Writing the Lives of Painters

Writing the Lives of Painters
Author: Karen Junod
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2011-01-27
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0199597006

This book explores the development of artists' biographies in the cultural context of 18th- and early 19th-century Britain. It argues that the proliferation of a myriad biographical forms mirrored the privileging of artistic originality and difference within an art world that had yet to generate a coherent 'British School' of painting.

Painted Love

Painted Love
Author: Hollis Clayson
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2003-10-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0892367296

In this engrossing book, Hollis Clayson provides the first description and analysis of French artistic interest in women prostitutes, examining how the subject was treated in the art of the 1870s and 1880s by such avant-garde painters as Cézanne, Degas, Manet, and Renoir, as well as by the academic and low-brow painters who were their contemporaries. Clayson not only illuminates the imagery of prostitution-with its contradictory connotations of disgust and fascination-but also tackles the issues and problems relevant to women and men in a patriarchal society. She discusses the conspicuous sexual commerce during this era and the resulting public panic about the deterioration of social life and civilized mores. She describes the system that evolved out of regulating prostitutes and the subsequent rise of clandestine prostitutes who escaped police regulation and who were condemned both for blurring social boundaries and for spreading sexual licentiousness among their moral and social superiors. Clayson argues that the subject of covert prostitution was especially attractive to vanguard painters because it exemplified the commercialization and the ambiguity of modern life.

Photography and the Art of Chance

Photography and the Art of Chance
Author: Robin Kelsey
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2015-05-26
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0674744004

As anyone who has wielded a camera knows, photography has a unique relationship to chance. It also represents a struggle to reconcile aesthetic aspiration with a mechanical process. Robin Kelsey reveals how daring innovators expanded the aesthetic limits of photography in order to create art for a modern world.

The Routledge History of Literature in English

The Routledge History of Literature in English
Author: Ronald Carter
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 598
Release: 2001
Genre: English language
ISBN: 9780415243179

This is a guide to the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature, charting some of the main features of literary language development and highlighting key language topics.