Art History and Theory

Publications

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Description: A. W. N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00252
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–1852) was one of the most influential architects and designers of the nineteenth century, a man whose ideas and design principles were adopted and developed by followers as diverse as William Morris and Frank Lloyd Wright. As an architect, Pugin created cathedrals, churches, colleges, convents, and a wide range of domestic buildings whose form and structure changed the nature of architecture in his era. As a designer, he was responsible for the Gothic Revival, the most popular decorative form in Britain and around the world, and he was the creator of stunning furniture and woodwork; silver, metalwork, and jewelry; pottery and tiles; textiles and wallpapers; and books. This important book, written by eminent scholars, presents a comprehensive picture of Pugin, his achievements, and his times.

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Author
Print publication date January 1995 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300066562
EISBN 9780300260922
Illustrations 410
Print Status out of print
Description: Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00005
Original and theoretically astute, Abstract Bodies is the first book to apply the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies to the discipline of art history. It recasts debates around abstraction and figuration in 1960s art through a discussion of gender’s mutability and multiplicity. In that decade, sculpture purged representation and figuration but continued to explore the human as an implicit reference. Even as the statue and the figure were left behind, artists and critics asked how the human, and particularly gender and sexuality, related to abstract sculptural objects that refused the human form.

This book examines abstract sculpture in the 1960s that came to propose unconventional and open accounts of bodies, persons, and genders. Drawing on transgender and queer theory, David J. Getsy offers innovative and archivally rich new interpretations of artworks by and critical writing about four major artists—Dan Flavin (1933–1996), Nancy Grossman (b. 1940), John Chamberlain (1927–2011), and David Smith (1906–1965). Abstract Bodies makes a case for abstraction as a resource in reconsidering gender’s multiple capacities and offers an ambitious contribution to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field.

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Print publication date November 2015 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300196757
EISBN 9780300232646
Illustrations 100 illus
Print Status in print
Description: Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00006
The Abstract Expressionist movement has long been bound up in the careers and lifestyles of about twelve white male artists who exhibited in New York in the 1940s. In this book Ann Eden Gibson reconsiders the history of the movement by investigating other artists—people of color, women, and gays and lesbians—whose versions of abstraction have been largely ignored until now.

Gibson argues that the origins and promotion of Abstract Expressionism were influenced by sexual and racial biases, and she shows how both the themes and physical appearance of Abstract Expressionism were gradually defined and refined by the white male artists who became its spokesmen, by critics, and by private and institutional supporters. She offers a justification for rethinking the definition of Abstract Expressionism through the work of such well-known contemporaries as Romare Bearden, Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Norman Lewis, Alfonso Ossorio, Aaron Siskind, Leon Polk Smith, Anne Ryan, and Hale Woodruff, as well as such lesser known artists as Ruth Abrams, Ronald Joseph, and Thelma Johnson Streat. Gibson contends that the current description of Abstract Expressionism has not only deprived it of such themes as masking, maternity, domesticity, and the experience of African American and Native American culture but has also limited it formally by excluding smaller, representational, and more personal work by canonical as well as noncanonical artists. She demonstrates that exposing the movement's true diversity makes this important heritage even more valuable than it was before.

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Print publication date November 1999 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300080728
EISBN 9780300229011
Illustrations 191
Print Status out of print
Description: The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00116
Using words and works of both pupils and masters of the French Academy of Beaux-Arts, this fascinating book provides a wealth of information about the environment and studio practices of French official art from 1830 to 1890. Albert Boime describes the training of new pupils in the Academic ateliers, from the time they began and were set to copy engravings and casts to their copying of the old masters in the Louvre to their work before the live model and landscape painting out-of-doors. Boime's account includes not only a history of the transition from guild-controlled arts sanctioned by the church to an academic system sponsored by the state but also a reassessment of the positive role played by the Academy's teaching program in the evolution of the independent movements of the nineteenth century.

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Print publication date June 1986 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9789998002845
EISBN 9780300244458
Illustrations 161
Print Status out of print
Description: Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00007
In the post-Civil War Era, American portraiture began to show a new complexity of character, a character at odds with itself and brimming with tensions between masculine and feminine sensibilities. David M. Lubin here examines three major works of portraiture, two paintings and one novel, from the 1880s: Thomas Eakins' The Agnew Clinic, John Singer Sargent's The Boit Children, and Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady. Discussing several contradictory tendencies evident in the three works, Lubin probes at greatest length the contradiction each artist sensed between masculine power and feminine passivity and relates this troublesome dichotomy to issues of property, propriety, social and authorial control, formalism, realism, and patriarchal family life. He argues that the conflict enacted depicts the pressures of a masculine-ordered bourgeois ideology and speaks of social problems in American culture both a century ago and today.

Act of Portrayal reveals not only how Eakins, Sargent, and James construct portraits but also how the subjects within those portraits view themselves or others, and how we, by our constructive, synthetic act of reading, add ourselves to the portrait-making process.

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Print publication date January 1986 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300032130
EISBN 9780300235845
Illustrations 23 Illus.
Print Status out of print
Description: African Americans in Art: Selections from The Art Institute of Chicago
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00008
This special, expanded issue of Museum Studies focuses on the Art Institute of Chicago's growing collection of works by African Americans. Essays on the work of such influential artists as Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Marion Perkins, and Lorna Simpson are presented along with an article on the Art Institute’s striking daguerreotype of Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass. In addition to these essays, a portfolio section features twenty-nine images, with informative, brief entries examining each work. This important publication presents an overview of the concerns surrounding race in art, celebrates the achievements of a number of gifted African American artists, and provides a broad, multifaceted view of American art and culture.

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Author
Print publication date May 1999 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300114799
EISBN 9780300236859
Illustrations 95 Illus.
Print Status out of print
Description: The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00338
The Age of Undress explores the emergence and meaning of neoclassical dress in the 1790s, tracing its evolution from Naples to London and Paris over the course of a single decade. The neoclassical style of clothing—often referred to as robe à la grecque, empire style, or “undress”—is marked by a sheer, white, high-waisted muslin dress worn with minimal undergarments, often accessorized with a cashmere shawl. This style represented a dramatic departure from that of previous decades and was short lived: by the 1820s, corsets, silks, and hoop skirts were back in fashion.

Amelia Rauser investigates this sudden transformation and argues that women styled themselves as living statues, artworks come to life, an aesthetic and philosophical choice intertwined with the experiments and innovations of artists working in other media during the same period. Although neoclassicism is often considered a cold, rational, and masculine movement, Rauser’s analysis shows that it was actually deeply passionate, with women at its core—as ideals and allegories, as artistic agents, and as important patrons.

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Print publication date March 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300241204
EISBN 9780300272536
Illustrations 181
Print Status in print
Description: Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place
Ittai Weinryb (Editor)
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00203
Votive objects or ex-votos are a broad category of material artifacts produced with the intention of being offered as acts of faith. Common across historical periods, religions, and cultures, they are presented as tokens of gratitude for prayers answered, as well as the physical manifestation of hopes and anxieties. Agents of Faith explores votive offerings in the context of material culture, art history, and religious studies to better understand their history and present-day importance. By looking at what humans have chosen to offer in their votive transactions, this volume uncovers their most intimate moments in life and questions the nature, role, and function of one of the most fundamental aspects of the relationship between people and things—the imbuing of objects with sentiment. Encompassing exquisite works of art as well as votives of humble origin and material, with objects dating from 2000 B.C. to the twenty-first century, the beautiful illustrations and wide-ranging text expose the global reach of votive practices and the profoundly personal nature behind their creation.

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Author
Ittai Weinryb (Editor)
Print publication date October 2018 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300222968
EISBN 9780300254679
Illustrations 390
Print Status in print
Description: Alain Locke and the Visual Arts
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00339
Alain Locke (1885–1954), leading theorist of the Harlem Renaissance, maintained a lifelong commitment to the visual arts. Offering an in-depth study of Locke’s writings and art world interventions, Kobena Mercer focuses on the importance of cross-cultural entanglement. This distinctive approach reveals Locke’s vision of modern art as a dynamic space where images and ideas generate new forms under the fluid conditions of diaspora.

Positioning the philosopher as an advocate for an Afromodern aesthetic that drew from both formal experiments in Europe and the iconic legacy of the African past, Mercer shows how Aaron Douglas, Loïs Mailou Jones, and other New Negro artists acknowledged the diaspora’s rupture with the ancestral past as a prelude to the rebirth of identity. In his 1940 picture book, The Negro in Art, Locke also explored the different ways black and white artists approached the black image. Mercer’s reading highlights the global mobility of black images as they travel across national and ethnic frontiers. Finally, Mercer examines how Locke’s investment in art was shaped by gay male aestheticism. Black male nudes, including works by Richmond Barthé and Carl Van Vechten, thus reveal the significance of queer practices in modernism’s cross-cultural genesis.

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Print publication date September 2022 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300247268
EISBN 9780300272949
Illustrations 119
Print Status in print
Description: The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00212
The painting and carving of altarpieces was one of the most important and characteristic tasks of Italian Renaissance artists, yet the altarpiece as an artistic genre has been surprisingly neglected by art historians. This book—the first detailed study of the altarpiece in a major center of Renaissance art—focuses on Venice from 1450 to 1530. Peter Humfrey, an authority on Venetian painting, explores a wide range of issues surrounding altarpieces as an art form. These include the traditions of decoration of Venetian churches, the sacred and secular functions that altarpieces were expected to perform, the market for altarpieces, and the professional world of the Venetian artist. He discusses altarpieces by Bellini, Cima, the three Vivarini, and the young Titian, as well as by numerous other painters and sculptors of the period.

A central theme of the book is the relation between the altarpieces and their original physical and liturgical context. Throughout, Humfrey tries to reintegrate altarpieces with their intended settings, both for the sake of recapturing their full visual effect and as a basis for examining the ideological relationship between their subject matter and the altar table below. He also examines the complex mixture of motives, worldly as well as pious, that prompted fifteenth-century Venetians to spend large sums of money on commissioning altarpieces for the churches of their city. The first part of the book is thematic, dealing with the making, placement, and function of the altarpiece. The second part is a chronological discussion of specific works, focusing on the ways in which the artists met challenges posed by specific commissions. An appendix to the book gives further factual and bibliographical information about one hundred major Venetian altarpieces of the period.

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Print publication date July 1993 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300053584
EISBN 9780300258035
Illustrations 315
Print Status out of print
Description: Always Reaching: The Selected Writings of Anne Truitt
Spanning more than fifty years, this comprehensive volume collects the letters, journal entries, interviews, lectures, reviews, and remembrances of the groundbreaking twentieth-century artist Anne Truitt (1921–2004). Alexandra Truitt, the artist’s daughter and a leading expert on her work, has carefully selected these writings, most of which are previously unpublished, from the artist’s papers at Bryn Mawr College as well as private holdings.

Revelations about the artist’s life abound. Among Truitt’s earliest writings are excerpts from journals written more than a decade before her first artistic breakthrough, in which she establishes themes that would occupy her for decades. In later texts she shares uncommon insights into the practices of other artists and writers, both predecessors and peers. Like Truitt’s published journals, these writings offer a compelling narrative of her development as an artist and efforts to find her voice as a writer. They show that Truitt’s creative impulse to translate the inner workings of her mind into a symbolic language, so important to understanding her sculpture, predates her art.
Print publication date April 2023 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300260410
EISBN 9780300279016
Illustrations 63
Print Status in print
Description: Ambitious Form: Giambologna, Ammanati, and Danti in Florence
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00009
Ambitious Form describes the transformation of Italian sculpture during the neglected half century between the death of Michelangelo and the rise of Bernini. The book follows the Florentine careers of three major sculptors—Giambologna, Bartolomeo Ammanati, and Vincenzo Danti—as they negotiated the politics of the Medici court and eyed one another's work, setting new aims for their art in the process. Only through a comparative look at Giambologna and his contemporaries, it argues, can we understand them individually--or understand the period in which they worked.

Michael Cole shows how the concerns of central Italian artists changed during the last decades of the Cinquecento. Whereas their predecessors had focused on specific objects and on the particularities of materials, late sixteenth-century sculptors turned their attention to models and design. The iconic figure gave way to the pose, individualized characters to abstractions. Above all, the multiplicity of master crafts that had once divided sculptors into those who fashioned gold or bronze or stone yielded to a more unifying aspiration, as nearly every ambitious sculptor, whatever his training, strove to become an architect.
Print publication date January 2010 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691147444
EISBN 9780300249712
Illustrations 170
Print Status in print
Description: American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00011
American genre painting flourished in the thirty years before the Civil War, a period of rapid social change that followed the election of President Andrew Jackson. 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.

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Print publication date December 1991 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300050196
EISBN 9780300232165
Illustrations 80
Print Status out of print
Description: American Painting: From the Armory Show to the Depression
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00013
American Painting: From the Armory Show to the Depression is a history of modern painting in the United States in the exciting period between 1913 and 1929—the years when the schools of modernism and conservatism struggled for dominance in American art.

It begins with the emergence of a school of realism, dubbed in derision the Ash Can School, an artistic outgrowth of the liberal reform movement and of the general cultural revolt at the beginning of the twentieth-century. The introduction of modernism through Alfred Stieglitz and his circle and the first great exhibition of modern art at the Armory Show in 1913 is described as a clean break from this establishment American academic tradition. The period ended with the coming of the Depression when the realist tradition reasserted itself in a new generation of American Scene and Regionalist painters.

This book investigates the impact of Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Purism, etc., upon American artists; the original Dada and mechanistic experiments of Duchamp and Picabia in this country and their effects; the development of a native school of Cubist Realism; pseudo-scientific theories as a reaction among some more conservative artists to the new movements; and the many experiments and eventual assimilation of modernism by leading artists of the period.
Print publication date January 1970 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780691003016
EISBN 9780300249699
Illustrations 155
Print Status out of print
Description: American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00253
The formation of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 by a small, dedicated group of painters transformed the perception of what had long been considered a marginal medium. Artists of all ages, styles, and backgrounds took up watercolor in the 1870s, inspiring younger generations of impressionists and modernists. By the 1920s many would claim it as “the American medium.”

This engaging and comprehensive book tells the definitive story of the metamorphosis of American watercolor practice between 1866 and 1925, identifying the artist constituencies and social forces that drove the new popularity of the medium. The major artists of the movement—Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, William Trost Richards, Thomas Moran, Thomas Eakins, Charles Prendergast, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, Charles Demuth, and many others—are represented.
Print publication date March 2017 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300225891
EISBN 9780300262292
Illustrations 346
Print Status out of print
Description: America's Rome: Volume II—Catholic and Contemporary Rome
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00014
This remarkable book, one of a two-volume set, discusses the impact of Rome on American artists and writers from the earliest days of the new republic. Vance presents examples of American painting, sculpture, and writings of many different kinds (novels, poetry, travel books, letters, cultural commentary, journalism) that have been inspired by American encounters with Roman places and people over the course of two centuries.

In this volume, Vance begins by examining the three foremost Roman Catholic symbols: the bambino, the madonna, and the pope. He traces for the first time the evolution of American writing on popes from the late eighteenth century to the election of Pope John Paul II, including fictional depictions of an American pope. Then, he explores the predominantly negative American reaction to Catholic baroque sculpture and architecture in the nineteenth century.

In the section on contemporary Rome, the author addresses American attitudes toward Rome’s earliest attempts at democratization, toward its aristocratic social structures, and toward the political changes that occurred after World War II.

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Print publication date September 1989 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300044539
EISBN 9780300243932
Illustrations 34
Print Status in print
Description: The Anatomy of Nature: Geology and American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00117
Geology was in vogue in nineteenth-century America. People crowded lecture halls to hear geologists speak, and parlor mineral cabinets signaled social respectability and intellectual engagement. This was also the heyday of the Hudson River School, and many prominent landscape painters avidly studied geology. Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, Frederic Church, John F. Kensett, William Stanley Haseltine, Thomas Moran, and other artists read scientific texts, participated in geological surveys, and carried rock hammers into the field to collect fossils and mineral specimens. As they crafted their paintings, these artists drew on their geological knowledge to shape new vocabularies of landscape elements resonant with moral, spiritual, and intellectual ideas.

Rebecca Bedell contributes to current debates about the relationship among art, science, and religion by exploring this phenomenon. She shows that at a time when many geologists sought to disentangle their science from religion, American artists generally sidestepped the era's more materialist science, particularly Darwinism. They favored a conservative, Christianized geology that promoted scientific study as a way to understand God. Their art was both shaped by and sought to preserve this threatened version of the science. And, through their art, they advanced consequential social developments, including westward expansion, scenic tourism, the emergence of a therapeutic culture, and the creation of a coherent and cohesive national identity.

This major study of the Hudson River School offers an unprecedented account of the role of geology in nineteenth-century landscape painting. It yields fresh insights into some of the most influential works of American art and enriches our understanding of the relationship between art and nature, and between science and religion, in the nineteenth century. It will draw a broad audience of art historians, Americanists, historians of science, and readers interested in the American natural landscape.
Print publication date January 2002 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691102917
EISBN 9780300249675
Illustrations 76
Print Status in print
Description: The Ancient Americas: Art from Sacred Landscapes
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00118
Marking the Columbus quincentennial, this catalog of a traveling exhibition explores the common threads in fourteen pre-Columbian cultures, from the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec of Mexico and Guatemala through the Chavin culture (900–200 B.C.) of the Andes to the Moche, Chimu, and the Inca empire. The book contains essays from 26 scholars examining sacred geographies, myths, and ancient beliefs as they are transmitted through visual arts and architecture.

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Author
Print publication date December 1998 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780865591042
EISBN 9780300226997
Illustrations 427
Print Status in print
Description: Ancient Bronzes through a Modern Lens: Introductory Essays on the Study of Ancient...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00015
This publication brings together prominent art historians, conservators, and scientists to discuss fresh approaches to the study of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern works of bronze. Featuring significant bronzes from the Harvard Art Museums’ holdings as well as other museum collections, the volume’s eight essays present technical and formal analyses in a format that will be useful for both general readers and students of ancient art. The text provides an overview of ancient manufacturing processes as well as modern methods of scientific examination, and it focuses on objects as diverse as large-scale statuary and more utilitarian armor, vessels, and lamps. Filling a current gap in the art historical literature, this book offers a much-needed, accessible introduction to ancient bronzes.

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Author
Print publication date November 2014 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300207798
EISBN 9780300236842
Illustrations 113 Illus.
Print Status in print
Description: Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archaeology of the Unknown Past
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00016
This volume documents the splendid accomplishments of Ancient West Mexico, and brings together some of its finest examples of sculptural art, including representations of people, animals and plants, as well as vessels and models of houses, ceremonial centres, ball games and ritual scenes. All the extraordinary earthenware figures illustrated here have been recovered from burial sites and shaft tombs. They represent a wide range of subjects — warriors, chieftains, ladies, acrobats, shamans, musicians, ball players, festival couples and bound prisoners — in a variety of styles from about 200 BC to AD 800 — that compose the artistic canon of Ancient West Mexico, a region encompassing the modern states of Colima, Jalisco and Nayarit.
Author
Print publication date January 1998 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780500050927
EISBN 9780300222074
Illustrations 415
Print Status in print
Description: Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00255
One of the most successful and internationally celebrated artists of the eighteenth century, Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807) established her reputation with sensitive portraits as well as ambitious history paintings. This major study explores the artist’s work and career by considering how Kauffman reconciled the public and presumed masculine pursuit of painting with her role as woman artist and arbiter of private taste.

Author Angela Rosenthal analyzes Kauffman’s pictorial strategies and her significant contribution to portraiture as a field of representation, including detailed discussion of the artist’s extraordinary series of self-portraits. Featuring a wealth of new information, this illustrated book demonstrates Kauffman’s role in shaping European visual culture, shedding new light on the history of women artists and on art history as a critical discipline.

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Print publication date May 2006 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300103335
EISBN 9780300264517
Illustrations 161
Print Status out of print
Description: Anne Vallayer-Coster: Painter to the Court of Marie-Antoinette
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00325
Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744–1818) was one of the most talented still-life painters of the French school. Her exquisite paintings, today located in some of the world’s finest museums, were admired and collected by many of her contemporaries, including Marie Antoinette, who became the artist’s most important patron.

This book, the first devoted to Vallayer-Coster in over 30 years, presents a stunning array of the artist’s still-life works, many of which have never before been reproduced in color. Recently rediscovered works, including three royal portraits from the collection of Versailles and a hitherto unknown pastel of Marie-Antoinette, are published here for the first time. The authors draw on the most current research to examine Vallayer-Coster’s relationship with landscape painter Joseph Vernet; her response to her immediate predecessor, still-life painter Jean-Siméon Chardin; her role with contemporary collectors of her art; and her place in the larger context of the eighteenth-century art world. The book also includes new archival and conservation findings and an illustrated index of extant paintings by Vallayer-Coster.

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Print publication date June 2022 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300093292
EISBN 9780300270358
Illustrations 264
Print Status out of print
Description: Antifascism in American Art
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00017
Between 1933 and 1945, American painters of widely divergent political views and artistic styles shared a belief that their art should aid in the fight against fascism. In this engrossing book, Cécile Whiting presents the first thorough study of the politically motivated art of this period.

Whiting shows how the various manifestations of antifascist art negotiated the competing demands of artistic conventions, aesthetic and political theories, and historical developments. The author explores the art produced by the radical Left in the early 1930s and social-realist art of the late 1930s. She looks at the way in which Stuart Davis reconciled modernism with antifascist politics by celebrating American democracy through semi-abstract paintings, and how the regionalists Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry strengthened American patriotism with nationalist myths and propaganda for the Allied cause. Whiting explains that as such overtly political and nationalist art came under fire for resembling the propaganda of the enemy, social realists and regionalists alike sought to endow some of their paintings with more universal appeal. She concludes by examining the myth paintings of Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, which not only captured a sense of the chaos and violence of the war but also challenged the way Nazi, regionalist, and social-realist artists used myth for nationalist political purposes. The dominance of abstraction in the post-war art world, says Whiting, was the direct legacy of this contentious artistic debate on how best to use art in the service of antifascism.

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Print publication date September 1989 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300042597
EISBN 9780300232189
Illustrations 107
Print Status out of print
Description: Antonio Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00247
One of Italy’s greatest modern painters, Antonio Mancini (1852–1930) is best known for his daring and innovative painting methods. This overview of his career—the first comprehensive study in English—follows upon the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s recent acquisition of fifteen major oil paintings and pastels by Mancini, including the famous Il Saltimbanco (1877–78), all of which are included in this beautiful volume.

Mancini’s paintings are at once realistic and visionary, and they span a career that brought him from the legendary slums of Naples to Paris, Rome, and English country houses. Of particular interest is Mancini’s relevance to the American art world, where he was once a much-discussed controversial figure, supported by a small group of American patrons and artists before becoming famous in Italy. John Singer Sargent is said to have called Mancini the greatest living painter.

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Print publication date November 2007 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300122206
EISBN 9780300260915
Illustrations 101
Print Status out of print
Description: Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition
Perhaps America's best environmental idea was not the national park but the garden cemetery, a use of space that quickly gained popularity in the mid-nineteenth century. Such spaces of repose brought key elements of the countryside into rapidly expanding cities, making nature accessible to all and serving to remind visitors of the natural cycles of life. In this unique interdisciplinary blend of historical narrative, cultural criticism, and poignant memoir, Aaron Sachs argues that American cemeteries embody a forgotten landscape tradition that has much to teach us in our current moment of environmental crisis.

Until the trauma of the Civil War, many Americans sought to shape society into what they thought of as an Arcadia—not an Eden where fruit simply fell off the tree, but a public garden that depended on an ethic of communal care, and whose sense of beauty and repose related directly to an acknowledgement of mortality and limitation. Sachs explores the notion of Arcadia in the works of nineteenth-century nature writers, novelists, painters, horticulturists, landscape architects, and city planners, and holds up for comparison the twenty-first century's—and his own—tendency toward denial of both death and environmental limits. His far-reaching insights suggest new possibilities for the environmental movement today and new ways of understanding American history.
Print publication date January 2013 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300176407
EISBN 9780300276640
Illustrations 54
Print Status in print
Description: The Archaeology of Ancient China
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00207
The prehistory and the formation process of Chinese civilization have long been of interest to world historians.  However, knowledge of this period is constantly evolving because much of our understanding of ancient China is based on archaeological data that continues to come to light.

This fourth edition of K.C. Chang’s now-standard text on Chinese archaeology incorporates the latest information that has become available since the end of the Cultural Revolution.  Chang has rewritten and reorganized the material, using a new format to discuss the period from the early humans and their Palaeolithic cultures through the first agricultural settlements to the rise and development of the earliest civilizations around 1000 B.C.  Chang now demonstrates that several regional cultures developed independently of one another and began to be linked together around 4000 B.C.  According to Chang, the interaction of these cultures laid the foundation for the Chinese civilization that we recognize in the early dynasties and in China’s written history.  Chang also presents provocative views on the distinctive process of the rise of civilization, urbanism, and the state society in China, as embodied in the Chinese archaic bronzes.  The book includes more than 300 illustrations.

This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date September 1987 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300037821
EISBN 9780300256697
Illustrations 357
Print Status out of print
Description: The Art and Architecture of Ancient America: The Mexican, Maya and Andean Peoples
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00123
Yale University Press/Pelican History of Art

This important book examines the development of the principal styles of ancient American architecture, sculpture, and painting until the end of the Aztec and Inca empires in the sixteenth century. Written by esteemed scholar George Kubler, the volume aims to explain works of art as such, rather than dwelling upon those ideas about civilization that art is often made to illustrate in books of a more archaeological character. The Art and Architecture of Ancient America is arranged by geographical regions in three main divisions: Mexico, Central America and western South America. Architecture, sculpture, and painting occupy most of the volume, but town planning, pottery, textiles, and jewelry are also discussed. Many of the illustrations portray little known sites, buildings, and objects.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date November 1992 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300053258
EISBN 9780300225594
Illustrations 448
Print Status in print
Description: The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt
A wealth of art and architectural treasures survive from Ancient Egypt—a civilization that endured from the fourth millennium B.C. to the conquest of Alexander the Great. In this book, Ancient Egyptian monuments, their decorations, and many other works of art are reproduced in more than four hundred beautiful illustrations.

The Ancient Egyptians in their tombs attempted to recreate life for the dead in a naturalistic way, often against the background of the landscape in which they lived. This book shows the tombs at Thebes, including the treasure-filled burial place of Tutankhamen, the temples of Luxor and Karnak, and the palaces of Akhenaten at Tell el Amarna and of Amenhotep III at Thebes. It also presents many revealing portraits depicting a range of subjects from the kings and queens who built the pyramids at Giza and Saqqara to their own civil servants.

Many works reproduced in black-and-white in the print version of the book have been replaced with high-quality color illustrations in this electronic version.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date January 1999 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300077476
EISBN 9780300276480
Illustrations 420
Print Status out of print
Description: The Art and Architecture of Islam: 1250–1800
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00124
Yale University Press/Pelican History of Art

Virtually all the masterpieces of Islamic art—the Alhambra, the Taj Mahal, and the Tahmasp Shahnama—were produced during the period from the Mongol conquests in the early thirteenth century to the advent of European colonial rule in the nineteenth. This important book surveys the architecture and arts of the traditional Islamic lands during this era.

Conceived as a sequel to The Art and Architecture of Islam: 650–1250, by Richard Ettinghausen and Oleg Grabar, the book follows the general format of the first volume, with chronological and regional divisions and architecture treated separately from the other arts. The authors describe over two hundred works of Islamic art of this period and also investigate broader social and economic contexts, considering such topics as function, patronage, and meaning. They discuss, for example, how the universal caliphs of the first six centuries gave way to regional rulers and how, in this new world order, Iranian forms, techniques, and motifs played a dominant role in the artistic life of most of the Muslim world; the one exception was the Maghrib, an area protected from the full brunt of the Mongol invasions, where traditional models continued to inspire artists and patrons. By the sixteenth century, say the authors, the eastern Mediterranean under the Ottomans and the area of northern India under the Mughals had become more powerful, and the Iranian models of early Ottoman and Mughal art gradually gave way to distinct regional and imperial styles. The authors conclude with a provocative essay on the varied legacies of Islamic art in Europe and the Islamic lands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date September 1994 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300058888
EISBN 9780300233988
Illustrations 300 illus.
Print Status in print
Description: Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Théodore...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00348
In Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France, Greg Thomas sets forth a new ecological model of landscape painting, in which the process of art is seen to mimic the creative processes silently at work in the environment around us. Developing an aesthetics of place with implications for the entirety of nineteenth-century art, Thomas focuses specifically and with engaging exactitude on the landscapes of Barbizon painter Théodore Rousseau. These paintings—dreams of nature as a web of life in which human beings occupy a peripheral role—overwhelmed Rousseau's contemporaries with their novel light effects, original perspective, and "sheer profusion of visual sensation." While Baudelaire considered them superior to even Corot's works, they baffled art critics and have never fit convincingly into the received categories of naturalism, "pre-Impressionism," or modernism.

Surveying Rousseau's whole career and presenting the first English translations of his writings, Thomas analyzes the artist's political beliefs and record as a pioneer conservationist. He also traces alterations in a number of the French sites that Rousseau depicted, most notably the royal forest of Fontainebleau. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the author reinterprets Rousseau's paintings as embodiments of a new way of seeing the world, a new sense of the deep interconnectedness between the human and natural worlds that coincided with the earliest formulations of modern ecological thought. Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France offers readers the considerable pleasure of rediscovering one of the most important and most neglected painters of the nineteenth century.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date May 2000 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780691059464
EISBN 9780300273694
Illustrations 90
Print Status out of print