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This is the first modern book about the artist David Wilkie (1785-1841), the first British painter to become an international celebrity. Based on extensive original research, the book explores the ways in which Wilkie's images, so beloved by his contemporaries, engaged with a range of cultural predicaments close to their hearts. In a series of thematic chapters, whose concerns range far beyond the details of Wilkie's own career, Tromans shows how, through Wilkie's thrillingly original work, British society was able to reimagine its own everyday life, its history, and its multinational (Anglo-Scottish) nature. Other themes covered include Wilkie's roles in defining the border between painting and anatomy in the representation of the human body, and in transforming the pleasures of connoisseurship from an elite to a popular audience. For the first time, all of Wilkie's major subject pictures are brought together, reproduced and discussed. With a great range of new archival material and original interp
This book explores the complex and enigmatic motif of hair in the work of five contemporary women artists, Chrystl Rijkeboer, Alice Maher, Annegret Soltau, Kathy Prendergast and Ellen Gallagher, from the late 1970s to the present. It investigates why hair is such a productive and resonant site of meaning, how it is suggestive of, and responds to, serial strategies, and why it appears to be of particular significance to women who are artists. It explores the implications of hair as an embodied material, its role as a haptic metaphor of the life cycle, and what might be seen as a darker, more liminal side of hair as a site of excess and body waste, and its ability to represent trauma and ‘wounding’. It also discusses some of the divergent histories of hair as a rich marker of identity in cultural discourses of beauty, myth and femininity, and as a symbol of status and power. Informed by a range of theoretical approaches, this book draws on Julia Kristeva’s theorizations of the abject, Hélène Cixous’s notion of écriture feminine, and a Deleuzian consideration of difference.