Lotus and Laurel

Lotus and Laurel
Author: Rune Nyord
Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press
Total Pages: 518
Release: 2015-10-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 8763542080

Lotus and Laurel brings together a wealth of essays in celebration of Paul John Frandsen, who has had a distinguished career as a scholar of ancient Egyptian language and religion. The contributors are friends, colleagues, or former students, and all are leading authorities in Egyptology. Evoking Frandsen's wide range of interests, they touch on a breadth of topics, including religious thought and representation; social questions of gender, kinship, and temple slavery; and studies of grammar and etymology. More than a tribute to this important scholar in Egyptology, Lotus and Laurel is a window onto some of the most important work going on now in the field.

The Formalesque

The Formalesque
Author: Bernard Smith
Publisher: Macmillan Education AU
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2007
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781876832339

In this well-illustrated book Professor Bernard Smith, who is often referred to as the father of art history in Australia, condenses the arguments presented in an earlier publication Modernisms History, 1998) into a very accessible and helpful text will prove useful for students and arts-interested readers. He begins by listing and carefully explaining those terms which frequently occur in arts literature dealing with the modern period and then goes on to show that modernism has become an historical period with its art forms both 'institutionalised' and 'globalised'. Now an historical entity, art historys basic tools can be employed to explain and describe it. They include an investigation of the periods 'style', use of 'form' and attitudes to meaning. In his defence of art historys traditions and methodologies he argues that the period that encompasses modernism in the arts might now be known as The Formalesque .

Book Chat

Book Chat
Author: William George Jordan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 336
Release: 1890
Genre: American literature
ISBN:

Standard Books

Standard Books
Author: Charles Frederick Tweney
Publisher:
Total Pages: 936
Release: 1915
Genre: Best books
ISBN:

Alois Riegl

Alois Riegl
Author: Margaret Iversen
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2003-03-17
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262590247

Alois Riegl (1858-1905) was one of the founders of art history as a discipline. This is the first general introduction to the work of the celebrated Austrian who brought complex philosophical considerations to bear on art and its history. Ranging easily over diverse fields and among a large group of thinkers, Margaret Iversen establishes Riegl's relevance to recent critical thinking while clearly delineating his extraordinary critical powers. Iversen contextualizes Riegl's thought among the wider cultural crosscurrents of his time, pointing for example to his denunciation of the sub-Semperians and his profound influence on Walter Benjamin. She is equally concerned to relate Riegl's work to contemporary theoretical interests, arguing that he pioneered an approach to art history that took into consideration the role of the spectator. She devotes a chapter to Riegl's theory of spectator/depiction relationships, comparing it with more recent writing on the subject by commentators like Fried, Foucault, and others. In a sympathetic reading of Riegl, Iversen interprets his theory of Kunstwollen or artistic volition, as a concept that ran counter to narrowly empiricist and determinist histories of art that were dominant in his time. She provides extended critical commentary on his most important works, Questions of Style, Late Roman Art Industry, and The Dutch Group Portrait, enriched by explorations of the theoretical background of his systematic art history, including the work of Kant, Hegel, Herbart, and Hildebrand. Iversen also details Erwin Panofsky's early response to Riegl, arguing that Panofsky's search for an authoritative viewpoint collapsed Riegl's multiple typology of style into an art history constructed around a single aesthetic norm.

Assassin of Youth

Assassin of Youth
Author: Alexandra Chasin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2016-09-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 022627702X

Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from its establishment in 1930 until his retirement in 1962, Harry J. Anslinger is the United States’ little known first drug czar. Anslinger was a profligate propagandist with a flair for demonizing racial and immigrant groups and perhaps best known for his zealous pursuit of harsh drug penalties and his particular animus for marijuana users. But what made Anslinger who he was, and what cultural trends did he amplify and institutionalize? Having just passed the hundredth anniversary of the Harrison Act—which consolidated prohibitionist drug policy and led to the carceral state we have today—and even as public doubts about the drug war continue to grow, now is the perfect time to evaluate Anslinger’s social, cultural, and political legacy. In Assassin of Youth, Alexandra Chasin gives us a lyrical, digressive, funny, and ultimately riveting quasi-biography of Anslinger. Her treatment of the man, his times, and the world that arose around and through him is part cultural history, part kaleidoscopic meditation. Each of the short chapters is anchored in a historical document—the court decision in Webb v. US (1925), a 1935 map of East Harlem, FBN training materials from the 1950s, a personal letter from the Treasury Department in 1985—each of which opens onto Anslinger and his context. From the Pharmacopeia of 1820 to death of Sandra Bland in 2015, from the Pennsylvania Railroad to the last passenger pigeon, and with forays into gangster lives, CIA operatives, and popular detective stories, Chasin covers impressive ground. Assassin of Youth is as riotous and loose a history of drug laws as can be imagined—and yet it culminates in an arresting and precise revision of the emergence of drug prohibition. Today, even as marijuana is slowly being legalized, we still have not fully reckoned with the racist and xenophobic foundations of our cultural appetite for the severe punishment of drug offenders. In Assassin of Youth, Chasin shows us the deep, twisted roots of both our love and our hatred for drug prohibition.