Nature's Covenant, a reading of John Ruskin, including his neglected poems and early prose writings, brings forth a fresh awareness of his career as an interpreter of landscape, where landscape is conceived as a filter of human meaning, of aesthetic and theological significance. The book shows the correlation in Ruskin's work between the Reformed theology of his religious tradition and the Romantic poetics of literature that he sought to practice. It reconstructs the particular hermeneutic of landscape that Ruskin developed, a vision of the natural world that depended equally upon the Romantic... View More...
Close readings of ostensibly "blank" works--from unprinted pages to silent music--that point to a new understanding of media.In No Medium, Craig Dworkin looks at works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent, writing critically and substantively about works for which there would seem to be not only nothing to see but nothing to say. Examined closely, these ostensibly contentless works of art, literature, and music point to a new understanding of media and the limits of the artistic object.Dworkin considers works predicated on blank sheets of paper, from a fictional collection of poems in Jean... View More...
An interdisciplinary examination of the impact of Latino cultures and the Spanish language on New York, which is approaching the milestone of being one third Hispanic. Accompanying a major exhibition organised by the New York Historical Society and El Museo del Barrio (an abbreviated version of which will travel through the United States), this groundbreaking, interdisciplinary publication will for the first time make visible these connections and the myriad ways in which they have shaped the city for more than four centuries. Edward J. Sullivan is Helen Gould Sheppard Professor in the History... View More...
The palette knife and painting knife are intriguing and expressive tools. Working in oil with a painting knife adds an element of texture and spontaneity to fine art that simply cannot be achieved with a paintbrush alone. Oil Painting Techniques addresses everything you want to know about painting with a knife, including the materials you will need to get started, as well as hand positions, paint mixing, and coverage techniques. Follow step-by-step instructions to create different textures and master numerous applications: thick and thin coverage, dot and sidestrokes, and much more. From paint... View More...
First printed in the 12th century, here is the earliest treatise on the arts written by a practicing artist. Offering an essential understanding of pre-Renaissance art and technology, the Benedictine author details pigments, glass blowing, stained glass, gold and silver work, and more -- information of great importance to craftsmen and historians of art and science. Includes 34 illustrations. View More...
Art Does art leave you cold? And is that what it's supposed to do? Or is a painting meant to move you to tears? Hemingway was reduced to tears in the midst of a drinking bout when a painting by James Thurber caught his eye. And what's bad about that? In Pictures and Tears, art historian James Elkins tells the story of paintings that have made people cry. Drawing upon anecdotes related to individual works of art, he provides a chronicle of how people have shown emotion before works of art in the past, and a meditation on the curious tearlessness with which most people approach art in the presen... View More...
How do the arts give us pleasure? Covering a very wide range of artistic works, from Auden to David Lynch, Rembrandt to Edward Weston, and Richard Strauss to Keith Jarrett, Pleasure and the Arts offers us an explanation of our enjoyable emotional engagements with literature, music, and painting. The arts direct us to intimate and particularized relationships, with the people represented in the works, or with those we imagine produced them. When we listen to music, look at a purely abstract painting, or drink a glass of wine, can we enjoy the experience without verbalizing our response? Do our ... View More...
This new hardcover annual offers a unique scholarly format, an interdisciplinary dialogue that, it is hoped, will foster the development of a sound, useful methodology for applying psychoanalytic insight to art and artists. The series provides a medium for those who study art, those who interpret it, and occasionally those who create it, formally to explore the meaning of an artistic work as the direct reflection of the inner world of its creator. Within each volume, individual topics are addressed by either an art historian or a psychoanalyst, with a response frequently tendered by an expert ... View More...
Is culture brokered like stocks, real estate, or marriage? In this engaging book, Richard Kurin shows that cultures are also mediated and indeed brokered by countries, organizations, communities, and individuals -- all with their own vision of the truth and varying abilities to impose it on others. Drawing on his diverse experiences in producing exhibitions and public programs, Kurin challenges culture brokers -- defined broadly to include museum professionals, film-makers, journalists, festival producers, and scholars of many disciplines -- to reveal more clearly the nature of their interpret... View More...
Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art spans the period from the 10th to the 15th century, including discussion of the Carolingian renaissance and the 12th century proto-renaissance. Erwin Panofsky posits that there were "reanscences" prior to the widely known Renaissance that began in Italy in the 14th century. Whereas earlier renascences can be classified as revivals, the Renaissance was a unique instance that led to a wider cultural transformation. View More...
Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford talked in art galleries or churches or their own homes, and this book is structured around their journeys. But whether they were in the Louvre or the Prado, the Mauritshuis of the Palazzo Pitti, they reveal the pleasures of truly looking.De Montebello shares the sense of excitement recorded by Goethe in his autobiography--"akin to the emotion experienced on entering a House of God"--but also reflects on why these secular temples might nevertheless be the "worst possible places to look at art." But in the end both men convey, with subtlety and brillianc... View More...
In this groundbreaking volume, contemporary art historians-all of them women-probe the dilemmas and complexities of writing about the woman artist, past and present. Singular Women proposes a new feminist investigation of the history of art by considering how a historian's theoretical approach affects the way in which research progresses and stories are told. These thirteen essays on specific artists, from the Renaissance to the present day, address their work and history to examine how each has been inserted into or left out of the history of art. The authors go beyond an analysis of the past... View More...
In the years following World War I, a small group of writers, painters, and filmmakers called the Surrealists set out to change the way we perceive the world. In Surreal Lives, Ruth Brandon follows the lives and interactions of such firecracker minds as the movement's didactic "Pope", Andre Breton and the ambitious and manic Salvador Dali, as well as Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Man Ray, Max Ernst, and filmmaker Luis Bunuel. It charts the shifting allegiances, such muses and patrons as Gala Dali and Peggy Guggenheim. Ruth Brandon spins the many stories of Surrealism with wit... View More...
With 43 illustrations of works by Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, Cindy Sherman, and Jo Spence, among others, The Art of Reflection is the first sustained inquiry into the appropriation of self-portraiture by women painters, photographers, scultptors, and performance artists. View More...
Creativity is of rising interest to scholars and laypeople alike. Creativity in the arts, however, is very different from creativity in science, business, sports, cooking, or teaching. This book brings together top experts in the field from around the world to discuss creativity across many different domains. Each chapter includes clear definitions, intriguing research, potential measures, and suggestions for development or future directions. After a broad discussion of creativity across different domains, subsequent chapters look deeper into those individual domains (traditional arts, science... View More...
This unique anthology brings together material from 38 well-known writers, artists, and scientists who attempt to describe the process by which original ideas come to them. Contributors include Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Amy Lowell, Rudyard Kipling, Max Ernst, Katherine Anne Porter, Henry Miller, Carl Gustav Jung, Mary Wigman, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Henri Poincar and many others. View More...
What constitutes a creative person? Different cultures have different perspectives on what it means to be creative, yet it is nearly always the American or Western perspective that is represented in the psychological literature. The goal of this handbook is to present a truly international and diverse set of perspectives on the psychology of human creativity. Distinguished international scholars have contributed to this book's chapters on the history and current state of creativity research and theory in their respective parts of the world. Much of the work discussed has never before been avai... View More...
Vermeer, Goya, Rembrandt, Rubens - the Beit art collection was worth millions. For decades Sir Alfred and Lady Beit had lived peacefully at Russborough House in Ireland. Until people started stealing their paintings...Of all the canvases at Russborough, it was Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid that most caught the public's imagination. Twice stolen, once by an IRA sympathiser and then by notorious gangster Martin Cahill, it risked being lost from view forever, unless the Garda, together with Scotland Yard and some seasoned international art detectives, could contrive the perfect st... View More...
Drawing on Freudian theories of sexuality and Kant's conception of the beautiful, French art historian Hubert Damisch considers artists as diverse as Raphael, Picasso, Watteau, and Manet to demonstrate that beauty has always been connected to ideas of sexual difference and pleasure. Damisch's tale begins with the judgment of Paris, in which Paris awards Venus the golden apple and thus forever links beauty with desire. The casting of this decision as a mistake-in which desire is rewarded over wisdom and strength-is then linked to theories of the unconscious and psychological drives. In his ques... View More...
Moshe Barasch, an authority on art theory, tackles the complex question of how art works as language. Barasch shows how, once an art work is seen and understood, a new, communicative function is effectively added to the work. In an engaging style Barasch moves from the art and civilization of Ancient Egypt to that of modern Europe, and effortlessly shows a full and surprising range of language in art--from the magical to the impious, from the ambiguous to the didactic, from the scientific to the propagandistic. Barasch contemplates a variety of mediums including sculpture, painting, mural, sta... View More...
Moshe Barasch, an authority on art theory, tackles the complex question of how art works as language. Barasch shows how, once an art work is seen and understood, a new, communicative function is effectively added to the work. In an engaging style Barasch moves from the art and civilization of Ancient Egypt to that of modern Europe, and effortlessly shows a full and surprising range of language in art--from the magical to the impious, from the ambiguous to the didactic, from the scientific to the propagandistic. Barasch contemplates a variety of mediums including sculpture, painting, mural, sta... View More...
Told with consummate skill by the writer of the bestselling, award-winning A Civil Action, The Lost Painting is a remarkable synthesis of history and detective story. An Italian village on a hilltop near the Adriatic coast, a decaying palazzo facing the sea, and in the basement, cobwebbed and dusty, lit by a single bulb, an archive unknown to scholars. Here, a young graduate student from Rome, Francesca Cappelletti, makes a discovery that inspires a search for a work of art of incalculable value, a painting lost for almost two centuries. The artist was Caravaggio, a master of the Italian Ba... View More...
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award The cast of characters includes Hitler and Goering, Gertrude Stein and Marc Chagall--not to mention works by artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Pablo Picasso. And the story told in this superbly researched and suspenseful book is that of the Third Reich's war on European culture and the Allies' desperate effort to preserve it. From the Nazi purges of "Degenerate Art" and Goering's shopping sprees in occupied Paris to the perilous journey of the "Mona Lisa" from Paris and the painstaking reclamation of the priceless treasures of liberated Italy, T... View More...