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Springer sees in it, not a harsh condemnation of militarism, but a marked ambivalence in the artist's attitude toward war. This new reading of the painting grows out of Springer's assessment of its imagery in relation to patronage, gender relations, and national identity - and particularly to propaganda and satire. Using Kirchner's letters and other documentation, much of it only recently available, Springer reconstructs the years of Kirchner's military service.
Offering a corrective to the common scholarly characterization of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting as modern, realistic and secularized, Boudewijn Bakker here explores the long history and purpose of landscape in Netherlandish painting. In Bakker's view, early Netherlandish as well as seventeenth-century Dutch painting can be understood only in the context of the intellectual climate of the day. Concentrating on landscape painting as the careful depiction of the visible world, Bakker's analysis takes in the thought of figures seldom consulted by traditional art historians, such as the fifteenth-century philosopher Dionysius the Carthusian, the sixteenth-century religious reformer...
Oil sketches by Peter Paul Rubens—created at speed and in the heat of invention with a colorful loaded brush—convey all the spontaneity of the great Flemish painter’s creative process. This ravishing book draws from both private and public collections to present in full color 40 of Rubens’s oil sketches. Viewers will find in these informal paintings an enchanting intimacy and gain a new appreciation of Rubens’s capacity for invention and improvisation, and of his special genius for dramatic design and coloristic brilliance. The book investigates the role of the oil sketch in Rubens’s work; the development of the artist’s themes and narratives in his multiple sketches; and the history of the appreciation of his oil sketches. It also explores some of the unique aspects of his techniques and materials. By revealing the oil sketches as the most direct record of Rubens’s creative process, the book presents him as the greatest and most fluent practitioner of this vibrant and vital medium.
Based on papers presented at the Fifth Triennial Conference of the International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS/AERTI) held in 2002 in Hamburg, the twenty-two essays in this volume cover a wide array of intermedial relations and a great variety of media, from medieval architecture to interactive digital art. They have been arranged in sections labeled "History and Identity," "Cultural Memory," "Texts and Photographs: Cultural Anthropology and Cultural Memory," "Mixed-Media Texts: Cartography in Contemporary Art and Fiction," "Mixed-Media Texts: 'Yellow-Cover Books', Artists' Books, and Comics," "Intermedia Texts: Logotypes," and "Space, Spatialization, Virtual Space." Displaying a range of methods and interests, these contributions by scholars from Europe, the United States, and South America working in different disciplines confirm the impression voiced by IAWIS president Charlotte Schoell-Glass in her introduction that "the influence of Visual and Cultural Studies has changed the outlook of many who study the interactions of texts and images".
Published on the occasion of the exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mar. 30-Aug. 29, 2005.
As the site of royal coronations, Reims cathedral was a monument to French national history and identity. But after German troops bombed the cathedral during World War I, it took on new meaning. The French reimagined it as a martyr of civilization, as the rupture between the warring states. Despite a history of mutual respect, the bombing of the cathedral caused all social, scientific, artistic, and cultural ties between Germany and France to be severed for decades. The resulting battle of words and images stressed the differences between German Kultur and French civilisation. Artists and intelligentsia caricatured this entrenched cultural dichotomy, influencing portrayals of the two nations...
A wide-ranging, insightful history of culture in West Germany—from literature, film, and music to theater and the visual arts After World War II a mood of despair and impotence pervaded the arts in West Germany. The culture and institutions of the Third Reich were abruptly dismissed, yet there was no immediate return to the Weimar period’s progressive ideals. In this moment of cultural stasis, how could West Germany’s artists free themselves from their experiences of Nazism? Moving from 1945 to reunification, Michael H. Kater explores West German culture as it emerged from the darkness of the Third Reich. Examining periods of denial and complacency as well as attempts to reckon with the past, he shows how all postwar culture was touched by the vestiges of National Socialism. From the literature of Günter Grass to the happenings of Joseph Beuys and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s innovations in electronic music, Kater shows how it was only through the reinvigoration of the cultural scene that West Germany could contend with its past—and eventually allow democracy to reemerge.
This book examines the ways in which selfhood and cultural solidarity came to be understood and lived as historical identities during the first half of the nineteenth century. It's focus is on the Prussian capital- Berlin- and on the remarkable groups of artists and thinkers- Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Felix Mendelssohn, Jacob Grimm, Friedrich Karl von Savigny and Leopold von Ranke-who became associated in 1840 with the cultural agenda of a regime that hoped to forge solidarity among its subjects by encouraging identification with a constructed public memory. The book emphasizes both the developmental phases and the inner tensions of the program for "becoming historical" that was publicly articulated in 1840.