The Amusements of Jan Steen

The Amusements of Jan Steen
Author: Mariët Westermann
Publisher:
Total Pages: 378
Release: 1997
Genre: Art
ISBN:

The Dutch painter Jan Steen (1626-1679) has long enjoyed a reputation for his dissolute life, redeemed only by a keen eye for the follies of his contemporaries and an exquisite ability to capture his observations in paint. Steen's paintings of unruly households, rambunctious revels, and wily seductresses have come to define our image of the delicious and immoral excesses of the Golden Age. But rather than simply recording the illicit pleasures of Dutch burghers and peasants, Steen transformed them into ambitious genre paintings that rival the peasant epics of Bruegel the Elder and jest with the genteel idylls of Vermeer and Terborch. By placing Steen within Dutch society and culture of the seventeenth century, Mariet Westermann shows how the contradictions and parallels between his life and his art were essential to his innovative achievements. In a detailed analysis of his career and audience, she suggests how Steen became a comic painter and why his pictures appealed to prosperous urban connoisseurs. Documented throughout with seventeenth-century jokes, poems, and plays, The Amusements of Jan Steen gives the first full account of Steen's creative relationship to comic literature and performance.

Jan Steen's Histories

Jan Steen's Histories
Author: Ariane van Suchtelen
Publisher: Uitgeverij de Kunst
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: History in art
ISBN: 9789462621664

Jan Steen, one of the most popular painters of the Dutch Golden Age, is known for his humorous depictions of dissolute households, tavern interiors, quacksalvers and love-sick young women. He was unrivalled in poking fun at every conceivable human weakness and vice. A lesser known fact is that he also painted history pieces: scenes based on episodes from the Bible, apocryphal writings and mythology - stories full of excitement, drama and passion. As he did in his genre pieces, Steen devoted a great deal of attention in his history paintings to the interaction between the figures, and was keenly aware of the satirical possibilities of every story. In contrast to what his later image suggests, Jan Steen was a versatile and ambitious artist with a profound knowledge of art history and literature: knowledge that comes to the fore in his history pieces. This richly illustrated publication, written by experts on Jan Steen, focuses on this little-known part of the artist's oeuvre. AUTHORS: Ariane van Suchtelen, curator at the Mauritshuis, is the author of an introduction to the life and work of Jan Steen, in which she discusses the place occupied by history painting in his (otherwise humorous) oeuvre. Which themes did he prefer? What were his sources? For whom were these paintings intended? Wouter Kloek, former curator at the Rijksmuseum, writes about the form and content of Steen's history paintings, and the thin line that separates representations of biblical and mythological themes from scenes of everyday life. Mariet Westermann, executive vice president of the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, writes about Steen's exceptional ambition as a history painter. Her essay clarifies the national and international context in which these paintings originated. SELLING POINTS: * For the first time in book form, presenting history-pieces by Jan Steen * 17th century paintings from the Dutch Golden Age * Contributions by Ariane van Suchtelen, Wouter Kloek and Mariet Westermann 125 colour, 25 b/w images

Heroines, Harpies, and Housewives

Heroines, Harpies, and Housewives
Author: Martha Moffitt Peacock
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 530
Release: 2020-11-16
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9004432159

A novel and female empowering interpretive approach to these artistic archetypes in her analysis of Imaging Women of Consequence in the Dutch Golden Age.

Mozart's Music of Friends

Mozart's Music of Friends
Author: Edward Klorman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2016-04-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1107093651

This study analyzes chamber music from Mozart's time within its highly social salon-performance context.

Rembrandt and the Female Nude

Rembrandt and the Female Nude
Author: Eric Jan Sluijter
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2006
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9053568379

Rembrandt’s extraordinary paintings of female nudes—Andromeda, Susanna, Diana and her Nymphs, Danaë, Bathsheba—as well as his etchings of nude women, have fascinated many generations of art lovers and art historians. But they also elicited vehement criticism when first shown, described as against-the-grain, anticlassical—even ugly and unpleasant. However, Rembrandt chose conventional subjects, kept close to time-honored pictorial schemes, and was well aware of the high prestige accorded to the depiction of the naked female body. Why, then, do these works deviate so radically from the depictions of nude women by other artists? To answer this question Eric Jan Sluijter, in Rembrandt and the Female Nude, examines Rembrandt’s paintings and etchings against the background of established pictorial traditions in the Netherlands and Italy. Exploring Rembrandt’s intense dialogue with the works of predecessors and peers, Sluijter demonstrates that, more than any other artist, Rembrandt set out to incite the greatest possible empathy in the viewer, an approach that had far-reaching consequences for the moral and erotic implications of the subjects Rembrandt chose to depict. In this richly illustrated study, Sluijter presents an innovative approach to Rembrandt’s views on the art of painting, his attitude towards antiquity and Italian art of the Renaissance, his sustained rivalry with the works of other artists, his handling of the moral and erotic issues inherent in subjects with female nudes, and the nature of his artistic choices.

Table-talk

Table-talk
Author: William Hazlitt
Publisher:
Total Pages: 504
Release: 1869
Genre: Authors and publishers
ISBN:

Author:
Publisher: Waxmann Verlag
Total Pages: 426
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 3830965532

The Sides of the North

The Sides of the North
Author: Tamar Cholcman
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2015-09-18
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1443883492

The Sides of the North is dedicated to Yona Pinson’s extensive scholarly work on Northern Renaissance art, from Hieronymus Bosch’s and Peter Breughel’s oeuvre, through lessons of morality, the Fool’s imagery, gender problems in the representation of the “femme fatale” bourgeois seductress, to emblem studies, and up to her most recent project on “Mirror, Moralization and Irony” in Bosch’s painting. In tribute to her research, this volume offers new insights into her fields of interest from a number of leading scholars in these disciplines. Larry Silver reconstructs a recently found Adoration of the Magi Triptych by Bosch, while Mara R. Wade, Michael J. Giordano and Kathryn M. Rudy discuss aspects of self-fashioning through portraiture, emblem books, and manuscripts and their spiritual and performative qualities. Nurith Kenaan-Kedar and Liad Rinot delve into problems of marginality in Gothic sculpture, as well as in Robert Campain’s and Jan van Eyck’s paintings. Ingrid Alexander-Skipnes, Ruth Strauss and Juliette Roding explore the topic of artistic identities and intentionalism, and political ideologies in various media, such as in small-scale sculptures and paintings. Just as Yona Pinson’s research diversified from iconographical studies to post-modern reflections on such issues as marginality and folly, this anthology presents a broad spectrum not only of the diverse topics, genres, and media of Northern Renaissance art, but also, and particularly, an overview of the methodological range of art scholarship of recent decades, thus offering readers insights into the intricate sides of contemporary Netherlandish visual culture.

Planet Funny

Planet Funny
Author: Ken Jennings
Publisher: Scribner
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2019-07-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501100602

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year The witty and exuberant New York Times bestselling author and record-setting Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings relays the history of humor in “lively, insightful, and crawling with goofy factlings,” (Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go Bernadette)—from fart jokes on clay Sumerian tablets to the latest Twitter gags and Facebook memes. Where once society’s most coveted trait might have been strength or intelligence or honor, today, in a clear sign of evolution sliding off the trails, it is being funny. Yes, funniness. Consider: Super Bowl commercials don’t try to sell you anymore; they try to make you laugh. Airline safety tutorials—those terrifying laminated cards about the possibilities of fire, explosion, depressurization, and drowning—have been replaced by joke-filled videos with multimillion-dollar budgets and dance routines. Thanks to social media, we now have a whole Twitterverse of amateur comedians riffing around the world at all hours of the day—and many of them even get popular enough online to go pro and take over TV. In his “smartly structured, soundly argued, and yes—pretty darn funny” (Booklist, starred review) Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it means—or doesn’t—to be funny in it now. Tracing the evolution of humor from the caveman days to the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Python’s game-changing silliness to the fast-paced meta-humor of The Simpsons, Jennings explains how we built our humor-saturated modern age, where lots of us get our news from comedy shows and a comic figure can even be elected President of the United States purely on showmanship. “Fascinating, entertaining and—I’m being dead serious here—important” (A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically), Planet Funny is a full taxonomy of what spawned and defines the modern sense of humor.