Artist monographs

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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.

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Print publication date September 1985 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300031690
EISBN 9780300253337
Illustrations 204
Print Status out of print
Description: Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity, and Geopolitics
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00347
Perhaps no other great modern architect has been linked to a native country as closely as Alvar Aalto (1898–1976). Critics have argued that the essence of Finland flows, as if naturally, into his quasi-organic forms, ranging from such buildings as the Baker House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to iconic 20th-century designs, including his Savoy vase and bent-plywood stacking stools.

What did Aalto himself say about the importance of nationalism and geography in his work and in architecture generally? With an unprecedented focus on the architect’s own writings, library, and critical reception, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen proposes a dramatically different interpretation of Aalto’s oeuvre, revealing it as a deeply thoughtful response to his intellectual and cultural milieu—especially to Finland’s dynamic political circumstances following independence from Russia in 1917.

Pelkonen also considers the geographic and geopolitical narratives found in his writings. These include ideas about national style and national cultural revival, and about how architecture can foster cosmopolitanism, internationalism, and regionalism. Expanding the canonical reading of Aalto, this work promises to influence future inquiries on Aalto for generations to come.

"This novel interpretation sheds a clear light on Aalto's relationship with Finland's society and culture, not merely by better defining the architect's often overlooked 'context,' but by recreating the intellectual milieus in which he developed. Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen introduces a very fresh discussion of Aalto's writings and designs in the framework of Finland's modern history."—Jean-Louis Cohen, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

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Print publication date May 2009 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300114287
EISBN 9780300273953
Illustrations 124
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.

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

 
Print publication date January 2006 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780810955394
EISBN 9780300266382
Illustrations 794
Print Status out of 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.

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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.

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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.

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Print publication date June 2022 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300093292
EISBN 9780300270358
Illustrations 264
Print Status out of print
Description: Antonio Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00247
One of Italy’s greatest modern painters, Antonio Mancini (1852–1930) is best known for his daring and innovative painting methods. This overview of his career—the first comprehensive study in English—follows upon the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s recent acquisition of fifteen major oil paintings and pastels by Mancini, including the famous Il Saltimbanco (1877–78), all of which are included in this beautiful volume.

Mancini’s paintings are at once realistic and visionary, and they span a career that brought him from the legendary slums of Naples to Paris, Rome, and English country houses. Of particular interest is Mancini’s relevance to the American art world, where he was once a much-discussed controversial figure, supported by a small group of American patrons and artists before becoming famous in Italy. John Singer Sargent is said to have called Mancini the greatest living painter.

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Print publication date November 2007 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300122206
EISBN 9780300260915
Illustrations 101
Print Status out of print
Description: Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Théodore...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00348
In Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France, Greg Thomas sets forth a new ecological model of landscape painting, in which the process of art is seen to mimic the creative processes silently at work in the environment around us. Developing an aesthetics of place with implications for the entirety of nineteenth-century art, Thomas focuses specifically and with engaging exactitude on the landscapes of Barbizon painter Théodore Rousseau. These paintings—dreams of nature as a web of life in which human beings occupy a peripheral role—overwhelmed Rousseau's contemporaries with their novel light effects, original perspective, and "sheer profusion of visual sensation." While Baudelaire considered them superior to even Corot's works, they baffled art critics and have never fit convincingly into the received categories of naturalism, "pre-Impressionism," or modernism.

Surveying Rousseau's whole career and presenting the first English translations of his writings, Thomas analyzes the artist's political beliefs and record as a pioneer conservationist. He also traces alterations in a number of the French sites that Rousseau depicted, most notably the royal forest of Fontainebleau. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the author reinterprets Rousseau's paintings as embodiments of a new way of seeing the world, a new sense of the deep interconnectedness between the human and natural worlds that coincided with the earliest formulations of modern ecological thought. Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France offers readers the considerable pleasure of rediscovering one of the most important and most neglected painters of the nineteenth century.

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Print publication date May 2000 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780691059464
EISBN 9780300273694
Illustrations 90
Print Status out of 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.

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Print publication date February 2015 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300185119
EISBN 9780300256970
Illustrations 114
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.

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Print publication date May 2022 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300256925
EISBN 9780300272611
Illustrations 131
Print Status in print
Description: Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00235
Barnett Newman (1905–1970), one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, has captivated critics, scholars, and the general public for decades. This definitive catalogue raisonné presents Newman’s entire oeuvre—paintings, drawings, sculpture, graphics, an architectural model, lost and unfinished works, and ephemera. Featured elements include color reproductions; extensive provenance, exhibition, and publication histories; and a listing of the contents of the artist’s library at the time of his death.

In addition to the catalogue raisonné prepared by Heidi Colsman-Freyberger, the book offers revelatory essays on the artist, his career, and his working methods and features fascinating photographs of Newman, his studios, and his installations. Richard Shiff draws on new documentation to explain why Newman chose to create abstract art, how he achieved “fullness” in his paintings, and how his works exemplify the social functions of an artist. Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro reveals extraordinary details about Newman’s studio practice and materials and techniques, information not available to the public before because Newman only allowed his wife to observe him at work. Mancusi-Ungaro also discusses the fate of works that were damaged while traveling to exhibitions or by vandals.

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Print publication date October 2004 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300101678
EISBN 9780300259780
Illustrations 451
Print Status out of print
Description: Cézanne’s Gravity
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00292
Cézanne’s Gravity is an ambitious reassessment of the paintings of Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). Whereas previous studies have often looked at the artist’s work for its influence on his successors and on the development of abstraction, Carol Armstrong untethers it from this timeline, examining Cézanne’s painting as a phenomenological and intellectual endeavor. Armstrong uses an interdisciplinary approach to analyze Cézanne’s work, pairing the painter with artists and thinkers who came after him, including Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Rainer Maria Rilke, R. D. Laing, and Helen Frankenthaler. Through these pairings, Armstrong addresses diverse subjects that illuminate Cézanne’s painting, from the nonlinear narratives of modernist literature and the ways in which space and time act on objects, to color sensation and the schizophrenic mind. Cézanne’s Gravity attends to both the physicality of the artist’s works and the weight they bear on the history of art. This distinctive study not only invites its readers to view Cézanne’s paintings with fresh eyes but also offers a new methodology for art historical inquiry outside linear narratives, one truly fitting for our time.

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

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Print publication date November 2018 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300232714
EISBN 9780300266832
Illustrations 125
Print Status in print
Description: Cultures Crossed: John Frederick Lewis and the Art of Orientalism
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00344
John Frederick Lewis (1804–1876) is one of the best-known yet least understood British Orientalist painters of the nineteenth century. His numerous, highly detailed Orientalist images stand in dramatic contrast to the meager written archive of the years he spent in Egypt between 1841 and 1851; art historians have long puzzled over the details of this significant period and struggled for meaningful insight into his process of artful construction.

This innovative book, the first critical monograph devoted to this acclaimed artist, draws on both newly uncovered historical data and imperial and post-colonial theory to propose a compelling new interpretation of Lewis’s paintings and biography. In addition to offering formal, historical, and theoretical examinations of Lewis’s highly nuanced subject matter, Weeks argues that Lewis crafted an ambiguous, cross-cultural identity that challenged viewers’ understanding of fact and fiction and, along with his pictures, subverted systems of patriarchal power in England and abroad.

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Print publication date November 2014 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300208160
EISBN 9780300273458
Illustrations 111
Print Status out of print
Description: Degas at Harvard
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00035
This handsome book presents more than seventy paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and sculptures by Edgar Degas (1834–1917) in Harvard University’s collections—one of the most important holdings of the artist’s work in the United States. In 1911, the Fogg Art Museum was the first museum to mount a one-man exhibition on Degas and was the only museum to do so during the artist’s lifetime. This book examines the history of Degas’s reception in the U.S., and in particular the pivotal role that Harvard played.

Marjorie Benedict Cohn offers a historical account of the formation of the prized collection of Degas’s works at the Fogg. Jean Sutherland Boggs provides an engaging personal recollection of her initial encounter in 1944 with Degas and his champion at the Fogg, associate director Paul J. Sachs, who inspired not only Boggs’s later work on Degas but also that of many other art historians, museum directors, and curators.

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Print publication date August 2005 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300111446
EISBN 9780300243901
Illustrations 88
Print Status in print
Description: The Diary of Ford Madox Brown
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00350
Ford Madox Brown (1821–1893) was perhaps the most important and influential associate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The diary that he began in 1847 and kept for some twenty years appears here in a complete and fully annotated edition. It is an absorbing and moving chronicle of the life of an impoverished artist striving for acknowledgement and success in mid-nineteenth-century London.

Madox Brown’s character was moulded by the harsh circumstances of his life. Without money and seemingly without recognition, a widower with a young child and later a second wife and children, he seemed to many a taciturn and suspicious figure and his diary demonstrates his antagonism toward some of his contemporaries, notably John Ruskin, John Everett Millais, and the London art trade. But he also speaks in revealing detail of his working life and recounts with enthusiasm his relationships with friends and associates—particularly William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Elizabeth Siddal.

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Author
Print publication date May 1981 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300027433
EISBN 9780300274028
Illustrations 21
Print Status out of print
Description: Donald Judd
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00184
This pioneering book, the first monograph devoted to Donald Judd, addresses the whole breadth of Judd's practices. Drawing on documents found in nearly twenty archives, David Raskin explains why some of Judd's works of art seem startlingly ephemeral while others remain insistently physical. In the process of answering this previously perplexing question, Raskin traces Judd's principles from his beginnings as an art critic through his fabulous installations and designs in Marfa, Texas. He discusses Judd's early important paintings and idiosyncratic red objects, as well as the three-dimensional works that are celebrated throughout the world. He also examines Judd's commitment to empirical values and his political activism, and concludes by considering the importance of Judd's example for recent art.

Ultimately, Raskin develops a picture of Judd as never before seen: he shows us an artist who asserted his individuality with spare designs; who found spiritual values in plywood, Plexiglas, and industrial production; who refused to distinguish between thinking and feeling while asserting that science marked the limits of knowledge; who claimed that his art provided intuitions of morality but not a specific set of tenets; and who worked for political causes that were neither left nor right.

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Print publication date November 2010 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300162769
EISBN 9780300229059
Illustrations 117
Print Status in print
Description: Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00306
Between 1915 and 1923, Marcel Duchamp created one of the most mystifying art works of the early twentieth century: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (also known as the Large Glass). The work is over nine feet tall, and on its glass surface Duchamp used such unorthodox materials as lead wire, lead foil, mirror silver, and dust, in addition to more conventional oil paint and varnish. Duchamp's declared subject is the relation between the sexes, but his protagonists are biomechanical creatures: a "Bride" in the upper panel hovers over a "Bachelor Apparatus" in the panel below, stimulating the "Bachelors" with "love gasoline" for an "electrical stripping."

In preparation for the Large Glass, Duchamp wrote hundreds of notes, which he considered just as important as the work itself. He published 178 during his lifetime, but over 100 more notes relating to the Glass were discovered and published following his death. In this landmark book, Linda Henderson provides the first systematic study of the Large Glass in relation to the entire corpus of Duchamp's notes for the project. Since Duchamp declared his interest in creating a "Playful Physics," she focuses on the scientific and technological themes that pervade the notes and the imagery of the Large Glass. In doing so, Henderson provides an unprecedented history of science as popularly known at the turn of the century, centered on late Victorian physics. In addition to electromagnetic waves, including X-rays and the Hertzian waves of wireless telegraphy, the areas of science to which Duchamp responded so creatively ranged from chemistry and classical mechanics to thermodynamics, Brownian movement, radioactivity, and atomic theory. Restored to its context and amplified by the information in the posthumously published notes, the Large Glass appears far richer and more multifaceted and witty than had ever been suspected.

Henderson also includes a close examination of Duchamp's literary and artistic models for creative invention based on science, including Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, Frantisek Kupka, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The book will not only redefine scholarship on Duchamp and the Large Glass, but will be a crucial resource for historians of literature, science, and modernism.
Print publication date September 2005 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780691123868
EISBN 9780300267822
Illustrations 197
Print Status out of print
Description: Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00051
Frederic Church (1826–1900), the most celebrated painter in the United States during the mid-19th century, created monumental landscapes of North and South America, the Arctic, and the Middle East. These paintings were unsurpassed in their attention to detail, yet the significance of this pictorial approach has remained largely unexplored. In this important reconsideration of Church's works, Jennifer Raab offers the first sustained examination of the aesthetics of detail that fundamentally shaped 19th-century American landscape painting. Moving between historical context and close readings of famous canvases—including Niagara, The Heart of the Andes, and The Icebergs—Raab argues that Church's art challenged an earlier model of painting based on symbolic unity, revealing a representation of nature with surprising connections to scientific discourses of the time. The book traces Church's movement away from working in oil on canvas to shaping the physical landscape of Olana, his self-designed estate on the Hudson River, a move that allowed the artist to rethink scale and process while also engaging with pressing ecological questions. In sum, Frederic Church: The Art and Science of Detail offers a profoundly new understanding of this canonical artist.
Print publication date November 2015 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300208375
EISBN 9780300234411
Illustrations 103 Illus.
Print Status in print
Description: From San Juan to Paris and Back: Francisco Oller and Caribbean Art in the Era of...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00261
Francisco Oller (1833–1917) was a Puerto Rican painter whose work was admired on both sides of the Atlantic. A native of San Juan, Oller spent over twenty years in Europe, establishing himself as one of the most distinguished transatlantic painters of his day. Oller participated in the pioneering movements of Realism, Impressionism, and naturalism, and he developed mutually influential relationships with such artists as Camille Pissarro and Gustave Courbet. These artistic trends informed his novel Realist-Impressionist approach, with which he would revolutionize the school of painting in his native Puerto Rico.

In this original and important book, Edward J. Sullivan advances close readings of works spanning Oller’s entire career and offers insights into the development of the Caribbean basin in the nineteenth century. From San Juan to Paris and Back recasts Oller as a central figure in nineteenth-century art and restores the significance of Oller’s work and his influence in shaping a uniquely Caribbean aesthetic.

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Print publication date October 2014 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300203202
EISBN 9780300263978
Illustrations 99
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.

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Print publication date April 2023 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300260687
EISBN 9780300278125
Illustrations 172
Print Status in print
Description: The Genius of Robert Adam: His Interiors
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00304
Robert Adam was one of the greatest British architects of the later eighteenth century. So widespread was his influence as a decorator and furniture designer that his name has become a household word. But it is the synthesis of architecture, planning, and decoration that stands at the heart of Adam’s achievement, as Eileen Harris shows in this enlightening book. She considers in detail the interaction of each of these elements in nineteen of Adam’s most accomplished interior projects, including some of the most famous British country houses and London town houses.

Most of Adam’s enormous body of work was in preexisting houses; the challenges of remodeling stimulated his inventive imagination, and he became a master at turning awkward situations to advantage. Harris has mined archival sources, including the large collection of drawings from the Adam office at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, and fully examined the houses themselves to discover exactly what Adam did in each project and why. In her detailed discussions of the planning, decoration, ceilings, carpets, chimney pieces, and furniture of such interiors as those at Kedleston, Syon House, Osterley Park, Newby Hall, Culzean Castle, and Home and Lansdowne Houses in London, Harris uncovers the full extent of Adam’s prodigious achievements.

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Print publication date November 2001 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300081299
EISBN 9780300267518
Illustrations 506
Print Status out of print
Description: Georges Seurat: The Art of Vision
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00057
This revelatory study of Georges Seurat (1859–1891) explores the artist’s profound interest in theories of visual perception and analyzes how they influenced his celebrated seascape, urban, and suburban scenes. While Seurat is known for his innovative use of color theory to develop his pointillist technique, this book is the first to underscore the centrality of diverse ideas about vision to his seascapes, figural paintings, and drawings. Michelle Foa highlights the importance of the scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, whose work on the physiology of vision directly shaped the artist’s approach. Foa contends that Seurat’s body of work constitutes a far-reaching investigation into various modes of visual engagement with the world and into the different states of mind that visual experiences can produce. Foa’s analysis also brings to light Seurat’s sustained exploration of long-standing and new forms of illusionism in art.
Print publication date July 2015 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300208351
EISBN 9780300248074
Illustrations 141
Print Status in print
Description: Goya in the Twilight of Enlightenment
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00060
The great Spanish painter Francisco Goya has long been considered an artist of the Enlightenment who took a heroic stance against the forces of political oppression, and critics have read his art as a reflection of his renegade ideas. In this book Janis A. Tomlinson offers a fresh and innovative interpretation of the major paintings of Goya's mid-career, disentangling the historic Goya from the romanticized Goya and placing his works in the context of the ideological, social, and artistic changes of the times.

Tomlinson examines the social history of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spain from the outbreak of the French Revolution and its effect on Spain through the restoration of Spain's Bourbon monarchy in 1814. She discusses such well-known works by Goya as the Family of Carlos IV, the Maja vestida and the Maja desnuda, and the Second of May and Third of May, reassessing them in relation to Goya's changing patrons: Carlos IV and María Luisa, the court favorite Manuel Godoy, the rulers of the interim regimes of the Napoleonic years, Fernando VII, and, finally, the broader public characterized by its alienation from a conservative restoration regime. Emphasizing the complexity of the context that engendered these paintings, Tomlinson demonstrates that any reading of Goya's works must acknowledge the unique circumstances of their patronage and ideology in a period of transition and ambivalence.

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Print publication date October 1992 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300054620
EISBN 9780300254198
Illustrations 102
Print Status out of print
Description: Hieronymus Bosch: Time and Transformation in The Garden of Earthly Delights
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00336
Hieronymus Bosch’s (c. 1450–1516) Garden of Earthly Delights has elicited a sense of wonder for centuries. Over ten feet long and seven feet tall, it demands that we step back to take it in, while its surface, intricately covered with fantastical creatures in dazzling detail, draws us closer. In this highly original reassessment, Margaret D. Carroll reads the Garden as a speculation about the origin of the cosmos, the life-history of earth, and the transformation of humankind from the first age of world history to the last. Upending traditional interpretations of the painting as a moralizing depiction of God’s wrath, human sinfulness, and demonic agency, Carroll argues that it represents Bosch’s exploration of progressive changes in the human condition and the natural world.

Extensively researched with a robust illustration program, this groundbreaking secular analysis draws on new findings about Bosch’s idiosyncratic painting technique, his curiosity about natural history, his connections to the Burgundian court, and his experience of contemporary politics. The book offers fresh insights into the artist and his most beloved and elusive painting.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date August 2022 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300255324
EISBN 9780300272604
Illustrations 186
Print Status in print
Description: Horace Pippin, American Modern
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00211
"Horace Pippin shines in the midst of an overdue racial reckoning in the United States, to which it makes a substantial scholarly contribution." —Clara Barnhart, caa.reviews

Arguably the most successful African American artist of his day, Horace Pippin (1888–1946) taught himself to paint in the 1930s and quickly earned international renown for depictions of World War I, black families, and American heroes Abraham Lincoln, abolitionist John Brown, and singer Marian Anderson, among other subjects. This volume sheds new light on how the disabled combat veteran claimed his place in the contemporary art world. Organized around topics of autobiography, black labor, artistic process, and gift exchange, it reveals the range of references and critiques encoded in his work and the racial, class, and cultural dynamics that informed his meteoric career.

Horace Pippin, American Modern offers a fresh perspective on the artist and his moment that contributes to a more expansive history of art in the 20th century. Featuring over 60 of Pippin’s paintings, this volume also includes two previously unknown artist’s statements—“The Story of Horace Pippin as told by Himself” and “How I Paint”—and an exhibition history and list of artworks drawn from new research.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date February 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300243307
EISBN 9780300257533
Illustrations 121
Print Status in 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: 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: Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00065
Roy Lichtenstein’s distinctive paintings of the early 1960s are synonymous with the Pop art movement. These bold, oversized images inspired by newspaper advertisements and comic book scenes have been taken as reflecting the artist’s fascination with the links between art and popular culture. In this book, Michael Lobel challenges this circumscribed view of Lichtenstein’s work, offering a set of compelling new interpretations that reveal the artist’s confrontation with a far wider range of issues. Lichtenstein’s art is fundamentally engaged with a set of concerns central to art making in the postwar period: the relation between vision and technology, the possibility of articulating artistic identity, and the effect of mechanical reproduction on the work of art. Lichtenstein’s project, Lobel argues, is structured by the tension between painting understood as a fully expressive, humanistic gesture and, conversely, as the product of a purely mechanical act.

Image Duplicator makes available for the first time an array of archival materials about Lichtenstein and his work, including photographs of the artist and many newly discovered sources for his imagery in the comics and advertisements of the early 1960s. It also provides new information on the context of the artist’s Pop paintings in relation to contemporary developments in advertising culture, mechanical reproduction, and visual technologies. Examining the artist’s work from fresh perspectives, the author not only offers a comprehensive analysis of Lichtenstein’s early Pop paintings but also provides new insight into the issues that shaped the Pop art movement, artistic practices in the 1960s, and the historical relation between modern art and popular culture.
Print publication date March 2002 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300087628
EISBN 9780300232455
Illustrations 70 b/w + 40 color illus.
Print Status out of 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: James Castle: A Retrospective
Ann Percy (Editor)
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00328
James Castle (1899–1977) never learned to speak, read, or write—and left his native state of Idaho only once—and yet he created a wide range of extraordinary works that resonate with much of 20th-century art. This book offers the first critical exploration of the many creative genres of this self-taught artist, who first came to notice in the 1950s and 1960s but has only recently been recognized by major museums.

This book examines Castle’s drawings, color-wash works, idiosyncratic cardboard and paper constructions, and word, sign, and symbol pieces. As a child he developed his favorite medium and method of working, mixing stove soot with saliva and applying this “ink” with sharpened sticks and cotton wads to such found materials as product packaging and discarded paper. These everyday materials have given his works a singular, immediate, and appealing natural quality.

This engaging volume considers Castle’s remarkable art from a variety of perspectives, examining his life, modes of depiction, working methods and materials, and the “visual poetry” of his text works.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Ann Percy (Editor)
Print publication date November 2008 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300137309
EISBN 9780300272192
Illustrations 434
Print Status out of print