thinking that lay behind it, have been of inestimable importance to the artists who followed him. This gathering of writings will be of enormous interest to artists, writers, art historians—indeed to all students of modern art.
Michael Sullivan
Modern Chinese Artists
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The first biographical dictionary of its kind in any Western language, this pioneering work provides short, information-packed entries for approximately 1,800 Chinese artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In recent years interest in modern Chinese art has spread across the globe. Public and private collections are being formed; courses in modern Chinese art are offered in many universities and museums. At the same time, the number of practicing artists in China and the amount of published material have greatly increased. Michael Sullivan’s pathbreaking book Art and Artists of Twentieth-Century China, published in 1996, included a biographical index of some eight hundred artists. This volume includes more than twice that number, with entries that have been revised, expanded, and brought up to date. Illustrated with portraits and photographs of more than seventy leading artists, this comprehensive, convenient reference will be an essential tool for anyone interested in the study or collection of modern Chinese art.
William H. Truettner
Painting Indians and Building Empires in North America, 1710–1840
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The Europeans who first settled North America were endlessly intrigued by the indigenous people they found there; even before the colonials began to record the landscape, they drew and painted Indians. This study offers a new visual perspective on westward expansion through a survey of the major Indian images painted by Euro-American artists before and after the American Revolution. William H. Truettner's accessible readings of paintings by artists such as Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, Charles Bird King, and George Catlin relate these images to social and political events of the time and tell us much about how North American tribes would fare as they fought to survive during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Edited by Lisa Farrington
Black Artists in Their Own Words
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$95.00
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The first book to center Black artists' voices on Black aesthetics, revealing a century of evolving relationships to race, identity, and art.
What is Black art? No one has thought harder about that question than Black artists, yet their perspectives have been largely ignored. Instead, their stories have been told by intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, who defined "a school" of Black art in the early twentieth century. For the first time, Black Artists in Their Own Words offers an insightful corrective.
Esteemed art historian Lisa Farrington gathers writing spanning a century across the United States, the Caribbean, and the African continent—including from renowned artists Henry Tanner, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Romare Bearden, Wifredo Lam, Renee Cox, and many more—that reveals both evolutions and equivocations. Many artists, especially during the civil rights era, have embraced Black aesthetics as a source of empowerment. Others prefer to be artists first and Black second, while some have rejected racial identification entirely. Here, Black artists reclaim their work from reductive critical narratives, sharing the motivations underlying their struggles to create in a white-dominated art world.
Edited by Lisa Farrington
Black Artists in Their Own Words
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$34.95
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The first book to center Black artists' voices on Black aesthetics, revealing a century of evolving relationships to race, identity, and art.
What is Black art? No one has thought harder about that question than Black artists, yet their perspectives have been largely ignored. Instead, their stories have been told by intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, who defined "a school" of Black art in the early twentieth century. For the first time, Black Artists in Their Own Words offers an insightful corrective.
Esteemed art historian Lisa Farrington gathers writing spanning a century across the United States, the Caribbean, and the African continent—including from renowned artists Henry Tanner, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Romare Bearden, Wifredo Lam, Renee Cox, and many more—that reveals both evolutions and equivocations. Many artists, especially during the civil rights era, have embraced Black aesthetics as a source of empowerment. Others prefer to be artists first and Black second, while some have rejected racial identification entirely. Here, Black artists reclaim their work from reductive critical narratives, sharing the motivations underlying their struggles to create in a white-dominated art world.
Lisa E. Farrington
Black Artists in Their Own Words
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$34.95
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The first book to center Black artists' voices on Black aesthetics, revealing a century of evolving relationships to race, identity, and art.
What is Black art? No one has thought harder about that question than Black artists, yet their perspectives have been largely ignored. Instead, their stories have been told by intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, who defined "a school" of Black art in the early twentieth century. For the first time, Black Artists in Their Own Words offers an insightful corrective.
Esteemed art historian Lisa Farrington gathers writing spanning a century across the United States, the Caribbean, and the African continent—including from renowned artists Henry Tanner, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Romare Bearden, Wifredo Lam, Renee Cox, and many more—that reveals both evolutions and equivocations. Many artists, especially during the civil rights era, have embraced Black aesthetics as a source of empowerment. Others prefer to be artists first and Black second, while some have rejected racial identification entirely. Here, Black artists reclaim their work from reductive critical narratives, sharing the motivations underlying their struggles to create in a white-dominated art world.
Howard Singerman
Art History, After Sherrie Levine
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This book examines the career of New York-based artist Sherrie Levine, whose 1981 series of photographs "after Walker Evans"—taken not from life but from Evans’s famous depression-era documents of rural Alabama—became central examples in theorizing postmodernism in the visual arts in the 1980s. For the first in-depth examination of Levine, Howard Singerman surveys a wide variety of sources, both historical and theoretical, to assess an artist whose work was understood from the outset to challenge both the label "artist" and the idea of oeuvre—and who has over the past three decades crafted a significant oeuvre of her own. Singerman addresses Levine’s work after Evans, Brancusi, Malevich, and others as an experimental art historical practice—material reenactments of the way the work of art history is always doubled in and structured by language, and of the ways the art itself resists.
Erkki Huhtamo
Media Archaeology
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This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.
Peter Selz
Art of Engagement
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Art of Engagement takes the first comprehensive look at the key role of California's art and artists in politics and culture since 1945. Tracing the remarkably fertile confluence of political agitation and passionately engaged art, Peter Selz leads readers on a journey that begins with the Nazi death camps and moves through the Bay Area's Free Speech Movement of 1964, the birth of Beat and hippie countercultures, the Chicano labor movement in the San Joaquin Valley, the beginning of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, and some of the most radical manifestations of the women's movement, gay liberation, Red Power, and environmental activism. It also deals with artists' responses to critical issues such as censorship and capital punishment. Selz follows California's outpouring of political art into the present with responses to September 11 and the war in Iraq. In the process, Selz considers the work of artists such as Robert Arneson, Hans Burkhardt, Jerome (Caja), Enrique Chagoya, Judy Chicago, Llyn Foulkes, Rupert García, Helen and Newton Harrison, Wally Hedrick, Suzanne Lacy, Hung Liu, Peter Saul, Miriam Schapiro, Allan Sekula, Mark di Suvero, Masami Teraoka, and Carrie Mae Weems. Abundantly illustrated and beautifully produced, Art of Engagement showcases many types of media, including photographs, found objects, drawings and prints, murals, painting, sculpture, ceramics, installations, performance art, and collage. Readers will come away from the book with a historical sense of the significant role California has played in generating political art and also how the state has stimulated politically engaged art throughout the world.
Copub: San Jose Museum of Art
Ernst van de Wetering
Rembrandt
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Rembrandt's intriguing painting technique stirred the imaginations of art lovers during his lifetime and has done so ever since. In this book, now revised, updated, and with a new foreword by the author, Rembrandt's pictorial intentions and the variety of materials and techniques he applied to create his fascinating effects are unraveled in depth. At the same time, this "archaeology" of Rembrandt's paintings yields information on many other levels and offers a view of Rembrandt's daily practice and artistic considerations while simultaneously providing a more dimensional image of the artist.
Copub: Amsterdam University Press
David Morgan
The Embodied Eye
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David Morgan builds on his previous groundbreaking work to offer this new, systematically integrated theory of the study of religion as visual culture. Providing key tools for scholars across disciplines studying the materiality of religions, Morgan gives an accessibly written theoretical overview including case studies of the ways seeing is related to touching, hearing, feeling, and such ephemeral experiences as dreams, imagination, and visions. The case studies explore both the high and low of religious visual culture: Catholic traditions of the erotic Sacred Heart of Jesus, the unrecognizability of the Virgin in the Fatima apparitions, the prehistory of Warner Sallman’s face of Jesus, and more. Basing the study of religious images and visual practices in the relationship between seeing and the senses, Morgan argues against reductionist models of "the gaze," demonstrating that vision is not something that occurs in abstraction, but is a fundamental way of embodying the human self.
Gennifer Weisenfeld
Imaging Disaster
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Focusing on one landmark catastrophic event in the history of an emerging modern nation—the Great Kanto Earthquake that devastated Tokyo and surrounding areas in 1923—this fascinating volume examines the history of the visual production of the disaster. The Kanto earthquake triggered cultural responses that ran the gamut from voyeuristic and macabre thrill to the romantic sublime, media spectacle to sacred space, mournful commemoration to emancipatory euphoria, and national solidarity to racist vigilantism and sociopolitical critique. Looking at photography, cinema, painting, postcards, sketching, urban planning, and even scientific visualizations, Weisenfeld demonstrates how visual culture has powerfully mediated the evolving historical understanding of this major national disaster, ultimately enfolding mourning and memory into modernization.
Linda Weintraub
To Life!
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To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet documents the burgeoning eco art movement from A to Z, presenting a panorama of artistic responses to environmental concerns, from Ant Farm’s anti-consumer antics in the 1970s to Marina Zurkow’s 2007 animation that anticipates the havoc wreaked upon the planet by global warming. This text is the first international survey of twentieth and twenty-first-century artists who are transforming the global challenges facing humanity and the Earth’s diverse living systems. Their pioneering explorations are situated at today’s cultural, scientific, economic, spiritual, and ethical frontiers. The text guides students of art, design, environmental studies, and interdisciplinary studies to integrate environmental awareness, responsibility, and activism into their professional and personal lives.
Jennifer Dorothy Lee
Anxiety Aesthetics
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Anxiety Aesthetics is the first book to consider a prehistory of contemporaneity in China through the emergent creative practices in the aftermath of the Mao era. Arguing that socialist residues underwrite contemporary Chinese art, complicating its theorization through Maoism, Jennifer Dorothy Lee traces a selection of historical events and controversies in late 1970s and early 1980s Beijing. Lee offers a fresh critical frame for doing symptomatic readings of protest ephemera and artistic interventions in the Beijing Spring social movement of 1978–80, while exploring the rhetoric of heated debates waged in institutional contexts prior to the '85 New Wave. Lee demonstrates how socialist aesthetic theories and structures continued to shape young artists' engagement with both space and selfhood and occupied the minds of figures looking to reform the nation. In magnifying this fleeting moment, Lee provides a new historical foundation for the unprecedented global exposure of contemporary Chinese art today.
Loren Partridge
Art of Renaissance Florence, 1400–1600
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In this absorbing illustrated history, Loren Partridge takes the reader on an insightful tour of Renaissance Florence and sheds new light on its celebrated art and culture by examining the city's great architectural and artistic achievements in their political, intellectual, and religious contexts. This essential and accessible text, the only up-to-date volume on Renaissance Florence currently available, incorporates insights from recent scholarship, including gender studies, while emphasizing the artists' social status, rivalries, and innovations. The result is a multilevel exploration of how the celebrated Florentine culture formally registers in specific works of art or architecture and how these works interactively informed and often shaped the culture.
Brian O'Doherty
Inside the White Cube
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When these essays first appeared in Artforum in 1976, their impact was immediate. They were discussed, annotated, cited, collected, and translated—the three issues of Artforum in which they appeared have become nearly impossible to obtain. Having Brian O'Doherty's provocative essays available again is a signal event for the art world. This edition also includes "The Gallery as Gesture," a critically important piece published ten years after the others.
O'Doherty was the first to explicitly confront a particular crisis in postwar art as he sought to examine the assumptions on which the modern commercial and museum gallery was based. Concerned with the complex and sophisticated relationship between economics, social context, and aesthetics as represented in the contested space of the art gallery, he raises the question of how artists must construe their work in relation to the gallery space and system.
These essays are essential reading for anyone interested in the history and issues of postwar art in Europe and the United States. Teeming with ideas, relentless in their pursuit of contradiction and paradox, they exhibit both the understanding of the artist (Patrick Ireland) and the precision of the scholar.
With an introduction by Thomas McEvilley and a brilliantly cogent afterword by its author, Brian O'Doherty once again leads us on the perilous journey to center to the art world: Inside the White Cube.
Alexander Nemerov
The Body of Raphaelle Peale
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The American painter Raphaelle Peale (1774-1825) left a legacy of vibrantly beautiful still lifes depicting objects such as fruit, vegetables, and meat. In this lively and literate study, the first book-length exploration of the artist, Alexander Nemerov presents a radical new reading of these paintings focusing on the uncanny quality of Raphaelle's still-life objects. Nemerov argues that the physical presence of these objects is not strictly their own but that of the artist's body. This imagery of embodiment, Nemerov argues, relates deeply to Raphaelle's own time.
The Body of Raphaelle Peale focuses on not just Raphaelle's paintings but also the visual and intellectual culture of early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia, to which these works intimately relate. More broadly, the book presents a reading of romanticism in the American visual arts. Above all, it is an argument about selfhood in Raphaelle's era. Raphaelle's focus—in paintings both playful and morbid—was the pleasures and horrors of being a mere body, of being less than a self.
Nemerov's primary source of evidence in this study is Raphaelle's art itself. After considering its theoretical and historical implications, he returns to the images, deftly guiding us to a fresh understanding of these remarkable paintings. Nemerov's formal analysis is infused with a sophisticated awareness of interdisciplinary issues, and he gracefully balances the formal, the theoretical, and the historical throughout his narrative. This beautifully illustrated study is sure to stimulate renewed appreciation of an exceptional American artist.
Robert M. Adams
The Roman Stamp
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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.
Dr. Angela Miller Dr.
Body Language
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Examines early practices of staged photography in visualizing queer forms of relation.
Body Language is the first in-depth study of the extraordinary interplay between George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoening French). Nick Mauss and Angela Miller offer timely readings of how their practices of staging, collaboration, and psychological enactment through the body arced across the boundaries of art and life, private and public worlds, anticipating contemporary social media. Using the camera not to capture, but to actively perform, they renounced photography’s conventional role as mirror of the real, energizing forms of world-making via a new social framing of the self.
Jacquelynn Baas
Smile of the Buddha
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$58.95
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Smile of the Buddha explores the influences of Asian world-views and particularly Buddhism on the art of Europe and America in the modern era. In an informative and perceptive introduction and essays on twenty well-known artists, Jacquelynn Baas analyzes how the teachings of the Buddha offered alternatives to Western intellectual conceptions of art and traces the various ways this inspiration materialized in artworks. The influence of Buddhism on art from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the present has been greater than historians and critics generally recognize, Baas claims. Considering essential questions about the relationship of art and life, this timely and beautifully illustrated book expands our perspective on how spirituality and creativity inspire and inform one another. Baas's insights and the images she presents give the reader a new understanding and appreciation of a diverse array of Western artworks.
