Hailed as one of the most influential and expressive painters of the seventeenth century, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–ca. 1656) has figured prominently in the art historical discourse of the past two decades. This attention to Artemisia, after many years of scholarly neglect, is partially due to interest in the dramatic details of her early life, including the widely publicized rape trial of her painting tutor, Agostino Tassi, and her admission to Florence’s esteemed Accademia del Disegno. While the artist’s early paintings have been extensively discussed, her later work has been largely dismissed.

This elegantly written book provides a revolutionary look at Artemisia’s later career, refuting longstanding assumptions about the artist. The fact that she was semi-illiterate has erroneously led scholars to assume a lack of literary and cultural education on her part. Stressing the importance of orality in Baroque culture and in Artemisia’s paintings, Locker argues for her important place in the cultural dialogue of the seventeenth century.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

As early as the sixteenth century, drawing in England came to be seen as something more than an activity exclusive to artists—it became a polite and useful art, a practice of everyday life. This generously illustrated book explores the social and cultural processes that enabled drawing to emerge as an amateur pastime, as well as the meanings that drawing had for people who were not artists. Ann Bermingham shows how the history of drawing in England—from the age of Elizabeth I to the era of early photography—mirrored changes in society, politics, the practical world, and notions of self.

The book examines how drawing intersected with a wide range of social phenomena, from political absolutism, writing, empirical science, and Enlightenment pedagogy to nationalism, industrialism, tourism, bourgeois gentility, and religious instruction. Bermingham discusses the central role of drawing and the visual arts in Renaissance debates about government and self-government, then considers the relations between seventeenth-century drawing, natural science, and the masculine ideal of the honest gentleman. She also investigates landscape drawing in the context of eighteenth-century views on sensibility; the emergence of the amateur draftsman and the accomplished woman; and the commercialization of amateur drawing in the nineteenth century. The book concludes with a discussion of the impact of photography on the social practice of drawing.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

This critically acclaimed book is both a detailed history of the development of modern art in England in the early twentieth century and a study of the evolution of the concept of modernism among English artists, critics, and theorists.

Charles Harrison explores the two main phases of modern art activity during the period: the years before and during the First World War, when the principal factions were Sickert's Camden Town Group, the English Post-Impressionists, and the Vorticists; and the 1930s, when a new avant garde assembled in response to recent developments in European art, only to divide into groupings of abstract artists, Surrealists, and Realists. Harrison discusses the artists of the period, the most important individual works, and the writings of the critics, resulting in a major contribution to knowledge about the art and theory of modernism.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

Bearing witness to the changing economic landscape amid the Cold War, artists in the 1960s created works that critiqued, reshaped, and sometimes reinforced the spirit of capitalism. At a time when currency and finance were becoming ever more abstracted—and the art market increasingly an arena for speculation—artists on both sides of the Atlantic turned to economic themes, often grounded in a human context. The Artist as Economist examines artists who approached these issues in critical, imaginative, and humorous ways: Andy Warhol and Larry Rivers incorporated the iconography of printed currency into their paintings, while Ray Johnson sought to disrupt and reinvent circuits of commerce with his mail art collages. Yves Klein and Edward Kienholz critiqued conceptions of artistic and monetary value, as Lee Lozano and Dennis Oppenheim engaged directly with the New York Stock Exchange. Such examples, which author Sophie Cras insightfully situates within their historic economic context, reveal capitalism’s visual dimension. As art and economics grow more entangled, this volume offers a timely consideration of art’s capacity to reflect on and reimagine economic systems.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

This book showcases 110 objects from the Dallas Museum of Art’s world-renowned African collection. In contrast to Western “art for art’s sake,” tradition-based African art served as an agent of religion, social stability, or social control. Chosen both for their visual appeal and their compelling histories and cultural significance, the works of art are presented under the themes of leadership and status; the cycle of life; decorative arts; and influences (imported and exported). Also included are many fascinating photographs that show the context in which these objects were originally used.

Drawn from talks between celebrated artist Richard Serra and acclaimed art historian Hal Foster held over a fifteen-year period, this volume offers revelations into Serra’s prolific six-decade career and the ideas that have informed his working practice. Conversations about Sculpture is both an intimate look at Serra’s life and work, with candid reflections on personal moments of discovery, and a provocative examination of sculptural form from antiquity to today. Serra and Foster explore such subjects as the artist’s work in steel mills as a young man; the impact of music, dance, and architecture on his art; the importance of materiality and site specificity to his aesthetic; the controversies and contradictions his work has faced; and his belief in sculpture as experience. They also discuss sources of inspiration—from Donatello and Brancusi to Japanese gardens and Machu Picchu—revealing a history of sculpture across time and culture through the eyes of one of the medium’s most brilliant figures.

Introduced with an insightful preface by Foster, this probing dialogue is beautifully illustrated with duotone images that bring to life both Serra's work and his key commitments.

In October 1962, a set of blurred surveillance photographs brought the world to the brink of nuclear apocalypse during the Cuban missile crisis. The pictures themselves demonstrated little, and explanatory captions were necessary to identify the danger for the public. In the following months, two artists with antithetical backgrounds arrived at a similar aesthetic: Andy Warhol, who began his career as a commercial artist in New York City, turned to the silkscreened replication of violent photographs. Gerhard Richter, who began as a mural painter in socialist Dresden, East Germany, painted blurred versions of personal and media photographs. In A Conspiracy of Images, author John J. Curley explores how the artists’ developing aesthetic approaches were informed by the political agency and ambiguity of images produced during the Cold War, particularly those disseminated by the mass media on both sides. As the first scholarly consideration of the visual conditions of the Cold War, A Conspiracy of Images provides a new and compelling transatlantic model for Cold War art history.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

In 1848 there were thirteen commercial photographic studios in the city of Paris. By 1871 this number had expanded to almost 400. This book is the first to analyze the origins of professional photography during the Second Empire and its transformation from a novel curiosity to a vital part of the urban environment.

Drawing on extensive archival documentation, Elizabeth Anne McCauley profiles the people who became commercial photographers—the innovators, entrepreneurs, and "artistes" who tried to earn their fortunes but were beset by bankruptcy and failure. She also discusses the business of photography—the ways studios were formed, products promoted, and financial backers found. In a detailed analysis of five studios that represent different aspects of commercial production, from industrial photographs to art reproductions, McCauley uncovers the social, political, and psychological needs that each type of photography satisfied. For example, in a groundbreaking examination of the market for photographs of female nudes, McCauley documents how the photographs reinforced masculine stereotypes of female sexual passivity, how government responses to such images reflected the precariousness of Napoleon III's political power, and how the photographs were positioned within ongoing arguments about realism as a new literary and artistic movement. Industrial Madness is not only an innovative contribution to the sociology of the arts but also an exploration of the ways ideology and visual representation intersected during the decades that saw the birth of modernism.

The book also includes a comprehensive listing of commercial photographers working in Paris between 1848 and 1871.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

Fin-de-siècle France was a period of unrest, with strikes, demonstrations, and anarchist terrorism reflecting deep social and political differences. Yet at the same time, this decade produced a vibrant visual culture—monumental sculpture, mural decoration, avant-garde painting, posters, illustrations, and photography—much of which was used to articulate France’s ideological arguments. This fascinating book shows how four key issues in social debate were treated by contemporary artists.

Richard Thomson begins by exploring disquieting attitudes toward the body and sexuality that resulted from France’s concerns about national decadence after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. He then considers how artists depicted crowds and represented public discomfort about mass unrest. Next he discusses religious imagery during a decade when the Catholic Church was attempting to come to terms with Republicanism. And finally he addresses the question of revenge against Germany for the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, showing that it was kept alive in contemporary art.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

The painter, designer, and architect Henry van de Velde (1863–1957) played a crucial role in expanding modernist aesthetics beyond Paris and beyond painting. Opposing growing nationalism around 1900, he sought to make painting the basis of an aesthetic that transcended boundaries between the arts and between nations through his work in Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Van de Velde’s designs for homes, museums, and theaters received international recognition. The artist, often associated with the Art Nouveau and Jugendstil, developed a style of abstraction that he taught in his School of Applied Arts in Weimar, the immediate precursor of and model for the Bauhaus. As a leading member of the German Werkbund, he helped shaped the fields of modern architecture and design. This long-awaited book, the first major work on van de Velde in English, firmly positions him as one of the twentieth century’s most influential artists and an essential voice within the modern movement.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

The great Spanish painter Francisco Goya has long been considered an artist of the Enlightenment who took a heroic stance against the forces of political oppression, and critics have read his art as a reflection of his renegade ideas. In this book Janis A. Tomlinson offers a fresh and innovative interpretation of the major paintings of Goya's mid-career, disentangling the historic Goya from the romanticized Goya and placing his works in the context of the ideological, social, and artistic changes of the times.

Tomlinson examines the social history of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spain from the outbreak of the French Revolution and its effect on Spain through the restoration of Spain's Bourbon monarchy in 1814. She discusses such well-known works by Goya as the Family of Carlos IV, the Maja vestida and the Maja desnuda, and the Second of May and Third of May, reassessing them in relation to Goya's changing patrons: Carlos IV and María Luisa, the court favorite Manuel Godoy, the rulers of the interim regimes of the Napoleonic years, Fernando VII, and, finally, the broader public characterized by its alienation from a conservative restoration regime. Emphasizing the complexity of the context that engendered these paintings, Tomlinson demonstrates that any reading of Goya's works must acknowledge the unique circumstances of their patronage and ideology in a period of transition and ambivalence.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*