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One focus of this book is to look at the interrelationship between the old Philadelphia upper class and the legal profession. The upper class refers to a group of old Philadelphia families whose members are descendants of financially successful individuals. Through their families, those men have had the means to enter, train in, and practice law. While over the two centuries covered here the percentage of upper class lawyers decreased, their influence for many years continued to surpass their numbers. In 1944, about 10 percent of all lawyers were listed in the Social Register. In the eight largest law firms in the city they accounted for 37 percent of the partners and 23 percent of the assoc...
Art History and Its Institutions focuses on the institutional discourses that shaped and continue to shape the field from its foundations in the nineteenth century. From museums and universities to law courts, labour organizations and photography studios, contributors examine a range of institutions, considering their impact on movements such as modernism; their role in conveying or denying legitimacy; and their impact on defining the parameters of the discipline.
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...
Collecting Italian Renaissance paintings during America’s Gilded Age was fraught with risk because of the uncertain identities of the artists and the conflicting interests of the dealers. Stanley Mazaroff’s fascinating account of the close relationship between Henry Walters, founder of the legendary Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and Bernard Berenson, the era’s preeminent connoisseur of Italian paintings, richly illustrates this important chapter of America’s cultural history. When Walters opened his Italianate museum in 1909, it was labeled as America’s “Great Temple of Art.” With more than 500 Italian paintings, including self-portraits purportedly by Raphael and Michelange...
"Few would have predicted that Bernard Berenson, from a poor Lithuanian Jewish immigrant family, would rise above poverty. Yet Berenson left his crowded home near Boston's railyards and transformed himself into the world's most renowned expert on Italian Renaissance paintings, the owner of a beautiful villa and an immense private library in the hills outside Florence. The explosion of the Gilded Age art market and Berenson's work for dealer Joseph Duveen supported a luxurious life, but it came with painful costs: Berenson hid his origins and, though his attributions remain foundational, felt that he had betrayed his gifts as a critic and interpreter of paintings. This finely drawn portrait o...
Economists historically have had very little to say about art. In the latter part of the twentieth century, however, difficult issues such as pricing and art valuation, the influence of the fashionable on pricing, and the nature of auction all began to be explored. Economic Engagements with Art suggests that taste and fashion in art need not be mysterious or outside rational discourse and that these matters can be studied by economists to the benefit of the discipline.
The Italian Presence in American Art, 1760-1860, based on papers presented at a joint Instituto della Enciclopedia Italiana/Fordham U. symposium held in 1987, was published in 1989. The present volume comprises 17 papers presented at the second joint symposium, dealing with American art from 1860 to 1920. It is also Volume II of what is now projected as a three-volume study of the Italian presence in American art, to be completed with a volume based on the third symposium (1991) covering the period 1920-1990. The production is lovely throughout, and the essays are illustrated with 16 color plates and 149 bandw figures. Co-published with the Instituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR