Kategoria BISAC: Art >> History - General

The great poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was also an extremely influential art critic. High Art relates the philosophical issues posed by Baudelaire's art writing to the theory and practice of modernist and postmodernist painting. Baudelaire wrote in an age of transition, David Carrier argues, an era divided by the Revolution of 1848, the historical break that played for him a role now taken within modernism by the political revolts of 1968. Moving from the grand tradition of Delacroix to the images of modern life made by Constantin Guys, this movement from "high" to "low,"...

Images of women were ubiquitous in America at the turn of the last century. In painting and sculpture, they took on a bewildering variety of identities, from Venus, Ariadne, and Diana to Law, Justice, the Arts, and Commerce. Bailey Van Hook argues here that the artists' concepts of art coincided with the construction of gender in American culture. She finds that certain characteristics such as "ideal," "beautiful," "decorative," and "pure" both describe this art and define the perceived role of women in American society at the time.

Most late nineteenth-century American artists had...

Museums of the Mind is the first book to explore the evolving relationship of collecting and the German literary imagination since the invention of the public museum. This study shows that in addition to redefining categories of art, history, and identity in modernity, the museum transforms the relationship between material objects and imaginative narratives. Using new categories, Peter McIsaac constructs a critical genealogy using key texts by Johann Goethe, Adalbert Stifter, Wilhelm Raabe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ingeborg Bachmann, Siegfried Lenz, W. G. Sebald, and Durs Grunbein and...

Providing legal analysis and touching upon social history and art history themes, this work offers an objective review of five art trials. Spanning the last 20 years, specific areas of law are examined with each trial: First and Fifth Amendments, copyright law, contract law, valuation of art, and misrepresentation. Art, outside of the legal vacuum, has been embroiled in a battle initiated by social conservatives to promote decency. Three trials involving this struggle and the National Endowment of the Arts are analyzed. The valuation of art is examined in the context of Andy Warhol's...

Both critic and artist, Wolfgang Paalen was a highly influential figure in the culture of the Modernist movements of the 20th century. His work significantly informed Abstract Expressionism, especially with his periodical DEGREESIDYN DEGREESR, published from 1942-1944, which became a seminal work for painters of that time. This is the first book-length work to demonstrate his importance and bring together the contexts--philosophical, scientific, anthropological, political, and cultural--in which he worked. Thus it provides a study not only of Paalen himself, but of the relationships...

The ancient Maya city of Quirigua occupied a crossroads between Copan in the southeastern Maya highlands and the major centers of the Peten heartland. Though always a relatively small city, Quirigua stands out because of its public monuments, which were some of the greatest achievements of Classic Maya civilization. Impressive not only for their colossal size, high sculptural quality, and eloquent hieroglyphic texts, the sculptures of Quirigua are also one of the few complete, in situ series of Maya monuments anywhere, which makes them a crucial source of information about ancient...

The late fifth century BC was the golden age of ancient Athens. Under the leadership of the renowned soldier-statesman Perikles, Athenians began rebuilding the Akropolis, where they created the still awe-inspiring Parthenon. Athenians also reached a zenith of artistic achievement in sculpture, vase painting, and architecture, which provided continuing inspiration for many succeeding generations.

The specially commissioned essays in this volume offer a fresh, innovative panorama of the art, architecture, history, culture, and influence of Periklean Athens. Written by leading experts...

Nationally acclaimed for her bold, imaginative, allegorical paintings of animals, Melissa Miller is an iconoclastic artist who has fearlessly worked outside of prevailing artistic styles and movements since the mid-1970s. Her paintings have been included in the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Bienniale and collected by major museums, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington, D.C. Miller draws on a wider variety of literary and art historical sources than most contemporary artists, as well as a deeply felt connection to...

Of all the ancient civilizations that flourished in the Americas, only one perfected true portraiture of living people and produced it in quantity--the Moche who inhabited the north coast of Peru between approximately AD 100 and 800. Using the medium of three-dimensional ceramic vessels that could have contained liquid, Moche artisans typically formed the heads of the individuals they wished to portray, though sometimes they presented full figures with realistic portrait faces. Depicting an astonishing range of physical types, these portraits now allow us to meet Moche people who lived...

The art of William Ingham demonstrates how the modernist tradition, specifically Abstract Expressionism, has flourished in the Pacific Northwest. This lavishly illustrated volume brings to a wider audience the Seattle-born artist's highly gestural and vividly colored abstract paintings. Exploring gesture, form, scale, color, touch, and texture, Ingham's paintings are exuberant statements.

Tracing the artist's evolution through detailed analyses of individual works, distinguished art critic Matthew Kangas builds the case for Ingham's significance and, in so doing, broadens the...

Readers who fell in love with The Eighth Lively Art will delight in the stories and profiles that the painter and paleontologist Wesley Wehr has collected in this follow-up to his earlier memoir of Pacific Northwest artistic and intellectual life in the 1950s and 1960s. Above all, these are Wehr's accounts, distilled by passionate recollection, of what some remarkable artists and thinkers brought out in him and in each other--stories of creative people and how they inspired, influenced, challenged, and occasionally infuriated one another.

Hailed as a landmark in its field since its first publication in 1984, Denis E. Cosgrove's Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape has been influential well beyond geography. It has continued to spark lively debate among historians, geographers, art historians, social theorists, landscape architects, and others interested in the social and cultural politics of landscape.

Famous for iconic images of the rural Midwest such as American Gothic, Politics in Missouri, and Baptism in Kansas Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry have long been lumped together under the rubric the "Regionalists." James M. Dennis offers a fresh and sophisticated look at the modernist tendencies of this trio of American painters, arguing that the individual styles of Wood, Benton, and Curry were both mislabeled and misunderstood. Revisiting the artistic and political culture of America between the World Wars, he shows that critics and ideologues...

This compelling book brings together physicians, artists, and scholars of film, literature, philosophy, art, and politics to discuss the representation of the corpse in Western culture. Spanning a timeline from the Renaissance to the present, these essays introduce readers to a modern autopsy, a public execution and dissection in seventeenth-century England, the genre of postmortem photography, the corpse as artist's model, images of dead women in such popular films as Copycat and The Silence of the Lambs, and post-mortem scenes in the works of Flaubert, Balzac, Andres...