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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)...
Washington Irving’s Critique of American Culture: Sketching a Vision of World Citizenship challenges long-standing views of Washington Irving. He has been portrayed as writing in the 18th century style of Addison and Goldsmith, without having much substance of his own. Irving has also been accused of being insufficiently American and adrift in an identity crisis. The author argues that Irving addressed the American cultural context very extensively—he was a writer of substance who articulated an ethic of world citizenship that was found in the philosophy of ancient Greek cynics and stoics. This ethic was united with a love of picturesque travel, which emphasized variety and texture in ex...
This book examines the portrayal of themes of boundary crossing, itinerancy, relocation, and displacement in US genre paintings during the second half of the long nineteenth century (c. 1860–1910). Through four diachronic case studies, the book reveals how the high-stakes politics of mobility and identity during this period informed the production and reception of works of art by Eastman Johnson (1824–1906), Enoch Wood Perry, Jr. (1831–1915), Thomas Hovenden (1840–95), and John Sloan (1871–1951). It also complicates art history’s canonical understandings of genre painting as a category that seeks to reinforce social hierarchies and emphasize more rooted connections to place by, instead, privileging portrayals of social flux and geographic instability. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, literature, American studies, and cultural geography.
'Destined to become a new classic' Chris Kraus A dazzlingly original reassessment of women's stories, bodies and art - and how we think about them. For decades, feminist artists have confronted the problem of how to tell the truth about their experiences as bodies. Queer bodies, sick bodies, racialised bodies, female bodies, what is their language, what are the materials we need to transcribe it? Exploring the ways in which feminist artists have taken up this challenge, Art Monsters is a landmark intervention in how we think about art and the body. Weaving daring links between disparate artists and writers – from Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography to Kara Walker’s silhouettes, Vanessa Bell’s portraits to Eva Hesse’s rope sculptures – Lauren Elkin shows that their work offers a potent celebration of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political. ‘The Susan Sontag of her generation’ Deborah Levy
These in-depth, historical, and critical essays study the meaning of ornament, the role it played in the formation of modernism, and its theoretical importance between the mid-nineteenth century and the late twentieth century in England and Germany. Ranging from Owen Jones to Ernst Gombrich through Gottfried Semper, Alois Riegl, August Schmarsow, Wilhelm Worringer, Adolf Loos, Henry van de Velde, and Hermann Muthesius, the contributors show how artistic theories are deeply related to the art practice of their own times, and how ornament is imbued with historical and social meaning.
This book addresses the critical terminologies of place and space (and their role within medieval studies) in a considered and critical manner, presenting a scholarly introduction written by the editors alongside thematic case studies that address a wide range of visual and textual material. The chapters consider the extant visual and textual sources from the medieval period alongside contemporary scholarly discussions to examine place and space in their wider critical context, and are written by specialists in a range of disciplines including art history, archaeology, history, and literature.
The eminent physician and anatomist Dr William Hunter (1718-1783) made an important and significant contribution to the history of collecting and the promotion of the fine arts in Britain in the eighteenth century. Born at the family home in East Calderwood, he matriculated at the University of Glasgow in 1731 and was greatly influenced by some of the most important philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, including Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746). He quickly abandoned his studies in theology for Medicine and, in 1740, left Scotland for London where he steadily acquired a reputation as an energetic and astute practitioner; he combined his working life as an anatomist successfully with a wid...
This book elaborates on the social and cultural phenomenon of national schools during the nineteenth century, via the less studied field of sculpture and using Belgium as a case study. The role, importance of, and emphasis on certain aspects of national identity evolved throughout the century, while a diverse array of criteria were indicated by commissioners, art critics, or artists that supposedly constituted a "national sculpture." By confronting the role and impact of the four most crucial actors within the artistic field (politics, education, exhibitions, public commissions) with a linear timeframe, this book offers a chronological as well as a thematic approach. Artists covered include Guillaume Geefs, Eugène Simonis, Charles Van der Stappen, Julien Dillens, Paul Devigne, Constantin Meunier, and George Minne.
This volume explores the late medieval and early modern periods from the perspective of objects. While the agency of things has been studied in anthropology and archaeology, it is an innovative approach for art historical investigations. Each contributor takes as a point of departure active things: objects that were collected, exchanged, held in hand, carried on a body, assembled, cared for or pawned. Through a series of case studies set in various geographic locations, this volume examines a rich variety of systems throughout Europe and beyond. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315401867, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license
The 16th century bronze plaques from the kingdom of Benin are among the most recognized masterpieces of African art, and yet many details of their commission and installation in the palace in Benin City, Nigeria, are little understood. The Benin Plaques, A 16th Century Imperial Monument is a detailed analysis of a corpus of nearly 850 bronze plaques that were installed in the court of the Benin kingdom at the moment of its greatest political power and geographic reach. By examining European accounts, Benin oral histories, and the physical evidence of the extant plaques, Gunsch is the first to propose an installation pattern for the series.