Title: Dynasty and empire in the age of Augustus: the case of the of the Boscoreale Cups 
Author: Kuttner, Ann L
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Art | Art History | Classical History | Ancient History
Publisher's Description: The two silver skyphoi commonly known as the Boscoreale Cups of Augustus and Tiberius are indispensable for providing the documentation of one of the only two cycles of Roman imperial state reliefs to survive from the Julio-Claudian period. Ann Kuttner offers the first comprehensive examination of these historical treasures.Kuttner studies the Cups not only from the standpoint of art history but also as they relate to Augustan ideology and politics. When she began work on this book, the whereabouts of the Cups was unknown, and she had to rely on the illustrations in Monuments et Memoires (Fondation Eugen Pinot, 1901). The rediscovery of the Cups at the Louvre in late 1990 has allowed Kuttner to examine them directly.   [brief]
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Title: Early Gothic Saint-Denis: restorations and survivals 
Author: Blum, Pamela Z
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Art | Architectural History | Art History | Medieval Studies | Archaeology
Publisher's Description: quality. Indeed, the well-preserved sculptural passages provide a key to the Early Gothic style as well as revealing the distinct imprints of three artists and their influences on each other. Blum's penetrating analyses of the restorative techniques and materials are accompanied by telling photograph-diagrams that distinguish the original work from that done later.Pamela Blum's investigation has relevance not only for students and scholars of medieval art but for curators and collectors as well. Anyone concerned with survivals from the past will appreciate her scrupulous detection in studying one of France's greatest monuments.   [brief]
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Title: Earthwards: Robert Smithson and art after Babel
Author: Shapiro, Gary 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Art | Art Criticism | Social and Political Thought
Publisher's Description: The death of Robert Smithson in 1973 robbed postwar American art of an unusually creative practitioner and thinker. Smithson's pioneering earthworks of the 1960s and 1970s anticipated contemporary concerns with environmentalism and the site-specific character of artistic production. His interrogation of authorship, the linear historiography of high modernism, and the limitations of the museum prefigures key themes in postmodern criticism while underscoring the uniqueness of Smithson's own work as an artist, filmmaker, and writer.Gary Shapiro's elegant and incisive study of Smithson's career is the first book to address the full range of the artist's dazzling virtuosity. Ranging from Smithson's best known works such as Spiral Jetty and Partially Buried Woodshed to his photographs, films, and theoretical readings and writings, Shapiro's masterful book analyzes Smithson's art in relation to the legacy of American art of the 1960s and central philosophical themes in its contemporary reception.   [brief]
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Title: The Enlightenment against the Baroque: economics and aesthetics in the eighteenth century 
Author: Saisselin, Rémy G. (Rémy Gilbert) 1925-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Economics and Business | Popular Culture | Art | Renaissance History
Publisher's Description: How do seemingly disparate arenas of Enlightenment philosophy, economic theories, boudoir etiquette, literary styles, and artistic modes coincide in the late eighteenth century? In this poetic essay on the evolution of the idea of luxury and art, Rémy Saisselin uses precise, witty examples to describe the development of our modern taste, ultimately the successor of the more spiritual and grand baroque goût . His analysis both illuminates and distinguishes between eighteenth-century and modern varieties of conspicuous consumption.This persuasive discourse depicts the rise of luxe as an escape from ennui and shows how, for the first time in European history, a large class of wealthy, leisured people emerged to make art, luxury, and the avoidance of boredom its preoccupation. Saisselin provides an original and lucid picture of the first phases in the emergence of a specifically bourgeois taste.   [brief]
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Title: Erotic faculties 
Author: Frueh, Joanna
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Art | Gender Studies | Women's Studies | Literary Theory and Criticism | Art Theory
Publisher's Description: The erotic and the intellectual come together to create a new kind of criticism in the lushly written work of Joanna Frueh. Addressing sexuality in ways that are usually hidden or left unsaid, Frueh - a noted performance artist and art historian - explores subjects such as aging, beauty, love, sex, pleasure, contemporary art, and the body as a site and vehicle of knowledge. Frueh's language is explicit, graphic, fragmented. She assumes multiple voices: those of lover, prophet, daughter, mythmaker, art critic, activist, and bleeding heart. What results is an utterly original narrative that frees us from the false objectivity of traditional critical discourse and affirms the erotic as a way to ease human suffering.Through personal reflection, parody, autobiography, and poetry, Frueh shows us what it means to perform criticism, to personalize critical thinking. Rejecting postmodern, deconstructed prose, she recuperates the sentimental, proudly asserts a romantic viewpoint, and disrupts academic and feminist conventions. Erotic Faculties seeks to free the power of our unutilized erotic faculties and to expand the possibilities of criticism; it is a wild ride and a consummate pleasure.   [brief]
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Title: Essays on the blurring of art and life
Author: Kaprow, Allan
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Art | Art Criticism | Art Theory
Publisher's Description: As the creator of "Happenings" and "Environments," Allan Kaprow is the prince and prophet of all we call performance art today. He is also known for having written some of the most thoughtful, provocative, and influential essays of his generation. From "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock" in 1958 to "The Meaning of Life" in 1990, Kaprow has conducted a sustained philosophical inquiry into the paradoxical relationship of art to life, and thus into the nature of meaning itself. With the publication of this book, twenty-three of Kaprow's most significant essays are brought together in one volume for the first time.Kaprow charts his own evolution as an artist and also comments on contemporaneous developments in the arts. From the modernist avant-garde of the fifties to the current postmodern fin de siècle , Kaprow has written about - and from within - the shifting, blurring boundaries of genre, media, culture, and experience. Edited and introduced by critic Jeff Kelley, these essays bring into crisp focus the thinking of one of the most influential figures in the varied landscape of American art since the late 1950s.   [brief]
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Title: A fable of modern art 
Author: Ashton, Dore
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Art | Art History | Art Theory | Intellectual History
Publisher's Description: Dore Ashton's masterly analysis of modern art grows out of a consideration of Balzac's brilliant and little known 'philosophic' story The Unknown Masterpiece in which the concerns of Cézanne, Picasso, and the abstract expressionists are strikingly prefigured. Balzac's fable is discussed not only within the context from which it emerged - early nineteenth-century romanticism - but also in its embodiment of various attitudes towards art. Ashton illuminates a web of associations linking Balzac to Cézanne, Rilke, Schoenberg, Kandinsky and Picasso as they struggle with the yearning to express the inexpressible, to make concrete the abstract.As Professor Ashton develops the conjectures of her book she reveals the interrelations of literature, music, and art and the basic problems which engage or beset the contemporary artist and those who seek to understand and appreciate contemporary art. This is a book of extreme originality which ranges so widely and offers such valuable insights that it forms an important contribution not only to the history of art and culture, but also to the history of ideas.   [brief]
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Title: Faces of power: Alexander's image and Hellenistic politics
Author: Stewart, Andrew F
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Art | Art and Architecture
Publisher's Description: Alexander the Great changed the face of the ancient world. During his life and after his death, his image in works of art exerted an unprecedented influence?on marbles, bronzes, ivories, frescoes, mosaics, coins, medals, even painted pottery and reliefware. Alexander's physiognomy became the most famous in history. But can we really know what meaning lies behind these images?Andrew Stewart demonstrates that these portraits - wildly divergent in character, quality, type, provenance, date, and purpose - actually transmit not so much a likeness of Alexander as a set of carefully crafted clichés that mobilize the notion "Alexander" for diverse ends and diverse audiences. Stewart discusses the portraits as studies in power and his original interpretation of them gives unprecedented fullness and shape to the idea and image called "Alexander."   [brief]
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Title: Fluxus experience
Author: Higgins, Hannah 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Art | Art History | Art Theory | Art Criticism
Publisher's Description: In this groundbreaking work of incisive scholarship and analysis, Hannah Higgins explores the influential art movement Fluxus. Daring, disparate, contentious - Fluxus artists worked with minimal and prosaic materials now familiar in post-World War II art. Higgins describes the experience of Fluxus for viewers, even experiences resembling sensory assaults, as affirming transactions between self and world. Fluxus began in the 1950s with artists from around the world who favored no single style or medium but displayed an inclination to experiment. Two formats are unique to Fluxus: a type of performance art called the Event, and the Fluxkit multiple, a collection of everyday objects or inexpensive printed cards collected in a box that viewers explore privately. Higgins examines these two setups to bring to life the Fluxus experience, how it works, and how and why it's important. She does so by moving out from the art itself in what she describes as a series of concentric circles: to the artists who create Fluxus, to the creative movements related to Fluxus (and critics' and curators' perceptions and reception of them), to the lessons of Fluxus art for pedagogy in general. Although it was commonly associated with political and cultural activism in the 1960s, Fluxus struggled against being pigeonholed in these too-prescriptive and narrow terms. Higgins, the daughter of the Fluxus artists Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, makes the most of her personal connection to the movement by sharing her firsthand experience, bringing an astounding immediacy to her writing and a palpable commitment to shedding light on what Fluxus is and why it matters.   [brief]
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Title: The forgotten hermitage of Skellig Michael 
Author: Horn, Walter William 1908-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Architecture | Art | Architectural History | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: This book is a dramatically told and visually stunning account of a ninth-century hermitage discovered on the South Peak of Skellig Michael, an island off the west coast of Ireland. It is the story, pieced together from fragmentary remains, study, and conjecture, of a man's attempt to live on a tiny ledge some 700 feet above the Atlantic on the outer edge of the European land mass, alone, as close to God as possible, in what is perhaps the ne plus ultra of ecstatic monastic solitude.Richly illustrated with maps, plans, and photographs that capture both the astonishing beauty and isolation of the hermitage, the text also includes reconstruction drawings of the site that combine a surveyor's accuracy with an artist's imaginative response to the hermit who found spiritual refuge on a pinnacle.   [brief]
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Title: The French Revolution as blasphemy: Johan Zoffany's paintings of the massacre at Paris, August 10, 1792
Author: Pressly, William L 1944-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Art | Art History | European History | French Studies
Publisher's Description: William Pressly presents for the first time a close analysis of two important, neglected paintings, arguing that they are among the most extraordinary works of art devoted to the French Revolution. Johan Zoffany's Plundering the King's Cellar at Paris, August 10, 1792 , and Celebrating over the Bodies of the Swiss Soldiers , both painted in about 1794, represent events that helped turn the English against the Revolution.Pressly places both paintings in their historical context - a time of heightened anti-French hysteria - and relates them to pictorial conventions: contemporary history painting, the depiction of urban mobs in satiric and festival imagery, and Hogarth's humorous presentation of modern moral subjects, all of which Zoffany adopted and reinvented for his own purposes. Pressly relates the paintings to Zoffany's status as a German-born Catholic living in Protestant England and to Zoffany's vision of revolutionary justice and the role played by the sansculottes, women, and blacks. He also examines the religious dimension in Zoffany's paintings, showing how they broke new ground by conveying Christian themes in a radically new format.Art historians will find Pressly's book of immense value, as will cultural historians interested in religion, gender, and race.   [brief]
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Title: Giambologna: narrator of the Catholic Reformation 
Author: Gibbons, Mary Weitzel 1929-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Art | Art History
Publisher's Description: Arguably the pre-eminent European sculptor of his age, but historically considered little more than the facile court sculptor to the grand dukes of Florence, Giambologna played a major role in the artistic transformations of the late sixteenth century. Mary Weitzel Gibbons seeks to broaden our hitherto limited view of Giambologna's work by considering his neglected Genoese masterpiece, the Grimaldi Chapel. Although the chapel itself was destroyed during the Napoleonic period, its dazzling bronzes of Virtues and angel-putti and a Passion cycle in relief have survived. The fine detail and rich color of the bronzes are featured in color plates and black-and-white images photographed especially for this book.Gibbons reassesses Giambologna's work, clearly defining his relation to the narrative tradition and his role as an artist of the Catholic Reformation. Her new insights into the artist's work will appeal to all those intrigued by this turbulent era in Western European history.   [brief]
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Title: High anxieties: cultural studies in addiction 
Author: Brodie, Janet Farrell
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Literature | Media Studies | Gender Studies | Cognitive Science | Social and Political Thought | Art | Sociology
Publisher's Description: High Anxieties explores the history and ideological ramifications of the modern concept of addiction. Little more than a century old, the notions of "addict" as an identity and "addiction" as a disease of the will form part of the story of modernity. What is addiction? This collection of essays illuminates and refashions the term, delivering a complex and mature understanding of addiction. Brodie and Redfield's introduction provides a roadmap for readers and situates the fascinating essays within a larger, interdisciplinary framework. Stacey Margolis and Timothy Melley's pieces grapple with the psychology of addiction. Cannon Schmitt and Marty Roth delve into the relationship between opium and the British Empire's campaign to control and stigmatize China. Robyn R. Warhol and Nicholas O. Warner examine accounts of alcohol abuse in texts as disparate as Victorian novels, Alcoholics Anonymous literature, and James Fenimore Cooper's fiction. Helen Keane scrutinizes smoking, and Maurizio Viano turns to the silver screen to trace how the representation of drugs in films has changed over time. Ann Weinstone and Marguerite Waller's essays on addiction and cyberspace cap this impressive anthology.   [brief]
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Title: Imaging Aristotle: verbal and visual representation in fourteenth-century France 
Author: Sherman, Claire Richter
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Art | Art History | Medieval Studies
Publisher's Description: Nicole Oresme's translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and Economics into French from Latin in the 1370s is the subject of Claire Sherman's stunningly illustrated book. Though both the text translations and their images have been studied separately, this is the first time they are published in their entirety and considered together.Intended for an audience of Charles V, his counselors, and high-ranking lay people, these manuscripts are significant for their linguistic and political implications, for moving Aristotle's work beyond clerical and university boundaries, and for reflecting the dynamics of monarchic control of French language and culture. Sherman shows the importance of Oresme's role as translator and book designer. She also explores the gender and class representations in the imagery, relating them not only to the views of Oresme and his audience but also to the contemporary secular culture.   [brief]
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Title: In/different spaces: place and memory in visual culture
Author: Burgin, Victor
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Art | Art Criticism | Social Science
Publisher's Description: Recent discussions about the culture of images have focused on issues of identity - sexual, racial, national - and the boundaries that define subjectivity. In this context Victor Burgin adopts an original critical strategy. He understands images less in traditional terms of the specific institutions that produce them, such as cinema, photography, advertising, and television, and more as hybrid mental constructs composed of fragments derived from the heterogeneous sources that together constitute the "media." Through deft analyses of a photograph by Helmut Newton, Parisian cityscapes, the space of the department store, a film by Ousmane Sembéne, and the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Andrè Breton, and Roland Barthes, Burgin develops an incisive theory of our culture of images and spectacle. In/Different Spaces explores the construction of identities in the psychical space between perception and consciousness, drawing upon psychoanalytic theories to describe the constitution and maintenance of "self" and "us" - in imaginary spatial and temporal relations to "other" and "them" - through the all-important relay of images. For Burgin, the image is never a transparent representation of the world but rather a principal player on the stage of history.   [brief]
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Title: Jewish icons: art and society in modern Europe
Author: Cohen, Richard I
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Art | Jewish Studies | European Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: With the help of over one hundred illustrations spanning three centuries, Richard Cohen investigates the role of visual images in European Jewish history. The interaction of Jews with the visual arts takes place, as Cohen says, in a vast gallery of prints, portraits, books, synagogue architecture, ceremonial art, modern Jewish painting and sculpture, political broadsides, monuments, medals, and memorabilia. Pointing to recent scholarship that overturns the stereotype of Jews as people of the text, unconcerned with the visual, Cohen shows how the coming of the modern period expanded the relationship of Jews to the visual realm far beyond the religious context. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the study and collecting of Jewish art became a legitimate and even passionate pursuit, and signaled the entry of Jews into the art world as painters, collectors, and dealers.   [brief]
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Title: Looking at lovemaking: constructions of sexuality in Roman art, 100 B.C.-A.D. 250
Author: Clarke, John R 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Art | Classics | Art and Architecture | Art History | History | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: What did sex mean to the ancient Romans? In this lavishly illustrated study, John R. Clarke investigates a rich assortment of Roman erotic art to answer this question - and along the way, he reveals a society quite different from our own. Clarke reevaluates our understanding of Roman art and society in a study informed by recent gender and cultural studies, and focusing for the first time on attitudes toward the erotic among both the Roman non-elite and women. This splendid volume is the first study of erotic art and sexuality to set these works - many newly discovered and previously unpublished - in their ancient context and the first to define the differences between modern and ancient concepts of sexuality using clear visual evidence.Roman artists pictured a great range of human sexual activities - far beyond those mentioned in classical literature - including sex between men and women, men and men, women and women, men and boys, threesomes, foursomes, and more. Roman citizens paid artists to decorate expensive objects, such as silver and cameo glass, with scenes of lovemaking. Erotic works were created for and sold to a broad range of consumers, from the elite to the very poor, during a period spanning the first century B.C. through the mid-third century of our era. This erotic art was not hidden away, but was displayed proudly in homes as signs of wealth and luxury. In public spaces, artists often depicted outrageous sexual acrobatics to make people laugh. Looking at Lovemaking depicts a sophisticated, pre-Christian society that placed a high value on sexual pleasure and the art that represented it. Clarke shows how this culture evolved within religious, social, and legal frameworks that were vastly different from our own and contributes an original and controversial chapter to the history of human sexuality.   [brief]
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Title: Lovis Corinth 
Author: Uhr, Horst 1934-
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Art | Art History
Publisher's Description: This splendid and generously illustrated monograph by Horst Uhr is the first comprehensive study of one of the great individualists in the history of art. Lovis Corinth (1858-1925) has long been recognized as a major figure in German painting, along with Emile Nolde and Max Beckmann. Spanning a tremendously fertile period in European painting, his astonishingly productive career touched on major currents of art in his time, from the nineteenth-century academic tradition to Naturalism, Impressionism, and Expressionism. Corinth was accomplished in several media, including painting, drawing, and watercolor. After his death in 1925 virtually every major German city held its own memorial exhibition.Professor Uhr draws on the artist's own diaries and letters, observations by his family, and writings by contemporaries to construct a detailed narrative which places Corinth's deeply autobiographical and personal work in the context of turn-of-the-century art politics in Munich and Berlin. Corinth is seen in relation both to contemporary cultural figures, such as artists, critics, and dealers, and to the theater, the Jugendstil movement, the Berlin Secession, and the Nietzsche cult in Germany. Corinth's themes in combination with powerful use of color and bold application of paint distinguish him as a modern master.   [brief]
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Title: Made in God's image?: Eve and Adam in the Genesis mosaics at San Marco, Venice 
Author: Jolly, Penny Howell
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Art | Art History | Medieval Studies | Women's Studies | Religion
Publisher's Description: The stunning mosaics that illustrate the story of Creation in the church of San Marco in Venice are the focus of Penny Howell Jolly's compelling and provocative book. Scholars of medieval art have long been interested in the Genesis mosaics because they copy a nearly destroyed fifth-century illuminated Greek manuscript known as the Cotton Genesis. But instead of seeing the mosaics as a vehicle for reconstructing a lost cycle of paintings, Jolly presents them as a social document revealing the essential misogyny that existed in thirteenth-century Venice. Jolly analyzes more than twenty scenes, one by one in narrative order, and her perceptive reading goes well beyond what the Genesis Vulgate text says about Eve and Adam. The mosaics establish Eve as the culpable character from the very moment of her Creation, says Jolly, and depict her as dangerous and unrepentant at the end. Incorporating both feminist religious and narratological studies, Jolly poses important questions on the nature of visual language as opposed to verbal language. The very ability of visual forms to recall a rich variety of references is one source of their power, and propaganda must have enough breadth of reference to be read by diverse groups. The San Marco cupola, Jolly maintains, is dealing in powerful propaganda, and her pictorial observations offer an articulate and refreshing new view of this well-known work.   [brief]
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Title: Mallarmé's children: symbolism and the renewal of experience
Author: Smith, Richard Cándida
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | Intellectual History | Art | European Studies | Literature
Publisher's Description: In a narrative gracefully combining intellectual and cultural history, Richard Cándida Smith unfolds the legacy of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), the poet who fathered the symbolist movement in poetry and art. The symbolists found themselves in the midst of the transition to a world in which new media devoured cultural products and delivered them to an ever-growing public. Their goal was to create and oversee a new elite culture, one that elevated poetry by removing it from a direct relationship to experience. Instead, symbolist poetry was dedicated to exploring discourse itself, and its practitioners to understanding how language shapes consciousness.Cándida Smith investigates the intellectual context in which symbolists came to view artistic practice as a form of knowledge. He relates their work to psychology, especially the ideas of William James, and to language and the emergence of semantics. Through the lens of symbolism, he focuses on a variety of subjects: sexual liberation and the erotic, anarchism, utopianism, labor, and women's creative role. Paradoxically, the symbolists' reconfiguration of elite culture fit effectively into the modern commercial media. After Mallarmé was rescued from obscurity, symbolism became a valuable commodity, exported by France to America and elsewhere in the market-driven turn-of-the-century world. Mallarmé's Children traces not only how poets regarded their poetry and artists their art but also how the public learned to think in new ways about cultural work and to behave differently as a result.   [brief]
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