Download or read book Refracted Visions written by Karen Strassler and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-20 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young couple poses before a painted backdrop depicting a modern building set in a volcanic landscape; a college student grabs his camera as he heads to a political demonstration; a man poses stiffly for his identity photograph; amateur photographers look for picturesque images in a rural village; an old woman leafs through a family album. In Refracted Visions, Karen Strassler argues that popular photographic practices such as these have played a crucial role in the making of modern national subjects in postcolonial Java. Contending that photographic genres cultivate distinctive ways of seeing and positioning oneself and others within the affective, ideological, and temporal location of Indonesia, she examines genres ranging from state identification photos to pictures documenting family rituals. Oriented to projects of selfhood, memory, and social affiliation, popular photographs recast national iconographies in an intimate register. They convey the longings of Indonesian national modernity: nostalgia for rural idylls and “tradition,” desires for the trappings of modernity and affluence, dreams of historical agency, and hopes for political authenticity. Yet photography also brings people into contact with ideas and images that transcend and at times undermine a strictly national frame. Photography’s primary practitioners in the postcolonial era have been Chinese Indonesians. Acting as cultural brokers who translate global and colonial imageries into national idioms, these members of a transnational minority have helped shape the visual contours of Indonesian belonging even as their own place within the nation remains tenuous. Refracted Visions illuminates the ways that everyday photographic practices generate visual habits that in turn give rise to political subjects and communities.
Download or read book Living Pictures Missing Persons written by Mark B. Sandberg and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth century, Scandinavian urban dwellers developed a passion for a new, utterly modern sort of visual spectacle: objects and effigies brought to life in astonishingly detailed, realistic scenes. The period 1880-1910 was the popular high point of mannequin display in Europe. Living Pictures, Missing Persons explores this phenomenon as it unfolded with the rise of wax museums and folk museums in the largest cities of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Mark Sandberg asks: Why did modernity generate a cultural fascination with the idea of effigy? He shows that the idea of effigy is also a portal to understanding other aspects of visual entertainment in that period, including the widespread interest in illusionistic scenes and tableaux, in the "portability" of sights, spaces, and entire milieus. Sandberg investigates this transformation of visual culture outside the usual test cases of the largest European metropolises. He argues that Scandinavian spectators desired an unusual degree of authenticity--a cultural preference for naturalism that made its way beyond theater to popular forms of museum display. The Scandinavian wax museums and folk-ethnographic displays of the era helped pre-cinematic spectators work out the social implications of both voyeuristic and immersive display techniques. This careful study thus anticipates some of the central paradoxes of twentieth-century visual culture--but in a time when the mannequin and the physical relic reigned supreme, and in a place where the contrast between tradition and modernity was a high-stakes game.
Download or read book Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity written by Troy Thomas and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2016-10-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, an accessible and beautifully illustrated account of Caravaggio as a catalyst for modernity. Undeniably one of the greatest artists of all time, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio would develop a radically new kind of psychologically expressive, realistic art and, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, would lay the foundations for modern painting. His paintings defied tradition to such a degree that the meaning of his works has divided critics and viewers for centuries. In this original study, Troy Thomas examines Caravaggio’s life and art in relationship to the profound beginnings of modernity, exploring the many conventions that Caravaggio utterly dismantled with his extraordinary genius. Thomas begins with an in-depth look at Caravaggio’s early life and works and examines how he refined his realism, developed his obsession with darkness and light, and began to find the subtle and clever ambiguity of genre and meaning that would become his trademark. Focusing acutely on the inherent tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities within Caravaggio’s paintings, Thomas goes on to examine his mature religious works and the ways he created a powerful but stark and enigmatic expressiveness in his protagonists. Lastly, he delves into the artist’s final hectic years as a fugitive killer evading papal police and wandering the cities of southern Italy. Richly illustrated in color throughout, Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity will appeal to all of those fascinated by the history of art and the remarkable lives of Renaissance masters.
Download or read book Photography Temporality and Modernity written by Kris Belden-Adams and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-14 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the photography’s unique capacity to represent time with a degree of elasticity and abstraction. Part object-study, part cultural/philosophical history, it examines the medium’s ability to capture and sometimes "defy" time, while also traveling as objects across time-and-space nexuses. The book features studies of understudied, widespread, practices: studio portraiture, motion studies, panoramas, racing photo finishes, composite college class pictures, planetary photography, digital montages, and extended-exposure images. A closer look at these images and their unique cultural/historical contexts reveals photography to be a unique medium for expressing changing perceptions of time, and the anxiety its passage provokes.
Download or read book Exiled in Modernity written by David O'Brien and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Notions of civilization and barbarism were intrinsic to Eugène Delacroix’s artistic practice: he wrote regularly about these concepts in his journal, and the tensions between the two were the subject of numerous paintings, including his most ambitious mural project, the ceiling of the Library of the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais Bourbon. Exiled in Modernity delves deeply into these themes, revealing why Delacroix’s disillusionment with modernity increasingly led him to seek spiritual release or epiphany in the sensual qualities of painting. While civilization implied a degree of control and the constraint of natural impulses for Delacroix, barbarism evoked something uncontrolled and impulsive. Seeing himself as part of a grand tradition extending back to ancient Greece, Delacroix was profoundly aware of the wealth and power that set nineteenth-century Europe apart from the rest of the world. Yet he was fascinated by civilization’s chaotic underbelly. In analyzing Delacroix’s art and prose, David O’Brien illuminates the artist’s effort to reconcile the erudite, tradition-bound aspects of painting with a desire to reach viewers in a more direct, unrestrained manner. Focusing chiefly on Delacroix’s musings about civilization in his famous journal, his major mural projects on the theme of civilization, and the place of civilization in his paintings of North Africa and of animals, O’Brien links Delacroix’s increasingly pessimistic view of modernity to his desire to use his art to provide access to a more fulfilling experience. With more than one hundred illustrations, this original, astute analysis of Delacroix and his work explains why he became an inspiration for modernist painters over the half-century following his death. Art historians and scholars of modernism especially will find great value in O’Brien’s work.
Download or read book Refiguring the Real written by Christopher Braider and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-08 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a major analysis of pictorial forms from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, Christopher Braider argues that the painted image provides a metaphor and model for all other modes of expression in Western culture—particularly literature, philosophy, religion, and science. Because critics have conventionally explained visual images in terms of verbal texts (Scripture, heroic poetry, and myth), they have undervalued the impact of the pictorial naturalism practiced by painters from the fifteenth century onward and the fundamentally new conception of reality it conveys. By reinterpreting modern Western experience in light of northern "descriptive art," the author enriches our understanding of how both painted and written cultural texts shape our perceptions of the world at large. Throughout Braider draws on works by such painters as van der Weyden, Bruegel the Elder, Steen, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Poussin, and addresses such topics as the Incarnation of the Word in Christ, the elegiac foundations of Enlightenment aesthetics, and the rivalry between northern and southern art. His goal is not only to reexamine important aesthetic issues but also to offer a new perspective on the general intellectual and cultural history of the modern West. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book Narrating Modernity The British Problem Picture 1895 1914 written by Pamela M. Fletcher and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-05 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title was first published in 2003. Problem pictures were very popular during the Edwardian period. These pictures invited multiple interpretations of modern life and were often slightly risque. Pamela Fletcher explores how these works of art engaged with questions of gender, sexuality and identity during their heyday.
Download or read book Potential Images written by Dario Gamboni and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2002 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Potential Images Dario Gamboni explores ambiguity in modern art, considering images that rely to a great degree on a projected or imaginative response from viewers to achieve their effect. Ambiguity became increasingly important in late 19th- and early 20th-century aesthetics, as is evidenced in works by such artists as Redon, Cezanne, Gauguin, Ensor and the Nabis. Similarly, the Cubists subverted traditional representational conventions, requiring their viewers to decipher images to extract their full meanings. The same device was taken up in the various experiments leading to abstraction. For example, it was Kandinsky's intention that his work could be interpreted in both figurative and non-figurative ways, and Duchamp's Readymades suggested the radical conclusion that 'it is the beholder who makes the picture'. These invitations to viewers to participate in the process of artistic communication had social and political implications, as they accorded artist and beholder symmetrical, almost interchangeable, roles.
Download or read book Overcoming Modernity written by Yasuo Yuasa and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Overcoming Modernity, which contains the last writings from Yuasa, the prominent Japanese scholar reconsiders the modern Western paradigm of thinking and in its place proposes a more holistic worldview. A wide range of topics are examined, including the relationships between language, being, psychology, and logic; Jung's concept of synchronicity; the Yijing (Book of Changes); paranormal phenomena; physics and metaphysics; mind and body; and teleology. Through these explorations, engaging a wide range of Western and East Asian thought, Yuasa offers an alternative to the scientific worldview inherited from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This new paradigm involves the integration of space-and-time and mind-and-body, thematics brought together through what Yuasa calls "image-thinking," a mode of thinking that incorporates image-experience.
Download or read book Mapping Modernisms written by Elizabeth Harney and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-16 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mapping Modernisms brings together scholars working around the world to address the modern arts produced by indigenous and colonized artists. Expanding the contours of modernity and its visual products, the contributors illustrate how these artists engaged with ideas of Primitivism through visual forms and philosophical ideas. Although often overlooked in the literature on global modernisms, artists, artworks, and art patrons moved within and across national and imperial borders, carrying, appropriating, or translating objects, images, and ideas. These itineraries made up the dense networks of modern life, contributing to the crafting of modern subjectivities and of local, transnationally inflected modernisms. Addressing the silence on indigeneity in established narratives of modernism, the contributors decenter art history's traditional Western orientation and prompt a re-evaluation of canonical understandings of twentieth-century art history. Mapping Modernisms is the first book in Modernist Exchanges, a multivolume project dedicated to rewriting the history of modernism and modernist art to include artists, theorists, art forms, and movements from around the world. Contributors. Bill Anthes, Peter Brunt, Karen Duffek, Erin Haney, Elizabeth Harney, Heather Igloliorte, Sandra Klopper, Ian McLean, Anitra Nettleton, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Ruth B. Phillips, W. Jackson Rushing III, Damian Skinner, Nicholas Thomas, Norman Vorano
Download or read book Architecture and Modernity written by Hilde Heynen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000-02-28 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bridges the gap between the history and theory of twentieth-century architecture and cultural theories of modernity. In this exploration of the relationship between modernity, dwelling, and architecture, Hilde Heynen attempts to bridge the gap between the discourse of the modern movement and cultural theories of modernity. On one hand, she discusses architecture from the perspective of critical theory, and on the other, she modifies positions within critical theory by linking them with architecture. She assesses architecture as a cultural field that structures daily life and that embodies major contradictions inherent in modernity, arguing that architecture nonetheless has a certain capacity to adopt a critical stance vis-à-vis modernity. Besides presenting a theoretical discussion of the relation between architecture, modernity, and dwelling, the book provides architectural students with an introduction to the discourse of critical theory. The subchapters on Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, and the Venice School (Tafuri, Dal Co, Cacciari) can be studied independently for this purpose.
Download or read book Still Modernism written by Louise Hornby and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-232) and index.
Download or read book Marianne Moore and the Cultures of Modernity written by Victoria Bazin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victoria Bazin examines the poetry of Marianne Moore as it is shaped by and responsive to the experience of being a modern woman, of living in the aftermath of the First World War, of being interpellated as a modern consumer and of writing in "the age of mechanical reproduction." She argues that Moore's textual collages and syllabic sculptures are based on the cultural clutter or debris of modernity, on textual extracts and reproductions, on the phantasmagoria of city life revealing something modernism worked hard to conceal: its relation to modernity, more specifically its relation to the new emerging and expanding mass consumer culture. Drawing extensively on archival resources to trace Moore's influences and to describe her own distinctive modernist aesthetic, this book argues that it was her feminist adaptation of pragmatism that shaped her poetic response to modernity. Moore's use of the quoted fragment is conceptualised in relation not only to Walter Benjamin's philosophical history but also to William James's image of the world as a series of "partial stories." As such, this account of Marianne Moore not only contributes to a greater understanding of the poet and her work, but it also offers up a more politicized and historically nuanced understanding of poetic modernism between the wars, one that retains a sense of the formal complexities of poetic language and the poet's own ethical imperatives whilst also recognising the material impact of modernity upon the modernist poem. This book will appeal, therefore, not only to scholars already familiar with Moore's poetry but more widely to those interested in modernism and American culture between the wars.
Download or read book Posing Modernity written by Denise Murrell and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious and revelatory investigation of the black female figure in modern art, tracing the legacy of Manet through to contemporary art This revelatory study investigates how changing modes of representing the black female figure were foundational to the development of modern art. Posing Modernity examines the legacy of Édouard Manet's Olympia (1863), arguing that this radical painting marked a fitfully evolving shift toward modernist portrayals of the black figure as an active participant in everyday life rather than as an exotic "other." Denise Murrell explores the little-known interfaces between the avant-gardists of nineteenth-century Paris and the post-abolition community of free black Parisians. She traces the impact of Manet's reconsideration of the black model into the twentieth century and across the Atlantic, where Henri Matisse visited Harlem jazz clubs and later produced transformative portraits of black dancers as icons of modern beauty. These and other works by the artist are set in dialogue with the urbane "New Negro" portraiture style with which Harlem Renaissance artists including Charles Alston and Laura Wheeler Waring defied racial stereotypes. The book concludes with a look at how Manet's and Matisse's depictions influenced Romare Bearden and continue to reverberate in the work of such global contemporary artists as Faith Ringgold, Aimé Mpane, Maud Sulter, and Mickalene Thomas, who draw on art history to explore its multiple voices. Featuring over 175 illustrations and profiles of several models, Posing Modernity illuminates long-obscured figures and proposes that a history of modernism cannot be complete until it examines the vital role of the black female muse within it. Published in association with the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University in the City of New York Exhibition Schedule: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York (10/24/18-02/10/19) Musée d'Orsay (03/25/19-07/14/19)
Download or read book Camera Ottomana written by Zeynep Çelik and published by Koc University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book has been published on the occasion of the exhibition 'Camera Ottomana: Photography and Modernity in the Ottoman Empire, 1840-1914', at Kooc University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Istanbul, April 21-August 19th, 2015"-- Page 3.
Download or read book Foto written by Matthew S Witkovsky and published by Thames and Hudson. This book was released on 2007-05-29 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliantly illustrated survey of modernist photography in Central Europe, published in association with the National Gallery of Art. In the 1920s and 1930s, photography became an immense phenomenon across Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, and Poland. Through magazines and books, in advertisements and at exhibitions, from amateur clubs to avant-garde schools, photographs emerged as a key vehicle of modern consciousness. This book presents the work of approximately one hundred individuals whose creations exemplify the potential of photography in Central Europe between the two World Wars. Foto brings together for the first time works by recognized masters such as the Russian El Lissitzky, the Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy, and the German Hannah Hóch—all of whom developed their photographic ideas in Germany—with contemporaries like Karel Teige and Jaromír Funke (Czechoslovakia), Kazimierz Podsadecki (Poland), Károly Escher (Hungary), and Trude Fleischmann (Austria), who are less well known today. Organized thematically, the book explores topics from photomontage and war to gender identity, modern living, and the spread of Surrealism. It shows the shared experience of modernity in the region, whereby recently founded nations and dismantled empires alike sought their place within the new world order established in the aftermath of World War I. The illustrations, drawn from more than seventy collections in America and abroad, include several previously unpublished works as well as many others never before available in high-quality reproductions.
Download or read book Exiled in Modernity written by David O'Brien and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Notions of civilization and barbarism were intrinsic to Eugène Delacroix’s artistic practice: he wrote regularly about these concepts in his journal, and the tensions between the two were the subject of numerous paintings, including his most ambitious mural project, the ceiling of the Library of the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais Bourbon. Exiled in Modernity delves deeply into these themes, revealing why Delacroix’s disillusionment with modernity increasingly led him to seek spiritual release or epiphany in the sensual qualities of painting. While civilization implied a degree of control and the constraint of natural impulses for Delacroix, barbarism evoked something uncontrolled and impulsive. Seeing himself as part of a grand tradition extending back to ancient Greece, Delacroix was profoundly aware of the wealth and power that set nineteenth-century Europe apart from the rest of the world. Yet he was fascinated by civilization’s chaotic underbelly. In analyzing Delacroix’s art and prose, David O’Brien illuminates the artist’s effort to reconcile the erudite, tradition-bound aspects of painting with a desire to reach viewers in a more direct, unrestrained manner. Focusing chiefly on Delacroix’s musings about civilization in his famous journal, his major mural projects on the theme of civilization, and the place of civilization in his paintings of North Africa and of animals, O’Brien links Delacroix’s increasingly pessimistic view of modernity to his desire to use his art to provide access to a more fulfilling experience. With more than one hundred illustrations, this original, astute analysis of Delacroix and his work explains why he became an inspiration for modernist painters over the half-century following his death. Art historians and scholars of modernism especially will find great value in O’Brien’s work.
