Search results for ""Author Henry M. Sayre""

This book on the contemporary painter and printmaker James B. Thompson is a meditation on the possibility of discovering, in an American landscape wracked by the devastation of global warming, flood, drought, and environmental disaster, an uncanny beauty, even a source of affirmation and hope. Thompson's entirely abstract canvases and prints offer themselves up as metaphors for landscape, as terrains full of incident designed to reveal not only a sense of what we have lost but the creative energy necessary to renew our imaginative capacity to move on. They constitute a new sublime, a vision of something infinite that we cannot quite comprehend, even as they seek to convey landscape's very essence. Henry M. Sayre's introductory essay and commentaries on individual works place Thompson's work in the context of landscape painting as a whole and offer the viewer insight into the meaning of the works themselves.

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Art historian Henry M. Sayre traces the origins of the term “value” in art criticism, revealing the politics that define Manet’s art. How did art critics come to speak of light and dark as, respectively, “high in value” and “low in value”? Henry M. Sayre traces the origin of this usage to one of art history’s most famous and racially charged paintings, Édouard Manet’s Olympia. Art critics once described light and dark in painting in terms of musical metaphor—higher and lower tones, notes, and scales. Sayre shows that it was Émile Zola who introduced the new “law of values” in an 1867 essay on Manet. Unpacking the intricate contexts of Zola’s essay and of several related paintings by Manet, Sayre argues that Zola’s usage of value was intentionally double coded—an economic metaphor for the political economy of slavery. In Manet’s painting, Olympia and her maid represent objects of exchange, a commentary on the French Empire’s complicity in the ongoing slave trade in the Americas. Expertly researched and argued, this bold study reveals the extraordinary weight of history and politics that Manet’s painting bears. Locating the presence of slavery at modernism’s roots, Value in Art is a surprising and necessary intervention in our understanding of art history.

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