Best of
Art-History

1991

Frida Kahlo: The Paintings


Hayden Herrera - 1991
    Included among the illustrations are more than eighty full–color paintings, as well as dozens of black–and–white pictures and line illustrations. Among the famous and little–known works included in Frida Kahlo: The Paintings are The Two Fridas, Self–Portrait as a Tehuana, Without Hope, The Dream, The Little Deer, Diego and I, Henry Ford Hospital, My Birth, and My Nurse and I. Here, too, are documentary photographs of Frida Kahlo and her world that help to illuminate the various stages of her life.About the Author:Hayden Herrera is an art historian. She has lectured widely, curated several exhibitions of art, taught Latin American art at New York University, and has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of numerous articles and reviews for such publications as Art in America, Art Forum, Connoisseur, and the New York Times, among others. Her books include Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo; Mary Frank; and Matisse: A Portrait. She is working on a critical biography of Arshile Gorky. She lives in New York City.

A Life of Picasso, Vol. 1: The Early Years, 1881-1906


John Richardson - 1991
    "To understand it, you have to see how it mirrors my life." Richardson, who lived near the artist in Provence for ten years and became a trusted friend, was able to observe and record this phenomenon at first hand. Later, Picasso's widow continued to give Richardson access to the artist's studios and storerooms. This close personal friendship and the privilege of working in hitherto inaccessible archives make Richardson uniquely qualified to write the artist's life, rescuing his renown from sensationalist legend and specialist pleading and analyzing anew the traumas and obsessions that triggered his explosive genius.Richardson is the first biographer to make sense of the myriad contradictions that leave so many statements about Picasso's nature equally true in reverse. The artist's ambivalence is one of the author's central themes. At last we are able to see how his courage and terror misogyny and tenderness, generosity and thrift, superstition and skepticism, cynicism and sentiment, are reflected in the conflicts and paradoxes in his work.Richardson's eye is finely attuned to the complexities of Picasso's art, and his extensive knowledge of cultural history enables him to show how Picasso plundered the art of the past, the imaginations of his poet friends, the beliefs of mystics and magi, to create a revolutionary new synthesis. The author's evocation of Picasso's ferocious ego, demonic loves and hates and black fears is the more absorbing for its terse and lively prose and freedom from jargon.This first volume of Richardson's prodigiously detailed and documented four-volume study takes Picasso to the age of twenty-five. It reveals how the adolescent Picasso struggled, through determination and study, to escape the shadow of his father's artistic failures. It describes his precocious success in Barcelona and Paris and the period of rejection and despair that followed. We watch Picasso transform the prostitutes of the Saint-Lazare prison into Blue period madonnas and, later, the performers of the Montmartre circuses into Rose period harlequins. Volume I culminates in Picasso's dawning perception of himself as the messiah of the modern movement.Some nine hundred illustrations, many of them unfamiliar, enable the reader to follow Picasso's mesmerizing development in images as well as words.

Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art


Hans Belting - 1991
    In this magisterial book, Hans Belting traces the longhistory of the sacral image and its changing role in European culture.Likeness and Presence looks at the beliefs, superstitions, hopes,and fears that come into play as people handle and respond to sacredimages, and presents a compelling interpretation of the place of theimage in Western history."A rarity within its genre—an art-historical analysis of iconographywhich is itself iconoclastic. . . . One of the most intellectuallyexciting and historically grounded interpretations of Christianiconography." —Graham Howes, Times Literary Supplement"Likeness and Presence offers the best source to survey the facts ofwhat European Christians put in their churches. . . . An impressivelydetailed contextual analysis of medieval objects." —Robin Cormack,New York Times Book Review"I cannot begin to describe the richness or the imaginative grandeur ofHans Belting's book. . . . It is a work that anyone interested in art,or in the history of thought about art, should regard as urgent reading.It is a tremendous achievement."—Arthur C. Danto, New Republic

Max Ernst: A Retrospective


Werner Spies - 1991
    A leader of the Dada movement in Germany, he later joined the circle of writers and artists gathered in Paris around André Breton, the unofficial founder of the Surrealist movement. At the outset of World War II, Ernst fled Germany for the United States, first going to New York and eventually settling in Sedona, Arizona. Ernst returned to Europe in 1950 and continued to explore Surrealist imagery and methods throughout his life.This important book accompanies the first retrospective exhibition of Ernst’s work held in the United States in thirty years. It examines his pioneering accomplishments in painting, collage, and sculpture and considers his use of the techniques of frottage, grattage, and decalcomania. Also featured are Ernst’s unique collage novels--narratives comprising disparate images culled from nineteenth-century engravings and combined in surreal, unsettling compositions. Leading scholars write on various aspects of Ernst’s life and art: Werner Spies on Ernst in America; Ludger Derenthal on Ernst and politics; Pepe Karmel on Ernst and contemporary art; Thomas Gaehtgens on Ernst and the old masters; and Robert Storr on the collage novels.

Degenerate Art


Stephanie Barron - 1991
    More than 150 of the surviving masterworks from the original show are collected and illustrated in this book.

The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation


James M. Saslow - 1991
    The poems are invaluable for what they reveal of the artist's innermost feelings about such universal themes as love, death, and redemption. "A superb introduction to Michelangelo's life, a masterful bilingual presentation of his written work, commentaries, and an annotated bibliography. . . . A handsome volume of pure scholarship that will find a permanent place in one's library, to be dipped into from time to time as a source of deep enjoyment."—Virginia Quarterly Review "For educated readers who want to know what Michelangelo's poetry manages to do, who want a guide through the Italian and even more through the conventions that enabled Michelangelo to write at all, this is an indispensable book."—Richard Howard"The exceptionally difficult task of translating Michelangelo's poetry has been accomplished with aplomb: equally successful is the no less difficult task of placing the poems within their biographical, social, intellectual, and artistic context. Saslow's annotated translation will be the standard critical edition of Michelangelo's poetry."—William E. Wallace

Embroiderers


Kay Staniland - 1991
    A further title from the MEDIEVAL CRAFTSMEN series.

Matisse, Picasso, Miro--as I Knew Them


Rosamond Bernier - 1991
    350 reproductions and photographs, 200 in full color.

Paris And The Surrealists


George Melly - 1991
    George Melly narrates the history of Surrealism and describes his love affair with the movement and its native city.

Art in Theory, 1648–1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas


Charles Harrison - 1991
    Like its highly successful companion volumes, Art in Theory, 1815–1900 and Art in Theory, 1900–1990, its primary aim is to provide students and teachers with the documentary material for informed and up-to-date study. Its 240 texts, clear principles of organization and considerable editorial content offer a vivid and indispensable introduction to the art of the early modern period.Harrison, Wood, and Gaiger have collected writing by artists, critics, philosophers, literary figures, and administrators of the arts, some reprinted in their entirety, others excerpted from longer works. A wealth of material from French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and Latin sources is also provided, including many new translations.Among the major themes treated are early arguments over the relative merits of ancient and modern art, debates between the advocates of form and color, the beginnings of modern art criticism in reviews of the Salon, art and politics during the French Revolution, the rise of landscape painting, and the artistic theories of Romanticism and Neo-classicism.Each section is prefaced by an essay that situates the ideas of the period in their historical context, while relating theoretical concerns and debates to developments in the practice of art. Each individual text is also accompanied by a short introduction. An extensive bibliography and full index are provided.

Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery


Jill Dunkerton - 1991
    It is based largely on the collection of early Renaissance paintings in the National Gallery in London, one of the finest and most comprehensive collections in the world. In an extensive introduction the authors explain the background of religious belief and devotional practice for which many of the paintings were created and the secular requirements and ambitions that influenced them. They discuss the social context in which art was created and then displayed in the street, the palace, or the church, and they consider the role of the patron and the dealer. They describe the artist’s workshop, consider the role of apprentices and assistants, discuss the influence of guilds and courts, and explore the reasons why new subjects and techniques were introduced and earlier traditions survived. They then supply the first full modern account of the materials and techniques of the early Renaissance artist, drawing on recent research to explain the preparation of panels, the application of gold leaf, and the use of tempera and oil paint. The book also features a detailed examination of some seventy of the finest and best known paintings in the Gallery, including masterpieces by Duccio, Van Eyck, Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Bouts, Bellini, Memling, Raphael, and Leonardo. The book is a stimulating and authoritative guide to the paintings in the Gallery—for those who can observe them in person and for those who must view them through the printed page. Publication of this book coincides with the reopening of the Sainsbury Wing designed by Robert Venturi, in which the Early Renaissance Collection will be newly exhibited.

American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life


Elizabeth Johns - 1991
    It has long been assumed that these paintings—of farmers, western boatmen and trappers, blacks both slave and free, middle-class women, urban urchins, and other everyday folk—served as records of an innocent age, reflecting a Jacksonian optimism and faith in the common man. In this enlightening book Elizabeth Johns presents a different interpretation—arguing that genre paintings had a social function that related in a more significant and less idealistic way to the political and cultural life of the time. Analyzing works by William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, David Gilmore Blythe, Lilly Martin Spencer, and others, Johns reveals the humor and cynicism in the paintings and places them in the context of stories about the American character that appeared in sources ranging from almanacs and newspapers to joke books and political caricature. She compares the productions of American painters with those of earlier Dutch, English, and French genre artists, showing the distinctive interests of American viewers. Arguing that art is socially constructed to meet the interests of its patrons and viewers, she demonstrates that the audience for American genre paintings consisted of New Yorkers with a highly developed ambition for political and social leadership, who enjoyed setting up citizens of the new democracy as targets of satire or condescension to satisfy their need for superiority. It was this network of social hierarchies and prejudices—and not a blissful celebration of American democracy—that informed the look and the richly ambiguous content of genre painting.

Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being


Jonathan Fineberg - 1991
    ARTnews hailed this lively volume as "a fascinating book" by "a superb critic and art historian". For this Second Edition, the author adds a new final chapter and extensively reworks the last quarter of the hook to incorporate current thinking on the art of the last 20 years.

The Impressionists: A Retrospective


Martha Kapos - 1991
    A general introduction and essay accompanying each of the 48 color plates provide an overview and appropriate social, cultural, and historical background for each work. Works by Monet, Degas, Ranoir, Manet, van Gogh, Cezanne, Seurat, Pissaro, and many others are included. 48 color plates. 12 b&w illustrations.

Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson


Richard J. Powell - 1991
    

The National Portrait Gallery History of the Kings and Queens of England


David Williamson - 1991
    His text is enlivened and complemented by a rich selection of images, largely chosen from the holdings of the National Portrait Gallery of London, the definitive collection of pictures on the British monarchy.

Manet by Himself


Juliet Wilson-Bareau - 1991
    The unity of Manet's life and art is revealed through the presentation of his letters and records of his conversations, together with a selection of his work in all media from all periods of his career.

Corot in Italy: Open-Air Painting and the Classical-Landscape Tradition


Peter Galassi - 1991
    Galassi shows how Corot's works point both forward to Impressionism and back to the past.

Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration


Georges Didi-Huberman - 1991
    Georges Didi-Huberman disrupts this story with a new look—and a new way of looking—at the fifteenth-century painter Fra Angelico. In doing so, he alters our understanding of both early Renaissance art and the processes of art history.A Florentine painter who took Dominican vows, Fra Angelico (1400-1455) approached his work as a largely theological project. For him, the problems of representing the unrepresentable, of portraying the divine and the spiritual, mitigated the more secular breakthroughs in imitative technique. Didi-Huberman explores Fra Angelico's solutions to these problems—his use of color to signal approaching visibility, of marble to recall Christ's tomb, of paint drippings to simulate (or stimulate) holy anointing. He shows how the painter employed emptiness, visual transformation, and displacement to give form to the mystery of faith.In the work of Fra Angelico, an alternate strain of Renaissance painting emerges to challenge rather than reinforce verisimilitude. Didi-Huberman traces this disruptive impulse through theological writings and iconographic evidence and identifies a widespread tradition in Renaissance art that ranges from Giotto's break with Byzantine image-making well into the sixteenth century. He reveals how the techniques that served this ultimately religious impulse may have anticipated the more abstract characteristics of modern art, such as color fields, paint spatterings, and the absence of color.

The Nabis: Bonnard, Vuillard and Their Circle


Claire Freches-Thory - 1991
    Their common aim was to make art part of everyday life.

Painted Love: Prostitution and French Art of the Impressionist Era


Hollis Clayson - 1991
    In this book, Hollis Clayson explains why she provides the first description and analysis of French artistic interest in women prostitutes, examining how the subject was treated in the art of the 1870s and 1880s by such avant-garde painters as Cezanne, Degas, Manet, and Renoir as well as by academic and low-brow painters who were their contemporaries.

The Heritage Of Giotto's Geometry: Art And Science On The Eve Of The Scientific Revolution


Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr. - 1991
    Marraro Prize from the American Historical Association "Edgerton's interdisciplinary study is a bold attempt to show how the perception of the world, as slowly refined by the Renaissance artists, provided the impetus behind the scientific revolution. . . . An ambitious and largely persuasive book." --Nature"Edgerton's book is learned and richly illustrated with paintings and drawings from the Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance, and contemporaneous Chinese dynasties. . . . [His] argument is intricate and flawless." --American Historical Review

Ancient Egyptian Jewelry


Carol A.R. Andrews - 1991
    The spectacular jewels of ancient Egypt, long buried in desert tombs, are revealed here in all their exotic beauty.

Paintings Of Maine


Arnold Skolnick - 1991
    Eighty of their most memorable masterpieces are collected here.

Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience


Stephen Polcari - 1991
    Based on examinations of new archival material and many unknown paintings, this study relates Abstract Expressionism to the actual historical circumstances, as well as intellectual and cultural milieu, of America from the 1930s to the 1950s. Stephen Polcari reverses the traditional perspective of Abstract Expressionism as an abstract art inspired by issues of the postwar period. Examining its roots in the art of the 1930s and 1940s, he contends that Abstract Expressionism emerges as a public art that actively engaged in the social, economic, and political crises of the 1930s, and, more significantly, the experience of World War II. Polcari provides an account of the contemporary artistic, intellectual and cultural history to establish a macro-history of human beings under the pressures of war, fear, torment, and hope. Within this context, he convincingly presents Abstract Expressionism as a mode of modern, metaphysical 'history' painting that uses the forms and devices of modern art to come to terms with the brutality of contemporary history.

Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration


Jay Levenson - 1991
    Five hundred years later an exhibition and book celebrate this crucial turning point in civilization by examining the art and history of the principal cultures in Europe and the Mediterranean, the Far East, and the Americas.

Monet: The Ultimate Impressionist


Sylvie Patin - 1991
    In 1874 his Impression, Sunrise caused uproar among the critics and a revolution in painting. His inventiveness was inexhaustible: with the Haystacks, Poplars, Cathedrals and, finally, the enchanting Water-lilies of Givemy, Monet captured light in all its fleeting qualities. At last, almost blind - I fear the dark more than death- he feverishly produced near-abstract landscapes of water and reflection, a vision of nature that paved the way for the art of our own day. This book traces his career.

Ottonian Book Illumination: An Historical Study


Henry Mayr-Harting - 1991
    It brings to light an aesthic passage of European history which has never before received full-scale treatment in English. It explains, historically and with a rich body of illustrations, the origins and momentum of a magnificent movement of German art, and shows, through this powerful and expressive art, how religion and political ideaology were interwined in Ottonian culture from about 950 to 1050. Besides dealing with the great imperials books such as the Gospels of Otto III and the Pericopes Book of Henry II, as well as other splendid liturgical manuscripts, the author also writes with penetrating insight about the great art-loving bishops such as Egbert of Trier and Bernard of Hildesheim, whose aims ans personalitites are express in the books they commissioned. In addition, the most important art centres of the Ottonian Empire - Reichenau, Cologne, Fulda and Corvey - are discussed in detail. This seminal work explains, historically and with a rich body of illustrations, the origins and momentum of a magnificent movement of German art, and shows, through this powerful and expressive art, how religion and political ideaology were interwined in Ottonian culture from about 950 to 1050. 'This study ensures that the Ottonians and their art are set to occupy an increasingly significant place in the awarences of English-speaking historians.' Burlington Magazine.

Guide du Musée d'Orsay (édition Anglaise)


Réunion des Musées Nationaux - 1991
    

Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance


Richard Jenkyns - 1991
    In advancing his argument Jenkyns turns our accepted notions of the Victorians upside down, presenting Ruskin as an admirer of Greek statuary, the Houses of Parliament as a classical rather than a Gothic composition, and Thomas Woolner, the only sculptor among the original Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, as a neo-Hellenic carver and poet. Jenkyns moves effortlessly between the general and the particular and is refreshingly unafraid to make judgments. Here are some of the best descriptions of Victorian painting, sculpture, and architecture to have appeared in recent years. From the very gradual changes throughout the paintings of Leighton and Alma-Tadema, to the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, the 'aesthetic scripture' of Pater, and even the advertisements for Beecham's pills, Jenkyns shows how what had been merely eclectic became a distinctive fin-de-siecle style and eventually began to point the way for Modernism. These are grand themes, presented by a masterly guide. Above all Jenkyns is entertaining: Dignity and Decadence is one of the most illuminating and enjoyable books about the Victorians yet to appear.

Vincent: The Works of Vincent Van Gogh


Franco Vedovello - 1991
    

Voicing Our Visions: Writings by Women Artists


Mara Witzling - 1991
    Includes contributions from Georgia O'Keefe and Barbara Hepworth. First published in 1992.

Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas


Carol Armstrong - 1991
    Armstrong grapples with contradictory portrayals of Degas as "odd man out" within the modernist canon: he was a realist whom realists rejected; a storyteller in pictures who did not satisfy novelist-critics; a painter of modern life who was not a modernist; a member of the impressionist group who was no impressionist. Armstrong confronts these and other paradoxes by analyzing the critical vocabularies used to describe Degas's work. By reading several groups of the artist's images through the lens of a sequence of critical texts, Armstrong shows how our critical and popular expectations of Degas are overturned and subverted. This is a reprint of the book first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1991.

The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion


Hans Belting - 1991