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What can the performance of a single play on one specific night tell us about the world this event inhabited so briefly? Alexander Nemerov takes a performance of Macbeth in Washington, DC on October 17, 1863—with Abraham Lincoln in attendance—to explore this question and illuminate American art, politics, technology, and life as it was being lived. Nemerov’s inspiration is Wallace Stevens and his poem "Anecdote of the Jar," in which a single object organizes the wilderness around it in the consciousness of the poet. For Nemerov, that evening’s performance of Macbeth reached across the tragedy of civil war to acknowledge the horrors and emptiness of a world it tried and ultimately failed to change.
"In its most basic form, the rosary is a series of prayers and meditations designed to bring the worshiper closer to God through the Virgin Mary. But, as Anne Winston-Allen shows, there was no single text of the rosary prayer: different versions, some in German and some in Latin, evolved over the course of the late Middle Ages as communities of believers experimented with their own forms. She also finds that rosary prayers were influenced by secular, even courtly literature that used images of the rose and rose garden; in the rosary, Mary is the Mystical Rose.".
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The physical landscape has been appropriated by artists throughout temporal and spatial history to represent (or present) political, social, and national identities. Artists have long imbued the landscape with personal and public ideologies. Indeed, landscapes can be more than simple representations of scenic beauty, when artists use the genre to convey or reflect upon various political and social concerns important in different periods. This collection of essays brings together the perspectives of scholars from a variety of backgrounds. Subjects range from Venetian Renaissance waterscapes to the rolling farm hills of Grant Wood, and from native Botswana imagery to ecosensitive Florida portraits. These examinations of landscapes consider the rich ideology and iconography that define and redefine peoples and places.
Speculative Landscapes offers the first comprehensive account of American artists’ financial involvements in and creative responses to the nineteenth-century real estate economy. Examining the dealings of five painters who participated actively in this economy—Daniel Huntington, John Quidor, Eastman Johnson, Martin Johnson Heade, and Winslow Homer—Ross Barrett argues that the experience of property investment exposed artists to new ways of seeing and representing land, inspiring them to develop innovative figural, landscape, and marine paintings that radically reworked visual conventions. This approach moved beyond just aesthetics, however, and the book traces how artists creatively interrogated the economic, environmental, and cultural dynamics of American real estate capitalism. In doing so, Speculative Landscapes reveals how the provocative experience of land investment spurred painters to produce uniquely insightful critiques of the emerging real estate economy, critiques that uncovered its fiscal perils and social costs and imagined spaces outside the regime of private property.
In Gardens of Love and the Limits of Morality in Early Netherlandish Art, Andrea Pearson charts the moralization of human bodies in late medieval and early modern visual culture, through paintings by Jan van Eyck and Hieronymus Bosch, devotional prints and illustrated books, and the celebrated enclosed gardens of Mechelen among other works. Drawing on new archival evidence and innovative visual analysis to reframe familiar religious discourses, she demonstrates that depicted topographies advanced and sometimes resisted bodily critiques expressed in scripture, conduct literature, and even legislation. Governing many of these redemptive greenscapes were the figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary, archetypes of purity whose spiritual authority was impossible to ignore, yet whose mysteries posed innumerable moral challenges. The study reveals that bodily status was the fundamental problem of human salvation, in which artists, patrons, and viewers alike had an interpretive stake.
Annotation. "Roberta Favis tells the story of the last two decades of the life and artistic career of Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), when the peripatetic painter settled permanently in St. Augustine, Florida. Providing generous illustrations in both black and white" Annotation. Roberta Favis tells the story of the last two decades of the life and artistic career of Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904), when the peripatetic painter settled permanently in St. Augustine, Florida. Providing generous illustrations in both black and white and color, she reassesses his career and importance by focusing on this late period of his work and looking more closely at his local context and the contemporary...
Even in this age of emails, texts, and tweets, there is an ongoing fascination with the simple act of putting pen to paper. Associations such as the International Association of Master Penmen and the Society for Italic Handwriting keep the traditions of calligraphy and penmanship alive, hand-writing typefaces continue to sell, and hand-drawn display type and packaging of all sorts enjoy a renaissance. Pen to Paper, a collection of letters by artists from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, reveals how letter writing can be an artistic act, just as an artist puts pen to paper to craft a line in a drawing. Brief essays explore what can be learned from the handwriting of celebrated artists such as Mary Cassatt, Frederic Church, Howard Finster, Winslow Homer, Ray Johnson, Rockwell Kent, Georgia O'Keeffe, Claes Oldenburg, Maxfield Parrish, Eero Saarinen, Saul Steinberg, and many others. Each letter is accompanied by an archival image of the artist or a related artwork, with a full transcription. Pen to Paper provides a fresh way to think about artists and their creative work and is sure to inspire your next handwritten note or letter.
Dramatic changes during the Reformation era in Northern Europe, such as witchcraft and new global discoveries, are examined through visual culture, both prints and paintings.
Tracing the evolution of the newly emerging iconographical patterns of fools and folly, this book sheds light on the original and innovative invention that was an exclusive creation of northern Renaissance art and culture. The novel theme of the fools' journey, as expressed mainly through prints in Germany and later in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century is revealed as an ironical paraphrase, parodying the well established Christian topos, the Pilgrimage of Life or the Pilgrimage of the Human Soul, which offered the believer the opportunity to travel on the road toward redemption. The new mythical image of the fools' journey, however, confronts the contemporary reader/viewer with the im...