Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies

eBooks

Toggle ebook view
Description: Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00005
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date November 2015 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300196757
EISBN 9780300232646
Illustrations 100 illus
Print Status in print
Description: Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00006
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date November 1999 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300080728
EISBN 9780300229011
Illustrations 191
Print Status out of print
Description: The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00338
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date March 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300241204
EISBN 9780300272536
Illustrations 181
Print Status in print
Description: Alain Locke and the Visual Arts
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00339
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date September 2022 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300247268
EISBN 9780300272949
Illustrations 119
Print Status in print
Description: Always Reaching: The Selected Writings of Anne Truitt
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.
Print publication date April 2023 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300260410
EISBN 9780300279016
Illustrations 63
Print Status in 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: American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00012
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date June 2010 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300116540
EISBN 9780300230932
Illustrations 165
Print Status in print
Description: Angelica Kauffman: Art and Sensibility
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00255
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date May 2006 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300103335
EISBN 9780300264517
Illustrations 161
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: Anne Vallayer-Coster: Painter to the Court of Marie-Antoinette
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00325
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date June 2022 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300093292
EISBN 9780300270358
Illustrations 264
Print Status out of print
Description: Art & Graphic Design: George Maciunas, Ed Ruscha, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00305
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date November 2021 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300249859
EISBN 9780300269338
Illustrations 152
Print Status in print
Description: Artemisia Gentileschi: The Language of Painting
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00192
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date February 2015 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300185119
EISBN 9780300256970
Illustrations 114
Print Status out of print
Description: Black Artists in America: From the Great Depression to Civil Rights
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00312
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

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date January 2022 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300260908
EISBN 9780300269932
Illustrations 130
Print Status in print
Description: Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00277
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Print publication date February 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300249866
EISBN 9780300266146
Illustrations 136
Print Status in print
Description: Byzantine Women and Their World
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00029
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date March 2003 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300096989
EISBN 9780300247961
Illustrations 216
Print Status out of print
Description: Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00281
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.
Print publication date January 2006 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780691096315
EISBN 9780300266344
Illustrations 92
Print Status out of print
Description: Eileen Gray
Eileen Gray (1878–1976) was a versatile designer and architect who navigated numerous literary and artistic circles over the course of her life. This volume chronicles Gray’s career as a designer, architect, painter, and photographer. The book’s essays, featuring copious new research, offer in-depth analysis of more than 50 individual designs and architectural projects, accompanied by both period and new photographs.

Born in Ireland and educated in London, Gray proceeded to Paris where she opened a textile studio, studied the Japanese craft of lacquer that would become a primary technique in her design work, and owned and directed the influential gallery and store known as “Jean Désert.” Gray struggled for acceptance as a largely self-taught woman in male-dominated professions. Although she is now best known for her furniture, lighting, and carpets, she dedicated herself to many architectural and interior projects that were both personal and socially driven, including the Villa E 1027, the iconic modern house designed with Jean Badovici, as well as economical and demountable projects, such as the Camping Tent.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Print publication date June 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300251067
EISBN 9780300279825
Illustrations 597
Print Status in print
Description: Eros Visible: Art, Sexuality and Antiquity in Renaissance Italy
Focusing on the impact of the erotic revolution that swept through 16th-century Italy, Eros Visible presents a compendious, revisionist account of High Renaissance art. Through close visual analysis of artworks and careful reading of related texts, James Grantham Turner demonstrates the surprisingly close connection between explicitly pornographic art and the canonical works of masters such as Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. Full of new discoveries, this volume explores the passionate response to antiquity and how a new sex-positive philosophy not only encouraged an increased accentuation of sensual and erotic themes in art, but influenced the sexual cultures of both the court and the art studio. With an interdisciplinary approach that draws on a wide array of visual and textual erotica, Turner offers the first broad, synthetic history of the classically inspired and unambiguously lascivious sensibilities behind some of the most sublime artistic achievements of the Renaissance.
Print publication date October 2017 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300219951
EISBN 9780300279795
Illustrations 340
Print Status out of print
Description: Gego: Weaving the Space in Between
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date April 2023 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300260687
EISBN 9780300278125
Illustrations 172
Print Status in print
Description: Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830
John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00205
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
John Styles (Editor), Amanda Vickery (Editor)
Print publication date February 2007 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300116595
EISBN 9780300256710
Illustrations 89
Print Status out of print
Description: Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00357
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

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date November 2022 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300264296
EISBN 9780300275537
Illustrations 110
Print Status in print
Description: I, Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Print publication date September 1996 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780894670756
EISBN 9780300278064
Illustrations 278
Print Status out of print
Description: Ida O’Keeffe: Escaping Georgia’s Shadow
This is the first publication devoted to Ida Ten Eyck O’Keeffe (1889–1961), the younger sister of Georgia O’Keeffe. It presents a thoughtful consideration of Ida’s personal history and her creative work.  As a professionally trained artist, graduating with an MFA from Columbia in 1932, Ida crafted an artistic identity that was dynamic and distinct in style and subject matter from that of her celebrated sibling. The positive critical attention she received became a source of tension between her and Georgia, who was determined that there would be only one painter in the family. Ida’s complex relationship with Georgia and Alfred Stieglitz, though once loving and close, eventually devolved into estrangement. This volume illustrates works by Ida, including oils, watercolors, and monotypes, and examines their merits as well as their place within the aesthetics of American Modernism during the 1920s and 1930s.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Print publication date December 2018 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300214567
EISBN 9780300282221
Illustrations 90
Print Status out of print
Description: Ike Taiga and Tokuyama Gyokuran: Japanese Masters of the Brush
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00302
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.
Print publication date May 2007 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300122183
EISBN 9780300263169
Illustrations 482
Print Status out of print
Description: The Italian Renaissance Nude
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00310
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date June 2018 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300201567
EISBN 9780300269727
Illustrations 120
Print Status out of print
Description: Kantha: The Embroidered Quilts of Bengal from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00323
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.
Author
Print publication date December 2009 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300154429
EISBN 9780300270549
Illustrations 270
Print Status in print
Description: Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00189
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date March 2000 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300080391
EISBN 9780300254662
Illustrations 270
Print Status out of print
Description: Looking at Men: Anatomy, Masculinity and the Modern Male Body
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00297
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date September 2018 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300112948
EISBN 9780300267839
Illustrations 196
Print Status out of print
Description: Manet Manette
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00080
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date September 2002 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300096583
EISBN 9780300234404
Illustrations 174 illus.
Print Status out of print
Description: Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date September 1990 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300045963
EISBN 9780300276916
Illustrations 103
Print Status out of print