Paperny examines the evolution of architecture in Russia during the Stalinist period. Defining two conflicting trends--Culture One and Culture Two--that have alternately prevailed in Russian culture, the author argues that the shift away from the architectural avant-garde of the 1920s was not entirely the result of Stalin's will. Rather, he demonstrates how the aesthetic choices of Stalin and his architects were conditioned by the prevailing cultural mechanisms of the 1930s and 40s. Combining academic precision with engaging narrative, Paperny leads the reader through the remarkable...

Visualizing Boccaccio represents a new approach to the interpretation of Boccaccio's classic book of erotic tales, The Decameron. In a comparison of selected tales from The Decameron with works by Cimabue and Giotto, fifteenth-century manuscript illumination, a series of paintings by Botticelli, and Pier Paolo Pasolini's cinematic interpretation of the tales, Ricketts demonstrates how the juxtaposition of verbal and visual renditions permits new interpretations of each of these works.

"We can no longer see, much less teach, transhistorical truths, timeless works of art, and unchanging critical criteria without a highly developed sense of irony about the grand narratives of the past," declare the editors, who also coedited Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (1990). The field of art history is not unique in finding itself challenged and enlarged by cultural debates over issues of class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, and gender. Visual Culture assembles some of the foremost scholars of cultural studies and art history to explore new critical approaches...

First published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this highly original book Norman Bryson applied 'structuralist' and 'post-structuralist' approaches to French Romantic Painting.

In The Rhetoric of Purity, Mark Cheetham explores the historical and theoretical relations between early abstract painting in Europe and the notion of purity. For Gauguin, Serusier, Mondrian and Kandinsky - the pioneering abstractionists whose written and visual works Cheetham discusses in detail - purity is the crucial quality that painting must possess. Purity, however, was itself only a password for what Cheetham defines as an 'essentialist' philosophy inaugurated by Plato's vision of a perfect, non-mimetic art form and practised by the founders of abstraction. The essentialism of late...

This 1982 book, now recognised as a classic, has done perhaps more than any other single work to change the face of art criticism in the twentieth century. Whereas previous books on French painting looked only at the history of painting as an evolution of artistic styles (baroque, rococo, neo-classical, and so on), Norman Bryson examines the evolution of narrative styles: the kinds of stories paintings tell, the ways they communicate their information, the different techniques of presenting the body as an instrument for incorporating textual messages. The procedure is applied to a number of...