Pioneered by William Hogarth (1697–1764) and his peers in the early 18th century, and then revitalized by Johan Zoffany (1733–1810), the conversation piece was an innovative mode of portraiture, depicting groups posed in landscape or domestic settings. These artists grappled with creating complex multi-figured compositions and intricate narratives, filling their paintings with representations of socially, nationally, and temporally precise customs. Paying particular attention to the vibrant (and at times fabricated) interior and exterior settings in these works, Kate Retford discusses the various ways that the conversation piece engaged with the rich material culture of Georgian Britain. The book also explores how these portraits served a wide array of interests and concerns among familial networks and larger social groups. From codifying performances of politeness to engaging in cross-cultural exchanges, the conversation piece was a complex and nuanced expression of a multifaceted society.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
". . . it provides not only an extremely satisfying account of conversation pieces but makes significant contributions to our understanding of British art and the eighteenth century more broadly. Essential." — Craig Hanson, Choice

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An in-depth survey of the various phases of Expressionism, from its beginnings in 1905 to its most recent formulation in the art of the 1970s, this book examines Expressionist art for the first time in the context of the history of philosophy and social ideas. Author Donald E. Gordon shows how this art embodies the vanguard aesthetic of modern art and demonstrates in detail its relationship to the cultural traditions of its time.

In the late 19th century, a centuries-old preference for highly ornamented architecture gave way to a budding Modernism of clean lines and unadorned surfaces. At the same moment, everyday objects—cups, saucers, chairs, and tables—began to receive critical attention.

Alina Payne addresses this shift, arguing for a new understanding of the genealogy of architectural modernism: rather than the well-known story in which an absorption of technology and mass production created a radical aesthetic that broke decisively with the past, Payne argues for a more gradual shift, as the eloquence of architectural ornamentation was taken on by objects of daily use. As she demonstrates, the work of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier should be seen as the culmination of a conversation about ornament dating as far back as the Renaissance. Payne looks beyond the usual suspects of philosophy and science to establish theoretical catalysts for the shift from ornament to object in the varied fields of anthropology and ethnology; art history and the museum; and archaeology and psychology.

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The early 19th century was a period in German art in which painting played a significant part in the cultural resurgence commonly known as the Romantic Movement. This Movement and some of its chief exponents are examined against a background of German literature, philosophy and music.

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This original study sets out to investigate and analyze the reactions of English artists in the four decades following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The period was a critical one: despite the brilliant achievements of Turner, Constable, and Lawrence, there was a growing uneasiness about the "sensuous" direction taken by the British School as a whole. After years of isolation due to the wars with France, British artists became aware of striking new developments in continental art, culminating in the 1840s when German monumental painting was held up as a model for the competitions for the decoration of the new Houses of Parliament.

The first part of the book considers the principal areas of artistic contact between the two countries, the radical new developments in the field of aesthetics, and the new range of themes found in German Romanticism. The latter half looks at specific stylistic connections, the impact of German book illustration and design, the influence of the Munich school on history painting, and the rivalry between English and German artists in the field or religious art.

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In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

The Eighteenth Century features a particularly rich collection of images of Africans representing slavery’s apogee and the beginnings of abolition. Old visual tropes of a master with adoring black slave gave way to depictions of Africans as victims and individuals, while at the same time the intellectual foundations of scientific racism were established.

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In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

Europe and the World Beyond focuses geographically on peoples of South America and the Mediterranean as well as Africa—but conceptually it emphasizes the many ways that visual constructions of blacks mediated between Europe and a faraway African continent that was impinging ever more closely on daily life, especially in cities and ports engaged in slave trade.

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In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

The much-awaited Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque has been written by an international team of distinguished scholars, and covers the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The rise of slavery and the presence of black people in Europe irrevocably affected the works of the best artists of the time. Essays on the black Magus and the image of the black in Italy, Spain, and Britain, with detailed studies of Rembrandt and Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, all presented with superb color plates, make this new volume a worthy addition to this classic series.

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In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten classic books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

Black Models and White Myths examines the tendentious racial assumptions behind representations of Africans that emphasized the contrast between “civilization” and “savagery” and the development of so-called scientific and ethnographic racism. These works often depicted Africans within a context of sexuality and exoticism, representing their allegedly natural behavior as a counterpoint to inhibited European conduct.

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We often imagine the Renaissance as an age of exceptional human progress and artistic achievement. But, intriguingly, macabre images proliferated in precisely this period: unsettling depictions of Death personified, of decaying bodies, of young lovers struck down in their prime. These morbid themes run riot in the remarkable array of artworks featured in The Ivory Mirror. Nearly 200 artworks—from ivory prayer beads to gem-encrusted jewelry to exquisitely carved small sculptures—present us with an aspect of this era that is at once darker and more familiar than we might have expected. Focused on the challenge of making choices in an increasingly complex and uncertain world, Renaissance artists turned to poignant, often macabre imagery to address the critical human concern of acknowledging death, while striving to create a personal legacy that might outlast it. The essays gathered here discuss the development and significance of this transformative art of the past, while exploring themes that are still relevant today: how does one navigate the implicit tension between mortality and morality and seek to balance individual pleasure with the pursuit of a greater good?

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This fascinating book offers a definitive new assessment of the oeuvre of Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), a central figure of the interwar European avant-garde. Active as an artist, designer, publisher, performer, critic, poet, and playwright, Schwitters is best known for intimately scaled, materially rich collages and assemblages made from found objects—often refuse—that the artist described as having lost all contact with their role and history in the world at large. But as Graham Bader explores, such simple separation of art from life is precisely what Schwitters's "poisoned abstraction" calls into question.

Considering works reaching from Schwitters’s earliest collage-based pieces of 1918–19, through his 1920s advertising designs, to his seminal environmental installation the Merzbau, Bader carefully unpacks the meaning behind such projects and sheds new light on the tumultuous historical conditions in which they were made. In the process, he reveals a new Schwitters—aesthetically committed and politically astute—for our time. This authoritative account reframes our understanding of Schwitters’s multifaceted artistic practice and explores the complex entwinement of art, politics, and history in the modern period.

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An unusual collaboration among distinguished art historians and historians of science, this book demonstrates how printmakers of the Northern Renaissance, far from merely illustrating the ideas of others, contributed to scientific investigations of their time. Hans Holbein, for instance, worked with cosmographers and instrument makers on some of the earliest sundial manuals published; Albrecht Dürer produced the first printed maps of the constellations, which astronomers copied for over a century; and Hendrick Goltzius's depiction of the muscle-bound Hercules served as a study aid for students of anatomy.

Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe features fascinating reproductions of woodcuts, engravings, and etchings; maps, globe gores, and globes; multilayered anatomical "flap" prints; and paper scientific instruments used for observation and measurement.

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Printmaking matured in western Europe between 1470 and 1550, when the great generation of artists and printmakers brought international recognition to print as an art form. This book examines the technical and aesthetic experimentation that went into printmaking, workshop practices, and the material and social contexts of print production, and it gives the fullest account ever written of the ways in which Renaissance prints were produced, distributed, and acquired.

David Landau and Peter W. Parshall pose a range of practical questions about the production of prints. They investigate, for example, what materials were used, how they were acquired, and how a Renaissance printmaker's workshop operated. They explore the evidence that individual prints were beginning to be esteemed as works of art rather than as inexpensive substitutes for them, and the relationship between prints made to be collected and those of a more ephemeral nature intended for a wider audience. They discuss how prints were valued during the period, including the relative value of woodcuts to engravings, and engravings to etchings. And they investigate how prints evolved in relation to the pictorial arts of the Renaissance generally. Examining documentary evidence and many individual prints, Landau and Parshall provide an integrated view of the Renaissance print as a social and artistic enterprise and reevaluate the achievements of the most influential phase in the history of European printmaking.

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In late medieval Germany, wood was a material laden with significance. It was an important part of the local environment and economy, as well as an object of religious devotion in and of itself.  Gregory C. Bryda examines the multiple meanings of wood and greenery within religious art—as a material, as a feature of agrarian life, and as a symbol of the cross, whose wood has resonances with other iconographies in the liturgy. Bryda discusses how influential artists such as Matthias Grünewald, known for the Isenheim Altarpiece, and the renowned sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider exploited wood’s multivalent nature to connect spiritual themes to the lived environment outside church walls. Exploring the complex visual and material culture of the period, this lavishly illustrated volume features works ranging from monumental altarpieces to portable pictures and offers a fresh understanding of how wood in art functioned to unlock the mysteries of faith and the natural world in both liturgy and everyday life.

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