Selected Writings on Art and Literature

Selected Writings on Art and Literature

Author: Charles Baudelaire

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13:

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Discusses works by great painters such as Delacroix and Ingres. This title features writings on Poe, Flaubert and Gautier.


A Mythology of Forms

A Mythology of Forms

Author: Carl Einstein

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-12-26

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 022646427X

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The German art historian and critic Carl Einstein (1885-1940) was at the forefront of the modernist movement that defined the twentieth century. One of the most prolific and brilliant early commentators on cubism, he was also among the first authors to assess African sculpture as art. Yet his writings remain relatively little known in the Anglophone world. With A Mythology of Forms, the first representative collection of Einstein’s art theory and criticism to appear in English translation, Charles W. Haxthausen fills this gap. Spanning three decades, it assembles the most important of Einstein’s writings on the art that was central to his critical project—on cubism, surrealism, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Paul Klee, and includes the full texts of his two pathbreaking books on African art, Negro Sculpture (1915) and African Sculpture (1921). With fourteen texts by Einstein, each presented with extensive commentary, A Mythology of Forms will bring a pivotal voice in the history of modern art into English.


Essays on Art and Literature

Essays on Art and Literature

Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1994-07-25

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780691036571

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Part of an exhaustive series which provides English translations of a representative proportion of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's vast body of work, this volume contains such essays as "On Gothic Architecture", "On the Laocoon" and "Shakespeare: a Tribute."


The Utopian Function of Art and Literature

The Utopian Function of Art and Literature

Author: Ernst Bloch

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1989-03-06

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 9780262521390

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Essays in aesthetics by the philosopher Ernst Bloch that belong to the tradition of cultural criticism represented by Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. The aesthetic essays of the philosopher Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) belong to the rich tradition of cultural criticism represented by Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. Bloch was a significant creative source for these thinkers, and his impact is nowhere more evident than in writings on art. Bloch was fascinated with art as a reflection of both social realities and human dreams. Whether he is discussing architecture or detective novels, the theme that drives his work is always the same—the striving for "something better," for a "homeland" that is more socially aware, more humane, more just. The book opens with an illuminating discussion between Bloch and Adorno on the meaning of utopia; then follow twelve essays written between 1930 and 1973 on topics such as aesthetic theory, genres such as music, painting, theater, film, opera, poetry, and the novel, and perhaps most important, popular culture in the form of fairy tales, detective stories, and dime novels. The MIT Press has previously published Ernst Bloch's Natural Law and Human Dignity and his magnum opus, The Principle of Hope. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.


Images of Quattrocento Florence

Images of Quattrocento Florence

Author: Stefano Ugo Baldassarri

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2000-01-01

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 9780300080520

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This anthology provides a panoramic view of fifteenth-century Florence in the words of the city's own citizens and visitors. The fifty-one selections offer glimpses into Renaissance thought. Together, the documents demonstrate the social, political, religious, and cultural impact Florence had in shaping the Italian and European Renaissance, and they reveal how Florence created, developed, and diffused the mythology of its own origins and glory. The documents point up the divergences in quattrocento accounts of the origins of Florence, and they reveal the importance of the city's economy, social life, and military success to the formation of its image. The book includes sources that elaborate on the city's accomplishments in literature and the visual arts, others that present major trends in Florentine religious life, and still others that attest to the acclaim and admiration that Florence evoked from foreign visitors. The editors also provide an informative introduction, a detailed chronology of fifteenth-century Italy, maps, photographs, an annotated bibliography, and a biographical sketch of the author of each document.


Selected Writings of Walter Pater

Selected Writings of Walter Pater

Author: Walter Pater

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 1982

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780231054812

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Harold Bloom's selection of Pater's writings brings together in one volume the most important sections and passages from The Renaissance, Imaginary Portraits, Appreciations, Plato and Platonism, Greek Studies, and Sketches and Reviews, as well as "The Child in the House." Pater, the chief aesthetician and literary critic of Victorian England, brought his powerful imagination to bear on a wide range of subjects: from the drama of Euripides to the painters of the Renaissance, from the Romantic poets to the pre-Raphaelites, from Plato to Oscar Wilde. In the twentieth century, Pater's theories of art and literature exerted a strong inluence on the work of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Stevens.


Visions and Ecstasies

Visions and Ecstasies

Author: H.D.

Publisher: David Zwirner Books

Published: 2019-11-26

Total Pages: 81

ISBN-13: 1644230232

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H.D’s writing continues to inspire generations of readers. Bringing together a number of never-before-published essays, this new collection of H.D.’s writings introduces her compelling perspectives on art, myth, and the creative process. While H.D. is best known for her elemental poetry, which draws heavily on the imagery of natural and ancient worlds, her critical writings remain a largely underexplored and unpublished part of her oeuvre. Crucial to understanding both the formative contexts surrounding her departure from Imagism following the First World War and her own remarkable creative vision, Notes on Thought and Vision, written in 1918, is one of the central works in this collection. H.D. guides her reader to the untamed shores of the Scilly Isles, where we hear of powerful, transformative experiences and of her intense relationship with the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. The accompanying essays, many published here for the first time, help color H.D.’s astute critical engagement with the past, from the city of Athens and the poetry of ancient Greece. Like Letters to a Young Painter (2017), also published in the ekphrasis series, this collection is essential reading for anyone interested in the creative process.


Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins

Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins

Author: Dick Higgins

Publisher:

Published: 2018-11-20

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 9781938221200

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Dick Higgins and his Something Else Press epitomized the riotous art of the '60s There are few art-world figures as influential--and as little known--as Dick Higgins (1938-98), cofounder of Fluxus, "polyartist," poet, scholar, theorist, composer, performer and, not least, the publisher of the legendary Something Else Press. In 1965 he restored the term "intermedia" to the English language, giving it new dimension to recognize the dissolution of boundaries between traditional modes of art-making and the open field for new forms that cannot be compartmentalized. His own contributions to intermedia are many--as a participant and instigator of happenings, as writer and composer straddling traditional and vanguard forms, among others--but it was Something Else Press (1963-74) that redefined how "the book" could inhabit that energized, in-between space. Something Else Press was as much a critical statement and radical experiment as it was a collection of books by some of the most luminary artists and writers of the 20th century: Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Ray Johnson, Dieter Roth, Bern Porter, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Emmett Williams, Robert Filliou, and George Brecht, among many others. Along with his Great Bear Pamphlet series and the Something Else newsletter, Higgins exploited and subverted conventional book production and marketing strategies to get unconventional and avant-garde works into the hands of new and often unsuspecting readers. Edited by Granary Books publisher Steve Clay and Fluxus artist Ken Friedman, this judiciously curated and indispensable compendium of essays, theoretical writings and narrative prose dives deep into the ever-influential ideas that Higgins explored in theory and practice. Clay and Friedman have chosen works that illuminate Higgins' voracious intellectual appetite, encyclopedic body of knowledge and playful yet rigorous experimentation in a selection that includes many writings long out of print or difficult to find.


Radical Coherency

Radical Coherency

Author: David Antin

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-03-15

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 0226923320

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“We got to talking”—so David Antin begins the introduction to Radical Coherency, embarking on the pursuit that has marked much of his breathless, brilliantly conversational work. For the past forty years, whether spoken under the guise of performance artist or poet, cultural explorer or literary critic, Antin’s innovative observations have helped us to better understand everything from Pop to Postmodernism. Intimately wedded to the worlds of conceptual art and poetics, Radical Coherency collects Antin’s influential critical essays and spontaneous, performed lectures (or “talk pieces”) for the very first time, capturing one of the most distinctive perspectives in contemporary literature. The essays presented here range from the first serious assessment of Andy Warhol published in a major art journal, as well as Antin’s provocative take on Clement Greenberg’s theory of Modernism, to frontline interventions in present debates on poetics and fugitive pieces from the ’60s and ’70s that still sparkle today—and represent a gold mine for art historians of the period. From John Cage to Allan Kaprow, Mark Rothko to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Antin takes the reader on an idiosyncratic, personal journey through twentieth-century culture with his trademark antiformalist panache—one thatwill be welcomed by any fan of this consummate trailblazer.