This sensitive and compelling biography sheds new light on John Singer Sargent’s art through an intimate history of his family. Karen Corsano and Daniel Williman focus especially on his niece and muse, Rose-Marie Ormond, telling her story for the first time. In a score of paintings created between 1906 and 1912, John Singer Sargent documented the idyllic teenage summers of Rose-Marie and his own deepening affection for her serene beauty and good-hearted, candid charm. Rose-Marie married Ro...

Marcel Duchamp's life and work in more than 200 alphabetical entries, using the latest scholarship and research. Marcel Duchamp (1887 - 1968) was one of the founding fathers of modern art, Dada and Surrealism: in the words of artist Thomas Hirschhorn, Duchamp was 'the most intelligent mind of his time'. Despite his popularity and provocative art, discussions often shroud his work in theory, but this book uses lively dictionary entries (from Alchemy and Anatomy to Warhol, via the Bicycle Wh...

In this pioneering book, Christopher Whitehead provides an overview and critique of art interpretation practices in museums and galleries. Covering the philosophy and sociology of art, traditions in art history and art display, the psychology of the aesthetic experience and ideas about learning and communication, Whitehead advances major theoretical frameworks for understanding interpretation from curators’ and visitors’ perspectives. Although not a manual, the book is deeply practical. It...

The long-awaited, fresh and accurate new translation of the correspondence of Paul Cézanne. For this richly-illustrated edition, Alex Danchev has gone back to the original manuscripts, clearing up decades of questionable scholarship. Cézanne was a singular thinker and an uncompromising seeker after artistic truth qualities that shine through in the letters which reveal the mans very human hopes and fears as he strove to harness his artistic passion. The result is a collection of over 250 l...

The greatest artist of the 18th century, Francisco de Goya began his career as an apprentice to a local artist where one of his jobs was adding draperies and modesty items to nude figures in religious paintings; for this he was titled “Reviser of Indecent Paintings.” But by the age of 40, Goya had established himself as a leading Spanish artist. Goya simultaneously pursued a number of disparate projects, commissions he received from prestigious churches and royalty, as well as producing se...

The Victorian era heralded an age of transformation in which momentous changes in the field of natural history coincided with the rise of new visual technologies. Concurrently, different parts of the British Empire began to more actively claim their right to being acknowledged as indispensable contributors to knowledge and the progress of empire. This book addresses the complex relationship between natural history and photography from the 1850s to the 1880s in Britain and its colonies: Aus...

This volume examines the relationship between occultism and Surrealism, specifically exploring the reception and appropriation of occult thought, motifs, tropes and techniques by Surrealist artists and writers in Europe and the Americas, from the 1920s through the 1960s. Its central focus is the specific use of occultism as a site of political and social resistance, ideological contestation, subversion and revolution. Additional focus is placed on the ways occultism was implicated in Surre...

Dedicated to an articulation of the earth from broadly ecological perspectives, eco art is a vibrant subset of contemporary art that addresses the widespread public concern with rapid climate change and related environmental issues. In Landscape into Eco Art, Mark Cheetham systematically examines connections and divergences between contemporary eco art, land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and the historical genre of landscape painting.Through eight thematic case studies that ...

Several decades have now passed since postcolonial and feminist critiques presented the art-historical world with a demythologized Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), a much-diminished image of the artist/hero who had once been universally admired as “the father of modernist primitivism.” In this volume, both long-established and more recent Gauguin scholars offer a provocative picture of the evolution of Gauguin scholarship in the recent postmodern era, as they confront and consider how the dismant...

This study analyzes the impact of color-making technologies on the visual culture of nineteenth-century France, from the early commercialization of synthetic dyes to the Lumière brothers’ perfection of the autochrome color photography process. Focusing on Impressionist art, Laura Anne Kalba examines the importance of dyes produced in the second half of the nineteenth century to the vision of artists such as Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Claude Monet.The proliferation of v...

Reviewers of a recent exhibition termed Federico Barocci (ca. 1533–1612), 'the greatest artist you’ve never heard of'. One of the first original iconographers of the Counter Reformation, Barocci was a remarkably inventive religious painter and draftsman, and the first Italian artist to incorporate extensive color into his drawings. The purpose of this volume is to offer new insights into Barocci’s work and to accord this artist, the dates of whose career fall between the traditional Renais...

The European continent gathers together, without a doubt, the most famous works of art, evidence of the history of Western art. The cultural capitals and their emblematic museums contain paintings, sculptures, or rather works of art, devised by the great artists, representative of European culture. From Madrid to London, passing through Prague, the major works of the old continent are presented here. Thanks to detailed information about the museums and their collections, you, too, can expl...