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When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1837 that "Our Age is Ocular," he offered a succinct assessment of antebellum America's cultural, commercial, and physiological preoccupation with sight. In the early nineteenth century, the American city's visual culture was manifest in pamphlets, newspapers, painting exhibitions, and spectacular entertainments; businesses promoted their wares to consumers on the move with broadsides, posters, and signboards; and advances in ophthalmological sciences linked the mechanics of vision to the physiological functions of the human body. Within this crowded visual field, sight circulated as a metaphor, as a physiological process, and as a commercial commodity. Out ...
The Terra Foundation for American Art uses its impressive collection of American art spanning a two-hundred-year period to fulfill its mission. Since the Foundation's establishment in 1978, it has sought to share the collection's extraordinary pieces by renowned American artists like Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Edward Hopper with an international audience, encouraging the study of American art around the world. Conversations with the Collection helps to realize the Foundation's mission of serving as a "museum without walls," bringing art and scholarship to a global audience. The handbook entries and scholars' responses to the artworks that comprise these Conversations provide fascina...
More than one hundred and fifty years after Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, the Civil War still occupies a prominent place in the national collective memory. Paintings and photographs, plays and movies, novels, poetry, and songs portray the war as a battle over the future of slavery, often focusing on Lincoln’s determination to save the Union, or highlighting the brutality of brother fighting brother. Battles and battlefields occupy us, too: Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg all conjure up images of desolate landscapes strewn with war dead. Yet the frontlines were not the only landscapes of the war. Countless civilians saw their daily lives upended while the entire nation suffered. Hom...
"This publication arose from an inspired partnership between the Terra Foundation, The University of Western Australia, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, and the University of Melbourne's Ian Potter Museum of Art. Together, the partners co-organized and presented the Terra Collection Initiative exhibition Continental shift: Nineteenth Century American and Australian Landscape Painting (shown in Melbourne as Not as the Songs of Other Land s: 19th Century American and Australian Landscape Painting)."--Page 7.
Catalogue of a touring exhibition held at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, June 20-September 20, 2015; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, November 7, 2015-January 18, 2016; and Pinacoteca do Estado de Saao Paulo, Saao Paulo, February 27-May 29, 2016.
"Known today primarily for his role in the development of the electromagnetic telegraph and Morse code, Samuel F.B. Morse began his career as a painter. His monumental Gallery of the Louvre was the culmination of an extended period of study in Europe"--Provided by publisher.
What determines whether complex life will arise on a planet, or even any life at all? Questions such as these are investigated in this groundbreaking book. In doing so, the authors synthesize information from astronomy, biology, and paleontology, and apply it to what we know about the rise of life on Earth and to what could possibly happen elsewhere in the universe. Everyone who has been thrilled by the recent discoveries of extrasolar planets and the indications of life on Mars and the Jovian moon Europa will be fascinated by Rare Earth, and its implications for those who look to the heavens for companionship.
Perhaps America's best environmental idea was not the national park but the garden cemetery, a use of space that quickly gained popularity in the mid-nineteenth century. Such spaces of repose brought key elements of the countryside into rapidly expanding cities, making nature accessible to all and serving to remind visitors of the natural cycles of life. In this unique interdisciplinary blend of historical narrative, cultural criticism, and poignant memoir, Aaron Sachs argues that American cemeteries embody a forgotten landscape tradition that has much to teach us in our current moment of environmental crisis. Until the trauma of the Civil War, many Americans sought to shape society into wha...
The impulse in much nineteenth-century American painting and culture was to describe nature as a wilderness on which the young nation might freely inscribe its future: the United States as a virgin land, that is, unploughed, unfenced, and unpainted. Insofar as it exhibited evidence of a past, its traces pointed to a geologic or cosmic past, not a human one. The work of the New England artist Fitz H. Lane, however, was decidedly different. In this important study, Margaretta Markle Lovell singles out the more modestly scaled, explicitly inhabited landscapes of Fitz H. Lane and investigates the patrons who supported his career, with an eye to understanding how New Englanders thought about thei...
A study of three controversies that illuminate the changing cultural role of art exhibition in the nineteenth century From the antebellum era through the Gilded Age, New York City's leading art institutions were lightning rods for conflict. In the decades before the Civil War, art promoters believed that aesthetic taste could foster national unity and assuage urban conflicts; by the 1880s such hopes had faded, and the taste for art assumed more personal connotations associated with consumption and domestic decoration. Art Wars chronicles three protracted public battles that marked this transformation. The first battle began in 1849 and resulted in the downfall of the American Art-Union, the ...