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"This short book offers a dazzling new interpretation of Paul Klee's most famous work: his Angelus Novus (1920), which was purchased by Walter Benjamin and became the model for his Angel of History, a figure saturated with Jewish mysticism that he introduces in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In 2014 the celebrated American artist R. H. Quaytman made a surprising discovery about Klee's work when she examined it at the Jewish Museum in Israel. She realized that Klee had carefully pasted the Angelus down over another image, a face, leaving just a finger's breadth of it showing. Through forensic science and lots of sleuthing it was determined that face belonged to Martin Luther. Behind the Angel of History tells the story of how Quaytman solved the mystery of who lurks behind Klee's angel. It then plunges into questions about why a face long hidden beneath another picture might matter. The book travels through a tangle of loaded conversations among images-from Klee's Angelus to Benjamin's own drawing of a crucified angel, from Klee's Angelus to Quaytman's own layered panels meditating on its secret"--
In the early modern period, images of revolts and violence became increasingly important tools to legitimize or contest political structures. This volume offers the first in-depth analysis of how early modern people produced and consumed violent imagery, and assesses its role in memory practices, political mobilization, and the negotiation of cruelty and justice. Critically evaluating the traditional focus on Western European imagery, the case studies in this book draw on evidence from Russia, China, Hungary, Portugal, Germany, North America, and other regions. The contributors highlight the distinctions among visual cultures of violence, as well as their entanglements in networks of intensive transregional communication, early globalization, and European colonization. Contributors: Monika Barget, David de Boer, Nóra G. Etényi, Fabian Fechner, Joana Fraga, Malte Griesse, Alain Hugon, Gleb Kazakov, Nancy Kollmann, Ya-Chen Ma, Galina Tirnanić, and Ramon Voges.
This richly illustrated volume, the first devoted to maritime art and galley slavery in early modern France, shows how royal propagandists used the image and labor of enslaved Muslims to glorify Louis XIV. Mediterranean maritime art and the forced labor on which it depended were fundamental to the politics and propaganda of France’s King Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715). Yet most studies of French art in this period focus on Paris and Versailles, overlooking the presence or portrayal of galley slaves on the kingdom’s coasts. By examining a wide range of artistic productions—ship design, artillery sculpture, medals, paintings, and prints—Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss uncover a vital asp...
Reading the Royal Monument in Eighteenth-Century Europe is the first in-depth study of the major role played by royal monuments in the public space of expanding cities across eighteenth-century Europe. Using the royal public statues as the basis for its examination of modern European cities, the book considers the development of urban landscapes from the creation of capital cities to the last embers of the Ancien R?me and at how the royal politics of the arts affected the cityscapes of the time. The focus of the book thereby intersects across a spectrum of disciplines, including the social and architectural history of cities, the politics of urban planning, the history of monumental sculpture, and the material culture of the eighteenth century.
An unprecedented survey of artists in exile from the 19th century through the present day, with notable attention to Asian, Latin American, African American, and female artists This timely book offers a wide-ranging and beautifully illustrated study of exiled artists from the 19th century through the present day, with notable attention to individuals who have often been relegated to the margins of publications on exile in art history. The artworks featured here, including photography, paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture, present an expanded view of the conditions of exile--forced or voluntary--as an agent for both trauma and ingenuity. The introduction outlines the history and percept...
The first history of the deaccession of objects from museum collections that defends deaccession as an essential component of museum practice. Museums often stir controversy when they deaccession works—formally remove objects from permanent collections—with some critics accusing them of betraying civic virtue and the public trust. In fact, Martin Gammon argues in Deaccessioning and Its Discontents, deaccession has been an essential component of the museum experiment for centuries. Gammon offers the first critical history of deaccessioning by museums from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, and exposes the hyperbolic extremes of “deaccession denial”—the assumption that deac...
Im Jahre 1763 fand auf der Pariser Place Louis XV, der heutigen Place de la Concorde, die Einweihung der kolossalen Reiterstatue des Königs statt. Mit diesem Ensemble waren der Architekt Ange-Jacques Gabriel und der Bildhauer Edme Bouchardon beauftragt. Die vorliegende Studie widmet sich neben der Entstehungsgeschichte auch der künstlerischen Originalität und den politischen Aussagen von Platz und Denkmal. Insbesondere beschäftigt sich die Autorin mit den unterschiedlichen Ansichten, die darüber bestanden, wie sich der König auf dem Platz zu inszenieren habe. Denn verschiedene Gesellschaftsgruppen versuchten, die Gestaltung des zukünftigen Königsbildes zu beeinflussen: Dem seit Ludwi...
Facing the Revocation tells the story of one French Protestant (Huguenot) family, the Champagnés, as they faced the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which criminalized their religion in 1685. In this sweeping family saga, Carolyn Chappell Lougee narrates how the Champagné family's persecution and Protestant devotion unsettled their economic advantages and social standing. The family provides a window onto the choices that individuals and their kin had to make in these trying circumstances, the agency of women within families, and the consequences of their choices. Lougee traces the lives of the family members who escaped; the kin and community members who decided to stay, both complying with and resisting the king's will; and those who resettled in Britain and Prussia, where they adapted culturally and became influential members of society. It challenges the way Huguenot history has been told for 300 years and thereby offers new insights into the reign of Louis XIV.
Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV: Artifacts for a Future Past provides a new interpretation of objects and images commissioned by Louis XIV (1638-1715) to document his reign for posterity. The Sun King's image-makers based their prediction of how future historians would interpret the material remains of their culture on contemporary antiquarian methods, creating new works of art as artifacts for a future time. The need for such items to function as historical evidence led to many pictorial developments, and medals played a central role in this. Coin-like in form but not currency, the medal was the consummate antiquarian object, made in imitation of ancient coins used to s...
In many contemporary societies we encounter iconoclasm breaking out with renewed violence. Iconoclastic actions against objects of visual material culture and testimonials of history act as dynamite in the public sphere. They are expressions of political, religious, national, and identity conflicts. Even the freedom of art is threatened by censorship and cancel culture. Based on case studies from different world regions, contemporary iconoclasms in art, media, and cultural heritage are critically analyzed from both a global and an interdisciplinary perspective. Divided into three sections, the book discusses attacks on monuments and memorials, idol disputes in museums and the visual arts, and forms of mediated iconoclasm in contemporary art. Look Inside