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There are many factors at work in the iconography of human remains. Some of those frequently discussed are aesthetic criteria, iconographic traditions and specific contingencies, whether political (for example in war paintings), symbolic (essential for transi images) or cultural. There is, however, one factor that is rarely mentioned, despite its centrality: the regime of value associated with corpses. Christ’s body is not painted in the same way as that of a departed relative or that used in a human dissection. Artists choose a suitable iconography depending on how the remains are perceived. This criterion became absolutely crucial in contexts such as nineteenth-century France, when attitudes to corpses underwent major changes.
Allison Myers discusses the strange marriage of Greenbergian formalism with Maoist militancy that characterised the work of the French artists’ collective known as Supports/Surfaces. By looking at its journal, Peinture: Cahiers Théoriques, she demonstrates how the group used Mao’s theory of contradictions to rejuvenate both the avant-garde and French painting via an expanded concept of materialism.
This book presents new research on the histories and legacies of the German Expressionist group, Der Blaue Reiter, the founding force behind modernist abstraction. For the first time Der Blaue Reiter is subjected to a variety of novel inter-disciplinary perspectives, ranging from a philosophical enquiry into its language and visual perception, to analyses of its gender dynamics, its reception at different historical junctures throughout the twentieth century, and its legacies for post-colonial aesthetic practices. The volume offers a new perspective on familiar aspects of Expressionism and abstraction, taking seriously the inheritance of modernism for the twenty-first century in ways that will help to recalibrate the field of Expressionist studies for future scholarship. Der Blaue Reiter still matters, the contributors argue, because the legacies of abstraction are still being debated by artists, writers, philosophers and cultural theorists today.
Richly illustrated with over 110 colour and black and white images, the book productively contests the supposedly exclusive feminine aspect of the style moderne (art deco). It explores how alternative, parallel and overlapping experiences and expressions of decorative modernism, nationalism, gender and sexuality in the heady years surrounding World War I converge in the protean figure of the deco dandy. As such, the book significantly departs from and corrects the assumptions and biases that have dominated scholarship on and popular perceptions of art deco. The book outlines how designed products and representations of and for the dandy both existed within and outwith normative expectations of gender and sexuality complicating men’s relationship to consumer culture more broadly and the moderne more specifically. Through a sustained focus on the figure of the dandy, the book offers a broader view of art deco by claiming a greater place for the male body and masculinity in this history than has been given to date. The mass appeal of the dandy in the 1920s was a way to redeploy an iconic, popular and well-known typology as a means to stimulate national industries, to engender a desire for all things made in France. Important, essential and productive moments in the history of the cultural life of Paris presented in the book are instructive of the changing role performed by consumerism, masculinity, design history and national identity.
Delving into a hitherto unexplored aspect of Irish art history, Painting Dublin, 1886–1949 examines the depiction of Dublin by artists from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Artists’ representations of the city have long been markers of civic pride and identity, yet in Ireland, such artworks have been overlooked in favour of the rural and pastoral, falling outside of the dominant disciplinary narratives of nationalism or modernism. Framed by the shift from city of empire to capital of an independent republic, this book chiefly examines artworks by of Walter Frederick Osborne (1857–1903), Rose Mary Barton (1856–1929), Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957), Harry Aaron Kernoff (1900–74), Estella Frances Solomons (1882–1968), and Flora Hippisley Mitchell (1890–1973), encompassing a variety of urban views and artistic themes. While Dublin is renowned for its representation in literature, this book will demonstrate how the city was also the subject of a range of visual depictions, including those in painting and print. Focusing on the images created by these artists as they navigated the city’s streets, this book offers a vivid visualisation of Dublin and its inhabitants, challenging a reengagement with Ireland’s art history through the prism of the city and urban life.
understand who or what Lise is like, we need to familiarise ourselves with these women from nineteenth-century French painting, and by casting Lise in the role both of the central figure of a Renoir canvas and nineteenth-century Parisienne music-hall star Jane Avril as imagined by Toulouse-Lautrec, the sequence reveals her iconographical prefigurations. This leaves one possible and overarching defini arisienne, which might be expressed as follows: difficult to tion of la P define or grasp, yet possessing a recognisable chain of associations, or iconography. It is now
would argue, several of the papiers épinglés . 9 Their pins’ ‘intensive’ investigation of the surface further complicates its ambivalent spatiality by reminding us of the unseen substrate to which the visible elements adhere. In passing beneath the surface of the paper, then re-emerging into view, Picasso’s straight pins suggest that even the flattest of pictorial surfaces contains depths that had gone entirely unplumbed in earlier works of art. Much of the interest in and rhetoric surrounding flatness in early twentieth-century French painting was bound up with
Great Depression; second, by framing his rural films as an alternative form of poetic realism that draws on a history of representations encompassing French painting, literature, and silent cinema; third, by mapping his complex personal and professional relations with influential contemporaries such as André Antoine, Jean Renoir, and René Clair; finally, by highlighting Pagnol’s status in the 1930s as a successful
been considered only through its interruption, for instance in the alienating devices of Brechtian theatre or postmodernist meta-fiction – and towards scholarship on the visual arts. In a series of studies beginning with his now-classic 1980 book Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot , the art critic and historian Michael Fried uses the term absorption to describe an ideal relation between an artwork and its beholder. Fried's initial thesis, briefly summarized, is that in French painting of the 1750s and 1760s there emerged
: The Near East in French Painting, 1800 – 1880 (Rochester: University of Rochester, Memorial Art Gallery, 1982). 4 Mary Roberts, “Gérôme in Istanbul,” in Reconsidering Gérôme , ed. Scott Allan and Mary Morton (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010), 119–34. Mary Roberts, “Gérôme in Istanbul,” in Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015) , 75–110. On more recent collecting practices see: Roger