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A globetrotting Gold Rush heiress. An awkward Paris schoolmaster. A celebrated French actor. And a museum of history and art in California’s Central Valley. What do they have in common? They are all connected by an oil painting, a still life called Flowers and Fruit, that may or may not have been painted by the post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin. In the decade that museums began to collect modern art, Flowers and Fruit traveled the art market in Paris and New York. Experts and connoisseurs hailed it as a signature work of Gauguin just as he came to be acknowledged as a master. When it joined the Haggin Museum in Stockton, California, locals treasured it as “the Museum’s Gauguin.” But by...
In this interdisciplinary exploration of the cultural and social history of early 19th-century France, Patricia Mainardi focuses on what was considered a major social problem of the time - adultery. In a period when expectations about marriage were changing, the problems of husbands, wives and lovers became a major theme in theatre, literature and the visual arts. The author demonstrates that this intense interest was historically grounded in the post-revolutionary collision between the new concept of the individual's right to happiness and the traditional prerogatives of family and state. duty or happiness more important? Are arranged marriages doomed to be empty of love and poisoned by adultery? Should adulterous wives and their lovers be punished while husbands may commit adultery with impunity? Out of such legal, social and cultural debates ultimately emerged modern bourgeois family values, Mainardi argues. And she illuminates how art, in all its varieties, both influences and is influenced by social change.
This comprehensive overview of recent American graphic design, draws examples from avant-garde and mainstream typefaces; expression of corporate identity through logos, society's image of the design profession; and publications, from underground fanzines to multimedia projects.
This volume surveys the history of printmaking with a particular focus on artists and works that expanded the boundaries of various media, including woodcuts, etchings, engravings, lithographs, mezzo-tints, screen prints and more, right up to the digital and photographic processes of today. Originally published in hardback in 2000 this title received excellent reviews. Now republished in paperback making it more accessible to an even wider market 84 colour illustrations
The remarkable story of the stylistic, cultural, and technical innovations that drove the surge of comics, caricature, and other print media in 19th-century Europe Taking its title from the 1844 visionary graphic novel by J. J. Grandville, this groundbreaking book explores the invention of print media—including comics, caricature, the illustrated press, illustrated books, and popular prints—tracing their development as well as the aesthetic, political, technological, and cultural issues that shaped them. The explosion of imagery from the late 18th century to the beginning of the 20th exceeded the print production from all previous centuries combined, spurred the growth of the internation...
Consummate painter, draftsman, sculptor, and architect, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) was celebrated for his disegno, a term that embraces both drawing and conceptual design, which was considered in the Renaissance to be the foundation of all artistic disciplines. To his contemporary Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo was “the divine draftsman and designer” whose work embodied the unity of the arts. Beautifully illustrated with more than 350 drawings, paintings, sculptures, and architectural views, this book establishes the centrality of disegno to Michelangelo’s work. Carmen C. Bambach presents a comprehensive and engaging narrative of the artist’s long career in Florence and Rome...
Théodore Rousseau (1812–1867), arguably the most important French landscape artist of the mid-nineteenth century and a leader of the so-called Barbizon School, occupies a crucial moment of transition from the idealizing effects of academic painting to the radically modern vision of the Impressionists. He was an experimental artist who rejected the traditional historical, biblical, or literary subject matter in favor of “unruly nature,” a Romantic naturalism that confounded his contemporaries with its “bizarre” compositional and coloristic innovations. Lavishly illustrated and thoroughly documented, this volume includes five essays by experts in the field. Scott Allan and Édouard ...
Vanishing paradise" offers a fresh take on the modernist primitivism of the French painter Paul Gauguin, the exoticism of the American John LaFarge, and the elite tourism of the American writer Henry Adams. Childs explores how these artists wrestled with the elusiveness of paradise and portrayed colonial Tahiti in ways both mythic and modern.
Canaletto, Bernardo Bellotto, Luca Carlevarijs, Giovanni Paolo Panini, Francesco Guardi, Hubert Robert—these renowned view painters are perhaps most famous for their expansive canvases depicting the ruins of Rome or the canals of Venice. Many of their most splendid paintings, however, feature important contemporary events. These occasions motivated some of the greatest artists of the era to produce their most exceptional work. Little explored by scholars, these paintings stand out by virtue of their extraordinary artistic quality, vibrant atmosphere, and historical interest. They are imbued with a sense of occasion, even drama, and were often commissioned by or for rulers, princes, and amb...
This fascinating new look at the artistic legacy of the Tudors reveals the dynasty’s enduring influence on the arts of Renaissance England and beyond. Ruling successively from 1485 through 1603, the five Tudor monarchs brought seismic changes to England that reverberated throughout Europe. They used the arts to legitimize and glorify their tumultuous rule, from Henry VII’s bloody rise to power, through Henry VIII’s breach with the Roman Catholic Church, to the reign of the “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth I. With incisive scholarship and sumptuous new photography, this book explores the extreme politics and outsize personalities of the Tudors, and how they used art in their diplomacy at ho...