Original and theoretically astute, Abstract Bodies is the first book to apply the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies to the discipline of art history. It recasts debates around abstraction and figuration in 1960s art through a discussion of gender’s mutability and multiplicity. In that decade, sculpture purged representation and figuration but continued to explore the human as an implicit reference. Even as the statue and the figure were left behind, artists and critics asked how the human, and particularly gender and sexuality, related to abstract sculptural objects that refused the human form.

This book examines abstract sculpture in the 1960s that came to propose unconventional and open accounts of bodies, persons, and genders. Drawing on transgender and queer theory, David J. Getsy offers innovative and archivally rich new interpretations of artworks by and critical writing about four major artists—Dan Flavin (1933–1996), Nancy Grossman (b. 1940), John Chamberlain (1927–2011), and David Smith (1906–1965). Abstract Bodies makes a case for abstraction as a resource in reconsidering gender’s multiple capacities and offers an ambitious contribution to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field.

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The Abstract Expressionist movement has long been bound up in the careers and lifestyles of about twelve white male artists who exhibited in New York in the 1940s. In this book Ann Eden Gibson reconsiders the history of the movement by investigating other artists—people of color, women, and gays and lesbians—whose versions of abstraction have been largely ignored until now.

Gibson argues that the origins and promotion of Abstract Expressionism were influenced by sexual and racial biases, and she shows how both the themes and physical appearance of Abstract Expressionism were gradually defined and refined by the white male artists who became its spokesmen, by critics, and by private and institutional supporters. She offers a justification for rethinking the definition of Abstract Expressionism through the work of such well-known contemporaries as Romare Bearden, Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Norman Lewis, Alfonso Ossorio, Aaron Siskind, Leon Polk Smith, Anne Ryan, and Hale Woodruff, as well as such lesser known artists as Ruth Abrams, Ronald Joseph, and Thelma Johnson Streat. Gibson contends that the current description of Abstract Expressionism has not only deprived it of such themes as masking, maternity, domesticity, and the experience of African American and Native American culture but has also limited it formally by excluding smaller, representational, and more personal work by canonical as well as noncanonical artists. She demonstrates that exposing the movement's true diversity makes this important heritage even more valuable than it was before.

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The Age of Undress explores the emergence and meaning of neoclassical dress in the 1790s, tracing its evolution from Naples to London and Paris over the course of a single decade. The neoclassical style of clothing—often referred to as robe à la grecque, empire style, or “undress”—is marked by a sheer, white, high-waisted muslin dress worn with minimal undergarments, often accessorized with a cashmere shawl. This style represented a dramatic departure from that of previous decades and was short lived: by the 1820s, corsets, silks, and hoop skirts were back in fashion.

Amelia Rauser investigates this sudden transformation and argues that women styled themselves as living statues, artworks come to life, an aesthetic and philosophical choice intertwined with the experiments and innovations of artists working in other media during the same period. Although neoclassicism is often considered a cold, rational, and masculine movement, Rauser’s analysis shows that it was actually deeply passionate, with women at its core—as ideals and allegories, as artistic agents, and as important patrons.

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Alain Locke (1885–1954), leading theorist of the Harlem Renaissance, maintained a lifelong commitment to the visual arts. Offering an in-depth study of Locke’s writings and art world interventions, Kobena Mercer focuses on the importance of cross-cultural entanglement. This distinctive approach reveals Locke’s vision of modern art as a dynamic space where images and ideas generate new forms under the fluid conditions of diaspora.

Positioning the philosopher as an advocate for an Afromodern aesthetic that drew from both formal experiments in Europe and the iconic legacy of the African past, Mercer shows how Aaron Douglas, Loïs Mailou Jones, and other New Negro artists acknowledged the diaspora’s rupture with the ancestral past as a prelude to the rebirth of identity. In his 1940 picture book, The Negro in Art, Locke also explored the different ways black and white artists approached the black image. Mercer’s reading highlights the global mobility of black images as they travel across national and ethnic frontiers. Finally, Mercer examines how Locke’s investment in art was shaped by gay male aestheticism. Black male nudes, including works by Richmond Barthé and Carl Van Vechten, thus reveal the significance of queer practices in modernism’s cross-cultural genesis.

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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.

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.

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The sleek lines and gleaming facades of the architecture of the late 1940s and 1950s reflect a culture fascinated by the promise of the Jet Age. Buildings like Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal at JFK Airport and Philip Johnson's Four Seasons Restaurant retain a thrilling allure, seeming to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. In this work, distinguished architectural historian Alice Friedman draws on a vast range of sources to argue that the aesthetics of mid-century modern architecture reflect an increasing fascination with "glamour," a term widely used in those years to characterize objects, people, and experiences as luxurious, expressive, and even magical.

Featuring assessments of architectural examples ranging from Mies van der Rohe's monolithic Seagram Building to Elvis Presley's sprawling Graceland estate, as well as vintage photographs, advertisements, and posters, this book argues that new audiences and client groups with tastes rooted in popular entertainment made their presence felt in the cultural marketplace during the postwar period. The author suggests that American and European architecture and design increasingly reflected the values of a burgeoning consumer society, including a fundamental confidence in the power of material objects to transform the identity and status of those who owned them.

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One of the most successful and internationally celebrated artists of the eighteenth century, Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807) established her reputation with sensitive portraits as well as ambitious history paintings. This major study explores the artist’s work and career by considering how Kauffman reconciled the public and presumed masculine pursuit of painting with her role as woman artist and arbiter of private taste.

Author Angela Rosenthal analyzes Kauffman’s pictorial strategies and her significant contribution to portraiture as a field of representation, including detailed discussion of the artist’s extraordinary series of self-portraits. Featuring a wealth of new information, this illustrated book demonstrates Kauffman’s role in shaping European visual culture, shedding new light on the history of women artists and on art history as a critical discipline.

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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.

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Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744–1818) was one of the most talented still-life painters of the French school. Her exquisite paintings, today located in some of the world’s finest museums, were admired and collected by many of her contemporaries, including Marie Antoinette, who became the artist’s most important patron.

This book, the first devoted to Vallayer-Coster in over 30 years, presents a stunning array of the artist’s still-life works, many of which have never before been reproduced in color. Recently rediscovered works, including three royal portraits from the collection of Versailles and a hitherto unknown pastel of Marie-Antoinette, are published here for the first time. The authors draw on the most current research to examine Vallayer-Coster’s relationship with landscape painter Joseph Vernet; her response to her immediate predecessor, still-life painter Jean-Siméon Chardin; her role with contemporary collectors of her art; and her place in the larger context of the eighteenth-century art world. The book also includes new archival and conservation findings and an illustrated index of extant paintings by Vallayer-Coster.

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This fascinating study of the role that graphic design played in American art of the 1960s and 1970s focuses on the work of George Maciunas, Ed Ruscha, and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. Examining how each of these artists utilized typography, materiality, and other graphic design aesthetics, Benoît Buquet reveals the importance of graphic design in creating a sense of coherence within the disparate international group of Fluxus artists, an elusiveness and resistance to categorization that defined much of Ruscha’s brand of Pop Art, and an open and participatory visual identity for a range of feminist art practices. Rigorous and compelling scholarship and a copious illustration program that presents insightful juxtapositions of objects—some of which have never been discussed before—combine to shed new light on a period of abundant creativity and cultural transition in American art and the intimate, though often overlooked, entwinement between art and graphic design.

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Hailed as one of the most influential and expressive painters of the seventeenth century, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–ca. 1656) has figured prominently in the art historical discourse of the past two decades. This attention to Artemisia, after many years of scholarly neglect, is partially due to interest in the dramatic details of her early life, including the widely publicized rape trial of her painting tutor, Agostino Tassi, and her admission to Florence’s esteemed Accademia del Disegno. While the artist’s early paintings have been extensively discussed, her later work has been largely dismissed.

This elegantly written book provides a revolutionary look at Artemisia’s later career, refuting longstanding assumptions about the artist. The fact that she was semi-illiterate has erroneously led scholars to assume a lack of literary and cultural education on her part. Stressing the importance of orality in Baroque culture and in Artemisia’s paintings, Locker argues for her important place in the cultural dialogue of the seventeenth century.

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This insightful book surveys the varied ways in which Black American artists responded to the political, social, and economic climate of the United States from the time of the Great Depression through the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision. Featuring paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by artists including Jacob Lawrence, Horace Pippin, Augusta Savage, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, Norman Lewis, Walter Augustus Simon, Loïs Mailou Jones, and more, the book recognizes the contributions Black artists made to Social Realism and abstraction as they debated the role of art in society and community. Black artists played a vital part in midcentury art movements, and the inclusive policies of government programs like the Works Progress Administration brought more of these artists into mainstream circles.

Earnestine Jenkins discusses the work of Black artists during this period; the perspective of Black women artists with a focus on the sculpture of Augusta Savage; and the pedagogy of Black American art through the art and teaching of Walter Augustus Simon.

Published by Yale University Press in association with the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis

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Winner of the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award, sponsored by the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA)

In 1916, John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) met Thomas Eugene McKeller (1890–1962), a young African American elevator attendant, at Boston’s Hotel Vendome. McKeller became the principal model for Sargent’s murals in the new wing of the city’s Museum of Fine Arts, among the painter’s most ambitious works. Sargent’s nude studies and sketches from this project attest to a close collaboration between the two men that unfolded over nearly ten years. Featuring drawings given by Sargent to Isabella Stewart Gardner and published in full for the first time, a portrait of McKeller, and archival materials reconstructing his life and relationship with Sargent, this book opens new avenues into artist-model relationships and transforms our understanding of Sargent’s iconic American paintings. Essays offer the first biography of McKeller and a window onto African American life in early-20th-century Boston. They also address the artist’s sexuality, his models, and questions of race and identity.

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This book explores the representation of women in the Byzantine Empire. Featuring nearly two hundred works of art, the volume illustrates how women in Byzantium were represented in both material and literary culture and explores the continuities and changes in their lives throughout the era.

The featured artworks—gathered from premier collections in North America—date from the fourth through the fifteenth century and represent a full range of media and subject matter. They include luxury objects such as ivories, silver vessels, and precious jewelry; utilitarian objects such as toiletries and weaving tools; official objects such as coins and seals; and ritual objects such as icons and amulets. Organized in two broad categories—women in the public sphere and women in the private sphere—these works of art and objects of everyday life illustrate the diverse roles of women in Byzantine society and offer a view of their personal and public lives. Introductory essays by leading Byzantinists Ioli Kalavrezou and Angeliki Laiou offer further insights into these themes.

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St. Joseph is mentioned only eight times in the New Testament Gospels. Prior to the late medieval period, Church doctrine rarely noticed him except in passing. But in 1555 this humble carpenter, earthly spouse of the Virgin Mary and foster father of Jesus, was made patron of the Conquest and conversion in Mexico. In 1672, King Charles II of Spain named St. Joseph patron of his kingdom, toppling St. James—traditional protector of the Iberian peninsula for over 800 years—from his honored position. Focusing on the changing manifestations of Holy Family and St. Joseph imagery in Spain and colonial Mexico from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, this book examines the genesis of a new saint's cult after centuries of obscurity. In so doing, it elucidates the role of the visual arts in creating gender discourses and deploying them in conquest, conversion, and colonization.

Charlene Villaseñor Black examines numerous images and hundreds of primary sources in Spanish, Latin, Náhuatl, and Otomí. She finds that St. Joseph was not only the most frequently represented saint in Spanish Golden Age and Mexican colonial art, but also the most important. In Spain, St. Joseph was celebrated as a national icon and emblem of masculine authority in a society plagued by crisis and social disorder. In the Americas, the parental figure of the saint—model father, caring spouse, hardworking provider—became the perfect paradigm of Spanish colonial power.

Creating the Cult of St. Joseph exposes the complex interactions among artists, the Catholic Church and Inquisition, the Spanish monarchy, and colonial authorities. One of the only sustained studies of masculinity in early modern Spain, it also constitutes a rare comparative study of Spain and the Americas.

This important book is the first extended study of the life and work of German-born Venezuelan artist Gertrude Goldschmidt (1912–94), known as Gego. In locating the artist’s contribution to postwar art and her important place in the global conversations around modernity, Mónica Amor explores her intermedial practice as a model of cultural complexity at the “edge of modernity.” In situating Gego’s work alongside other local archives and against her European education and global reception, Amor offers a monographic model that complicates traditional approaches to history. She investigates the full range of Gego’s work, including her furniture workshop, her teaching at schools of architecture and design, her seminal reticuláreas, and her lesser-known prints. Through rigorous archival research, formal analysis, theoretical relevance, and deep exploration of historical context, this essential book unpacks Gego’s radical recasting of the modern sculptural project through her engagement with architecture, craft, and design pedagogy.

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Between 1700 and 1830, men and women in the English-speaking territories framing the Atlantic gained unprecedented access to material things. The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language, but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods, like clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity. This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multi-disciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

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Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction is a fascinating examination of the multifaceted career of artist, activist, curator, and writer Howardena Pindell (b. 1943). It offers a fresh perspective on her abstract practice from the late 1960s through the early 1980s—a period in which debates about Black Power, feminism, and modernist abstraction intersected in uniquely contentious yet generative ways. Sarah Louise Cowan not only asserts Pindell’s rightful place within the canon but also recenters dominant historical narratives to reveal the profound and overlooked roles that Black women artists have played in shaping modernist abstraction. Pindell’s career acts as a springboard for a broader study of how artists have responded during periods of heightened social activism and used abstraction to convey political urgency. With works that drew on Ghanaian textiles, administrative labor, cosmetics, and postminimalism, Pindell deployed abstraction in deeply personal ways that resonated with collective African diasporic and women’s practices. In her groundbreaking analysis, Cowan argues that such work advanced Black feminist modernisms, diverse creative practices that unsettle racist and sexist logics.

“A deeply informative, inventive monograph that adroitly traces Pindell’s multi-media practice, the intermingling evolution of her aesthetic and political positions, and the critical context in which her work was received and evaluated.”—Blake Oetting, caa.reviews

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I, Claudia is a comprehensive study of the lives of Roman women as revealed in Roman art. It concentrates on the evidence provided by portraits, reliefs, wall-paintings, architecture and decorative arts. The catalogue entries describe more than 180 works, and seven essays discuss gender theory, portraits of empresses and princesses, the portrayal of women as goddesses and women's roles in society, the home, literature and artistic patronage.

The book was published on the occasion of "I, Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome," an exhibition organized and circulated by the Yale University Art Gallery. Many black-and-white images in the print version have been replaced by color illustrations in this digital edition.

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Ike Taiga (1723–1776) and his wife Tokuyama Gyokuran (1727–1784) were preeminent artists in eighteenth-century Japan. This landmark book—the only comprehensive survey available in English—focuses on the lives and times of these artists and accompanied the first-ever exhibition devoted to their work in the United States.

Considered by contemporaries to be an eccentric marvel, indifferent to worldly preoccupations, Taiga is best known as an exponent of the so-called Nanga school of Chinese literati painting. He was hugely prolific and experimental, working in an impressive range of styles, techniques, compositions, and subjects to produce over 1,000 calligraphies and paintings, and many large-scale fusuma (sliding doors) and screens. While not as well known as her husband, Gyokuran was a significant artist and a well-regarded poet of Japanese verse. Taiga wrote poetry in Chinese, and translated poems by both artists are featured prominently in this volume.

The first scholarly monograph to focus on the inception of the Italian Renaissance nude, this insightful study subverts the idea that the nude in this period was a triumph of classical revival. Looking again at familiar (even overly familiar) images by artists such as Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Titian, this book investigates the nude as a tool of colonialism and conquest, as a means of asserting the superiority of men to women, and of naturalizing power differentials by entrenching them in a fixed set of ideas about the body and its representation. Jill Burke uses new research on Renaissance sexual practices, material culture, and the history of medicine to contextualize the era’s fascination with nakedness and the body in both art and life. The Italian Renaissance Nude invites readers to consider these celebrated nudes from beyond an aesthetic perspective—to consider why they were painted, whose gaze the images were created for, and how these artworks were used.

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This first book-length study on kanthas published outside of South Asia focuses on two premier collections, one assembled by the legendary historian of Indian art, Dr. Stella Kramrisch, the other by Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz, leading proponents of self-taught art. Created from worn-out garments imaginatively embroidered by women with motifs and tales drawn from a rich regional repertoire, kanthas traditionally were stitched as gifts for births, weddings, and other family occasions.

Innovative essays by leading scholars explore the domestic, ritual, and historical contexts of the fascinating quilts in these collections—made between the mid-19th and mid-20th century in what is today Bangladesh and West Bengal, India—and trace their reinterpretation as emblems of national identity and works of art.

As early as the sixteenth century, drawing in England came to be seen as something more than an activity exclusive to artists—it became a polite and useful art, a practice of everyday life. This generously illustrated book explores the social and cultural processes that enabled drawing to emerge as an amateur pastime, as well as the meanings that drawing had for people who were not artists. Ann Bermingham shows how the history of drawing in England—from the age of Elizabeth I to the era of early photography—mirrored changes in society, politics, the practical world, and notions of self.

The book examines how drawing intersected with a wide range of social phenomena, from political absolutism, writing, empirical science, and Enlightenment pedagogy to nationalism, industrialism, tourism, bourgeois gentility, and religious instruction. Bermingham discusses the central role of drawing and the visual arts in Renaissance debates about government and self-government, then considers the relations between seventeenth-century drawing, natural science, and the masculine ideal of the honest gentleman. She also investigates landscape drawing in the context of eighteenth-century views on sensibility; the emergence of the amateur draftsman and the accomplished woman; and the commercialization of amateur drawing in the nineteenth century. The book concludes with a discussion of the impact of photography on the social practice of drawing.

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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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Manet, a founding father of modernism, is one of the towering figures of nineteenth-century art. In this absorbing book, Carol Armstrong looks closely at Manet’s works to uncover a novel and compelling view not only of the artist but also of modernity itself. As she places his art within frameworks of color, the feminine Other (the “Manette” in “Manet”), and consumerism, Armstrong greatly expands and revises our understanding of this artist as a painter of modern life.

Surveying most of Manet’s diverse output, the book addresses along the way his methods of self-presentation, his exhibition strategies, the relation of his etchings and paintings, the significance of his relationships with the model Victorine Meurent and the painter Berthe Morisot, the painterly construction of identity and gender difference, and much more. At the same time, the book considers contemporary writings by Baudelaire, Zola, the Goncourts, and others who dealt with issues relating to artistic identity and modernity, painting, the model, and femininity. Armstrong concludes that Manet’s work demonstrates consistent preoccupations with defining and contradicting his own signature style of painting and with the gendering of costume, color, and the making of his art. These preoccupations, she shows, suggest a new understanding of Manet’s oeuvre.

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When nineteenth-century Americans looked at a statue of a nude woman in chains, or a shipwrecked mother and child, what did they see? When they talked or wrote about them, what did they say?

In this fascinating book, Joy S. Kasson argues that there was a connection between the popularity of artworks such as these, which derive from a sentimental literary culture, and the rapidly changing social, economic, and political environment that was beginning to raise questions about women's nature and role in society. By exploring the once-popular genre of ideal sculpture, with its focus on female subjects and its insistence on narrative content, Kasson is able to shed light on conventional assumptions about gender roles, as well as the tensions that lay behind these beliefs. Kasson reconstructs the intellectual, aesthetic, and literary contexts in which these sculptures were viewed and traces the social history of their production and reception. She shows that sculptors and audiences repeatedly idealized women as fragile, endangered, and vulnerable.

Immoral or powerful women, such as Eve, Pandora, or Medea, were presented in a web of sentimental narrative that hinted at moral redemption in order to reassure viewers that woman's true nature would remain domestic and maternal. Kasson looks closely at a number of sculptures that exemplified these themes—from Hiram Power's The Greek Slave to works by the most prominent female sculptor of the period, Harriet Hosmer. Resurrecting these forgotten artworks and explicating their narrative context, she provides fresh insights into the cultural construction of gender in nineteenth-century America.

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One of the few women Impressionists, Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) had a life of paradoxes: American born, she lived and worked in France; a classically trained artist, she preferred the company of radicals; never married, she painted exquisite and beloved portraits of mothers and children. This book provides fascinating new insight into the personal life and artistic endeavors of this extraordinary woman.

In May 1914 the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London opened its exhibition of “Twentieth-Century Art.” The catalogue identified four main strands in modern painting but included a fifth group of Jewish artists, hung in the “Small Gallery.” In this illuminating book art historian Lisa Tickner takes a fresh look at the work of artists from each of these strands. In a series of innovative case studies, combining analysis with substantial new research, she examines the artists’ radical approaches to the process of painting and their resources in the defining conditions of modern life.

Tickner discusses Walter Sickert’s Camden Town Murder and L’Affaire de Camden Town in the context of tabloid crime. Augustus John’s Lyric Fantasy is seen as rooted in, but also as qualifying, the Edwardian fascination with gypsies and tramping while memorializing John’s dead wife, Ida. The studies for Wyndham Lewis’s lost Kermesse are connected to popular dance and to his sense of the "wild body." Vanessa Bell’s Studland Beach is related to the emergence of the beach as a social and psychic space and to childhood summers in St. Ives drawn on by her sister, Virginia Woolf, in To the Lighthouse. And David Bomberg’s In the Hold, along with Mark Gertler’s Jewish Family, is shown to emerge from contemporary debates surrounding Jewish art and the possibility of a secular, urban, Yiddish culture. In an extended Afterword, Tickner considers the interplay between modernism and modernity in British art before 1914.

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At the age of seventy-two, Mary Delany, née Mary Granville (1700–1788), embarked upon a series of nearly a thousand botanical collages, or paper mosaics, which would prove to be the crowning achievement of her rich creative life. These delicate hand-cut floral designs, made by a method of Mrs. Delany’s own invention, vie with the finest botanical works of her time. More than two centuries later her extraordinary work continues to inspire.

Although best known for these collages, Mrs. Delany was also an amateur artist, woman of fashion, and commentator on life and society in 18th-century England and Ireland. Her prolific craft activities not only served to cement personal bonds of friendship, but also allowed her to negotiate the interconnecting artistic, aristocratic, and scientific networks that surrounded her. This ambitious and groundbreaking book, the first to survey the full range of Mrs. Delany’s creative endeavors, reveals the complexity of her engagement with natural science, fashion, and design.

The book includes a video demonstrating some of Mrs. Delany's "paper mosaick" techniques (see chapter 11).

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