Articulates the role of personality in creative pursuits, defining personality a set of enduring qualities that effect such behavior as a general preference for autonomous or interdependent activity. Examines the psychology of creativity, the challenge and opportunity of developing a creative gift, the struggles of a creative life, and the fit between talent and opportunity. Illustrates the principles with case studies of Paul Cezanne and Eugene Delacroix. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
"Art historian Patricia Mathews examines the artistic, social, and scientific discourses of fin-de-siecle France. Along the way, she illuminates the Symbolist construction of a feminized aesthetic that nonetheless excluded female artists from its realm. She analyzes contemporary cultural assumptions as well as theories such as social Darwinism, biological determinism, and degeneracy."--BOOK JACKET.
Thomas Eakins is widely considered one of the great American painters, an artist whose uncompromising realism helped move American art from the Victorian era into the modern age. He is also acclaimed as a paragon of integrity, one who stood up for his artistic beliefs even when they brought him personal and professional difficulty--as when he was fired from the Pennsylvania Academy of Art for removing a model's loincloth in a drawing class. Yet beneath the surface of Eakins's pictures is a sense of brooding unease and latent violence--a discomfort voiced by one of his sitters who said his portrait "decapitated" her. In Eakins Revealed, art historian Henry Adams examines the dark side of Eakins's life and work, in a startling new biography that will change our understanding of this American icon. Based on close study of Eakins's work and new research in the Bregler papers, a major collection never fully mined by scholars, this volume shows Eakins was not merely uncompromising, but harsh and brutal both in his personal life and in his painting. Adams uncovers the bitter personal feuds and family tragedies surrounding Eakins--his mother died insane and his niece committed suicide amid allegations that Eakins had seduced her--and documents the artist's tendency toward psychological abuse and sexual harassment of those around him. This provocative book not only unveils new facts about Eakins's life; more important, it makes sense, for the first time, of the enigmas of his work. Eakins Revealed promises to be a controversial biography that will attract readers inside and outside the art world, and fascinate anyone concerned with the mystery of artistic genius.
This work surveys Edwin Dickinson's life and career, both of which revolved around Cape Cod, Buffalo, and New York's Finger Lakes region. It covers the artist's influential career as a teacher, and analyzes Dickinson's self-portraits and major symbolic paintings.
This book examines psychoanalysis, feminism, philosophy, and semiotics to examine late 19th- and 20th-Century Spanish and Spanish-American literature in relation to painting, and to larger questions of art theory and literary history.
Why and how do music and abstract art pack such universal appeal? Why do they often have 'therapeutic' efficacy? Between Couch and Piano links well-established psychoanalytic ideas with historical and neurological theory to help us begin to understand some of the reasons behind music's ubiquity and power. Drawing on new psychoanalytic understanding as well as advances in neuroscience, this book sheds light on the role of the arts as stimulus, and as a key to creative awareness. Subjects covered include: * music in relation to the trauma of loss * music in connection with wholeness and the sense of identity * the ability of music to jump-start normal feelings, motion and identity where these have been seemingly destroyed by neurological disease * the theory of therapeutic efficacy of music and art. Between Couch and Piano is a comprehensive overview that will be of interest to all those intrigued by the interrelation of psychoanalysis and the creative arts. www.psychoanalysisarena.com
This new hardcover annual offers a unique scholarly format, an interdisciplinary dialogue that, it is hoped, will foster the development of a sound, useful methodology for applying psychoanalytic insight to art and artists. The series provides a medium for those who study art, those who interpret it, and occasionally those who create it, formally to explore the meaning of an artistic work as the direct reflection of the inner world of its creator. Within each volume, individual topics are addressed by either an art historian or a psychoanalyst, with a response frequently tendered by an expert from the other field. Reviews of important books of cross-disciplinary interest are treated in a similar manner, and include rebuttals by the authors themselves. It is precisely this exchange of ideas among scholars with difference perspectives on the meaning of a work of art that sets PPA apart from the standard art history publication. Its depth of scholarship, coupled with its innovative format, make it a fascinating addition to the burgeoning field of psychoanalytic studies of art history.
Steven Z. Levine provides a new understanding of the life and work of Claude Monet and the myth of the modern artist. Levine analyzes the extensive critical reception of Monet and the artist's own prolific writings in the context of the story of Narcissus, popular in late nineteenth-century France. Through a careful blending of psychoanalytical theory and historical study, Levine identifies narcissism and obsession as driving forces in Monet's art and demonstrates how we derive meaning from the accumulated verbal responses to an artist's work.
Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country's postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France's need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.
