La Pollera Ediciones
La Pollera's catalog includes narrative, essay, and chronicle of contemporary and classic authors.
View Rights PortalLa Pollera's catalog includes narrative, essay, and chronicle of contemporary and classic authors.
View Rights PortalPolperro Heritage Press is an independent British publisher, established in 1995. Recent titles from Polperro Press have included biographies, guides and a growing list of Cornish local history titles.
View Rights PortalA pioneering work in the movement to free art from its traditional bonds to material reality, this book is one of the most important documents in the history of modern art. Written by the famous nonobjective painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), it explains Kandinsky's own theory of painting and crystallizes the ideas that were influencing many other modern artists of the period. Along with his own groundbreaking paintings, this book had a tremendous impact on the development of modern art. Kandinsky's ideas are presented in two parts. The first part, called "About General Aesthetic," issues a call for a spiritual revolution in painting that will let artists express their own inner lives in abstract, non-material terms. Just as musicians do not depend upon the material world for their music, so artists should not have to depend upon the material world for their art. In the second part, "About Painting," Kandinsky discusses the psychology of colors, the language of form and color, and the responsibilities of the artist. An Introduction by the translator, Michael T. H. Sadler, offers additional explanation of Kandinsky's art and theories, while a new Preface by Richard Stratton discusses Kandinsky's career as a whole and the impact of the book. Making the book even more valuable are nine woodcuts by Kandinsky himself that appear at the chapter headings. This English translation of Über das Geistige in der Kunst was a significant contribution to the understanding of nonobjectivism in art. It continues to be a stimulating and necessary reading experience for every artist, art student, and art patron concerned with the direction of 20th-century painting.
"I am Jugoslovenka" argues that queer-feminist artistic and political resistance were paradoxically enabled by socialist Yugoslavia's unique history of patriarchy and women's emancipation. Spanning performance and conceptual art, video works, film and pop music, lesbian activism and press photos of female snipers in the Yugoslav wars, the book analyses feminist resistance in a range of performative actions that manifest the radical embodiment of Yugoslavia's anti-fascist, transnational and feminist legacies. It covers celebrated and lesser-known artists from the 1970s to today, including Marina Abramovic, Sanja Ivekovic, Vlasta Delimar, Tanja Ostojic, Selma Selman and Helena Janecic, along with music legends Lepa Brena and Esma Redzepova. "I am Jugoslovenka" tells a unique story of women's resistance through the intersection of feminism, socialism and nationalism in East European visual culture.
Through the lens of performance and politics, this collection zooms in on the context-specific dimensions, analogies, and micro-histories of the Left to better understand the larger picture. It proposes a search for the Left not from totalising Leftist ideological positions and partisan politics but from ethical dimensions through smaller-scale Left-leaning struggles; not from the political to the aesthetic, but from the potentiality of art to offer new political imagination and critique; not from the individual subordinated to the collective, but from the dialectics of subjectivity and collectivity. This is not an attempt at a sweeping global overview of Leftist cultures either, but a collection that brings together culture-specific and comparative perspectives. This book searches for fragments of and on the Left, past and present, through which to rethink and patch a fragmented world.
In an age when engraving and photography were making artistic images available to a much wider public, artists were able to influence public attitudes more powerfully than ever before. This book examines works of art on military themes in relation to ruling-class ideologies about the army, war and the empire. The first part of the book is devoted to a chronological survey of battle painting, integrated with a study of contemporary military and political history. The chapters link the debate over the status and importance of battle painting to contemporary debates over the role of the army and its function at home and abroad. The second part discusses the intersection of ideologies about the army and military art, but is concerned with an examination of genre representations of soldiers. Another important theme which runs through the book is the relation of English to French military art. During the first eighty years of the period under review France was the cynosure of military artists, the school against which British critics measured their own, and the place from which innovations were imported and modified. In every generation after Waterloo battle painters visited France and often trained there. The book shows that military art, or the 'absence' of it, was one of the ways in which nationalist commentators articulated Britain's moral superiority. The final theme which underlies much of the book is the shifts which took place in the perception of heroes and hero-worship.
Materials carried the meaning of early modern art. Transformed and crafted from the matter of nature, art objects were the physical embodiment of both the inherent qualities of materials and the forces of culture that used, refined and produced them. The study of materials offers a new approach to this important period in the history of art, science and culture, linking the close study of painting, sculpture and architecture to much wider categories of the everyday and the exotic. Drawing on new research and models from anthropology, material culture and the history of art, scholars in The matter of art explore topics as diverse as Inka stonework, gold in panel painting, cork platforms for shoes, and the Christian Eucharist.
The art of poverty is the first book in English to analyse depictions of beggars in sixteenth-century European art. Featuring works from Germany, the Low Countries, Britain, France and Italy, it discusses a diverse body of imagery in many different media, from crude woodcuts to monumental church altarpieces. It develops a striking thesis, arguing that these works largely conformed to two paradoxical, though mutually supportive, representational approaches. The earlier chapters follow the emergence of a trenchantly negative approach in Northern art, in which beggars are shown as vagabonds, whose idleness and thievery threatened the values of sixteenth-century society (especially its growing emphasis on the need to work). In the other predominant visual mode, beggars are exalted as examples of sacred purity. In many Italian religious paintings, beggars are morally exalted with reference to sacred texts, and made formally beautiful with reference to revered artistic models. Though these approaches reflect the impact of religious reform, it is shown that, by the end of the century, they happily co-existed within Protestant and Catholic cultures. The final part of the book is concerned with the issue of artistic style and with the growing tendency of the beggar image to mediate and dissolve the didactic traditions through which it had originally been defined. The art of poverty will be of special interest to scholars and students of Renaissance art history, and its progressive approach and cross-disciplinary theme and perspective will also make it vital reading for those concerned with the development of early modern European culture. ;
This study examines Exeter riddles, Anglo-Saxon biblical poems (Exodus, Andreas, Judith) and Beowulf in order to uncover the poetics of spolia, an imaginative use of recycled fictional artefacts to create sites of metatextual reflection. Old English poetry famously lacks an explicit ars poetica. This book argues that attention to particularly charged moments within texts - especially those concerned with translation, transformation and the layering of various pasts - yields a previously unrecognised means for theorising Anglo-Saxon poetic creativity. Borrowed objects and the art of poetry works at the intersections of materiality and poetics, balancing insights from thing theory and related approaches with close readings of passages from Old English texts.
This collection sets out a range of perspectives on the challenges that the Caribbean is facing today, showing how the arts hold a crucial role in forging a more sustainable Caribbean community. It forcefully attests to the view that visual art in particular has a specific contribution to make and that this in turn means striving to foster a sustainable arts community that can contend with an environment of uneven infrastructure, opportunity and public awareness. Spanning the scholarly, artistic and professional fields of arts and heritage, this book compares two of the Caribbean's key linguistic regions - the Anglophone and the Dutch - to address the themes of global-local relations, capital, patronage, morality, contestation, sustainability and knowledge exchange. The result is a milestone of collaboration from diverse global settings of the Caribbean and its diaspora, including Jamaica, the Bahamas, Barbados, Suriname, Curaçao, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Germany and the United States.
As human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital media is overlaid onto the urban landscape, The machinic city argues that performance art can help us to understand contemporary urban living. Dias analyses interventions from performance artists such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces for deliberation and reflection on urban life, and speculation on its future. While cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes mediated by technical machines, Dias analyses the performative potential of the aesthetic machine, as it assembles with media, capitalist, human and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban space is examined through its different components - design, city and technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city.
Now available in paperback for the first time, this study of the modern London art market establishes the central importance of London for the development of the modern retail market in fine art. Leading experts track the emergence and development of the structures and practices that have come to characterize the commercial art system, including the commercial art gallery, the professional dealer, the exhibition cycle and its accompanying rhetoric of press coverage and publicity, and an international network for the circulation of goods. This new commercial system involved a massive transformation of the experience of viewing art; of the relationships between artists, dealers, collectors, art objects and audiences; and of the very criteria of aesthetic value itself. Its history is thus a vital part of the history of modern art, and this anthology will be of interest to art historians as well as scholars of Victorian Studies, Museum Studies, and Social History.
Representing Renaissance art, c.1500-c.1600 is a study of change and continuity in the iconographies of art and the visual representation of artists during the sixteenth century, especially in Italy and the Netherlands. The issue of how, and how far, artists obtained higher status for their profession during the Renaissance is a key question for the study of the early modern period. This book considers the maintenance of well-established traditions for the visual representation of artists, and also examines the new iconographies that emerged in the sixteenth century. By highlighting art and architecture that artists designed for their personal use, including the decoration of their houses, this study provides insight into the tastes and 'ways of looking' specific to artists. By examining the visual evidence we see the opinions both of artists who expressed their views in literary texts, and additionally those of artists who did not publish their ideas in written form.
Art History: A critical introduction to its methods provides a lively and stimulating introduction to methodological debates within art history. Offering a lucid account of approaches from Hegel to post-colonialism, the book provides a sense of art history's own history as a discipline from its emergence in the late-eighteenth century to contemporary debates. By explaining the underlying philosophical and political assumptions behind each method, along with clear examples of how these are brought to bear on visual and historical analysis, the authors show that an adherence to a certain method is, in effect, a commitment to a set of beliefs and values. The book makes a strong case for the vitality of the discipline and its methodological centrality to new fields such as visual culture. This book will be of enormous value to undergraduate and graduate students, and also makes its own contributions to ongoing scholarly debates about theory and method. ;