Guilhermina Suggia: Cellist

Guilhermina Suggia: Cellist

Author: Anita Mercier

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 1351564765

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Born in 1885 in Porto, Portugal, to a middle-class musical family, Guilhermina Suggia began playing cello at the age of five. A child prodigy, she was already a seasoned performer when she won a scholarship to study with Julius Klengel in Leipzig at the age of sixteen. Suggia lived in Paris with fellow cellist Pablo Casals for several years before World War I, in a professional and personal partnership that was as stormy as it was unconventional. When they separated Suggia moved to London, where she built a spectacularly successful solo career. Suggia's virtuosity and musicianship, along with the magnificent style and stage presence famously captured in Augustus John's portrait, made her one of the most sought-after concert artists of her day. In 1927 she married Dr Jos asimiro Carteado Mena and settled down to a comfortable life divided between Portugal and England. Throughout the 1930s, Suggia remained one of the most respected musicians in Europe. She partnered on stage with many famous instrumentalists and conductors and completed numerous BBC broadcasts. The war years kept her at home in Portugal, where she focused on teaching, but she returned to England directly after the war and resumed performing. When Suggia died in 1950, her will provided for the establishment of several scholarship funds for young cellists, including England's prestigious Suggia Gift. Mercier's study of Suggia's letters and other writings reveal an intelligent, warm and generous character; an artist who was enormously dedicated, knowledgeable and self-disciplined. Suggia was one of the first women to make a career of playing the cello at a time when prejudice against women playing this traditionally 'masculine' instrument was still strong. A role model for many other musicians, she was herself a fearless pioneer.


Byron, Sully, and the Power of Portraiture

Byron, Sully, and the Power of Portraiture

Author: John Clubbe

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-28

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 1351162144

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since the early nineteenth century, Byron, the man and his image, have captured the hearts and minds of untold legions of people of all political and social stripes in Britain, Europe, America, and around the world. This book focuses on the history and cultural significance for Federal America of the only portrait of Byron known to have been painted by a major artist. In private hands from 1826 until this day, Thomas Sully's Byron has never before been the subject of scholarly study. Beginning with his discovery of the portrait in 1999 and a 200-year narrative of the portrait's provenance and its relation to other well-known Byron portraits, the author discusses the work within the broad context of British and American portraiture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Receiving most attention are Thomas Lawrence and Sully, his American counterpart. The author gives the fullest account to date of Sully's career and his relation to English influences and to figures prominent in the early-nineteenth-century American imagination, among them, Washington, Fanny Kemble, Lafayette, Joseph Bonaparte, and Nicholas Biddle. Byron is discussed as an icon of the young American Republic whose Jubilee year coincided with Sully's initial work on the poet's portrait. Later chapters offer a close reading of the portrait, arguing that Sully has given a visual interpretation truly worthy of his celebrated, controversial, and famously handsome subject.


Exhibitionist

Exhibitionist

Author: Richard Dorment

Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press

Published: 2016-08-22

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 1908524685

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

100 sumptuously produced essays by Britain’s leading art critic, US born, Richard Dorment. They cover exhibitions of historic and contemporary art world-wide, interpreting and critiquing many of the most important shows of the last 30 years. They offer, in a highly accessible form, the fundamental elements of a history of art, and a beguiling review of recent cultural trends.


Picture World

Picture World

Author: Rachel Teukolsky

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-08-16

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 0192603566

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The modern media world came into being in the nineteenth century, when machines were harnessed to produce texts and images in unprecedented numbers. In the visual realm, new industrial techniques generated a deluge of affordable pictorial items, mass-printed photographs, posters, cartoons, and illustrations. These alluring objects of the Victorian parlor were miniaturized spectacles that served as portals onto phantasmagoric versions of 'the world.' Although new kinds of pictures transformed everyday life, these ephemeral items have received remarkably little scholarly attention. Picture World shines a welcome new light onto these critically neglected yet fascinating visual objects. They serve as entryways into the nineteenth century's key aesthetic concepts. Each chapter pairs a new type of picture with a foundational keyword in Victorian aesthetics, a familiar term reconceived through the lens of new media. 'Character' appears differently when considered with caricature, in the new comics and cartoons appearing in the mass press in the 1830s; likewise, the book approaches 'realism' through pictorial journalism; 'illustration' via illustrated Bibles; 'sensation' through carte-de-visite portrait photographs; 'the picturesque' by way of stereoscopic views; and 'decadence' through advertising posters. Picture World studies the aesthetic effects of the nineteenth century's media revolution: it uses the relics of a previous era's cultural life to interrogate the Victorian world's most deeply-held values, arriving at insights still relevant in our own media age.


Advance Your Swagger

Advance Your Swagger

Author: Fonzworth Bentley

Publisher: Villard

Published: 2010-01-20

Total Pages: 130

ISBN-13: 0307481174

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“My manners were the first ingredient that set me apart from my peers,” notes the suave and stylish Fonzworth Bentley, Sean “Diddy” Combs’s former personal assistant and a celebrity in his own right. Now, in this one-of-a-kind book, Bentley shares his surefire strategies for success. Just how does a guy move from Atlanta to New York City without knowing a soul in the entertainment industry and become, in less than two years, the P.A. to one of the biggest moguls in hip-hop history? Bentley attributes his accomplishment to one key equation: Manners + Confidence + Style = Swagger. With this formula, Bentley transformed himself into an icon of unflappable grace, elegance, and good manners–and now he’s on a mission to help you step up your game, advance your swagger, get ahead, and live out your dreams. Inside you’ll learn everything you need to know about • manners and the magic of Please and Thank You • the art of eating well, from which glass to use to handling the napkin • the basics of fine dining, whether you’re a host or a guest • the do’s and “oh no you di’int’s” of cell phones, e-mail, and text messaging • projecting confidence through your body language • the power of introductions, even when you can’t remember someone’s name • what to do before, during, and after a job interview • body maintenance, from hair to toes to pearly whites • the principles of timeless fashion, so you never go out of style • 15 things every man and 15 things every woman must have in his or her closet Plus “Bent Hints”–little things to keep in mind for any occasion Though we seem to be in the midst of what Bentley calls “the Golden Age of Disrespect,” he demonstrates how we can add a touch of class and dignity to our lives. He’s here to make sure your color schemes are fly and your stance is stage-ready. Filled with photographs to illustrate his lessons, Advance Your Swagger is the lifestyle book of the year. He’s taken care of his world–now let Mr. Bentley whip yours into style. From the Hardcover edition.


Writing Visual Histories

Writing Visual Histories

Author: Florence Grant

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-11-12

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1350023477

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What can visual artifacts tell us about the past? How can we interpret them rigorously, weaving their formal and material qualities into rich social contexts to reach wider historical conclusions? Unfolding key historiographical and methodological issues, Writing Visual Histories equips students to answer these questions, showing visual analysis to be a key skill in historical research. A multifaceted structure makes this a practical guide for writing and reflecting on visual histories. A first section includes six case studies -- on topics ranging from medieval heraldry to Life magazine. These examples are followed by an exploration of essential concepts that inform historical thinking about visual matters, a treatment of disciplinary practices, and discussion of the practicalities (such as accessing museum collections and organising permissions) that scholars working with visual sources have to navigate. This book is an invaluable tool kit for opening up a historical understanding of visual phenomena and practices of looking, and for writing that takes an integrated approach to studies of the past.


Art and Emergency

Art and Emergency

Author: Emilia Terracciano

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-10-30

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 178673270X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

During states of emergency, normal rules and rights are suspended, and force can often prevail. In these precarious intervals, when the human potential for violence can be released and rehearsed, images may also emerge. This book asks: what happens to art during a state of emergency? Investigating the uneasy relationship between aesthetics and political history, Emilia Terracciano traces a genealogy of modernism in colonial and postcolonial India; she explores catastrophic turning points in the history of twentieth-century India, via the art works which emerged from them. Art and Emergency reveals how the suspended, diagonal, fugitive lines of Nasreen Mohamedi's abstract compositions echo Partition's traumatic legacy; how the theatrical choreographies of Sunil Janah's photographs document desperate famine; and how Gaganendranath Tagore's lithographs respond to the wake of massacre. Making an innovative, important intervention into current debates on visual culture in South Asia, this book also furthers our understanding of the history of modernism.


Portraits and Philosophy

Portraits and Philosophy

Author: Hans Maes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-20

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0429581254

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Portraits are everywhere. One finds them not only in museums and galleries, but also in newspapers and magazines, in the homes of people and in the boardrooms of companies, on stamps and coins, on millions of cell phones and computers. Despite its huge popularity, however, portraiture hasn’t received much philosophical attention. While there are countless art historical studies of portraiture, contemporary philosophy has largely remained silent on the subject. This book aims to address that lacuna. It brings together philosophers (and philosophically minded historians) with different areas of expertise to discuss this enduring and continuously fascinating genre. The chapters in this collection are ranged under five broad themes. Part I examines the general nature of portraiture and what makes it distinctive as a genre. Part II looks at some of the subgenres of portraiture, such as double portraiture, and at some special cases, such as sport card portraits and portraits of people not present. How emotions are expressed and evoked by portraits is the central focus of Part III, while Part IV explores the relation between portraiture, fiction, and depiction more generally. Finally, in Part V, some of the ethical issues surrounding portraiture are addressed. The book closes with an epilogue about portraits of philosophers. Portraits and Philosophy tangles with deep questions about the nature and effects of portraiture in ways that will substantially advance the scholarly discussion of the genre. It will be of interest to scholars and students working in philosophy of art, history of art, and the visual arts.


Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England

Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England

Author: Susan Dwyer Amussen

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 9780719046957

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Combining the work of major scholars on both sides of the Atlantic this volume seeks to explore the interconnections between popular culture and political activism at both the local and central levels. Strongly influenced by the work of David Underdown, the contributions range across a spectrum of social and political history from witchcraft to the aristocracy, from forest riots to battles of the civil war. The volume combines chapters from historians of gender, of political theory, of social structure, and of high politics. Within this diversity, the contributors offer a cohesive approach to the study of early modern England, encouraging the exploration of mentalities and political activities, as well as artistic rendering, writing and ceremony within the widest context of cultural politics.