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.

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.

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.

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.

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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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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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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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.

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.

The sleek lines and gleaming facades of the architecture of the late 1940s and 1950s reflect a culture fascinated by the promise of the Jet Age. Buildings like Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal at JFK Airport and Philip Johnson's Four Seasons Restaurant retain a thrilling allure, seeming to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. In this work, distinguished architectural historian Alice Friedman draws on a vast range of sources to argue that the aesthetics of mid-century modern architecture reflect an increasing fascination with "glamour," a term widely used in those years to characterize objects, people, and experiences as luxurious, expressive, and even magical.

Featuring assessments of architectural examples ranging from Mies van der Rohe's monolithic Seagram Building to Elvis Presley's sprawling Graceland estate, as well as vintage photographs, advertisements, and posters, this book argues that new audiences and client groups with tastes rooted in popular entertainment made their presence felt in the cultural marketplace during the postwar period. The author suggests that American and European architecture and design increasingly reflected the values of a burgeoning consumer society, including a fundamental confidence in the power of material objects to transform the identity and status of those who owned them.

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.