Museum Skepticism

Museum Skepticism
Author: David Carrier
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2006-05-31
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780822336945

DIVProminent art historian looks at the birth of the art museum and contemplates its future as a public institution./div

Dialogues with Degas

Dialogues with Degas
Author: Kathryn Brown
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2023-12-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1350258717

Dialogues with Degas demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Edgar Degas to 20th- and 21st-century ideas and art practices. The first in-depth examination of this major artist's impact on contemporary art, this book explores how contemporary practitioners have used Degas's creativity as a springboard to engage imaginatively and critically with themes of colonialism, gender, race and class. Individual chapters are devoted to dialogues between Degas's art and works produced by Frank Auerbach, Cecily Brown, Xinyi Cheng, Ryan Gander, Maggi Hambling, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Chantal Joffe, Leon Kossoff, R.B. Kitaj, Juan Muñoz, Paula Rego, Jenny Saville, Yinka Shonibare, Cy Twombly and Rebecca Warren. Through close analyses of selected paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, Kathryn Brown explores how Degas's technical and compositional experiments have been extended or challenged in innovative ways. By experimenting with the materials and methods of existing works, contemporary artists generate visual palimpsests that make new demands of the viewer and prompt a reconsideration of ideas that have informed histories of 19th-century French art. The book overturns familiar conceptions of influence by eschewing a genealogical approach and prioritizing, instead, the analysis of non-linear encounters between artworks. This encourages a new conception of the agency of visual artefacts and of the conversations they are capable of entertaining with each other. While this study sheds new light on Degas's art and that of his interlocutors, it also has methodological significance for the writing of art history.

Art/talk

Art/talk
Author: Alwynne Mackie
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 1989
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780231066488

This book explores the puzzling phenomenon of new veiling practices among lower middle class women in Cairo, Egypt. Although these women are part of a modernizing middle class, they also voluntarily adopt a traditional symbol of female subordination. How can this paradox be explained? An explanation emerges which reconceptualizes what appears to be reactionary behavior as a new style of political struggle--as accommodating protest. These women, most of them clerical workers in the large government bureaucracy, are ambivalent about working outside the home, considering it a change which brings new burdens as well as some important benefits. At the same time they realize that leaving home and family is creating an intolerable situation of the erosion of their social status and the loss of their traditional identity. The new veiling expresses women's protest against this. MacLeod argues that the symbolism of the new veiling emerges from this tense subcultural dilemma, involving elements of both resistance and acquiescence.

Barnett Newman

Barnett Newman
Author: Barnett Newman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 1992-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780520078178

Barnett Newman's writings reveal him to be an impassioned and articulate analyst of art and society who never hesitated to make his views known and always stood by them. To understand Newman's unique place in the culture of the twentieth century, we must know both his paintings and his words--a knowledge made possible by this long-awaited volume. "Barnett Newman [1905-1970] was a thinker who chose to develop his ideas both in painting and in writing. He was also a citizen who made his acts of painting and writing political. And he was an artist."--Richard Schiff, from the Introduction Barnett Newman's writings reveal him to be an impassioned and articulate analyst of art and society who never hesitated to make his views known and always stood by them. To understand Newman's unique place in the culture of the twentieth century, we must know both his paintings and his words--a knowledge made possible by this long-awaited volume. "Barnett Newman [1905-1970] was a thinker who chose to develop his ideas both in painting and in writing. He was also a citizen who made his acts of painting and writing political. And he was an artist."--Richard Schiff, from the Introduction

Saul Steinberg

Saul Steinberg
Author: Joel Smith
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0300115865

Best known for his barbed and brilliant art for "The New Yorker," Saul Steinberg (1914-1999) turned his magic touch to the fields of painting, sculpture, advertising, and even wartime propaganda. This is the first comprehensive look at Steinberg's extraordinary contribution to 20th-century art.

Saul Steinberg's Literary Journeys

Saul Steinberg's Literary Journeys
Author: Jessica R. Feldman
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 476
Release: 2021-02-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813945127

Saul Steinberg’s inimitable drawings, paintings, and assemblages enriched the New Yorker, gallery and museum shows, and his own books for more than half a century. Although the literary qualities of Steinberg’s work have often been noted in passing, critics and art historians have yet to fathom the specific ways in which Steinberg meant drawing not merely to resemble writing but to be itself a type of literary writing. Jessica R. Feldman's Saul Steinberg’s Literary Journeys, the first book-length critical study of Steinberg’s art and its relation to literature, explores his complex literary roots, particularly his affinities with modernist aesthetics and iconography. The Steinberg who emerges is an artist of far greater depth than has been previously recognized. Feldman begins her study with a consideration of Steinberg as a reader and writer, including a survey of his personal library. She explores the practice of modernist parody as the strongest affinity between Steinberg and the two authors he repeatedly claimed as his "teachers"—Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce. Studying Steinberg’s art in tandem with readings of selected works by Nabokov and Joyce, Feldman explores fascinating bonds between Steinberg and these writers, from their tastes for parody and popular culture to their status as mythmakers, émigrés, and perpetual wanderers. Further, Feldman relates Steinberg’s uniquely literary art to a host of other authors, including Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Defoe. Generously illustrated with the artist’s work and drawing on invaluable archival material from the Saul Steinberg Foundation, this innovative fusion of literary history and art history allows us to see anew Steinberg’s art.

Beginner's French

Beginner's French
Author: Marie-Rose Carré
Publisher: Hippocrene Books
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2001
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780781808637

Each lesson includes a lively dialogue that focuses on a situation of interest to the visitor, such as dining in a restaurant or sight-seeing. Historical and cultural background, as well as practical information on France, provides a reference for the student, traveller and businessperson. A key to the exercise and a glossary are provided at the end of the book.