Skip to main content
Skip to top navigation
Skip to site search
Action menu options
Close action menu
Sign in to use this feature
Please wait while we complete your search...
Please wait while we complete your search...
eBooks
Titles
Subject Areas
Authors
Publishers
Advanced search
Image Search
Search
Coursepacks
Coursepacks list
Search
Site search
Search in:
All content
Coursepacks
Media library
Publications
Search
Sign in
Accessibility Options
Base text size -
This is a sample piece of body text
Larger
Smaller
Shopping cart (0)
Accessibility Options
Titles
Loading eBooks
Sort by:
Title (A-Z)
Title (Z-A)
Author (A-Z)
Author (Z-A)
Publisher (A-Z)
Publisher (Z-A)
Print date (oldest first)
Print date (newest first)
1
–
12
of
123
titles
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Previous
|
Next
Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender
David J. Getsy
Publisher (in print)
WorldCat
Google Books
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.
Author
David J. Getsy
Publisher
Yale University Press
Print publication date
November 2015 (in print)
Print ISBN
9780300196757
EISBN
9780300232646
Copyright
© 2015 by David Getsy
Illustrations
100 illus
Print Status
in print
Posted by
John Carlson
278 views
0 comments
Purchase the entire book for $12.99
(133,341 words)
Add to cart
Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics
Ann Eden Gibson
Publisher (out of print)
WorldCat
Google Books
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.
Author
Ann Eden Gibson
Publisher
Yale University Press
Print publication date
November 1999 (out of print)
Print ISBN
9780300080728
EISBN
9780300229011
Copyright
Yale University Press 1999
Illustrations
191
Print Status
out of print
Posted by
John Carlson
354 views
0 comments
Purchase the entire book for $15.99
(136,842 words)
Add to cart
The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century
Albert Boime
Publisher (out of print)
WorldCat
Google Books
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.
Author
Albert Boime
Publisher
Yale University Press
Print publication date
June 1986 (out of print)
Print ISBN
9789998002845
EISBN
9780300244458
Copyright
© 1986 by Yale University
Illustrations
161
Print Status
out of print
Posted by
John Carlson
103 views
0 comments
Purchase the entire book for $19.95
(135,160 words)
Add to cart
Act of Portrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James
David M. Lubin
Publisher (out of print)
WorldCat
Google Books
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.
Author
David M. Lubin
Publisher
Yale University Press
Print publication date
January 1986 (out of print)
Print ISBN
9780300032130
EISBN
9780300235845
Copyright
© 1985 by Yale University
Illustrations
23 Illus.
Print Status
out of print
Posted by
John Carlson
91 views
0 comments
Purchase the entire book for $8.99
(77,310 words)
Add to cart
African Americans in Art: Selections from The Art Institute of Chicago
Susan F. Rossen
,
Andrea D. Barnwell
(Contributor),
Colin L. Westerbeck
(Contributor)
Publisher (out of print)
WorldCat
Google Books
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.
Author
Susan F. Rossen
,
Andrea D. Barnwell
(Contributor),
Colin L. Westerbeck
(Contributor)
Publisher
Art Institute of Chicago
Print publication date
May 1999 (out of print)
Print ISBN
9780300114799
EISBN
9780300236859
Copyright
©1999 by The Art Institute of Chicago
Illustrations
95 Illus.
Print Status
out of print
Posted by
John Carlson
84 views
0 comments
Purchase the entire book for $8.99
(62,494 words)
Add to cart
American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life
Elizabeth Johns
Publisher (in print)
WorldCat
Google Books
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.
Author
Elizabeth Johns
Publisher
Yale University Press
Print publication date
December 1991 (in print)
Print ISBN
9780300050196
EISBN
9780300232165
Copyright
© 1991 by Elizabeth Johns
Illustrations
80
Print Status
in print
Posted by
John Carlson
165 views
0 comments
Purchase the entire book for $12.99
(112,078 words)
Add to cart
American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture
Alice T. Friedman
Publisher (in print)
WorldCat
Google Books
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.
Author
Alice T. Friedman
Publisher
Yale University Press
Print publication date
June 2010 (in print)
Print ISBN
9780300116540
EISBN
9780300230932
Copyright
© 2010 by Alice T. Friedman
Illustrations
165
Print Status
in print
Posted by
John Carlson
177 views
0 comments
Purchase the entire book for $10.99
(104,736 words)
Add to cart
America’s Rome: Volume I—Classical Rome
William L. Vance
Publisher (out of print)
WorldCat
Google Books
This remarkable book is one of a two-volume set that examines the impact of Rome on American artists and writers from the earliest days of the new republic. William L. Vance presents examples of American painting, sculpture, and writings of many different kinds (novels, poetry, travel books, letters, cultural commentary, journalism) that have been inspired by American encounters with Roman places and people over the course of two centuries.
Volume I focuses on the influence of classical Rome, showing how the Forum and the Colosseum inspired American thoughts of ideal republics and powerful empires, how the Campagna was an ambiguous image of Arcadia or wasteland in the aftermath of empire, and how the Pantheon and the galleries of antique sculpture presented a pagan challenge to American ideas of divinity, beauty, and sexuality.
Author
William L. Vance
Publisher
Yale University Press
Print publication date
September 1989 (out of print)
Print ISBN
9789998004733
EISBN
9780300243925
Copyright
© 1989 by Yale University
Illustrations
173
Print Status
out of print
Posted by
John Carlson
126 views
0 comments
Purchase the entire book for $9.46
(216,609 words)
Add to cart
America's Rome: Volume II—Catholic and Contemporary Rome
William L. Vance
Publisher (out of print)
WorldCat
Google Books
This remarkable book, one of a two-volume set, discusses the impact of Rome on American artists and writers from the earliest days of the new republic. Vance presents examples of American painting, sculpture, and writings of many different kinds (novels, poetry, travel books, letters, cultural commentary, journalism) that have been inspired by American encounters with Roman places and people over the course of two centuries.
In this volume, Vance begins by examining the three foremost Roman Catholic symbols: the bambino, the madonna, and the pope. He traces for the first time the evolution of American writing on popes from the late eighteenth century to the election of Pope John Paul II, including fictional depictions of an American pope. Then, he explores the predominantly negative American reaction to Catholic baroque sculpture and architecture in the nineteenth century.
In the section on contemporary Rome, the author addresses American attitudes toward Rome’s earliest attempts at democratization, toward its aristocratic social structures, and toward the political changes that occurred after World War II.
Author
William L. Vance
Publisher
Yale University Press
Print publication date
September 1989 (in print)
Print ISBN
9780300044539
EISBN
9780300243932
Copyright
© 1989 by Yale University
Illustrations
34
Print Status
in print
Posted by
John Carlson
104 views
0 comments
Purchase the entire book for $7.97
(276,988 words)
Add to cart
The Ancient Americas: Art from Sacred Landscapes
Richard F. Townsend
(Editor)
Publisher (out of print)
WorldCat
Google Books
Marking the Columbus quincentennial, this catalog of a traveling exhibition explores the common threads in fourteen pre-Columbian cultures, from the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec of Mexico and Guatemala through the Chavin culture (900–200 B.C.) of the Andes to the Moche, Chimu, and the Inca empire. The book contains essays from 26 scholars examining sacred geographies, myths, and ancient beliefs as they are transmitted through visual arts and architecture.
Author
Richard F. Townsend
(Editor)
Publisher
Art Institute of Chicago
Print publication date
December 1998 (in print)
Print ISBN
9780865591042
EISBN
9780300226997
Copyright
© 1992 The Art Institute of Chicago
Illustrations
427
Print Status
in print
Posted by
John Carlson
321 views
0 comments
Purchase the entire book for $37.99
(158,479 words)
Add to cart
Ancient Bronzes through a Modern Lens: Introductory Essays on the Study of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Bronzes
Susanne Ebbinghaus
,
Lisa Anderson
(Contributor),
Francesca G. Bewer
(Contributor)
Publisher (in print)
WorldCat
Google Books
This publication brings together prominent art historians, conservators, and scientists to discuss fresh approaches to the study of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern works of bronze. Featuring significant bronzes from the Harvard Art Museums’ holdings as well as other museum collections, the volume’s eight essays present technical and formal analyses in a format that will be useful for both general readers and students of ancient art. The text provides an overview of ancient manufacturing processes as well as modern methods of scientific examination, and it focuses on objects as diverse as large-scale statuary and more utilitarian armor, vessels, and lamps. Filling a current gap in the art historical literature, this book offers a much-needed, accessible introduction to ancient bronzes.
Author
Susanne Ebbinghaus
,
Lisa Anderson
(Contributor),
Francesca G. Bewer
(Contributor)
Publisher
Harvard Art Museums
Print publication date
November 2014 (in print)
Print ISBN
9780300207798
EISBN
9780300236842
Copyright
© 2014 President and Fellows of Harvard College
Illustrations
113 Illus.
Print Status
in print
Posted by
John Carlson
56 views
0 comments
Purchase the entire book for $12.99
(75,179 words)
Add to cart
Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archaeology of the Unknown Past
Richard F. Townsend
(Editor)
Publisher (out of print)
WorldCat
Google Books
This volume documents the splendid accomplishments of Ancient West Mexico, and brings together some of its finest examples of sculptural art, including representations of people, animals and plants, as well as vessels and models of houses, ceremonial centres, ball games and ritual scenes. All the extraordinary earthenware figures illustrated here have been recovered from burial sites and shaft tombs. They represent a wide range of subjects — warriors, chieftains, ladies, acrobats, shamans, musicians, ball players, festival couples and bound prisoners — in a variety of styles from about 200 BC to AD 800 — that compose the artistic canon of Ancient West Mexico, a region encompassing the modern states of Colima, Jalisco and Nayarit.
Author
Richard F. Townsend
(Editor)
Publisher
Art Institute of Chicago
Print publication date
January 1998 (in print)
Print ISBN
9780500050927
EISBN
9780300222074
Copyright
©1998 by The Art Institute of Chicago
Illustrations
415
Print Status
in print
Posted by
John Carlson
887 views
0 comments
Purchase the entire book for $23.99
(155,109 words)
Add to cart
Default
For this site to function correctly you need to enable javascript in your browser.