History of art Books

Book SynopsisElaine Sisson is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture in the Faculty of Film, Art and Creative Technologies at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin, Ireland. Her publications include Ireland, Design and Visual Culture: Negotiating Modernity 1922-1992, edited with L. King (2007) and Pearse's Patriots: The Cult of Boyhood at St. Enda's (2005).

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Book SynopsisSophie Halart is a Visiting Teaching Fellow at the Universidad Catolica de Chile, Santiago de Chile and a Teaching Fellow at University College London, UK, where she received her PhD on contemporary women artists in the Southern Cone.Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra is Lecturer in History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, UK and received her PhD in Latin American Cultural Studies from the University of Cambridge, UK.Trade ReviewNelly Richard once commented on the difficulty of reading the politics of Latin American contemporary art abroad without reducing the works to a testimonial function or, alternatively, stripping them of their incisive concreteness. This wonderful collection speaks to the emergence of a critical discourse on Latin American art that manages to hold form and politics not just in the balance but to read one through the other: a truly groundbreaking achievement. * Jens Andermann, Professor of Latin American Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland *Sabotage Art provides a welcome shift of emphasis amidst perennial redefinitions of “political art” in Latin America. Framing sabotage as a “positional choice with regard to the institution” allows Halart, Polgovsky Ezcurra and their collaborators to critically interrogate the longstanding association of Latin American art with struggle or “adversity” for both historical case studies and the market delirium over “contemporary art”. This book makes for an excellent teaching resource on overlooked artists such as Paulo Bruscky, Enrique Guzman, Marcos Kurtycz, and Edgardo Antonio Vigo, offers fresh examinations of canonized avant-gardes in Argentina and Chile, and considers recent participatory projects in Bogotá and Mexico City. Yet it is most valuable in the sum total of its discrete chapters, which together demonstrate a range of new methods for a field now hitting its stride. * Daniel Quiles, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Theory & Criticism, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra and Sophie Halart Part I: Ensnaring, Burning, Trespassing: Material Sabotage 1. Marta Minujin’s Self-Sabotage: From Existentialism to Counterculture Catherine Spencer 2. Shaman, Thespian, Saboteur: Marcos Kurtycz and the Ritual Poetics of Iconoclasm Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra 3. Pictorial Eviscerations, Emblems, and Self-Immolation in Mexico: Dissensus in the work of Enrique Guzmán and Nahum B. Zenil Erica Segre 4. Bureaucratic Sabotage: Knocking at the door of the ‘Big Monster’ Zanna Gilbert Part II: Cannons and Canons: Explosive vs. Implosive Postures 5. Cogs and Clogs: Sabotage as Noise in Post-1960s Chilean and Argentine Art and Art History Sophie Halart 6. Impossible Objects: Gabriel Orozco’s Empty Shoe Box and Yielding Stone Natasha Adamou 7. El Museo de la Calle. Art, Economy and the Paradoxes of Bartering Olga Fernández López 8. Stay at Your Own Risk: Disturbing Ideas of Community in Two Projects by Elkin Calderón Carla Macchiavello 9. ‘The Space of Appearance’: Performativity and Aesthetics in the Politicization of Mexico’s Public Sphere Robin Greeley Notes Index

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Book SynopsisIn the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, ideals of technological progress and mass consumerism shaped the print cultures of countries across the globe. Magazines in Europe, the USA, Latin America, and Asia inflected a shared internationalism and technological optimism. But there were equally powerful countervailing influences, of patriotic or insurgent nationalism, and of traditionalism, that promoted cultural differentiation. In their editorials, images, and advertisements magazines embodied the tensions between these domestic imperatives and the forces of global modernity.Magazines and Modern Identities explores how these tensions played out in the magazine cultures of ten different countries, describing how publications drew on, resisted, and informed the ideals and visual forms of global modernism. Chapters take in the magazines of Australia, Europe and North America, as well as China, The Soviet Turkic states, and Mexico. With contributions from leadi

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Book SynopsisBetween 1966 and 1976, American artist Nancy Spero completed some of her most aggressively political work. Made at a time when Spero was a key member of the anti-war and feminist arts-activism that burgeoned in the New York art world during the period, her works demonstrate a violent and bodily rejection of injustice. Considering the ways in which anti-war and feminist art used emotion as a means to persuade and protest, Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art examines the history of this crucial decade in American art politics through close attention to Spero's practice. Situating her work amongst the activism that defined the era, this book examines the ways in which sensation and emotion became political weapons for a generation of artists seeking to oppose patriarchy and war. Exemplary of the way in which artists were using metaphors of sensation and emotion in their work as part of the anti-Vietnam war and feminist art movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Spero's pract

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Book SynopsisThis book addresses the work of architect John Dalton (1927-2007), an important voice in mid-century modernism in Australia whose work, despite his being exhibited and published internationally and also winning several awards for his designs, is woefully little known.Published as part of the Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture series, which brings to light the work of significant yet overlooked modernist architects, the book draws on previously unpublished archival documents, including Dalton's drawings and paintings, transcripts of lectures, letters and articles, plans and photographic images of built works, to characterize the architect not only as a very talented designer, but also as a pioneer of environmentalist thinking in Australia.The book reveals how Dalton's architectural preoccupations parallel a transition in mid-century modern architecture globally from functional efficiency and material rationalism, to a concern with being in dialogue with the env

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Book SynopsisThis book provides an intellectual history of the modernist minimum dwelling, exploring how early modernism saw mass housing as a primary vehicle for achieving the utopian transformation of society. It reappraises the often-overlooked 2nd and 3rd CIAM conferences (1929-31), addressing their engagement with the minimum dwelling and revealing them both as milestones in the organisation''s annals and as seminal moments in the history of interwar modernism.In 1929, an eclectic international group of avant-garde modernist architects, including Ernst May, Mart Stam, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, met in Frankfurt for the second instalment of the CIAM conferences. They discussed a design programme for cost-effective, good-quality housing, seeking new approaches and processes to maximize quality and functionality while ensuring affordability for the wider population. In exploring the meaning and form of the ''minimum dwelling'', they also re-defined dwelling as the hub of a new wa

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Book SynopsisThe poetry of the late Roman world has a fascinating history. Sometimes an object of derision, sometimes an object of admiration, it has found numerous detractors and defenders among classicists and Latin literary critics. This volume explores the scholarly approaches to late Latin poetry that have developed over the last 40 years, and it seeks especially to develop, complement and challenge the seminal concept of the Jeweled Style' proposed by Michael Roberts in 1989. While Roberts's monograph has long been a vade mecum within the world of late antique literary studies, a critical reassessment of its validity as a concept is overdue. This volume invites established and emerging scholars from different research traditions to return to the influential conclusions put forward by Roberts. It asks them to examine the continued relevance of The Jeweled Style and to suggest new ways to engage it. In a joint effort, the nineteen chapters of this volume d

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Book SynopsisArtists have worked from home for many reasons, including care duties, financial or political constraints, or availability and proximity to others. From the home studios' of Charles and Ray Eames, to the different photographic representations of Robert Rauschenberg's studio, this book explores the home as a distinct site of artistic practice, and the traditions and developments of the home studio as concept and space throughout the 20th and into the 21st century. Using examples from across Europe and the Anglophone world between the mid-20th century and the present, each chapter considers the different circumstances for working at home, the impact on the creative lives of the artists, their identities as artists and on the work itself, and how, sometimes, these were projected and promoted through photographs and the media. Key themes include the gendered and performative aspects of women practising at home', collaborative studio communities of the 1970s 90s including the appropria

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Book SynopsisThis pioneering account of Modern Spiritualism in late 19th and early 20th-century Scotland is a compelling history of the international movement's cultural impact on Scottish art. From spirit-mediums creating séance art to mainstream artists of the Royal Scottish Academy, this exposition reveals for the first time the extent of Spiritualist interest in Scotland. With its interdisciplinary scope, Modern Spiritualism and Scottish Art combines cultural and art history to explore the ways in which Scottish art reflected Spiritualist beliefs at the turn of the 20th century. More than simply a history of the Spiritualist cause and its visual manifestations, this book also provides a detailed account of scepticism, psychical research, and occulture in modern Scotland, and the role that these aspects played in informing responses to Spiritualist ideology.Utilising extensive archival research, together with in-depth analyses of overlooked paintings, drawings and sculp

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Book SynopsisShelley Hales is Associate Professor in Art and Visual Culture at the University of Bristol, UK.

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Book SynopsisIn April 1937, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted an exhibition that served as a catalyst for the appropriation of prehistoric rock art in postwar abstract painting. With the title Prehistoric Rock Pictures in Europe and Africa, it displayed a range of copies from the influential collection of the German ethnologist Leo Frobenius.Largely disregarded in modern American art history up until now, this book highlights the importance of this exhibition to artists such as Josef Albers, Adolph Gottlieb, David Smith, and The American Abstract Artists group, who sought inspiration from the prehistoric images' primordial creativity. With a transnational scope, this book reveals new facts about the connections between Paris and New York, and the importance of communication and collaboration between them for these artists. In doing so, Seibert shows that this debate was about more than just legitimizing abstract art forms from the past, but about recognizing an autonomous Ameri

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Book SynopsisHeidi A. Strobel is Associate Professor of Art History and Curator of the Peters-Margedant House, University of Evansville, USA.

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Book SynopsisThe Lure of the South looks at the experience of British health seekers in the explosion of continental touring that occurred after the opening of the Post-Napoleonic European continent to relatively easy access. These people ranged from the genuinely ill some even on the verge of death to the merely overworked or ill at ease. It examines why they went, where and how; who advised and guided them; how they lived (and sometimes died) when abroad; and finally the influence they had on the wider development of European tourism and tourist resorts. Considering health tourism as an integral part of the wider phenomenon of foreign touring and travel, it surveys a wide range of concerns that exercised expatriate patients and their companions on the Continent beyond merely their health concerns that were informed by the social and cultural baggage they brought with them. The overarching theme of the book therefore is to use health as a lens through which to examine Victo

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Book SynopsisRichard Alston is Professor of Roman History at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. He is author and editor of several books including The City in Roman and Byzantine Egypt (2001), and has published articles on the classical influences on modern urbanism, city planning and political theory.

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Book SynopsisHallie Franks is Associate Professor of Ancient Studies at New York University, USA. She is author of The World Underfoot: Mosaics and Movement in the Greek Symposium (2018) and Hunters, Heroes, Kings (2012).

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Book SynopsisIs it possible to consider art-making as a spiritual practice independent of explicit religious belief or content? This open access collection establishes a new paradigm that changes the conversation surrounding the spiritual significance of art. Where earlier research has focused on the religious significance of secular artworks, this innovative volume turns its attention to the role of the artist, and to specific examples of art practices, putting them into conversation with particular ritual practices. By creating a web of connections that emerge across multiple disciplines and practices, a team of scholars and artist shed new light on the way art-making and ritual embody non-discursive forms of understanding. Drawing on the work of scholars who argue that ritual practice is central to religious identities, they use close analysis of specific examples to address philosophical issues about the nature of knowledge and spirituality and the relationship between them. Bringing a prac

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