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Art history traditionally classifies works of art by country as well as period, but often political borders and cultural boundaries are highly complex and fluid. Questions of identity, policy, and exchange make it difficult to determine the "place" of art, and often the art itself results from these conflicts of geography and culture. Addressing an important approach to art history, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann's book offers essays that focus on the intricacies of accounting for the geographical dimension of art history during the early modern period in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Toward a Geography of Art presents a historical overview of these complexities, debates contemporary concerns, a...
No German painter evokes such strong emotions as Caspar David Friedrich: his evening skies remain icons of longing, his mountain vistas testaments to the grandeur of nature. He inspired Samuel Beckett to write Waiting for Godot and Walt Disney to create Bambi. Goethe, however, was so enraged by the enigmatic melancholy of Friedrich’s paintings that he wanted to smash them on the edge of a table. In a sweeping journey through time, bestselling author Florian Illies tells the story of Friedrich’s paintings and their impact on subsequent generations. Many of his most beautiful paintings were burned, first in his birthplace and then in World War II; others, like the Chalk Cliffs on Rügen, e...
This is an exciting exploration of the role art plays in our lives. Mattick takes the question "What is art?" as a basis for a discussion of the nature of art, he asks what meaning art can have and to whom in the present order.
A fresh contribution to the ongoing debate between Kunstwissenschaft (scientific study of art) and Kunstgeschichte (art history), this essay collection explores how German-speaking art historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century self-consciously generated a field of study. Prominent North American and European scholars provide new insights into how a mixing of diverse methodologies took place, in order to gain a more subtle and comprehensive understanding of how art history became institutionalized and legitimized in Germany. One common assumption about early art-historical writing in Germany is that it depended upon a simplistic and narrowly-defined formalism. This book he...
This sequel to The Practice of Theory stresses the continued need for self-reflective awareness in art historical writing. Offering a series of meditations on the discipline of art history in the context of contemporary critical theory, Moxey addresses such central issues as the status of the canon, the nature of aesthetic value, and the character of historical knowledge. The chapters are linked by a common interest in, even fascination with, the paradoxical power of narrative and the identity of the authorial voice. Moxey maintains that art history is a rhetoric of persuasion rather than a discourse of truth. Each chapter in The Practice of Persuasion attempts to demonstrate the paradoxes i...
Zalampas applies the psychological model of Alfred Adler to Adolf Hitler through the examination of his views on architecture, art, and music. This study was made possible by the publication of Billy F. Price's volume of over seven hundred of Hitler's watercolors, oils, and sketches.
This collection represents a tool to broaden and deepen our geographical, institutional, and historical understanding of the term totalitarianism. Is totalitarianism only found in ‘other’ societies? How come, then, it emerged historically in ‘ours’ first? How come it developed in so many countries either in Western Europe (Italy, Germany, Portugal, and Spain) or under implicit Western forms of coercion (Latin America)? How do relations between individual(s), mass and the visual arts relate to totalitarian trends? These are among the questions this book asks about totalitarianism. The volume does not impose a ‘one size fits all’ interpretation, but opens new spaces for debate on t...
The study of the eighth-century prophets has experienced major changes over the past five decades. In these articles, published during a time when traditional methods of reading these texts gave way to new interests and approaches, John Willis addresses some of the major challenges facing interpreters of the prophetic works as coherent books. The careful attention to detail in the biblical texts themselves and in the history of scholarship shown in these essays offers a helpful model for scholars seeking to understand the ancient texts and appropriate them for new conditions.
A fresh and insightful history of how the German arts-and-letters scene was transformed under the Nazis Culture was integral to the smooth running of the Third Reich. In the years preceding WWII, a wide variety of artistic forms were used to instill a Nazi ideology in the German people and to manipulate the public perception of Hitler's enemies. During the war, the arts were closely tied to the propaganda machine that promoted the cause of Germany's military campaigns. Michael H. Kater's engaging and deeply researched account of artistic culture within Nazi Germany considers how the German arts-and-letters scene was transformed when the Nazis came to power. With a broad purview that ranges widely across music, literature, film, theater, the press, and visual arts, Kater details the struggle between creative autonomy and political control as he looks at what became of German artists and their work both during and subsequent to Nazi rule.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.