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Alexander Gardner is best known for his innovative photographic history of the Civil War. What is less known is the extent to which he was involved in the international workers’ rights movement. Tying Gardner’s photographic storytelling to his transatlantic reform activities, this book expands our understanding of Gardner’s career and the work of his studio in Washington, DC, by situating his photographic production within the era’s discourse on social and political reform. Drawing on previously unknown primary sources and original close readings, Makeda Best reveals how Gardner’s activism in Scotland and photography in the United States shared an ideological foundation. She reads ...
Develops a comparative de-colonial framework for visual culture studies.
"How did art critics come to speak of light and dark as, respectively, "high in value" and "low in value." In this book, Henry Sayre traces the origins of this usage in one of art history's most famous and racially charged paintings, Manet's Olympia. Masterfully researched and argued, this bold study reveals the extraordinary weight of history and politics that Manet's painting bears, and the presence of slavery at modernism's roots. Sayre shows that it was Émile Zola who introduced a new "law of values" to art criticism in an 1867 essay on Manet. Unpacking the intricate contexts of Zola's essay and of several related paintings of Manet, Sayre argues that Zola's use of the economic metaphor of "value" was doubly coded. On the one hand, it was a feint that deflected attention away from Olympia's actual subject and toward the painting's formal qualities. On the other, Sayre argues, "value" for Zola was a trope for the political economy of slavery and the Second Empire's complicity in the ongoing slave trade in the Americas. Value in Art is a surprising and necessary intervention in our understanding of modern art's emergence in relation to issues of race"--
Throughout film history, war films have been in constant dialogue with both previous depictions of war and contemporary debates and technology. War films remember older war film cycles and draw upon the resources of the present day to say something new about the nature of war. The American Civil War was viscerally documented through large-scale panorama paintings, still photography, and soldier testimonials, leaving behind representational principles that would later inform the development of the war film genre from the silent era up to the present. This book explores how each of these representational modes cemented different formulas for providing war stories with emotional content.
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The present volume, Publications of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1964-2005, is a successor to a volume published by the Museum in 1965 entitled Publications of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1870-1964. These two bibliographic volumes endeavor to list all the known books, pamphlets, and serial publications bearing the Museum's imprint, and issued by the institution during the first 135 years of its existence (through June 2005). The first volume was compiled by Albert TenEyck Gardner, at the time an Associate Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, and the present volume has been compiled from the Annual Reports issued by the Museum during the relevant years. Together the two volumes...
An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. “It is strange,” Proust wrote in 1909, “that, in the most widely different departments . . . there should be no other literature which exercises over me so powerful an influence as English and American.” In the spirit of Proust’s admission, this engaging and critical volume offers the first comparative reading of the French novelist in the context of American art, literature, and culture. In addition to examining Proust’s key American influences—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe, and James McNeill Whistler—Proust and America investigates the previously overlooked influence of the American neurologist George Beard, whose writings on neurasthenia and “American nervousness” contributed to the essential modernity of the author’s work.
Changing how we look at and think about the color grey Why did many of the twentieth century’s best-known abstract painters often choose grey, frequently considered a noncolor and devoid of meaning? Frances Guerin argues that painters (including Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, Brice Marden, Mark Rothko, and Gerhard Richter) select grey to respond to a key question of modernist art: What is painting? By analyzing an array of modernist paintings, Guerin demonstrates that grey has a unique history and a legitimate identity as a color. She traces its use by painters as far back as medieval and Renaissance art, through Romanticism, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernism to show ...
Manet Paints Monet focuses on an auspicious moment in the history of art. In the summer of 1874, Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Claude Monet (1840–1926), two outstanding painters of the nascent Impressionist movement, spent their holidays together in Argenteuil on the Seine River. Their growing friendship is expressed in their artwork, culminating in Manet’s marvelous portrait of Monet painting on a boat. The boat was the ideal site for Monet to execute his new plein-air paintings, enabling him to depict nature, water, and the play of light. Similarly, Argenteuil was the perfect place for Manet, the great painter of contemporary life, to observe Parisian society at leisure. His portrait brings all the elements together— Manet’s own eye for the effect of social conventions and boredom on vacationers, and Monet’s eye for nature—but these qualities remain markedly distinct. With this book, esteemed art historian Willibald Sauerländer describes how Manet, in one instant, created a defining image of an entire epoch, capturing the artistic tendencies of the time in a masterpiece that is both graceful and profound.
"On June 19, 1864, the United States warship Kearsarge sank the Confederate raider Alabama off the coast of Cherbourg, France, in one of the most celebrated naval engagements of the American Civil War. When Kearsarge later anchored off the French resort town of Boulogne-sur-Mer it was thronged by curious visitors, one of whom was the artist Edouard Manet. Although he did not witness the historic battle, Manet made a painting of it partly as an attempt to regain the respect of his colleagues after having been ridiculed for his works in the 1864 Salon. Manet's picture of the naval engagement and his portrait of the victorious Kearsarge belong to a group of his seascapes of Boulogne whose unort...