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This book represents the first book-length, critical study of the art of Emile Gallé. It thus promises not only to revolutionize our understanding of his work but also to reframe the study of Art Nouveau by relocating the movement within the deeply politicized context in which it was created.
With the increasing loss of biological diversity in this Sixth Age of Mass Extinction, it is timely to show that devolutionary paranoia is not new, but rather stretches back to the time of Charles Darwin. It is also an opportune moment to show how human-driven extinction, as designated by the term, Anthropocene, has long been acknowledged. The halcyon days of European industrial progress, colonial expansion and scientific revolution trumpeted from the Great Exhibition of 1851 until the Dresden International Hygiene Exhibition of 1930 were constantly marred by fears of rampant degeneration, depopulation, national decline, environmental devastation and racial extinction. This is demonstrated b...
This study uncovers the plethora of new, innovative drawing strategies that shaped French visual arts at the height of France’s imperial power. Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, Eugene Guillaume, and Félix Ravaisson, among others, designed new drawing procedures that responded to leading concerns of modern art and the exigencies of modern life: landscape painting and picturesque tourism, industrial design, and the use of drawing as vehicles of knowledge production and in social control. From graphic regimes that were “purement mathématique” and demanded the practice of orthographic projection, to those that privileged the articulation of proportions and the cultivation of an internal meas...
With the words ?A new manifestation of art was ... expected, necessary, inevitable,? Jean Mor? announced the advent of the Symbolist movement in 1886. When Symbolist artists began experimenting in order to invent new visual languages appropriate for representing modern life in all its complexity, they set the stage for innovation in twentieth-century art. Rejecting what they perceived as the superficial descriptive quality of Impressionism, Naturalism, and Realism, Symbolist artists delved beneath the surface to express feelings, ideas, scientific processes, and universal truths. By privileging intangible concepts over perceived realities and by asserting their creative autonomy, Symbolist a...
This comprehensive book brings to light the portraits, private collections and public patronage of the princesse de Lamballe, a pivotal member of Marie-Antoinette’s inner circle. Drawing extensively on unpublished archival sources, Sarah Grant examines the princess’s many portrait commissions and the rich character of her private collections, which included works by some of the period’s leading artists and artisans. The book sheds new light on the agency, sorority and taste of Marie-Antoinette and her friends, a group of female patrons and model of courtly collecting that would be extinguished by the coming revolution.
This collection draws together original scholarship from international contributors on a range of aspects of professional and semi-professional medical work and its relations to British culture. It combines a diverse spectrum of scholarly approaches, from medical history to book history, exploring literary and scientific texts, such as satiric poetry, essays, anatomies, advertisements, and the novel, to shed light on the mythologisation and transmission of medical (mis)information through literature and popular culture. It analyses the persuasive and sometimes deceptive means by which myths, as well as information and beliefs, about medicine and the medical professions proliferated in English literary culture of this period, from early eighteenth-century household remedies to the late nineteenth-century concerns with vaccination that are still relevant today.
Place and Locality in Modern France analyses the significance and changing constructions of local place in modern France. Drawing on the expertise of a range of scholars from around the world, this book provides a timely overview of the cross-disciplinary thinking that is currently taking place over a central issue in French history. The contributed chapters address a range of subjects that include: the politics of administrative reform, decentralization, regionalism and local advocacy; the role of commerce in engendering narratives and experience of local place; the importance of ethnic, class, gender and race distinctions in shaping local connection and identity; the generation and transmission of knowledge about local place and culture through academia, civic heritage and popular memory. As a reconsideration of the 'local' in French history, Place and Locality in Modern France bridges the divide between micro- and macro-history for all those interested in ideas of locality and culture in modern French and European history.
Fair Women was the Victorian equivalent of a ‘blockbuster’ exhibition. Organised by a committee of women, it opened to great fanfare in the Grafton Galleries in London, and was comprised of both historical and contemporary portraits of women as well as decorative objects. Meaghan Clarke argues that the exhibition challenged contemporary assumptions about the representation of women and the superficiality of female collectors. The Fair Women phenomenon complicated gender stereotypes and foregrounded women as cultural arbiters. This book uncovers a wide range of texts and images to reveal that Fair Women brought together fashion, modernity and gender politics in new and surprising ways. It shows that, while invariably absent in institutional histories, women were vital to the development of the modern blockbuster exhibition. This book will be of interest to scholars in art and gender studies, museum studies, feminist art history, women artists and art history.
This book explores the ways in which Nordic private collectors displayed their collections of Chinese objects in their homes. This leads to a reconsideration of how to define collecting and display by analysing the difference between objects serving as decorative or collectible items, while tracing collecting and display trends of the twentieth century. Minna Törmä examines four Scandinavian collections as case studies: Kustaa Hiekka, Sophus Black, Osvald Sirén and Marie-Louise and Gunnar Didrichsen, all of whom had professional backgrounds (a jeweler, two businessmen and a scholar) and for whom collecting became a passion and an educational endeavour. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, museum studies, Chinese studies and design history.
Rather than the customary focus on the activities of individual collectors, The Emergence of the Antique and Curiosity Dealer in Britain 1815–1850: The Commodification of Historical Objects illuminates the less-studied roles played by dealers in the nineteenthcentury antique and curiosity markets. Set against the recent ‘art market turn’ in scholarly literature, this volume examines the role, activities, agency and influence of antique and curiosity dealers as they emerged in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. This study begins at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when dealers began their wholesale importations of historical objects; it closes during the 1850s, after which th...