The meaning of a painted portrait and even its subject may be far more complex than expected, Tamar Garb reveals in this book. She charts for the first time the history of French female portraiture from its heyday in the early nineteenth century to its demise in the early twentieth century, showing how these paintings illuminate evolving social attitudes and aesthetic concerns in France over the course of the century.

The author builds the discussion around six canonic works by Ingres, Manet, Cassatt, Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse, beginning with Ingres’s idealized portrait of Mme de Sennones and ending with Matisse’s elegiac last portrait of his wife. The chapters offer meditations on these individual paintings, each of which dramatises in its own way the historical place of portraiture and the modern construction of the feminine. During the hundred years that separate these works, the female portrait went from being the ideal genre for the expression of painting’s capacity to describe and embellish “nature,” to the prime locus of its refusal to do so. Picasso’s Cubism, and specifically Ma Jolie, provides the fulcrum of this shift.

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Beginning in 1800, Looking at Men explores how the modern male body was forged through the intimately linked professions of art and medicine, which deployed muscular models and martial arts to renew the beau idéal. This ideal of the virile body derived from the athletic perfection found in the classical male nude. The study of human anatomy and dissection in both art and medicine underpinned a modern gladiatorial ideal, its representations setting the parameters not just of ‘normal’ virile masculinity but also its abject ‘other’. Through the shared violence of human dissection and martial arts, male artists and medics secured their professional privilege and authority on the bodies of ‘roughs’. First and foremost visual, this process has literary parallels in Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde. While embodying signs of dominant power and signalling differences of race, class, gender and sexuality, the virile masculine ideal contained its shadow, the threat of loss, of a Darwinian ‘degeneration’ that required vigilant intervention to ensure the health of nations.

Anthea Callen’s lively and intelligent study casts a new eye on contributions by many lesser-known artists, as well as more familiar works by Géricault, Courbet, Dalou and Bazille through to Eakins, Thornycroft, Leighton and Tonks, and includes images that draw on photography and the popular visual cultures of boxing, wrestling and bodybuilding. Callen reassesses ideas of the modern male body and virile manhood in this exploration of the heteronormative, the homosocial and the homoerotic in art, anatomy and nascent anthropology.

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This fascinating book transforms our understanding of Cubism, showing in unprecedented detail how it emerged in Picasso’s work of the years 1906–13, and tracing its roots in nineteenth-century philosophy and linguistics. Linking well-known paintings and sculptures to the hitherto-ignored drawings that accompanied them, Pepe Karmel demonstrates how Picasso’s quest to depict the human body with greater solidity led, paradoxically, to its fragmentation; and how Picasso used the archaic model of stage space to free himself from conventional perspective, replacing the open window of Renaissance painting with a new projective space.

In other chapters, Karmel discusses the empiricist philosophy championed by Hippolyte Taine, which encouraged the breakdown of painting into its abstract elements, and laid the groundwork for an art of mental association rather than naturalistic figuration. Similarly, contemporary philology provided the model for a visual language employing both metaphoric and metonymic (but not arbitrary) signs. Combining intellectual history with close visual reading, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism opens new perspectives on the most influential movement in twentieth-century art.

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Best known for his paintings Irises and Red and White Plum Blossoms, Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716) was a highly successful Edo period artist who worked in many genres and media—including hanging scrolls, screen paintings, fan paintings, lacquer, textiles, and ceramics. Combining archival research, social history, and visual analysis, Frank Feltens situates Kōrin within the broader art culture of early modern Japan. He shows how financial pressures, client preferences, and the impulse toward personal branding in a competitive field shaped Kōrin’s approach to art-making throughout his career. Feltens also offers a keen visual reading of the artist’s work, highlighting the ways Kōrin’s artistic innovations succeeded across media, such as his introduction of painterly techniques into lacquer design and his creation of ceramics that mimicked the appearance of ink paintings. This book, the first major study of Kōrin in English, provides an intimate and thought-provoking portrait of one of Japan’s most significant artists.

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Cézanne’s Gravity is an ambitious reassessment of the paintings of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). Whereas previous studies have often looked at the artist’s work for its influence on his successors and on the development of abstraction, Carol Armstrong untethers it from this timeline, examining Cézanne’s painting as a phenomenological and intellectual endeavor. Armstrong uses an interdisciplinary approach to analyze Cézanne’s work, pairing the painter with artists and thinkers who came after him, including Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Rainer Maria Rilke, R. D. Laing, and Helen Frankenthaler. Through these pairings, Armstrong addresses diverse subjects that illuminate Cézanne’s painting, from the nonlinear narratives of modernist literature and the ways in which space and time act on objects, to color sensation and the schizophrenic mind. Cézanne’s Gravity attends to both the physicality of the artist’s works and the weight they bear on the history of art. This distinctive study not only invites its readers to view Cézanne’s paintings with fresh eyes but also offers a new methodology for art historical inquiry outside linear narratives, one truly fitting for our time.

Co-winner of the 2019 Robert Motherwell Book Award, sponsored by the Dedalus Foundation

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Archaeological and historical scholarship completed over the past decade has revealed much about the built environments of slavery and the daily lives of enslaved workers in North America. Cabin, Quarter, Plantation is the first book to take this new research into account and comprehensively examine the architecture and landscapes of enslavement on plantations and farms.

This important work brings together the best writing in the field, including classic pieces on slave landscapes by W. E. B. Du Bois and Dell Upton, alongside new essays on such topics as the building methods that Africans brought to the American South and information about slave family units and spiritual practices that can be gathered from archaeological remains. Through deep analysis of the built environment the authors invite us to reconsider antebellum buildings, landscapes, cabins, yards, and garden plots, and what these sites can teach us about the real conditions of enslavement. The starting point in any study of slavery and the built environment, this anthology makes essential contributions to our understanding of American slavery and to the fields of landscape history and architectural history.

The essay by Cheryl Janifer LaRoche in this volume has been revised and expanded for the A&AePortal.

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The cities of Renaissance Italy comprised a network of forces shaping both the urban landscape and those who inhabited it. In this illuminating study, those complex relations are laid bare and explored through the lens of contemporary urban theory, providing new insights into the various urban centers of Italy’s transition toward modernity. The book underscores how the design and structure of public space during this transformative period were intended to exercise a certain measure of authority over its citizens, citing the impact of architecture and street layout on everyday social practices. The ensuing chapters demonstrate how the character of public space became increasingly determined by the habits of its residents, for whom the streets served as the backdrop of their daily activities. Highlighting major hubs such as Rome, Florence, and Bologna, as well as other lesser-known settings, Street Life in Renaissance Italy offers a new look at this remarkable era.

The superb sculptures of the Baule people of the Ivory Coast have long been recognized in Europe and the United States as one of Africa's most significant art traditions. The work of many modern artists—Amedeo Modigliani in particular—reflects the direct influence of Baule invention and forms. This original book, filled with the insights of an author who has lived with the Baule and studied their art for more than twenty-five years, explores for the first time the full texture and details of Baule life and art. Abundant illustrations include field photographs showing artworks in the intimacy of daily lives and public performances, and museum photographs of Baule sculptures.

Susan Vogel focuses on the creation and uses of Baule works of art apart from their definition as "art" in Western eyes. She establishes a means for understanding Baule expressive culture from the perspective of the Baule individuals. In an extensive discussion of Baule experiences of art objects, she finds different kinds of looking and seeing—art that is watched (mask dances and entertainment performances), that is seen without looking (works of art too sacred or awesome to be scrutinized), that is glimpsed (sculptures made for personal shrines and kept in private rooms), and that is visible to all (elaborately decorated objects that fulfill the desire for beauty and for open display of talents).

In the mid-1960s, at the height of his creative powers, Andy Warhol produced hundreds of three-minute cinematic portraits, called "Screen Tests." Although rarely screened now, these short films captured a virtual who's who of the avant-garde, including such cultural icons as Edie Sedgwick, Bob Dylan, Salvador Dalí, and Susan Sontag. In this initial volume of the authorized catalogue raisonné of Warhol's films, Warhol authority Callie Angell examines all 189 people captured by Warhol's lens. Stills from many of the films appear here for the first time. Drawing on 13 years of original research into the Screen Test subjects and their relationships to Warhol, Angell provides an unprecedented look at the pop art master's working method, and a unique record of his colorful social and professional life.

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The second volume of this catalogue raisonné project (The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: 1963–1965, edited by John G. Hanhardt [2021]) will be available on the A&AePortal at a later date.

 

A sweeping history of premodern architecture told through the material of stone

Apollo Magazine's Book of the Year 2021
 
Joint-winner of the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2021

Spanning almost five millennia, Painting in Stone tells a new history of premodern architecture through the material of precious stone. Lavishly illustrated examples include the synthetic gems used to simulate Sumerian and Egyptian heavens; the marble temples and mansions of Greece and Rome; the painted palaces and polychrome marble chapels of early modern Italy; and the multimedia revival in 19th-century England. Poetry, the lens for understanding costly marbles as an artistic medium, summoned a spectrum of imaginative associations and responses, from princes and patriarchs to the populace. Three salient themes sustained this “lithic imagination”: marbles as images of their own elemental substance according to premodern concepts of matter and geology; the perceived indwelling of astral light in earthly stones; and the enduring belief that colored marbles exhibited a form of natural—or divine—painting, thanks to their vivacious veining, rainbow palette, and chance images.

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Celebrating two collectors’ passion for Americana and the window it provides into the everyday beauty of the past

Becoming America offers a multifaceted view of one of the foremost collections of 18th- and 19th-century American folk and decorative art from the rural Northeast. Essays by leading specialists discuss the culture of furniture workshops, exuberant painted decoration, techniques of sewing and quilting, and poignant stories about the families depicted in the portraits. The collection itself includes Shaker boxes, a beaded Iroquois hat, embroidered samplers, metalwork, scrimshaw, handwoven rugs, ceramics, and a weather vane. The majority of these works have never before been published. With lively essays and profuse illustrations, this handsome volume brings to life the aesthetic of early Americans living in the countryside and is an essential exploration of the period’s taste and style.

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On October 27, 1960, art critic Pierre Restany named a group of Paris-based artists the “Nouveaux Réalistes” (New Realists) in a founding declaration that stated, “The New Realists recognize their collective singularity. New Realism = new perceptual approaches of the real.” Besides Restany, this group included Arman, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Yves Klein, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely, and Jacques Villeglé. Their work incorporated consumer objects and new media in response to the postwar period’s painterly modes and its burgeoning consumer and industrial society. However, they did not share a common avant-garde strategy.

The Myth of Nouveau Réalisme is a critical reassessment of this important neo-avant-garde movement. Kaira M. Cabañas offers an interdisciplinary account of their work and challenges the ideas of Restany, who mandated a “direct appropriation of the real.” Cabañas posits that, for the Nouveaux Réalistes, realism engaged performative practices to produce alternative social meanings.