A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY109 start with H start with H
In Haeckel’s Embryos, Nick Hopwood tells this extraordinary story in full for the first time. He tracks the drawings and the charges against them from their genesis in the nineteenth century to their continuing involvement in innovation in the present day, and from Germany to Britain and the United States. Emphasizing the changes worked by circulation and copying, interpretation and debate, Hopwood uses the case to explore how pictures succeed and fail, gain acceptance and spark controversy. Along the way, he reveals how embryonic development was made a process that we can see, compare, and discuss, and how copying—usually dismissed as unoriginal—can be creative, contested, and consequential.
With a wealth of expertly contextualized illustrations, Haeckel’s Embryos recaptures the shocking novelty of pictures that enthralled schoolchildren and outraged priests, and highlights the remarkable ways these images kept on shaping knowledge as they aged.
Built from 532 to 537 as the Cathedral of Constantinople, Hagia Sophia was little studied and seldom recognized as a great monument of world art until the nineteenth century, and Nelson examines the causes and consequences of the building's newly elevated status during that time. He chronicles the grand dome's modern history through a vibrant cast of characters—emperors, sultans, critics, poets, archaeologists, architects, philanthropists, and religious congregations—some of whom spent years studying it, others never visiting the building. But as Nelson shows, they all had a hand in the recreation of Hagia Sophia as a modern architectural icon. By many means and for its own purposes, the West has conceptually transformed Hagia Sophia into the international symbol that it is today.
While other books have covered the architectural history of the structure, this is the first study to address its status as a modern monument. With his narrative of the building's rebirth, Nelson captures its importance for the diverse communities that shape and find meaning in Hagia Sophia. His book will resonate with cultural, architectural, and art historians as well as with those seeking to acquaint themselves with the modern life of an inspired and inspiring building.
Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage consists of twenty-seven essays addressing objects in the remarkable collection of Nasser David Khalili. The collection features more than five thousand objects relating to the arts of pilgrimage, from the eighth century to today, and includes Qur’ans, illustrated manuscripts, rare books, scientific instruments, textiles, coins, paintings, prints, and photo-postcards, as well as archival material, unique historical documents, and examples of the work of some of the earliest Muslim photographers of Hajj. Together the essays collected in Hajj and the Arts of Pilgrimage provide a comprehensive overview of Hajj, illustrating the religious, spiritual, cultural, and artistic aspects of pilgrimage to the Holy Sanctuaries of Islam and the cosmopolitan nature of Hajj itself. Each essay is written by a prominent specialist in the field and beautifully illustrated with full-color images of objects from the collection, some of which have never been seen in print before. Taking readers from the early history of Islam to the fascinating story of the Western view of Muslim pilgrimage, these essays will transform our perception of Hajj.
The Hajj, one of the five pillars of Islam, is the largest pilgrimage in the world today and a sacred duty for all Muslims. Each year, millions of the faithful from around the world make the pilgrimage to Makkah, the birthplace of Islam where the Prophet Muhammad received his revelation.
With contributions from renowned experts Muhammad Abdel Haleem, Hugh Kennedy, Robert Irwin, and Ziauddin Sardar, this fascinating book pulls together many strands of Hajj, its rituals, history, and modern manifestations. Travel was once a hazardous gamble, yet devoted Muslims undertook the journey to Makkah, documenting their experiences in manuscripts, wall paintings, and early photographs, many of which are presented here. Through a wealth of illustrations including pilgrims' personal objects, souvenirs, and maps, Hajj provides a glimpse into this important holy rite for Muslim readers already grounded in the tradition and non-Muslims who cannot otherwise participate.
Hajj does not, however, merely trace pilgrimages of the past. The Hajj is a living tradition, influenced by new conveniences and obstacles. Graffiti, consumerism, and state lotteries all now play a role in this time-honored practice. This book opens out onto the full sweep of the Hajj: a sacred path walked by early Islamic devotees and pre-Islamic Arabians; a sumptuous site of worship under the care of sultans; and an expression of faith in the modern world.
It also examines in depth what is arguably the least studied project of Stanford White, one of the most distinguished architects of the Gilded Age. Originally designed for New York University’s new campus in the Bronx, the Hall of Fame once housed ninety-eight bronze busts of men and women deemed “great Americans” within its elegant colonnade, including the likes of George Washington, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Booker T. Washington, Susan B. Anthony, and Robert E. Lee.
The Hall was conceived when the Great Man theory dominated American thought. However, as times changed, challenges to ideas concerning greatness and heroism grew, and heroes once celebrated were scrutinized for their flaws. The monument is now a shell of its former glory and largely forgotten, and the NYU campus that once housed the colonnade was eventually sold to Bronx Community College.
In 2017, following the violent demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, by white supremacists attempting to prevent the removal of a monument to General Lee, Andrew Cuomo, then governor of New York, thrust the Hall of Fame back into the limelight by ordering the busts of Lee and Stonewall Jackson to be removed. This action joined a national trend to remove monuments deemed offensive. Gerami argues that the rise and fall of this institution mirrors the nation’s changing conception of what comprises a hero. This biography of a public art memorial answers questions about the importance of art history and the cultural evolution of what it means to be great in America.
Appalachians have always honored craft. Showoff quilts, complicated whittlings, "face jugs," intricate woven coverlets, and the work of famous basketmakers constituted the art of early Appalachia, the life and color of its remote mountain households. By the 1920s, however, the craft tradition was quickly vanishing. This lively, highly personal book recounts the "missionary" effort that preserved the traditional Appalachian craft culture and traces the organization, politics, and economics of later handcraft revival organizations in Southern Appalachia.
Deeply involved in many of the events he describes, Garry Barker has worked in the Appalachian crafts world since the early 1960s. He draws on memories of the leading craftspeople of a bygone era, LBJ's War on Poverty, mushrooming markets for craft products, and the rise of academic crafts training. The Handcraft Revival in Southern Appalachia represents the thoughtful winnowing of Barker's decades of serendipitous experience and disciplined observation, casual conversation and formal interviews, research and collecting, teaching and writing.
The book is the only history of the Appalachian craft movement between 1930 and 1990. As such it will become an essential resource for craftspeople, scholars, and all interested in the Southern Appalachian region. In addition, it constitutes a crucial chapter in the newly emerging history of American craft.
In addition to illustrating the techniques used by handwriting instructors and documenting the ever-changing views of script stylists, this volume probes the development and manufacture of writing equipment as well as useful examples for today’s teachers of writing. Handwriting of the Twentieth Century is a delightful, comprehensive account of our constant quest for fluent and clear handwritten script.
A widely recognized authority on Ryggen, Marit Paasche brings this important Scandinavian artist to the foreground in this biography, the first published on Ryggen in English. Paasche looks at Ryggen within the social, political, and cultural contexts of her time and explores how these issues informed her work, from her anti-fascist tapestry that depicted a spear piercing Mussolini’s head to one protesting the war in Vietnam. Published to correspond with a major retrospective in Frankfurt, of which Paasche is one of the curators, Hannah Ryggen is a foundational book that will provide a crucial introduction of this artist to a broader audience.
The art and artists of Harlem: Found Ways represent the place and its people, burnishing Harlem’s luster but never attempting to smooth its rough edges. The works in the exhibition span a variety of media to explore the invention of Harlem and, at the same time, reinvent it. Artists in the exhibition Harlem: Found Ways, at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art in Cambridge, MA, from 24 May to 15 July, 2017, included Dawoud Bey, Abigail DeVille, Glenn Ligon, Howard Tangye, Nari Ward, and Kehinde Wiley. The exhibition also included items from the Harlem Postcards project at The Studio Museum in Harlem.
This catalog features essays, including a foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that contemplate the uniquely layered urban landscape of Harlem, a city within a city. Vibrantly illustrated with objects from the exhibition, the catalog itself is an important resource for students of contemporary African American art and of the city.
How representations of the preparation, sale, and consumption of leftovers in nineteenth-century urban France link socioeconomic and aesthetic history
The concept of the “harlequin” refers to the practice of reassembling dinner scraps cleared from the plates of the wealthy to sell, replated, to the poor in nineteenth-century Paris. In The Harlequin Eaters, Janet Beizer investigates how the alimentary harlequin evolved in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the earlier, similarly patchworked Commedia dell’arte Harlequin character and can be used to rethink the entangled place of class, race, and food in the longer history of modernism.
By superimposing figurations of the edible harlequin taken from a broad array of popular and canonical novels, newspaper articles, postcard photographs, and lithographs, Beizer shows that what is at stake in nineteenth-century discourses surrounding this mixed meal are representations not only of food but also of the marginalized people—the “harlequin eaters”—who consume it at this time when a global society is emerging. She reveals the imbrication of kitchen narratives and intellectual–aesthetic practices of thought and art, presenting a way to integrate socioeconomic history with the history of literature and the visual arts. The Harlequin Eaters also offers fascinating background to today’s problems of food inequity as it unpacks stories of the for-profit recycling of excess food across class and race divisions.
With Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life, Debra Bricker Balken offers the first-ever complete biography of this great and eccentric man. Although he is now known mainly for his role as an art critic at the New Yorker from 1962 to 1978, Balken weaves together a complete tapestry of Rosenberg’s life and literary production, cast against the dynamic intellectual and social ferment of his time. She explores his role in some of the most contentious cultural debates of the Cold War period, including those over the commodification of art and the erosion of individuality in favor of celebrity, demonstrated in his famous essay “The Herd of Independent Minds.” An outspoken socialist and advocate for the political agency of art, he formed deep alliances with figures such as Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Mary McCarthy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, all of whom Balken portrays with vivid accounts from Rosenberg’s life.
Thoroughly researched and captivatingly written, this book tells in full Rosenberg’s brilliant, fiercely independent life and the five decades in which he played a leading role in US cultural, intellectual, and political history.
In 1852 Hosmer moved from Boston to Rome, where she shared a house with actress Charlotte Cushman and soon formed close friendships with such prominent expatriates as Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and fellow sculptors John Gibson, Emma Stebbins, and William Wetmore Story. References to Hosmer or characters inspired by her appear in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Kate Field among others. Culkin argues that Hosmer's success was made possible by her extensive network of supporters, including her famous friends, boosters of American gentility, and women's rights advocates. This unlikely coalition, along with her talent, ambition, and careful maintenance of her public profile, ultimately brought her great acclaim. Culkin also addresses Hosmer's critique of women's position in nineteenth-century culture through her sculpture, women's rights advocates' use of high art to promote their cause, the role Hosmer's relationships with women played in her life and success, and the complex position a female artist occupied within a country increasingly interested in proving its gentility.
Winner, William M. LeoGrande Prize, Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, 2022
For half a century, cultural production in Colombia has labored under the weight of magical realism—above all, the works of Gabriel García Márquez—where ghosts told stories about the country’s violent past and warned against a similarly gruesome future.
Decades later, the story of violence in Colombia is no less horrific, but the critical resources of magical realism are depleted. In their wake comes "spectral realism." Juliana Martínez argues that recent Colombian novelists, filmmakers, and artists—from Evelio Rosero and William Vega to Beatriz González and Erika Diettes—share a formal and thematic concern with the spectral but shift the focus from what the ghost is toward what the specter does. These works do not speak of ghosts. Instead, they use the specter to destabilize reality by challenging the authority of human vision and historical chronology.
By introducing the spectral into their work, these artists decommodify well-worn modes of representing violence and create a critical space from which to seek justice for the dead and disappeared. A Colombia-based study, Haunting without Ghosts brings powerful insight to the politics and ethics of spectral aesthetics, relevant for a variety of sociohistorical contexts.
The writings are arranged chronologically, beginning with “Indiana Street,” a vivid autobiographical account of the artist’s early years in Kansas City, Missouri. Have I Reasons includes reflections on Morris’s own site-specific installations; transcripts of seminars he conducted in conjunction with exhibitions; and the textual element of The Birthday Boy, the two-screen video-and-sound piece he installed at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, Italy, on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of Michelangelo’s David. Essays range from original interpretations of Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings and Jasper Johns’ early work to engagements with one of Morris’s most significant interlocutors, the philosopher Donald Davidson. Have I Reasons conveys not only Morris’s enduring deep interest in philosophy and issues of resemblance and representation but also his more recent turn toward directly addressing contemporary social and political issues such as corporate excess and preemptive belligerence.
When the alluring, eleventh-century Cambodian stone head of Radha, consort to Krishna, shows up at the Searles Museum, young curator Jenna Murphy doesn’t suspect that it will lead her to a murder. Asian art is her bailiwick, not criminal investigation, and her immediate concern is simply figuring out whether the head is one famously stolen from its body, or a fake.
When a second decapitation happens—this time of an art collector, not a statue—Jenna finds herself drawn into a different kind of mystery, and the stakes are life or death. It turns out that the same talents for research and for unraveling puzzles—the bread and butter of an art historian—have perfectly equipped her to solve crimes. She’s certain the sculpture provides clues to help her solve the case, which takes her to Thailand and Cambodia. But the collectors, dealers, and con artists of the Bangkok art world only compound her questions.
A Head in Cambodia is the fiction debut of noted Asian art expert Nancy Tingley. Readers will delight in the rarified world of collecting, as well as getting to know Jenna, an intrepid and shrewd observer who will easily find her place among V.I. Warshawski, Kinsey Milhone, and other great female sleuths.
Over the last five decades, Black women have been one of the fastest-growing segments of the global prison population, thanks to changes in policies that mandate incarceration for nonviolent offenses and criminalize what women do to survive interpersonal and state violence. In The Healing Stage, Lisa Biggs reveals how four ensembles of currently and formerly incarcerated women and their collaborating artists use theater and performance to challenge harmful policies and popular discourses that justify locking up “bad” women. Focusing on prison-based arts programs in the US and South Africa, Biggs illustrates how Black feminist cultural traditions—theater, dance, storytelling, poetry, humor, and protest—enable women to investigate the root causes of crime and refute dominant narratives about incarcerated women. In doing so, the arts initiatives that she writes about encourage individual and collective healing, a process of repair that exceeds state definitions of rehabilitation. These case studies offer powerful examples of how the labor of incarcerated Black women artists—some of the most marginalized and vulnerable people in our society—radically extends our knowledge of prison arts programs and our understanding of what is required to resolve human conflicts and protect women’s lives.
For the car enthusiast, How to Be a Motorist offers a compendium of Robinson’s wonderfully inventive car-based contraptions, with innovations like a handy “zip-opening bonnet,” a rear wheel to turn the car around with one movement, and a fork attachment to help rural motorists to avoid the occasional chicken on the roadway. The days of unsolicited driving advice could be over with the realization of Robinson’s “duo car for the incompatible,” and the book also includes a parody of a production line demonstrating how cars are made.
A side-splittingly funny collection from the man whose “absurd, beautiful drawings” H. G. Wells claimed “give me a peculiar pleasure of the mind like nothing else in the world,” this book make a perfect gift for anyone looking to have a laugh at our complicated and increasingly mechanical modern life.
How to Live in a Flat brings together a series of patently Robinsonesque space-saving solutions for city dwellers looking to make the most of modest square footage. Some of the solutions involve furniture made to serve multiple—and often opposing—purposes, like a combination bath-and-writing desk for businessmen. Others reimagine the workings of entire apartment complexes, including one cutaway explaining the use of the communal bath.
A side-splittingly funny collection from the man whose “absurd, beautiful drawings” H. G. Wells claimed “give me a peculiar pleasure of the mind like nothing else in the world,” this book make a perfect gift for anyone looking to have a laugh at our complicated and increasingly mechanical modern life.
Heath Robinson’s Golf establishes Robinson as one of the great humorists of the “gentleman’s game.” From the origin of those peculiar shortened pants called “plus-fours” to the multiple meanings of an “awkward lie,” Robinson pokes fun at this popular sport. Among the cartoons in Golf are mechanisms like a machine for testing golf drivers or the “waterproof mashie” for keeping one’s clothes dry. And, while Robinson primarily focuses on the antics of a portly golfer and his long-suffering caddie, few will avoid the feeling that Robinson is at times speaking directly to them with contraptions like a putter fitted with a patented ball guide or a “movable bunker” to block an opponent’s progress down the fairway.
A side-splittingly funny collection from the man whose “absurd, beautiful drawings” H. G. Wells claimed “give me a peculiar pleasure of the mind like nothing else in the world,” this book make a perfect gift for anyone looking to have a laugh at our complicated and increasingly mechanical modern life.
With Heath Robinson’s Great War, the cartoonist lampoons the German army and the hardships of war. What better antidote to the threat of popular German propaganda than drawings of the “Huns” disabling the British army not with mustard gas but laughing gas? In high demand among British civilians, Robinson’s WWI panels also provided respite to thousands of troops—many of whom sent the cartoonist letters suggesting future subjects or simply expressing their appreciation.
A side-splittingly funny collection from the man whose “absurd, beautiful drawings” H. G. Wells claimed “give me a peculiar pleasure of the mind like nothing else in the world,” this book make a perfect gift for anyone looking to have a laugh at our complicated and increasingly mechanical modern life.
Heath Robinson was a household name in Britain, and millions of readers around the world continue to thoroughly enjoy his cartoons today. A classic military-themed compendium, Heath Robinson’s Home Front will be a favorite with fans of the cartoonist’s complicated, fanciful contraptions.
Heath Robinson was a household name in Britain, and millions of readers around the world continue to thoroughly enjoy his cartoons today. This classic military-themed compendium will be a favorite with fans of the cartoonist’s complicated, fanciful contraptions.
Examining the vivid, often apocalyptic church murals of Peru from the early colonial period through the nineteenth century, Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between explores the sociopolitical situation represented by the artists who generated these murals for rural parishes. Arguing that the murals were embedded in complex networks of trade, commerce, and the exchange of ideas between the Andes and Europe, Ananda Cohen-Aponte also considers the ways in which artists and viewers worked through difficult questions of envisioning sacredness.
This study brings to light the fact that, unlike the murals of New Spain, the murals of the Andes possess few direct visual connections to a pre-Columbian painting tradition; the Incas’ preference for abstracted motifs created a problem for visually translating Catholic doctrine to indigenous congregations, as the Spaniards were unable to read Inca visual culture. Nevertheless, as Cohen Suarez demonstrates, colonial murals of the Andes can be seen as a reformulation of a long-standing artistic practice of adorning architectural spaces with images that command power and contemplation. Drawing on extensive secondary and archival sources, including account books from the churches, as well as on colonial Spanish texts, Cohen Suarez urges us to see the murals not merely as decoration or as tools of missionaries but as visual archives of the complex negotiations among empire, communities, and individuals.
Arts as intimate as a piece of needlework or a home altar. Arts as visible as decorative iron, murals, and low riders. Through such arts, members of Tucson's Mexican American community contribute much of the cultural flavor that defines the city to its residents and to the outside world. Now Tucson folklorist Jim Griffith celebrates these public and private artistic expressions and invites us to meet the people who create them.
- Josefina Lizárraga learned to make paper flowers as a girl in her native state of Nayarit, Mexico, and ensures that this delicate art is not lost.
- Ornamental blacksmith William Flores runs the oldest blacksmithing business in town, a living link with an earlier Tucson.
- Ramona Franco's family has maintained an elaborate altar to Our Lady of Guadalupe for three generations.
- Signmaker Paul Lira, responsible for many of Tucson's most interesting signs, brings to his work a thoroughly mexicano sense of aesthetics and humor.
- Muralists David Tineo and Luis Mena proclaim Mexican cultural identity in their work and carry on a tradition that has blossomed in the last twenty years.
Featuring a foreword by Tucson author Patricia Preciado Martin and a spectacular gallery of photographs, many by Pulitzer prize-winning photographer José Galvez, this remarkable book offers a close-up view of a community rich with tradition and diverse artistic expression. Hecho a Mano is a piñata bursting with unexpected treasures that will inspire and inform anyone with an interest in folk art or Mexican American culture.
Addressing a range of important topics, the essays examine the conceptual bases of Hegel's organization of his aesthetics, his treatment of various specific arts (architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and tragedy), and several of the most famous issues in the literature--including the "end of art" thesis, the relation between art and religion, and the vexed relationship between Hegel and the romantics. Together they shed light on the profound reflections on art contained in Hegel's philosophy and also suggest ways in which his aesthetics might resonate well beyond the field of philosophical aesthetics, perhaps beyond philosophy itself.
For over thirty years, Kumao has developed an expanded art practice that includes animations, video installations, photographs, machine art, and fabric works that give physical form to the intangible parts of our lives: our emotions, psychological states, memories, thinking patterns. Her hybrid artworks have included electromechanical girl’s legs that “misbehave,” video installations about surviving confinement, surreal, experimental stop motion puppet animations, performative staged photographs, and hand crafted cinema machines.
She has exhibited her award-winning artwork in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally including the Art Science Museum Singapore, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, the Museum of Image and Sound (São Paulo) and the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires. Her work is in permanent and private collections including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Arizona State University Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Exploratorium in San Francisco. She has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Creative Capital Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a professor at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
This exhibition catalogue marks the first significant publication on Kumao’s work and includes a selection of works from across her career. It includes written contributions by: Srimoyee Mitra, curator and Director of the Stamps Gallery and NYC-based art critic; Wendy Vogel; an interview between the artist and writer Lynn Love; and poems by the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize Award winner Marilyn Chin.
This catalog accompanies the Courtauld’s display of the work of Helen Saunders (1885–1963), the first monographic exhibition devoted to the artist in over twenty-five years. One of the first British artists to pursue abstraction, Saunders was one of only two women to join the Vorticists, the radical but short-lived art movement that emerged in London on the eve of World War I. Her extraordinary drawings capture both the dynamism of modern urban life and the horrors of mechanized warfare. Following the war, she turned her back on Vorticism and chose to work in a more figurative style. Due in part to the loss of a significant portion of her oeuvre, including all of her Vorticist oil paintings, this remarkable artist fell into obscurity. Only in recent years has her work been rediscovered and celebrated.
Featuring essays on Saunders’s artistic education and career and her relationship to the places of Vorticism in London, this catalog sheds light on an artist who steadily pursued her own path and whose contribution to the story of modern art is gaining recognition for the first time.
"[Tanner] ranks not only as the first truly distinguished Negro American artist but as one of America's first outstanding successes in the salons of Europe. In this work [Mathews] has significantly added to our knowledge of the history of American art."—John Hope Franklin, from the Foreword
"The book gives the main facts of Tanner's life and successfully places his artistic work in its historic context....It is a welcome and useful volume."—August Meier, Journal of American History
Belgian artist, architect, designer, and theorist Henry van de Velde (1863–1957) was a highly original and influential figure in Europe beginning in the 1890s. A founding member of the Art Nouveau and Jugendstil movements, he also directed the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, Germany, which eventually became the Bauhaus under Walter Gropius.
This selection of twenty-six essays, translated from French and German, includes van de Velde’s writings on William Morris and the English Arts and Crafts movement, Neo-Impressionist painting, and relationships between ornament, line, and abstraction in German aesthetics. The texts trace the evolution of van de Velde’s thoughts during his most productive period as a theorist in the artistic debates in France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Katherine M. Kuenzli expertly guides readers to see how van de Velde’s writings reconcile themes of aesthetics and function, and expression and reason, throughout the artistic periods and regions represented by these texts. With introductory discussions of each essay and full annotations, this is an essential volume for a broad range of scholars and students of the history of fine and applied arts and ideas.
How was the Roman Empire invoked in Brexit Britain and in the United States during Donald Trump’s presidency, and to what purpose? And why is it critical to answer these kinds of questions? Heritage and Nationalism explores how people’s perceptions and experiences of the ancient past shape political identities in the digital age. It examines the multiple ways in which politicians, parties, and private citizens mobilize aspects of the Iron Age, Roman, and Medieval past of Britain and Europe to include or exclude others based on culture, religion, class, race, and ethnicity.
The book uses quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate how premodern periods are leveraged to support or oppose populist-nationalist arguments as part of social media discussions concerning Brexit, the Italian Election of 2018, and the US-Mexican border debate in the United States. Analyzing millions of tweets and Facebook posts, comments, and replies, this book is the first to use big data to answer questions about public engagement with the past and identity politics. The findings and conclusions revise and reframe the meaning of populist nationalism today and help to build a shared basis for the democratic engagement of citizens in public life in the future. The book offers a fascinating and unmissable read for anyone interested in how the past and its contemporary legacy, or heritage, influence our political thinking and feeling in a time of hyper-connectivity.
In 1799, when the French artist Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) exhibited his Intervention of the Sabines, a history painting featuring the ancient heroine Hersilia, he added portraits of two contemporary women on either side of her—Henriette de Verninac, daughter of Charles-François Delacroix, minister of foreign affairs, and Juliette Récamier, a well-known and admired socialite. Drawing on many disciplines, Norman Bryson explains how such a combination of paintings could reveal the underlying nature of the Directoire, the period between the vicious and near-dictatorial Reign of Terror (1793–94) and the coup in 1799 that brought Napoleon to power.
Hersilia’s Sisters illuminates ways that cultural life and civil society were rebuilt during these years through an extraordinary efflorescence of women pioneers in every cultural domain—literature, the stage, opera, moral philosophy, political theory, painting, popular journalism, and fashion. Through a close examination of David’s work between The Intervention of the Sabines (begun in 1796) and Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (begun in 1800), Bryson explores how the flowering of women’s culture under the Directoire became a decisive influence on David’s art. With more than 150 illustrations, this book provides new and brilliant insight into this period that will captivate readers.
La présente étude reconstitue les discours autour du portrait dans la France du XVIIe siècle et dévoile une discussion d’une vivacité surprenante, où d’aucuns se sont même demandé si le portrait ne méritait pas – plutôt que la peinture d’histoire – d’occuper la première place dans la hiérarchie des genres.
To answer these questions, Colin Williamson situates film within a long tradition of magical practices that combine art and science, involve deception and discovery, and evoke two forms of wonder—both awe at the illusion displayed and curiosity about how it was performed. He thus considers how, even as they mystify audiences, cinematic illusions also inspire them to learn more about the technologies and techniques behind moving images. Tracing the overlaps between the worlds of magic and filmmaking, Hidden in Plain Sight examines how professional illusionists and their tricks have been represented onscreen, while also considering stage magicians who have stepped behind the camera, from Georges Méliès to Ricky Jay.
Williamson offers an insightful, wide-ranging investigation of how the cinema has functioned as a “device of wonder” for more than a century, while also exploring how several key filmmakers, from Orson Welles to Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese, employ the rhetoric of magic. Examining pre-cinematic visual culture, animation, nonfiction film, and the digital trickery of today’s CGI spectacles, Hidden in Plain Sight provides an eye-opening look at the powerful ways that magic has shaped our modes of perception and our experiences of the cinema.
In Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture, Rachel Stephens addresses an enormous body of material by tracing themes of concealment and silence through paintings, photographs, and ephemera, connecting long overlooked artworks with both the abolitionist materials to which they were responding and archival research across a range of southern historical narratives.
Stephens begins her fascinating study with an examination of the ways that slavery was visually idealized and defended in antebellum art. She then explores the tyranny—especially that depicted in art—enacted by supporters of enslavement, introduces a range of ways that artwork depicting slavery was tangibly concealed, considers photographs of enslaved female caretakers with the white children they reared, and investigates a printmaker’s confidential work in support of the Confederacy. Finally, she delves into an especially pernicious group of proslavery artists in Richmond, Virginia.
Reading visual culture as a key element of the antebellum battle over slavery, Hidden in Plain Sight complicates the existing narratives of American art and history.
In Hidden Thunder, renowned watercolor artist Geri Schrab and archaeologist Robert "Ernie" Boszhardt give readers an up-close-and-personal look at rock art. With an eye toward preservation, Schrab and Boszhardt take you with them as they research, document, and interpret at the ancient petroglyphs and pictographs made my Native Americans in past millennia. In addition to publicly accessible sites such as Wisconsin’s Roche-a-Cri State Park and Minnesota’s Jeffers Petroglyphs, Hidden Thunder covers the artistic treasures found at several remote and inaccessible rock art sites—revealing the ancient stories through words, full-color photographs, and artistic renditions.
Offering the duo perspectives of scientist and artist, Boszhardt shares the facts that archaeologists have been able to establish about these important artifacts of our early history, while Schrab offers the artist's experience, describing her emotional and creative response upon encountering and painting these sites. Viewpoints by members of the Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Ojibwe, and other Native nations offer additional insight on the historic and cultural significance of these sites. Together these myriad voices reveal layers of meaning and cultural context that emphasize why these fragile resources—often marred by human graffiti and mishandling or damage from the elements—need to be preserved.
In his lifetime the early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch was famous for his phantasmagoric images, and today his name is synonymous with the infernal. The creator of expansive tableaus of fantastic and hellish scenes—where any devil not dancing is too busy eating human souls—he has been as equally misunderstood by history as his paintings have. In this book, Nils Büttner draws on a wealth of historical documents—not to mention Bosch’s paintings—to offer a fresh and insightful look at one of history’s most peculiar artists on the five-hundredth anniversary of his death.
Bosch’s paintings have elicited a number of responses over the centuries. Some have tried to explain them as alchemical symbolism, others as coded messages of a secret cult, and still others have tried to psychoanalyze them. Some have placed Bosch among the Adamites, others among the Cathars, and others among the Brethren of the Free Spirit, seeing in his paintings an occult life of free love, strange rituals, mysterious drugs, and witchcraft. As Büttner shows, Bosch was—if anything—a hardworking painter, commissioned by aristocrats and courtesans, as all painters of his time were. Analyzing his life and paintings against the backdrop of contemporary Dutch culture and society, Büttner offers one of the clearest biographical sketches to date alongside beautiful reproductions of some of Bosch’s most important work. The result is a smart but accessible introduction to a unique artist whose work transcends genre.
To answer this question, Stuart Plattner eschews the spotlights and media-hype of glitzy New York galleries, and focuses instead upon the more localized, and much more typical, world of the St. Louis art scene. What emerges is the most comprehensive description ever published of a contemporary regional avant-garde center, where noble aesthetic ambitions compete with the exigencies of economic survival. Plattner's skillful use of in-depth interviews enables the market's key participants to speak for themselves, giving voice to the many frustrations and rewards, motivations and constraints that influence their interactions with their work, the market, and each other.
"Plattner analyzes the social and economic factors that govern art markets outside the long shadow cast by chic New York galleries. An insightful and fascinating work."—Library Journal
"Explains much about the conundrums and paradoxes of the art world as a whole."—Eddie Silva, Riverfront Times
The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) was forty-four years old when she broke with the academic tradition in which she had been trained to produce a body of radical, abstract works the likes of which had never been seen before. Today, it is widely accepted that af Klint was one of the earliest abstract academic painters in Europe.
But this is only part of her story. Not only was she a working female artist, she was also an avowed clairvoyant and mystic. Like many of the artists at the turn of the twentieth century who developed some version of abstract painting, af Klint studied Theosophy, which holds that science, art, and religion are all reflections of an underlying life-form that can be harnessed through meditation, study, and experimentation. Well before Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich declared themselves the inventors of abstraction, af Klint was working in a nonrepresentational mode, producing a powerful visual language that continues to speak to audiences today. The exhibition of her work in 2018 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City attracted more than 600,000 visitors, making it the most-attended show in the history of the institution.
Despite her enormous popularity, there has not yet been a biography of af Klint—until now. Inspired by her first encounter with the artist’s work in 2008, Julia Voss set out to learn Swedish and research af Klint’s life—not only who the artist was but what drove and inspired her. The result is a fascinating biography of an artist who is as great as she is enigmatic.
Despite the vast popularity and cultural influence of hip-hop, efforts to archive its history are still in fairly early stages. This book focuses on the cultural and political aspects of those undertakings. It addresses practical aspects, including methods of collection, curation, preservation, and digitization, and critically analyzes institutional power, community engagement, urban economics, public access, and the ideological implications of hip-hop culture’s enduring tensions with dominant social values. A wide swath of hip-hop culture is covered by the contributors, including dance, graffiti, clothing, and battle rap.
In the twelfth century, along the borders of the Japanese state in northern Honshu, three generations of local rulers built a capital city at Hiraizumi that became a major military and commercial center. Known as the Hiraizumi Fujiwara, these rulers created a city filled with art, in an attempt to use the power of art and architecture to claim a religious and political mandate.
In the first book-length study of Hiraizumi in English, the author studies the rise of the Hiraizumi Fujiwara and analyzes their remarkable construction program. She traces the strategies by which the Hiraizumi Fujiwara attempted to legitimate their rule and grounds the splendor of Hiraizumi in the desires, political and personal, of the men and women who sponsored and displayed that art.
Wendy Lesser counters the reigning belief that male artists inevitably misrepresent women. She builds this daring case compellingly through inquiry into many unexpected and delightfully germane subjects—Marilyn Monroe’s walk, for instance, or dwarf manicurist Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield, or the shoulder blades of Degas’s bathers. Placing such particulars within the framework of Plato’s myth of the divided beings and psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism, Lesser sets out before us an art that responds to and even attempts to overcome division.
By following a developmental, rather than historical, sequence, the book uncovers startling correspondences and fresh insights. It begins by considering Dickens, Lawrence, Harold Brodkey, Peter Handke, and John Berger on the subject of mothers; turns to Degas and the Victorian novelist George Gissing to examine the figure of woman alone, and then to Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock for their perspectives on the battle between the sexes; and then looks at the poetry of Randall Jarrell, the fashion photographs of Cecil Beaton, and the range of artworks inspired by Marilyn Monroe to investigate the central idea of woman as the artist's mirror and secret self.
A chapter on Barbara Stanwyck returns us to an essential premise—that art transcends gender boundaries, that the masculine and the feminine coexist within each individual psyche. The refreshingly open-minded approach of His Other Half finds its corollary in Lesser's lucid and accessible style. With great affection for her subject and her audience, Lesser writes in language that is opinionated yet free of cant. Her book avoids—as the best art avoids—prefabricated schemes and ideological presumptions. At once exploratory and definitive, original and erudite, His Other Half is critical inquiry at its finest.
The thirty major art historians and scholars represented raise questions such as when to restore, what to preserve, and how to maintain aesthetic character. Excerpts have been selected from the following books and essays: John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture; Bernard Berenson, Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts; Clive Bell, The Aesthetic Hypothesis; Cesare Brandi, Theory of Restoration; Kenneth Clark, Looking at Pictures; Erwin Panofsky, The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline; E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion; Marie Cl. Berducou, The Conservation of Archaeology; and Paul Philippot, Restoration from the Perspective of the Social Sciences. The fully illustrated book also contains an annotated bibliography and an index.
In 1893 Friedrich Engels branded history “the cruelest goddess of all.” This sorrowful vision of the past is deeply rooted in the Western imagination, and history is thus presented as a joyless playground of inevitability rather than a droll world of possibilities. There are few places this is more evident than in historical cinema which tends to portray the past in a somber manner.
Historical Comedy on Screen examines this tendency paying particular attention to the themes most difficult to laugh at and exploring the place where comical and historical storytelling intersect. The book emphasizes the many oft-overlooked comical renderings of history and asks what they have to tell us if we begin to take them seriously.
An exploration of Colombian maps in New Granada.
During the late Spanish colonial period, the Pacific Lowlands, also called the Greater Chocó, was famed for its rich placer deposits. Gold mined here was central to New Granada’s economy yet this Pacific frontier in today’s Colombia was considered the “periphery of the periphery.” Infamous for its fierce, unconquered Indigenous inhabitants and its brutal tropical climate, it was rarely visited by Spanish administrators, engineers, or topographers and seldom appeared in detail on printed maps of the period.
In this lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched volume, Juliet Wiersema uncovers little-known manuscript cartography and makes visible an unexamined corner of the Spanish empire. In concert with thousands of archival documents from Colombia, Spain, and the United States, she reveals how a "periphery" was imagined and projected, largely for political or economic reasons. Along the way, she unearths untold narratives about ephemeral settlements, African adaptation and autonomy, Indigenous strategies of resistance, and tenuous colonialisms on the margins of a beleaguered viceroyalty.
A History of Arcadia in Art and Literature is an unprecedented exploration of the pastoral through the close examination of original texts of classical and early and later modern pastoral poetry, literature, and drama in ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German, and English, as well as of a wide range of visual imagery. The book is an iconographic study of Renaissance and Baroque pastoral and related subject matter, with an important chapter on the eighteenth century, both in the visual arts, where pastoral is poorly understood, and in words and performance, about which many false preconceptions prevail.
The book begins with Virgil’s use of Theocritus and an analysis of what basis Virgil provided for Renaissance pastoral and what, by contrast, stemmed from the medieval pastourelle. Paul Holberton then moves through a remarkable range of works, addressing authors such as Petrarch, Tasso, Guarino, Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, and artists such as Giorgione, Claude, Poussin, Watteau, Gainsborough, and many more. The book serves simultaneously as a careful study, an art book full of beautiful reproductions, and an anthology, presenting all texts both in the original language and in English translation.
A History of Arcadia in Art and Literature is an unprecedented exploration of the pastoral through the close examination of original texts of classical and early and later modern pastoral poetry, literature, and drama in ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German, and English, as well as of a wide range of visual imagery. The book is an iconographic study of Renaissance and Baroque pastoral and related subject matter, with an important chapter on the eighteenth century, both in the visual arts, where pastoral is poorly understood, and in words and performance, about which many false preconceptions prevail.
The book begins with Virgil’s use of Theocritus and an analysis of what basis Virgil provided for Renaissance pastoral and what, by contrast, stemmed from the medieval pastourelle. Paul Holberton then moves through a remarkable range of works, addressing authors such as Petrarch, Tasso, Guarino, Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, and artists such as Giorgione, Claude, Poussin, Watteau, Gainsborough, and many more. The book serves simultaneously as a careful study, an art book full of beautiful reproductions, and an anthology, presenting all texts both in the original language and in English translation.
Generations have relied on the Randall book as the most authoritative and comprehensive guide to buildings in the Chicago central area. This edition is updated with information about fifty additional buildings from the time frame of the original text, 1830-1949; new data for four hundred buildings from the period 1950-98; and a number of additional plates from the rare Rand McNally Views of Chicago.
The second edition of The History of the Development of Building Construction in Chicago is a tribute to Frank Randall's vision and an indispensable resource to Chicago area architects, engineers, preservation specialists, and other members of the building industry.
Arranged by decades, with outliers and franchise films overlapping some years, this one-stop sourcebook unearths the historical origins of characters such as Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman and their various incarnations in film from the silent era to comedic sequels. In covering the last decade, this new edition includes coverage of the resurgence of the genre, covering the swath of new groundbreaking horror films directed by women, Black and queer horror films, and a new international wave in body horror films.
A History of Horror explores how the horror film fits into the Hollywood studio system, how the distribution and exhibition of horror films have changed in a post-COVID world, and how its enormous success in American and European culture expanded globally over time.
Dixon examines key periods in the horror film-in which the basic precepts of the genre were established, then banished into conveniently reliable and malleable forms, and then, after collapsing into parody, rose again and again to create new levels of intensity and menace. A History of Horror, supported by rare stills from classic films, brings over sixty timeless horror films into frightfully clear focus, zooms in on today's top horror Web sites, and champions the stars, directors, and subgenres that make the horror film so exciting and popular with contemporary audiences.
From Dada to the Automatists, and from Max Ernst to André Breton, Gérard Durozoi here provides the most comprehensive history of the Surrealist movement. Tracing the movement from its origins in the 1920s to its decline in the 1950s and 1960s, Durozoi tells the history of Surrealism through its activities, publications, and reviews, demonstrating its close ties to some of the most explosive political, as well as creative, debates of the twentieth century.
Drawing on a staggering amount of documentary and visual evidence—including 1,000 photos—Durozoi illuminates all the intellectual and artistic facets of the movement, from literature and philosophy to painting, photography, and film, thus making History of the Surrealist Movement its definitive encyclopedia.
Doyle explores ideologies of emotion and how emotion circulates in and around art. Throughout, she gives readers welcoming points of entry into artworks that they may at first find off-putting or confrontational. Doyle offers new insight into how the discourse of controversy serves to shut down discussion about this side of contemporary art practice, and counters with a critical language that allows the reader to accept emotional intensity in order to learn from it.
Jewish studies scholar Oren Stier offers in this volume new insight into symbols and the symbol-making process, as he traces the lives and afterlives of certain remnants of the Holocaust and their ongoing impact. Stier focuses in particular on four icons: the railway cars that carried Jews to their deaths, symbolizing the mechanics of murder; the Arbeit Macht Frei (“work makes you free”) sign over the entrance to Auschwitz, pointing to the insidious logic of the camp system; the number six million that represents an approximation of the number of Jews killed as well as mass murder more generally; and the persona of Anne Frank, associated with victimization. Stier shows how and why these icons—an object, a phrase, a number, and a person—have come to stand in for the Holocaust: where they came from and how they have been used and reproduced; how they are presently at risk from a variety of threats such as commodification; and what the future holds for the memory of the Shoah.
In illuminating these icons of the Holocaust, Stier offers valuable new perspective on one of the defining events of the twentieth century. He helps readers understand not only the Holocaust but also the profound nature of historical memory itself.
In Holocaust Memory Reframed, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich examines representations in three museums: Israel’s Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Germany’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She describes a variety of visually striking media, including architecture, photography exhibits, artifact displays, and video installations in order to explain the aesthetic techniques that the museums employ. As she interprets the exhibits, Hansen-Glucklich clarifies how museums communicate Holocaust narratives within the historical and cultural contexts specific to Germany, Israel, and the United States. In Yad Vashem, architect Moshe Safdie developed a narrative suited for Israel, rooted in a redemptive, Zionist story of homecoming to a place of mythic geography and renewal, in contrast to death and suffering in exile. In the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Daniel Libeskind’s architecture, broken lines, and voids emphasize absence. Here exhibits communicate a conflicted ideology, torn between the loss of a Jewish past and the country’s current multicultural ethos. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum presents yet another lens, conveying through its exhibits a sense of sacrifice that is part of the civil values of American democracy, and trying to overcome geographic and temporal distance. One well-know example, the pile of thousands of shoes plundered from concentration camp victims encourages the visitor to bridge the gap between viewer and victim.
Hansen-Glucklich explores how each museum’s concept of the sacred shapes the design and choreography of visitors’ experiences within museum spaces. These spaces are sites of pilgrimage that can in turn lead to rites of passage.
Founded by Constantine the Great, rebuilt by Justinian, and redecorated in the ninth, tenth, and twelfth centuries, the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople was the mausoleum of emperors, patriarchs, and saints. It was also a key station in the ceremonies of the city, the site of an important school, a major inspiration for apostolic literature, and briefly the home of the patriarch. Despite its significance, the church no longer exists, replaced by the mosque of Mehmet II after the fall of the city to the Ottomans. Today the church is remembered primarily from two important middle Byzantine ekphraseis, which celebrate its beauty and prominence, as well as from architectural copies and manuscript illustrations.
Scholars have long puzzled over the appearance of the church, as well as its importance to the Byzantines. Anxious to reconstruct the building and its place in the empire, an early collaborative project of Dumbarton Oaks brought together a philologist, an art historian, and an architectural historian in the 1940s and 1950s to reconstruct their own version of the Holy Apostles. Never fully realized, their efforts remained unpublished. The essays in this volume reconsider their project from a variety of vantage points, while illuminating differences of approach seventy years later, to arrive at a twenty-first-century synthesis.
Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North reveals this side of the war as it happened, comprehensively examining the visual culture of the Northern home front. Through contributions from leading scholars from across the humanities, we discover how the war influenced household economies and the cotton economy; how the absence of young men from the home changed daily life; how war relief work linked home fronts and battle fronts; why Indians on the frontier were pushed out of the riven nation’s consciousness during the war years; and how wartime landscape paintings illuminated the nation’s past, present, and future.
A companion volume to a collaborative exhibition organized by the Newberry Library and the Terra Foundation for American Art, Home Front is the first book to expose the visual culture of a world far removed from the horror of war yet intimately bound to it.
Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss were consummate collectors and patrons. After purchasing Dumbarton Oaks in 1920, they significantly redesigned the house and its interiors, built important new structures, added over fifty acres of planned gardens, hosted important musical evenings and intellectual discussions in their Music Room, and acquired a world-class art collection and library.
The illustrated essays in this volume reveal how the Blisses’ wide-ranging interests in art, music, gardens, architecture, and interior design resulted in the creation of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Their collections of Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art and rare garden books and drawings are examined by Robert Nelson, Julie Jones, and Therese O’Malley, respectively. James Carder provides the Blisses’ biography and discusses their patronage of various architects, including Philip Johnson, and the interior designer Armand Albert Rateau. The Blisses’ collaboration with Beatrix Farrand on the creation of the Dumbarton Oaks Gardens is recounted by Robin Karson, and their commission of Igor Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto and its premiere by Nadia Boulanger is examined by Jeanice Brooks. The volume demonstrates that every aspect of the Blisses’ collecting and patronage had a place in the creation of what they came to call their “home of the humanities.”
Before Austin became the “live music capital of the world” and attracted tens of thousands of music fans, it had a vibrant local music scene that spanned late sixties psychedelic and avant-garde rock to early eighties punk. Venues such as the Vulcan Gas Company and the Armadillo World Headquarters hosted both innovative local musicians and big-name touring acts. Poster artists not only advertised the performances—they visually defined the music and culture of Austin during this pivotal period. Their posters promoted an alternative lifestyle that permeated the city and reflected Austin’s transformation from a sleepy university town into a veritable oasis of underground artistic and cultural activity in the state of Texas.
This book presents a definitive survey of music poster art produced in Austin between 1967 and 1982. It vividly illustrates four distinct generations of posters—psychedelic art of the Vulcan Gas Company, early works from the Armadillo World Headquarters, an emerging variety of styles from the mid-1970s, and the radical visual aesthetic of punk—produced by such renowned artists as Gilbert Shelton, Jim Franklin, Kerry Awn, Micael Priest, Guy Juke, Ken Featherston, NOXX, and Danny Garrett. Setting the posters in context, Texas music and pop-culture authority Joe Nick Patoski details the history of music posters in Austin, and artist and poster art scholar Nels Jacobson explores the lives and techniques of the artists.
Clarke shows how a sense of local identity emerged in Hong Kong as the transition approached and found expression in the often politicized art produced. Given the recent international exposure of mainland Chinese contemporary art, this book considers the uniqueness of the art of China’s most cosmopolitan city. With a modern visual culture that was flourishing even when the People’s Republic was still closed to the outside world, Hong Kong has established itself as an exemplary site for both local and transnational elements to formulate into brilliant and groundbreaking art.
The author writes about individual artists and art works with a detail that will appeal to artists, curators, and art historians, as well as to postcolonial scholars, cultural studies scholars, and others.
Wresting the language of affinity away from accusations of sticky sentiment and manipulative marketing, Felski argues that “being hooked” is as fundamental to the appreciation of high art as to the enjoyment of popular culture. Hooked zeroes in on three attachment devices that connect audiences to works of art: identification, attunement, and interpretation. Drawing on examples from literature, film, music, and painting—from Joni Mitchell to Matisse, from Thomas Bernhard to Thelma and Louise—Felski brings the language of attachment into the academy. Hooked returns us to the fundamentals of aesthetic experience, showing that the social meanings of artworks are generated not just by critics, but also by the responses of captivated audiences.
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.
How does a novel entice or enlist us? How does a song surprise or seduce us? Why do we bristle when a friend belittles a book we love, or fall into a funk when a favored TV series comes to an end? What characterizes the aesthetic experiences of feeling captivated by works of art? In Hooked, Rita Felski challenges the ethos of critical aloofness that is a part of modern intellectuals’ self-image. The result is sure to be as widely read as Felski’s book, The Limits of Critique.
Wresting the language of affinity away from accusations of sticky sentiment and manipulative marketing, Felski argues that “being hooked” is as fundamental to the appreciation of high art as to the enjoyment of popular culture. Hooked zeroes in on three attachment devices that connect audiences to works of art: identification, attunement, and interpretation. Drawing on examples from literature, film, music, and painting—from Joni Mitchell to Matisse, from Thomas Bernhard to Thelma and Louise—Felski brings the language of attachment into the academy. Hooked returns us to the fundamentals of aesthetic experience, showing that the social meanings of artworks are generated not just by critics, but also by the responses of captivated audiences.
Rising dramatically from the desert floor, Arizona's windswept mesas have been home to the Hopis for hundreds of years. A people known for protecting their privacy, these Native Americans also have a long and less known tradition of weaving baskets and plaques. Generations of Hopi weavers have passed down knowledge of techniques and materials from the plant world around them, from mother to daughter, granddaughter, or niece.
This book is filled with photographs and detailed descriptions of their beautiful baskets—the one art, above all others, that creates the strongest social bonds in Hopi life. In these pages, weavers open their lives to the outside world as a means of sharing an art form especially demanding of time and talent. The reader learns how plant materials are gathered in canyons and creek bottoms, close to home and far away. The long, painstaking process of preparation and dying is followed step by step. Then, using techniques of coiled, plaited, or wicker basketry, the weaving begins.
Underlying the stories of baskets and their weavers is a rare glimpse of what is called "the Hopi Way," a life philosophy that has strengthened and sustained the Hopi people through centuries of change. Many other glimpses of the Hopi world are also shared by author and photographer Helga Teiwes, who was warmly invited into the homes of her collaborators. Their permission and the permission of the Cultural Preservation Office of the Hopi Tribe gave her access to people and information seldom available to outsiders.
Teiwes was also granted access to some of the ceremonial observances where baskets are preeminent. Woven in brilliant reds, greens, and yellows as well as black and white, Hopi weavings, then, not only are an arresting art form but also are highly symbolic of what is most important in Hopi life. In the women's basket dance, for example, woven plaques commemorate and honor the Earth and the perpetuation of life. Other plaques play a role in the complicated web of Hopi social obligation and reciprocity.
Living in a landscape of almost surreal form and color, Hopi weavers are carrying on one of the oldest arts traditions in the world. Their stories in Hopi Basket Weaving will appeal to collectors, artists and craftspeople, and anyone with an interest in Native American studies, especially Native American arts. For the traveler or general reader, the book is an invitation to enter a little-known world and to learn more about an art form steeped in meaning and stunning in its beauty.
The remarkable relationship between people and horses has been evoked in art from the beginning of the bond between them. In this beautifully illustrated book, Catherine Johns explores the horse in art from the ancient world to the modern era.
In early human history, horses were among the wild creatures hunted for meat; they were domesticated comparatively late, around 4000 B.C. As people developed from hunter-gatherers to farmers, the horse offered the potential for a revolution in power and transport—the ability to move farther and faster transformed society. Johns tells the story of the horse and highlights the key roles this animal has played in human warfare, travel, ceremony, hunting, racing, and in myth and symbolism.
The themes are presented in stunning four-color illustrations of British Museum objects that trace our perceptions of the horse through time and space, and convey the wide variety of images that have been created of this magnificent creature: in colossal and life-sized sculpture, in paintings, and in minuscule form on coins, gems, and jewelry; and from the world of ancient Greece and Rome to the arts of India, Africa, China, and Japan.
Horses appear in stone and metal, ceramic, wood, bone, ivory, and textiles. From the Horse of Selene and a gold model chariot from the Oxus treasure to Persian miniatures and prints by Duerer, Stubbs, and Hokusai, this book will inform, entertain, and delight horse lovers and all readers interested in this inspiring animal and its profound contribution to human culture.
At the turn of the fifteenth century, private devotionals became a specialty of the renowned Ghent–Bruges illuminators. Wealthy patrons who commissioned work from these artists often spared no expense in the presentation of their personal prayer books, or “books of hours,” from detailed decoration to luxurious bindings and embroidery.
This manuscript owes its name to the French queen, Marie de Medici, widow of King Henri IV. The manuscript was painted by an artist known as the David Master, one of the renowned Flemish illuminators of the sixteenth century. Fine architectural interiors, gorgeous landscapes, and detailed city scenes form the subjects of three full-size illuminations and forty-two full-page miniatures. It is one of the finest examples of medieval illumination in a personal prayer book and the most copiously illustrated work of the David Master to survive.
Together with a scholarly introduction that gives an overview of Flemish illumination and examines each of the illustrations in detail, this full-color facsimile limited edition, bound in linen with a leather quarter binding and beautifully presented in a slipcase, faithfully reproduces all 176 leaves of the original manuscript.
By turns a collection of practical advice and a catalog of eccentricities, The Whole Art of Dining, republished by the Bodleian Library as How to Dine in Style, contained everything the would-be socialite needed to know in order to elevate food to high art, from tricks for putting together a proper French menu or throwing a garden party to practical tips on serving wines in the correct order and at the right temperature. Throughout the book are stories of astonishing excess, such as the search for ever-more-elaborate themes and venues, and the more daring of the book’s devotees might have been tempted to emulate efforts like those of the intrepid hostess whose mountaineering-themed dinner party had guests rappel to the rooftop of her Chicago home or American millionaire George A. Kessler, whose infamous “Gondola Party” flooded— for the first and only time—the central courtyard of the Savoy.
A captivating glimpse into the golden age of fine dining, this book will be consumed with interest by discerning diners and fans of the Roaring Twenties—and it may even inspire readers to try their hand at throwing a stylish soiree of their own.
First published in 1971, How to Read Donald Duck shocked readers by revealing how capitalist ideology operates in our most beloved cartoons. Having survived bonfires, impounding and being dumped into the ocean by the Chilean army, this controversial book is once again back on our shelves.
Written and published during the blossoming of Salvador Allende's revolutionary socialism in Chile, the book examines how Disney products reflect capitalist ideology, and are active agents working in this ideology’s favor. Focusing on the hapless mice and ducks of Disney, curiously parentless, marginalized and always short of cash, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart expose how these characters established hegemonic ideas about capital, race, gender and the relationship between developed countries and the Third World.
A devastating indictment of a media giant, a document of twentieth-century political upheaval, and a reminder of the dark undercurrent of pop culture, How to Read Donald Duck is once again available, together with a new introduction by Ariel Dorfman in which he writes.
"It is that joy in liberation, that alegria, that spirit of resistance, that I wish to share with America, as the book that Pinochet’s soldiers could not liquidate or Disney’s lawyers stop from entering the United States finally finds its way to its new home, deep into the land that invented Donald Duck and Donald Trump. Is the same country that gave me such a warm welcome as a child, and perhaps may now equally greet with open arms this critique of oppression and it certainty that we don’t have to leave the world as it was when we first encountered it."
While numerous studies over the years have focused on the ways in which art functions in our society, How to Study Art Worlds is the first to examine it in light of the organizational aspects of the art world. Van Maanen delves into the works of such sociologists as Howard S. Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, George Dickie, and Niklas Luhmann, among others, to examine the philosophical debates surrounding aesthetic experience—and then traces the consequences that each of these approaches has had and continues to have on organizations in the art world.
How should art be taught? What kind of knowledge should artists absorb? How might an ordinary person become a creature addicted to the creative process? In other words, how can a non-artist become an artist? Such programmatic questions articulated by acclaimed Polish artist Artur Żmijewski were at the heart of the workshop “How to Teach Art?” Żmijewski invited a group of graduate and doctoral students from three Zurich universities—the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the University of Zurich, and the Zurich University of the Arts—to collectively reflect on their artistic practices. Over the course of four months, the group met several times a week for hourlong sessions, following individual and collective exercises induced by Żmijewski himself.
This book retraces the workshop and its process by showing inconclusive, fragmentary results between theory and practice. How to Teach Art? presents drawings, videos, photographs, 16mm films, and accompanying reflections on the central premise, “How to teach art?”
From the lazy, fiddling grasshopper to the sneaky Big Bad Wolf, children’s stories and fables enchant us with their portrayals of animals who act like people. But the comparisons run both ways, as metaphors, stories, and images—as well as scientific theories—throughout history remind us that humans often act like animals, and that the line separating them is not as clear as we’d like to pretend.
Here Martin Kemp explores a stunning range of images and ideas to demonstrate just how deeply these underappreciated links between humans and other fauna are embedded in our culture. Tracing those interconnections among art, science, and literature, Kemp leads us on a dazzling tour of Western thought, from Aristotelian physiognomy and its influence on phrenology to the Great Chain of Being and Darwinian evolution. We learn about the racist anthropology underlying a familiar Degas sculpture, see paintings of a remarkably simian Judas, and watch Mowgli, the man-child from Kipling’s The Jungle Book, exhibit the behaviors of the beasts who raised him. Like a kaleidoscope, Kemp uses these stories to refract, reconfigure, and echo the essential truth that the way we think about animals inevitably inflects how we think about people, and vice versa.
Loaded with vivid illustrations and drawing on sources from Hesiod to La Fontaine, Leonardo to P. T. Barnum, The Human Animal in Western Art and Science is a fascinating, eye-opening reminder of our deep affinities with our fellow members of the animal kingdom.
The many major exhibitions of Antonin Artaud’s drawings and drawn notebook pages in recent years—at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Vienna’s Museum Moderner Kunst, and Paris’s Centre Georges Pompidou—have entirely transformed our perception of his work, reorienting it toward the artworks of his final years. This volume collects all three of Artaud’s major writings on his artworks. “The Human Face” (1947) was written as the catalog text for Artaud’s only gallery exhibition of his drawings during his lifetime, focusing on his approach to making portraits of his friends at the decrepit pavilion in the Paris suburbs where he spent the final year of his life. “Ten years that language is gone” (1947) examines the drawings Artaud made in his notebooks—his main creative medium at the end of his life—and their capacity to electrify his creativity when language failed him. “50 Drawings to assassinate magic” (1948), the residue of an abandoned book of Artaud’s drawings, approaches the act of drawing as part of the weaponry deployed by Artaud at the very end of his life to combat malevolent assaults and attempted acts of assassination. Together, these three extraordinary texts—pitched between writing and image—project Artaud’s ferocious engagement with the act of drawing.
Engaging critical human rights studies from an interdisciplinary arts and humanities perspective, Human Rights on the Move addresses a range of human rights violations in contemporary society, including the carceral systems that prevent movement, the gendered and racial restrictions placed on movement, the lack of access that assures movement only for those who have the ability to move, and the histories of movements such as settler colonialism. The approaches to human rights in this wide-ranging collection are also “on the move,” emphasizing a nimble, cross-disciplinary approach that considers the intersection of politics, culture, and the arts.
Contributing artists, activists, and scholars expose the fundamental paradox of human rights (namely that nation-states are violators and guarantors of rights) while also showing how people facing violence and persecution move with the hope of more livable and equitable futures. The assembled scholarly essays, interviews, and creative pieces demonstrate the importance of a more relational and contextual understanding of human rights—one that can destabilize current definitions and open space for new formulations.
Contributors:
nora chipaumire, Víctor M. Espinosa, Bridget M. Haas, Wendy S. Hesford, Sona Kazemi, Wendy Kozol, Guisela LaTorre, Rachel Lewis, Faustin Linyekula, Paloma Martinez-Cruz, Tiyi M. Morris, Momar K. Ndiaye, Eleanor Paynter, Cristian Pineda, Elaine Richardson, Amy Shuman, Jennifer Suchland, Mary E. Thomas, Shui-yin Sharon Yam
Humans are organisms, but “the human being” is a term referring to a complicated, self-contradictory, and historically evolving set of concepts and practices. Humans explores competing versions, constructs, and ideas of the human being that have figured prominently in the arts of the United States. These essays consider a range of artworks from the colonial period to the present, examining how they have reflected, shaped, and modeled ideas of the human in American culture and politics. The book addresses to what extent artworks have conferred more humanity on some human beings than others, how art has shaped ideas about the relationships between humans and other beings and things, and in what ways different artistic constructions of the human being evolved, clashed, and intermingled over the course of American history. Humans both tells the history of a concept foundational to US civilization and proposes new means for its urgently needed rethinking.
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