The Embodied Imagination In Antebellum American Art And Culture

This book reveals a new history of the imagination told through its engagement with the body. Even as they denounced the imagination’s potential for inviting luxury, vice, and corruption, American audiences avidly consumed a transatlantic visual culture of touring paintings, dioramas, gift books, and theatrical performances that pictured a preindustrial—and largely imaginary—European past. By examining the visual, material, and rhetorical strategies artists like Washington Allston, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, and others used to navigate this treacherous ground, Catherine Holochwost uncovers a hidden tension in antebellum aesthetics. The book will be of interest to scholars of art history, literary and cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, and media studies.

Political Economy, Race, and the Image of Nature in the United States, 1825–1878 is an interdisciplinary work analyzing the historical origins of a dominant concept of Nature in the culture of the United States during the period of its expansion across the continent. Chapters analyze the ways in which “Nature” became a discursive site where theories of race and belonging, adaptation and environment, and the uses of literary and pictorial representation were being renegotiated, forming the basis for an ideal of the human and the nonhuman world that is still with us. Through an interdisciplinary approach involving the fields of visual culture, political economy, histories of racial identity, and ecocritical studies, the book examines the work of seminal figures in a variety of literary and artistic disciplines and puts the visual culture of the United States at the center of intellectual trends that have enormous implications for contemporary cultural practice. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, American studies, environmental studies/ecocriticism, critical race theory, and semiotics.

This edited volume’s chief aim is to bring together, in an English-language source, the principal histories and narratives of some of the most significant academies and national schools of art in South America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. The book highlights not only issues shared by Latin American academies of art but also those that differentiate them from their European counterparts. Authors examine issues including statutes, the influence of workshops and guilds, the importance of patronage, discourses of race and ethnicity in visual pedagogy, and European models versus the quest for national schools. It also offers first-time English translations of many foundational documents from several significant academies and schools. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, Latin American and Hispanic studies, and modern visual cultures.

Admired for his trompe l’oeil style, American painter William Harnett (1848–1892) was as intellectually ambitious as he was technically skilled. The first scholarly monograph on the artist, William Harnett’s Curious Objects details Harnett’s career-long effort to position still life as a serious art. Nika Elder elevates the significance of Harnett’s academic training and questions his apparent turn away from it. Reading his still lifes in relation to wartime visual culture, literary realism, museum display, and industrial design, she shows how Harnett experimented with inanimate objects and pictorial techniques to represent the human condition without depicting the human body. His paintings illustrate late nineteenth-century American material culture, but they also represent Reconstruction, interiority, death and life, and the imagination. By engaging such lofty themes, Harnett reimagined history painting for the modern era. His work thus locates Gilded Age art and culture in the long shadow of the Civil War and its politics.

This book brings together leading scholars and practitioners to take stock of the frictions generated by a tumultuous time in the Australian art field and to probe what the crises might mean for the future of the arts in Australia. Specific topics include national and international art markets; art practices in their broader social and political contexts; social relations and institutions and their role in contemporary Australian art; the policy regimes and funding programmes of Australian governments; and national and international art markets. In addition, the collection will pay detailed attention to the field of indigenous art and the work of Indigenous artists. This book will be of interest to scholars in contemporary art, art history, cultural studies, and Indigenous peoples.

This book uses intermedial theories to study collage and montage, tracing the transformation of visual collage into photomontage in the early avant-garde period. Magda Dragu distinguishes between the concepts of collage and montage, as defined across several media (fine arts, literature, music, film, photography), based on the type of artistic meaning they generate, rather than the mechanical procedures involved. The book applies theories of intermediality to collage and montage, which is crucial for understanding collage as a form of cultural production. Throughout, the author considers the political implications, as collages and montages were often used for propagandistic purposes. This book combines research methods used in several areas of inquiry: art history, literary criticism, analytical philosophy, musicology, and aesthetics.

The Mongol period (1206-1368) marked a major turning point of exchange – culturally, politically, and artistically – across Eurasia. The wide-ranging international exchange that occurred during the Mongol period is most apparent visually through the inclusion of Mongol motifs in textile, paintings, ceramics, and metalwork, among other media. Eiren Shea investigates how a group of newly-confederated tribes from the steppe conquered the most sophisticated societies in existence in less than a century, creating a courtly idiom that permanently changed the aesthetics of China and whose echoes were felt across Central Asia, the Middle East, and even Europe. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, fashion design, and Asian studies.

This book illuminates the original meanings of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century mural paintings in Britain. At the time, these were called ‘histories’. Throughout the eighteenth century, though, the term became directly associated with easel painting and, as ‘history painting’ achieved the status of a sublime genre, any link with painted architectural interiors was lost. Whilst both genres contained historical figures and narratives, it was the ways of viewing them that differed. Lydia Hamlett emphasises the way that mural paintings were experienced by spectators within their architectural settings. New iconographical interpretations and theories of effect and affect are considered an important part of their wider historical, cultural and social contexts. This book is intended to be read primarily by specialists, graduate and undergraduate students with an interest in new approaches to British art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.