This volume is the catalogue of an exhibition organized by the Princeton University Art Museum, consisting of eighty-eight drawings by artists active in Central Europe during the neglected period following the age of the Old German Masters (Dürer, Holbein, and their contemporaries) and preceding that covered by Central European Drawings…
Westerners seeking to appreciate and understand Chinese art have long felt the need of a fundamental book that explains both the technical means used by Chinese artists and the traditional stylistic modes of artistic expression. In Chinese Painting Style Jerome Silbergeld addresses this need, beginning with a discussion of basic…
For the past few decades Hal Foster’s critical gaze has encompassed the increasingly complex machinery of the culture industry. His observations push the boundaries of cultural criticism to establish a vantage point from which the seemingly disparate agendas of artists, patrons, and critics have a telling coherence. Recodings has…
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…
The School of Prague provides both a much-needed catalogue raisonné of painting in Rudolfine Prague and a significant reassessment of Renaissance art theory and practice. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann masterfully reconstructs the Prague court, discussing the "mannerist" art it patronized and the artists who were active in it. The book was…
During the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Venetians lined their government council chambers and religious fraternities with narrative paintings of pageantry, diplomacy, and pious legend. These works—which include Carpaccio's pictorial stories about St. Ursula, St. George, and St. Jerome, as well as Bellini's panoramic recordings of the…
Central Europe occupies a prominent place in many realms of 18th-century culture. This volume is the catalogue of an exhibition of drawings, organized in 1989 by the Princeton University Art Museum, which presents some of the little-known accomplishments of artists from the region of present-day Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and parts of…
Li Huasheng (b. 1944) represents the first generation of artists raised and trained in the People's Republic of China. His career spans the painting of Maoist propaganda in the 1960s, a decade of secretly studying forbidden traditional styles during the Cultural Revolution, an overnight rise from poverty to prominence during the artistic…
Surrealism has long been seen as its founder, Andre Breton, wanted it to be seen: as a movement of love and liberation. In Compulsive Beauty, Foster reads surrealism from its other, darker side: as an art given over to the uncanny, to the compulsion to repeat and the drive toward death. Compulsive Beauty not only offers a…
Responding to ongoing debates over the role of humanism in the rise of empirical science, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann explores the history of Renaissance art to help explain the complex beginnings of the "scientific revolution." In a rich collection of new and previously published essays addressing conceptions of the mastery of nature, he discusses…
The collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe opened the doors to cultural treasures that for decades had been hidden, forgotten, or misinterpreted. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann looks at Central Europe as a cultural entity while chronicling more than three hundred years of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Germany, Poland, the Czech…
The bronze ritual vessel, the defining artifact of early Chinese civilization, is the subject of this monumental study of Shang ritual bronzes in the Arthur M. Sackler Collections. A comprehensive introduction, the most thorough treatment of Shang bronzes in any language, lays the foundation for 104 catalogue entries, many of which explore in…
Michael Koortbojian brings a novel approach to his study of the role of Greek mythology in Roman funerary art. He looks at two myths—Aphrodite and Adonis and Selene and Endymion—not only with respect to their appearance on Roman sarcophagi, but also with regard to the myths' significance in the greater fabric of Roman life. Moving beyond the…
In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the…
Through close examination of Renaissance paintings, drawings, book illustrations, and other art works, Patricia Fortini Brown brings 14th- and 15th-century Venice alive. She explores the role of the guilds and the nobility, the unique island setting, the environment of the church and the private home, the political rivalries with other states,…
Pietro Bracci was a leading sculptor of 18th-century Rome, but the dispersal of his drawings has hampered study of the interplay between his approach to design and his response to Rome's vast artistic heritage. Using a group of Bracci drawings acquired by the Canadian Centre for Architecture as their point d'appui, Elisabeth Kieven and…
Since 1984, Chinese cinema has been the most dramatic entry onto the international film scene. China into Film is the first book to look at contemporary Chinese cinema as a visual art and to illustrate the ways in which it has been shaped by centuries of Chinese tradition. Jerome Silbergeld looks at the significance of gender roles,…
Figure and Likeness presents a thought-provoking new account of Byzantine iconoclasm—the fundamental crisis in Christian visual representation during the 8th and 9th centuries that defined the terms of Christianity's relationship to the painted image. Charles Barber rejects the conventional means of analyzing this crisis, which seeks…
Chikubushima, a sacred island north of the ancient capital of Kyoto, attracted the attention of Japan’s rulers in the Momoyama period (1568–1615) and became a repository of their art, including a lavishly decorated building dedicated to the worship of Benzaiten. In this meticulous and lucid study, Andrew Watsky keenly illustrates how private…
This book offers an engaging and original perspective on the private lives and material culture of patrician families in 16th-century Venice. Distinguished art historian Patricia Fortini Brown takes us behind the elegant facades of grand palaces built along the Venetian canals and examines the roles of both fine and applied arts in family life…
How to imagine not only a new art or architecture but a new self or subject equal to them? In Prosthetic Gods, Hal Foster explores this question through the works and writings of such key modernists as Gauguin and Picasso, F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos and Max Ernst. These diverse figures were all fascinated by fictions of…
As China and the West grow closer together year by year, Chinese cinema becomes increasingly Westernized and Western interest in Chinese cinema continues to grow. Hitchcock with a Chinese Face examines three recent award-winning films—one from Shanghai, one from Hong Kong, one from Taipei—concerned with the issues of developing globalization…
Art history traditionally classifies works of art by country as well as period, but often political borders and cultural boundaries are highly complex and fluid. Questions of identity, policy, and exchange make it difficult to determine the “place” of art, and often the art itself results from these conflicts of geography and culture…
This volume presents a selection of studies written during the past decades by Professor DaCosta Kaufmann on a variety of topics concerning the history of painting, sculpture, art theory, collecting, and architecture. It includes several of his ground-breaking essays interpreting art at the Prague court of Rudolf II (1576–1612). However, the…
Franz Anton Maulbertsch (1724–1796) was an Austrian fresco painter known for his bold use of color. Although he has been recognized in the Central European regions where he worked, Maulbertsch has remained outside the general canon of art history. With Painterly Enlightenment, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann recovers the story of Maulbertsch,…
It's hard to imagine an issue or image more riveting than Black Germans during the Third Reich. Yet accounts of their lives are virtually nonexistent, despite the fact that they lived through a regime dedicated to racial purity.
Tina M. Campt's Other Germans tells the story of this largely forgotten group of…
Central European Drawings in the Collection of the Crocker Art Museum presents a survey of five centuries of draftsmanship from Central Europe. An interpretive and fully illustrated (with many illustrations in color) catalogue of one of the oldest public collections in the United States, it considers a wide variety of types of…
George Inness (1825–94), long considered one of America’s greatest landscape painters, has yet to receive his full due from scholars and critics. A complicated artist and thinker, Inness painted stunningly beautiful, evocative views of the American countryside. Less interested in representing the details of a particular place than in rendering…
Studies of the icon in Byzantium have tended to focus on the iconoclastic era of the eighth- and ninth-centuries. This study shows that discussion of the icon was far from settled by this lengthy dispute. While the theory of the icon in Byzantium was governed by a logical understanding that had limited painting to the visible alone, the four…
Max Loehr (1903–1988), the most distinguished historian of Chinese art of his generation, is celebrated above all for a 1953 art historical study of Chinese bronzes that effectively predicted discoveries Chinese archaeologists were about to make. Those discoveries in turn overthrew the theories of Loehr’s great rival Bernhard Karlgren (1889…
In the Heat of the Sun and Devils on the Doorstep are two of the finest and most honored Chinese films ever made. Body in Question is the first book to thoroughly examine these groundbreaking works and one of the first books in English to study individual Chinese films in depth.
These two award-winning films…
Artistic representations of landscape are studied widely in areas ranging from art history to geography to sociology, yet there has been little consensus about how to understand the relationship between landscape and art. This book brings together more than fifty scholars from these multiple disciplines to establish new ways of thinking about…
In 2003, the curatorial staff of the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou finished gathering together the first major museum collection ever assembled in China of documentary photographs produced by China's own photographers. Soliciting 100,000 photographs from all over the country, they selected the best 600. Representing a wide spectrum of…
The art world is currently enthralled with contemporary Chinese art. This thoughtful book argues, however, that American audiences have been exposed only to a narrow range of what is available—with the majority of attention having been given to “avant-garde,” “experimental,” or politically charged art. Outside In discusses…
Contemporary African Art Since 1980 is the first major survey of the work of contemporary African artists from diverse situations, locations, and generations who work either in or outside of Africa, but whose practices engage and occupy the social and cultural complexities of the continent since the past 30 years. Its frame of analysis…
The clothes we wear invariably telegraph information about our identity, our place in society and the stories we wish to convey about ourselves. The fantastically colorful costumes specific to African and Caribbean rituals and celebrations go several steps further, transforming ordinary people into mythic figures and magicians, tricksters and…
In Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s most famous paintings, grapes, fish, and even the beaks of birds form human hair. A pear stands in for a man’s chin. Citrus fruits sprout from a tree trunk that doubles as a neck. All sorts of natural phenomena come together on canvas and panel to assemble the strange heads and faces that constitute one of Renaissance…
The Ghanaian-born sculptor El Anatsui is one of the most significant artistic innovators of our time, merging personal, local, and global concerns in his visual creations. By weaving together discarded aluminum tops from Nigerian liquor bottles, Anatsui creates large-scale sculptures that demonstrate a fascinating interplay of color, shape, and…
Hal Foster, author of the acclaimed Design and Crime, argues that a fusion of architecture and art is a defining feature of contemporary culture. He identifies a “global style” of architecture—as practiced by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano—analogous to the international style of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies.
In these diatribes on the marketing of culture and the branding of identity, the development of spectacle—architecture and the rise of global cities, Hal Foster surveys our new political economy of design. Written in a lively style, Design and Crime explores the historical relations of modern art and modern museum, the conceptual…
Focusing on the art of Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) and his colleagues Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Frédéric Bazille, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Fellow Men argues for the importance of the group as a defining subject of 19th-century French painting. Through close readings of some of the most ambitious paintings of…
As they had during the Renaissance, ruins in the 18th century continued to serve as places of exchange between antiquity and modern times and between one architect and another. Rome functioned as a cultural entrepôt, drawing to it architects of the caliber of Filippo Juvarra, Robert Adam, Charles-Louis Clérisseau, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi…
At its peak in the 12th and 13th centuries, the so-called Spanish Reconquest transformed the societies of the Iberian Peninsula at nearly every level. Among the most vivid signs of this change were the innovative images developed by Christians to depict the subjugated Muslims and Jews within their vastly expanded kingdoms. In Art of…
Acclaimed as the definitive work on the subject, Art Since 1900 is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of art in the modern age. Conceived by four of the most influential art historians of our time, this extraordinary book has now been brought right up to date to include the latest developments…
In Image Matters, Tina M. Campt traces the emergence of a black European subject by examining how specific black European communities used family photography to create forms of identification and community. At the heart of Campt's study are two photographic archives, one composed primarily of snapshots of black German families taken…
Who branded painting in the Pop age more brazenly than Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha? And who probed the Pop revolution in image and identity more intensely than they? In The First Pop Age, leading critic and historian Hal Foster presents an exciting new interpretation of Pop art…
This book examines the new institution of divinization that emerged as a political phenomenon at the end of the Roman Republic with the deification of Julius Caesar. Michael Koortbojian addresses the myriad problems related to Caesar’s, and subsequently Augustus’s, divinization, in a sequence of studies devoted to the complex character of the…
Dans le système des beaux-arts, l’architecture, en tant qu’art utile, a toujours occupé une place singulière. Issue des arts du dessin, elle côtoyait sur un pied d’égalité la peinture et la sculpture dans les premières académies fondées par les humanistes de la Renaissance. Ces institutions connurent leur âge d’or au siècle des…
Brazil has long been called the “country of the future.” This book documents an exhibition that examines Brazil from the perspective of blindness as a critical category, a metaphor for the way in which the obstruction of perception can illuminate alternate modes of knowledge and experience. It features twenty emerging and mid-career artists…