14/18 – Rupture or Continuity
14/18 – Rupture or Continuity

Author: Inga Rossi-Schrimpf

Publisher: Leuven University Press

Published: 2018-10-04

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 9462701369

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The impact of the Great War and its aftermath on Belgian artistic life World War I had a major effect on Belgian visual arts. German occupation, the horror at the battlefield and the experience of exile led to multiple narratives and artistic expressions by Belgian artists during and after the war. Belgian interbellum art is extremely vibrant and diverse. 14/18 – Rupture or Continuity takes a look at Belgian artistic life in the years around the First World War and how it was affected by this event. The Great War was a catalyst of artistic oppositions, leading on the one hand to a Belgian avant-garde that explored new forms and styles, while continuing to uphold a more traditional and established art on the other. Whereas the war experience consolidated an already present style for some artists, for others it constituted a revolution leading to new artistic adventures. The collection of essays in the present book highlights these contrasting facets of Belgian art in its rich historical context during the early 20th century.

Eileen Gray
Eileen Gray

Author: Jennifer Goff

Publisher: Irish Academic Press

Published: 2014-11-28

Total Pages: 575

ISBN-13: 071653312X

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The renowned and highly influential architect, furniture-maker, interior designer and photographer Eileen Gray was born in Ireland and remained throughout her life an Irishwoman at heart. An elusive figure, her interior world has never before been observed as closely as in this ground-breaking study of her work, philosophy and inner circle of fellow artists. Jennifer Goff expertly blends art history and biography to create a stunning ensemble, offering a clear beacon of light into truly understanding Gray - the woman and the professional. Gray was a self-taught polymath and her work was multi-functional, user-friendly, ready for mass production yet succinctly unique, and her designs show great technical virtuosity. Her expertise in lacquer work and carpet design, often overlooked, is given due attention in this book, as is her fascinating relationship with the architect Le Corbusier and many other compelling and complex relationships. The book also offers rare insights into Gray s early years as an artist. The primary source material for this book is drawn from the Eileen Gray collection at the National Museum of Ireland and its wealth of documentation, correspondence, personal archives, photographs and oral history.

On the Nature of Ecological Paradox
On the Nature of Ecological Paradox

Author: Michael Charles Tobias

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-05-18

Total Pages: 894

ISBN-13: 3030645266

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This work is a large, powerfully illustrated interdisciplinary natural sciences volume, the first of its kind to examine the critically important nature of ecological paradox, through an abundance of lenses: the biological sciences, taxonomy, archaeology, geopolitical history, comparative ethics, literature, philosophy, the history of science, human geography, population ecology, epistemology, anthropology, demographics, and futurism. The ecological paradox suggests that the human biological–and from an insular perspective, successful–struggle to exist has come at the price of isolating H. sapiens from life-sustaining ecosystem services, and far too much of the biodiversity with which we find ourselves at crisis-level odds. It is a paradox dating back thousands of years, implicating millennia of human machinations that have been utterly ruinous to biological baselines. Those metrics are examined from numerous multidisciplinary approaches in this thoroughly original work, which aids readers, particularly natural history students, who aspire to grasp the far-reaching dimensions of the Anthropocene, as it affects every facet of human experience, past, present and future, and the rest of planetary sentience. With a Preface by Dr. Gerald Wayne Clough, former Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and President Emeritus of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Foreword by Robert Gillespie, President of the non-profit, Population Communication.

Private Collecting, Exhibitions, and the Shaping of Art History in London
Private Collecting, Exhibitions, and the Shaping of Art History in London

Author: Stacey J. Pierson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-01-12

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1315311917

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The Burlington Fine Arts Club was founded in London in 1866 as a gentlemen’s club with a singular remit – to exhibit members’ art collections. Exhibitions were proposed, organized, and furnished by a group of prominent members of British society who included aristocrats, artists, bankers, politicians, and museum curators. Exhibitions at their grand house in Mayfair brought many private collections and collectors to light, using members’ social connections to draw upon the finest and most diverse objects available. Through their unique mode of presentation, which brought museum-style display and interpretation to a grand domestic-style gallery space, they also brought two forms of curatorial and art historical practice together in one unusual setting, enabling an unrestricted form of connoisseurship, where new categories of art were defined and old ones expanded. The history of this remarkable group of people has yet to be presented and is explored here for the first time. Through a framework of exhibition themes ranging from Florentine painting to Ancient Egyptian art, a study of lenders, objects, and their interpretation paints a picture of private collecting activities, connoisseurship, and art world practice that is surprisingly diverse and interconnected.

State Laughter
State Laughter

Author: Evgeny Dobrenko

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 435

ISBN-13: 0198840411

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Stalin's reign of terror was not all doom and gloom, much of it was (meant to be) funny! Tracing the development of official humour, satire, and comedy, Dobrenko and Jonsson-Skradol do away with the idea that all humour in the USSR was subversive, instead exploring why laughter was a core component to the survival of the Soviet regime.