Modern Art In Cold War Beirut

Modern Art in Cold War Beirut: Drawing Alliances examines the entangled histories of modern art and international politics during the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Positing the Cold War as a globalized conflict, fraught with different political ideologies and intercultural exchanges, this study asks how these historical circumstances shaped local debates in Beirut over artistic pedagogy, the social role of the artist, the aesthetics of form, and, ultimately, the development of a national art. Drawing on a range of archival material and taking an interdisciplinary approach, Sarah Rogers argues that the genealogies of modern art can never be understood as isolated, national histories, but rather that they participate in an ever contingent global modernism. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art history, Cold War studies, and Middle East studies.

This book examines the development of national emblems, photographic portraiture, oil painting, world expositions, modern spaces for art exhibitions, university programs of visual arts, and other agencies of modern art in Korea. With few books on modern art in Korea available in English, this book is an authoritative volume on the topic and provides a comparative perspective on Asian modernism including Japan, China, and India. In turn, these essays also shed a light on Asian reception of and response to the Orientalism and exoticism popular in Europe and North America in the early twentieth century. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, the history of Asia, Asian studies, colonialism, nationalism, and cultural identity.

This edited collection explores the intersection of historical studies and the artistic representation of the past in the long nineteenth century. The case studies provide not just an account of the pursuit of history in art within Western Europe but also examples from beyond that sphere. These cover canonical and conventional examples of history painting as well as more inclusive, ‘popular’ and vernacular visual cultural phenomena. General themes explored include the problematics internal to the theory and practice of academic history painting and historical genre painting, including compositional devices and the authenticity of artefacts depicted; relationships of power and purpose in historical art; the use of historical art for alternative Liberal and authoritarian ideals; the international cross-fertilisation of ideas about historical art; and exploration of the diverse influences of socioeconomic and geopolitical factors. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of the histories of nineteenth-century art and culture.

This volume is a groundbreaking discussion of the role of digital media in research on ancient painting, and a deep reflection on the effectiveness of digital media in opening the field to new audiences. The study of classical art always oscillates between archaeology and classics, between the study of ancient texts and archaeological material. For this reason, it is often difficult to collect all the data, to have access to both types of information on an equal basis. The increasing development of digital collections and databases dedicated to both archaeological material and ancient texts is a direct response to this problem. The book’s central theme is the role of the digital humanities, especially digital collection,s such as the Digital Milliet, in the study of ancient Greek and Roman painting. Part 1 focuses on the transition between the original print version of the Recueil Milliet and its digital incarnation. Part 2 addresses the application of digital tools to the analysis of ancient art. Part 3 focuses on ancient wall painting. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, classics, archaeology, and digital humanities.

This book offers microhistories related to the transnational circulations of impressionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The contributors rethink the role of "French" impressionism in shaping these iterations by placing France within its global and imperialist context and arguing that impressionisms might be framed through the mobility studies’ concept of "constellations of mobility." Artists engaging with impressionism in France, as in other global contexts, relied on, responded to, appropriated, and resisted elements of form and content based on fluid and interconnected political realities and market structures. Written by scholars and curators, the chapters demand reconsideration of impressionism as a historical construct and the meanings assigned to that term. This project frames future discussion in art history, cultural studies, and global studies on the politics of appropriating impressionism.

Italian Painting in the Age of Unification reconstructs the artistic motivations and messaging of three artists—Tommaso Minardi, Francesco Hayez, and Gioacchino Toma—from three distinct regions in Italy prior to, during, and directly following political unification in 1861. Each artist, working in Rome, Milan, and Naples, respectively, adopted the visual narratives particular to his region, using style to communicate aspects of his political, religious, or social context. By focusing on these three figures, this study will introduce readers outside of Italy to their diversity of practice, and provide a means for understanding their place within the larger field of international nineteenth-century art, albeit a place largely distinct from the better-known French tradition. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, nationalism, Italian history, or Italian studies.

This book examines the arts and artistic exchanges at the ‘Christian Oriental’ fringes of Europe, especially Armenia. It starts with the architecture, history and inhabitants of the lesser known pilgrim compounds at the Vatican in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, of Hungary, Germany, but namely those of the most ancient of Churches, the Churches of the Christian Orient Ethiopia and Armenia. Without taking an Eurocentric view, this book explores the role of missionaries, merchants, artists (for example Momik, Giotto, Minas, Domenico Veneziano, Duerer), and artefacts (such as fabrics, inscriptions and symbols) travelling into both directions along the western stretch of the Silk Road between Ayas (Cilicia), ancient Armenia and North-western Iran. This area was truly global before globalization, was a site of intense cultural exchanges and East-West cultural transmissions. This book opens a new research window into the culturally mixed landscapes in the Christian Orient, the Middle East and North-eastern Africa by taking into consideration their many indigenous and foreign artistic components and embeds Armenian arts into today’s wider art historical discourse. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, architectural history, missions, trade, Middle Eastern arts and the arts of the Southern Caucasus.

Over the last three decades, a new generation of conceptual artists has come to the fore in the Arab Middle East. As wars, peace treaties, sanctions, and large-scale economic developments have reshaped the region, this cohort of cultural producers has also found themselves at the center of intergenerational debates on the role of art in society. Central to these cultural debates is a steady stream of support from North American and European funding organizations—resources that only increased with the start of the Arab uprisings in the early 2010s. The Politics of Art offers an unprecedented look into the entanglement of art and international politics in Beirut, Ramallah, and Amman to understand the aesthetics of material production within liberal economies. Hanan Toukan outlines the political and social functions of transnationally connected and internationally funded arts organizations and initiatives, and reveals how the production of art within global frameworks can contribute to hegemonic structures even as it is critiquing them—or how it can be counterhegemonic even when it first appears not to be. In so doing, Toukan proposes not only a new way of reading contemporary art practices as they situate themselves globally, but also a new way of reading the domestic politics of the region from the vantage point of art.