Your Search Results

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        September 2016

        Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘fancy subjects’

        Photographic allegories of Victorian identity and empire

        by Jeff Rosen

        The Victorians admired Julia Margaret Cameron for her evocative photographic portraits of eminent men like Tennyson, Carlyle and Darwin. However, Cameron also made numerous photographs that she called 'Fancy subjects', depicting scenes from literature, personifications from classical mythology, and Biblical parables from the Old and New Testament. This book is the first comprehensive study of these works, examining Cameron's use of historical allegories and popular iconography to embed moral, intellectual and political narratives in her photographs. A work of cultural history as much as art history, this book examines cartoons from Punch and line drawings from the Illustrated London News, cabinet photographs and autotype prints, textiles and wall paper, book illustrations and lithographs from period folios, all as a way to contextualise the allegorical subjects that Cameron represented, revealing connections between her 'Fancy subjects' and popular debates about such topics as Biblical interpretation, democratic government and colonial expansion. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Art & design styles: Baroque
        October 2016

        The matter of miracles

        Neapolitan baroque architecture and sanctity

        by Series edited by Amelia Jones, Helen Hills, Marsha Meskimmon

        This book investigates baroque architecture through the lens of San Gennaro's miraculously liquefying blood in Naples. This vantage point allows a bracing and thoroughly original rethink of the power of baroque relics and reliquaries. It shows how a focus on miracles produces original interpretations of architecture, sanctity and place which will engage architectural historians everywhere. The matter of the baroque miracle extends into a rigorous engagement with natural history, telluric philosophy, new materialism, theory and philosophy. The study will transform our understanding of baroque art and architecture, sanctity and Naples. Bristling with new archival materials and historical insights, this study lifts the baroque from its previous marginalisation to engage fiercely with materiality and potentiality and thus unleash baroque art and architecture as productive and transformational.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        August 2010

        Art, museums and touch

        by Fiona Candlin, Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon

        Art, museums and touch examines conceptions and uses of touch within arts museums and art history. Candlin deftly weaves archival material and contemporary museology together with government policy and art practice to question the foundations of modern art history, museums as sites of visual learning, and the association of touch with female identity and sexuality. This remarkable study presents a challenging riposte to museology and art history that privileges visual experience. Candlin demonstrates that touch was, and still is, crucially important to museums and art history. At the same time she contests the recent characterisation of touch as an accessible and inclusive way of engaging with museum collections, and argues against prevalent ideas of touch as an unmediated and uncomplicated mode of learning. An original and wide-ranging enquiry, this book is essential reading for scholars and students of museum studies, art history, visual culture, disability, and for anyone interested in the cultural construction of the senses. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2007

        Fragonard's playful paintings

        Visual games in rococo art

        by Jennifer Milam, Marsha Meskimmon, Shearer West, Tim Barringer

        Fragonard's playful paintings is the first critical analysis of the function of play as an artistic concept and visual experience in Rococo art. The art of Jean-Honoré Fragonard embodies the pervasive culture of play in eighteenth-century France. His interactive paintings and drawings invite beholders to engage in a visual game of interpretation through subject, form and theme. This book not only examines Fragonard's art through close analyses of individual works, but also considers the role of the viewer within a variety of contexts related to social behaviour, philosophy, literature and aesthetics. More than any other artist from the period, Fragonard produced images of play that evidence the ludic impulses of ancien-régime thought and expose the underlying significance of eighteenth-century frivolity. Focused on bringing students and specialists closer to works of art, the book addresses what we see in order to understand better how paintings about play can stimulate playful ideas through dynamic exchanges between artist, image and beholder. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        November 2011

        Timed out

        Art and the transnational Caribbean

        by Leon Wainwright, Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon

        'Timed out' is a pioneering study of modern and contemporary art in the aftermath of empire. It addresses the current 'global turn' in the study of art by way of the transnational Caribbean, offering an in-depth account of the Atlantic world in relation to the mainstream history of art. It looks at why art of the Anglophone Caribbean and its diaspora have been placed not only 'outside' but 'behind' the dominant art canons, and how the politics of space and time can be used to rethink the global geography of art. This is an essential addition to the growing field of 'world art studies', bringing concerns around temporality together with cross-cultural issues and debates. It shows how art and artists of the Caribbean have encountered and challenged the charges of belatedness, anachronism, provincialism and marginalisation that are fundamental to the time-space logic of art history. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        December 2013

        Simulating the marvellous

        Psychology - surrealism - postmodernism

        by David Lomas

        Simulating the marvellous presents important new research on Surrealism and the culture from which it arose. Offering fresh interpretations of Surrealist art and literature based around the theme of simulation, the book shows, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that the notion of simulation arose in a number of discrete contexts, in relation to hysteria and war neuroses; more broadly it shadows the emergence of our concept of 'the unconscious'. Acknowledging simulation's relevance to Surrealism, this book argues, radically alters our understanding of the Surrealists' project and the terms in which one gauges its success or failure. It leads one to question the naïve assumption that automatic writing or drawing represent an authentic outpouring of the unconscious and gives renewed significance to a figure such as Salvador Dalí who embraced simulation and made it the basis of his art and aesthetic. Resonances are also explored with postmodern theory and art practice, around the themes of simulation and the simulacrum.It also points to one of the ways in which Surrealism chimes with a core preoccupation of contemporary art and theory. Written accessibly, and ranging across many of the core ideas of Surrealism, David Lomas balances coverage of both Surrealist art and literature, looking at such figures as Dalì, Eluard, Masson, Desnos, Brouillet, Picasso, Tanning and Janet, as well as Glenn Brown, Douglas Gordon and Sarah Lucas. The book will interest not only art historians and theorists, but also students and those with a general interest in Surrealism. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        History of Art / Art & Design Styles
        July 2015

        Porous boundaries

        Art and essays

        by Edited by David Peters Corbett, Cyril Reade

        This innovative and exciting volume celebrates the career of Janet Wolff: a highly influential voice in the literature of sociology, cultural studies, visual studies and art history, as well as dance and modernism for several decades. Her work has significantly contributed to the way we view issues as diverse as modernism, the flâneur, British and American art in the early twentieth century, and the gendered literature of modernity. The volume contains contributions from a number of Janet Wolff's collaborators and others who are associated with the fields in which she has worked, including Zygmunt Bauman, Walid Raad and Griselda Pollock. The book includes original artworks, memoir and essays inspired by her example and which deal with questions she has discussed. The book will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in any of these disciplines, as well as those interested by the form of a transatlantic academic career.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        October 2006

        William Holman Hunt

        Painter, painting, paint

        by Carol Jacobi

        This is a fundamental reassessment of the work of William Holman Hunt, and the first critical text to reproduce his pictures in colour and set him on an international stage. Introducing a new critique of the autobiography and drawing on hundreds of private letters, drawings and paintings, the author depicts a radical man of his times, deeply troubled by the pivotal concerns of the materialist age - the isolation of the individual, the collapse of faith and the status of art - and seeking solutions through a systematic testing of the extremes of painting. A close examination of the pictures, including neglected later works, combined with recent scientific research relate the physical act of painting, and the paint, back to the body of the artist. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, this book answers the longstanding lack of any monograph on Hunt and will make compelling reading for undergraduate and graduate students of History of Art, Victorian Studies, English Literature and Religious Studies, as well as curators, conservators and the artist's many admirers. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        August 2010

        Women artists between the Wars

        'A fair field and no favour'

        by Katy Deepwell

        Starting with a critique of existing methodologies and histories of the period, this book examines the production of women artists, looking at different areas and aspects of their activities, and particularly contrasting the lives of different generations of women artists. Many of these women's names or their works are not familiar in art histories of the twentieth century. The book analyses how women artists' presence which was consistently one third of the artists in many major exhibiting groups became less than 10% of the museum purchases and in art historical texts for this period. Comparisons are made between the opportunities presented to women artists and those of their male peers in the light of considerable change and restructuring within the art world in Britain during this period, principally due to the growing influence of modernism in the art market. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        April 2011

        Visual culture in Spain and Mexico

        by Anny Brooksbank-Jones, Chantal Hamil

        Visual culture in Spain and Mexico analyses films, paintings and museum exhibitions to show how aspects of Hispanic visual culture 'manage' or 'mediate' risk, as articulated stylistically and ideologically in the visual artefact. The book is divided into six chapters plus an introduction. The first three chapters deal with Mexico or more accurately aspects of life in Mexico City; the other three with Spain or more precisely with the Basque Country and aspects of cultural appropriation which include but also exceed Basque cultural politics. The book is at one and the same time a fine set of specific, detailed essays on visual cultural artefacts and their histories/modes of consumption and reception, and a broader meditation on the role of visual culture in an age increasingly characterised by doom-laden analyses of global panics, pandemics and jihads. The study also reflects the continuing hybridization of Hispanic Studies into the eclecticism of Cultural and Visual Studies, and the re-siting of well known cultural objects and institutions - such as the Guggenheim and Picasso's Guernica - into new frames of reference, generating new approaches, ideas and modes of understanding. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        April 2007

        Visual culture in Spain and Mexico

        by Anny Brooksbank-Jones, Chantal Hamil

        Visual culture in Spain and Mexico analyses films, paintings and museum exhibitions to show how aspects of hispanic visual culture 'manage' or 'mediate' risk, as articulated stylistically and ideologically in the visual artefact. The book is divided into six chapters plus an Introduction. The first three chapters deal with Mexico or more accurately aspects of life in Mexico City; the other three with Spain or more precisely with the Basque Country and aspects of cultural appropriation which include but also exceed Basque cultural politics. The book is at one and the same time a fine set of specific, detailed essays on visual cultural artefacts and their histories/modes of consumption and reception, and a broader meditation on the role of visual culture in an age increasingly characterised by doom-laden analyses of global panics, pandemics and jihads. The study also reflects the continuing hybridization of Hispanic Studies into the eclecticism of Cultural and Visual Studies, and the re-siting of well known cultural objects and institutions - such as the Guggenheim and Picasso's Guernica - into new frames of reference, generating new approaches, ideas and modes of understanding. ;

      • Trusted Partner
        Art & design styles: from c 1960
        May 2014

        Performative monuments

        The rematerialisation of public art

        by Mechtild Widrich

        This book answers one of the most puzzling questions in contemporary art: how did performance artists of the '60s and '70s, famous for their opposition both to lasting art and the political establishment, become the foremost monument builders of the '80s, '90s and today? Not by selling out, nor by making self-undermining monuments. This book argues that the centrality of performance to monuments and indeed public art in general rests not on its ephemerality or anti-authoritarian rhetoric, but on its power to build interpersonal bonds both personal and social. Specifically, the survival of body art in photographs that cross time and space to meet new audiences makes it literally into a monument. The argument of the book spans art in Austria, the former Yugoslavia, and Germany: Valie Export, Peter Weibel and the Viennese Actionists (working in Austria and abroad), Marina Abramovic, Sanja Ivecovic and Braco Dimitrijevic (working in Yugoslavia and abroad), and Joseph Beuys and Jochen Gerz (working in Germany and abroad). These artists began by critiquing monumentality in authoritarian public space, and expanded the models developed on the streets of Vienna, Munich, Rome, Belgrade and Zagreb to participatory monuments that delegate political authority to the audience. Readers interested in contemporary art, politics, photography and performance will find in this book new facts and arguments for their interconnection.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2017

        Productive failure

        Writing queer transnational South Asian art histories

        by Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon, Alpesh Kantilal Patel

        This title sets out to write new transnational South Asian art histories - to make visible histories of artworks that remain marginalised within the discipline of art history. However, this is done through a deliberate 'productive failure' - specifically, by not upholding the strictly genealogical approach that is regularly assumed for South Asian art histories. For instance, one chapter explores the abstract work of Cy Twombly and Natvar Bhavsar. The author also examines 'whiteness', the invisible ground upon which racialized art histories often pivot, as a fraught yet productive site for writing art history. This book also provides original commentary on how queer theory can deconstruct and provide new approaches for writing art history. Overall, this title provides methods for generating art history that acknowledge the complex web of factors within which art history is produced and the different forms of knowledge-production we might count as art history.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2017

        Productive failure

        Writing queer transnational South Asian art histories

        by Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon, Alpesh Kantilal Patel

        This title sets out to write new transnational South Asian art histories - to make visible histories of artworks that remain marginalised within the discipline of art history. However, this is done through a deliberate 'productive failure' - specifically, by not upholding the strictly genealogical approach that is regularly assumed for South Asian art histories. For instance, one chapter explores the abstract work of Cy Twombly and Natvar Bhavsar. The author also examines 'whiteness', the invisible ground upon which racialized art histories often pivot, as a fraught yet productive site for writing art history. This book also provides original commentary on how queer theory can deconstruct and provide new approaches for writing art history. Overall, this title provides methods for generating art history that acknowledge the complex web of factors within which art history is produced and the different forms of knowledge-production we might count as art history.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2017

        The political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-garde

        The journey of the ‘painterly real', 1987–2004

        by Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon, Angela Harutyunyan

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2017

        The political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-garde

        The journey of the ‘painterly real', 1987–2004

        by Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon, Angela Harutyunyan

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2017

        The synthetic proposition

        Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art

        by Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon, Nizan Shaked

        The synthetic proposition examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas, as articulated by Joseph Kosuth, and traces key strategies in contemporary art to the reciprocal influences of conceptualism and identity politics: movements that have so far been historicised as mutually exclusive. The book demonstrates that while identity-based strategies were particular, their impact spread far beyond the individuals or communities that originated them. It offers a study of Adrian Piper, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Charles Gaines. By turning to social issues, these artists analysed the conventions of language, photography, moving image, installation and display.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2017

        The synthetic proposition

        Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art

        by Amelia Jones, Marsha Meskimmon, Nizan Shaked

        The synthetic proposition examines the impact of Civil Rights, Black Power, the student, feminist and sexual-liberty movements on conceptualism and its legacies in the United States between the late 1960s and the 1990s. It focuses on the turn to political reference in practices originally concerned with abstract ideas, as articulated by Joseph Kosuth, and traces key strategies in contemporary art to the reciprocal influences of conceptualism and identity politics: movements that have so far been historicised as mutually exclusive. The book demonstrates that while identity-based strategies were particular, their impact spread far beyond the individuals or communities that originated them. It offers a study of Adrian Piper, David Hammons, Renée Green, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Silvia Kolbowski, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Lorna Simpson, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Charles Gaines. By turning to social issues, these artists analysed the conventions of language, photography, moving image, installation and display.

      Subscribe to our

      newsletter