Search results for ""Author William Chapman""

A lively and thought-provoking tour of the intertwined histories of art and walking “A broad-ranging book [that] has something for every rambler.”—Benjamin Riley, New Criterion What does a walk look like? In the first book to trace the history of walking images from cave art to contemporary performance, William Chapman Sharpe reveals that a depicted walk is always more than a matter of simple steps. Whether sculpted in stone, painted on a wall, or captured on film, each detail of gait and dress, each stride and gesture has a story to tell, for every aspect of walking is shaped by social practices and environmental conditions. From classical statues to the origins of cinema, from medieval pilgrimages to public parks and the first footsteps on the moon, walking has engendered a vast visual legacy intertwined with the path of Western art. The path includes Romantic nature-walkers and urban flâneurs, as well as protest marchers and cell-phone zombies. It features works by artists such as Botticelli, Raphael, Claude Monet, Norman Rockwell, Agnès Varda, Maya Lin, and Pope.L. In 100 chronologically arranged images, this book shows how new ways of walking have spurred new means of representation, and how walking has permeated our visual culture ever since humans began to depict themselves in art.

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The relentless pace of urbanization since the industrial revolution has inspired a continuing effort to view, read, and name the modern city. "We are now at a point of transition to a new kind of city", write William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, "and thus we are experiencing the same crisis of language felt by observers of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities." "Visions of the Modern City" explores the ways in which artists and writers have struggled to define the city during the past two centuries and opens a new perspective on the urban vision of our time. In their introduction, the editors outline three phases in the evolution of the modern city-- each having its own distinctive morphology and metaphor-- and argue that a new vocabulary is needed to describe the sprawling "urban field" of today. Eric Lampard draws a detailed demographic and geographic picture of urbanization since the late eighteenth century, culminating with the "decentered" city of the 1980s. Other contributors examine the representation of cities from the London and Paris of 1850 to the New York, Los Angeles, and Tokyo of the present. Deborah Nord and Philip Collins follow Henry Mayhew and Charles Dickens, respectively, through the urban underworld of Victorian London. Theodore Reff traces the double life of Paris expressed in the work of Manet, while Michele Hannoosh shows bow Baudelaire influenced the Impressionists by transferring the aesthetic implications of the term nature to urban experience. Thomas Bender and William Taylor focus on tensions between the horizontal and the vertical in the architectural development of New York City, and Paul Anderer investigates the private, domestic spaces that represent Tokyo in postwar Japanese fiction. Steven Marcus analyzes the breakdown of the city as signifying system in the novels of Saul Bellow and Thomas Pynchon, writers who question whether the indecipherable contemporary city has any meaning left at all.

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From artifacts of ancient pre-Thai civilizations to achievements of the Thai kingdom in the early twentieth century, the enduring vestiges and persistent vitality of Thai heritage continue to entice visitors, residents, and researchers. Photographer and author Jim Wageman traveled to both well-known and little-visited sites throughout Thailand to capture images that convey the breadth and intricacy of the country’s heritage. Wageman presents his images in a gorgeous layout that is matched by solid, well-researched captions and explanations. Beautiful and incisive, The Timeless Heritage of Thailand is an outstanding compendium for anyone fascinated by the treasures of Thailand’s cultural heritage.

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