Title: Michelangelo's Last Judgment: the Renaissance response
Author: Barnes, Bernadine Ann
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Art
Publisher's Description: In her analysis of Michelangelo's Last Judgment , Bernadine Barnes provides an original and stimulating view of this renowned fresco and of the audience for which it was created. Because Michelangelo is so often regarded as a nearly superhuman artistic genius, we tend to forget that his works were not created to illustrate his life. The Last Judgment did have great personal meaning for him, but his representation of this religious event was not purely self-directed, says Barnes. She argues that Michelangelo had a particular type of viewer in mind as he designed his work. The Last Judgment dealt with an especially evocative subject, and Michelangelo engaged viewers by creating highly imaginative scenes tempering fear with hope and by referring to contemporary events. The painting's original, elite audience - the papal court and a handful of distinguished lay persons - was sophisticated about art and poetry, almost exclusively male, and orthodox in its religious beliefs. That audience later broadened and included artists allowed into the Chapel to copy Michelangelo's work. These artists helped to create another, less sophisticated audience, one that knew the fresco only through reproductions and written descriptions. The response of this latter audience eventually prompted the church to censor the painting. Beautifully illustrated with photographs of the recently restored Sistine Chapel, Barnes's study greatly enhances our understanding of changing Renaissance attitudes toward art. Her book also provides valuable insights into one of Michelangelo's greatest works.   [brief]
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Title: The art of Richard Diebenkorn
Author: Livingston, Jane
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Art
Publisher's Description: Recognized as a major figure in postwar American painting, Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) was an artist strongly identified with California but whose work is beloved throughout the United States and the rest of the world. This catalog is the most comprehensive volume on the artist now available. Jane Livingston's extensively researched biographical essay covers Diebenkorn's entire career and concentrates on the artist's inner life and purposes as revealed in his paintings. Ruth Fine deals primarily with the figurative aspect of Diebenkorn's work (1955-67), and John Elderfield concentrates on the Ocean Park period (1967-93). All three authors provide valuable insights based on their personal relationships with the artist and his widow, Phyllis. On both page and canvas, the reader can sense Diebenkorn's complexity and highly self-conscious working methods, as well as his formidable integrity. The Art of Richard Diebenkorn will give readers with an interest in all phases of modernism new thoughts about the relationship between abstraction and representation. Stunningly illustrated, with 192 full-color reproductions, this book is an exhilarating testament to a distinctive American artist.   [brief]
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Title: Unpacking Duchamp: art in transit 
Author: Judovitz, Dalia
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Art | Literature
Publisher's Description: Perhaps no twentieth-century artist utilized puns and linguistic ambiguity with greater effect - and greater controversy - than Marcel Duchamp. Through a careful "unpacking" of his major works, Dalia Judovitz finds that Duchamp may well have the last laugh. She examines how he interpreted notions of mechanical reproduction in order to redefine the meaning and value of the art object, the artist, and artistic production.Judovitz begins with Duchamp's supposed abandonment of painting and his subsequent return to material that mimics art without being readily classifiable as such. Her book questions his paradoxical renunciation of pictorial and artistic conventions while continuing to evoke and speculatively draw upon them. She offers insightful analyses of his major works including The Large Glass , Fountain and Given 1) the waterfall, 2) the illuminating gas. Duchamp, a poser and solver of problems, occupied himself with issues of genre, gender, and representation. His puns, double entendres, and word games become poetic machines, all part of his intellectual quest for the very limits of nature, culture, and perception. Judovitz demonstrates how Duchamp's redefinition of artistic modes of production through reproduction opens up modernism to more speculative explorations, while clearing the ground for the aesthetic of appropriation central to postmodernism.   [brief]
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Title: A medieval mirror, Speculum humanae salvationis, 1324-1500 
Author: Wilson, Adrian
Published: University of California Press,  1985
Subjects: Art | Architecture
Publisher's Description: The Speculum Humanae Salvationis or "Mirror of Human Salvation," is the only medieval work that exists in illuminated manuscripts, in blockbook editions of the mid-fifteenth century, and in sixteen later incunabula. The authors have provided lavishly illustrated accounts of the manuscripts and inclu . . . [more]
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Title: Visual piety: a history and theory of popular religious images
Author: Morgan, David 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Religion | Art
Publisher's Description: This fascinating study of devotional images traces their historical links to important strains of American culture. David Morgan demonstrates how popular visual images - from Warner Sallman's "Head of Christ" to velvet renditions of DaVinci's "Last Supper" to illustrations on prayer cards - have assumed central roles in contemporary American lives and communities.Morgan's history of popular religious images ranges from the late Middle Ages to the present day and analyzes what he calls "visual piety," or the belief that images convey. Rather than isolating popular icons from their social contexts or regarding them as merely illustrative of theological ideas, Morgan situates both Protestant and Catholic art within the domain of devotional practice, ritual, personal narrative, and the sacred space of the home. In addition, he examines how popular icons have been rooted in social concerns ranging from control of human passions to notions of gender, creedal orthodoxy, and friendship. Also discussed is the coupling of images with texts in the attempt to control meanings and to establish markers for one's community and belief. Drawing from the fields of music, sociology, theology, philosophy, psychology, and aesthetics, Visual Piety is the first book to bring to specialist and lay reader alike an understanding of religious imagery's place in the social formation and maintenance of everyday American life.   [brief]
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Title: Renaissance Paris: architecture and growth, 1475-1600 
Author: Thomson, David 1912-
Published: University of California Press,  1985
Subjects: Art | Architecture
Publisher's Description: In the modern literature on Renaissance art and architecture, Paris has often been considered the Cinderella of the European capitals. The prestigious buildings that were erected soon after François I decided in 1528 to make Paris his residence have long since been lost. Thomson, however, restores t . . . [more]
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Title: Contemplating the ancients: aesthetic and social issues in early Chinese portraiture 
Author: Spiro, Audrey
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Art | Architecture | China
Publisher's Description: Drawing on a wide variety of contemporaneous sources from Chinese history, literature, religious writings, and art and literary criticism, Spiro provides the modern reader with an aesthetic and social context for understanding early Chinese portraiture. Contemplating the Ancients introduces portraits that were never intended to be physical likenesses of their subjects and illuminates the meaning they held for the viewers for whom they were made.Spiro focusses on fourth- and fifth-century sets of almost identi- cal portraits of individuals known collectively in Chinese history as the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove. Unlike the earlier Han dynasty portraits whose messages were universal, these exemplary portraits addressed a specific elitist audience. The subjects of these portraits served as idealized representations for a largely nouvel-arrivé aristocracy.Spiro examines the complex and sometimes ironic changes that occur when historical individuals are transformed by tradition into classical exemplars. She shows how the visual arts translate ideals of personal character into stylistic cues and how these cues, in turn, affect the values and behavior of human beings.   [brief]
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Title: Out of Eden: essays on modern art 
Author: Di Piero, W. S
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Art | Art Criticism
Publisher's Description: Out of Eden presents the rigorous investigations and musings of a poet-essayist on the ways in which modern artists have confronted and transfigured the realist tradition of representation. Di Piero pursues his theme with an autobiographical force and immediacy. He fixes his attention on painters and photographers as disparate as Cezanne, Boccioni, Pollock, Warhol, Edward Weston, and Robert Frank. There is indeed a satisfying sweep to this collection: Matisse, Giacometti, Morandi, Bacon, the Tuscan Macchiaioli of the late nineteenth century, the Futurists of the early modern period, and the American pop painters.Di Piero's analysis of modern images also probes the relation between new kinds of image making and transcendence. The author argues that Matisse and Giacometti, for example, continued to exercise the religious imagination even in a desacralized age. And because Di Piero believes that the visual arts and poetry live intimate, coordinate lives, his essays speak of the relation of poetry to forms in art.   [brief]
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Title: To the rescue of art: twenty-six essays
Author: Arnheim, Rudolf
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Art | Art History
Publisher's Description: Never before published essays by the widely admired psychologist of art. Arnheim spiritedly asserts art's fundamental achievements.Rudolf Arnheim has spent a lifetime analyzing the basic psychological principles that make works of visual art meaningful, stirring, indispensable, and lasting. But recent fashionable attitudes and theories about art, he argues, are undermining the foundation of artistic achievement itself.The essays collected in this volume are written in his familiar, careful, and solidly supported manner, but under present circumstances they amount to a call to arms. Included is a series of miniature monographs on a variety of great works of art. In other essays, Arnheim uncovers enlightening perspectives in the art of the blind, in architectural space, in caricature, and in the work of psychotics and autistic children. He also presents new scientific aspects on the psychology of art and widens our range of vision by connecting art with language, literature, and religion.   [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: Brushes with power: modern politics and the Chinese art of calligraphy
Author: Kraus, Richard Curt
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Politics | China | Art
Publisher's Description: Chinese calligraphy has traditionally been an emblem of the ruling class and its authority. After a century of mass revolution, what is the fate of this elite art? Richard Kraus explores the relationship beween politics and the art of writing in China today to explicate the complex relationship between tradition and modernity in Chinese culture. His study draws upon a wide range of sources, from political documents, memoirs, and interviews with Chinese intellectuals to art exhibitions and television melodramas.Mao Zedong and other Communist leaders gave calligraphy a revolutionary role, believing that their beloved art reflected the luster of authoritative words and deeds. Calligraphy was joined with new propagandistic mass media to become less a private art and more a public performance. It provided politically engaged citizens with subtle cues to changing power relationships in the People's Republic.Claiming neither that the Communists obliterated traditional culture nor that revolution failed to relieve the burden of China's past, this study subtly examines the changing uses of tradition in a modernizing society.   [brief]
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Title: Parables of sun light: observations on psychology, the arts, and the rest
Author: Arnheim, Rudolf
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Art | Art Theory
Publisher's Description: For many years Rudolf Arnheim, known as the leading psychologist of art, has been keeping notebooks in which to jot down observations, ideas, questions, and even (after a stay in Japan for a year) poems in the haiku pattern. Some of these notes found their way into his books - known and prized the world over - such as Art and Visual Perception , Visual Thinking , and The Power of the Center (see list below). Now he has selected, from the remaining riches of his notebooks, the items in this volume. The book will be a joy to ramble through for all lovers of Arnheim's work, and indeed for anyone who shares Arnheim's contagious interest in the order that lies behind art, nature, and human life. It is a seedbed of ideas and observations in his special fields of psychology and the arts. "I have avoided mere images and I have avoided mere thoughts," says Arnheim in the Introduction, "but whenever an episode observed or a striking sentence read yielded a piece of insight I had not met before, I wrote it down and preserved it." There are also glimpses of his personal life - his wife, his cats, his students, his neighbors and colleagues. He is always concrete, in the manner that has become his trademark, often witty, and sometimes a bit wicked.In the blend of life and thought caught in these jottings, psychology and the arts are of course prominent. But philosophy, religion, and the natural sciences add to the medley of topics - always addressed in a way to sharpen the senses of the reader who, sharing Arnheim's cue from Dylan Thomas, may accompany him through "the parables of sun light and the legends of the green chapels and the twice told fields of childhood."All of Rudolf Arnheim's books have been published by the University of California Press.   [brief]
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Title: Masking the blow: the scene of representation in late prehistoric Egyptian art 
Author: Davis, Whitney
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Art | Art History
Publisher's Description: The meaning of late prehistoric Egyptian images has until now been tantalizingly mysterious, as little understood as the circumstances of their production. As a result, analyses of these images have been general and often incorrectly illustrated. Whitney Davis now provides a welcome remedy in this detailed reinterpretation of the images carved on ivory knife handles and schist cosmetic palettes. These images are among the most important documents of early Egyptian history and include the Narmer Palette, often considered the very inception of ancient Egyptian image making.Davis deciphers the intriguing pictorial narratives and complex metaphors of images that are concerned with "masking the blow" of the ruler. "Masking the blow" refers to the ways that the images - from hunted animals to human antagonists - represent, elide, or suppress the depiction of a ruler's violent act of conquering an enemy.Examining late prehistoric Egyptian images in light of contemporary visual theory and illustrating his analyses with excellent reproductions, Davis goes beyond the usual concern for stylistic development and iconographic meanings that characterize prior studies. His work will greatly interest art historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and students of the visual arts.   [brief]
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Title: Bronzino's Chapel of Eleonora in the Palazzo Vecchio
Author: Cox-Rearick, Janet
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Art | Art History
Publisher's Description: Do the sacred decorations of a Florentine Renaissance chapel - saints, symbols, and scriptural stories - hold personal and political meanings? Cox-Rearick's ground-breaking book explores the message hidden in the frescoes and altar panels of the Chapel of Eleonora di Toledo, painted in the early 1540s by Agnolo Bronzino for the Spanish-born wife of Duke Cosimo I de Medici. Bronzino, then the chief painter to the Medici court, was largely responsible for the invention in Florence of the highly self-conscious, elegant Maniera style. Cox-Rearick interweaves her account of the Medici biography with an examination of Bronzino's commission in the broader context of his oeuvre.Cox-Rearick reveals the Chapel of Eleonora as an intimately devised decorative program that transmits messages about its patrons and Medici rule. Detailed color photographs of the newly restored art splendidly document this early tour de force of a major artist whose works are still relatively unexamined.   [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: The two-headed deer: illustrations of the Rāmāyaṇa in Orissa 
Author: Williams, Joanna Gottfried 1939-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Art | Art History | South Asia
Publisher's Description: India's epic poem, the Ramayana, is a dramatic, ever-evolving tale of a prince and his bride, their adventures and dilemmas, and demons. Joanna Williams studies the art of the Ramayana in Orissa, a region known for its elegantly carved temples. There she researched both literary and visual art works, interviewed artists, and observed them at work.With depth and originality, Williams considers how Indian art tells a story in distinctive ways. Her narratological study takes into account many familiar genres of visual art: illustrated manuscripts, drawings on palm leaf paper, wall paintings, shadow plays, temple sculpture, and painted cloth pata . Included are discussions of pan-Indian versions of the epic, which include film, video, and the comic strip; and those local to Orissa, including rural theater and festivals.Noting that we often treat images designed to be seen in sequence as separate pictures, Williams argues that considering several Ramayana images in sequence reveals their qualities of variety, surprise, and emotional development, promoting an understanding of how the story is told. She discusses the artists' narrative strategies and offers interpretations of how and why artists made their choices.Williams persuasively argues against critics who believe that Indian art, indeed any traditional art, is conventional and lacks individual technique or vision. Her analysis across a variety of genres offers a new model for art historians; at the same time anthropologists, folklorists, and scholars of literature and narratology will find her work of great value.   [brief]
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Title: Ceremonial costumes of the Pueblo Indians: their evolution, fabrication, and significance in the prayer drama 
Author: Roediger, Virginia More
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Dance | Art
Publisher's Description: When the University of California Press first published Roediger's Ceremonial Costumes of the Pueblo Indians in 1941, it was immediately hailed as both a beautiful book and the most comprehensive description ever of the making and meaning of the Pueblo costumes of New Mexico and Arizona. It has been widely acknowledged as a classic and eagerly sought after in antiquarian bookstores.Exactly fifty years after its original publication, here is the book back in print, with a new introduction by the renowned anthropologist Fred Eggan. Roediger's vivid paintings are reproduced once more in full color, capturing the beauty and drama of the Pueblo ceremonies - the turquoise dance moccasins, the tableted headdress of the Zuni corn maidens, the bright-blanketed Kachina maiden, and the buffalo, brilliant eagle, and horned deer costumes.It was Roediger who first viewed the ceremony and ritual of the Pueblo peoples as dramatic performance, a view that has gained great currency since. As a student of drama at Yale University she was fascinated by the intensely theatrical dimension to Pueblo worship, and it is this original perspective that informs and illuminates her study.After a brief survey of the history, location, and life of the Pueblo peoples, Roediger embarks on a thorough analysis of the materials used in the Pueblo costumes. She explains both their symbolic significance and their manufacture - from the weaving of cloth and the tanning of leather to the preparation of birds' feathers, evergreens, paints, and dyes. She then provides a meticulous description of the costumed dancer - body paint, garments, ornaments, accessories, and dance properties such as rattles, headdresses, and masks.In her final section, Roediger explores the relation of the costumes to the prayer dramas, particularly to the reverential, solemn, ecstatic public dance with which these climax. Vivid details emerge here about such rituals as the animal dances from the Rio Grande region and the Rain Dance of the Zuni.Fifty years after its original publication, Virginia Roediger's book remains the most comprehensive study of the ceremonial costumes of the Pueblo peoples. A book of great visual appeal and unrivaled detail, it will be welcomed back by scholars and general readers alike.   [brief]
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Title: The private worlds of Marcel Duchamp: desire, liberation, and the self in modern culture 
Author: Seigel, Jerrold
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Art | History | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: Marcel Duchamp is a founding figure of twentieth-century art and culture, the common source to which many contemporary movements trace their roots. His career has often been celebrated for its contradictions and discontinuities, its disparate parts unified only by their assault on the traditions of art. Jerrold Seigel offers a wholly different view, revealing a web of interrelated themes that unify Duchamp's work and tie it to his life.At the book's center is a reinterpretation of the famous "readymades," of which the urinal "Fountain" and the defaced Mona Lisa were the most shocking. By recovering their history, Seigel shows that their playful and rebellious surface veiled the meanings that linked them to Duchamp's pictures (especially the famous "Large Glass," here illuminated by a comprehensive new reading) and to his experiments with language. The result gives the artist's career the unity of a colorful and intricate puzzle.Behind that puzzle were the great modernist themes of isolation, perpetuated desire, and the imagined dissolution of the self. These themes entered Duchamp's mind both from his social and cultural environment and from the shaping experience of his family; around them were woven the patterns of working and loving that Seigel uncovers in his life. Duchamp emerges not just as a coherent, understandable personality, but as an exemplary one, his very eccentricities reflecting essential dimensions of modern experience.A mythic presence in modern culture, a hero whose story we tell for the sake of its valuable lessons, Duchamp opened the floodgates to a sea of questions about the nature and meaning of art. Seigel demands that we think again about these questions, and about the answers that Duchamp's heirs and followers have tried to give to them.   [brief]
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Title: Recording conceptual art: early interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, Weiner, by Patricia Norvell
Author: Barry, Robert 1936-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Art | Art History | Art Theory
Publisher's Description: Recording Conceptual Art features a highly provocative series of previously unpublished interviews conducted in early 1969 with some of the most dynamic, daring, and innovative artists of the tumultuous 1960s. The nine individuals - eight artists and one art dealer - are now known as major contributors to Conceptual art. These fascinating dialogues, conducted by Patricia Norvell, provide tantalizing moments of spontaneous philosophizing and brilliant insights, as well as moments of unabashed self-importance, with highly imaginative and colorful individuals.   [brief]
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Title: Three artists (three women): modernism and the art of Hesse, Krasner, and O'Keeffe
Author: Wagner, Anne Middleton 1949-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Art | Art History | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: This original and sharply obser-vant book gives new significance to three important figures in the history of twentieth-century art: Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Anne Wagner looks at their imagery and careers, relating their work to three decisive moments in the history of American modernism: the avant-garde of the 1920s, the New York School of the 1940s and 1950s, and the modernist redefinition undertaken in the 1960s. Their artistic contributions were invaluable, Wagner demonstrates, as well as hard-won. She also shows that the fact that these artists were women - the main element linking the three - is as much the index of difference among their art and experience as it is a passkey to what they share.   [brief]
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