"This book offers the first critical reassessment of an artist whose mature oeuvre constitutes a rich and often disquieting critique that is equal parts wit, seduction, and bite. Honorae Sharrer (1920-2009) was a major figure in the years surrounding World War II, though her commitment to leftist ideals and an alternate trajectory of surrealism put her at increasing odds with the political and artistic climate of the time"--
The PIMS Yearbook is the annual yearbook of the International Panorama Council (IPC, Switzerland). It surveys the historical and contemporary landscape of panoramic and immersive media. This interdisciplinary field includes--but is not limited to--360-degree paintings; dioramas and museum displays; gaming; gardens; immersive experience; maps; material culture studies; media archeology; nineteenth-century popular media; optical and haptic devices; performative media; printed matter; public history; and virtual and augmented reality. Whereas the notion of the panoramic describes extensive, expansive and/or all-embracing vistas, immersion refers to porous interfaces between representation and the real, observer and observed, nature and culture, and past, present, and future. Together, the concepts of panorama and immersion have catalyzed time- and space-bending strategies for creating, experiencing, and transforming culture, ideas, and built and social space across the arc of human history. The PIMS Yearbook presents a range of disciplinary perspectives with the understanding that methodologies in the humanities, the arts, the sciences, design disciplines, social sciences, engineering, and other fields contribute important perspectives to the interdisciplinary field of panoramic and immersive media studies. The IPC is the international organization of panorama specialists committed to supporting the heritage and conservation of extant nineteenth and early-twentieth-century panoramas, and promoting awareness of the medium's history, derivative forms, and contemporary iterations. As a non-government and not-for-profit association subject to Swiss law, the IPC is active in the fields of panorama research, restoration, financing, management, exhibition, and marketing. The PIMS Yearbook succeeds the International Panorama Council Journal (IPCJ), a selected proceedings of the annual conferences of the IPC, published 2017-2023.
Often seen as backward-looking and convention-bound, genre painting representing scenes of everyday life was central to the work of twentieth-century artists such as John Sloan, Norman Rockwell, Jacob Lawrence, and others, who adapted such subjects to an era of rapid urbanization, mass media, and modernist art. Re-envisioning the Everyday asks what their works do to the tradition of genre painting and whether it remains a meaningful category through which to understand them. Working with and against the established narrative of American genre painting’s late nineteenth-century decline into obsolescence, John Fagg explores how artists and illustrators used elements of the tradition to picture everyday life in a rapidly changing society, whether by appealing to its nostalgic and historical connotations or by updating it to address new formal and thematic concerns. Fagg argues that genre painting enabled twentieth-century artists to look slowly and carefully at scenes of everyday life and, on some occasions, to understand those scenes as sites of political oppression and resistance. But it also limited them to anachronistic ways of seeing and tied them to a freighted history of stereotyping and condescension. By surveying genre painting when its status and relevance were uncertain and by looking at works that stretch and complicate its boundaries, this book considers what the form is and probes the wider practice of generic categorization. It will appeal to students and scholars of American art history, art criticism, and cultural studies.
At the height of his career as the leader of the Hudson River School of American landscape painting, Thomas Cole listed himself in the New York City Directory as an architect. Why would this renowned painter, who had never before designed a building, advertise himself as such? The importance of Cole’s paintings and the significance of his essays, poems, and philosophy are well established, yet an analysis of his architectural endeavors and their impact on his painting has not been undertaken—until now. In celebration of the recreation of the artist’s self-designed Italianate studio at Cedar Grove in Catskill, New York, now the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, this book focuses on Cole’s architectural interests through architectural elements found in his paintings and drawings as well as in his realized and visionary projects, expanding our understanding of the breadth of his talents and interests. An essay by noted art historian Annette Blaugrund and a contribution by Franklin Kelly, illustrated with Cole’s famous works, sketches, and architectural renderings, reveal an unexplored, yet fascinating, aspect of the career of this beloved artist—and thus, a crucial moment in the development of the Hudson River School and American art. Published to coincide with the exhibition “Thomas Cole: The Artist as Architect” at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site and travelling to the Columbus Art Museum, the book adds a new dimension to scholarship on the artist.
This essay collection, by scholars from both the United States and Europe, carefully examines the artwork of one of the most important 20th-century American painters and printmakers, George Bellows. It builds on the Columbus Museum of Art’s 2013 exhibition, George Bellows and the American Experience, and the National Gallery of Art’s 2012 exhibition, George Bellows. The volume offers innovative research that explores his oeuvre from multiple viewpoints. The essays challenge widely held perceptions of Bellows, such as his Americanness, hyper-masculinity, patronage, response to the World War I, and his relationship to fellow artist Edward Hopper. This is an essential collection for any serious study on Bellows’ work.
Boats on Land is a unique way of looking at India’s northeast and its people against a larger historical canvas—the early days of the British Raj, the World Wars, conversions to Christianity, and the missionaries. This is a world in which the everyday is infused with folklore and a deep belief in the supernatural. Here, a girl dreams of being a firebird. An artist watches souls turn into trees. A man shape-shifts into a tiger. Another is bewitched by water fairies. Political struggles and social unrest interweave with fireside tales and age-old superstitions. Boats on Land quietly captures our fragile and awkward place in the world.
Literary Nonfiction. Art. Art History. Drawing wisdom from ancient philosophers and poets, and the spirited rebellion of the contemporary arts scene, Minus Plato makes daily musings and ruminations concerning the state of global politics and the duty of citizens to dissent. This book records a year of critical thinking and the ensuing conversations, examining our everyday lives under the Trump administration, so that we may responsibly affect the future.
"Riotous Baroque" confronts pictures from the seventeenth century with art of the present day. The exhibition focuses on the "riotous" aspect and the proximity to life that is a recurring theme in the literature on the Baroque. The show wishes to extricate the concept of the Baroque from its conventional context within the history of style and to distance itself from formai artistic clichés. "Riotous Baroque" is not about pomp, ornament and gold, but about "Tributes to Precarious Vitality" - a vitality that is lived, rediscovered, lost, projected, and threatened by death.
David Lynch is internationally renowned as a filmmaker, but it is less known that he began his creative life as a visual artist and has maintained a devoted studio practice, developing an extensive body of painting, prints, photography, and drawing. Featuring work from all periods of LynchÕs career, this book documents LynchÕs first major museum exhibition in the United States, bringing together works held in American and European collections and from the artistÕs studio. Much like his movies, many of LynchÕs artworks revolve around suggestions of violence, dark humor, and mystery, conveying an air of the uncanny. This is often conveyed through the addition of text, wildly distorted forms, and disturbances in the paint fields that surround or envelop his figures. While a few relate to his film projects, most are independent works of art that reveal a parallel trajectory. Organized in close collaboration with the artist, David Lynch: The Unified Field brings together ninety-five paintings, drawings, and prints from 1965 to the present, often unified by the recurring motif of the home as a site of violence, memories, and passion. Other works explore the odd, tender, and mincing aspects of relationships. Highlighting many works that have rarely been seen in public, including early work from his critical years in Philadelphia (1965Ð70), this catalog offers a substantial response to dealer Leo Castelli's comment when he enthusiastically viewed LynchÕs work in 1987, ÒI would like to know how he got to this point; he cannot be born out of the head of Zeus.Ó Published in association with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
