You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Discusses Hugo von Tschudi's career as director of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin and of the Bayerische Stadtgemäldesammlungen in Munich, focussing particularly on Tschudi's influence in the collecting of new/contemporary French painting for German museums ; also discusses public and critical reaction to his initiatives.
The exhibition "Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst" that took place in Munich in 1910 marked a turning point in the approach to Islamic Art. The show attempted to break free of Orientalism and exotic fantasies and, in doing so, set a new standard for the reception of Islamic art in Europe. Moreover, naming the Islamic artefacts masterpieces, it layed claim to bestow upon Islamic art “a place equal to that of other cultural periods”. This book is the first comprehensive study on this path-breaking exhibition. It includes a wealth of unpublished material and numerous novel ideas on the subject and addresses the exhibition’s historical context, organization, realization and display as well as its reception in the West and its later influence on the study of Islamic art.
Famous across Europe and America, recipient of the highest possible honours in Germany including the order of the Black Eagle and elevation to nobility, admired by Degas as 'the greatest living master', Adolph Menzel was perhaps the greatest German painter of the late nineteenth century. In this splendidly illustrated book - the only comprehensive volume on Menzel in English - photographs of the artist and contemporary Berlin accompany reproductions of hundreds of his paintings and drawings. Menzel specialists and art historians contribute chapters on his life and art, his visits to France, his critical reception, relevant social and historical background, and different approaches to his wor...
These essays are case-studies, the cases unraveling our cultural roots, memory itself. If a museum is the subject, then for instance the way the museum changes face, function, its manner of speech; how, a repository of collections and the cultural memory of humankind itself turns into one of the objects, memories, a custodian and exponent of its own history, or the opposite: how it connects with its modernized environs and changing audience: us. How has, or might the sanctum be transformed into a public venue, go from an inward looking, reverential enclosure to a space full of life. In other studies included here the author speaks of spatial and incarnate remembrance: the radical difference between a monument and a memorial. The duality of “always remembering” and “never forgetting”: a past depersonalized and dehistoricized as it was seized and processed. Of the layers of meaning attached to concentration camps, transmuting essence of artworks, and the difficult, the contradictory but inescapable processing of history and the past, of self-identical existence in history. So that we know we are alive. And how that is so.
This book examines the responses of visual artists, including architects, designers and photographers, to the technological and social modernisation of Germany during the first three decades of the twentieth century. It investigates how these aspects of the modernising process inform both the subject matter and formal innovations of their work. The study analyses how these visual practices were not just the concerns of isolated and enclosed art worlds but had wider social resonances, ranging from the debates concerning the reformist objectives of the Deutscher Werkbund (1907) to the National Socialist ideological onslaught on modernist culture culminating in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate A...
Max Pechstein (1881–1955) is one of the most prominent German artists of the twentieth century, not least because of his crucial role in the breakthrough of German Expressionism. This long overdue biography combines the portrayal of an outstanding artistic personality with the story of an individual German who struggled through the political upheavals of his time. Pechstein's work is presented in the cultural context of museum politics and art associations, art dealers and critics, market forces and cultural trends.
This work provides an introduction to the visual arts in Germany from the early years of German unification to World War II. The study is an analysis of painting, sculpture, graphic art, design, film and photography in relation to a wider set of cultural and social issues that were specific to German modernism. It concentrates on the ways in which the production and reception of art interacted with and was affected by responses to unification, conflict between left and right political factions, gender concerns, contemporary philosophical and religious ideas, the growth of cities, and the increasing important of mass culture.
"The first study of its kind, this book will appeal to historians, museum professionals, and anyone interested in the relationship between art, politics, and culture."--BOOK JACKET.