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A celebrity in his own day, who gave lectures dressed as Napoleon or seated on the back of an elephant, Ramón Gómez de la Serna is the most representative writer of the interwar Spanish avant-garde. This book explores Gómez de la Serna's art and his quest to break down the barriers between literature and life, addressing two elements - already present in his work - of radical relevance in today's cultural debates: the relation of humans to the material world and the reduction of all experience to a singular individuality. Bringing Gómez de la Serna to an Anglophone audience, it reveals him to be the embodiment of a new kind of art on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Four Horsemen narrates the history of revolution in Spain, Naples, Greece, and Russia in the 1820s, connecting the social movements and activities on the ground, in the inimitable voice of a renowned historian.
This volume explores the fraught relationship between Futurism and the Sacred. Like many fin-de-siècle intellectuals, the Futurists were fascinated by various forms of esotericism such as theosophy and spiritualism and saw art as a privileged means to access states of being beyond the surface of the mundane world. At the same time, they viewed with suspicion organized religions as social institutions hindering modernization and ironically used their symbols. In Italy, the theorization of "Futurist Sacred Art" in the 1930s began a new period of dialogue between Futurism and the Catholic Church. The essays in the volume span the history of Futurism from 1909 to 1944 and consider its different configurations across different disciplines and geographical locations, from Polish and Spanish literature to Italian art and American music.
In the decades following the American Civil War and leading up to the First World War, a definitive shift in power took place between Spain and the United States. This original book explores American artists’ perceptions of Spain during this period of turmoil and demonstrates how their responses to Spanish art helped to answer emerging, complex questions about American national identity. M. Elizabeth Boone focuses on works by Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, John Singer Sargent, Robert Henri, and other American artists who traveled to Spain to study the achievements of such great masters as Murillo, Velázquez, and Goya. The resulting American paintings, some well known and others now largely forgotten, provide intriguing insights not only into the 19th-century American struggle to define itself as an imperial power but also into the relations between the United States and the Spanish-speaking world today.
Alisa Luxenberg examines the Galerie Espagnole, a collection of Spanish paintings exhibited in the Louvre from 1838 to 1848, in conjunction with the contemporaneous Museo Nacional in Madrid, from a new and critical focus on political and cultural discourse. She analyzes the visual and critical reception of the two collections, their intersection with contemporary debates about aesthetics and patrimony, the role of the art museum, and national and international politics.
Galileo never set foot on the Iberian Peninsula, yet, as Enrique García Santo-Tomás unfolds in The Refracted Muse, the news of his work with telescopes brought him to surprising prominence—not just among Spaniards working in the developing science of optometry but among creative writers as well. While Spain is often thought to have taken little notice of the Scientific Revolution, García Santo-Tomás tells a different story, one that reveals Golden Age Spanish literature to be in close dialogue with the New Science. Drawing on the work of writers such as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and Quevedo, he helps us trace the influence of science and discovery on the rapidly developing and highly playful genre of the novel. Indeed, García Santo-Tomás makes a strong case that the rise of the novel cannot be fully understood without taking into account its relationship to the scientific discoveries of the period.
Architectural Temperance examines relations between Bourbon Spain and papal Rome (1700-1759) through the lens of cultural politics. With a focus on key Spanish architects sent to study in Rome by the Bourbon Kings, the book also discusses the establishment of a program of architectural education at the newly founded Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. Victor Deupi explores why a powerful nation like Spain would temper its own building traditions with the more cosmopolitan trends associated with Rome; often at the expense of its own national and regional traditions. Through the inclusion of previously unpublished documents and images that shed light on the theoretical debates which shaped eighteenth-century architecture in Rome and Madrid, Architectural Temperance provides readers with new insights into the cultural history of early modern Spain.
Throughout the 1920s, a remarkable number of young writers and artists lived and worked in Madrid, creating an atmosphere of effervescence and an upsurge in creativity that has rarely been equalled. These young people, acquainting themselves with one another within the span of only a few years, came together to form a tightly woven network of both personal and artistic relationships. In Configurations of a Cultural Scene Andrew Anderson explores this growing community of artists and writers with a focus on how sites of face-to-face interaction in Madrid fostered creative work and forged young identities. Organizing locations into places of sociability, learning, and residence, Anderson offer...
Published to accompany the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, this catalogue charts the influential progress of the visual arts in Paris. Key figures such as Matisse, Duchamp, Picasso and Kandinsky are all represented.