Brushstroke and Emergence

Brushstroke and Emergence PDF Author: James D. Herbert
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022627215X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
No pictorial device in nineteenth-century French painting more clearly represented the free-ranging self than the loose brushstroke. From the romantics through the impressionists and post-impressionists, the brushstroke bespoke autonomous artistic individuality and freedom from convention. Yet the question of how much we can credit to the individual brushstroke is complicated—and in Brushstroke and Emergence, James D. Herbert uses that question as a starting point for an extended essay that draws on philosophy of mind, the science of emergence, and art history. Brushstrokes, he reminds us, are as much creatures of habit and embodied experience as they are of intent. When they gather in great numbers they take on a life of their own, out of which emerge complexity and meaning. Analyzing ten paintings by Courbet, Manet, Cézanne, Monet, Seurat, and Picasso, Herbert exposes vital relationships between intention and habit, the singular and the complex. In doing so, he uncovers a space worthy of historical and aesthetic analysis between the brushstroke and the self.

Brushstroke and Emergence

Brushstroke and Emergence PDF Author: James D. Herbert
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022627215X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Get Book Here

Book Description
No pictorial device in nineteenth-century French painting more clearly represented the free-ranging self than the loose brushstroke. From the romantics through the impressionists and post-impressionists, the brushstroke bespoke autonomous artistic individuality and freedom from convention. Yet the question of how much we can credit to the individual brushstroke is complicated—and in Brushstroke and Emergence, James D. Herbert uses that question as a starting point for an extended essay that draws on philosophy of mind, the science of emergence, and art history. Brushstrokes, he reminds us, are as much creatures of habit and embodied experience as they are of intent. When they gather in great numbers they take on a life of their own, out of which emerge complexity and meaning. Analyzing ten paintings by Courbet, Manet, Cézanne, Monet, Seurat, and Picasso, Herbert exposes vital relationships between intention and habit, the singular and the complex. In doing so, he uncovers a space worthy of historical and aesthetic analysis between the brushstroke and the self.

Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative

Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative PDF Author: Jack M. Greenstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226307077
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
In this study, Jack M. Greenstein draws on Early Renaissance art theory, modern narratology, translation studies, critical theory, the philosophy of history, and biblical hermeneutics to explicate the sense and significance of one of Andrea Mantegna's most enigmatic and influential works, the Uffizi Circumcision of Christ. Faced with a work that resists established methods of iconographical analysis, Greenstein reassesses the nature and goals of high humanist narrative painting. The result is a new, historically grounded theory of iconography that calls into question many widely held assumptions about the social and intellectual value of Early Renaissance art. Greenstein's theory rests on a careful analysis of Leon Battista Alberti's commentary On Painting, which equated both the form and the content of artistically composed painting with historia. Situating this equation within a centuries-old discourse on the multivalent significance of the Bible, Greenstein shows that, for Alberti, historia was a mode of artistic narrative, common to literature and painting, in which moral truths were presented to the corporeal senses, particularly to vision, in the guise of plausible human actions. In Greenstein's reading, the painter's primary task was the construction of a visually plausible narrative that effectively conveyed the higher meanings of historia. Having thus delineated the structure of significance in Albertian painting, Greenstein shows what was at stake when a painter of Mantegna's historical bent undertook to produce a historia. As one of the leading historical thinkers of his age, Mantegna imbued his depicted scenes with the plausibility of historical events by employing thosecodes of evidence, causality, and historical distance that underlay the Renaissance sense of the past. But the Circumcision of Christ resisted such treatment because the symbolic conventions developed by earlier artists for conveying the higher theological meanings of the theme were incompatible with the representational fidelity embraced by painters of historia. Mantegna overcame these difficulties by arriving at a new understanding of the Circumcision, which remained faithful to the narrative structure as well as the theological content of the biblical account. His interpretation was widely adopted by later artists, but was so pictorial in nature that, despite its consistency with the biblical account, it remained with-out parallel in theological literature. Greenstein's discovery--that artistic production of Albertian painting was a specialized and singularly visual form of thinking whose roots lay more in readerly hermeneutics than in perception, commerce, or common visual experience--raises questions about narrative, representation, and the textuality of art that will interest a wide array of scholars.

A Guide to Chicago's Murals

A Guide to Chicago's Murals PDF Author: Mary Lackritz Gray
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226305998
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description
Covering WPA murals to more current artwork, this handbook features full-color illustrations of nearly 200 Chicago murals with accompanying entries that describe their history. 204 color plates. 35 halftones.

The Rhetoric of Perspective

The Rhetoric of Perspective PDF Author: Hanneke Grootenboer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226309703
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
Perspective determines how we, as viewers, perceive painting. We can convince ourselves that a painting of a bowl of fruit or a man in a room appears to be real by the way these objects are rendered. Likewise, the trick of perspective can prevent us from being absorbed in a scene. Connecting contemporary critical theory with close readings of seventeenth-century Dutch visual culture, The Rhetoric of Perspective puts forth the claim that painting is a form of thinking and that perspective functions as the language of the image. Aided by a stunning full-color gallery, Hanneke Grootenboer proposes a new theory of perspective based on the phenomenological aspects of non-narrative still-life, trompe l'oeil, and anamorphic imagery. Drawing on playful and mesmerizing baroque images, Grootenboer characterizes what she calls their "sophisticated deceit," asserting that painting is more about visual representation than about its supposed objects. Offering an original theory of perspective's impact on pictorial representation, the act of looking, and the understanding of truth in painting, Grootenboer shows how these paintings both question the status of representation and explore the limits and credibility of perception. “An elegant and honourable synthesis.”—Keith Miller, Times Literary Supplement

The Liberation of Painting

The Liberation of Painting PDF Author: Patricia Leighten
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226471381
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
The years before World War I were a time of social and political ferment in Europe, which profoundly affected the art world. A major center of this creative tumult was Paris, where many avant-garde artists sought to transform modern art through their engagement with radical politics. In this provocative study of art and anarchism in prewar France, Patricia Leighten argues that anarchist aesthetics and a related politics of form played crucial roles in the development of modern art, only to be suppressed by war fever and then forgotten. Leighten examines the circle of artists—Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, František Kupka, Maurice de Vlaminck, Kees Van Dongen, and others—for whom anarchist politics drove the idea of avant-garde art, exploring how their aesthetic choices negotiated the myriad artistic languages operating in the decade before World War I. Whether they worked on large-scale salon paintings, political cartoons, or avant-garde abstractions, these artists, she shows, were preoccupied with social criticism. Each sought an appropriate subject, medium, style, and audience based on different conceptions of how art influences society—and their choices constantly shifted as they responded to the dilemmas posed by contradictory anarchist ideas. According to anarchist theorists, art should expose the follies and iniquities of the present to the masses, but it should also be the untrammeled expression of the emancipated individual and open a path to a new social order. Revealing how these ideas generated some of modernism’s most telling contradictions among the prewar Parisian avant-garde, The Liberation of Painting restores revolutionary activism to the broader history of modern art.

Color Harmonies

Color Harmonies PDF Author: Augusto Garau
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226281957
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 118

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Book Description
Because theories of visual perception have traditionally concentrated on form, artists have generally dealt with the problem of color through their own observation and intuition. In Color Harmonies, Augusto Garau systematically investigates the role of both color and form in visual perception and presents an original theory of the aesthetic relations among colors. Garau, a painter who teaches the psychology of form, pays particular attention to the way colors behave when organized in patterns. His theory of color combination addresses two principal compositional elements: the relations between figure and ground and the phenomenon of transparency. Garau meticulously analyzes the use of color in paintings by masters such as Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse to show how his theory applies to actual works of art. Containing many full-color examples, his introduction to the workings of color relations is of great practical use to art historians and critics, artists, interior decorators, fashion and set designers, and anyone who works with color to display information or convey emotions. "In an area of the psychology of art where reliable guidance is still so hard to come by, [Garau's] well-supported contributions to the theory of color composition ought to be welcomed by practitioners and scholars alike."—from the Foreword by Rudolf Arnheim

The Picture in Question

The Picture in Question PDF Author: Mark C. Taylor
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226791270
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
A rich exploration of the possibilities of representation after Modernism, Mark Taylor's new study charts the logic and continuity of Mark Tansey's painting by considering the philosophical ideas behind Tansey's art. Taylor examines how Tansey uses structuralist and poststructuralist thought as well as catastrophe, chaos, and complexity theory to create paintings that please the eye while provoking the mind. Taylor's clear accounts of thinkers ranging from Plato, Kant, and Hegel to Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and de Man will be an invaluable contribution to students and teachers of art.

Arcimboldo

Arcimboldo PDF Author: Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226426866
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
In Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s most famous paintings, grapes, fish, and even the beaks of birds form human hair. A pear stands in for a man’s chin. Citrus fruits sprout from a tree trunk that doubles as a neck. All sorts of natural phenomena come together on canvas and panel to assemble the strange heads and faces that constitute one of Renaissance art’s most striking oeuvres. The first major study in a generation of the artist behind these remarkable paintings, Arcimboldo tells the singular story of their creation. Drawing on his thirty-five-year engagement with the artist, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann begins with an overview of Arcimboldo’s life and work, exploring the artist’s early years in sixteenth-century Lombardy, his grounding in Leonardesque traditions, and his tenure as a Habsburg court portraitist in Vienna and Prague. Arcimboldo then trains its focus on the celebrated composite heads, approaching them as visual jokes with serious underpinnings—images that poetically display pictorial wit while conveying an allegorical message. In addition to probing the humanistic, literary, and philosophical dimensions of these pieces, Kaufmann explains that they embody their creator’s continuous engagement with nature painting and natural history. He reveals, in fact, that Arcimboldo painted many more nature studies than scholars have realized—a finding that significantly deepens current interpretations of the composite heads. Demonstrating the previously overlooked importance of these works to natural history and still-life painting, Arcimboldo finally restores the artist’s fantastic visual jokes to their rightful place in the history of both science and art.

Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter PDF Author: Dietmar Elger
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226203239
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
This fascinating book offers unprecedented insight into artist Gerhard Richter's life and work. From his childhood in Nazi Germany to his time in the West during the turbulent 1960s and '70s, this work presents a complete portrait of the often-reclusive Richter.

Absorption and Theatricality

Absorption and Theatricality PDF Author: Michael Fried
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226262130
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
With this widely acclaimed work, Michael Fried revised the way in which eighteenth-century French painting and criticism are viewed and understood. Analyzing paintings produced between 1753 and 1781 and the comments of a number of critics who wrote about them, especially Dennis Diderot, Fried discovers a new emphasis in the art of the time, based not on subject matter or style but on values and effects.