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The archives of the American School excavations in the Athenian Agora contain a remarkable series of watercolors and drawings - well over 400 - by Piet de Jong, one of the best-known, most distinctive, and influential archaeological illustrators of the 20th century. They show landscapes, people, and, above all, objects recovered during many seasons of fieldwork at one of the longest continuously running archaeological projects in Greece.The aim of this volume is to bring these illustrations out of the storage drawers and to assemble in color a representative sample of some of the finest of Piet de Jong's contributions. Along the way, this book tells the story of the Agora excavations and assesses their contribution to scholarship. It includes essays by 16 scholars currently working at the Agora, and surveys the entire span of the material they are studying - from Neolithic poetry to the Late Byzantine and post-Byzantine frescoes from the Church of Ayios Spyridon.
The first book-length study of this influential artist's work, focusing on the participatory role of the human subject rather than the art object. Michael Asher doesn't make typical installations. Instead, he extracts his art from the institutions in which it is shown, culling it from collections, histories, or museums' own walls. Since the late 1960s, Asher has been creating situations that have not only taught us about the conditions and contexts of contemporary art, but have worked to define it. In Situation Aesthetics, Kirsi Peltomäki examines Asher's practice by analyzing the social situations that the artist constructs in his work for viewers, participants, and institutional represent...
Main description: In Modris Eksteins's hands, the interlocking stories of Vincent van Gogh and art dealer Otto Wacker reveal the origins of the fundamental uncertainty that is the hallmark of the modern era. Through the lens of Wacker's sensational 1932 trial in Berlin for selling fake Van Goghs, Eksteins offers a unique narrative of Weimar Germany, the rise of Hitler, and the replacement of nineteenth-century certitude with twentieth-century doubt. Berlin after the Great War was a magnet for art and transgression. Among those it attracted was Otto Wacker, a young gay dancer turned art impresario. His sale of thirty-three forged Van Goghs and the ensuing scandal gave Van Gogh's work unpreced...
This book explores the transformation of the window during the Early Modern Period in Europe. Following the Italian Renaissance, new stylistic norms for modern ‘classical windows’ had to be invented. Building a new classical repertoire drew on existing traditions in fenestration as local builders throughout Europe struggled with the constraints of varying climatic conditions, customs and physical resources in pursuit of a broader vision of an international classical revival. With the Renaissance, the architectural emphasis shifted towards secular design and, as the classical revival gained momentum, a quest for a cultured lifestyle commensurate with the new architecture increased demand ...
From a punishment for the immoral acts of others, venereal disease has become a malady that may confront any one of us. This book examines the different stages in this long development and reveals the strange disjunction between waves of public anxiety and the factual incidence of disease, in this troubled overlap between medical science and social life. It describes the various efforts that have been made since 1850 to contain the hazard of sexually transmitted diseases and places the changing views on venereal infection in their historical and social context. The comparisons drawn between the late 19th-century battle against syphilis and present-day responses to the AIDS epidemic underscore the notable changes that have taken place not only in thinking about sexuality, but also in the authority of the medical profession and in the position of patients vis-à-vis policy-makers and all those involved in determining modes of treatment and prevention.
Exchange programmes have been a part of US foreign relations since the nineteenth century, but it was only during and after World War II that they were applied by the US government on a large scale to influence foreign publics in support of strategic objectives. This book looks at the background, organisation, and goals of the Department of State's most prestigious activity in this field, the Foreign Leader Program. The Program (still running as the International Visitor Leadership Program) enabled US Embassies to select and invite talented, influential 'opinion leaders' to visit the United States, meet their professional counterparts, and gain a broad understanding of American attitudes and opinions from around the country. By tracking the operation of the Program in three key transatlantic allies of the United States a full picture is given of who was selected and why, and how the target groups changed over time in line with a developing US-European relationship. The book therefore takes a unique in-depth look at the importance of exchanges for the extension of US 'informal empire' and the maintenance of the transatlantic alliance during the Cold War.
The fourth volume in a history of photography, this is a bibliography of books on the subject.
Although post-structuralism has highlighted the importance of what is offstage, lost, forgotten, hidden or discarded, silent or silenced, the poetics and politics of absence (much like its ethics and aesthetics) have rarely been discussed across media or disciplines. The book conceptualizes 'radical absence' to describe a certain tradition of resistance to ontology, predication, and representation, contesting their reliance on a metaphysics of presence. Apophatic speech, empty signifiers, and figural voids are some of the figures through which radical absence becomes apparent, with unprecedented intensity, in 20th-century theory, literature, film, and the arts. Phantasmatic and outrageous, s...