Historian and architectural critic William H. Jordy (1917–1997) significantly shaped the way we understand the character and meaning of modern architecture and American culture. This collection of his thought-provoking essays encompasses Jordy’s entire career and includes his signature essay, “The Symbolic Essence of Modern Architecture of the Twenties and Its Continuing Influence.” The collection also contains critical writings on works by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, and Robert Venturi as well as significant but less-well-known pieces and one previously unpublished text.

The book demonstrates the range and depth of Jordy’s thinking. He leads his readers to discover important connections of architecture with art, literature, intellectual history, symbolic structures, social purpose, and community. Mardges Bacon’s insightful introduction to the volume situates Jordy’s essays in historical and architectural context and offers a concise intellectual biography of this original and influential thinker.

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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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Written in the spirit of Ovid (43 B.C–A.D. 1718), this book traces the art derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses from the Renaissance up to the present day. The Metamorphoses has been more widely illustrated than any other book except the Bible; for centuries, great artists have drawn, painted, and sculpted its stories, the artists often responding not only to Ovid’s work but to one another’s in their depictions.  Paul Barolsky, a specialist in Italian Renaissance art and literature, explores Ovid’s unparalleled influence on the visual arts, discussing works by many of the most famous artists of the past six centuries.  Broadly interdisciplinary, the new understanding of the themes of the Metamorphoses revealed here will appeal to those in the fields of Renaissance art, humanism, literature, history, and classics, among others.  Ovid and the Metamorphoses of Modern Art from Botticelli to Picasso is a meditation on what words can achieve that images cannot, and conversely what images can show that words cannot tell.

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Frederic Church (1826–1900), the most celebrated painter in the United States during the mid-19th century, created monumental landscapes of North and South America, the Arctic, and the Middle East. These paintings were unsurpassed in their attention to detail, yet the significance of this pictorial approach has remained largely unexplored. In this important reconsideration of Church's works, Jennifer Raab offers the first sustained examination of the aesthetics of detail that fundamentally shaped 19th-century American landscape painting. Moving between historical context and close readings of famous canvases—including Niagara, The Heart of the Andes, and The Icebergs—Raab argues that Church's art challenged an earlier model of painting based on symbolic unity, revealing a representation of nature with surprising connections to scientific discourses of the time. The book traces Church's movement away from working in oil on canvas to shaping the physical landscape of Olana, his self-designed estate on the Hudson River, a move that allowed the artist to rethink scale and process while also engaging with pressing ecological questions. In sum, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail offers a profoundly new understanding of this canonical artist.

Underlying the religious art of the Renaissance is a tension between the needs of the Church and the impulse to create great works. This book presents sacred images from the 15th and 16th centuries, leading up to two pivotal events in 1563. The Council of Trent, which signified the beginning of the Counter-Reformation, defined requirements that curtailed the freedom of painters and patrons in creating art for churches, while the founding of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence symbolically acknowledged that artists had achieved the status of creators not craftsmen. Marcia B. Hall takes a fresh look at some of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance not typically associated with sacred imagery and shows how they navigated their way through the paradox of "limited freedom" to forge a new kind of religious art.

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In this highly original inquiry into the foundations of European culture, John Onians argues that the study of classical art provides a unique window into the minds of the Greeks and Romans for whom it was produced. Onians provides a sweeping account that ranges from the Greek Dark Ages to the Christianization of Rome and that reveals how the experience of a constantly changing physical environment influenced the inhabitants of ancient Greece and Rome. Tracing the imaginative life of these peoples through their responses to and their relation with the material world, the author shows how an examination of their artistic activity offers an especially insightful approach to their ideas and attitudes.

The book begins by explaining how the early Greeks—exposed to a rocky landscape, dependent on craft activities, and involved in warfare—saw themselves as made of stone and metal and represented themselves in statues of marble and bronze. Later, in the Hellenistic period, as the awareness of the individual’s power increased, so did the sense of physical and emotional weakness, while, with the rise of Rome, art came to be seen less as representation and more as sign, to be experienced less as a lever on the feelings and more as an aid to memory. By the end of the Roman Empire, Onians contends, inhabitants acquired an unprecedented sense of unstable inner life that enabled them to represent themselves not as solid sculptures but as thin marble slabs, their surfaces animated by veins suggestive of hidden spiritual vitality.

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Although Edouard Manet has long been regarded as one of the greatest nineteenth-century French artists, there has been little agreement about the real character of his contribution. His beautifully executed paintings often reveal curious tensions in the handling of space and color and leave his intentions unclear. Contemporary writers such as Zola and Mallarmé view his work very differently, and art historians and critics interpret his work in many ways, from strict formalism, devoid of meaning, to internalized musings full of hidden symbolism.

In this investigation of the artist and the society in which he lived, Anne Coffin Hanson examines the ambiguities that surround Manet. Manet is seen not just as an artistic genius, but as a man of his times, subject to the same influences and interests as his contemporaries, and painting, at least initially, with the same knowledge of his craft as his fellow artists. What emerges is a totally new concept of the man and what he was trying to do: a modern artist, complex, witty, ironical, and deeply involved in the world of his day.

Hanson first studies the ideas about art and life to which Manet was exposed through literature and his associations with literary friends. She then analyzes Manet's subject matter considering the influence of traditional masterpieces, as well as current, less-elevated popular imagery. Finally, she considers how he painted, what he learned from his teacher and from the models he admired, and how he developed his own extraordinarily expressive technique. The controlling theme through the book is la vie moderne—that sense of anticipation and enthusiasm about a modern life which would be essentially different from the past, yet rooted in the French tradition. Manet's art expressed the transitory feelings of this crucial moment in French history and yet remains profoundly beautiful and lasting.

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When artists depict the world around them, says David Lubin, their images necessarily respond to the underlying social conflicts of their time. Lubin here examines the work of six nineteenth-century American artists to show how their paintings at once embraced and, paradoxically, resisted dominant social values.

The artists considered—John Vanderlyn, George Caleb Bingham, Robert Duncanson, Lilly Martin Spencer, Seymour Guy, and William Harnett—came from a variety of backgrounds: several began in the working class, some were immigrants, three hailed from the West, one was an African-American, another was a woman. Drawing on letters, diaries, newspaper reviews, conduct manuals, poetry, fiction, and political speeches, as well as on modern critical theory, Picturing a Nation describes the America that created these artists and that these artists helped to create. Insisting on the complexity of nineteenth-century culture, Lubin provides multiple interpretations of individual paintings in a manner both subtle and revealing. His analyses take into account the nation's ambivalence toward domesticity, its conflicting ideas about child raising, its racial disharmony, territorial expansion, and many other issues central to the formation of modern America. He argues that the paintings speak to us today in contradictory voices because such was the nature of the societies that produced and received them.

Published with the assistance of the Getty Grant Program.

Manet, a founding father of modernism, is one of the towering figures of nineteenth-century art. In this absorbing book, Carol Armstrong looks closely at Manet’s works to uncover a novel and compelling view not only of the artist but also of modernity itself. As she places his art within frameworks of color, the feminine Other (the “Manette” in “Manet”), and consumerism, Armstrong greatly expands and revises our understanding of this artist as a painter of modern life.

Surveying most of Manet’s diverse output, the book addresses along the way his methods of self-presentation, his exhibition strategies, the relation of his etchings and paintings, the significance of his relationships with the model Victorine Meurent and the painter Berthe Morisot, the painterly construction of identity and gender difference, and much more. At the same time, the book considers contemporary writings by Baudelaire, Zola, the Goncourts, and others who dealt with issues relating to artistic identity and modernity, painting, the model, and femininity. Armstrong concludes that Manet’s work demonstrates consistent preoccupations with defining and contradicting his own signature style of painting and with the gendering of costume, color, and the making of his art. These preoccupations, she shows, suggest a new understanding of Manet’s oeuvre.

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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 this important and wide-ranging book, esteemed architectural historian Neil Levine investigates for the first time the complex history of representation—the use and meaning of architectural signifiers—from the 18th through the 20th century. Using the lens of a continuous theoretical argument, Levine provides a detailed survey and critical analysis of major works by a host of modern architects, including Étienne-Louis Boullée, Nicholas Hawksmoor, Louis Kahn, Henri Labrouste, Augustus Welby Pugin, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, John Soane, Louis Sullivan, Mies van der Rohe, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Levine posits that all modern architects, much like visual artists, have had to grapple with issues of representation in their work. Interweaving influential examples from outside the scope of modern architecture, Levine traces the history of representation in architecture, and in writings on architecture, both within each architect’s oeuvre and throughout the centuries discussed. The book features previously unpublished images, many created for this publication, and it addresses a variety of specific cases while offering an original and panoramic view of the history of architecture.

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This remarkable book, now a classic in its field, has transformed the way we look at Impressionist art. The culmination of twenty years of research by preeminent scholar Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism fundamentally revised the conventional view of this famous artistic movement and shows how it was fully integrated into the social and cultural life of the times.

The author explores the themes of leisure and entertainment that dominated the great years of Impressionist painting between 1865 and 1885. Cafes, opera houses, dance halls, theaters, racetracks, and vacations by the sea were the central subjects of the majority of these paintings, and Herbert relates these pursuits to the transformation of Paris under the Second Empire. This book presents provocative new interpretations of a wide range of famous masterpieces. Artists are seen to be active participants in, as well as objective witnesses to, contemporary life, and there are many profound insights into the social and cultural upheaval of the times.

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