On Telling Images of China
On Telling Images of China

Author: Shane McCausland

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Published: 2013-11-01

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 9888139436

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The essays in this volume address a diverse range of issues in China’s narrative art and visual culture mainly from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) to the present. These studies attend to the complex ways in which images circulate in pictorial media and across boundaries between ‘high art’ and popular culture—images in paintings, prints, stone engravings and posters, as well as in film and video art. In addition, the authors examine the roles of ancient exemplary stories and textual narratives, as well as their reiteration in the visual arts in early modern and modern social and political contexts. The volume is divided into three sections: Representing Paradigms, Interpreting Literary Themes and Narratives, and the Medium and Modernity. While the essays in each section deal with concerns in the field of China’s art history, an editors’ introduction serves to position the topic of narrative art and to introduce definitions and genre issues which run through the book. As a whole, the volume invites reflection on the intrinsic nature of narratives and their pictorial lives, and presents new research which challenges established views and paradigms.

A Companion to British Art
A Companion to British Art

Author: David Peters Corbett

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-02-16

Total Pages: 599

ISBN-13: 1119170117

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This companion is a collection of newly-commissioned essays written by leading scholars in the field, providing a comprehensive introduction to British art history. A generously-illustrated collection of newly-commissioned essays which provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of British art Combines original research with a survey of existing scholarship and the state of the field Touches on the whole of the history of British art, from 800-2000, with increasing attention paid to the periods after 1500 Provides the first comprehensive introduction to British art of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, one of the most lively and innovative areas of art-historical study Presents in depth the major preoccupations that have emerged from recent scholarship, including aesthetics, gender, British art’s relationship to Modernity, nationhood and nationality, and the institutions of the British art world

Essays on Paula Rego
Essays on Paula Rego

Author: Maria Manuel Lisboa

Publisher:

Published: 2019-08-30

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 9781783747566

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In these powerful and stylishly written essays, Maria Manuel Lisboa dissects the work of Paula Rego, the Portuguese-born artist considered one of the greatest artists of modern times. Focusing primarily on Rego's work since the 1980s, Lisboa explores the complex relationships between violence and nurturing, power and impotence, politics and the family that run through Rego's art. Taking a historicist approach to the evolution of the artist's work, Lisboa embeds the works within Rego's personal history as well as Portugal's (and indeed other nations') stories, and reveals the interrelationship between political significance and the raw emotion that lies at the heart of Rego's uncompromising iconographic style. Fundamental to Lisboa's analysis is an understanding that apparent opposites - male and female, sacred and profane, aggression and submissiveness - often co-exist in Rego's work in a way that is both disturbing and destabilising. This collection of essays brings together both unpublished and previously published work to make a significant contribution to scholarship about Paula Rego. It will also be of interest to scholars and students of contemporary painting, Portuguese and British feminist art, and the political and ideological aspects of the visual arts.

The Education of a British-Protected Child
The Education of a British-Protected Child

Author: Chinua Achebe

Publisher: Penguin Group

Published: 2009-10-06

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0307272907

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From one of the greatest writers of the modern era, an intimate and essential collection of personal essays on home, identity, and colonialism Chinua Achebe’s characteristically eloquent and nuanced voice is everywhere present in these seventeen beautifully written pieces. From a vivid portrait of growing up in colonial Nigeria to considerations on the African-American Diaspora, from a glimpse into his extraordinary family life and his thoughts on the potent symbolism of President Obama’s elections—this charmingly personal, intellectually disciplined, and steadfastly wise collection is an indispensable addition to the remarkable Achebe oeuvre.

Burning Bright
Burning Bright

Author: Diana Dethloff

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2015-09-11

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1910634344

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This book celebrates the work and career of the internationally renowned art historian, David Bindman, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, and is above all a tribute to him from his former students and colleagues.

Art and the Sublime
Art and the Sublime

Author: Christine Riding

Publisher:

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 19

ISBN-13: 9781854379481

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Scholars have debated the term 'sublime' in the field of aesthetics for centuries. Many more artists, writers, poets and musicians have sought to evoke or respond to it. But what is the sublime? Is it a thing, a feeling, an event or a state of mind? The word, of Latin origin, means something that is 'set or raised aloft, high up'. The sublime is further defined as having the quality of such greatness, magnitude or intensity, whether physical, metaphysical, moral, aesthetic or spiritual, that our ability to perceive or comprehend it is temporarily overwhelmed. The best-known theory published in Britain is Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Burke's definition of the sublime focuses on such terms as darkness, obscurity, privation, vastness, magnificence, loudness and suddenness, and that our reaction is defined by a kind of pleasurable terror. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the sublime was associated in particular with the immensity or turbulence of Nature and human responses to it. Consequently, in Western art, 'sublime' landscapes and seascapes, especially those from the Romantic period, often represent towering mountain ranges, deep chasms, violent storms and seas, volcanic eruptions or avalanches which, if actually experienced, would be life threatening. Other themes relate to the epic and the supernatural as described in drama, poetry and fiction, for example, by Homer, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, as well as more contemporary authors, such as Byron and Mary Shelley. Arguably the greatest source of the sublime for European art is the Bible, which begins with the creation of the world and ends with apocalypse and the Last Judgement. This display has been devised by curator Christine Riding.

Why I Write
Why I Write

Author: George Orwell

Publisher: Renard Press Ltd

Published: 2021-01-01

Total Pages: 15

ISBN-13: 1913724263

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George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

A History of British Art
A History of British Art

Author: Andrew Graham-Dixon

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780520223769

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Andrew Graham-Dixon unveils the long-kept secret of Britain's rich and vital visual culture.

Essays on Art and Language
Essays on Art and Language

Author: Charles Harrison

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2003-09-12

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 9780262582414

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Critical and theoretical essays by a long-time participant in the Art & Language movement. These essays by art historian and critic Charles Harrison are based on the premise that making art and talking about art are related enterprises. They are written from the point of view of Art & Language, the artistic movement based in England—and briefly in the United States—with which Harrison has been associated for thirty years. Harrison uses the work of Art & Language as a central case study to discuss developments in art from the 1950s through the 1980s. According to Harrison, the strongest motivation for writing about art is that it brings us closer to that which is other than ourselves. In seeing how a work is done, we learn about its achieved identity: we see, for example, that a drip on a Pollock is integral to its technical character, whereas a drip on a Mondrian would not be. Throughout the book, Harrison uses specific examples to address a range of questions about the history, theory, and making of modern art—questions about the conditions of its making and the nature of its public, about the problems and priorities of criticism, and about the relations between interpretation and judgment.