Photography and Film

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Description: A. A. E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00004
In 1854 the young aspiring photographer A. A. E. Disdéri patented the carte de viste, a relatively inexpensive photograph the size of a traditional calling card. This invention marked the beginning of popular photography, the first step in the transformation of the medium from a unique recording of the world on a daguerrian plate into a commonplace, disposable item taken for granted by its urban clientele.

In this carefully documented book, Elizabeth Anne McCauley traces Disdéri’s successes and failures, using his career as the framework against which to describe the history and significance of his most successful product. The carte becomes a unique means for McCauley to examine the social and cultural life of the mid-19th-century French middle class—their morals and manners, fashions and obsessions. McCauley finds that the cartes became a great equalizer, allowing bourgeois Parisians to examine and, in effect, bring into their living rooms the famous politicians, actors, dance-hall girls, and writers in the photographs. The carte also gave the bourgeoisie the opportunity to dress in their Sunday best and record their own lineage, just as the well‑to-do had done for centuries in painted portraits.

McCauley shows that the proliferation of the carte had a marked effect not only on society but also on portrait painting, especially on the styles and compositions of young artists such as Manet, Degas, Monet, and Renoir. Her multifaceted study thus provides a new perspective on art history, French culture, and photography.

*This book is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date September 1985 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300031690
EISBN 9780300253337
Illustrations 204
Print Status out of print
Description: American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00342
Visual texts uniquely demonstrate the contested terms of American identity. In American Archives Shawn Michelle Smith offers a bold and disturbing account of how photography and the sciences of biological racialism joined forces in the nineteenth century to offer an idea of what Americans look like — or “should” look like. Her varied sources, which include the middle-class portrait, baby picture, criminal mugshot, and eugenicist record, as well as literary, scientific, and popular texts, enable her to demonstrate how new visual paradigms posed bodily appearance as an index to interior “essence.” Ultimately we see how competing preoccupations over gender, class, race, and American identity were played out in the making of a wide range of popular and institutional photographs.

Smith demonstrates that as the body was variously mapped and defined as the key to essentialized identities, the image of the white middle-class woman was often held up as the most complete American ideal. She begins by studying gendered images of middle-class domesticity to expose a transformation of feminine architectures of interiority into the “essences” of “blood,” “character,” and “race.” She reads visual documents, as well as literary texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pauline Hopkins, and Theodore Dreiser, as both indices of and forms of resistance to dominant images of gender, class, race, and national identity. Through this analysis Smith shows how the white male gaze that sought to define and constrain white women and people of color was contested and transformed over the course of the nineteenth century.

Smith identifies nineteenth-century visual paradigms that continue to shape debates about the terms of American belonging today. American Archives contributes significantly to the growing field of American visual cultural studies, and it is unprecedented in explaining how practices of racialized looking and the parameters of “American looks” were established in the first place.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date December 1999 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691004778
EISBN 9780300273175
Illustrations 56
Print Status in print
Description: Andy Warhol Screen Tests: The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 1
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00286
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.

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

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.

 
Print publication date January 2006 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780810955394
EISBN 9780300266382
Illustrations 794
Print Status out of print
Description: Anne Brigman: The Photographer of Enchantment
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00256
In this first monograph devoted to Anne Brigman (1869–1950), Kathleen Pyne traces the groundbreaking photographer’s life from Hawai‘i to the Sierra and elsewhere in California, revealing how her photographs emerged from her experience of local place and cultural politics. Brigman’s work caught the eye of the well-known photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who welcomed her as one of the original members of his Photo-Secession group. He promoted her work as exemplary of his modernism and praised her Sierra landscapes with female nudes—work that at the time separated Brigman from the spiritualized upper-class femininity of other women photographers. Stieglitz later drew on Brigman’s images of the expressive female body in shaping the public persona of Georgia O’Keeffe into his ideal woman artist. This nuanced account reasserts Brigman’s place among photography’s most important early advocates and provides new insight into the gender and racialist dynamics of the early twentieth-century art world, especially on the West Coast of the United States.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date June 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300249941
EISBN 9780300263640
Illustrations 154
Print Status in print
Description: The Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography, 1860–1910
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00119
The birth of photography coincided with the expansion of European imperialism in the Middle East, and some of the medium's earliest images are Orientalist pictures taken by Europeans in such places as Cairo and Jerusalem—photographs that have long shaped and distorted the Western visual imagination of the region. But the Middle East had many of its own photographers, collectors, and patrons. In this book, Stephen Sheehi presents a groundbreaking new account of early photography in the Arab world.

The Arab Imago concentrates primarily on studio portraits by Arab and Armenian photographers in the late Ottoman Empire. Examining previously known studios such as Abdullah Frères, Pascal Sébah, Garabed Krikorian, and Khalil Raad, the book also provides the first account of other pioneers such as Georges and Louis Saboungi, the Kova Brothers, Muhammad Sadiq Bey, and Ibrahim Rif'at Pasha—as well as the first detailed look at early photographs of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. In addition, the book explores indigenous photography manuals and albums, newspapers, scientific journals, and fiction.

Featuring extensive previously unpublished images, The Arab Imago shows how native photography played an essential role in the creation of modern Arab societies in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon before the First World War. At the same time, the book overturns Eurocentric and Orientalist understandings of indigenous photography and challenges previous histories of the medium.
Print publication date January 2016 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691151328
EISBN 9780300249774
Illustrations 76
Print Status in print
Description: Atget’s Seven Albums
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.*
Print publication date September 1992 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300035803
EISBN 9780300278620
Illustrations 579
Print Status out of print
Description: Back to the Drawing Board: Ed Ruscha, Art, and Design in the 1960s
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00335
Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) emerged onto the Los Angeles art scene with paintings that incorporated consumer products, such as Spam and Sun-Maid raisins. In this revelatory book, Jennifer Quick looks at and beyond the consumer imagery in Ruscha’s work, examining it through the tools, techniques, and habits of mind of commercial art and design. Quick shows how his training and early work as a commercial artist helped him become an incisive commentator on the presence and role of design in the modern world.

Back to the Drawing Board explores how Ruscha mobilized commercial design techniques of scale, paste-up layout, and perspective as he developed his singular artistic style. Beginning with his formative design education and focusing on the first decade of his career, Quick analyzes previously unseen works from the Ruscha archives alongside his celebrated paintings, prints, and books, demonstrating how Ruscha’s engagement with commercial art has been foundational to his practice. Through this insightful lens, Quick affirms Ruscha as a powerful and witty observer of the vast network of imagery that permeates visual culture and offers new perspectives on Pop and conceptual art.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date May 2022 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300256925
EISBN 9780300272611
Illustrations 131
Print Status in print
Description: Charles White: A Retrospective
Charles White (1918–1979) is best known for bold, large-scale paintings and drawings of African Americans, meticulously executed works that depict human relationships and socioeconomic struggles with a remarkable sensitivity. This comprehensive study offers a much-needed reexamination of the artist’s career and legacy. With extensive reproductions of White’s finest paintings, drawings, and prints, the volume introduces his work to contemporary audiences, reclaims his place in the art-historical narrative, and stresses the continuing relevance of his insistent dedication to producing positive social change through art.

Tracing White’s career from his emergence in Chicago to his mature practice as an artist, activist, and educator in New York and Los Angeles, leading experts provide insights into White’s creative process, his work as a photographer, his political activism and interest in history, the relationship between his art and his teaching, and the importance of feminism in his work. A preface by Kerry James Marshall addresses White’s significance as a mentor to an entire generation of practitioners and underlines the importance of this largely overlooked artist.

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Author
Sarah Kelly Oehler (Editor), Esther Adler (Editor)
Print publication date June 2018 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300232981
EISBN 9780300279801
Illustrations 203
Print Status out of print
Description: Circulation
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00191
As a category in art history, circulation is rooted in the contemporary context of Internet culture and the digital image. Yet circulation, as a broader concept for the movement of art across time and space in vastly different cultural and media contexts, has been a factor in the history of the arts in the United States since at least the eighteenth century.

The third volume in the Terra Foundation Essays series, Circulation brings together an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars, including Thierry Gervais, Tom Gunning, J. M. Mancini, Frank Mehring, and Hélène Valance, who map the multiple planes where artistic meaning has been produced by the circulation of art from the eighteenth century to the present. The book looks at both broad historical trends and the successes and failures of particular works of art from a wide variety of artists and styles. Together, the contributions significantly expand the conceptual and methodological terrain of scholarship on American art.

Terra Foundation Essays
Volume 3
Author
Print publication date June 2017 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780932171610
EISBN 9780300256826
Illustrations 57
Print Status in print
Description: How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00262
When Andy Grundberg landed in New York in the early 1970s as a budding writer, photography was at the margins of the contemporary art world. By 1991, when he left his post as critic for the New York Times, photography was at the vital center of artistic debate. Grundberg writes eloquently and authoritatively about photography’s “boom years,” chronicling the medium’s increasing role within the most important art movements of the time, from Earth Art and Conceptual Art to performance and video. He also traces photography’s embrace by museums and galleries, as well as its politicization in the culture wars of the 80s and 90s.

Grundberg reflects on the landmark exhibitions that defined the moment and his encounters with the work of leading photographers—many of whom he knew personally—including Gordon Matta-Clark, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Mapplethorpe. He navigates crucial themes such as photography’s relationship to theory as well as feminism and artists of color. Part memoir and part history, this perspective by one of the period’s leading critics ultimately tells a larger story about the crucial decades of the 70s and 80s through the medium of photography.
Print publication date April 2021 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300234107
EISBN 9780300259896
Illustrations 120
Print Status in print
Description: Humans
BOOKHumans
Laura Bieger (Editor), Joshua Shannon (Editor), Jason Weems (Editor)
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00289
Humans are organisms, but “the human being” is a term referring to a complicated, self-contradictory, and historically evolving set of concepts and practices. Humans explores competing versions, constructs, and ideas of the human being that have figured prominently in the arts of the United States. These essays consider a range of artworks from the colonial period to the present, examining how they have reflected, shaped, and modeled ideas of the human in American culture and politics. The book addresses to what extent artworks have conferred more humanity on some human beings than others, how art has shaped ideas about the relationships between humans and other beings and things, and in what ways different artistic constructions of the human being evolved, clashed, and intermingled over the course of American history. Humans both tells the history of a concept foundational to US civilization and proposes new means for its urgently needed rethinking.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Laura Bieger (Editor), Joshua Shannon (Editor), Jason Weems (Editor)
Print publication date December 2021 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780932171726
EISBN 9780300267594
Illustrations 50
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume V: The Twentieth Century, Part 1: The...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00145
In the 1960s, art patrons Dominique and Jean de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times. Highlights from the image archive, accompanied by essays written by major scholars, appeared in three large-format volumes, consisting of one or more books, that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to have republished five of the original books and to present five completely new ones, extending the series into the twentieth century.

The Impact of Africa, the first of two books on the twentieth century, looks at changes in the Western perspective on African art and the representation of Africans, and the paradox of their interpretation as simultaneously “primitive” and “modern.” The essays include topics such as the new medium of photography, African influences on Picasso and on Josephine Baker’s impression of 1920s Paris, and the influential contribution of artists from the Caribbean and Latin American diasporas.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date February 2014 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674052673
EISBN 9780300244717
Illustrations 226
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume V: The Twentieth Century, Part 2: The...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00146
In the 1960s, art patrons Dominique and Jean de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times. Highlights from the image archive, accompanied by essays written by major scholars, appeared in three large‐format volumes, consisting of one or more books, that quickly became collector’s items. A half‐century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to have republished five of the original books and five completely new ones, extending the series into the twentieth century.

The Rise of Black Artists, the second of two books on the twentieth century and the final volume in The Image of the Black in Western Art, marks an essential shift in the series and focuses on representation of blacks by black artists in the West. This volume takes on important topics ranging from urban migration within the United States to globalization, to Négritude and cultural hybridity, to the modern black artist’s relationship with European aesthetic traditions and experimentation with new technologies and media. Concentrating on the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean, essays in this volume shed light on topics such as photography, jazz, the importance of political activism to the shaping of black identities, as well as the post-black art world.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date October 2014 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674052697
EISBN 9780300244724
Illustrations 220
Print Status in print
Description: Images of the West: Survey Photography in French Collections, 1860–1880
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00237
As American settlement expanded westward in the 1860s, the U.S. government undertook large-scale investigations of its new territories. Images of the West: Survey Photography in French Collections, 1860–1880 presents memorable glass-plate photographs from these federal surveys. The selection includes breathtaking views of such iconic sites as Yosemite, as well as lesser-known ethnographic portraits taken by Timothy H. O'Sullivan, William H. Jackson, and William Bell, among others. The accompanying essays discuss how the photographs were used to promote white settlement, how their distribution at home and abroad contributed to the aggrandizement of the American West, and how the exploitative ideology underlying the use of photography extended to attitudes toward both American landscapes and American Indians.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date January 2007 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780932171542
EISBN 9780300260175
Illustrations 97
Print Status in print
Description: Indecent Exposures: Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion Nudes
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00197
Photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), often termed the father of the motion picture, presented his iconic Animal Locomotion series in 1887. Produced under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania and encompassing thousands of photographs of humans and animals in motion, the series included more than 300 plates of nude men and women engaged in activities such as swinging a baseball bat, playing leapfrog, and performing housework—an astonishing fact given the period’s standards of propriety.

In the first sustained examination of these nudes and the remarkable success of their production, wide circulation, and reception, Indecent Exposures positions this revolutionary enterprise as central to crucial advancements of the modern era. Muybridge’s nudes ushered in new attitudes toward science and progress, including Darwinian ideas about human evolution and hierarchy; quickened debates over the role of photography and scientific investigation in art; and offered innovative perspectives on the human body.
Print publication date October 2015 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300209488
EISBN 9780300257410
Illustrations 93
Print Status in print
Description: Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848–1871
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00182
In 1848 there were thirteen commercial photographic studios in the city of Paris. By 1871 this number had expanded to almost 400. This book is the first to analyze the origins of professional photography during the Second Empire and its transformation from a novel curiosity to a vital part of the urban environment.

Drawing on extensive archival documentation, Elizabeth Anne McCauley profiles the people who became commercial photographers—the innovators, entrepreneurs, and "artistes" who tried to earn their fortunes but were beset by bankruptcy and failure. She also discusses the business of photography—the ways studios were formed, products promoted, and financial backers found. In a detailed analysis of five studios that represent different aspects of commercial production, from industrial photographs to art reproductions, McCauley uncovers the social, political, and psychological needs that each type of photography satisfied. For example, in a groundbreaking examination of the market for photographs of female nudes, McCauley documents how the photographs reinforced masculine stereotypes of female sexual passivity, how government responses to such images reflected the precariousness of Napoleon III's political power, and how the photographs were positioned within ongoing arguments about realism as a new literary and artistic movement. Industrial Madness is not only an innovative contribution to the sociology of the arts but also an exploration of the ways ideology and visual representation intersected during the decades that saw the birth of modernism.

The book also includes a comprehensive listing of commercial photographers working in Paris between 1848 and 1871.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date March 1994 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300038545
EISBN 9780300253344
Illustrations 141
Print Status out of print
Description: Jet Age Aesthetic: The Glamour of Media in Motion
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00209
Vanessa R. Schwartz engagingly presents the jet plane’s power to define a new age at a critical moment in the mid-20th century, arguing that the craft’s speed and smooth ride allowed people to imagine themselves living in the future. Exploring realms as diverse as airport architecture, theme park design, film, and photography, Schwartz argues that the jet created an aesthetic that circulated on the ground below.

Visual and media culture, including Eero Saarinen’s airports, David Bailey’s photographs of the jet set, and Ernst Haas’s experiments in color photojournalism glamorized the imagery of motion. Drawing on unprecedented access to the archives of The Walt Disney Studios, Schwartz also examines the period’s most successful example of fluid motion meeting media culture: Disneyland. The park’s dedication to “people-moving” defined Walt Disney’s vision, shaping the very identity of the place. The jet age aesthetic laid the groundwork for our contemporary media culture, in which motion is so fluid that we can surf the internet while going nowhere at all.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date March 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300247466
EISBN 9780300258882
Illustrations 149
Print Status in print
Description: Kissing Architecture
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00313
Kissing Architecture explores the mutual attraction between architecture and other forms of contemporary art. In this fresh and insightful book, renowned architectural critic and scholar Sylvia Lavin develops the concept of “kissing” to describe the growing intimacy between architecture and new types of art—particularly multimedia installations that take place in and on the surfaces of buildings—and to capture the sensual charge that is being designed and built into architectural surfaces and interior spaces today. Initiating readers into the guilty pleasures of architecture that abandons the narrow focus on function, Lavin looks at recent work by Pipilotti Rist, Doug Aitken, the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and others who choose instead to embrace the viewer in powerful affects and visual and sensory atmospheres.
Print publication date May 2011 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691149233
EISBN 9780300269505
Illustrations 39
Print Status in print
Description: Le Corbusier Before Le Corbusier: Applied Arts, Architecture, Painting, and...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00301
In his numerous writings, Le Corbusier remained uncharacteristically silent about his early career. This intriguing book examines his nascent years as a designer and architect, focusing on the period from 1907 to 1922—the year he changed his name from Charles Edouard Jeanneret and established his identity as Le Corbusier. The contributors to the book offer in unprecedented detail an account of Le Corbusier’s formative years and the cultural, intellectual, and artistic concerns that absorbed him as a young artist in Switzerland and Paris.

From 1907 to 1922 Jeanneret learned the art and craft of architecture and design, and defined his own image as an artist. The book discusses the cultural climate of his Swiss hometown, La Chaux-de-Fonds; his early mentors, friends, and clients; his educational pursuits, including his self-designed Grand Tour; and his first successes as an architect and designer. More than 350 illustrations—including architectural drawings and models, watercolors, sketches, photographs, and furniture—show the range of young Le Corbusier’s work and illuminate the principal themes and issues of his formative years.
Author
Print publication date August 2002 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300093575
EISBN 9780300266252
Illustrations 466
Print Status out of print
Description: My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00086
There are few couples in the history of 20th-century American art and culture more prominent than Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986) and Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946). Between 1915, when they first began to write to each other, and 1946, when Stieglitz died, O'Keeffe and Stieglitz exchanged over 5,000 letters (more than 25,000 pages) that describe their daily lives in profoundly rich detail. This long-awaited volume features some 650 letters, carefully selected and annotated by leading photography scholar Sarah Greenough.

In O'Keeffe's sparse and vibrant style and Stieglitz's fervent and lyrical manner, the letters describe how they met and fell in love in the 1910s; how they carved out a life together in the 1920s; how their relationship nearly collapsed during the early years of the Depression; and how it was reconstructed in the late 1930s and early 1940s. At the same time, the correspondence reveals the creative evolution of their art and ideas; their friendships with many of the most influential figures in early American modernism (Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Paul Strand, to name a few); and their relationships and conversations with an exceptionally wide range of key figures in American and European art and culture (including Duncan Phillips, Diego Rivera, D. H. Lawrence, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Marcel Duchamp). Furthermore, their often poignant prose reveals insights into the impact of larger cultural forces—World Wars I and II; the booming economy of the 1920s; and the Depression of the 1930s—on two articulate, creative individuals.
Author
Print publication date June 2011 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300166309
EISBN 9780300247770
Illustrations 26
Print Status in print
Description: Poisoned Abstraction: Kurt Schwitters between Revolution and Exile
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00317
This fascinating book offers a definitive new assessment of the oeuvre of Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), a central figure of the interwar European avant-garde. Active as an artist, designer, publisher, performer, critic, poet, and playwright, Schwitters is best known for intimately scaled, materially rich collages and assemblages made from found objects—often refuse—that the artist described as having lost all contact with their role and history in the world at large. But as Graham Bader explores, such simple separation of art from life is precisely what Schwitters's "poisoned abstraction" calls into question.

Considering works reaching from Schwitters’s earliest collage-based pieces of 1918–19, through his 1920s advertising designs, to his seminal environmental installation the Merzbau, Bader carefully unpacks the meaning behind such projects and sheds new light on the tumultuous historical conditions in which they were made. In the process, he reveals a new Schwitters—aesthetically committed and politically astute—for our time. This authoritative account reframes our understanding of Schwitters’s multifaceted artistic practice and explores the complex entwinement of art, politics, and history in the modern period.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date November 2021 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300257083
EISBN 9780300270600
Illustrations 130
Print Status in print
Description: Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00275
Photographs by Rebecca Busselle and Sylvia Ardyn Boone

The Sande Society of the Mende is a widespread secret female regulatory society that both guards and transmits the ideals of feminine beauty that comprise the fundamental aesthetic criterion in Mende culture. The Sande initiation camp is conceived as a realm beneath the waters, a domain from which beauty and art emerge, a sacred space where women rule. In this eloquent and moving book, Sylvia Ardyn Boone describes the society, its organization, some of its rituals, and finally the mask worn by its members—an archetypal African sculpture called the Sande Sowo head. Her observations are not only an evocative account of Mende life and philosophy but are also a unique approach to the study of African art, an approach based on African conceptions about the human body and the person. Boone's engaging text is accompanied by extraordinary photographs of Mende women by Rebecca Busselle.

After introducing the reader to Mende history and ethnography, Boone discusses the Sande Society as a program for promoting the spiritual and physical beauty of Mende women. She then shows that an examination of the physical qualities and proportions of feminine beauty is a portal to an understanding of Mende ideas of morality and power. Under the tutelage of Mende elders Boone learned, for example, that the sight of a luxuriant head of hair arranged in an intricate style gives pleasure, but that is also encodes at higher levels notions of right behavior, successful social relations, progeny, and abundance. Equipped with this intimate knowledge, Boone is able to analyze in new ways the symbolism of the Sande Sowo head, and uncovers the meaning of this sculpture by viewing it against the background of the Mende natural and metaphysical world from which it emerges and to which it refers.

*The eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date August 1986 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300035766
EISBN 9780300266016
Illustrations 92
Print Status out of print
Description: Thomas Eakins
Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) is one of the most fascinating and important personalities in the history of American art. His memorable and much-loved scenes of rowing, sailing, and boxing as well as his deeply moving portraits are renowned for their vibrant realism and dramatic intensity. This insightful book, published in conjunction with a major exhibition on the life and career of Eakins—the first in twenty years—presents a fresh perspective on the artist and his remarkable accomplishments.

Illustrated with more than 250 of Eakins’s most significant paintings, watercolors, drawings, and sculpture, the book features essays by prominent scholars who place his art in the context of the history and culture of late nineteenth-century Philadelphia, where he lived. The contributors also discuss how Eakins applied his French academic training to subjects that were distinctly American and part of his own immediate and complex experience. Eakins’s own photographs, which he used as part of his unique creative process, are also examined for the first time in the full context of his life’s work.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Darrel Sewell (Editor)
Print publication date September 2001 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300091113
EISBN 9780300282146
Illustrations 514
Print Status out of print
Description: William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography
Mirjam Brusius (Editor), Katrina Dean (Editor), Chitra Ramalingam (Editor)
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00251
William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) was a British pioneer in photography, yet he also embraced the wider preoccupations of the Victorian Age—a time that saw many political, social, intellectual, technical, and industrial changes. His manuscripts, now in the archive of the British Library, reveal the connections and contrasts between his photographic innovations and his investigations into optics, mathematics, botany, archaeology, and classical studies.

Drawing on Talbot’s fascinating letters, diaries, research notebooks, botanical specimens, and photographic prints, distinguished scholars from a range of disciplines—including historians of science, art, and photography—broaden our understanding of Talbot as a Victorian intellectual and a man of science.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Mirjam Brusius (Editor), Katrina Dean (Editor), Chitra Ramalingam (Editor)
Print publication date October 2013 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300179347
EISBN 9780300263244
Illustrations 114
Print Status in print
Description: Winslow Homer and the Camera: Photography and the Art of Painting
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00225
One of the greatest American painters of the 19th century, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) also maintained a deep engagement with photography throughout his career. Focusing on the important, yet often-overlooked, role that photography played in Homer’s art, this volume exposes Homer’s own experiments with the camera (he first bought one in 1882). It also explores how the medium of photography and the larger visual economy influenced his work as a painter, watercolorist, and printmaker at a moment when new print technologies inundated the public with images. Frank Goodyear and Dana Byrd demonstrate that photography offered Homer new ways of seeing and representing the world, from his early commercial engravings sourced from contemporary photographs to the complex relationship between his late-career paintings of life in the Bahamas, Florida, and Cuba and the emergent trend of tourist photography. The authors argue that Homer’s understanding of the camera’s ability to create an image that is simultaneously accurate and capable of deception was vitally important to his artistic practice in all media. Richly illustrated and full of exciting new discoveries, Winslow Homer and the Camera is a long-overdue examination of the ways in which photography shaped the vision of one of America’s most original painters.

Please note: the illustration program in this eBook has been changed slightly from the original print edition.

*This eBook is exclusively available on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date July 2018 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300214550
EISBN 9780300259766
Illustrations 125
Print Status in print
Description: You Look Beautiful Like That: The Portrait Photographs of Seydou Keïta and...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00181
Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, two important and widely known commercial photographers from Mali, took mesmerizing photographs of members of their communities during the decades before and after the country’s independence from France in 1960. This book presents a range of these portraits, as well as excerpts of recent interviews with the artists and an essay placing the photographers within the context of the history of portrait photography in West Africa since its beginnings in the 1840s.

In contrast to the early photographs of Africans produced by Western colonial powers, Keïta and Sidibé’s photographs represent the work of Africans controlling the camera to create images of African subjects for an African audience. Keïta combined formulas of Western portrait photography with local aesthetics to create images that reflect both his clients’ social identity and status within the community and an enthusiastic embrace of modernity. Later, as portrait conventions and societal roles became more flexible, Sidibé’s subjects took a more active part in constructing the images of themselves that they wanted to convey.

Africans have valued photography for its unique ability to capture a person’s likeness, which, says Sidibé, was regarded as more eternal than the subjects themselves. This book is a striking collection of such likenesses.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date August 2001 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300091885
EISBN 9780300243918
Illustrations 87
Print Status in print