To Myself is the autobiography of the late nineteenth century French artist Odilon Redon. Composed of his personal notes and journals, which he kept for over sixty years, it is a poignant testament of a self-effacing artist whose life was totally devoted to his self-imposed task. His writings consist of his reflections on being an artist, the creative act, and the struggle to achieve the lofty goals to which the truly committed artist aspires.
Together with the Olympics, world's fairs are one of the few regular international events of sufficient scale to showcase a spectrum of sights, wonders, learning opportunities, technological advances, and new (or renewed) urban districts, and to present them all to a mass audience. Meet Me at the Fair: A World's Fair Reader breaks new ground in scholarship on world's fairs by incorporating a number of short new texts that investigate world's fairs in their multiple aspects: political, urban/architectural, anthropological/ sociological, technological, commercial, popular, and representational. Contributors come from eight different countries and represent affiliations in academia, museums and libraries, professional and architectural firms, non-profit organizations, and government regulatory agencies. In taking the measure of both the material artifacts and the larger cultural production of world's fairs, the volume presents its own phantasmagoria of disciplinary perspectives, historical periods, geographical locales, media, and messages, mirroring the microcosmic form of the world's fair itself.
Englishman Robert Livermore jumped ship in Southern California in 1822, yet just 15 years later became the respected owner of the 40,000-acre Las Positas land grant. Here he built his new Californio wife an adobe house in 1839. The wealth that flowed into California during the gold rush allowed Livermore to import a two-story house around the Horn, but entrepreneurs and squatters flowed in as well. Nathaniel Patterson opened the first hotel in the old Livermore adobe, frequented by miners on their way from the South Bay to the Sierra gold mines. Laddsville, a village built where the roads to Stockton and Dublin met, was also a going concern until the Central Pacific pushed over the Altamont Pass. On this line grew the town founded by William Mendenhall in 1869, named for pioneer Livermore, who had died more than a decade earlier. Soon Livermore became the valley's commercial center for hay, wheat, barley, wine grapes, and ranching.
In the hauntingly beautiful sculptures of Tilmann Riemenschneider, the Late Gothic art of Germany achieved its highest expression. Now, for the first time in English, the eminent art historian Justus Bier accords Riemenschneider the extended attention he so richly deserves. Riemenschneider (ca. 1460–1531) holds a pivotal place in the development of German art. Rejecting the anonymous soulfulness of earlier Gothic sculpture, he created a style reflecting the deeply spiritual character of his time, yet one that also anticipated the humanism of the Italian Renaissance so soon to revolutionize European art. Bier crowns a lifelong study with this reconsideration of Reimenschneider's life and work, with emphasis on works in North American museums. More than 140 photographs illustrate 46 of the artist's major sculptures.
