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Seeking a broad reexamination of visual culture through the lenses of ecocriticism, environmental justice, and animal studies, this compendium offers a diverse range of art-historical criticism formulated within an ecological context. Picture Ecology brings together scholars whose contributions extend chronologically and geographically from 11th-century Chinese painting to contemporary photography of California wildfires. The book's 17 interdisciplinary essays provide a dynamic, cross-cultural approach to an increasingly vital area of study, emphasizing the environmental dimensions inherent in the content and materials of aesthetic objects. Picture Ecology provides valuable new approaches for considering works of art, in ways that are timely, intellectually stimulating, and universally significant.
This multidisciplinary book offers the first broad ecocritical review of American art and examines the environmental contexts of artistic practice from the colonial period to the present day. Tracing how visions of the environment have changed from the Native-European encounter to the emergence of modern ecological activism, more than a dozen scholars and practitioners discuss how artists have both responded to and actively instigated changes in ecological understanding.
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The almost three hundred portraits that once composed the New York Chamber of Commerce's renowned collection capture the giants of American business with aesthetic and symbolic power. The images of civic leaders and entrepreneurs, carefully assembled over two hundred years, tell the story of American industry as shaped and reflected in the life of a major institution. Interpreting these images as historical documents, Picturing Power traces the establishment, growth, and eventual decline of the nation's most powerful business organization. Lavishly illustrated, this book also charts the social and aesthetic course of institutional portraiture in the United States. From its inception in 1768,...
Inner Sanctum takes readers inside the Faculty Room of Princeton University's historic Nassau Hall. It explores the Faculty Room's role as the symbolic center of Princeton and venerable repository of its institutional memory, and looks at how the room and its portraits reflect and helped shape the University's identity. Located at the very heart of the Princeton campus, the Faculty Room served variously as a prayer hall, library, and museum, until University president Woodrow Wilson had it remodeled in 1906 for executive and ceremonial use. The room is distinctive for its fine architectural features, stately design, and remarkable collection of portraits depicting University founders, Americ...
"Berger's original readings provide altogether new and compelling ways to understand some of Eakins's most well-known paintings."--Alexander Nemerov, Stanford University "This book is most interesting. Berger rereads a number of Eakins's paintings and makes use of recent investigations about the meaning of manhood in the nineteenth century. Man Made casts much of Eakins's life and work into new light."--Elizabeth Johns, author of Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life "During the last decade, Martin Berger has been the most perceptive and sophisticated critic of masculinity in nineteenth-century American art. With this book he consolidates that analysis triumphantly--and extends its implications, first into a consideration of all of Eakins's oeuvre, and then into related discourses of sexuality, domesticity, and race. Man Made has useful things to say to scholars in all fields of American culture. In addition, it now becomes the most interesting book on Eakins since Elizabeth Johns's groundbreaking work, Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life, first published nearly twenty years ago."--Bruce Robertson, University of California, Santa Barbara
Readers of Implication will come away convinced that all art—regardless of historical period, context, genre, or medium—has an ecological connection to the world in which it was created Ecocriticism is an interdisciplinary mode of inquiry that examines the environmental significance of art, literature, and other creative endeavors. In Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History, Alan C. Braddock, a pioneer in art historical ecocriticism, presents a fascinating group of key terms and case studies to demonstrate that all art is ecological in its interconnectedness with the world. The book adopts a dictionary-style format, although not in a conventional sense. Drawing inspiration...
A groundbreaking ecocritical study that examines how ideas about the natural and built environment informed architectural and decorative trends of the Roman Late Republican and Early Imperial periods. Landscape emerged as a significant theme in the Roman Late Republican and Early Imperial periods. Writers described landscape in texts and treatises, its qualities were praised and sought out in everyday life, and contemporary perceptions of the natural and built environment, as well as ideas about nature and art, were intertwined with architectural and decorative trends. This illustrated volume examines how representations of real and depicted landscapes, and the merging of both in visual spac...
A groundbreaking reassessment that foregrounds Van Gogh’s profound engagement with the industrial age while making his work newly relevant for our world today Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) is most often portrayed as the consummate painter of nature whose work gained its strength from his direct encounters with the unspoiled landscape. Michael Lobel upends this commonplace view by showing how Van Gogh’s pictures are inseparable from the modern industrial era in which the artist lived—from its factories and polluted skies to its coal mines and gasworks—and how his art drew upon waste and pollution for its subjects and even for the very materials out of which it was made. Lobel undersc...