In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United StatesJane DuranAngloModern: Painting and Modernity in Britain and the United States, by Janet Wolff. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003, 172 pp.AngloModern, Janet Wolff's scintillating attempt to limn the construction of modernity in the visual arts, is more than worth reading for a number of reasons. In this work, she details how modernity positioned itself against a number of strands (...) of development, and then, by a process of exclusion, formulated its own stance. As poststructuralist theory has taught us, the procedures of building an excluded body against a center, when closely examined, frequently tell us more about a rubric or label than we could otherwise have imagined.Wolff is primarily concerned with three areas of exclusion/construction for the turn in the visual arts, painting in particular, that began at the opening of the twentieth century. Toward the beginning of the work, she notes that there was always a continuous realist and figurative genre at work even in modernist circles, but it seldom achieved anything like the recognition that the more typically abstract works we associate with the rise of modernism gained. She associates this area of nonrecognition with the work of women in particular, and these two areas alone — the realist/figurative and any work done by a woman artist — constitute two of her most important foci in AngloModern. In addition, and with some difficulty, since it adds a layer of complication, she is concerned about the exclusion and marginalization of Jewish artists during thisperiod — both in galleries and in thecommentary generated by the art world — although it is clear that many of the major "abstract" works associated with modernism were, in fact, produced by Jewish artists.Wolff is at her best in laying out in precise detail how it is that the culture of the art world throws up nearly insurmountable barriers against those deemed unworthy at a fairly early point in the construction of any new movement. The single strongest chapter in the work may well be the second, "Questions of Discovery: the Art of Kathleen McEnery," in which Wolff shows how various processes of categorization kept the work of this extremely talented woman from receiving anything like the recognition it deserved for a long period of time. Wolff sums up her overall project, and how it will relate to an artist such as McEnery, in her Introduction, when she writes:The story of modern art that is challenged [in her book] is the narrative tracing the development of Western painting from France to the United States, in a lineage more or less running from Manet and Post-Impressionism, by way of Cubism and Surrealism, to Abstract Expressionism. It is a story produced and reinforced by critics, academics, curators, and museum directors.(p. 3)Women artists, for example, were frequently excluded not only becausethey were women, but because they may have tended to engage in painting that was more realist, which itself [End Page 118] became coded as "feminine," and so forth. McEnery's intriguing portraits of the early two decades of the twentieth century were "discovered," as Wolff notes for the l987 inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, despite the fact that McEnery had at one point been fairly well-known (pp. 41-42). A woman at work in a figurative tradition, and working in suburban circles far away from the geographical centers of the art world, she was quickly at the mercy of the canonical forces of art historical construction.As we attempt to educate our students about rubrics, social movements, and the relationship of the arts to the political events of an era, we can do little better than to cite, for illustrative purposes, a number of interesting cases, and Wolff does just that. In sharp and incisive prose, she not only investigates McEnery's disappearance from the approved version of the early American modernist scene, but she also examines the construction of the early group displayed at the Whitney, the notion of the "feminine" in the work of Simmel and Benjamin, and, finally, the notion of the "Jewish artist." As her exemplar for the... (shrink)

In contemporary Chinese art the national traditions and modern trends of the art world are especially relevant. Since the 1980s, in the works of a number of authors, interest began to manifest itself in the techniques of silk work, which was characteristic of ancient and medieval painting on scrolls, which was later replaced by more accessible drawings on paper. At the present stage, such painting has reached its heyday and is highly appreciated in the art market. The most famous (...) masters engaged in silk painting are Mu Yilin and Dong Wenzheng. The analysis of their creations allows us to see how the artists discovered the expressive possibilities of this material, including its transparency, refraction, color and tone saturation. The object of attention is the Chinese tradition of painting on silk, and the subject is the features of its development at the beginning of the XXI century on the example of the work of famous artists and the options they take into account in the compositions of techniques, figurative structure and expressive means of the old masters. The purpose of the article is to identify the main themes and artistic means that modern artists use in their silk works, as well as the option of integrating an ethno-cultural component into their work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern ArtMatthew ZiffPainting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art, by David W. Galenson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001, 272 pp., $29.95.The relationship between the market value of paintings and the chronological point in an artist's working life when the paintings were produced is the driving mechanism for exploring creativity and innovation in David W. Galenson's (...) book "Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art. The working thesis of this book is that Modern artists have worked creatively and innovatively in one of two distinctly different manners. The terminology Galenson uses to describe these distinct ways of working are "finders" and "seekers." Finders are artists like Pablo Picasso, who at age 26, make startling and important innovations with little advance indication that such a burst is about to take place. Seekers are artists like Paul Cezanne, whospend their entire working lives engaged in the pursuit of a singular approach or achievement. The differences between these methodologies are carefully presented through the details of the working lives of a variety of Modern artists. French nineteenth century and early twentieth-century artists and mid-twentieth-century American artists are used as the source data for these comparisons.Early in the book Galenson presents lists of chronological events within the lives of artists and market valuation of their work within this chronology. The dramatic clarity of the relationships presented in this data sets the stage for the detailed information that follows. Factors that in some cases only partly, and in others nearly completely, explain an artist's way of working are offered through biographic information, information about the aesthetic and cultural milieu, and about the economic and educational structures that are predominant during the relevant time in the life of the artist.The relationship between the aesthetic and cultural milieu surrounding an artist and the capacity or inclination of an artist to be innovative is an important aspect of the book's analysis. The scope of the book is limited to Modern artists because of the shift that took place at the outset of Modern art, during the mid 1860s, that brought a strong emphasis on innovation and change for their own sake as an important characteristic within a work of art. This emphasis "created incentives for painters to produce new approaches to art" (p. 111). Prior to the time of Modern art, innovation and change were often unnecessary for an artist to be successful. Modern art introduced the demand that innovation and change be necessary ingredients in art, and therefore the search for innovation became a significant element within the work of many artists. The manner in which this search took place, as presented through the data at hand, reveals how individual artists viewed the need for innovation and change within their own [End Page 123] work. Paul Cezanne, for example, was aware of the impact that his painting was having on the art world, but he insisted that he was not yet finished with discoveries that would reveal the truest expression of his beliefs about aesthetic expression.In the American movement, "Abstract Expressionism," Galenson finds a useful counter example to the art scene in Paris. In the United States, especially during the 1940s and 1950s — the peak years of creative output by Abstract Expressionist artists — the demand for their work was quite low. There were few economically viable outlets for the work of de Kooning, Pollack, Rothko, and the others of this group. Consequently there is a shift in the chronological point at which these artists achieve market value success. Nearly all of these artists receivedrecognition at an older age than the French artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The thesis of the book, that there are two fundamentally different ways of working to produce works of art, is directly applicable to, and useful in, exploring issues of teaching and learning in design education. As a teacher of interior architecture I was interested to follow the details that Galenson presented in support of his analysis of the careers of numerous Modern artists. The methodological differences between seeking and... (shrink)

According to Marxist philosophy, everything in the world is universally connected and in perpetual motion. Chinese society has gone through a long history of civilizational development. Since the modern era (1840-1919), great changes have taken place in the civilizational development of China. The transformation of social forms depends on the transformation of culture, and the approximation of culture to modernity is a prerequisite for the modernization of society. Thus, the development of society inevitably causes changes in art and culture; (...) and vice versa, the progress of art and culture, in turn, contributes to the progress of society. A clear and complex line has been traced in the development of Chinese painting over the centuries: from a high degree of integration to gradual differentiation leading to conflict, and then to integration. The development of Chinese painting as a whole shows a transformational trend from tradition to modernity, developing in a tortuous way. In this paper, a combination of research methods is used for research, mainly documentary research, descriptive research, comparative research and case study. Considering the features and trends of Chinese painting at different stages of development, we can more accurately judge the direction of development of modern Chinese painting and find ways to integrate tradition and modernity. (shrink)

Dehejia has tried to create a place within the main frame of culture and philosophy of Indian art for a legitimate analytic theory called despair.

Essays on painting and its changes from the 1960s to the present.

British art historian Charles Harrison presumes the existence of a patriarchal world with power in the hands of men who dominate the representation of women and femininity. He applauds the ground-breaking work of feminist theorists who have questioned this imbalance of power since the 1970s. He stops short, however, of accepting their claims that all women have been represented by male artists as images of “utter passivity” (p. 4), routinely reduced by the male gaze to the status of exploited sexual (...) objects, or that women’s subjectivity is eroded by the visual treatment they receive at the hands of male artists such as Manet and Picasso. He wants to show that what is depicted in the picture plane by the (typically male) artist and enjoyed by the (typically male) spectator is more nuanced than just a simple privileged understanding between two men. He adds a third (and possibly fourth or more) party to the mix when he significantly redefines and expands our concept of the gaze: “A gaze may also be conceived of as a function of a painting’s represented content” (p. 9). In other words, a gaze may be “addressed outward by a represented figure,” and regardless of who and where, “the assumption conveyed by the term [‘gaze’] is that some differential and usually asymmetrical relation will be at stake in any exchange between one who directs the gaze and another at whom it is directed. In fact, it is just this difference—in age, in sex, in class, in interest, in power —that the operation of the gaze tends to mark” (p. 9). Referring to a woman depicted within the picture plane, he asks us to consider, “What does it feel like to look like this?” (p. 21) in order to entertain our many emotional responses and interpretations. When he adds, “What does it feel like to whom?” the sexual difference of the spectator also clearly comes into play. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Oinoe and the Painted Stoa: Ancient And Modern Misunderstandings?Jeremy G. TaylorThe argive and athenian defeat of the spartans in a battle at Argive Oinoe remains a problem for students of Greek art, Greek history, and the Periēgēsis of Pausanias.1 A painting of the battle stood in the Painted Stoa in the Athenian Agora (Paus. 1.15.1). At Delphi the Argives dedicated statues of the Seven against Thebes from the (...) spoils of victory, and statues of the Epigonoi nearby celebrated the same engagement, or so Pausanias believed (10.10.4). (See the Appendix for texts and translations.) The Stoa was erected by around 460 b.c.,2 and the sculptors of the Delphic statues, the Thebans Hypatodoros and Aristogeiton, appear to have been active in the 450s.3 Pausanias’ battle of Oinoe is therefore usually assigned to the middle of the fifth century, specifically to the period from 462, when Athens formed an alliance with Sparta’s old enemy Argos (Thuc. 1.102.4), to 451, when Athens and Sparta concluded a five–year truce (Thuc. 1.112.1).4 But a fifth–century b.c. battle, important enough to be commemorated by the Athenians in the Agora and the Argives at Delphi, yet so obscure that it is ignored by Thucydides and all surviving ancient authors except Pausanias in the second century a.d., is rightly seen as a puzzle. Moreover, the shadowy battle of Oinoe hardly seems to deserve a place alongside three other notable events depicted in the Stoa: Marathon, the Capture of Troy, and the Amazonomachy (Paus. 1.15.1–3). To take Pausanias at his word, therefore, is not an option without difficulties, and the skepticism of the [End Page 223] Cambridge Ancient History is justified: “The battle of Oinoe is not easy to believe in.”5But attempts to unravel Pausanias’ meaning raise problems of their own. One option is to amend the text. Thus for “Oinoe” read “Orneai” (Pritchett 1994), the name of a stronghold full of Argive exiles defended by a force of Lakedaimonians, which the Argives and Athenians razed to the ground in 416 (Thuc. 6.7.1–2). This suits Pausanias’ treatment of the Delphic monuments, but it remains unclear why the Athenians chose to celebrate this particular event in such a striking manner. A more popular approach is to argue that Pausanias misreported the painting. For example, the painting commemorated not Oinoe, but Oinophyta, perhaps with the local nymph Oinoe in attendance (Stier 1934). Oinophyta was certainly a famous Athenian victory, but the enemy was Boiotian not Spartan and, so far as we know, the Argives played no part (Thuc. 1.108.2–3). Alternatively, the painting celebrates a real battle at Oinoe via a mythical scene which (it is supposed) was associated with the area: the Athenians demanding the bodies of the Seven from the Thebans on behalf of the Argives (Jeffery 1965). But here again the Athenians would be squaring up to the wrong enemy. Or there is the bold suggestion of Francis and Vickers that the Oinoe painting has nothing to do with Oinoe in Argos but rather depicts the arrival of Plataian forces to join the Athenians at Marathon from the nearby Attic deme of Oinoe—and hence forms a companion piece to the Marathon painting. “We therefore imagine that the scene may have been depicted along the following lines: the Plataians are coming down the mountainside from Oinoe, in the vicinity of the Cave of Pan and perhaps beneath the gaze of Artemis Agrotera” (1985b, 103). From this perspective, though, Pausanias will have badly misread both the participants and the nature of the action.6 [End Page 224]These last three solutions suffer from the same difficulty. It is clearly unsatisfactory for us to accuse Pausanias of such a careless treatment of the Oinoe painting, while at the same time accepting down to the last detail, as most scholars do, his account of the other three pictures in the Stoa (to say nothing of his lengthy description of Polygnotos’ Sack of Troy and Nekuia in the Knidian Leschē, 10.25–31). Such carelessness is surely not characteristic of... (shrink)

SUMMARYEarly modern artists who did not have access to Roman Antiquity or needed quick access to it could refer to prints after monuments such as those issued by Antoine Lafréry. But Du Choul's Discours sur la castrametation et discipline militaire des Romains [ … ] De la Religion des anciens Romains was also successful among artists, particularly painters. It was in vernacular language and widely available in French, Spanish and Italian; it was affordable and compact in format ; it (...) had plenty of woodcuts; and it focused on the Roman military life, besides the monuments, for which information could also be found in travel guides. The present essay aims to study how Du Choul's volume circulated, with several examples from Spain and Italy. The Discours will be used as a case study of artists as readers, and I will study aspects previously overlooked such as the book's market price in the early modern period, examples of use of copies of the book by artists and, more broadly, the troubles and challenges encountered by these readers when representing subjects from ancient history. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 155-165.

The aim of the paper is to analyse the geometrical aspects of a series of modern paintings and to show the parallel between them and the development of modern geometry. It starts with El Greco, offering a geometrical explanation of his painting the figures in a prolonged manner. Further the analogy between the impressionist way of creating space and the geometrical idea of Cayley to use projective space as a basis for non-Euclidean geometry is reconstructed. Next the paper (...) describes the parallel between the creation of space in the paintings of Cézanne and Picasso and the concept of space in algebraic topology. In conclusion the paper deals with the analogy between Kandinski's abstract paintings and the set-theoretical foundations of geometry. (shrink)

Paintings of music are a significant presence in modern art. They are cross-modal representations, aimed at representing music, say, musical works or forms, using colors, lines, and shapes in the visual modality. This article aims to provide a conceptual framework for understanding paintings of music. Using examples from modern art, the article addresses the question of what a painting of music is. Implications for the aesthetic appreciation of paintings of music are also drawn.

The article identifies the manifestations of neomythology in Kazakh painting. Bricolage, as the basis of pre-logical, early human thinking, has not lost its relevance even in modern times, and it is being consciously disseminated. However, many researchers assert that the historical bricolage differs significantly from the contemporary artistic technique. As a creative technique with a conceptual underpinning, bricolage in XX century art manually produces a myth or imitates a myth. The mythology vanished and stopped existing, but the myth itself (...) persisted. The myth's cohesive narrative fabric has continued to fall apart, but the common mind's essence is still mythological, and the entire complex of its ideas aspires to systematization. The mythological network merges with cognitive processes, becoming an unconscious intellectual framework that sits on the periphery of religious activity. Although the myth's widespread dissemination unifies everyday consciousness, perceptions of the world are fragmentary, and the world's picture is shattered and transformed into a collage. Kazakh painting's archetypal mythical consciousness emphasizes that it unites traditionalism and modernism through its visual base. The presentation of archetypal images in an interpretive version within the framework of a new approach opens the way for the artist to create a new myth. Considering neo-mythologism in Kazakh painting, it is suggested that the new myth-making process is now taking place in Kazakh visual art. They are meta-views of modern art that are based on video art, which uses computer language and collage to create a pictorial language. (shrink)

The aim of the following paper is to show that it is not possible to penetrate into the depths of Nikolay Raynov's universe and to comprehend its wholeness, without posing and investigating the question about the origin or the foundation of his various creative occupations, i.e his novels, philosophic and theosophic writings, art history and critique, paintings, decorative design etc. This question is far too complex to be answered briefly without being simplified, and therefore two main directions will be articulated: (...) the recption of Orphism developed in Plotinus' and Porphyry's Neoplatonism – which is the basis of modern Theosophy –, and the synthetic understanding of art, which puts Raynov's views in close proximity to Wassily Kandinsky and Nicholas Roerich. (shrink)

With this widely acclaimed work, Fried revised the way in which eighteenth-century French painting and criticism were viewed and understood. "A reinterpretation supported by immense learning and by a series of brilliantly perceptive readings of paintings and criticism alike.... An exhilarating book." John Barrell, "London Review of Books".

English-language translation of a major work by French philosopher Eric Alliez, in which he offers a new perspective on critical problems in modern aesthetics.

_Toward a Grammar ofion_ takes as its point of departure three features of modern art reading: the practice of translating the visual into institutional language, the vocabulary of representation in relation to abstract art, and the prevalence of totality as a model of art-historical knowledge.

English-language translation of a major work by French philosopher Eric Alliez, in which he offers a new perspective on critical problems in modern aesthetics.

About the book: One of the issues underlying current debates between practitioners of art history, visual culture and aesthetics is whether the visual is a unique, irreducible category, or whether it can be assimilated with the textual or verbal without any significant loss. Can paintings, buildings or installations be 'read' in the way texts are read or deciphered, or do works of visual art ask for their own kind of appreciation? This is not only a question of choosing the right (...) method in dealing with visual works of art, but also an issue that touches on the roots of the disciplines involved: can a case be made for the visual as an irreducible category of art, and if so, how is it best studied and appreciated? In this anthology, this question is approached from the angles of three disciplines: aesthetics, visual culture and art history. Unlike many existing overviews of visual culture studies, it includes both painting and architecture, and investigates historical ways of defining and appreciating the visual in their own, contemporary terms. Dealing with the Visual will be of great use to advanced students because it offers an overview of current debates, and to graduate students and professionals in the field because the essays offer in-depth investigations of the methodological issues involved and various historical ways of defining visuality. The topics included range from early modern ways of viewing pictures and sixteenth-century views of Palladio's villas in their landscape settings to contemporary debate about whether there is life yet in painting. (shrink)

My topic is authenticity in or perhaps as painting, not the authenticity of paintings; I know next to nothing about the problem of verifying claims of authorship. I am interested in another kind of genuineness and fraudulence, the kind at issue when we say of a person that he or she is false, not genuine, inauthentic, lacks integrity, and, especially when we say he or she is playing to the crowd, playing for effect, or is a poseur. These are not (...) quite moral distinctions (no one has a duty to be authentic), but they are robustly normative appraisals, applicable even when such falseness is not a case of straight hypocrisy but of lack of self-knowledge or of self-deceit. (A person can be quite sincere and not realize the extent of her submission to the other’s expectations and demands.) This sort of appraisal also has a long history in post-Rousseauist reflections on the dangers of uniquely modern forms of social dependence, and they are prominent worries in the modern novel. (shrink)

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Paul Klee’s sense of modern art and his own painting as the channeling of the originary movement of life leads to an insight beyond modern art, and back towards such dynamic cosmological experiences as that of the Onas people of Patagonia. In their daily life and their rituals their painted bodies expressed the living force of their cosmos, an originary energy that occurred at the limit of what one may call art and nature. In engaging Klee’s painting and (...) drawing, one is brought to such an open space of living transformative movement; one finds a place wider than our present imagination, a time-space that in our being exposed to his works and experience remains for us to inhabit. (shrink)

At M. Bernard's I saw several magnificent paintings on porcelain by Monsieur Constantin. In two hundred years, Raphael's frescoes will be known only through Monsieur Constantin.Stendhal, Voyage en France, 1837If we compare the forms that the act of copying has assumed in various civilizations, we cannot fail to notice that a certain number of phenomena are specific to European culture since the Renaissance. Perhaps one of the most singular of these phenomena is the will to create and to possess imperishable (...) reproductions of works that have been singled out, at a given moment, as the brightest jewels of Western art. The history of the fortune of Graeco-Roman sculptures has been masterfully related by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny in Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900, even if it would no doubt be worthwhile to give further consideration to the critical fortune of materials used for reproduction, and particularly to the particular prestige attached to bronze—from the Mantuan works of Antico to the reconstitutions of Greek Urbilder in bronze, instead of the plaster used earlier, which were executed at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as the two Doryphoros that Georg Römer realized from various ancient marble copies of Polyclitus's athlete. But, in fact, it was not only in modern Europe that copies were made in bronze. The production of copies using this alloy was particularly prevalent in imperial China after the rediscovery, in the second half of the eleventh century of our era, of a collection of archaic bronzes from the Shang era. This is why I prefer to call attention to a practice that appears to me, in contrast, to be unique to the Western world: the copying of renowned paintings in materials that are supposed to defy time. (shrink)

Painted ceramics occupy an important place in ancient Chinese art and are the result of creative activity of people of primitive society. A large number of Neolithic patterns on ceramics are similar to those signs and symbols that were made on jade products of the same period. Such patterns resembled drawings made by hand and represented realistic and abstract ornaments, plant, zoomorphic patterns, etc. Thus, the subject of this study is the so-called "jade" patterns on painted ceramics of the Neolithic (...) era. The object of the study are objects of painted ceramics of the Neolithic era in China. Special attention is paid to the consideration of the specifics of ceramic products, as well as the features of their decors. The semantics of images on objects of Chinese painted ceramics is complex and ambiguous. The study revealed that it is associated with the development of human thinking, people's understanding of natural phenomena, awareness of the changing seasons, as well as the emergence of animism and totemic culture. These patterns had different interpretations, while they were not only a way of expressing the feelings and experiences of primitive people, but also a way for them to record important events from life, similar to modern memoirs. Thus, the novelty of this article is its comparative nature, manifested in the comparison of ornaments of painted ceramics and ancient Chinese jade products. (shrink)