In the modern period, sculpture has often been viewed as more limited, more literal, and also more primitive than the “leading” visual art: painting. But precisely because of its marginal status, Alex Potts points out in this stimulating and original book, sculpture has played a complex and intriguing role in modern ideas and fantasies surrounding visual art. Potts explores the special qualities of sculpture as a free-standing three-dimensional entity, and he considers the distinctive demands sculpture places on the viewer.

The book begins in the late eighteenth century, when a systematic formal distinction began to be made between painting and sculpture. Following changing attitudes toward sculpture through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Potts analyzes for the first time the radical transformation that has occurred not only in the nature of sculptural works but also in their display and reception. He focuses on a broad range of texts by major writers who have in some way been obsessed by sculpture and by such artist-theorists as Adolf Hildebrand and Donald Judd. The author also offers a detailed view of selected iconic works by key players in modern thinking about the sculptural. The impact of minimalism features prominently in this discussion, for it placed the phenomenology of viewing three-dimensional objects for the first time at the center of debate about modern visual art.

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

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), one of the most important figures ever to have written about art, is considered by many to be the father of modern art history. This book is an intellectual biography of Winckelmann that discusses his magnum opus, History of the Art of Antiquity, in the context of his life and work in Germany and in Rome in the eighteenth century.

Alex Potts analyzes Winckelmann's eloquent account of the aesthetic and imaginative Greek ideal in art, an account that focuses on the political and homoerotic sexual content that gave the antique ideal male nude its larger resonance. He shows how Winckelmann's writing reflects the well-known preoccupations and values of Enlightenment culture as well as a darker aspect of Enlightenment ideals—such as the fantasy of a completely free sovereign subjectivity associated with Greek art. Potts explores how Winckelmann's historical perspective on the art of antiquity both prefigures and undermines the more strictly historicizing views put forward in the nineteenth century and how his systematic definition of style and historical development casts a new light on the present-day understanding of these notions. According to Potts, Winckelmann goes well beyond the simple rationalist art history and Neoclassical art theory with which he is usually associated. Rather, he often seems to speak directly to our present awareness of the discomforting ideological and psychic contradictions inherent in supposedly ideal symbolic forms.

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

This pioneering book, the first monograph devoted to Donald Judd, addresses the whole breadth of Judd's practices. Drawing on documents found in nearly twenty archives, David Raskin explains why some of Judd's works of art seem startlingly ephemeral while others remain insistently physical. In the process of answering this previously perplexing question, Raskin traces Judd's principles from his beginnings as an art critic through his fabulous installations and designs in Marfa, Texas. He discusses Judd's early important paintings and idiosyncratic red objects, as well as the three-dimensional works that are celebrated throughout the world. He also examines Judd's commitment to empirical values and his political activism, and concludes by considering the importance of Judd's example for recent art.

Ultimately, Raskin develops a picture of Judd as never before seen: he shows us an artist who asserted his individuality with spare designs; who found spiritual values in plywood, Plexiglas, and industrial production; who refused to distinguish between thinking and feeling while asserting that science marked the limits of knowledge; who claimed that his art provided intuitions of morality but not a specific set of tenets; and who worked for political causes that were neither left nor right.

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

Renaissance Florence, of endless fascination for the beauty of its art and architecture, is no less intriguing for its dynamic political, economic, and social life. In this book Patricia Lee Rubin crosses the boundaries of all these areas to arrive at an original and comprehensive view of the place of images in Florentine society. The author asks an array of questions: Why were works of art made? Who were the artists who made them, and who commissioned them? How did they look, and how were they looked at? She demonstrates that the answers to such questions illuminate the contexts in which works of art were created, and how they were valued and viewed.

Rubin seeks out the meeting places of meaning in churches, in palaces, in piazzas—places of exchange where identities were taken on and transformed, often with the mediation of images. She concentrates on questions of vision and visuality, on “seeing and being seen.” With a blend of illustrations; close analyses of sacred and secular paintings by artists including Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Filippino Lippi, and Botticelli; and wide-ranging bibliographic essays, the book shines new light on fifteenth-century Florence, a special place that made beauty one of its defining features.

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

What is it to be a work of art? Renowned author and critic Arthur C. Danto addresses this fundamental, complex question. Part philosophical monograph and part memoiristic meditation, "What Art Is" challenges the popular interpretation that art is an indefinable concept, instead bringing to light the properties that constitute universal meaning. Danto argues that despite varied approaches, a work of art is always defined by two essential criteria: meaning and embodiment, as well as one additional criterion contributed by the viewer: interpretation. Danto crafts his argument in an accessible manner that engages with both philosophy and art across genres and eras, beginning with Plato's definition of art in "The Republic," and continuing through the progress of art as a series of discoveries, including such innovations as perspective, chiaroscuro, and physiognomy. Danto concludes with a fascinating discussion of Andy Warhol's famous shipping cartons, which are visually indistinguishable from the everyday objects they represent.

Throughout, Danto considers the contributions of philosophers including Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, and artists from Michelangelo and Poussin to Duchamp and Warhol, in this far-reaching examination of the interconnectivity and universality of aesthetic production.

In the flourishing ancient Indian communities of the American Southwest and northwest Mexico, master potters created ceramic arts that are considered among the most accomplished in the world. The symbolic imagery and distinctive local styles of the region are unmistakable—simple volumetric shapes covered with complex, interlocking geometrical designs that are sometimes combined with bold abstract animal, human, and composite figures. Within this shared tradition are clearly identifiable local styles and symbolic vocabularies, and this lavishly illustrated book focuses on one of them: the ceramic works of the Casas Grandes-Paquimé area of northwest Mexico and adjoining parts of New Mexico and Arizona, c. A.D. 1200–1400.

For the first time on a comprehensive scale, expert art historians and an artist-teacher discuss the complex imagery of approximately ninety Casas Grandes vessels with fifty pieces representing other major styles of the Greater Southwest. Superb examples show polychromatic designs of real and mythological animals, together with abstract human figures and remarkably varied geometries, demonstrating the imaginative complexity and exceptional achievement of the Casas Grandes potters. Certain motifs reflect affinities with distant Mesoamerica, yet the authors show that these forms were absorbed into a visual vocabulary that reflected the unique artistic and cosmological outlook of Casas Grandes, within the native Southwestern cultural tradition.

This important and innovative book examines artists' mobility as a critical aspect of Italian Renaissance art. It is well known that many eminent artists such as Cimabue, Giotto, Donatello, Lotto, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian traveled. This book is the first to consider the sixteenth-century literary descriptions of their journeys in relation to the larger Renaissance discourse concerning mobility, geography, the act of creation, and selfhood.

David Young Kim carefully explores relevant themes in Giorgio Vasari's monumental "Lives of the Artists," in particular how style was understood to register an artist's encounter with place. Through new readings of critical ideas, long-standing regional prejudices, and entire biographies, "The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance" provides a groundbreaking case for the significance of mobility in the interpretation of art and the wider discipline of art history.

Le Corbusier, the most influential architect of the twentieth century, died in 1965 only weeks after completing Mise au point, his last opus in the form of autobiographical reflections. Published posthumously, it is a curious and cryptic text, yet it sheds an important light on the great artist’s mind and temperament. This book is the first English translation of Mise au point, the first illustrated critical bilingual edition, and the first attempt to integrate this document into Le Corbusier’s life as a whole, especially its final embittered years.

In an insightful introduction and in annotations, Ivan Žaknić shows how the themes of the text echo the contradictions of Le Corbusier’s personality: determined to rebuke society and yet constantly courting its approval; devoted to serving the public and yet returning again and again to a solitary monastic ideal; distrusting professional institutions, the academy, and the government and yet stung by their willingness to pass him by. Žaknić links the themes of this text with Le Corbusier’s passion for certain literary works, especially Don Quixote, and emphasizes the architect’s many philosophical formulas for coming to terms with death—first that of his beloved wife and then his own. Including a revealing interview granted by Le Corbusier in the final months of his life, the volume is important for students of Le Corbusier’s art, architecture, and urban planning, as well as by those interested in modernism and twentieth-century culture.

Along the Ohio, Tennessee, and Mississippi Rivers, the archaeological remains of earthen pyramids, plazas, large communities, and works of art and artifacts testify to Native American civilizations that thrived there between 3000 B.C. and A.D. 1500. This fascinating book presents exciting new information on the art and cultures of these ancient peoples and features hundreds of photographs of important artworks, artifacts, and ritual objects excavated from Amerindian archaeological sites.

Drawing on excavation findings and extensive research, the contributors to the book document a succession of distinct ancient populations in the pre-Columbian world of the American Midwest and Southeast. A team of interdisciplinary scholars examines the connections between archaeological remains of different regions and the themes, forms, and rituals that continue in specific tribes of today. The book also includes the personal reflections of contemporary Native Americans who discuss their perspectives on the significance of the fascinating and beautiful prehistoric artifacts as well as their own cultural practices today.

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*

For the Classic Maya, who flourished in and around the Yucatan peninsula in the first millennium AD, artistic materials were endowed with an internal life. Far from being inert substances, jade, flint, obsidian, and wood held a vital essence, agency, and even personality. To work with these materials was to coax their life into full expression and to engage in witty play. Writing, too, could shift from hieroglyphic signs into vibrant glyphs that sprouted torsos, hands, and feet. Appearing to sing, grapple, and feed, they effectively blurred the distinction between text and image.

In this first full study of the nature of Maya materials and animism, renowned Mayanist scholar Stephen Houston provides startling insights into a Pre-Columbian worldview that dramatically contrasts with western perspectives. Illustrated with more than one hundred photographs, images, and drawings, this beautifully written book reveals the Maya quest for transcendence in the face of inevitable death and decay.

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