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29775 books about History and 2028
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29775 books about History and 2028
29775 books about History
2028 start with A start with A
2028 start with A start with A
Arming America through the Centuries
War, Business, and Building a National Security State
Benjamin Franklin Cooling
University of Tennessee Press, 2023
While many associate the concept commonly referred to as the “military-industrial complex” with President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address, the roots of it existed two hundred years earlier. This concept, as Benjamin Franklin Cooling writes, was “part of historical lore” as a burgeoning American nation discovered the inextricable relationship between arms and the State. In Arming America through the Centuries, Cooling examines the origins and development of the military-industrial complex (MIC) over the course of American history. He argues that the evolution of America’s military-industrial-business-political experience is the basis for a contemporary American Sparta. Cooling explores the influence of industry on security, the increasing prevalence of outsourcing, ever-present economic and political influence, and the evolving nature of modern warfare. He connects the budding military-industrial relations of the colonial era and Industrial Revolution to their formal interdependence during the Cold War down to the present-day resurrection of Great Power competition. Across eight chronological chapters, Cooling weaves together threads of industry, finance, privatization, appropriations, and technology to create a rich historical tapestry of US national defense in one comprehensive volume.
Integrating information from both recent works as well as canonical, older sources, Cooling’s ambitious single-volume synthesis is a uniquely accessible and illuminating survey not only for scholars and policymakers but for students and general readers as well.
[more]
Arming the Nation for War
Mobilization, Supply, and the American War Effort in World War II
Robert P. Patterson
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
A decorated World War I veteran, Federal Judge Robert P. Patterson knew all too well the
needs of soldiers on the battlefield. He was thus dismayed by America’s lack of military
preparedness when a second great war engulfed Europe in 1939–40. With the international
crisis worsening, Patterson even resumed military training—as a forty-nine-yearold
private—before being named assistant secretary of war in July 1940. That appointment
set the stage for Patterson’s central role in the country’s massive mobilization and
supply effort which helped the Allies win World War II.
In Arming the Nation for War, a previously unpublished account long buried among
the late author’s papers and originally marked confidential, Patterson describes the vast
challenges the United States faced as it had to equip, in a desperately short time, a fighting
force capable of confronting a formidable enemy. Brimming with data and detail, the book
also abounds with deep insights into the myriad problems encountered on the domestic
mobilization front—including the sometimes divergent interests of wartime planners and
industrial leaders—along with the logistical difficulties of supplying far-flung theaters of
war with everything from ships, planes, and tanks to food and medicine. Determined to
remind his contemporaries of how narrow the Allied margin of victory was and that the
war’s lessons not be forgotten, Patterson clearly intended the manuscript (which he wrote
between 1945 and ’47, when he was President Truman’s secretary of war) to contribute
to the postwar debates on the future of the military establishment. That passage of the
National Security Act of 1947, to which Patterson was a key contributor, answered many of
his concerns may explain why he never published the book during his lifetime.
A unique document offering an insider’s view of a watershed historical moment, Patterson’s
text is complemented by editor Brian Waddell’s extensive introduction and notes.
In addition, Robert M. Morgenthau, former Manhattan district attorney and a protégé of
Patterson’s for four years prior to the latter’s death in a 1952 plane crash, offers a heartfelt
remembrance of a man the New York Herald-Tribune called “an example of the public-spirited
citizen.”
needs of soldiers on the battlefield. He was thus dismayed by America’s lack of military
preparedness when a second great war engulfed Europe in 1939–40. With the international
crisis worsening, Patterson even resumed military training—as a forty-nine-yearold
private—before being named assistant secretary of war in July 1940. That appointment
set the stage for Patterson’s central role in the country’s massive mobilization and
supply effort which helped the Allies win World War II.
In Arming the Nation for War, a previously unpublished account long buried among
the late author’s papers and originally marked confidential, Patterson describes the vast
challenges the United States faced as it had to equip, in a desperately short time, a fighting
force capable of confronting a formidable enemy. Brimming with data and detail, the book
also abounds with deep insights into the myriad problems encountered on the domestic
mobilization front—including the sometimes divergent interests of wartime planners and
industrial leaders—along with the logistical difficulties of supplying far-flung theaters of
war with everything from ships, planes, and tanks to food and medicine. Determined to
remind his contemporaries of how narrow the Allied margin of victory was and that the
war’s lessons not be forgotten, Patterson clearly intended the manuscript (which he wrote
between 1945 and ’47, when he was President Truman’s secretary of war) to contribute
to the postwar debates on the future of the military establishment. That passage of the
National Security Act of 1947, to which Patterson was a key contributor, answered many of
his concerns may explain why he never published the book during his lifetime.
A unique document offering an insider’s view of a watershed historical moment, Patterson’s
text is complemented by editor Brian Waddell’s extensive introduction and notes.
In addition, Robert M. Morgenthau, former Manhattan district attorney and a protégé of
Patterson’s for four years prior to the latter’s death in a 1952 plane crash, offers a heartfelt
remembrance of a man the New York Herald-Tribune called “an example of the public-spirited
citizen.”
[more]
Arms and Men
A Study in American Military History
Millis, Walter
Rutgers University Press, 1981
"A classic..., a brilliant interpretation of the origins of mass warfare. In Arms and Men, Walter Millis has helped to explain not only how war has come to dominate our age, but the often troubled, anomalous relationship between the military and the rest of American society. For everyone, from the beginning student to the advanced scholar, there is not a more comprehensive, more stimulating, or more lively introduction to the men, the ideas, the policies, and the forces that have shaped the development of American military power."
--Richard H. Kohn
"In my opinion Arms and Men is a splendid piece of work, clearly organized, well argued and beautifully written. We have long needed an informed and intelligent commentary on the evolution of American military policy; and in Mr. Millis' book we have it. I think that his book will awaken great interest and be widely used. I am sure also that professional students of the subject will find it possible, after reading this book, to see the course of American military affairs with a new perspective. That is one of the great services performed by Mr. Millis. He has covered the whole subject with authority, but - thank heaven - in a short book, in which the arguments are not blunted by unnecessary detail."
--Gordon A. Craig
"This author knows weapons, politics and human nature. His perceptive grasp of these complexes shines in the writing."
--The New York Times
--Richard H. Kohn
"In my opinion Arms and Men is a splendid piece of work, clearly organized, well argued and beautifully written. We have long needed an informed and intelligent commentary on the evolution of American military policy; and in Mr. Millis' book we have it. I think that his book will awaken great interest and be widely used. I am sure also that professional students of the subject will find it possible, after reading this book, to see the course of American military affairs with a new perspective. That is one of the great services performed by Mr. Millis. He has covered the whole subject with authority, but - thank heaven - in a short book, in which the arguments are not blunted by unnecessary detail."
--Gordon A. Craig
"This author knows weapons, politics and human nature. His perceptive grasp of these complexes shines in the writing."
--The New York Times
[more]
Arms and the People
Popular Movements and the Military from the Paris Commune to the Arab Spring
Edited by Mike Gonzalez and Houman Barekat
Pluto Press, 2012
Looking at a range of global historical experiences, Arms and the People examines the relationship between mass movements and military institutions. Some argue that it is impossible to achieve and protect a revolution without the support of the army, but how can the support of the army be won?
Arms and the People explores the impact of profound social polarisation on the internal cohesion of the state’s ‘armed bodies of men’ and on the contested loyalties of soldiers. The different contributors examine a series of historical moments in which a crisis in the military institution has reflected a deeper social crisis which has penetrated that institution and threatened to disable it.
With a range of international contributors who have either studied or been directly involved in such social upheavals, Arms and the People is a pioneering contribution to the study of revolutionary change and will appeal to students and academics in history, politics and sociology.
Arms and the People explores the impact of profound social polarisation on the internal cohesion of the state’s ‘armed bodies of men’ and on the contested loyalties of soldiers. The different contributors examine a series of historical moments in which a crisis in the military institution has reflected a deeper social crisis which has penetrated that institution and threatened to disable it.
With a range of international contributors who have either studied or been directly involved in such social upheavals, Arms and the People is a pioneering contribution to the study of revolutionary change and will appeal to students and academics in history, politics and sociology.
[more]
Arms and the Woman
Classical Tradition and Women Writers in the Venetian Renaissance
Francesca D'Alessandro Behr
The Ohio State University Press, 2018
Arms and the Woman: Classical Tradition and Women Writers in the Venetian Renaissance by Francesca D’Alessandro Behr focuses on the classical reception in the works of female authors active in Venice during the Early Modern Age. Even in this relatively liberal city, women had restricted access to education and were subject to deep-seated cultural prejudices, but those who read and wrote were able, in part, to overcome those limitations.
In this study, Behr explores the work of Moderata Fonte and Lucrezia Marinella and demonstrates how they used knowledge of texts by Virgil, Ovid, and Aristotle to systematically reanalyze the biased patterns apparent both in the romance epic genre and contemporary society. Whereas these classical texts were normally used to bolster the belief in female inferiority and the status quo, Fonte and Marinella used them to envision societies structured according to new, egalitarian ethics. Reflecting on the humanist representation of virtue, Fonte and Marinella insisted on the importance of peace, mercy, and education for women. These authors took up the theme of the equality of genders and participated in the Renaissance querelle des femmes, promoting women’s capabilities and nature.
[more]
The Arms of Morpheus
Essays on Swedenborg and Mysticism
Stephen McNeilly
Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2007
The Arms of Morpheus:Essays on Swedenborg and Mysticism addresses the relatively untapped subject of the eighteenth-century Swedish philosopher and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and his place within the mystical tradition. Highlighting the congruencies and disparities of his ideas with those mystics and visionaries who preceded him and those that followed after, the volume opens with a wonderful essay on Swedenborg by the Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz and is followed by essays that offer important comparisons between Swedenborg and Jacob Boehme, Rudolf Steiner, Madame Guyon, the Kabbalah, Ibn ‘Arabi, and Paracelsus.
This volume, the fifth in the Journal of the Swedenborg Society series, contains the following seven essays:
• Czeslaw Milosz, “Swedenborg the Mystic”
• Ariel Hessayon, “Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg and Their Readers”
• Gary Lachman, “Swedenborg, Rudolf Steiner and the Hypnagogic State”
• Richard Lines, “The Feminine Mysticism of Madame Guyon”
• Reuben Bell, “Swedenborg and the Kabbalah”
• James Wilson, “Swedenborg and Paracelsus”
• José Antonio Antón-Pacheco, “Ibn ‘Arabi and Swedenborg”
Also included are a preface by Stephen McNeilly, a chronology of Swedenborg, biographies of the subjects of the essays, and an index.
This volume, the fifth in the Journal of the Swedenborg Society series, contains the following seven essays:
• Czeslaw Milosz, “Swedenborg the Mystic”
• Ariel Hessayon, “Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg and Their Readers”
• Gary Lachman, “Swedenborg, Rudolf Steiner and the Hypnagogic State”
• Richard Lines, “The Feminine Mysticism of Madame Guyon”
• Reuben Bell, “Swedenborg and the Kabbalah”
• James Wilson, “Swedenborg and Paracelsus”
• José Antonio Antón-Pacheco, “Ibn ‘Arabi and Swedenborg”
Also included are a preface by Stephen McNeilly, a chronology of Swedenborg, biographies of the subjects of the essays, and an index.
[more]
The Army and Democracy
Military Politics in Pakistan
Aqil Shah
Harvard University Press, 2014
Since Pakistan gained independence in 1947, only once has an elected government completed its tenure and peacefully transferred power to another elected government. In sharp contrast to neighboring India, the Muslim nation has been ruled by its military for over three decades. Even when they were not directly in control of the government, the armed forces maintained a firm grip on national politics. How the military became Pakistan's foremost power elite and what its unchecked authority means for the future of this nuclear-armed nation are among the crucial questions Aqil Shah takes up in The Army and Democracy.
Pakistan's and India's armies inherited their organization, training, and doctrines from their British predecessor, along with an ethic that regarded politics as outside the military domain. But Pakistan's weak national solidarity, exacerbated by a mentality that saw war with India looming around every corner, empowered the military to take national security and ultimately government into its own hands. As the military's habit of disrupting the natural course of politics gained strength over time, it arrested the development of democratic institutions.
Based on archival materials, internal military documents, and over 100 interviews with politicians, civil servants, and Pakistani officers, including four service chiefs and three heads of the clandestine Inter-Services Intelligence, The Army and Democracy provides insight into the military's contentious relationship with Pakistan's civilian government. Shah identifies steps for reforming Pakistan's armed forces and reducing its interference in politics, and sees lessons for fragile democracies striving to bring the military under civilian control.
[more]
Army and Nation
The Military and Indian Democracy since Independence
Steven I. Wilkinson
Harvard University Press, 2015
At Indian independence in 1947, the country’s founders worried that the army India inherited— conservative and dominated by officers and troops drawn disproportionately from a few “martial” groups—posed a real threat to democracy. They also saw the structure of the army, with its recruitment on the basis of caste and religion, as incompatible with their hopes for a new secular nation.
India has successfully preserved its democracy, however, unlike many other colonial states that inherited imperial “divide and rule” armies, and unlike its neighbor Pakistan, which inherited part of the same Indian army in 1947. As Steven I. Wilkinson shows, the puzzle of how this happened is even more surprising when we realize that the Indian Army has kept, and even expanded, many of its traditional “martial class” units, despite promising at independence to gradually phase them out.
Army and Nation draws on uniquely comprehensive data to explore how and why India has succeeded in keeping the military out of politics, when so many other countries have failed. It uncovers the command and control strategies, the careful ethnic balancing, and the political, foreign policy, and strategic decisions that have made the army safe for Indian democracy. Wilkinson goes further to ask whether, in a rapidly changing society, these structures will survive the current national conflicts over caste and regional representation in New Delhi, as well as India’s external and strategic challenges.
[more]
Army Life
From a Soldier's Journal
A. O. Marshall
University of Arkansas Press, 2009
In 1884, when Albert O. Marshall published Army Life, a memoir of his service as a private in the Thirty-Third Illinois Regiment, twenty years had passed since his 1864 discharge. Marshall left the journal untouched at publication, and today it is a journal that is rare in what it is not. This memoir is not a complete story of the Thirty-Third (known as the “Normal Regiment” because many of its soldiers were from Illinois State Normal University), nor is it a complete roster of regiment members, nor a list of killed and wounded. Army Life is not, even, a purely military account written from an officer’s point of view. It is the story of a twenty-year-old private whose engaging writing belies his age but also allows his youth to shine through. Marshall tells of the battles he fought and the games he played, of his friends, fellow soldiers, and officers, and of the regiment’s activities in Missouri and Arkansas, at Vicksburg, and in Louisiana and on the Texas Gulf Coast. Enhanced with careful editing and thorough annotations, this journal Marshall carried faithfully to every mustering out is a rich and important Civil War memoir.
[more]
Army Life of an Illinois Soldier
Including a Day-by-Day Record of Sherman's March to the Sea
Charles W. Wills. Foreword by John Y. Simon
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996
A high-spirited idealist who craved excitement when he enlisted in the Eighth Illinois Volunteers for three months and reenlisted for three years, Charles W. Wills of Canton, Illinois, wrote frequently to his sister Mary Emily Wills and kept a diary of General William T. Sherman’s campaigns during the last year of the war. In the beginning of his service, Wills could boast that his company refused to enlist "roughs." He reported that he and his comrades "drink no liquors and keep ourselves as cleanly as possible.... Almost all are reading or writing, and I defy anyone to find 75 men without any restraint, paying more attention to the Sabbath. . . . Health generally excellent in our company, because we are all careful."
A student and store clerk before enlisting, Wills found that army life "beats clerking." He enlisted as a private at the age of twenty-one and by twenty-four was a major. He had thought he might receive an infantry commission eventually, but when the opportunity arose for promotion to first lieutenant in the Seventh Illinois Cavalry, "cupidity and ambition" caused him to abandon the Eighth, enabling him to hold rank "without so much walking." For a while, though, he seriously rued his lack of action. "Haven’t I a brilliant record," he wrote. "Thirty-three months in service and not a battle." As Simon points out, however, "in the year ahead, Wills would have more than his fill of battles." Battle starved once, his enthusiasm for carnage waned as he marched with Sherman to the sea. Yet Major Wills was impressed by his troops’ "endurance, spirit and recklessness."
Wills matured in the army. He joined solely to preserve the Union, and his early comments on slaves "lacked sympathy, even decency," according to Simon. Later he came to the point where he would arm blacks—in part, with an eye toward gaining rank by leading the new regiments. Yet he was not blind to the anomalies of a slave society.
Wills died in 1883. To preserve his memory, his sister (now Mary Kellogg) printed his diary in 1904. Two years later, Kellogg combined the diary with the letters Wills had written to her earlier in the war. Simon renders this assessment: "Wills had a sparkling, witty style that contrasted sharply with that of both his contemporaries in the field and the seven regimental veterans who compiled their diaries. In assembling this book, Mary E. Kellogg wisely allowed her brother to speak for himself; rarely intruding a comment of her own, excising from his letters home inevitable expressions of concern for his sister and her welfare but leaving intact the sparkling flow of camp gossip and military speculation."
[more]
Army of Hope, Army of Alienation
Culture and Contradiction in the American Army Communities of Cold War Germany
John P. Hawkins
University of Alabama Press, 2004
Seeks to penetrate the logic, social structure, and daily practice of life in American military communities in Germany
Army life has always been known as a life of sacrifice, challenge, and frustration, yet one filled also with deep satisfactions. This is so for the soldiers’ families as much as for the soldiers themselves. Over the years, military and civilian leaders of the US Army have tried to reduce the hardships of military life by creating an array of community services designed to provide social support for soldiers and families and help them live satisfying lives in military communities.
Unfortunately, this effort has not been particularly successful, and frustration, dissatisfaction, and alienation persist among soldiers and family member in the US Army communities in Germany. Discontent continues because the underlying sources of alienation in the Army and among its families are highly complex, poorly understood, and therefore hardly addressed by the Army’s quality-of-life programs that are intended to make solider and family life more bearable.
In Army of Hope, Army of Alienation: Culture and Contradiction in the American Army Communities of Cold War Germany, the author seeks to penetrate the logic, social structure, and daily practice of life in the American military communities that lay scattered along the frontier between East and West Germany during the final years of the Cold War. In coming to understand the life and though of these American soldiers and families, ordinary American citizens can learn much about their military forces and about their own society and culture. In addition, a greater understanding about how people work and live around an institution that is at once so important and yet tasked with a mission so different from that of ordinary pursuits can stimulate social scientists and concerned citizens to think differently about culture, society, and behavior in general.
Army life has always been known as a life of sacrifice, challenge, and frustration, yet one filled also with deep satisfactions. This is so for the soldiers’ families as much as for the soldiers themselves. Over the years, military and civilian leaders of the US Army have tried to reduce the hardships of military life by creating an array of community services designed to provide social support for soldiers and families and help them live satisfying lives in military communities.
Unfortunately, this effort has not been particularly successful, and frustration, dissatisfaction, and alienation persist among soldiers and family member in the US Army communities in Germany. Discontent continues because the underlying sources of alienation in the Army and among its families are highly complex, poorly understood, and therefore hardly addressed by the Army’s quality-of-life programs that are intended to make solider and family life more bearable.
In Army of Hope, Army of Alienation: Culture and Contradiction in the American Army Communities of Cold War Germany, the author seeks to penetrate the logic, social structure, and daily practice of life in the American military communities that lay scattered along the frontier between East and West Germany during the final years of the Cold War. In coming to understand the life and though of these American soldiers and families, ordinary American citizens can learn much about their military forces and about their own society and culture. In addition, a greater understanding about how people work and live around an institution that is at once so important and yet tasked with a mission so different from that of ordinary pursuits can stimulate social scientists and concerned citizens to think differently about culture, society, and behavior in general.
[more]
Army Of Israel
David Bigler
Utah State University Press, 2000
The Army of Truth
Selected Poems
Henrik Wergeland
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003
One of Norway’s most celebrated literary figures of the nineteenth century, Henrik Wergeland worked tirelessly for the civil rights of Jews in Norway. He used the words and structure of his poetry to enliven the ideals of truth, freedom, and equality. This translated volume, containing several of Wergeland’s most prominent poems, beautifully encapsulates the compelling force of his message, allowing its enduring influence to benefit a wider contemporary audience.
[more]
Army Politics in Cuba, 1898-1958
Louis A., Jr. Perez
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976
Louis A. Pérez examines the founding of the national army in Cuba, the rise and fall of Cuban army preeminence during the Machado regime, the bizarre army seizure of power in 1933, which resulted in the collapse of the officer corps, and follows the dominance of the army until the revolution of 1958. He shows that the Cuban political order rested on the stability of the army, which itself grew increasingly estranged from national traditions and eventually became the tool of a clique of political leaders, only to fall to rebel forces during the revolution.
[more]
Around Quitting Time
Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction
Robert Seguin
Duke University Press, 2001
Virtually since its inception, the United States has nurtured a dreamlike and often delirious image of itself as an essentially classless society. Given the stark levels of social inequality that have actually existed and that continue today, what sustains this at once hopelessly ideological and breathlessly utopian mirage? In Around Quitting Time Robert Seguin investigates this question, focusing on a series of modern writers who were acutely sensitive to the American web of ideology and utopic vision in order to argue that a pervasive middle-class imaginary is the key to the enigma of class in America.
Tracing connections between the reconstruction of the labor process and the aesthetic dilemmas of modernism, between the emergence of the modern state and the structure of narrative, Seguin analyzes the work of Nathanael West, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, John Barth, and others. These fictional narratives serve to demonstrate for Seguin the pattern of social sites and cultural phenomenon that have emerged where work and leisure, production and consumption, and activity and passivity coincide. He reveals how, by creating pathways between these seemingly opposed domains, the middle-class imaginary at once captures and suspends the dynamics of social class and opens out onto a political and cultural terrain where class is both omnipresent and invisible.
Aroung Quitting Time will interest critics and historians of modern U.S. culture, literary scholars, and those who explore the interaction between economic and cultural forms.
Tracing connections between the reconstruction of the labor process and the aesthetic dilemmas of modernism, between the emergence of the modern state and the structure of narrative, Seguin analyzes the work of Nathanael West, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, John Barth, and others. These fictional narratives serve to demonstrate for Seguin the pattern of social sites and cultural phenomenon that have emerged where work and leisure, production and consumption, and activity and passivity coincide. He reveals how, by creating pathways between these seemingly opposed domains, the middle-class imaginary at once captures and suspends the dynamics of social class and opens out onto a political and cultural terrain where class is both omnipresent and invisible.
Aroung Quitting Time will interest critics and historians of modern U.S. culture, literary scholars, and those who explore the interaction between economic and cultural forms.
[more]
Around the Globe
Rethinking Oral History with Its Protagonists
Edited by Miroslav Vanek
Karolinum Press, 2013
In this unusual and important new work, Miroslav Vanek interviews twelve experts on oral history to discuss the medium’s current status within the social sciences in light of recent technology breakthroughs. Around the Globe addresses many of the challenges of oral history, from its inherent subjectivity to whether it should be treated as a discipline or simply a method for research. The interviewees also include their own accounts of how they began to study oral history, giving each section of the book a personal element that makes it a unique handbook for anyone using oral history in their research.
[more]
Around the Roman Table
Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome
Patrick Faas
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Craving dolphin meatballs? Can't find a reliable restaurant for boiled parrot? Have a hankering for jellyfish omelettes, sows' wombs in brine, sheep's brain pate, or stuffed mice? Look no further than Around the Roman Table, a unique hybrid cookbook and history lesson. A portrait of Roman society from the vantage point of the dining table, kitchen, and market stalls, Around the Roman Table offers both an account of Roman eating customs and 150 recipes reconstructed for the modern cook.
Faas guides readers through the culinary conquests of Roman invasions—as conquerors pillaged foodstuffs from faraway lands—to the decadence of Imperial Rome and its associated table manners, dining arrangements, spices, seasonings, and cooking techniques. With recipes for such appetizing dishes as chicken galantine with lambs' brains and fish relish, Around the Roman Table is ideal for food aficionados who wish to understand how the desire for power and conquest was manifested in Roman appetites.
"There are many misconceptions about the food of ancient Rome that Faas sets out to correct. The result is half cookbook, half history book and is entirely fascinating to both chef and antiquarian alike."—Washington Times
Faas guides readers through the culinary conquests of Roman invasions—as conquerors pillaged foodstuffs from faraway lands—to the decadence of Imperial Rome and its associated table manners, dining arrangements, spices, seasonings, and cooking techniques. With recipes for such appetizing dishes as chicken galantine with lambs' brains and fish relish, Around the Roman Table is ideal for food aficionados who wish to understand how the desire for power and conquest was manifested in Roman appetites.
"There are many misconceptions about the food of ancient Rome that Faas sets out to correct. The result is half cookbook, half history book and is entirely fascinating to both chef and antiquarian alike."—Washington Times
[more]
Around the World in 80 Words
A Journey through the English Language
Paul Anthony Jones
University of Chicago Press, 2018
What makes a place so memorable that it survives forever in a word? In this captivating round-the-world tour, Paul Anthony Jones acts as your guide through the intriguing stories of how eighty places became immortalized in the English language. You’ll discover why the origins of turkeys, limericks, Brazil nuts, and Panama hats aren’t quite as straightforward as you might presume. If you’ve never heard of the tiny Czech mining town of Jáchymov—or Joachimsthal, as it was known until the late 1800s—you’re not alone, which makes its claim to fame as the origin of the word “dollar” all the more extraordinary. The story of how the Great Dane isn’t all that Danish makes the list, as does the Jordanian mountain whose name has become a byword for a tantalizing glimpse. We’ll also find out what the Philippines has given to your office inbox, what Alaska has given to your liquor cabinet, and how a speech given by a bumbling North Carolinian gave us a word for impenetrable nonsense.
Surprising, entertaining, and illuminating, this is essential reading for armchair travelers and word nerds. Our dictionaries are full of hidden histories, tales, and adventures from all over the world—if you know where to look.
Surprising, entertaining, and illuminating, this is essential reading for armchair travelers and word nerds. Our dictionaries are full of hidden histories, tales, and adventures from all over the world—if you know where to look.
[more]
Around the World with LBJ
My Wild Ride as Air Force One Pilot, White House Aide, and Personal Confidant
By Brigadier General James U. Cross, USAF (retired), with Denise Gamino and Gary Rice
University of Texas Press, 2008
When Lyndon Baines Johnson wanted to go somewhere, there was no stopping him. This dynamic president called for Air Force One as others summon a taxi—at a moment's notice, whatever the hour or the weather. And the man who made sure that LBJ got his ride was General James U. Cross, the president's hand-picked pilot, top military assistant, and personal confidante. One of the few Air Force One pilots to have a position, simultaneously, in the White House, General Cross is also the only member of LBJ's inner circle who has not publicly offered his recollections of the president. In this book, he goes on the record, creating a fascinating, behind-the-scenes portrait of America's complex, often contradictory, always larger-than-life thirty-sixth president.
General Cross tells an engrossing story. In addition to piloting Air Force One around the globe, he served President Johnson in multiple capacities, including directing the Military Office in the White House; managing a secret two-million-dollar presidential emergency fund; supervising the presidential retreat at Camp David, the president's entire transportation fleet, and the presidential bomb shelters; running the White House Mess; hiring White House social aides, including the president's future son-in-law, Charles Robb; and writing condolence letters to the families of soldiers killed in Vietnam. This wide-ranging, around-the-clock access to President Johnson allowed Cross to witness events and share moments that add color and depth to our understanding of America's arguably most demanding and unpredictable president.
[more]
Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past
Invasion, Violence, and Imagination in Indigenous Central Australia
Diane J. Austin-Broos
University of Chicago Press, 2008
The Arrernte people of Central Australia first encountered Europeans in the 1860s as groups of explorers, pastoralists, missionaries, and laborers invaded their land. During that time the Arrernte were the subject of intense curiosity, and the earliest accounts of their lives, beliefs, and traditions were a seminal influence on European notions of the primitive. The first study to address the Arrernte’s contemporary situation, Arrernte Present, Arrernte Past also documents the immense sociocultural changes they have experienced over the past hundred years.
Employing ethnographic and archival research, Diane Austin-Broos traces the history of the Arrernte as they have transitioned from a society of hunter-gatherers to members of the Hermannsburg Mission community to their present, marginalized position in the modern Australian economy. While she concludes that these wrenching structural shifts led to the violence that now marks Arrernte communities, she also brings to light the powerful acts of imagination that have sustained a continuing sense of Arrernte identity.
Employing ethnographic and archival research, Diane Austin-Broos traces the history of the Arrernte as they have transitioned from a society of hunter-gatherers to members of the Hermannsburg Mission community to their present, marginalized position in the modern Australian economy. While she concludes that these wrenching structural shifts led to the violence that now marks Arrernte communities, she also brings to light the powerful acts of imagination that have sustained a continuing sense of Arrernte identity.
[more]
Arrested Histories
Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War
Carole McGranahan
Duke University Press, 2010
In the 1950s, thousands of ordinary Tibetans rose up to defend their country and religion against Chinese troops. Their citizen army fought through 1974 with covert support from the Tibetan exile government and the governments of India, Nepal, and the United States. Decades later, the story of this resistance is only beginning to be told and has not yet entered the annals of Tibetan national history. In Arrested Histories, the anthropologist and historian Carole McGranahan shows how and why histories of this resistance army are “arrested” and explains the ensuing repercussions for the Tibetan refugee community.
Drawing on rich ethnographic and historical research, McGranahan tells the story of the Tibetan resistance and the social processes through which this history is made and unmade, and lived and forgotten in the present. Fulfillment of veterans’ desire for recognition hinges on the Dalai Lama and “historical arrest,” a practice in which the telling of certain pasts is suspended until an undetermined time in the future. In this analysis, struggles over history emerge as a profound pain of belonging. Tibetan cultural politics, regional identities, and religious commitments cannot be disentangled from imperial histories, contemporary geopolitics, and romanticized representations of Tibet. Moving deftly from armed struggle to nonviolent hunger strikes, and from diplomatic offices to refugee camps, Arrested Histories provides powerful insights into the stakes of political engagement and the cultural contradictions of everyday life.
[more]
Arresting Dress
Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco
Clare Sears
Duke University Press, 2015
In 1863, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed a law that criminalized appearing in public in “a dress not belonging to his or her sex.” Adopted as part of a broader anti-indecency campaign, the cross-dressing law became a flexible tool for policing multiple gender transgressions, facilitating over one hundred arrests before the century’s end. Over forty U.S. cities passed similar laws during this time, yet little is known about their emergence, operations, or effects. Grounded in a wealth of archival material, Arresting Dress traces the career of anti-cross-dressing laws from municipal courtrooms and codebooks to newspaper scandals, vaudevillian theater, freak-show performances, and commercial “slumming tours.” It shows that the law did not simply police normative gender but actively produced it by creating new definitions of gender normality and abnormality. It also tells the story of the tenacity of those who defied the law, spoke out when sentenced, and articulated different gender possibilities.
[more]
Arrian the Historian
Writing the Greek Past in the Roman Empire
By Daniel W. Leon
University of Texas Press, 2021
During the first centuries of the Roman Empire, Greek intellectuals wrote a great many texts modeled on the dialect and literature of Classical Athens, some 500 years prior. Among the most successful of these literary figures were sophists, whose highly influential display oratory has been the prevailing focus of scholarship on Roman Greece over the past fifty years. Often overlooked are the period’s historians, who spurned sophistic oral performance in favor of written accounts. One such author is Arrian of Nicomedia.
Daniel W. Leon examines the works of Arrian to show how the era's historians responded to their sophistic peers’ claims of authority and played a crucial role in theorizing the past at a time when knowledge of history was central to defining Greek cultural identity. Best known for his history of Alexander the Great, Arrian articulated a methodical approach to the study of the past and a notion of historical progress that established a continuous line of human activity leading to his present and imparting moral and political lessons. Using Arrian as a case study in Greek historiography, Leon demonstrates how the genre functioned during the Imperial Period and what it brings to the study of the Roman world in the second century.
[more]
Arrow Rock
The Story of a Missouri Village
Authorene Wilson Phillips
University of Missouri Press, 2005
Arrow Rock, so named because Native Americans once went there to shape their arrowheads from the flint found along the Missouri River, is a small historic village. Today fewer than one hundred people call Arrow Rock home, but its scenic location and rich history continue to attract thousands of visitors every year.
In June 1804, the Corps of Discovery passed “the big arrow rock,” as William Clark noted in his journal, “a handsome spot for a town . . . the situation is elegant, commanding and healthy, the land about it fine, well-timbered and watered.” Settlers soon arrived, some bringing slaves who developed the large farms; the village that was established grew slowly but saw profits from trade on the river. The beginnings of trade in the far west, the gold rush, and the Civil War all had profound effects on the settlers.
Meanwhile, area residents were having an effect on the world. George Caleb Bingham, who became known as the “Missouri artist,” participated in the founding of the town and built a home there, and Dr. John Sappington, an early resident of Arrow Rock, saved thousands of lives by perfecting a treatment for malaria. Also calling Arrow Rock home were numerous influential politicians, including three governors, M. M. Marmaduke, Claiborne Fox Jackson, and John Sappington Marmaduke.
Life changed after the Civil War, and Arrow Rock changed, too. As railroads and major highways bypassed the town, many people moved away and fewer came through. Arrow Rock provides insight into the progression of history and its effects on one small Missouri town. The story of this village, now a historic site, brings to life the history of America: early days of settlement, an era of prosperity and power for some and incredible hardship for others, wars, a decline, and a rebirth. In addition, the long roll call of those who visited the area provides a history of the opening of the West.
This book will prove valuable to those interested in Missouri history; the developing nation; and the geographical, political, and recreational forces that were at work as so many came and went. Like a visit to Arrow Rock itself, this book allows readers to step back into history and appreciate a time when the river was the highway.
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Arrows in the Dark (Volumes 1 and 2)
David Ben-Gurion, the Yishuv Leadership, and Rescue Attempts during the Holocaust
Tuvia Friling; Translated by Ora Cummings
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005
Arrows in the Dark recounts and analyzes the many efforts of aid and rescue made by the Jewish community of Palestine—the Yishuv—to provide assistance to European Jews facing annihilation by the Nazis. Tuvia Friling provides a detailed account of the activities carried out at the behest of David Ben-Gurion and the Yishuv leadership, from daring attempts to extract Jews from Nazi-occupied territory, to proposals for direct negotiations with the Nazis. Through its rich array of detail and primary documentation, this book shows the wide scope and complexity of Yishuv activity at this time, refuting the idea that Ben-Gurion and the Yishuv ignored the plight of European Jews during the Holocaust.
[more]
Arsnick
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas
Jennifer Jensen Wallach
University of Arkansas Press, 2011
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) arrived in Arkansas in October 1962 at the request of the Arkansas Council on Human Relations, the state affiliate of the Southern Regional Council. SNCC efforts began with Bill Hansen, a young white Ohioan--already an early veteran of the civil rights movement--who traveled to Little Rock in the early sixties to help stimulate student sit-in movements promoting desegregation. Thanks in large part to SNCC's bold initiatives, most of Little Rock's public and private facilities were desegregated by 1963, and in the years that followed many more SNCC volunteers rushed to the state to set up projects across the Arkansas Delta to help empower local people to take a stand against racial discrimination. In the five short years before it disbanded, the SNCC's Arkansas Project played a pivotal part in transforming the state, yet this fascinating branch of the national organization has barely garnered a footnote in the history of the civil rights movement. This collection serves as a corrective by bringing articles on SNCC's activities in Arkansas together for the first time, by providing powerful firsthand testimonies, and by collecting key historical documents from SNCC's role in the region's emergence from the slough of southern injustice.
[more]
Art Against Dictatorship
Making and Exporting Arpilleras Under Pinochet
By Jacqueline Adams
University of Texas Press, 2013
Art can be a powerful avenue of resistance to oppressive governments. During the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, some of the country’s least powerful citizens—impoverished women living in Santiago’s shantytowns—spotlighted the government’s failings and use of violence by creating and selling arpilleras, appliquéd pictures in cloth that portrayed the unemployment, poverty, and repression that they endured, their work to make ends meet, and their varied forms of protest. Smuggled out of Chile by human rights organizations, the arpilleras raised international awareness of the Pinochet regime’s abuses while providing income for the arpillera makers and creating a network of solidarity between the people of Chile and sympathizers throughout the world.
Using the Chilean arpilleras as a case study, this book explores how dissident art can be produced under dictatorship, when freedom of expression is absent and repression rife, and the consequences of its production for the resistance and for the artists. Taking a sociological approach based on interviews, participant observation, archival research, and analysis of a visual database, Jacqueline Adams examines the emergence of the arpilleras and then traces their journey from the workshops and homes in which they were made, to the human rights organizations that exported them, and on to sellers and buyers abroad, as well as in Chile. She then presents the perspectives of the arpillera makers and human rights organization staff, who discuss how the arpilleras strengthened the resistance and empowered the women who made them.
[more]
Art Against the Law
Edited by Rebecca Zorach
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2014
In 1968, Chicago made headlines for the ferocity of its police response to protesters at the Democratic National Convention, prompting outrage in the art world. Some artists pulled their shows from the city and called for a boycott until the mayor left office. But others responded artistically, creating new works and even full exhibitions in reaction to the political and social issues raised by the summer’s events.
Despite the city's sometimes notorious political and social history, art practices that challenge authority have thrived in Chicago. Art Against the Law examines the creative tactics of the city’s activist artists and their ways of addressing the broad definitions of the law—from responses to excessive policing to inequities in public policy. These include creative forms of protest, rebellion against the law through illegal art practices, and using the political system itself as an art medium to alter existing laws. The essays and conversations in this volume also address the boundaries between art and creative activism and question whether lines should be drawn at all. Through these texts and interviews, Art Against the Law proves that creative imagination can be formidable in challenging the status quo.
Art Against the Law is part of the new Chicago Social Practice History series, edited by Mary Jane Jacob and Kate Zeller in the Department of Exhibitions and Exhibition Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).
Despite the city's sometimes notorious political and social history, art practices that challenge authority have thrived in Chicago. Art Against the Law examines the creative tactics of the city’s activist artists and their ways of addressing the broad definitions of the law—from responses to excessive policing to inequities in public policy. These include creative forms of protest, rebellion against the law through illegal art practices, and using the political system itself as an art medium to alter existing laws. The essays and conversations in this volume also address the boundaries between art and creative activism and question whether lines should be drawn at all. Through these texts and interviews, Art Against the Law proves that creative imagination can be formidable in challenging the status quo.
Art Against the Law is part of the new Chicago Social Practice History series, edited by Mary Jane Jacob and Kate Zeller in the Department of Exhibitions and Exhibition Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).
[more]
Art & Language International
Conceptual Art between Art Worlds
Robert Bailey
Duke University Press, 2016
In Art & Language International Robert Bailey reconstructs the history of the conceptual art collective Art & Language, situating it in a geographical context to rethink its implications for the broader histories of contemporary art. Focusing on its international collaborations with dozens of artists and critics in and outside the collective between 1969 and 1977, Bailey positions Art & Language at the center of a historical shift from Euro-American modernism to a global contemporary art. He documents the collective’s growth and reach, from transatlantic discussions on the nature of conceptual art and the establishment of distinct working groups in New York and England to the collective’s later work in Australia, New Zealand, and Yugoslavia. Bailey also details its publications, associations with political organizations, and the internal power struggles that precipitated its breakdown. Analyzing a wide range of artworks, texts, music, and films, he reveals how Art & Language navigated between art worlds to shape the international profile of conceptual art. Above all, Bailey underscores how the group's rigorous and interdisciplinary work provides a gateway to understanding how conceptual art operates as a mode of thinking that exceeds the visual to shape the philosophical, historical, and political.
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Art and Archaeology of Pre-Columbian Cuba
Ramon Dacal Moure
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997
Art and Archaeology of Pre-Columbian Cuba presents a number of works, sixteen reproduced in color, by pre-Columbian artists from the archipelago, covering three millennia of human life in Cuba.
Living under difficult conditions, the first Cubans sculpted their emotions, fears, and hopes on stone, shell, wood, and bones. Much of their art has not previously been available either within or outside of the Caribbean. Ramon Dacal Moure and Manuel Rivero de la Calle describe and interpret the two kinds of prehistoric art found on the island: that of original settlers, the Ciboneys, and that of the Tainos, who had largely replaced the Ciboneys by the time of Columbus.
More than one hundred photographs culled for Cuban museums and collections reveal the superb artistry of the Ciboney and Taino cultures. Idols and amulets carved of stone, coral, and wood; shell masks; stone axes; petroglyphs and pictographs are among the art works never before seen outside of Cuba.
Art and Archaeology of Pre-Columbian Cuba is the first report of archaeological findings in Cuba since 1959 and the first synthesis of Cuban prehistoric art and archaeology since Mark Harrington’s Cuba Before Columbus, published in 1921. Since 1959, Cuban archaeologists have been isolated from research being carried out on other islands in the region, just as other scientists have been unable to work on Cuba or communicate easily with their Cuban colleagues.
While popular interest in and scholarly knowledge of prehistoric art and archaeology have grown in recent years, the Caribbean has been neglected, and Cuba especially. Through Art and Archaeology of Pre-Columbian Cuba, archaeologists and other professionals as well as general readers will come to admire and respect the talent visible in these examples of aboriginal art.
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The Art and Architecture of the Texas Missions
By Jacinto Quirarte
University of Texas Press, 2002
Winner, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas
Built to bring Christianity and European civilization to the northern frontier of New Spain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries...secularized and left to decay in the nineteenth century...and restored in the twentieth century, the Spanish missions still standing in Texas are really only shadows of their original selves. The mission churches, once beautifully adorned with carvings and sculptures on their façades and furnished inside with elaborate altarpieces and paintings, today only hint at their colonial-era glory through the vestiges of art and architectural decoration that remain.
To paint a more complete portrait of the missions as they once were, Jacinto Quirarte here draws on decades of on-site and archival research to offer the most comprehensive reconstruction and description of the original art and architecture of the six remaining Texas missions—San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo), San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción, San Juan Capistrano, and San Francisco de la Espada in San Antonio and Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo in Goliad. Using church records and other historical accounts, as well as old photographs, drawings, and paintings, Quirarte describes the mission churches and related buildings, their decorated surfaces, and the (now missing) altarpieces, whose iconography he extensively analyzes. He sets his material within the context of the mission era in Texas and the Southwest, so that the book also serves as a general introduction to the Spanish missionary program and to Indian life in Texas.
[more]
Art and Cartography
Six Historical Essays
Edited by David Woodward
University of Chicago Press, 1987
The contributors—Svetlana Alpers, Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., Ulla Ehrensvard, Juergen Schulz, James A. Welu, and David Woodward—examine the historical links between art and cartography from varied perspectives.
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Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance
A Contribution to the History of Collecting
Julius von Schlosser
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2021
For the first time, the pioneering book that launched the study of art and curiosity cabinets is available in English.
Julius von Schlosser’s Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance (Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance) is a seminal work in the history of art and collecting. Originally published in German in 1908, it was the first study to interpret sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cabinets of wonder as precursors to the modern museum, situating them within a history of collecting going back to Greco-Roman antiquity. In its comparative approach and broad geographical scope, Schlosser’s book introduced an interdisciplinary and global perspective to the study of art and material culture, laying the foundation for museum studies and the history of collections. Schlosser was an Austrian professor, curator, museum director, and leading figure of the Vienna School of art history whose work has not achieved the prominence of his contemporaries until now.
This eloquent and informed translation is preceded by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s substantial introduction. Tracing Schlosser’s biography and intellectual formation in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, it contextualizes his work among that of his contemporaries, offering a wealth of insights along the way.
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Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson
Francesca Aran Murphy
University of Missouri Press, 2004
In Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson, Francesca Aran Murphy tells the story of this French philosopher’s struggle to reconcile faith and reason. In his lifetime, Gilson often stood alone in presenting Saint Thomas Aquinas as a theologian, one whose philosophy came from his faith. Today, Gilson’s view is becoming the prevalent one. Murphy provides us with an intellectual biography of this Thomist leader throughout the stages of his scholarly development.
Murphy covers more than a half century of Gilson’s life while reminding readers of the political and social realities that confronted intellectuals of the early twentieth century. She shows the effects inner-church politics had on Gilson and his contemporaries such as Alfred Loisy, Lucien Lévy Bruhl, Charles Maurras, Henri de Lubac, Marie-Dominique Chenu, and Jacques Maritain, while also contextualizing Gilson’s own life and thoughts in relation to these philosophers and theologians.
These great thinkers, along with Gilson, continue to be sources of important intellectual debate among scholars, as do the political periods through which Gilson’s story threads—World Wars I and II, the rise and fall of Fascism, and the political upheavals of Europe. By placing Gilson’s twentieth-century Catholic life against a dramatic background of opposed political allegiances, clashing spiritualities, and warring ideas of philosophy, this book shows how rival factions each used their own interpretations of Thomas Aquinas to legitimate their conceptions of the Catholic Church. In Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson, Murphy shows Gilson’s early openness to the artistic revolution of the Cubist and the Expressionist movements and how his love of art inspired his existential theology. She demonstrates the influence that Henri Bergson continued to have on Gilson and how Gilson tried to bring together the intellectual, Dominican side of Christianity with the charismatic, experiential Franciscan side.
Murphy concludes with a chapter on issues inspired by the Gilsonist tradition as developed by recent thinkers. This volume makes an original contribution to the study of Gilson, for the first time providing an organic and synthetic treatment of this major spiritual philosopher of modern times.
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The Art and Life of Merritt Dana Houghton in the Northern Rockies, 1878-1919
by Michael A. Amundson
University of Wyoming Press, 2022
Between 1891 and 1915, pen-and-ink artist Merritt Dana Houghton made over 200 bird’s-eye sketches of towns, ranches, mines, businesses, historic sites, and animals in Wyoming, northern Colorado, Montana, Idaho, and Washington state. Historian Michael A. Amundson brings these many views together for the first time in these pages.
This lavishly illustrated biography details Houghton’s life and work from his birth in Michigan in 1846 to his death in 1919 in Spokane through extensive genealogical records, newspaper accounts, and his illustrations—including historic ranches and bird’s-eye views of Fort Collins, Colorado; Dillon, Montana; and Spokane, Washington and the only known illustrations of long-lost places like Pearl, Colorado, and Rambler, Wyoming. Also included is reproduction of a four-foot-by-eight-foot view of Sheridan, Wyoming and a sixty-image sample portfolio of his best-preserved illustrations organized by type.
Houghton’s work depicts the infrastructure of the new settler society that was remaking the West in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, and Amundson demonstrates how Houghton’s vision of the American West remains active today.
This lavishly illustrated biography details Houghton’s life and work from his birth in Michigan in 1846 to his death in 1919 in Spokane through extensive genealogical records, newspaper accounts, and his illustrations—including historic ranches and bird’s-eye views of Fort Collins, Colorado; Dillon, Montana; and Spokane, Washington and the only known illustrations of long-lost places like Pearl, Colorado, and Rambler, Wyoming. Also included is reproduction of a four-foot-by-eight-foot view of Sheridan, Wyoming and a sixty-image sample portfolio of his best-preserved illustrations organized by type.
Houghton’s work depicts the infrastructure of the new settler society that was remaking the West in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, and Amundson demonstrates how Houghton’s vision of the American West remains active today.
[more]
Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia
Shells, Bodies, and Materiality
Anna Grasskamp
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
During the early modern period, objects of maritime material culture were removed from their places of origin and traded, collected and displayed worldwide. Focusing on shells and pearls exchanged within local and global networks, this monograph compares and connects Asian, in particular Chinese, and European practices of oceanic exploitation in the framework of a transcultural history of art with an understanding of maritime material culture as gendered. Perceiving the ocean as mother of all things, as womb and birthplace, Chinese and European artists and collectors exoticized and eroticized shells’ shapes and surfaces. Defining China and Europe as spaces entangled with South and Southeast Asian sites of knowledge production, source and supply between 1500 and 1700, the book understands oceanic goods and maritime networks as transcending and subverting territorial and topographical boundaries. It also links the study of globally connected port cities to local ecologies of oceanic exploitation and creative practices.
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Art and Politics
Psychoanalysis, Ideology, Theatre
Walter A. Davis
Pluto Press, 2006
This book explores the complex relationship between art and politics. Walter A. Davis uses his extensive knowledge of psychoanalysis to develop a philosophical critique of the impact that the current political climate is having on all artistic endeavor. He uses examples from a wide variety of fields, including the theater and popular culture, to show how true artistic freedom of expression is under threat from the ideological constraints imposed by contemporary capitalism.
Starting with an analysis of the censorship of the play My Name is Rachel Corrie, which was withdrawn from production by a major New York theater due to a political pressure, Davis shows how all art that challenges the mainstream is either suppressed or distorted to suit the politics of our time---one that will not recognize the truth of human experience and the disorder at the heart of all civilization.
Starting with an analysis of the censorship of the play My Name is Rachel Corrie, which was withdrawn from production by a major New York theater due to a political pressure, Davis shows how all art that challenges the mainstream is either suppressed or distorted to suit the politics of our time---one that will not recognize the truth of human experience and the disorder at the heart of all civilization.
[more]
Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Nigel Aston
Reaktion Books, 2009
Eighteenth-century Europe witnessed monumental upheavals in both the Catholic and Protestant faiths and the repercussions rippled down to the churches’ religious art forms. Nigel Aston now chronicles here the intertwining of cultural and institutional turmoil during this pivotal century.
The sustained popularity of religious art in the face of competition from increasingly prevalent secular artworks lies at the heart of this study. Religious art staked out new spaces of display in state institutions, palaces, and private collections, the book shows, as well as taking advantage of patronage from monarchs such as Louis XIV and George III, who funded religious art in an effort to enhance their monarchial prestige. Aston also explores the motivations and exhibition practices of private collectors and analyzes changing Catholic and Protestant attitudes toward art. The book also examines purchases made by corporate patrons such as charity hospitals and religious confraternities and considers what this reveals about the changing religiosity of the era as well.
An in-depth historical study, Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe will be essential for art history and religious studies scholars alike.
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Art and Social Movements
Cultural Politics in Mexico and Aztlán
Edward J. McCaughan
Duke University Press, 2012
Art and Social Movements offers a comparative, cross-border analysis of the role of visual artists in three social movements from the late 1960s through the early 1990s: the 1968 student movement and related activist art collectives in Mexico City, a Zapotec indigenous struggle in Oaxaca, and the Chicano movement in California. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, Edward J. McCaughan explores how artists helped to shape the identities and visions of a generation of Mexican and Chicano activists by creating new visual discourses.
McCaughan argues that the social power of activist artists emanates from their ability to provoke people to see, think, and act in innovative ways. Artists, he claims, help to create visual languages and spaces through which activists can imagine and perform new collective identities and forms of meaningful citizenship. The artists' work that he discusses remains vital today—in movements demanding fuller democratic rights and social justice for working people, women, ethnic communities, immigrants, and sexual minorities throughout Mexico and the United States. Integrating insights from scholarship on the cultural politics of representation with structural analyses of specific historical contexts, McCaughan expands our understanding of social movements.
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Art and the Subway
New York Underground
Fitzpatrick, Tracy
Rutgers University Press, 2009
The New York City subway, considered an engineering feat and a work of art, has kindled the imagination of millions. Art and the Subway explores artistic production surrounding the world's most famous public transportation system, from just before its opening in 1904 to the present day. Using a stunning array of images, Tracy Fitzpatrick offers perspectives on ways in which the subway has been used as a subject about which to make art, as a site within which to make art, and as a canvas upon which to make art.
Fitzpatrick captures the emotions of artists and riders alike, as she explores paintings, photographs, performance art, graffiti, and public art by artists such as Walker Evans, Bruce Davidson, DONDI, Keith Haring, Yayoi Kusama, Jacob Lawrence, Reginald Marsh, Elizabeth Murray, and many others. She also considers representations of the subway in film, on song sheet covers, and in illustration. By examining the cultural, technological, and social contexts for these creative interpretations, Fitzpatrick illuminates in fresh ways the contradictions and harmonies between public and private space.
Featuring 17 color plates and 80 black-and-white images, Art and the Subway takes readers on a fascinating ride through the visual history of one of the twentieth century's greatest urban planning endeavors as it grew, changed form, and reinvented itself with passion and vitality.
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Art and Trousers
Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Asian Art
David Elliott
National University of Singapore Press, 2021
An illustrated collection of essays on modern and contemporary Asian art by a key figure of the international contemporary art world.
An illustrated collection of more than thirty essays and 640 color images, Art and Trousers moves deftly between regional analysis, portraits of individual artists, and a metaphorical history of trousers. This book presents a panoramic view of modern and contemporary Asian art, varying its focus on the impacts of invention, tradition, exchange, colonization, politics, social development, and gender. David Elliott spotlights the practice of many leading global artists of the early twenty-first century, including Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cai Guo-Qiang, Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, Rashid Rana, Bharti Kher, Makoto Aida, Chatchai Puipia, and Yeesookyung, among many others. Art and Trousers offers insight into the development of a key curatorial practice for our times, and it will be an essential resource for anyone seeking to understand contemporary art and the way it operates across borders.
An illustrated collection of more than thirty essays and 640 color images, Art and Trousers moves deftly between regional analysis, portraits of individual artists, and a metaphorical history of trousers. This book presents a panoramic view of modern and contemporary Asian art, varying its focus on the impacts of invention, tradition, exchange, colonization, politics, social development, and gender. David Elliott spotlights the practice of many leading global artists of the early twenty-first century, including Hiroshi Sugimoto, Cai Guo-Qiang, Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, Rashid Rana, Bharti Kher, Makoto Aida, Chatchai Puipia, and Yeesookyung, among many others. Art and Trousers offers insight into the development of a key curatorial practice for our times, and it will be an essential resource for anyone seeking to understand contemporary art and the way it operates across borders.
[more]
Art as Information Ecology
Artworks, Artworlds, and Complex Systems Aesthetics
Jason Hoelscher
Duke University Press, 2021
In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher offers not only an information theory of art but an aesthetic theory of information. Applying close readings of the information theories of Claude Shannon and Gilbert Simondon to 1960s American art, Hoelscher proposes that art is information in its aesthetic or indeterminate mode—information oriented less toward answers and resolvability than toward questions, irresolvability, and sustained difference. These irresolvable differences, Hoelscher demonstrates, fuel the richness of aesthetic experience by which viewers glean new information and insight from each encounter with an artwork. In this way, art constitutes information that remains in formation---a difference that makes a difference that keeps on differencing. Considering the works of Frank Stella, Robert Morris, Adrian Piper, the Drop City commune, Eva Hesse, and others, Hoelscher finds that art exists within an information ecology of complex feedback between artwork and artworld that is driven by the unfolding of difference. By charting how information in its aesthetic mode can exist beyond today's strictly quantifiable and monetizable forms, Hoelscher reconceives our understanding of how artworks work and how information operates.
[more]
Art at Auction in 17th Century Amsterdam
John Michael Montias
Amsterdam University Press, 2003
This book exploits a trove of original documents that have survived on the auctions organized by the Orphan Chamber of Amsterdam in the first half of the 17th century. For the first time, the names of some 2000 buyers of works of art at auction in the 29 extant notebooks of the Chamber have been systematically analyzed. On the basis of archival research, data have been assembled on the occupation of these buyers (most of whom were merchants), their origin (Southern Netherlands, Holland, and other), their religion, their year of birth, their date of marriage, the taxes they paid and other indicators of their wealth. Buyers were found to cluster in groups, not only by extended family but by occupation, religion (Remonstrants, Counter-Remonstrants) and avocation (amateurs of tulips and of porcelain, members of Chambers of Rhetoricians, and so forth). The subjects of the works of art they bought and the artists to which they were attributed (only the most important were attributed) are also analyzed. In the second part of the book on “Selected Buyers”, three chapters are devoted to art dealers who bought at auction and four to buyers who had special connections with artists, including principally Rembrandt. To forge a link between the cultural milieu of Amsterdam in this period and the buying public, two chapters are given over to buyers who were either poets themselves or were connected with contemporary poets. As a whole, the book offers a penetrating insight into the culture of the Amsterdam elite in the 17th century.
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Art, Culture, and Cuisine
Ancient and Medieval Gastronomy
Phyllis Pray Bober
University of Chicago Press, 1999
In Art, Culture, and Cuisine, Phyllis Pray Bober examines cooking through an assortment of recipes as well as the dual lens of archaeology and art history. Believing that the unity of a culture extends across all forms of expression, Bober seeks to understand the minds and hearts of those who practiced cookery or consumed it as reflected in the visual art of the time.
Bober draws on archaeology and art history to examine prehistoric eating customs in ancient Turkey; traditions of the great civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome; and rituals of the Middle Ages. Both elegant and entertaining, Art, Culture, and Cuisine reveals cuisine and dining's place at the heart of cultural, religious, and social activities that have shaped Western sensibilities.
Bober draws on archaeology and art history to examine prehistoric eating customs in ancient Turkey; traditions of the great civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome; and rituals of the Middle Ages. Both elegant and entertaining, Art, Culture, and Cuisine reveals cuisine and dining's place at the heart of cultural, religious, and social activities that have shaped Western sensibilities.
[more]
Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich
Edited by Richard A. Etlin
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich explores the ways in which the Nazis used art and media to portray their country as the champion of Kultur and civilization. Rather than focusing strictly on the role of the arts in state-supported propaganda, this volume contributes to Holocaust studies by revealing how multiple domains of cultural activity served to conceptually dehumanize Jews and other groups.
Contributors address nearly every facet of the arts and mass media under the Third Reich—efforts to define degenerate music and art; the promotion of race hatred through film and public assemblies; views of the racially ideal garden and landscape; race as portrayed in popular literature; the reception of art and culture abroad; the treatment of exiled artists; and issues of territory, conquest, and appeasement. Familiar subjects such as the Munich Accord, Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds, and Lebensraum (Living Space) are considered from a new perspective. Anyone studying the history of Nazi Germany or the role of the arts in nationalist projects will benefit from this book.
Contributors:
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
David Culbert
Albrecht Dümling
Richard A. Etlin
Karen A. Fiss
Keith Holz
Kathleen James-Chakraborty
Paul B. Jaskot
Karen Koehler
Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien
Jonathan Petropoulos
Robert Jan van Pelt
Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn and Gert Gröning
Contributors address nearly every facet of the arts and mass media under the Third Reich—efforts to define degenerate music and art; the promotion of race hatred through film and public assemblies; views of the racially ideal garden and landscape; race as portrayed in popular literature; the reception of art and culture abroad; the treatment of exiled artists; and issues of territory, conquest, and appeasement. Familiar subjects such as the Munich Accord, Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds, and Lebensraum (Living Space) are considered from a new perspective. Anyone studying the history of Nazi Germany or the role of the arts in nationalist projects will benefit from this book.
Contributors:
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
David Culbert
Albrecht Dümling
Richard A. Etlin
Karen A. Fiss
Keith Holz
Kathleen James-Chakraborty
Paul B. Jaskot
Karen Koehler
Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien
Jonathan Petropoulos
Robert Jan van Pelt
Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn and Gert Gröning
[more]
Art Essays
A Collection
Alexandra Kingston-Reese
University of Iowa Press, 2021
Art Essays is a passionate collection of the best essays on the visual arts written by contemporary novelists. This vibrant and diverse selection includes essays by award-winning writers such as Zadie Smith, Chris Kraus, Teju Cole, Orhan Pamuk, and Jhumpa Lahiri. From the art of Sonia Delaunay to contemporary photography, from the docks of Malaysia to Leonora Carrington’s home in Mexico City, and from reflections on modern Black British paintings to meditations on the female gaze, these essays bring together blazing insights to the visual world, with personal, intimate reflections. With an introduction by literary critic and editor Alexandra Kingston-Reese, Art Essays is an enthralling vision of a new wave of literary essays shaping contemporary culture.
Contributors: Chloe Aridjis, Tash Aw, Claire-Louise Bennett, Teju Cole, Geoff Dyer, Sheila Heti, Katie Kitamura, Chris Kraus, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ben Lerner, Orhan Pamuk, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, Heidi Sopinka, Hanya Yanagihara
[more]
Art for an Undivided Earth
The American Indian Movement Generation
Jessica L. Horton
Duke University Press, 2017
In Art for an Undivided Earth Jessica L. Horton reveals how the spatial philosophies underlying the American Indian Movement (AIM) were refigured by a generation of artists searching for new places to stand. Upending the assumption that Jimmie Durham, James Luna, Kay WalkingStick, Robert Houle, and others were primarily concerned with identity politics, she joins them in remapping the coordinates of a widely shared yet deeply contested modernity that is defined in great part by the colonization of the Americas. She follows their installations, performances, and paintings across the ocean and back in time, as they retrace the paths of Native diplomats, scholars, performers, and objects in Europe after 1492. Along the way, Horton intervenes in a range of theories about global modernisms, Native American sovereignty, racial difference, archival logic, artistic itinerancy, and new materialisms. Writing in creative dialogue with contemporary artists, she builds a picture of a spatially, temporally, and materially interconnected world—an undivided earth.
[more]
Art for People's Sake
Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975
Rebecca Zorach
Duke University Press, 2019
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Chicago witnessed a remarkable flourishing of visual arts associated with the Black Arts Movement. From the painting of murals as a way to reclaim public space and the establishment of independent community art centers to the work of the AFRICOBRA collective and Black filmmakers, artists on Chicago's South and West Sides built a vision of art as service to the people. In Art for People's Sake Rebecca Zorach traces the little-told story of the visual arts of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, showing how artistic innovations responded to decades of racist urban planning that left Black neighborhoods sites of economic depression, infrastructural decay, and violence. Working with community leaders, children, activists, gang members, and everyday people, artists developed a way of using art to help empower and represent themselves. Showcasing the depth and sophistication of the visual arts in Chicago at this time, Zorach demonstrates the crucial role of aesthetics and artistic practice in the mobilization of Black radical politics during the Black Power era.
[more]
Art Forgery
The History of a Modern Obsession
Thierry Lenain
Reaktion Books, 2011
With the recent advent of technologies that make detecting art forgeries easier, the art world has become increasingly obsessed with verifying and ensuring artistic authenticity. In this unique history, Thierry Lenain examines the genealogy of faking and interrogates the anxious, often neurotic, reactions triggered in the modern art world by these clever frauds.
Lenain begins his history in the Middle Ages, when the issue of false relics and miracles often arose. But during this time, if a relic gave rise to a cult, it would be considered as genuine even if it obviously had been forged. In the Renaissance, forgery was initially hailed as a true artistic feat. Even Michelangelo, the most revered artist of the time, copied drawings by other masters, many of which were lent to him by unsuspecting collectors. Michelangelo would keep the originals himself and return the copies in their place. As Lenain shows, authenticity, as we think of it, is a purely modern concept. And the recent innovations in scientific attribution, archaeology, graphology, medical science, and criminology have all contributed to making forgery more detectable—and thus more compelling and essential to detect. He also analyzes the work of master forgers like Eric Hebborn, Thomas Keating, and Han van Meegeren in order to describe how pieces baffled the art world.
Ultimately, Lenain argues that the science of accurately deciphering an individual artist’s unique characteristics has reached a level of forensic sophistication matched only by the forger’s skill and the art world’s paranoia.
[more]
Art from a Fractured Past
Memory and Truth-Telling in Post-Shining Path Peru
Cynthia E. Milton, ed.
Duke University Press, 2014
Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission not only documented the political violence of the 1980s and 1990s but also gave Peruvians a unique opportunity to examine the causes and nature of that violence. In Art from a Fractured Past, scholars and artists expand on the commission's work, arguing for broadening the definition of the testimonial to include various forms of artistic production as documentary evidence. Their innovative focus on representation offers new and compelling perspectives on how Peruvians experienced those years and how they have attempted to come to terms with the memories and legacies of violence. Their findings about Peru offer insight into questions of art, memory, and truth that resonate throughout Latin America in the wake of "dirty wars" of the last half century. Exploring diverse works of art, including memorials, drawings, theater, film, songs, painted wooden retablos (three-dimensional boxes), and fiction, including an acclaimed graphic novel, the contributors show that art, not constrained by literal truth, can generate new opportunities for empathetic understanding and solidarity.
Contributors. Ricardo Caro Cárdenas, Jesús Cossio, Ponciano del Pino, Cynthia M. Garza, Edilberto Jímenez Quispe, Cynthia E. Milton, Jonathan Ritter, Luis Rossell, Steve J. Stern, María Eugenia Ulfe, Víctor Vich, Alfredo Villar
Contributors. Ricardo Caro Cárdenas, Jesús Cossio, Ponciano del Pino, Cynthia M. Garza, Edilberto Jímenez Quispe, Cynthia E. Milton, Jonathan Ritter, Luis Rossell, Steve J. Stern, María Eugenia Ulfe, Víctor Vich, Alfredo Villar
[more]
Art in a Disrupted World
Poland 1939–1949
Agata Pietrasik
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2020
With Art in a Disrupted World, art historian Agata Pietrasik presents a study of artistic practices that emerged in Poland during and after World War II. Pietrasik highlights examples of artworks by a number of Polish-born artists that were created in concentration camps and ghettos, in exile, and during the years of social, political, and cultural disintegration immediately following the war. She draws attention to the ethics of artistic practice as a method of fighting to preserve one’s own humanity amid even the most dehumanizing circumstances. Breaking out of entrenched historical timelines and traditional forms of narration, this book brings together drawings, paintings, architectural designs, and exhibitions, as well as literary and theatrical works created in this time period, to tell the story of Polish life in wartime.
Employing an accessible, essayistic style, Pietrasik offers a new look at life in the ten years following the outbreak of World War II and features artists—including Marian Bogusz, Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz, and Józef Szajna—whose work has not yet found substantial audiences in the English-speaking world. Her reading of the art and artists of this period strives to capture their autonomous artistic language and poses critical questions about the ability of traditional art history writing to properly accommodate artworks created in direct response to traumatic experiences.
Employing an accessible, essayistic style, Pietrasik offers a new look at life in the ten years following the outbreak of World War II and features artists—including Marian Bogusz, Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz, and Józef Szajna—whose work has not yet found substantial audiences in the English-speaking world. Her reading of the art and artists of this period strives to capture their autonomous artistic language and poses critical questions about the ability of traditional art history writing to properly accommodate artworks created in direct response to traumatic experiences.
[more]
Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848-1871
Albert Boime
University of Chicago Press, 2008
From the European revolutions of 1848 through the Italian independence movement, the American Civil War, and the French Commune, the era Albert Boime explores in this fourth volume of his epic series was, in a word, transformative. The period, which gave rise to such luminaries as Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, was also characterized by civic upheaval, quantum leaps in science and technology, and the increasing secularization of intellectual pursuits and ordinary life. In a sweeping narrative that adds critical depth to a key epoch in modern art’s history, Art in an Age of Civil Struggle shows how this turbulent social environment served as an incubator for the mid-nineteenth century’s most important artists and writers.
Tracing the various movements of realism through the major metropolitan centers of Europe and America, Boime strikingly evokes the milieus that shaped the lives and works of Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Émile Zola, Honoré Daumier, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and the earliest photographers, among countless others. In doing so, he spearheads a powerful new way of reassessing how art emerges from the welter of cultural and political events and the artist’s struggle to interpret his surroundings. Boime supports this multifaceted approach with a wealth of illustrations and written sources that demonstrate the intimate links between visual culture and social change. Culminating at the transition to impressionism, Art in an Age of Civil Struggle makes historical sense of a movement that paved the way for avant-garde aesthetics and, more broadly, of how a particular style emerges at a particular moment.
Tracing the various movements of realism through the major metropolitan centers of Europe and America, Boime strikingly evokes the milieus that shaped the lives and works of Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Émile Zola, Honoré Daumier, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and the earliest photographers, among countless others. In doing so, he spearheads a powerful new way of reassessing how art emerges from the welter of cultural and political events and the artist’s struggle to interpret his surroundings. Boime supports this multifaceted approach with a wealth of illustrations and written sources that demonstrate the intimate links between visual culture and social change. Culminating at the transition to impressionism, Art in an Age of Civil Struggle makes historical sense of a movement that paved the way for avant-garde aesthetics and, more broadly, of how a particular style emerges at a particular moment.
[more]
Art in an Age of Counterrevolution, 1815-1848
Albert Boime
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Art for art's sake. Art created in pursuit of personal expression. In Art in an Age of Counterrevolution, Albert Boime rejects these popular modern notions and suggests that history—not internal drive or expressive urge—as the dynamic force that shapes art.
This volume focuses on the astonishing range of art forms currently understood to fall within the broad category of Romanticism. Drawing on visual media and popular imagery of the time, this generously illustrated work examines the art of Romanticism as a reaction to the social and political events surrounding it. Boime reinterprets canonical works by such politicized artists as Goya, Delacroix, Géricault, Friedrich, and Turner, framing their work not by personality but by its sociohistorical context. Boime's capacious approach and scope allows him to incorporate a wide range of perspectives into his analysis of Romantic art, including Marxism, social history, gender identity, ecology, structuralism, and psychoanalytic theory, a reach that parallels the work of contemporary cultural historians and theorists such as Edward Said, Pierre Bourdieu, Eric Hobsbawm, Frederic Jameson, and T. J. Clark.
Boime ultimately establishes that art serves the interests and aspirations of the cultural bourgeoisie. In grounding his arguments on their work and its scope and influence, he elucidates how all artists are inextricably linked to history. This book will be used widely in art history courses and exert enormous influence on cultural studies as well.
This volume focuses on the astonishing range of art forms currently understood to fall within the broad category of Romanticism. Drawing on visual media and popular imagery of the time, this generously illustrated work examines the art of Romanticism as a reaction to the social and political events surrounding it. Boime reinterprets canonical works by such politicized artists as Goya, Delacroix, Géricault, Friedrich, and Turner, framing their work not by personality but by its sociohistorical context. Boime's capacious approach and scope allows him to incorporate a wide range of perspectives into his analysis of Romantic art, including Marxism, social history, gender identity, ecology, structuralism, and psychoanalytic theory, a reach that parallels the work of contemporary cultural historians and theorists such as Edward Said, Pierre Bourdieu, Eric Hobsbawm, Frederic Jameson, and T. J. Clark.
Boime ultimately establishes that art serves the interests and aspirations of the cultural bourgeoisie. In grounding his arguments on their work and its scope and influence, he elucidates how all artists are inextricably linked to history. This book will be used widely in art history courses and exert enormous influence on cultural studies as well.
[more]
Art in Chicago
A History from the Fire to Now
Edited by Maggie Taft and Robert Cozzolino
University of Chicago Press, 2018
For decades now, the story of art in America has been dominated by New York. It gets the majority of attention, the stories of its schools and movements and masterpieces the stuff of pop culture legend. Chicago, on the other hand . . . well, people here just get on with the work of making art.
Now that art is getting its due. Art in Chicago is a magisterial account of the long history of Chicago art, from the rupture of the Great Fire in 1871 to the present, Manierre Dawson, László Moholy-Nagy, and Ivan Albright to Chris Ware, Anne Wilson, and Theaster Gates. The first single-volume history of art and artists in Chicago, the book—in recognition of the complexity of the story it tells—doesn’t follow a single continuous trajectory. Rather, it presents an overlapping sequence of interrelated narratives that together tell a full and nuanced, yet wholly accessible history of visual art in the city. From the temptingly blank canvas left by the Fire, we loop back to the 1830s and on up through the 1860s, tracing the beginnings of the city’s institutional and professional art world and community. From there, we travel in chronological order through the decades to the present. Familiar developments—such as the founding of the Art Institute, the Armory Show, and the arrival of the Bauhaus—are given a fresh look, while less well-known aspects of the story, like the contributions of African American artists dating back to the 1860s or the long history of activist art, finally get suitable recognition. The six chapters, each written by an expert in the period, brilliantly mix narrative and image, weaving in oral histories from artists and critics reflecting on their work in the city, and setting new movements and key works in historical context. The final chapter, comprised of interviews and conversations with contemporary artists, brings the story up to the present, offering a look at the vibrant art being created in the city now and addressing ongoing debates about what it means to identify as—or resist identifying as—a Chicago artist today. The result is an unprecedentedly inclusive and rich tapestry, one that reveals Chicago art in all its variety and vigor—and one that will surprise and enlighten even the most dedicated fan of the city’s artistic heritage.
Part of the Terra Foundation for American Art’s year-long Art Design Chicago initiative, which will bring major arts events to venues throughout Chicago in 2018, Art in Chicago is a landmark publication, a book that will be the standard account of Chicago art for decades to come. No art fan—regardless of their city—will want to miss it.
Now that art is getting its due. Art in Chicago is a magisterial account of the long history of Chicago art, from the rupture of the Great Fire in 1871 to the present, Manierre Dawson, László Moholy-Nagy, and Ivan Albright to Chris Ware, Anne Wilson, and Theaster Gates. The first single-volume history of art and artists in Chicago, the book—in recognition of the complexity of the story it tells—doesn’t follow a single continuous trajectory. Rather, it presents an overlapping sequence of interrelated narratives that together tell a full and nuanced, yet wholly accessible history of visual art in the city. From the temptingly blank canvas left by the Fire, we loop back to the 1830s and on up through the 1860s, tracing the beginnings of the city’s institutional and professional art world and community. From there, we travel in chronological order through the decades to the present. Familiar developments—such as the founding of the Art Institute, the Armory Show, and the arrival of the Bauhaus—are given a fresh look, while less well-known aspects of the story, like the contributions of African American artists dating back to the 1860s or the long history of activist art, finally get suitable recognition. The six chapters, each written by an expert in the period, brilliantly mix narrative and image, weaving in oral histories from artists and critics reflecting on their work in the city, and setting new movements and key works in historical context. The final chapter, comprised of interviews and conversations with contemporary artists, brings the story up to the present, offering a look at the vibrant art being created in the city now and addressing ongoing debates about what it means to identify as—or resist identifying as—a Chicago artist today. The result is an unprecedentedly inclusive and rich tapestry, one that reveals Chicago art in all its variety and vigor—and one that will surprise and enlighten even the most dedicated fan of the city’s artistic heritage.
Part of the Terra Foundation for American Art’s year-long Art Design Chicago initiative, which will bring major arts events to venues throughout Chicago in 2018, Art in Chicago is a landmark publication, a book that will be the standard account of Chicago art for decades to come. No art fan—regardless of their city—will want to miss it.
[more]
Art in Cinema
Documents Toward a History of the Film Society
Scott MacDonald
Temple University Press, 2006
From 1946 until 1954, the San Francisco-based film society Art in Cinema presented programs of independent film to audiences at the San Francisco Museum of Art and the University of California, Berkeley. Led by filmmaker Frank Stauffacher, Art in Cinema's programs pioneered the promotion of avant-garde cinema in America.
Scott MacDonald's Art in Cinema presents complete programs presented by the legendary society; dozens of previously unavailable letters between Stauffacher, his collaborators, and filmmakers including Maya Deren, Hans Richter, Vincent Minelli, and Man Ray; a reprint of the society's original catalog, which features essays by Henry Miller and others; and a wide range of other remarkable historical documents.
A companion to Cinema 16 (Temple), a documentary history of the first west coast film society, Art in Cinema provides cineastes, students, teachers, and scholars with extensive and fascinating documentation of one of the most important film societies in American history. Together or separately, the books provide an indispensable reference source for the beginning of this country's love affair with independent film.
Scott MacDonald's Art in Cinema presents complete programs presented by the legendary society; dozens of previously unavailable letters between Stauffacher, his collaborators, and filmmakers including Maya Deren, Hans Richter, Vincent Minelli, and Man Ray; a reprint of the society's original catalog, which features essays by Henry Miller and others; and a wide range of other remarkable historical documents.
A companion to Cinema 16 (Temple), a documentary history of the first west coast film society, Art in Cinema provides cineastes, students, teachers, and scholars with extensive and fascinating documentation of one of the most important film societies in American history. Together or separately, the books provide an indispensable reference source for the beginning of this country's love affair with independent film.
[more]
Art in Mind
How Contemporary Images Shape Thought
Ernst van Alphen
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Art has the power to affect our thinking, changing not only the way we view and interact with the world but also how we create it. In Art in Mind, Ernst van Alphen probes this idea of art as a commanding force with the capacity to shape our intellect and intervene in our lives. Rather than interpreting art as merely a reflection of our social experience or a product of history, van Alphen here argues that art is a historical agent, or a cultural creator, that propels thought and experience forward.
Examining a broad range of works, van Alphen—a renowned art historian and cultural theorist—demonstrates how art serves a socially constructive function by actually experimenting with the parameters of thought. Employing work from artists as diverse as Picasso, Watteau, Francis Bacon, Marlene Dumas, and Matthew Barney, he shows how art confronts its viewers with the "pain points" of cultural experience-genocide, sexuality, diaspora, and transcultural identity-and thereby transforms the ways in which human existence is conceived. Van Alphen analyzes how art visually "thinks" about these difficult cultural issues, tapping into an understudied interpretation of art as the realm where ideas and values are actively created, given form, and mobilized. In this way, van Alphen's book is a work of art in itself as it educates us in a new mode of thought that will forge equally new approaches and responses to the world.
Examining a broad range of works, van Alphen—a renowned art historian and cultural theorist—demonstrates how art serves a socially constructive function by actually experimenting with the parameters of thought. Employing work from artists as diverse as Picasso, Watteau, Francis Bacon, Marlene Dumas, and Matthew Barney, he shows how art confronts its viewers with the "pain points" of cultural experience-genocide, sexuality, diaspora, and transcultural identity-and thereby transforms the ways in which human existence is conceived. Van Alphen analyzes how art visually "thinks" about these difficult cultural issues, tapping into an understudied interpretation of art as the realm where ideas and values are actively created, given form, and mobilized. In this way, van Alphen's book is a work of art in itself as it educates us in a new mode of thought that will forge equally new approaches and responses to the world.
[more]
Art in Progress
Maarten Doorman
Amsterdam University Press, 2004
In this challenging essay, Maarten Doorman argues that in art, belief in progress is still relevant, if not essential. The radical freedoms of postmodernism, he claims, have had a crippling effect on art, leaving it in danger of becoming meaningless. Art can only acquire meaning through context; the concept of progress, then, is ideal as the primary criterion for establishing that context. The history of art, in fact, can be seen as a process of constant accumulation, works of art commenting on one another and enriching one another's meanings. It is these complex interrelationships and the progress they create in both art and its observers that Doorman, in a display of great philosophical erudition, defends.
[more]
Art in Spain and Portugal from the Romans to the Early Middle Ages
Routes and Myths
Rose Walker
Amsterdam University Press, 2016
In this colorfully illustrated book, Rose Walker surveys Spanish and Portuguese art and architecture from the time of the Roman conquest to the early twelfth century. For generations, scholarly discussions of such art have been complicated by a focus on maps of the pilgrimage roads and images of the Reconquista. Walker contextualizes these aspects by bringing together an exceptionally diverse range of academic studies, including work previously familiar only to Hispanophone audiences. By breaking down chronological, regional, and disciplinary divides that have limited scholarship on the subject for decades, this book enriches the wider English-language literature on early medieval art.
[more]
Art in the Lives of Immigrant Communities in the United States
DiMaggio, Paul
Rutgers University Press, 2010
Art in the Lives of Immigrant Communities in the United States is the first book to provide a comprehensive and lively analysis of the contributions of artists from America's newest immigrant communities--Africa, the Middle East, China, India, Southeast Asia, Central America, and Mexico. Adding significantly to our understanding of both the arts and immigration, multidisciplinary scholars explore tensions that artists face in forging careers in a new world and navigating between their home communities and the larger society. They address the art forms that these modern settlers bring with them; show how poets, musicians, playwrights, and visual artists adapt traditional forms to new environments; and consider the ways in which the communities' young people integrate their own traditions and concerns into contemporary expression.
[more]
Art Market and Connoisseurship
A Closer Look at Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens and Their Contemporaries
Anna Tummers
Amsterdam University Press, 2008
The question whether or not seventeenthcentury painters such as Rembrandt and Rubens created the paintings which were later sold under their names, has caused many a heated debate. Much is still unknown about the ways in which paintings were produced, assessed, priced, and marketed. For example, did contemporary connoisseurs expect masters such as Rembrandt to paint their works entirely by their own hand? Who was credited with the ability to assess paintings? How did a painting’s price relate to its quality? And how did connoisseurship change as the art market became increasingly complex? The contributors to this essential volume trace the evolution of connoisseurship in the booming art market of the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries. Among them are the renowned Golden Age scholars Eric Jan Sluijter, Hans Van Miegroet and Neil De Marchi. It is not to be missed by anyone with an interest in the Old Masters and the early modern art market.
[more]
The Art Museums of Louis I. Kahn
Patricia C. Loud
Duke University Press, 1989
The art museum has become a prestige commission for contemporary architects, and for several decades reference has been made to a “museum building boom.” Among these new museums, those of Louis Kahn are especially admired. This significant American architect, who ranks in this century with Frank Lloyd Wright both as a creator and as an influence, has made a special contribution to the architecture of museums and has helped create a subtle but telling change in the concept of what a late twentieth-century museum building should be.
After a brief look at the development of a tradition in museum architecture, this study examines Kahn’s three art museums: the Yale University Art Gallery, the Kimbell Art Museum, and the Yale Center for British Art. It traces the development of each museum through museum through its various stages: the background of the institutions and the commissions, the programs for the buildings, their designs and evolutions, their constructions, and the evaluations of the completed buildings. Material on Kahn’s plans for a museum for the De Menil collection, begun shortly before his death, is also included.
Accompanying the text are illustrations of the buildings, including Kahn’s personal sketches, architectural plans and sections, and presentation perspective drawings. Photographs of the finished buildings present the transformed vision of the architect in tangible form, showing that the museums, while related, are individualized accomplishments. This is the first comprehensive study of Kahn’s museums.
After a brief look at the development of a tradition in museum architecture, this study examines Kahn’s three art museums: the Yale University Art Gallery, the Kimbell Art Museum, and the Yale Center for British Art. It traces the development of each museum through museum through its various stages: the background of the institutions and the commissions, the programs for the buildings, their designs and evolutions, their constructions, and the evaluations of the completed buildings. Material on Kahn’s plans for a museum for the De Menil collection, begun shortly before his death, is also included.
Accompanying the text are illustrations of the buildings, including Kahn’s personal sketches, architectural plans and sections, and presentation perspective drawings. Photographs of the finished buildings present the transformed vision of the architect in tangible form, showing that the museums, while related, are individualized accomplishments. This is the first comprehensive study of Kahn’s museums.
[more]
Art, Myth, and Ritual
The Path to Political Authority in Ancient China
K. C. Chang
Harvard University Press, 1983
A leading scholar in the United States on Chinese archaeology challenges long-standing conceptions of the rise of political authority in ancient China. Questioning Marx’s concept of an “Asiatic” mode of production, Wittfogel’s “hydraulic hypothesis,” and cultural-materialist theories on the importance of technology, K. C. Chang builds an impressive counterargument, one which ranges widely from recent archaeological discoveries to studies of mythology, ancient Chinese poetry, and the iconography of Shang food vessels.
[more]
Art, Nature, and Religion in the Central Andes
Themes and Variations from Prehistory to the Present
By Mary Strong
University of Texas Press, 2012
From prehistory to the present, the Indigenous peoples of the Andes have used a visual symbol system—that is, art—to express their sense of the sacred and its immanence in the natural world. Many visual motifs that originated prior to the Incas still appear in Andean art today, despite the onslaught of cultural disruption that native Andeans have endured over several centuries. Indeed, art has always been a unifying power through which Andeans maintain their spirituality, pride, and culture while resisting the oppression of the dominant society.
In this book, Mary Strong takes a significantly new approach to Andean art that links prehistoric to contemporary forms through an ethnographic understanding of Indigenous Andean culture. In the first part of the book, she provides a broad historical survey of Andean art that explores how Andean religious concepts have been expressed in art and how artists have responded to cultural encounters and impositions, ranging from invasion and conquest to international labor migration and the internet. In the second part, Strong looks at eight contemporary art types—the scissors dance (danza de tijeras), home altars (retablos), carved gourds (mates), ceramics (ceramica), painted boards (tablas), weavings (textiles), tinware (hojalateria), and Huamanga stone carvings (piedra de Huamanga). She includes prehistoric and historic information about each art form, its religious meaning, the natural environment and sociopolitical processes that help to shape its expression, and how it is constructed or performed by today’s artists, many of whom are quoted in the book.
[more]
The Art of Advertising, The
Julie Anne Lambert
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2020
Advertisers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century pushed the boundaries of printing, manipulated language, inspired a new form of art and exploited many formats, including calendars, bookmarks and games. This collection of essays examines the extent to which these standalone advertisements – which have survived by chance and are now divorced from their original purpose – provide information not just on the sometimes bizarre products being sold, but also on class, gender, Britishness, war, fashion and shopping. Starting with the genesis of an advertisement through the creation of text, image, print and format, the authors go on to examine the changing profile of the consumer, notably the rise of the middle classes, and the way in which manufacturers and retailers identified and targeted their markets. Finally, they look at advertisements as documents that both reveal and conceal details about society, politics and local history. Copiously illustrated from the world-renowned John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera and featuring work by influential illustrators John Hassall and Dudley Hardy, this attractive book invites us to consider both the intended and unintended messages of the advertisements of the past.
[more]
The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe
Taylor McCall
Reaktion Books, 2023
A new history of the medieval illustrations that birthed modern anatomy.
This book is the first history of medieval European anatomical images. Richly illustrated, The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe explores the many ways in which medieval surgeons, doctors, monks, and artists understood and depicted human anatomy. Taylor McCall refutes the common misconception that Renaissance artists and anatomists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Vesalius were the fathers of anatomy who performed the first human dissections. On the contrary, she argues that these Renaissance figures drew upon centuries of visual and written tradition in their works.
This book is the first history of medieval European anatomical images. Richly illustrated, The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe explores the many ways in which medieval surgeons, doctors, monks, and artists understood and depicted human anatomy. Taylor McCall refutes the common misconception that Renaissance artists and anatomists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Vesalius were the fathers of anatomy who performed the first human dissections. On the contrary, she argues that these Renaissance figures drew upon centuries of visual and written tradition in their works.
[more]
The Art of Ancient Egypt
Revised Edition
Gay Robins
Harvard University Press, 2008
From the awesome grandeur of the Great Pyramids to the delicacy of a face etched on an amulet, the spellbinding power of ancient Egyptian art persists to this day. Spanning three thousand years, this beautifully illustrated history offers a thorough and delightfully readable introduction to the artwork even as it provides insight into questions that have long engaged experts and amateurs alike. In its scope, its detail, and its eloquent reproduction of over 250 objects, Gay Robins’s classic book is without parallel as a guide to the art of ancient Egypt. And her eagerly awaited new edition includes many new color photographs and a fully revised and updated bibliography.
[more]
The Art of Authorial Presence
Hawthorne’s Provincial Tales
G. R. Thompson
Duke University Press, 1993
The critical literary world has spent a wealth of thought and words on the question of Hawthorne himself: Where does he stand in his works? In history? In literary tradition? In this major new study, G. R. Thompson recasts the "Hawthorne question" to show how authorial presence in the writer's works is as much a matter of art as the writing itself. The Hawthorne who emerges from this masterful analysis is not, as has been supposed, identical to the provincial narrator of his early tales; instead he is revealed to be the skillful manipulator of that narrative voice, an author at an ironic distance from the tales he tells.
By focusing on the provincial tales as they were originally conceived--as a narrative cycle--Thompson is able to recover intertextual references that reveal Hawthorne's preoccupation with framing strategies and variations on authorial presence. The author shows how Hawthorne deliberately constructs sentimental narratives, only to deconstruct them. Thompson's analysis provides a new aesthetic context for understanding the whole shape of Hawthorne's career as well as the narrative, ethical, and historical issues within individual works.
Revisionary in its view of one of America's greatest authors, The Art of Authorial Presence also offers invaluable insight into the problems of narratology and historiography, ethics and psychology, romanticism and idealism, and the cultural myths of America.
By focusing on the provincial tales as they were originally conceived--as a narrative cycle--Thompson is able to recover intertextual references that reveal Hawthorne's preoccupation with framing strategies and variations on authorial presence. The author shows how Hawthorne deliberately constructs sentimental narratives, only to deconstruct them. Thompson's analysis provides a new aesthetic context for understanding the whole shape of Hawthorne's career as well as the narrative, ethical, and historical issues within individual works.
Revisionary in its view of one of America's greatest authors, The Art of Authorial Presence also offers invaluable insight into the problems of narratology and historiography, ethics and psychology, romanticism and idealism, and the cultural myths of America.
[more]
The Art of Being In-between
Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca
Yanna Yannakakis
Duke University Press, 2008
In The Art of Being In-between Yanna Yannakakis rethinks processes of cultural change and indigenous resistance and accommodation to colonial rule through a focus on the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, a rugged, mountainous, ethnically diverse, and overwhelmingly indigenous region of colonial Mexico. Her rich social and cultural history tells the story of the making of colonialism at the edge of empire through the eyes of native intermediary figures: indigenous governors clothed in Spanish silks, priests’ assistants, interpreters, economic middlemen, legal agents, landed nobility, and “Indian conquistadors.” Through political negotiation, cultural brokerage, and the exercise of violence, these fascinating intercultural figures redefined native leadership, sparked indigenous rebellions, and helped forge an ambivalent political culture that distinguished the hinterlands from the centers of Spanish empire.
Through interpretation of a wide array of historical sources—including descriptions of public rituals, accounts of indigenous rebellions, idolatry trials, legal petitions, court cases, land disputes, and indigenous pictorial histories—Yannakakis weaves together an elegant narrative that illuminates political and cultural struggles over the terms of local rule. As cultural brokers, native intermediaries at times reconciled conflicting interests, and at other times positioned themselves in opposing camps over the outcome of municipal elections, the provision of goods and labor, landholding, community ritual, the meaning of indigenous “custom” in relation to Spanish law, and representations of the past. In the process, they shaped an emergent “Indian” identity in tension with other forms of indigenous identity and a political order characterized by a persistent conflict between local autonomy and colonial control. This innovative study provides fresh insight into colonialism’s disparate cultures and the making of race, ethnicity, and the colonial state and legal system in Spanish America.
[more]
The Art of Biblical Interpretation
Visual Portrayals of Scriptural Narratives
Heidi J. Hornik
SBL Press, 2021
A richly illustrated collection of essays on visual biblical interpretation
For centuries Christians have engaged their sacred texts as much through the visual as through the written word. Yet until recent decades, the academic disciplines of biblical studies and art history largely worked independently. This volume bridges that gap with the interdisciplinary work of biblical scholars and art historians. Focusing on the visualization of biblical characters from both the Old and New Testaments, essays illustrate the potential of such collaboration for a deeper understanding of the Bible and its visual reception. Contributions from Ian Boxall, James Clifton, David B. Gowler, Jonathan Homrighausen, Heidi J. Hornik, Jeff Jay, Christine E. Joynes, Yohana A. Junker, Meredith Munson, and Ela Nuțu foreground diverse cultural contexts and chronological periods for scholars and students of the Bible and art.
[more]
The Art of Childbirth
A Seventeenth-Century Midwife’s Epistolary Treatise to Doctor Vallant: A Bilingual Edition
Marie Baudoin
Iter Press, 2022
The extraordinary story of a seventeenth-century French midwife and her treatise on childbirth.
In 1671, Marie Baudoin (1625–1700), head midwife and governor of the Hôtel-Dieu of Clermont-Ferrand, sent a treatise on the art of childbirth to her powerful Parisian patron, Dr. Vallant. The story of how Baudoin’s knowledge and expertise as a midwife came to be expressed, recorded, and archived raises the question: Was Baudoin exceptional because she was herself extraordinary, or because her voice has reached us through Vallant’s careful archival practices? Either way, Baudoin’s treatise invites us to reconsider the limits of what we thought we knew midwives “could be and do” in seventeenth-century France. Grounding Marie Baudoin’s text in a microanalysis of her life, work, and the Jansenist network between Paris and Clermont-Ferrand, this book connects historiographies of midwifery, Jansenism, hospital administration, public health, knowledge and record-keeping, and women’s work, underscoring both Baudoin’s capabilities and the archival accidents and intentions behind the preservation of her treatise in a letter.
In 1671, Marie Baudoin (1625–1700), head midwife and governor of the Hôtel-Dieu of Clermont-Ferrand, sent a treatise on the art of childbirth to her powerful Parisian patron, Dr. Vallant. The story of how Baudoin’s knowledge and expertise as a midwife came to be expressed, recorded, and archived raises the question: Was Baudoin exceptional because she was herself extraordinary, or because her voice has reached us through Vallant’s careful archival practices? Either way, Baudoin’s treatise invites us to reconsider the limits of what we thought we knew midwives “could be and do” in seventeenth-century France. Grounding Marie Baudoin’s text in a microanalysis of her life, work, and the Jansenist network between Paris and Clermont-Ferrand, this book connects historiographies of midwifery, Jansenism, hospital administration, public health, knowledge and record-keeping, and women’s work, underscoring both Baudoin’s capabilities and the archival accidents and intentions behind the preservation of her treatise in a letter.
[more]
Art of Darkness
A Poetics of Gothic
Anne Williams
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Art of Darkness is an ambitious attempt to describe the principles governing Gothic literature. Ranging across five centuries of fiction, drama, and verse—including tales as diverse as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Shelley's Frankenstein, Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Freud's The Mysteries of Enlightenment—Anne Williams proposes three new premises: that Gothic is "poetic," not novelistic, in nature; that there are two parallel Gothic traditions, Male and Female; and that the Gothic and the Romantic represent a single literary tradition.
Building on the psychoanalytic and feminist theory of Julia Kristeva, Williams argues that Gothic conventions such as the haunted castle and the family curse signify the fall of the patriarchal family; Gothic is therefore "poetic" in Kristeva's sense because it reveals those "others" most often identified with the female. Williams identifies distinct Male and Female Gothic traditions: In the Male plot, the protagonist faces a cruel, violent, and supernatural world, without hope of salvation. The Female plot, by contrast, asserts the power of the mind to comprehend a world which, though mysterious, is ultimately sensible. By showing how Coleridge and Keats used both Male and Female Gothic, Williams challenges accepted notions about gender and authorship among the Romantics. Lucidly and gracefully written, Art of Darkness alters our understanding of the Gothic tradition, of Romanticism, and of the relations between gender and genre in literary history.
Building on the psychoanalytic and feminist theory of Julia Kristeva, Williams argues that Gothic conventions such as the haunted castle and the family curse signify the fall of the patriarchal family; Gothic is therefore "poetic" in Kristeva's sense because it reveals those "others" most often identified with the female. Williams identifies distinct Male and Female Gothic traditions: In the Male plot, the protagonist faces a cruel, violent, and supernatural world, without hope of salvation. The Female plot, by contrast, asserts the power of the mind to comprehend a world which, though mysterious, is ultimately sensible. By showing how Coleridge and Keats used both Male and Female Gothic, Williams challenges accepted notions about gender and authorship among the Romantics. Lucidly and gracefully written, Art of Darkness alters our understanding of the Gothic tradition, of Romanticism, and of the relations between gender and genre in literary history.
[more]
Art of Death
Visual Culture in the English Death Ritual c.1500 - c.1800
Nigel Llewellyn
Reaktion Books, 1991
How did our ancestors die? Whereas in our own day the subject of death is usually avoided, in pre-Industrial England the rituals and processes of death were present and immediate. People not only surrounded themselves with memento mori, they also sought to keep alive memories of those who had gone before. This continual confrontation with death was enhanced by a rich culture of visual artifacts. In The Art of Death, Nigel Llewellyn explores the meanings behind an astonishing range of these artifacts, and describes the attitudes and practices which lay behind their production and use.
Illustrated and explained in this book are an array of little-known objects and images such as death's head spoons, jewels and swords, mourning-rings and fans, wax effigies, church monuments, Dance of Death prints, funeral invitations and ephemera, as well as works by well-known artists, including Holbein, Hogarth and Blake.
Illustrated and explained in this book are an array of little-known objects and images such as death's head spoons, jewels and swords, mourning-rings and fans, wax effigies, church monuments, Dance of Death prints, funeral invitations and ephemera, as well as works by well-known artists, including Holbein, Hogarth and Blake.
[more]
The Art of Defiance
Graffiti, Politics and the Reimagined City in Philadelphia
Tyson Mitman
Intellect Books, 2018
The Art of Defiance is an ethnographic portrait of how graffiti writers see their city and, in turn, how their city sees them. It explores how becoming a graffiti writer helps disenfranchised urban citizens negotiate their cultural identities, build their social capital, and gain a voice within an urban environment that would prefer they remain quiet, passive, and anonymous.
In order to both demystify and complicate our understanding of the practice of graffiti writing, this book pushes past the narrative that links the origins of graffiti to criminal gangs and instead offers a detailed portrait of graffiti as a rich urban culture with its own rules and practices. To do so, it examines the cultural history of graffiti in Philadelphia from the early 1970s onward and explores what it is like to be a graffiti writer in the city today. Ultimately, Tyson Mitman aims to humanize graffiti writers and to show that what they do is not merely destructive or puerile, but, rather, adds something important to the urban experience that is a conscious and deliberate act on the part of its practitioners.
In order to both demystify and complicate our understanding of the practice of graffiti writing, this book pushes past the narrative that links the origins of graffiti to criminal gangs and instead offers a detailed portrait of graffiti as a rich urban culture with its own rules and practices. To do so, it examines the cultural history of graffiti in Philadelphia from the early 1970s onward and explores what it is like to be a graffiti writer in the city today. Ultimately, Tyson Mitman aims to humanize graffiti writers and to show that what they do is not merely destructive or puerile, but, rather, adds something important to the urban experience that is a conscious and deliberate act on the part of its practitioners.
[more]
The Art of Describing
Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century
Svetlana Alpers
University of Chicago Press, 1983
"The art historian after Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich is not only participating in an activity of great intellectual excitement; he is raising and exploring issues which lie very much at the centre of psychology, of the sciences and of history itself. Svetlana Alpers's study of 17th-century Dutch painting is a splendid example of this excitement and of the centrality of art history among current disciples. Professor Alpers puts forward a vividly argued thesis. There is, she says, a truly fundamental dichotomy between the art of the Italian Renaissance and that of the Dutch masters. . . . Italian art is the primary expression of a 'textual culture,' this is to say of a culture which seeks emblematic, allegorical or philosophical meanings in a serious painting. Alberti, Vasari and the many other theoreticians of the Italian Renaissance teach us to 'read' a painting, and to read it in depth so as to elicit and construe its several levels of signification. The world of Dutch art, by the contrast, arises from and enacts a truly 'visual culture.' It serves and energises a system of values in which meaning is not 'read' but 'seen,' in which new knowledge is visually recorded."—George Steiner, Sunday Times
"There is no doubt that thanks to Alpers's highly original book the study of the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century will be thoroughly reformed and rejuvenated. . . . She herself has the verve, the knowledge, and the sensitivity to make us see familiar sights in a new light."—E. H. Gombrich, New York Review of Books
"There is no doubt that thanks to Alpers's highly original book the study of the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century will be thoroughly reformed and rejuvenated. . . . She herself has the verve, the knowledge, and the sensitivity to make us see familiar sights in a new light."—E. H. Gombrich, New York Review of Books
[more]
The Art of Eastern India, 300-800
Frederick M. Asher
University of Minnesota Press, 1980
The Art of Eastern India, 300–800 was first published in 1980. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Though scholars have extensive knowledge of the art that flourished during Pala rule in Eastern India (ca. 800-1200), little is known about Eastern Indian art during the preceding 500 years. This half-millennium includes the period of the Gupta dynasty and the two centuries that bridge Gupta and Pala rule, when no single dynasty long maintained control of Eastern India. In this study, Frederick M. Asher challenges arthistorical assumptions about Pala art — that it is a new school virtually without links to earlier art 00 by demonstrating that sculpture during the Gupta period and the subsequent three centuries evolved along lines that connect it with Pala art. In so doing, he draws attention to important sculptures, most of them never previously studied, that tell us not only about an unexplored period in Indian art but also about broader aspects of the cultural history and geography of Eastern India.
Asher's work is based on field research in Bihar, West Bengal, and Bangladesh. There he gave special attention to the sites of once-flourishing Buddhist monasteries and to Hindu images still worshipped in village India. The author's photographs of the bronze, terra cotta, and stone sculptures, and his detailed text, provide a virtual catalogue raisonne of the known works of the period.
Asher's analyses of the images and his attributions of dates to them are based upon close attention to artistic style and iconography, and the study of dynastic and social history, contemporary travelers' reports, and religious history. Drawing together these diverse strands of information, he describes the evolution of art forms over a long period in which there was little apparent historic unity. John M. Rosenfield, professor of art history at Harvard University and author of The Art of the Kushans, says, of The Art of Eastern India,"The scholarship is scrupulously detailed and careful . . . [The book] is in the finest tradition of classical scholarship, and will be consulted or several generations."
[more]
The Art of Experiment
Parmigianino at The Courtauld
Edited by Ketty Gottardo and Guido Rebecchini
Paul Holberton Publishing, 2022
A showcase of the Courtauld Gallery’s outstanding Parmigianino collection.
Accompanying an exhibition at London’s Courtauld Gallery, this stunning catalog presents works by the Renaissance artist Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, better known as Parmigianino (1503–1540).
Fundamentally a draftsman at heart, Parmigianino drew relentlessly during his relatively short life, and around a thousand of his drawings have survived. The Courtauld’s collection comprises twenty-four sheets. In preparation for the catalog, new photography and technical examinations have been carried out on all the works, revealing two new drawings that were previously unknown, hidden underneath their historic mounts. They have also helped to better identify connections between some of the drawings and the finished paintings for which they were conceived. This stunning illustrated catalog presents the whole Courtauld collection and sheds light on an artist who approached every technique with unprecedented freedom and produced innovative works that are still admired by artists and collectors today.
Accompanying an exhibition at London’s Courtauld Gallery, this stunning catalog presents works by the Renaissance artist Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, better known as Parmigianino (1503–1540).
Fundamentally a draftsman at heart, Parmigianino drew relentlessly during his relatively short life, and around a thousand of his drawings have survived. The Courtauld’s collection comprises twenty-four sheets. In preparation for the catalog, new photography and technical examinations have been carried out on all the works, revealing two new drawings that were previously unknown, hidden underneath their historic mounts. They have also helped to better identify connections between some of the drawings and the finished paintings for which they were conceived. This stunning illustrated catalog presents the whole Courtauld collection and sheds light on an artist who approached every technique with unprecedented freedom and produced innovative works that are still admired by artists and collectors today.
[more]
The Art of History
African American Women Artists Engage the Past
Lisa Gail Collins
Rutgers University Press, 2002
“This important study is the first to confront head-on the avoidance of the visual that has plagued black studies in the United States. The Art of History opens the often hermetic world of black visual culture to a much broader realm in which questions central to contemporary feminism, black studies, and cultural theory are brought to bear.”—Judith Wilson, University of California, Irvine
“The Art of History is an important book that expands the significance of visual culture to African American studies debates. It provides cogent and insightful explorations of the work of contemporary African American women artists. Scholars and general readers alike are sure to be compelled by this original and innovative study.”—Valerie Smith, author of Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings
In this lively and engaging book, Lisa Gail Collins examines the work of contemporary African American women artists. Her study comes at a time when an unprecedented number of these artists—photographers, filmmakers, painters, installation and mixed-media artists—have garnered the attention and imagination of the art-viewing public.
To better understand the significance of this particular historical moment in American visual arts, Collins focuses on four “problems” that recur when these artists confront their histories: the documentation of truth; the status of the black female body; the relationship between art and cultural contact and change; and the relationship between art and black girlhood. By examining the social and cultural histories which African American women artists engage, Collins illuminates a dialogue between past and present imagemakers.
The Art of History is a major contribution to the study of American visual culture. It will be of use to both scholars and students in art history, African American studies, American studies, and women’s studies.
[more]
The Art of I. Denton
Ivan Denton
University of Arkansas Press, 1988
Art of Jazz
Form/Performance/Notes
David Bindman
Harvard University Press
This catalogue documents the exhibition Art of Jazz, a collaborative installation at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art with one section (“Form”) installed at the Harvard Art Museum. The book explores the intersection of the visual arts and jazz music, and presents a visual feast of full color plates of artworks, preceded by a series of essays.
“Form,” curated by Suzanne Preston Blier and David Bindman in the teaching gallery of the Harvard Art Museum, ushers in a dialogue between visual representation and jazz music, showcasing artists’ responses to jazz. “Performance,” also curated by Blier and Bindman, guides us through a rich collection of books, album covers, photographs, and other ephemera installed at the Cooper Gallery. “Notes,” curated by Cooper Gallery director Vera Ingrid Grant, fills five of the gallery’s curatorial spaces with contemporary art that illustrates how late twentieth- and early twenty-first century artists hear, view, and engage with jazz.
Visual artists represented in “Form” include Matisse, Jackson Pollock, Romare Bearden, and Stuart Davis. “Performance” includes art by Hugh Bell, Carl Van Vechten, and Romare Bearden; additional album cover art by Joseph Albers, Ben Shahn, Andy Warhol, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers; and posters and photographs of Josephine Baker and Lena Horne. “Notes” includes art by Cullen Washington, Norman Lewis, Walter Davis, Lina Viktor, Petite Noir, Ming Smith, Richard Yarde, Christopher Myers, Whitfield Lovell, and Jason Moran.
[more]
The Art of Life in South Africa
Daniel Magaziner
Ohio University Press, 2016
From 1952 to 1981, South Africa’s apartheid government ran an art school for the training of African art teachers at Indaleni, in what is today KwaZulu-Natal. The Art of Life in South Africa is the story of the students, teachers, art, and politics that circulated through a small school, housed in a remote former mission station. It is the story of a community that made its way through the travails of white supremacist South Africa and demonstrates how the art students and teachers made together became the art of their lives.
Daniel Magaziner radically reframes apartheid-era South African history. Against the dominant narrative of apartheid oppression and black resistance, as well as recent scholarship that explores violence, criminality, and the hopeless entanglements of the apartheid state, this book focuses instead on a small group’s efforts to fashion more fulfilling lives for its members and their community through the ironic medium of the apartheid-era school.
There is no book like this in South African historiography. Lushly illustrated and poetically written, it gives us fully formed lives that offer remarkable insights into the now clichéd experience of black life under segregation and apartheid.
[more]
The Art of Mbira
Musical Inheritance and Legacy
Paul F. Berliner
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Growing out of the collaborative research of an American ethnomusicologist and Zimbabwean musician, Paul F. Berliner’s The Art of Mbira documents the repertory for a keyboard instrument known generally as mbira. At the heart of this work lies the analysis of the improvisatory processes that propel mbira music’s magnificent creativity.
In this book, Berliner provides insight into the communities of study, performance, and worship that surround mbira. He chronicles how master player Cosmas Magaya and his associates have developed their repertory and practices over more than four decades, shaped by musical interaction, social and political dynamics in Zimbabwe, and the global economy of the music industry. At once a detailed exposition of the music’s forms and practices, it is also an indispensable historical and cultural guide to mbira in a changing world.
Together with Berliner and Magaya's compendium of mbira compositions, Mbira’s Restless Dance, The Art of Mbira breaks new ground in the depth and specificity of its exploration of an African musical tradition, and in the entwining of the authors’ collaborative voices. It is a testament to the powerful relationship between music and social life—and the rewards of lifelong musical study, performance, and friendship.
In this book, Berliner provides insight into the communities of study, performance, and worship that surround mbira. He chronicles how master player Cosmas Magaya and his associates have developed their repertory and practices over more than four decades, shaped by musical interaction, social and political dynamics in Zimbabwe, and the global economy of the music industry. At once a detailed exposition of the music’s forms and practices, it is also an indispensable historical and cultural guide to mbira in a changing world.
Together with Berliner and Magaya's compendium of mbira compositions, Mbira’s Restless Dance, The Art of Mbira breaks new ground in the depth and specificity of its exploration of an African musical tradition, and in the entwining of the authors’ collaborative voices. It is a testament to the powerful relationship between music and social life—and the rewards of lifelong musical study, performance, and friendship.
[more]
The Art of Mechanical Reproduction
Technology and Aesthetics from Duchamp to the Digital
Tamara Trodd
University of Chicago Press, 2015
The Art of Mechanical Reproduction presents a striking new approach to how traditional art mediums—painting, sculpture, and drawing—changed in the twentieth century in response to photography, film, and other technologies. Countering the modernist view that the medium provides advanced art with “resistance” against technological pressures, Tamara Trodd argues that we should view art and its practices as imaginatively responding to the potential that artists glimpsed in mechanical reproduction, putting art into dialogue with the commercial cultures of its time.
The Art of Mechanical Reproduction weaves a rich history of the experimental networks in which artists as diverse as Paul Klee, Hans Bellmer, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Smithson, Gerhard Richter, Chris Marker, and Tacita Dean have worked, and it shows for the first time how extensively technological innovations of the moment have affected their work. Original and broad-ranging, The Art of Mechanical Reproduction challenges some of the most respected and entrenched criticism of the past several decades—and allows us to think about these artists anew.
The Art of Mechanical Reproduction weaves a rich history of the experimental networks in which artists as diverse as Paul Klee, Hans Bellmer, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Smithson, Gerhard Richter, Chris Marker, and Tacita Dean have worked, and it shows for the first time how extensively technological innovations of the moment have affected their work. Original and broad-ranging, The Art of Mechanical Reproduction challenges some of the most respected and entrenched criticism of the past several decades—and allows us to think about these artists anew.
[more]
The Art of Medicine
Over 2,000 Years of Images and Imagination
Julie Anderson, Emm Barnes, and Emma Shackleton
University of Chicago Press, 2011
Since ancient times people have depended on medical practitioners to enhance life, to treat illness and injuries, and to help reduce pain and suffering. The scientifically based discipline that we know today stands beside diverse traditions, belief systems, and bodies of medical knowledge that have evolved in fascinating ways across cultures and continents. Throughout this history, successive generations have created artistic representations of these varied aspects of medicine, illustrating instruction manuals, documenting treatments, and creating works of art that enable individuals to express their feelings and ideas about medicine, health, and illness. From ancient wall paintings and tomb carvings to sculpture, installations, and digitally created artworks, the results are extraordinary and pay tribute to how medicine has affected our lives and the lives of our ancestors.
Drawing on the remarkable holdings of the Wellcome Collection in London, The Art of Medicine offers a unique gallery of rarely seen paintings, artifacts, drawings, prints, and extracts from manuscripts and manuals to provide a fascinating visual insight into our knowledge of the human body and mind, and how both have been treated with medicine. Julie Anderson, Emm Barnes, and Emma Shackleton take readers on a fascinating visual journey through the history of medical practice, exploring contemporary biomedical images, popular art, and caricature alongside venerable Chinese scrolls, prehistoric Mesoamerican drawings, paintings of the European Renaissance, medieval Persian manuscripts, and more. The result is a rare and remarkable visual account of what it was and is to be human in sickness and health.
[more]
The Art of Memory
Frances A. Yates
University of Chicago Press, 1974
One of Modern Library's 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century
In this classic study of how people learned to retain vast stores of knowledge before the invention of the printed page, Frances A. Yates traces the art of memory from its treatment by Greek orators, through its Gothic transformations in the Middle Ages, to the occult forms it took in the Renaissance, and finally to its use in the seventeenth century. This book, the first to relate the art of memory to the history of culture as a whole, was revolutionary when it first appeared and continues to mesmerize readers with its lucid and revelatory insights.
In this classic study of how people learned to retain vast stores of knowledge before the invention of the printed page, Frances A. Yates traces the art of memory from its treatment by Greek orators, through its Gothic transformations in the Middle Ages, to the occult forms it took in the Renaissance, and finally to its use in the seventeenth century. This book, the first to relate the art of memory to the history of culture as a whole, was revolutionary when it first appeared and continues to mesmerize readers with its lucid and revelatory insights.
[more]
The Art of Military Coercion
Why the West's Military Superiority Scarcely Matters
Rob de Wijk
Amsterdam University Press, 2014
The United States spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined. And Western nations in general spend far more than developing nations around the globe. Yet when Western nations have found themselves in conflicts in recent decades, their performance has been mixed at best. In his fully updated new edition of The Art of Military Coercion, Rob de Wijk presents a theory on the use of force. He argues that the key is a failure to use force decisively, to properly understand the dynamics of conflict and balance means and ends. Without that ability, superiority of dollars, numbers, and weaponry won't necessarily translate to victory.
[more]
The Art of Military Innovation
The Israel Defense Forces
Edward N. Luttwak and Eitan Shamir
Harvard University Press
The Art of Occupation
Crime and Governance in American-Controlled Germany, 1944–1949
Thomas J. Kehoe
Ohio University Press, 2019
The literature describing social conditions during the post–World War II Allied occupation of Germany has been divided between seemingly irreconcilable assertions of prolonged criminal chaos and narratives of strict martial rule that precluded crime. In The Art of Occupation, Thomas J. Kehoe takes a different view on this history, addressing this divergence through an extensive, interdisciplinary analysis of the interaction between military government and social order.
Focusing on the American Zone and using previously unexamined American and German military reports, court records, and case files, Kehoe assesses crime rates and the psychology surrounding criminality. He thereby offers the first comprehensive exploration of criminality, policing, and both German and American fears around the realities of conquest and potential resistance, social and societal integrity, national futures, and a looming threat from communism in an emergent Cold War. The Art of Occupation is the fullest study of crime and governance during the five years from the first Allied incursions into Germany from the West in September 1944 through the end of the military occupation in 1949. It is an important contribution to American and German social, military, and police histories, as well as historical criminology.
[more]
The Art of Preaching
A Theological and Practical Primer
Daniel Cardo
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
The growing awareness of the importance of preaching is a sign of our times. In the past decades, conscious that a renewal of preaching is essential for a renewed evangelization, many seminaries have implemented homiletic courses. However, there is still a real limitation of good and systematic resources in order to learn the theological depth and practical elements of the art of preaching.
The Art of Preaching: A Theological and Practical Primer aims to fill that gap. It explores the theological understanding of the homily, lessons from classical and contemporary rhetoric, the relevance of preaching for the life of the Church, highlighting recent teachings of the Magisterium, and it presents the incarnation as the foundation for preaching, understood as an essential aspect of the priestly life and mission.
This primer also offers a simple and effective method for the preparation and delivery of homilies, illustrating this by the example of brilliant preachers and exploring the idea of preaching as locus theologicus, i.e., the privileged place for the exercise of theology today. It is in deepening in the value and importance of preaching that theology can be renewed as a living and essential part of the daily life of priests. Seeing the homily not as a burden but as an occasion to fulfill the priestly identity will offer the opportunity to embrace the preparation for preaching as a key for unity among the many tasks and demands of pastoral life. In the homily prayer, study, and work come together.
The Art of Preaching will also provide a selection of homilies from the great preachers of the Church, organized chronologically, with brief introductions and commentaries that highlight what those homilies teach us for our preaching today. Only learning from the best preachers can we hope to preach effectively in our times.
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The Art of Prestige
The Formative Years at Knopf, 1915-1929
Amy Clements
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
In the American book trade, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and its inimitable logo featuring a borzoi wolfhound have come to signify the pinnacle of prestigious publishing. Launched in 1915 by a dynamic twenty-two-year-old and his refined fiancée, Blanche Wolf, the firm soon developed a reputation for excellence, quickly overcoming outsider status to forge a unique identity that has endured well past its founders' lifetimes.
Capturing the little-known early history of Knopf, The Art of Prestige explores the origins of the company's rise to success during the Jazz Age, when Alfred and Blanche established themselves as literary impresarios on both sides of the Atlantic. Drawing on key archival documents from all phases of the publishing process, Amy Root Clements reconstructs the turning points and rhetorical exchanges that made Knopf's initial books noteworthy, from the acquisitions process to design, consumer marketing, and bookselling.
Lasting cornerstones of the young firm include alliances with pivotal figures in the world of graphic arts and book production and with European publishers who brought numerous Nobel Prize winners to the Borzoi list during the company's first fifteen years. Other featured luminaries include the American authors Willa Cather, Dashiell Hammett, and Langston Hughes. The Art of Prestige also examines Alfred Knopf's ancestry, up-bringing, and formal education at Columbia, as well as his apprenticeships with Frank Nelson Doubleday and Mitchell Kennerley—factors that would influence his business decisions for years to come.
The result is a portrait of innovative branding that seamlessly merged book production with book promotion in a literary landscape that was ripe for transformation.
Capturing the little-known early history of Knopf, The Art of Prestige explores the origins of the company's rise to success during the Jazz Age, when Alfred and Blanche established themselves as literary impresarios on both sides of the Atlantic. Drawing on key archival documents from all phases of the publishing process, Amy Root Clements reconstructs the turning points and rhetorical exchanges that made Knopf's initial books noteworthy, from the acquisitions process to design, consumer marketing, and bookselling.
Lasting cornerstones of the young firm include alliances with pivotal figures in the world of graphic arts and book production and with European publishers who brought numerous Nobel Prize winners to the Borzoi list during the company's first fifteen years. Other featured luminaries include the American authors Willa Cather, Dashiell Hammett, and Langston Hughes. The Art of Prestige also examines Alfred Knopf's ancestry, up-bringing, and formal education at Columbia, as well as his apprenticeships with Frank Nelson Doubleday and Mitchell Kennerley—factors that would influence his business decisions for years to come.
The result is a portrait of innovative branding that seamlessly merged book production with book promotion in a literary landscape that was ripe for transformation.
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The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico
Crowned-Nun Portraits and Reform in the Convent
By James M. Córdova
University of Texas Press, 2014
In the eighteenth century, New Spaniards (colonial Mexicans) so lauded their nuns that they developed a local tradition of visually opulent portraits, called monjas coronadas or “crowned nuns,” that picture their subjects in regal trappings at the moment of their religious profession and in death. This study identifies these portraits as markers of a vibrant and changing society that fused together indigenous and Euro-Christian traditions and ritual practices to construct a new and complex religious identity that was unique to New Spain.
To discover why crowned-nun portraits, and especially the profession portrait, were in such demand in New Spain, this book offers a pioneering interpretation of these works as significant visual contributions to a local counter-colonial discourse. James M. Córdova demonstrates that the portraits were a response to the Spanish crown’s project to modify and modernize colonial society—a series of reforms instituted by the Bourbon monarchs that threatened many nuns’ religious identities in New Spain. His analysis of the portraits’ rhetorical devices, which visually combined Euro-Christian and Mesoamerican notions of the sacred, shows how they promoted local religious and cultural values as well as client-patron relations, all of which were under scrutiny by the colonial Church. Combining visual evidence from images of the “crowned nun” with a discussion of the nuns’ actual roles in society, Córdova reveals that nuns found their greatest agency as Christ’s brides, a title through which they could, and did, challenge the Church’s authority when they found it intolerable.
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The Art of Renaissance Venice
Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, 1460-1590
Norbert Huse and Wolfgang Wolters
University of Chicago Press, 1990
In the first contemporary single-volume survey of the three arts of Venice—painting, sculpture, and architecture—Norbert Huse and Wolfgang Wolters offer an important counterbalance to the traditional orientation toward painting as the city's preeminent art by focusing on architecture as the essential Venetian art. They begin their study in 1460, when Venice was one of the key powers of Italy, and end with the death of Tintoretto in 1594, a period of waning international power. In the process, they define the distinctly Venetian terms by which the city and its culture should be understood. With over three hundred illustrations and an exhaustive bibliography, this volume makes an impressive contribution to art historical scholarship.
"The historical aspect of this book is splendid, but where it excels is in its fearless and thought-provoking critical judgements. . . . it will lead both beginners and experts to new joys."—David Ekserdjian, Times Literary Supplement
"The historical aspect of this book is splendid, but where it excels is in its fearless and thought-provoking critical judgements. . . . it will lead both beginners and experts to new joys."—David Ekserdjian, Times Literary Supplement
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The Art of Return
The Sixties and Contemporary Culture
James Meyer
University of Chicago Press, 2019
More than any other decade, the sixties capture our collective cultural imagination. And while many Americans can immediately imagine the sound of Martin Luther King Jr. declaring “I have a dream!” or envision hippies placing flowers in gun barrels, the revolutionary sixties resonates around the world: China’s communist government inaugurated a new cultural era, African nations won independence from colonial rule, and students across Europe took to the streets, calling for an end to capitalism, imperialism, and the Vietnam War.
In this innovative work, James Meyer turns to art criticism, theory, memoir, and fiction to examine the fascination with the long sixties and contemporary expressions of these cultural memories across the globe. Meyer draws on a diverse range of cultural objects that reimagine this revolutionary era stretching from the 1950s to the 1970s, including reenactments of civil rights, antiwar, and feminist marches, paintings, sculptures, photographs, novels, and films. Many of these works were created by artists and writers born during the long Sixties who were driven to understand a monumental era that they missed. These cases show us that the past becomes significant only in relation to our present, and our remembered history never perfectly replicates time past. This, Meyer argues, is precisely what makes our contemporary attachment to the past so important: it provides us a critical opportunity to examine our own relationship to history, memory, and nostalgia.
In this innovative work, James Meyer turns to art criticism, theory, memoir, and fiction to examine the fascination with the long sixties and contemporary expressions of these cultural memories across the globe. Meyer draws on a diverse range of cultural objects that reimagine this revolutionary era stretching from the 1950s to the 1970s, including reenactments of civil rights, antiwar, and feminist marches, paintings, sculptures, photographs, novels, and films. Many of these works were created by artists and writers born during the long Sixties who were driven to understand a monumental era that they missed. These cases show us that the past becomes significant only in relation to our present, and our remembered history never perfectly replicates time past. This, Meyer argues, is precisely what makes our contemporary attachment to the past so important: it provides us a critical opportunity to examine our own relationship to history, memory, and nostalgia.
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The Art of Solidarity
Visual and Performative Politics in Cold War Latin America
Edited by Jessica Stites Mor and Maria del Carmen Suescun Pozas
University of Texas Press, 2018
The Cold War claimed many lives and inflicted tremendous psychological pain throughout the Americas. The extreme polarization that resulted from pitting capitalism against communism held most of the creative and productive energy of the twentieth century captive. Many artists responded to Cold War struggles by engaging in activist art practice, using creative expression to mobilize social change. The Art of Solidarity examines how these creative practices in the arts and culture contributed to transnational solidarity campaigns that connected people across the Americas from the early twentieth century through the Cold War and its immediate aftermath.
This collection of original essays is divided into four chronological sections: cultural and artistic production in the pre–Cold War era that set the stage for transnational solidarity organizing; early artistic responses to the rise of Cold War polarization and state repression; the centrality of cultural and artistic production in social movements of solidarity; and solidarity activism beyond movements. Essay topics range widely across regions and social groups, from the work of lesbian activists in Mexico City in the late 1970s and 1980s, to the exchanges and transmissions of folk-music practices from Cuba to the United States, to the uses of Chilean arpilleras to oppose and protest the military dictatorship. While previous studies have focused on politically engaged artists or examined how artist communities have created solidarity movements, this book is one of the first to merge both perspectives.
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The Art of Staying Neutral
The Netherlands in the First World War, 1914-1918
Maartje Abbenhuis
Amsterdam University Press, 2006
An insightful account of the challenges of neutrality in an era of total war, The Art of Staying Neutral shows how the Netherlands remained peaceful throughout World War I. This sustained neutrality, Maartje Abbenhuis demonstrates, was the result of many factors, including masterly diplomacy, careful adherence to international laws and a decisive measure of good fortune. Neutrality, however, did not come without considerable costs to the nation’s economy and security.
This book is a major contribution both to the study of neutrality and the domestic history of the Netherlands.
This book is a major contribution both to the study of neutrality and the domestic history of the Netherlands.
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The Art of Surrender
Decomposing Sovereignty at Conflict's End
Robin Wagner-Pacifici
University of Chicago Press, 2005
How do we know when a war ends? For many, the resolution of a conflict comes not with the last traces of smoke left on the battlefield, but with the formal ceremonies of surrender: possession and repossession, the signing of treaties, and the pomp and circumstance that mark them. Historically, most conflicts have ended with such rituals. But, as Robin Wagner-Pacifici reveals in The Art of Surrender, they should not be seen as merely a matter of giving up. They also offer ways of holding back and signal early fault lines that give rise to later undoings and conflicts.
The Art of Surrender explores these ritual concessions as acts of warfare, performances of submission, demonstrations of power, and representations of shifting, unstable worlds. Wagner-Pacifici analyzes three significant military surrenders in the history of warfare—the Thirty Years' War of the seventeenth century, the American Civil War, and World War II—through the use of period documents and forms, maps, literature, witness accounts, photographs, and paintings that were left as proof of victory and defeat. In her analyses of such archival material and iconic works of art, she considers the limits of sovereignty at conflict's end, showing how the ways we concede loss can be as important as the ways we claim victory.
The Art of Surrender explores these ritual concessions as acts of warfare, performances of submission, demonstrations of power, and representations of shifting, unstable worlds. Wagner-Pacifici analyzes three significant military surrenders in the history of warfare—the Thirty Years' War of the seventeenth century, the American Civil War, and World War II—through the use of period documents and forms, maps, literature, witness accounts, photographs, and paintings that were left as proof of victory and defeat. In her analyses of such archival material and iconic works of art, she considers the limits of sovereignty at conflict's end, showing how the ways we concede loss can be as important as the ways we claim victory.
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Art of the Islands
Celtic, Pictish, Anglo-Saxon and Viking Visual Culture, c. 450-1050
Michelle P. Brown
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2016
The Celtic, Pictish, Anglo-Saxon, and Viking peoples who inhabited the British Isles and Ireland from late prehistory to the Normal Conquest left behind a rich visual heritage that continues to be felt today. The traditions of each of these peoples has been studied separately, but rarely has the historical interaction of these cultures been adequately considered.
Michelle P. Brown remedies this oversight, presenting an extensively illustrated art historical overview of this formative period in the region’s history. Describing the interactions between the region’s inhabitants, she also explores the formation of national and regional identities. Brown ranges across works as diverse as the Book of Kells, the Tara Brooch, the Aberlemno Stone, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Alfred Jewel, and the Benedictional of St. Ethelwold, showing how their complex imagery can be best interpreted. She also considers the impact of the art of this period upon the history of art in general, exploring how it has influenced many movements since, from the Carolingian Renaissance and the Romanesque style to the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement.
Michelle P. Brown remedies this oversight, presenting an extensively illustrated art historical overview of this formative period in the region’s history. Describing the interactions between the region’s inhabitants, she also explores the formation of national and regional identities. Brown ranges across works as diverse as the Book of Kells, the Tara Brooch, the Aberlemno Stone, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Alfred Jewel, and the Benedictional of St. Ethelwold, showing how their complex imagery can be best interpreted. She also considers the impact of the art of this period upon the history of art in general, exploring how it has influenced many movements since, from the Carolingian Renaissance and the Romanesque style to the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement.
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The Art of the Jewish Family
A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects
Laura Arnold Leibman
Bard Graduate Center, 2020
In The Art of the Jewish Family, Laura Arnold Leibman examines five objects owned by a diverse group of Jewish women who all lived in New York in the years between 1750 and 1850: a letter from impoverished Hannah Louzada seeking assistance; a set of silver cups owned by Reyna Levy Moses; an ivory miniature owned by Sarah Brandon Moses, who was born enslaved and became one of the wealthiest Jewish women in New York; a book created by Sarah Ann Hays Mordecai; and a family silhouette owned by Rebbetzin Jane Symons Isaacs. These objects offer intimate and tangible views into the lives of Jewish American women from a range of statuses, beliefs, and lifestyles—both rich and poor, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, slaves and slaveowners.
Each chapter creates a biography of a single woman through an object, offering a new methodology that looks past texts alone to material culture in order to further understand early Jewish American women’s lives and restore their agency as creators of Jewish identity. While much of the available history was written by men, the objects that Leibman studies were made for and by Jewish women. Speaking to American Jewish life, women’s studies, and American history, The Art of the Jewish Family sheds new light on the lives and values of these women, while also revealing the social and religious structures that led to Jewish women being erased from historical archives.
The Art of the Jewish Family was the winner of three 2020 National Jewish Book Awards: the Celebrate 350 Award for American Jewish Studies, the Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award for History, and the Barbara Dobkin Award for Women's Studies.
Each chapter creates a biography of a single woman through an object, offering a new methodology that looks past texts alone to material culture in order to further understand early Jewish American women’s lives and restore their agency as creators of Jewish identity. While much of the available history was written by men, the objects that Leibman studies were made for and by Jewish women. Speaking to American Jewish life, women’s studies, and American history, The Art of the Jewish Family sheds new light on the lives and values of these women, while also revealing the social and religious structures that led to Jewish women being erased from historical archives.
The Art of the Jewish Family was the winner of three 2020 National Jewish Book Awards: the Celebrate 350 Award for American Jewish Studies, the Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award for History, and the Barbara Dobkin Award for Women's Studies.
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The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento
Representing Culture and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Italy
Albert Boime
University of Chicago Press, 1993
During the 1860s and '70s, more than a decade before the development of French Impressionism, Italy produced a group of avant-garde artists whose fervently nationalist paintings anticipated some of Impressionism's theoretical concerns. These artists were called "Macchiaioli" because they based their technique on a quickly rendered macchia, or sketch.
In the first extended sociopolitical interpretation in English of this important group, Albert Boime places the Macchiaioli in the cultural context of the Risorgimento—the political movement that unified Italy, freed from foreign rule, under a secular, constitutional government. Anglo-American art criticism has generally neglected these painters (probably because of their overt political affiliation and nationalist expression), but Boime shows that these artists, while deeply political, nevertheless created aesthetically superior work.
Boime's study departs from previous research on the Macchiaioli by systematically investigating the group's writings, sources, and patronage in relation to the Risogimento. The book also examines both contemporary and later critical responses, revealing how French art criticism has obscured the achievements of Macchiaioli art. Richly illustrated, The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento will appeal to anyone interested in nineteenth-century European art or the history of Italy.
In the first extended sociopolitical interpretation in English of this important group, Albert Boime places the Macchiaioli in the cultural context of the Risorgimento—the political movement that unified Italy, freed from foreign rule, under a secular, constitutional government. Anglo-American art criticism has generally neglected these painters (probably because of their overt political affiliation and nationalist expression), but Boime shows that these artists, while deeply political, nevertheless created aesthetically superior work.
Boime's study departs from previous research on the Macchiaioli by systematically investigating the group's writings, sources, and patronage in relation to the Risogimento. The book also examines both contemporary and later critical responses, revealing how French art criticism has obscured the achievements of Macchiaioli art. Richly illustrated, The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento will appeal to anyone interested in nineteenth-century European art or the history of Italy.
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The Art of the Network
Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence
Paul D. McLean
Duke University Press, 2007
Writing letters to powerful people to win their favor and garner rewards such as political office, tax relief, and recommendations was an institution in Renaissance Florence; the practice was an important tool for those seeking social mobility, security, and recognition by others. In this detailed study of political and social patronage in fifteenth-century Florence, Paul D. McLean shows that patronage was much more than a pursuit of specific rewards. It was also a pursuit of relationships and of a self defined in relation to others. To become independent in Renaissance Florence, one first had to become connected. With The Art of the Network, McLean fills a gap in sociological scholarship by tracing the historical antecedents of networking and examining the concept of self that accompanies it. His analysis of patronage opens into a critique of contemporary theories about social networks and social capital, and an exploration of the sociological meaning of “culture.”
McLean scrutinized thousands of letters to and from Renaissance Florentines. He describes the social protocols the letters reveal, paying particular attention to the means by which Florentines crafted credible presentations of themselves. The letters, McLean contends, testify to the development not only of new forms of self-presentation but also of a new kind of self to be presented: an emergent, “modern” conception of self as an autonomous agent. They also bring to the fore the importance that their writers attached to concepts of honor, and the ways that they perceived themselves in relation to the Florentine state.
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Art of the United States, 1750–2000
John Davis and Michael Leja
Terra Foundation for American Art, 2019
Art of the United States is a landmark volume that presents three centuries of US art through a broad array of historical texts, including writings by artists, critics, patrons, literary figures, and other commentators. Combining a wide-ranging selection of texts with high-quality reproductions of artworks, it offers a resource for the study and understanding of the visual arts of the United States. With contextual essays, explanatory headnotes, a chronology of US historical landmarks, maps, and full-color illustrations of key artworks, the volume will appeal to national and international audiences ranging from undergraduates and museum visitors to art historians and other scholars. Texts by a range of artists and cultural figures—including John Adams, Thomas Cole, Frederick Douglass, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, Clement Greenberg, and Cindy Sherman—are grouped according to historical era alongside additional featured artists.
A sourcebook of unprecedented breadth and depth, Art of the United States brings together multiple voices throughout the ages to provide a framework for learning and critical thinking on US art.
A sourcebook of unprecedented breadth and depth, Art of the United States brings together multiple voices throughout the ages to provide a framework for learning and critical thinking on US art.
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