Precious spices and textiles, imported from distant trading posts in the eastern Mediterranean, stocked Venetian markets in the Middle Ages; but Venice’s merchants imported more than material goods from the East—they acquired also a wealth of visual ideas and information from Muslim culture. This fascinating book investigates the influence of oriental trade and travel on medieval Venice and its architecture.

Architectural historian Deborah Howard examines the experiences of Venetian merchants overseas, focusing on links with Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, as well as with Persia and the Silk Route. She argues that many Venetians gained insight into Islamic culture through personal contacts with their Muslim trading partners. Based on wide-ranging multidisciplinary research, this book examines the mechanisms that governed the exchange of visual culture across ideological boundaries before the age of printing. Howard explores a range of building types that reflect the impact of Islamic imagery, paying special attention to two iconic buildings, San Marco and the Palazzo Ducale. She considers the complexities of importing Muslim ideas to an unambiguously Christian city, itself the point of embarkation for pilgrims to the Holy Land.

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

In this study, Seth Estrin probes the emotional effects of one of the largest and most important categories of Greek sculpture: the funerary monuments of Classical Athens. Instead of simply documenting experiences of bereavement, he demonstrates that funerary monuments played a vital role in giving grief visual and material presence, employing the subtle effects of relief sculpture to make private experiences of loss socially meaningful to others. By identifying the deaths they marked as worthy of grief, funerary monuments mobilized fundamental questions about sculptural form and pictorial recognition to political ends, instrumentalizing the emotional dimensions of sculpture as a means to construct and uphold social hierarchies. Grounded in careful examination of numerous monuments, new readings of their accompanying epigrams and ancient literary sources, and close consideration of both ancient and modern theories of emotion, Grief Made Marble makes a landmark contribution not only to the study of Greek sculpture, but to our broader understanding of the relationship between art and emotion in antiquity.

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

Sargent Claude Johnson (1888–1967) was the first Black modernist on the West Coast to gain national acclaim. His artistic practice, forged in California, drew from a range of international influences, including traditional and contemporary arts of Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, particularly Mexican modernism and Indigenous pottery techniques. Spanning the Black Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Johnson’s career was devoted to sensitive, ennobling portrayals of people of color. Though best known as a sculptor, he worked expertly in a broad range of media—from painting and printmaking to enamelwork and ceramics—each illuminating his multifaceted identity as an artist.

In this catalogue, leading scholars examine Johnson’s artistic evolution and offer fresh perspectives on his work. From sculptures of underrepresented subjects to majestic architectural commissions—including a celebrated mural—the book positions Johnson’s oeuvre within an expansive framework of global modernism.

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

The best cartooning is efficient visual storytelling—it is as much a matter of writing as it is of drawing. In this book, noted cartoonist and illustrator Ivan Brunetti presents fifteen distinct lessons on the art of cartooning, guiding his readers through wittily written passages on cartooning terminology, techniques, tools, and theory. Supplemented by Brunetti's own illustrations, prepared specially for this book, these lessons move the reader from spontaneous drawings to single-panel strips and complicated multipage stories.

Through simple, creative exercises and assignments, Brunetti offers an unintimidating approach to a complex art form. He looks at the rhythms of storytelling, the challenges of character design, and the formal elements of comics while composing pages in his own iconic style and experimenting with a variety of tools, media, and approaches. By following the author's sophisticated and engaging perspective on the art of cartooning, aspiring cartoonists of all ages will hone their craft, create their personal style, and discover their own visual language.

Winner of the 2012 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for the Best Academic/Scholarly Work

"Brunetti has given the cartooning world something very similar to what Strunk & White gave to prose with their Elements of Style."—Tim O’Neil, PopMatters.com

After Raphael is an essential overview of sixteenth-century Italian painting. The book evaluates the paintings of Raphael, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Bronzino, and their followers and presents a new interpretation for the stylistic shifts that occurred after 1520. By taking into account the social, cultural, political, theological, and patronage issues that affected taste and stylistic developments, Marcia B. Hall demonstrates how the revival of interest in antique Roman sculpture relief affected Mannerist painters. She also examines the repercussions of the Reformation, which changed forever the Church's view of the function of images.

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

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) took his first major trip to New York in 1909, fleeing a failed marriage and artistic stagnation. He returned a decade later, his personal life and architectural career again in crisis. Booming 1920s New York served as a refuge, but it also challenged him and resurrected his career. The city connected Wright with important clients and commissions that would harness his creative energy and define his role in modern architecture, even as the stock market crash took its toll on his benefactors.

Wright denounced New York as an “unlivable prison” even as he reveled in its culture. The city became an urban foil for Wright’s work in the desert and in the “organic architecture” he promoted as an alternative to American Art Deco and the International Style. New York became a major protagonist at the end of Wright’s life, as he spent his final years at the Plaza Hotel working on the Guggenheim Museum, the building that would cement his legacy.

Anthony Alofsin has broken new ground by mining the recently opened Wright archives held by Columbia University and the Museum of Modern Art. His foundational research provides a crucial and innovative understanding of Wright’s life, his career, and the conditions that enabled his success. The result is at once a stunning biography and a glittering portrait of early twentieth-century Manhattan.

Monet’s Minutes is a revelatory account charting the relationship between the works of Claude Monet (1840–1926)—founder of French Impressionism and one of the world’s best-known painters—and the modern experience of time. André Dombrowski illuminates Monet’s celebration of instantaneity in the context of the late nineteenth-century time technologies that underwrote it.

Monet’s version of Impressionism demonstrated an acute awareness of the particularly modern pressures of time, but until now scholars have not examined the histories and technologies of time and timekeeping that informed Impressionism’s major stylistic shifts. Arguing that the fascination with instantaneity rejected the dulling cultures of newly routinized and standardized time, Monet’s Minutes traces the evolution of Monet’s art to what were then seismic shifts in the shape of time itself.

In each chapter, Dombrowski focuses on the connections between a set of Monet’s works and a specific technology or experience of time, while providing the voices of period critics responding to Impressionism. Grounded in exceptional research and analyses, this book offers new interpretations of key paintings by Monet and a fresh perspective on late nineteenth-century art, society, and modern temporality.

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

A new transnational history of modernist art that connects discourses on art as therapy to questions of gender, disability, race, and the politics of care
 
In an innovative collection of essays by established and emerging scholars, Modernism, Art, Therapy explores relationships between clinically derived art therapies and the modernisms that developed transnationally in visual arts across the twentieth century. Through sites of practice such as hospitals, clinics, and prisons—but also schools, art museums, and galleries—the book puts art history into conversation with critical medical and health humanities, disability studies, critical race studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Committed to exploring questions of agency and social justice, contributors to the book attend to traditionally marginalized subjects and makers, from children and the incarcerated to women artists, therapists, and care workers. The volume thus aims not only to expand the category of masterworks that art historians deem meaningful but also to expose the limitations of dominant narratives about modernism.

This born-digital book is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.

Between 1909 and 1915, Eugène Atget (1857–1927) produced seven albums filled with photographs of Paris at the height of its belle époque. The albums were prototypes for books that were never published. Now for the first time Atget's albums are presented in full, edited with the sequencing and repetition that the great photographer intended. In addition, Atget's pictures are analyzed in an altogether new way: as commercial picture documents produced by a photographer for the artists, archivists, antiquarians, designers, and builders who were his clients.

Molly Nesbit defines and explores the nature of Atget's pictures in terms of their form, practical vision, and relation to knowledge, providing the first discussion of the commercial picture document. She also offers a glimpse into the politics of Atget's ways of seeing: how he identified with the far left; how his sense of modern life and the variety in popular culture was exhibited through the artisans, cabarets, ragpicker carts, and marketplaces he photographed; how his albums opened up a space without bourgeois order, an elliptical, often beautiful image of mass culture.

Atget's Seven Albums is thus many books—a critical edition, a fresh view of Atget's work, a new kind of history of photography, and a social history of art and Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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

Spanning more than fifty years, this comprehensive volume collects the letters, journal entries, interviews, lectures, reviews, and remembrances of the groundbreaking twentieth-century artist Anne Truitt (1921–2004). Alexandra Truitt, the artist’s daughter and a leading expert on her work, has carefully selected these writings, most of which are previously unpublished, from the artist’s papers at Bryn Mawr College as well as private holdings.

Revelations about the artist’s life abound. Among Truitt’s earliest writings are excerpts from journals written more than a decade before her first artistic breakthrough, in which she establishes themes that would occupy her for decades. In later texts she shares uncommon insights into the practices of other artists and writers, both predecessors and peers. Like Truitt’s published journals, these writings offer a compelling narrative of her development as an artist and efforts to find her voice as a writer. They show that Truitt’s creative impulse to translate the inner workings of her mind into a symbolic language, so important to understanding her sculpture, predates her art.

A prominent practitioner, an influential theorist, and an esteemed educator, the architect Peter Eisenman commands attention in architectural discourse and debate. This book, a companion volume to Eisenman Inside Out: Selected Writings, 1963–1988, gathers a generous selection of his later writings. In these texts Eisenman undertakes theoretical analyses, close readings of his own works, and innovative assessments of the designs and writings of other architects and critics.

In a major introduction to the volume, Jeffrey Kipnis looks closely at Eisenman’s approach toward language and writing, a practice in which architecture itself becomes a form of written theory, as well as at his context within a critical canon that includes Jacques Derrida and Rosalind Krauss. Presenting the range of Eisenman’s important contributions to architectural theory, this collection of nineteen essays provides insight into the architect’s own understandings and methodologies and offers provocative challenges for his readers.

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

Although the arts are often thought to be closer to the rim of education than to its core, they are, surprisingly, critically important means for developing complex and subtle aspects of the mind, argues Elliot W. Eisner in this engrossing book. In it he describes how various forms of thinking are evoked, developed, and refined through the arts. These forms of thinking, Eisner argues, are more helpful in dealing with the ambiguities and uncertainties of daily life than are the formally structured curricula that are employed today in schools.

Offering a rich array of examples, Eisner describes different approaches to the teaching of the arts and the virtues each possesses when well taught. He discusses especially nettlesome issues pertaining to the evaluation of performance in the arts. Perhaps most important, Eisner provides a fresh and admittedly iconoclastic perspective on what the arts can contribute to education, namely a new vision of both its aims and its means. This new perspective, Eisner argues, is especially important today, a time at which mechanistic forms of technical rationality often dominate our thinking about the conduct and assessment of education.