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The nineteenth century witnessed a series of revolutions in the production and circulation of images. From lithographs and engraved reproductions of paintings to daguerreotypes, stereoscopic views, and mass-produced sculptures, works of visual art became available in a wider range of media than ever before. But the circulation and reproduction of artworks also raised new questions about the legal rights of painters, sculptors, engravers, photographers, architects, collectors, publishers, and subjects of representation (such as sitters in paintings or photographs). Copyright and patent laws tussled with informal cultural norms and business strategies as individuals and groups attempted to exe...
This book presents and analyses the results of the use and adaptation of ancient Egyptian architecture in modern times. It traces the use of ancient Egyptian motifs and constructions across the world, from Australia, the Americas and Southern Africa to Western Europe. It also inquires into the cultural, economic and social contexts of this practice. Imhotep Today is exceptional not only in its global coverage, but in its analyses of thorny questions such as: what was it about Ancient Egypt that inspired such Egyptianizing monuments, and was it just one idea, or several different ones which formed the basis of such activities? The book also asks why only certain images, such as obelisks and sphinxes, were incorporated within the movement. The contributors explore how these 'monuments' fitted into the local architecture of the time and, in this context, they investigate whether 'Egyptianizing architecture' is an ongoing movement and, if so, how it differs from earlier, similar activities.
Napoleon Sarony was once one of the most famous names in American photography. During the Gilded Age, his grand portrait studio with its one-story-high marquee reproducing the photographer’s signature in golden letters was a New York City landmark visited by celebrities such as Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, and Mark Twain. Sarony’s story represents a central chapter in the history of photography. Napoleon Sarony’s Living Pictures documents Sarony’s career as New York City’s premier portrait photographer and details a moment when the birth of celebrity culture and growth of mass media helped promote popular acceptance of photography as fine art. Sarony’s larger-than-life public im...
What worlds take root in war? In this book, anthropologist Munira Khayyat describes life along the southern border of Lebanon, where resistant ecologies thrive amid a terrain of perennial war. A Landscape of War takes us to frontline villages where armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings, and scattered land mines have become the environment where everyday life is waged. This book dwells with multispecies partnerships such as tobacco farming and goatherding that carry life through seasons of destruction. Neither green-tinged utopia nor total devastation, these ecologies make life possible in an insistently deadly region. Sourcing an anthropology of war from where it is lived, this book decolonizes distant theories of war and brings to light creative practices forged in the midst of ongoing devastation. In lyrical prose that resonates with imperiled conditions across the Global South, Khayyat paints a portrait of war as a place where life must go on.
William Rimmer (1816–1879) is arguably the first modernist American sculptor, although his inventive originality has not been fully acknowledged. Rimmer cultivated an art of ideas and personal expression whilst supporting himself as a physician and, later, as a teacher of art anatomy at the Cooper Union School of Design for Women in New York. Unlike his contemporaries, he advocated the creation of sculpture drawn entirely from the artist’s imagination, as opposed to antique archetypes or live models. In this way, he sought to reframe excellence in American art as something that must be found within, rather than derived from Europe. In this new monograph, the meaning of Rimmer’s works i...
A reconsideration of Church's works offering a sustained examination of the aesthetics of detail that fundamentally shaped 19th-century American landscape painting.
Photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), often termed the father of the motion picture, presented his iconic Animal Locomotion series in 1887. Produced under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania and encompassing thousands of photographs of humans and animals in motion, the series included more than 300 plates of nude men and women engaged in activities such as swinging a baseball bat, playing leapfrog, and performing housework—an astonishing fact given the period’s standards of propriety. In the first sustained examination of these nudes and the remarkable success of their production, wide circulation, and reception, Indecent Exposures positions this revolutionary enterprise as central to crucial advancements of the modern era. Muybridge’s nudes ushered in new attitudes toward science and progress, including Darwinian ideas about human evolution and hierarchy; quickened debates over the role of photography and scientific investigation in art; and offered innovative perspectives on the human body. This fascinating story is copiously illustrated, and includes many lesser-known photographs published here for the first time.
Antebellum American Pendant Paintings: New Ways of Looking marks the first sustained study of pendant paintings: discrete images designed as a pair. It opens with a broad overview that anchors the form in the medieval diptych, religious history, and aesthetic theory and explores its cultural and historical resonance in the 19th-century United States. Three case studies examine how antebellum American artists used the pendant format in ways revelatory of their historical moment and the aesthetic and cultural developments in which they partook. The case studies on John Quidor’s Rip Van Winkle and His Companions at the Inn Door of Nicholas Vedder (1839) and The Return of Rip Van Winkle (1849)...
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