Best of
Art-History

1997

American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America


Robert Hughes - 1997
    The intense relationship between the American people and their surroundings has been the source of a rich artistic tradition. American Visions is a consistently revealing demonstration of the many ways in which artists have expressed this pervasive connection. In nine eloquent chapters, which span the whole range of events, movements, and personalities of more than three centuries, Robert Hughes shows us the myriad associations between the unique society that is America and the art it has produced:"O My America, My New Founde Land"  explores the churches, religious art, and artifacts of the Spanish invaders of the Southwest and the Puritans of New England; the austere esthetic of the Amish, the Quakers, and the Shakers; and the Anglophile culture of Virginia."The Republic of Virtue"  sets forth the ideals of neo-classicism as interpreted in the paintings of Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, and the Peale family, and in the public architecture of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Latrobe, and Charles Bulfinch."The Wilderness and the West"  discusses the work of landscape painters such as Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, and the Luminists, who viewed the natural world as "the fingerprint of God's creation,"  and of those who recorded America's westward expansion--George Caleb Bingham, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Remington--and the accompanying shift in the perception of the Indian, from noble savage to outright demon."American Renaissance" describes the opulent era that followed the Civil War, a cultural flowering expressed in the sculpture of Augustus Saint-Gaudens; the paintings of John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, and Childe Hassam; the Newport cottages of the super-rich; and the beaux-arts buildings of Stanford White and his partners."The Gritty Cities"  looks at the post-Civil War years from another perspective: cast-iron cityscapes, the architecture of Louis Henri Sullivan, and the new realism of Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, the trompe-l'oeil painters, and the Ashcan School."Early Modernism" introduces the first American avant garde: the painters Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Joseph Stella, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, and Georgia O'Keeffe, and the premier architect of his time, Frank Lloyd Wright."Streamlines and Breadlines"  surveys the boom years, when skyscrapers and Art Deco were all the rage . . . and the bust years that followed, when painters such as Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Thomas Hart Benton, Diego Rivera, and Jacob Lawrence showed Americans "the way we live now." "The Empire of Signs"  examines the American hegemony after World War II, when the Abstract Expressionists (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, et al.) ruled the artistic roost, until they were dethroned by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, the Pop artists, and Andy Warhol, while individualists such as David Smith and Joseph Cornell marched to their own music."The Age of Anxiety"  considers recent events: the return of figurative art and the appearance of minimal and conceptual art; the speculative mania of the 1980s, which led to scandalous auction practices and inflated reputations; and the trends and issues of art in the 90s.Lavishly illustrated and packed with biographies, anecdotes, astute and stimulating critical commentary, and sharp social history, American Visions is published in association with a new eight-part PBS television series. Robert Hughes has called it "a love letter to America."  This superb volume, which encompasses and enlarges upon the series, is an incomparably entertaining and insightful contemplation of its splendid subject.

Vermeer: The Complete Works


Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. - 1997
    The text includes a short essay and commentaries on each of the paintings, and incorporates new research on Vermeer's life and extraordinary artistic achievements.

Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque


Rudolf Wittkower - 1997
    Inventive and skilled, he virtually created the Baroque style. In his religious sculptures he excelled at capturing movement and extreme emotion, uniting figures with their setting to create a single conception of overwhelming intensity that expressed the fervour of Counter-Reformation Rome. Intensity and drama also characterize his portraits and world-famous Roman fountains.

Formless: A User's Guide


Yve-Alain Bois - 1997
    In Formless: A User's Guide, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss present a rich and compelling panorama of the formless. They chart its persistence within a history of modernism that has always repressed it in the interest of privileging formal mastery, and they assess its destiny within current artistic production. In the domain of practice, they analyze it as an operational tool, the structural cunning of which has repeatedly been suppressed in the service of a thematics of art. Neither theme nor form, formless is, as Bataille himself expressed it, a job. The job of Formless: A User's Guide is to explore the power of the informe. A stunning new map of twentieth-century art emerges from this reconceptualization and from the brilliantly original analyses of the work of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Lucio Fontana, Cindy Sherman, Claes Oldenburg, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others.

Original Sin: The Visionary Art of Joe Coleman


Jim Jarmusch - 1997
    Artist Joe Coleman's ORIGINAL SIN contains visually stimulating and radically graphic nightmarish images. Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, historian Harold Schechter and art critic/poet John Yau contribute essays to this extremely dark "coffin table" book. Joe's work is often compared to illuminated manuscripts because of the great detail contained within each piece. His acrylic paintings depict acts of violence, some of which even include gory details of various body parts. Both sexual and revolting, the book contains material that may not be suitable for everyone.

The Old Man Mad about Drawing: A Tale of Hokusai


François Place - 1997
    An illustrated tribute to the master, Hokusai.

Romanesque Art: Architecture Sculpture Painting


Rolf Toman - 1997
    The impressive photographs of works from all visual arts movements are at the center of these richly illustrated volumes. The books successfully provide an overview of the artistic diversity of the individual periods, and they couldn't have been written and illustrated any more clearly.

The Illuminated Page: Ten Centuries of Manuscript Painting in the British Library


Janet Backhouse - 1997
    The British Library boasts the world's finest collection of medieval manuscripts, and in this new and lavishly illustrated survey, Janet Backhouse draws on these collections to provide a comprehensive introduction to these exciting and colourful materials.The manuscripts featured include bestiaries, psalters, Bibles, books of hours, and medical and herbal collections that originated in workrooms as geographically diverse as the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria and the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. There is also a great chronological diversity among the selected manuscripts, with examples ranging from the seventh century AD and the Lindisfarne Gospels to early Renaissance offerings.Each of the almost 220 illluminations presented are accompanied by a caption and have been reproduced in colour. Many of the immages chosen have been reproduced here for the first time.

Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists


Jan Marsh - 1997
    Now, 150 years later, the popularity of leading (male) exponents such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and John Everett Millais is greater than ever, while the crucial role played by women artists has largely been forgotten.

Monet


Carla Rachman - 1997
    The artist's personal life and his relations with dealers, patrons, critics and institutions are seen as formative influences on his work. The book traces critical reaction to Monet's work from the early years, which were marked by clashes with conventional artistic values, to the present, in which Monet's vision of the world has gained popularity with the public at large.

The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention


Donald Albrecht - 1997
    Their greatest accomplishment was in their wholehearted belief that design could improve people's lives, a serious ambition that they approached with elegance, wit, and beauty.

Indian Art (Phaidon Art and Ideas)


Vidya Dehejia - 1997
    Considering Indian art within a chronological framework, Vidya Dehejia analyses the great cities of the Indus civilization, the serene Buddha image, the intriguing art of cave sites, the sophisticated temple-building traditions, the luxurious art of the Mughal court, the palaces and pavilions of Rajasthan, the churches of Portuguese Goa, the various forms of art in the British Raj and the issues related to taking Indian art into the twenty-first century.

After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History


Arthur C. Danto - 1997
    Ever since this declaration, he has been at the forefront of a radical critique of the nature of art in our time. After the End of Art presents Danto's first full-scale reformulation of his original insight, showing how, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art has deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, he leads the way to a new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol's Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store. Here we are engaged in a series of insightful and entertaining conversations on the most relevant aesthetic and philosophical issues of art, conducted by an especially acute observer of the art scene today. Originally delivered as the prestigious Mellon Lectures on the Fine Arts, these writings cover art history, pop art, "people's art," the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg--who helped make sense of modernism for viewers over two generations ago through an aesthetics-based criticism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition (the idea that art was a progressively more adequate representation of reality) through the modern era of manifestos (when art was defined by the artist's philosophy), Danto shows that it wasn't until the invention of Pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways of producing art, hinged on a narrative. Traditional notions of aesthetics can no longer apply to contemporary art, argues Danto. Instead he focuses on a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of contemporary art: that everything is possible.

The Art of Arts: Rediscovering Painting


Anita Albus - 1997
    And in the contest between the senses, the ear, through which we had previously received all knowledge and the word of God, was conquered by the eye, which would henceforth be king. A new breed of painters aimed to reconcile the world of the senses with that of the mind, and their goal was to conceal themselves in the details and vanish away, like God. A new way of perceiving was born.Anita Albus describes the birth and evolution of trompe-l'oeil painting in oils in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, focusing her attention on works by northern European artists—both major and minor. As a scholar, she stands in the tradition of Panofsky; as a painter, she is able to see things others have not yet perceived; as a storyteller, she skillfully describes abstract notions in a vivid and exciting way. Like the multilayered technique of the Old Masters, her method assumes an ability to distinguish between the different levels, as well as a talent for synthesizing them.The first part of the book is devoted to the visibility of the invisible in the art of Jan van Eyck—his visual effects, perspective, artistic technique, and philosophy. The second and third parts are taken up with descriptions of the genres of "forest landscape," "still life," and "forest floor." In the midst of butterflies, bumblebees, and dragonflies, Vladimir Nabokov emerges as final witness to the survival in literature of all that was condemned to vanish from the fine arts. After a glimpse into the continuing presence of the past and some conjectures as to the future, the book's final part throws fresh light on the colored grains of the hand-ground pigments that were lost when artists' materials began to be commercially manufactured in the nineteenth century.The Art of Arts is thus both a dazzling cultural history and the story of two explosive inventions: the so-called third dimension of space through perspective, and the shockingly vivid colors of revolutionary oil paints. Albus makes abundantly clear how, taken together, these breakthroughs not only created a new art, but altered forever our perception of the world.

The Self Aware Image: An Insight Into Early Modern Meta-Painting


Victor Ieronim Stoichiță - 1997
    Eschewing questions of style, it focuses instead on the painting as a framed, transportable and marketable object that is a specifically modern artistic medium. Arguing that panel painting, from its origins in the Early Renaissance, was a self-aware image, Stoichita demonstrates that the artists and his art were often the theme of the painting. The also examines the mirror effect and other splitting strategies such as the mise en abime and intertextual play. By analyzing these modalities of self-reflection, Stoichita offers a view of a period and the art it produced once considered to have been definitively classified.

Nature Illuminated: Flora and Fauna from the Court of Emperor Rudolf II


Lee Hendrix - 1997
    The project began when Rudolf's predecessor, Ferdinand I, commissioned master calligrapher Georg Bocskay tocreate a model book of calligraphy. A preeminent scribe, Bocskay assembled a vast selection of contemporary and historic scripts.Years later, at Rudolf's behest, miniaturist Joris Hoefnagel filled the spaces on each manuscript page with insects, fruits, flowers, and other botanical images. The combination of word and illustration is rare and, on its tiny scale, constitutes one of the marvels of the Central EuropeanRenaissance.Nature Illuminated reproduces forty-one pages from the original codex. Those who love and collect beautiful books will be endlessly fascinated by Hoefnagel's imagery and invention. The accompanying commentary identifies and explains the details of Hoefnagel's exquisitely craftedilluminations.

Greatest Works of Art of Western Civilization


Thomas Hoving - 1997
    The ones that after years I could describe down to the tiniest details, as if standing in front of them. These are the ones that changed my lifeÓ So begins Thomas Hoving--the man who revolutionized the Metropolitan Museum of Art and with it the museums of the world--in this sumptuous book that contains his passionate, opinionated, and sometimes controversial selection of the 111 masterpieces of Western art. Encompassing classical Greek statuary, paintings by Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Renoir, Munch, and Pollack, frescoes by Piero Della Francesca, mosaics, altarpieces, tapestries, even Benvenuto Cellini's Great Salt Cellar, this book takes a fresh, engaging look at Western man's artistic accomplishments. Interpreted with wit, zeal, and passion, The Greatest Works of Art includes treasures from the Museum of Modern Art, the Phillips Collection, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and of course the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Hogarth: A Life and a World


Jenny Uglow - 1997
    Evoking Hogarth's fierce nationalism, his philanthropic vision, and his antagonistic dance with London's artists and patrons, Uglow's acclaimed biography crackles with vitality and sparkles with insights (Michael Holroyd).

Art in Renaissance Italy: 1350-1500


Evelyn Welch - 1997
    Here, Evelyn Welch presents a fresh picture of the Italian Renaissance by challenging traditional scholarship and placing emphasis on recreating the experience of contemporary Italians: the patrons who commissioned the works, the members of the public who viewed them, and the artists who produced them. Art in Renaissance Italy 1350-1500 dramatically revises the traditional story of the Renaissance and takes into account new issues that have greatly enriched our understanding of the period. From paintings and coins to sculptures and tapestries, Welch examines the issues of materials, workshop practices, and artist-patron relationships, and explores the ways in which visual imagery related to contemporary sexual, social, and political behavior.

America and Lewis Hine: Photographs, 1904-1940


Naomi Rosenblum - 1997
    Seventy years after they were made, his Ellis Island pictures are still intensely moving: the newly arrived immigrants caught in all their bewilderment-- uncertain as to whether they will even be admitted to the promised land. Hine's dynamic images changed the way Americans looked at social conditions. Hine put his life on the line to capture a truthful picture of people at work. He risked physical attack in order to expose the brutal exploitation of child labor; then, years later, he had himself suspended from the hundredth floor of the Empire State Building to preserve on film the workers who were in the process of erecting it. Never content merely to depict labor's dehumanizing features, Hine shows us the dignity of work, the workers dominate the instruments of their labor-- the open hearths, mine pits, shovels, tongs and trolleys. Only a consummate camera-artist could have made such pictures, with their poignant qualities of light and shadow, their inescapable presence: all the more remarkable when we consider his cumbersome instrument-- a tripod-mounted 5 x 7 view camera with slides, flash pan, and powder. How bitterly ironic that this artist and social reformer, after devoting his life to working people, should end up as so many of his subjects did-- on a welfare line. Decades earlier, he had written: "For many years I have followed the procession of child workers winding through a thousand industrialcommunities from the canneries of Maine to the fields of Texas. I have heard their tragic stories, watched their cramped lives, and seen their fruitless struggles in the industrial game where the odds are all against them." Like Walt Whitman before him, Lewis Hine viewed his work and art as grounded in the fluid movements of everyday lives, of history, the present and the future, expressing with vividness and responsiveness the hope for America revived in a sense of great community, and democracy as a life of free and enriching communion.

The Tibetan Art of Healing: The Dalai Lama Speaks on the Art of Healing.


Ian A. Baker - 1997
    Simultaneous. IP.

The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting


Wu Hung - 1997
    A Chinese painting is often reduced to the image it bears;its material form is dismissed; its intimate connection with socialactivities and cultural conventions neglected.A screen occupies a space and divides it, supplies an ideal surface forpainting, and has been a favorite pictorial image in Chinese art sinceantiquity. Wu Hung undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the screen,which can be an object, an art medium, a pictorial motif, or all threeat once. With its diverse roles, the screen has provided Chinesepainters with endless opportunities to reinvent their art.The Double Screen provides a powerful non-Western perspective onissues from portraiture and pictorial narrative to voyeurism,masquerade, and political rhetoric. It will be invaluable to anyoneinterested in the history of art and Asian studies.

Valley of Shining Stone: The Story of Abiquiu


Lesley Poling-Kempes - 1997
    O'Keeffe saw the magic of sandstone cliffs and turquoise skies, but her life and death here are only part of the story. Reading almost like a novel, this book spills over with other legends buried deep in time, just as some of North America's oldest dinosaur bones lie hidden beneath the valley floor. Here are the stories of Pueblo Indians who have claimed this land for generations. Here, too, are Utes, Navajos, Jicarilla Apaches, Hispanos, and Anglos—many lives tangled together, yet also separate and distinct. Underlying these stories is the saga of Ghost Ranch itself, a last living vestige of the Old West ideal of horses, cowboys, and wide-open spaces. Readers will meet a virtual Who's Who of visitors from "dude ranch" days, ranging from such luminaries as Willa Cather, Ansel Adams, and Charles Lindbergh to World War II scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues, who were working on the top-secret atomic bomb in nearby Los Alamos. Moving on through the twentieth century, the book describes struggles to preserve the valley's wild beauty in the face of land development and increased tourism. Just as the Piedra Lumbre landscape has captivated countless wayfarers over hundreds of years, so its stories cast their own spell. Indispensable for travelers, pure pleasure for history buffs and general readers, these pages are a magic carpet to a magic land: Abiquiu, Ghost Ranch, the Valley of Shining Stone.

Victorian Fairy Painting


Pamela White Trimpe - 1997
    Includes paintings by Turner, Millais and others. 168 pages 130 illus.

Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art


Roger S. Wieck - 1997
    Including 100 examples of hand-coloured medieval and Renaissance illumination from around Europe, this work presents translations of key texts and explanations of the cultural significance of Books of Hours.

Joan Mitchell


Klaus Kertess - 1997
    She won a place for herself in the New York art world of the 1950s and achieved recognition for her grand yet personal style of painting. That she is not more widely appreciated in the United States is partly because she lived in France during the later decades of her life.

The Essential Joseph Beuys


Alain Borer - 1997
    Arranged chronologically, the book reflects the changes in Beuys' choice of register.

Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs


Christopher Pinney - 1997
    Studying photographic practice in India, Pinney traces photography's various purposes and goals from colonial through postcolonial times. He identifies three key periods in Indian portraiture: the use of photography under British rule as a quantifiable instrument of measurement, the later role of portraiture in moral instruction, and the current visual popular culture and its effects on modes of picturing. Photographic culture thus becomes a mutable realm in which capturing likeness is only part of the project. Lavishly illustrated, Pinney's account of the change from depiction to invention uncovers fascinating links between these evocative images and the society and history from which they emerge.

Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting


Yang Xin - 1997
    This magnificent book, written by a team of eminent international scholars, is the first to recount the history of Chinese painting over a span of some three thousand years. Drawing on museum collections, archives, and archaeological sites in China—including many resources never before available to Western scholars—as well as on collections in other countries, the authors present and analyze the very best examples of Chinese painting: more than 300 of them are reproduced here in color. Both accessible to the general reader and revelatory for the scholar, the book provides the most up-to-date and detailed history of China’s pictorial art available today. In this book the authors rewrite the history of Chinese art wherever it is found—in caves, temples, or museum collections. They begin by grounding the Western reader in Chinese traditions and practices, showing in essence how to look at a Chinese painting. They then shed light on such topics as the development of classical and narrative painting, the origins of the literati tradition, the flowering of landscape painting, and the ways the traditions of Chinese painting have been carried into the present day. The book, which concludes with a glossary of techniques and terms and a list of artists by dynasty, is an essential resource for all lovers of, or newcomers to, Chinese painting.Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting is the inaugural volume in a new series, The Culture & Civilization of China, a joint publishing venture of Yale University Press and the American Council of Learned Societies with the China International Publishing Group in Beijing. The undertaking will ultimately result in the publication of more than seventy-five volumes on the visual arts, classical literature, language, and philosophy, as well as several comprehensive reference volumes.

Picasso: The Early Years, 1892-1906


Marilyn McCully - 1997
    The exhibitions focus on Picasso's early work: the Bleu period; the Rose period; and the 1906 work devoted to the female nude.

Pieter Bruegel


Philippe Roberts-Jones - 1997
    This book, the most up-to-date monograph on Bruegel, incorporates the latest art-historical research and new information gleaned from recent restoration of his work. The authors, an art historian and a painting conservator, each bring their special expertise to bear on the many outstanding questions about the artist's life, technique, and the often enigmatic meaning of his paintings.Bruegel's enduring appeal brought huge crowds to a recent show of his drawings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Lavishly illustrated not only with Bruegel's paintings, drawings, and engravings but also with telling details and archival material rarely or never shown elsewhere, this sumptuous book on this enormously popular artist will find a wide audience.

Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits in Roman Egypt


Susan Walker - 1997
    Published to coincide with a new major exhibition of these portraits, Ancient Faces is the most comprehensive, up-to-date survey of these astonishing works of art.Dating from the later period of Roman rule in Egypt, shortly before the birth of Christ, the painted mummy portraits are among the most remarkable products of the ancient world, a fusion of the traditions of pharonic Egypt and the Classical world. They are historical and cultural objects of outstanding importance and beauty, superb works of art that represent some of the earliest known examples of life-like portraiture. Though the subjects of the portraits believed in the traditional Egyptian cults, which offered them a firm prospect of life after death, they also wished to be commemorated in the Roman manner, with their fashion of dress and adornment signaling their status in life. Despite their ancient history, these portraits speak to the modern eye with a beauty and intensity that would be lost to portraiture until the Renaissance.

Master Paintings in The Art Institute of Chicago


James N. Wood - 1997
    This volume presents 149 of the museum's greatest European and American paintings from 1400 to the 1980s.

Steichen: A Biography


Penelope Niven - 1997
    A portrait of the photographer covers his years in Paris and New York, his influence on modern art and fashion photography, and his contributions to aerial reconnaissance photography through his work during World War I.

Florence: Art and Architecture


Antonio Paolucci - 1997
    Prominent Florentine scholars and museum directors accompany the reader on a journey to the unique artistic treasures of this city on the Arno. The experts introduce superb historical buildings and sculptures in their historical contexts, and as "insiders" lead you through world famous painting galleries such as the Accademia and the Palazzo Pitti.

Famous American Illustrators


Arpi Ermoyan - 1997
    From illustrators such as N.C. Wyeth to Charles Dana Gibson to Thomas Nast, profiles and major examples of each artist's work give a sweeping overview of the art of illustration. 450 color illustrations.

Secrets of Monet's Garden: Bringing the Beauty of Monet's Style to Your Own Garden


Derek Fell - 1997
    Premier garden writer and photographer Derek Fell helps the home gardener recreate some of Giverny’s beauty through an illuminating examination of the painter’s planting philosophies. With hundreds of full-color photographs, and reproductions, Fell sheds light on Monet’s use of color, structure, favorite flowers; and more.

The Concrete Wave: The History of Skateboarding


Michael Brooke - 1997
    Designed for a dedicated readership of skateboarding fans and aficionados, The Concrete Wave provides: A spectacular history of skateboarding (1960-2000); Hundreds of fabulous photographs - from the archival to the awesome!; An interview with world champion Tony Hawk, and much more...; All presented in a format both radical and readable and designed to appeal to everyone who loves their skateboard!

A House of Her Own: Kay Sage, Solitary Surrealist


Judith D. Suther - 1997
    Born in 1898 to wealthy American parents in upstate New York, Sage spent most of her childhood and young adult years in Italy and France. In 1937 she moved to Paris, where she became a member of the Surrealist group surrounding André Breton. She returned to the United States in 1940, settling in Woodbury, Connecticut. Her most productive years as an artist extended from roughly 1938 through the late 1950s, when her health began to deteriorate and she withdrew gradually from social contact. She stopped working on her oil paintings in 1958 but continued to forge her increasingly nihilistic poems until she shot herself in the heart in January 1963. Along with her eloquent chronicle of Sage’s life, Judith D. Suther presents subtle, revelatory views of Sage’s artistic accomplishments. She takes us into the artist’s elegant, dreamlike paintings, connecting them to Sage’s complex inner life and to the artistic and intellectual worlds in which she moved. Suther also shows how the raw language and iconoclastic themes of Sage’s poetic works were related to Sage’s lifelong revolt against social and artistic convention.

Hans Holbein


Oskar Bätschmann - 1997
    To commemorate the five-hundredth anniversary of the artist's birth, Oskar B�tschmann and Pascal Griener offer this richly illustrated book--the first comprehensive monograph on the artist to appear in more than forty years--which is a major advance in our understanding of Holbein's contribution to European art. The authors reexamine every aspect of a remarkable career, and further illuminate the artistic and cultural influences that affected the artist.Holbein was a hugely ambitious artist, and even during his formative years in Lucerne and Basel, made designs for jewelry, stained glass, and woodcuts, and painted major altarpieces and portraits. He also carried out several monumental decorative schemes for private houses and civic buildings. In his commissions, Holbein sought to rival the greatest masters of Germany and Italy, most notably D�rer and Mantegna, and by the time of his visit to France in 1524 he was determined to secure a position as Court Painter. However, Holbein soon found himself in a precarious situation as a result of the Reformation's increasing hostility toward religious works, and he left for England in 1532. While in England, in addition to decorative schemes and Triumphs, he both drew and painted numerous unrivaled likenesses of leading courtiers, merchants, and diplomats, among which is his celebrated double portrait, The Ambassadors. This book offers both a remarkable range of extant visual evidence and a rewarding and scholarly account of Holbein's oeuvre in its full historical and artistic contexts.

Norman Rockwell and the Saturday Evening Post: The Middle Years


Norman Rockwell - 1997
    

The Sweetness of Life. A Biography of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun


Angelica Goodden - 1997
    her connections in Parisian high society made the Revolution dangerous for her, and after the fall of the Bastille she fled France both to save her own skin and to go on painting beautiful women and powerful men. Her wandering, cosmopolitan life took her to Bourbon Naples, Hapsburg Vienna, imperial St. Petersburg and Georgian London, ans wherever she went she attracted attention for her alluring portraits.Vigée Le Brun, in both her personal and her public life, was a woman of contradictions. A revolutionary female artist, she was apolitical reactionary who yearned for what he saw as the lost paradise of France before the Revolution. A proud and independent woman, she raised her daughter single-handedly, only tragically to lose her affection.Angelica Goodden's illuminating account of this extraordinary woman - the first biography of the artist in English for seventy-five-years - is also a vivid portrait of an age of society scandal and political turmoil. Drawing on contemporary records and Vigée Le Brun's own fascinating memoirs, Godden brings to life the remarkable range of friends and acquaintances the artist made through her work, from Catherine the Great to Madame de Staël to Emma Hamilton, whose suggestive portrait won Vigée Le Brun some notoriety. As her art regains favour, this definitive biography is a long-overdue reassessment of this sometimes scandalous, often devious but prodigiously gifted woman.

Jack Smith: Flaming Creature: His Amazing Life and Times


Edward Leffingwell - 1997
    Example and antagonist to generations of artists and performers?revered by Robert Wilson, denounced by Kenneth Anger, imitated by Andy Warhol?Jack Smith is ready for his close-up, on location in the streets and ruins of the world. This volume recognizes Smith?s seminal contributions and the need for a significant rethinking of the history of the American avant-garde.

Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting


Harald Weinrich - 1997
    . . . We find that cultural history provides a helpful perspective in which the value of the art of forgetting emerges. . . . That is the subject this book (through which flows Lethe, the meandering stream of forgetfulness) will try to represent and discuss by means of many concrete examples, taken primarily from literature." from LetheLethe is an exploration of the art of forgetting as the counterpart of the rhetorical art of memory in Western culture from the Greeks to the present. It offers penetrating analyses of works by, among others, Augustine, Bellow, Borges, Casanova, Celan, Cervantes, Dante, Descartes, Freud, Goethe, Homer, Kant, Kleist, Levi, Locke, Mallarme, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Ovid, Pirandello, Plato, Proust, Rabelais, Rousseau, Sartre, and Wiesel. What emerges is a general view of forgetting that combines a recognition of its necessity and inevitability with a critique of forgetting (particularly in the case of the Holocaust) and the need to combat it. Harald Weinrich's epilogue considers forgetting in the present age of information overflow, particularly in the area of the natural sciences.This magisterial book was first published in German in 1997 and has already been translated into French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish; a Korean translation is in the works. This is the first of Weinrich's books to be translated into English and will be welcomed by scholars and students of literature, intellectual and cultural historians, classicists, historians of philosophy, and other philosophers with literary interests. The range of the book is astonishing. In Steven Rendall's skillful and fluent translation, its readability is noteworthy.

The Art Teacher's Book of Lists


Helen D. Hume - 1997
    For easy use, the lists are organized into ten sections, given here with a sample from each: All About Art ("Elements of Art") ... Art History ("Timelines of Art History") ... For the Art Teacher ("The National Visual Arts Standards") ... Art Materials ("Things to Do with Collage") ... Painting, Drawing & Printmaking ("All About Color Pigment") ... Sculpture ("Master Sculptors & Their Work")... Architecture ("Great Architects of the World")... Fine Arts & Folk Art ("African American Crafts") ... Technology & Art ("The Evolution of Photography") ... Museums ("Museums Devoted to the Work of One Artist").

Michelangelo: The Last Judgement - A Glorious Restoration


Loren Partridge - 1997
    This lavishly-illustrated volume presents the work in its entirety, as well as in close-up detail.

Exposed: The Victorian Nude


Alison Smith - 1997
    It was also one of the most conspicuous categories for the visual image at every level, from elite paintings for the Royal Academy to mass-produced photographs and magazine illustrations. Exposed: The Victorian Nude provides a fascinating overview of the nude figure—both male and female—and the intriguing role it played in Victorian art. While it concentrates on painting, sculpture, and drawing, this beautifully illustrated reference also explores the depiction of the body in other media—including photography, popular illustration, advertising, and caricature—and discusses the issues of morality, uality, and desire that are relevant even today. Since nudes were an important subject for most Victorian artists, Exposed: The Victorian Nude showcases dazzling artwork from such legendary masters as Millais, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Whistler, and Sargent, as well as pivotal figures of early English modernism. Cutting across the conventional categories of style and period, this guide offers a fresh, engrossing vision of Victorian art and culture unmatched anywhere else.• Beautifully produced and full of breathtaking artwork• Nudes are perennially popular with art lovers• Book serves as a catalog for a traveling exhibition from the prestigious Tate Gallery that will visit several US museums, beginning with the Brooklyn Museum in September 2002

Art in Story: Teaching Art History to Elementary School Children


Marianne Saccardi - 1997
    It would also be an excellent supplementary textbook for arts education methods classes. The author's aim is to help those working with children to develop in them a knowledge of and enthusiasm for fine art by telling stories that connect to a particular kind of art or artist. Art in Story focuses on art of the ancient world, of the East and Africa, of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Chapters consider the European Masters, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, art of America and Mexico, and computer art. Each chapter has background information for the teacher, a story completely written out as it is meant to be told, suggestions for viewing art, a journal writing activity, an art activity related to the type of art being studied, connections to other topics of study, suggestions for drama possibilities, and an extensive bibliography of adult reference as well as children's books and other materials. This new edition presents new chapters on Middle Eastern art and revisions of all other material. The bibliography updates have been extensive. Grades K-6.

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics


Ann Eden Gibson - 1997
    This text reconsiders the history of the movement by investigating other largely-ignored artists - people of colour, women, and gays and lesbians.

German Expressionism: Art and Society


Wolf-Dieter Dube - 1997
    Highlights the visual art, films, theater, and architecture of German Expressionism.

Rock Art of the Dreamtime: Images of Ancient Australia


Josephine Flood - 1997
    It gives an overview of recent research, dating techniques and discoveries.

An Early Encounter with Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicago's Loop, and the World's Columbian Exposition


Arnold Lewis - 1997
    This volume also contains an extensive bibliography, arranged by country, and profiles of the foreign observers who sought the implications for European culture in what Asa Briggs called the "shock city" of the western world.

Dictionary of Women Artists


Delia Gaze - 1997
    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Picturing Women In Renaissance And Baroque Italy


Sara F. Matthews Grieco - 1997
    Women's experiences and needs (perceived by women themselves or defined by men on their behalf) are seen as important determinants in the production and consumption of visual culture. By using a variety of approaches the contributors demonstrate the importance of adopting an interdisciplinary approach when studying women in Italy from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.

Titian's Women


Rona Goffen - 1997
    It aims to show how female images relate to Titian's concern with larger themes in life.

Renoir's Portraits: Impressions of an Age


Colin B. Bailey - 1997
    For more than fifty years Renoir explored the genre of portraiture, experimenting and pressing forward in his determination to become -- as he explained to Monet in January 1884 - "a painter of figures." This sumptuously illustrated book is the first devoted exclusively to Renoir's portraiture, bringing together the finest examplesof the portraits he painted during each period of his prolific career. In these delightful paintings Renoir created uniquely endearing and enduring images of pleasure, comfort, and prosperity.

Film Essays and Criticism


Rudolf Arnheim - 1997
    This is the first English translation of another of his important books, Kritiken und Aufsätze zum Film, which collects both film reviews and theoretical essays, most of them written between 1925 and 1940.     As a young man in 1920s Berlin, Arnheim began writing about film for the satirical magazine Das Stachelschwein. In 1928, as the Weimar Republic began to crumble, he joined the intellectual weekly Die Weltbühne as  film critic and assistant editor for cultural affairs. His most important contributions to both magazines are published here, including witty and incisive comments on many of the great classics of the silent and early sound period, such as Buster Keaton’s The General and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. With the advent of Nazism in Germany, Arnheim emigrated first to Italy, where he wrote essays (many included here) for a nascent Enciclopedia del Cinema, and then to England and the United States.    The thirty essays on film theory discuss elements of theory and technique, early sound film, production, style and content, and the relationship of film and the state. The fifty-six critical pieces include Arnheim’s thoughts on the practice of film criticism, his reviews of German, American, French, and Soviet films, and his profiles of Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Felix Bressart, Erich von Stroheim, and others. Also included in the volume are an introduction (newly revised by Arnheim) and a comprehensive bibliography.

Paul Delaroche: History Painted


Stephen Bann - 1997
    Stephen Bann addresses this lacuna in art scholarship, presenting an in-depth examination of Delaroche’s career.            Bann situates Delaroche and his wide-ranging oeuvre in the context of early nineteenth-century visual culture. From his early historical paintings to experimental pieces influenced by photography, the book analyzes each stage of Delaroche’s artistic development—as well as his major masterpieces such as The Execution of Lady Jane Grey and The Princes in the Tower. Bann also analyzes the numerous reproductions of Delaroche’s works in a variety of visual mediums, including engravings by Mercuri and Henriquel-Dupont, lithographs, popular prints, and the photographs that illustrated Delaroche’s first retrospective catalog.            An unparalleled and lushly illustrated study, Paul Delaroche restores a neglected master to his rightful place in nineteenth-century European art.

Masterpieces Of The J. Paul Getty Museum


Thomas Kren - 1997
    Dating from the tenth to the sixteenth century, they were produced in France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, England, Spain, Poland, and the eastern Mediterranean. Among the highlights are four Ottonian manuscripts, Romanesque treasures from Germany, Italy, and France, and English Gothic Apocalypse, and late medieval manuscripts painted by such masters as Jean Fouquet, Girolamo da Cremona, Simon Marmion, and Joris Hoefnagel. Included are liturgical books, devotional books for private use, books of the Bible, histories by Giovanni Boccaccio and Jean Froissart, and a Model Book of Calligraphy.

Lorenzo Lotto


Peter Humfrey - 1997
    This study of the Venetian artist Lorenzo Lotto draws on the large body of work by the artist, as well as on the 16th-century documentation on the artist's life, including letters, an account book for the years 1538-56, and will.

Masterpieces of the J. Paul Getty Museum: Illuminated Manuscripts


J. Paul Getty Museum - 1997
    Dating from the tenth to the sixteenth century, they were produced in France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, England, Spain, Poland, and the eastern Mediterranean. Among the highlights are four Ottonian manuscripts, Romanesque treasures from Germany, Italy, and France, and English Gothic Apocalypse, and late medieval manuscripts painted by such masters as Jean Fouquet, Girolamo da Cremona, Simon Marmion, and Joris Hoefnagel. Included are liturgical books, devotional books for private use, books of the Bible, histories by Giovanni Boccaccio and Jean Froissart, and a Model Book of Calligraphy.

Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent


Jeffrey F. Hamburger - 1997
    Hamburger's groundbreaking study of the art of female monasticism explores the place of images and image-making in the spirituality of medieval nuns during the later Middle Ages. Working from a previously unknown group of late-fifteenth-century devotional drawings made by a Benedictine nun for her cloistered companions, Hamburger discusses the distinctive visual culture of female communities. The drawings discovered by Hamburger and the genre to which they belong have never been given serious consideration by art historians, yet they serve as icons of the nuns' religious vocation in all its complexity. Setting the drawings and related imagery—manuscript illumination, prints, textiles, and metalwork—within the context of religious life and reform in late medieval Germany, Hamburger reconstructs the artistic, literary, and institutional traditions that shaped the lives of cloistered women.Hamburger convincingly demonstrates the overwhelming importance of "seeing" in devotional practice, challenging traditional assumptions about the primacy of text over image in monastic piety. His presentation of the "visual culture of the convent" makes a fundamental contribution to the history of medieval art and, more generally, of late medieval monasticism and spirituality.

Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered


Wayne Franits - 1997
    With the advent of new methodologies, these debates have gained momentum in the past decade. Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, which includes classic essays as well as contributions especially written for this volume, provides a timely survey of the principal interpretative methods and debates, from their origins in the 1960s to current manifestations, while suggesting potential avenues of inquiry for the future. The book offers fascinating insights into the meaning of Dutch art in its original cultural context as well as into the world of scholarship that it has inspired.

The Art of Glass: Art Nouveau to Art Deco


Victor Arwas - 1997
    This introduction to the most innovative period of glass making in the twentieth century is a beautifully illustrated reference guide to the work of the great designers and firms of the time.