Rodin's Art

Rodin's Art
Author: the late Albert E. Elsen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 681
Release: 2003-03-13
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0198030614

The late Albert Elsen was the first American scholar to study seriously the work of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, and the person most responsible for a revival of interest in the artist as a modern innovator--after years during which the sculpture had been dismissed as so much Victorian bathos. After a fortuitous meeting with the financier, philanthropist, and art collector B. Gerald Cantor, Elsen helped Cantor to build up a major collection of Rodin's work. A large part of this collection, consisting of more than 200 pieces, was donated to the Stanford Museum by Mr. Cantor, who died recently. In size it is surpassed only the by the Musée Rodin in Paris and rivaled only by the collection in Philadelphia. In scope the collection is unique in having been carefully selected to present a balanced view of Rodin's work throughout his life. Rodin's Art encompasses a lifetime's thoughts on Rodin's career, surveying the artist's accomplishments through the detailed discussion of each object in the collection. It will begin with essays on the formation of the collection, the reception of Rodin's work, and his casting techniques. The entries that follow are arranged topically and include extensive discussions of Rodin's major projects.

The Sketchbooks Revealed

The Sketchbooks Revealed
Author: Richard Diebenkorn
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Artists
ISBN: 9780804799171

Foreword / Connie Wolf and Alison Gass -- Private to Public / Gretchen Diebenkorn Grant -- Understanding Diebenkorn / Steven A. Nash -- Two Sides of a Coin: Reflections on Artistic Practice / Enrique Chagoya -- The Ace of Spades / Alexander Nemerov -- (With)Drawing from Mastery / Peggy Phelan -- The Sketchbooks -- Notes to Myself of Beginning a Painting / Richard Diebenkorn

Women and Museums

Women and Museums
Author: Victor J. Danilov
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780759108554

Women and Museums is a comprehensive directory of museums for, by, and about women, providing information about interpretive themes, historical significance of collections, and cultural and social relevance to women, along with programming events and facility information. Useful cross-reference guides and accessible format provide quick and easy ways of finding information on America's women-related museums. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Manuel Neri

Manuel Neri
Author: Bruce Nixon
Publisher: Hudson Hills
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2006
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781883124250

A new monograph of relief sculptures and related drawings by this celebrated contemporary artist. Neri is the 2006 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award presented by the International Sculpture Center.

Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century

Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century
Author: Aida Audeh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2012-03-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191639850

This collection of essays by an international group of scholars offers an account of Dante's reception in a wide range of media: visual art, literature, theatre, cinema, and music, from the late eighteenth century through to the early twentieth. It thus explores various appropriations and interpretations of his works and persona during the era of modernization in Europe, the United States, and beyond. It includes work by internationally recognized experts and a new generation of scholars in the field, and the eighteen essays are grouped in sections which relate both to themes and regions. The volume begins and ends by addressing Italy's reception of the national poet, and its other main sections show how a worldwide dialogue with Dante developed in France, Britain, Germany, the United States, Ireland, India, and Turkey. The whole collection demonstrates how this dialogue explicitly or implicitly informed the construction, recovery or re-definition of cultural identity among various nations, regions and ethnic groups during the 'long nineteenth century'. It not only aims at wide coverage of the period's voices and concerns, and includes discussion of well-known writers such as Ugo Foscolo, Giosuè Carducci, Mary Shelley, John Ruskin, George Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton and Ralph Waldo Emerson - along with a large number of significant but less familiar figures. It also emphasizes the importance of a multidisciplinary and multilingual approach to the subject of Dante and nineteenth-century nationalism, and it will thus be of interest to scholars and students in comparative literary and nineteenth-century studies, as well as to those with a general interest in cultural studies and the history of ideas.

Monument, Moment, and Memory

Monument, Moment, and Memory
Author: Ronald R. Bernier
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 113
Release: 2007
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0838756719

By the end of the nineteenth century, a mode of painting captured instantaneity had come to be seen as an appropriate and characteristically Impressionist means of depictin its subject, when that subject was understood to be our variable perception in nature. In May of 1895, however, capriciously it seemed to some, to the facade of a Gothic cathedral. Struck by the curious choice a medieval monument as subject matter, critics, used to about instantaneity, continued to lay emphasis on a theme of temporality, and this was addressed in two but related ways. First, there was the matter of perception - the temporality that is involved in engaging visually with near impenetrable surfaces of individual canvases...

Darwin's Camera

Darwin's Camera
Author: Phillip Prodger
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2009-10-22
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 0199722307

Darwin's Camera tells the extraordinary story of how Charles Darwin changed the way pictures are seen and made. In his illustrated masterpiece, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1871), Darwin introduced the idea of using photographs to illustrate a scientific theory--his was the first photographically illustrated science book ever published. Using photographs to depict fleeting expressions of emotion--laughter, crying, anger, and so on--as they flit across a person's face, he managed to produce dramatic images at a time when photography was famously slow and awkward. The book describes how Darwin struggled to get the pictures he needed, scouring the galleries, bookshops, and photographic studios of London, looking for pictures to satisfy his demand for expressive imagery. He finally settled on one the giants of photographic history, the eccentric art photographer Oscar Rejlander, to make his pictures. It was a peculiar choice. Darwin was known for his meticulous science, while Rejlander was notorious for altering and manipulating photographs. Their remarkable collaboration is one of the astonishing revelations in Darwin's Camera. Darwin never studied art formally, but he was always interested in art and often drew on art knowledge as his work unfolded. He mingled with the artists on the voyage of HMS Beagle, he visited art museums to examine figures and animals in paintings, associated with artists, and read art history books. He befriended the celebrated animal painters Joseph Wolf and Briton Riviere, and accepted the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner as a trusted guide. He corresponded with legendary photographers Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, and G.-B. Duchenne de Boulogne, as well as many lesser lights. Darwin's Camera provides the first examination ever of these relationships and their effect on Darwin's work, and how Darwin, in turn, shaped the history of art.

Spectacles of Authenticity

Spectacles of Authenticity
Author: Hsuan Tsen
Publisher: Stanford University
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2011
Genre:
ISBN:

In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, America and Japan were in the process of establishing their positions as powers in a world dominated by Western Europe. The two nations with unconnected histories and cultures found themselves in momentary sympathy as they embarked on their first forays into military imperialism, expanded their trade, and constructed civic institutions intended to compete with those of Europe. It was during this period that mass entertainments developed and began circulating across national borders and, drawing on tourist practices, helped create a "universal" visual culture which coexisted with local particularities. This dissertation undertakes a study of Japanese and American shared visual culture and modern entertainments with the goal of nuancing current scholarship on East/West exchanges and expanding the definition of modernity. Three modern phenomena, panoramas, World's Fairs, and film, form the core of my three main chapters and describe a process of appropriation, assimilation, and collaboration through their movements from Europe, across America to Japan, and ending with a return to America. Many scholars have observed that Americans viewed Japan as a confusing cultural other with a baffling skill at appearing modern. This dissertation begins with the premise that Japan was modern and re-examines American and Japanese cultural exchanges from this position with the aim of shifting the paradigms of modernity and modern visuality.

Aesthetics and Material Beauty

Aesthetics and Material Beauty
Author: Jennifer A. McMahon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2013-01-11
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1135195633

In Aesthetics and Material Beauty, Jennifer A. McMahon develops a new aesthetic theory she terms Critical Aesthetic Realism - taking Kantian aesthetics as a starting point and drawing upon contemporary theories of mind from philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. The creative process does not proceed by a set of rules. Yet the fact that its objects can be understood or appreciated by others suggests that the creative process is constrained by principles to which others have access. According to her update of Kantian aesthetics, beauty is grounded in indeterminate yet systematic principles of perception and cognition. However, Kant’s aesthetic theory rested on a notion of indeterminacy whose consequences for understanding the nature of art were implausible. McMahon conceptualizes "indeterminacy" in terms of contemporary philosophical, psychological, and computational theories of mind. In doing so, she develops an aesthetic theory that reconciles the apparent dichotomies which stem from the tension between the determinacy of communication and the indeterminacy of creativity. Dichotomies such as universality and subjectivity, objectivity and autonomy, cognitivism and non-cognitivism, and truth and beauty are revealed as complementary features of an aesthetic judgment.