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Yale University Press
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This lavishly illustrated volume is the first comprehensive publication on the Brooklyn Museum of Art's internationally renowned historic costume collection. The nearly 25,000-object collection comprises fashionable women's and men's garments and accessories from the 18th through the 20th centuries. It features sumptuous 19th-century gowns from the House of Worth, exquisite works by the great 20th-century French couturiers, iconic Surrealist-based designs of Elsa Schiaparelli, sportswear classics from pioneer American designers, and the incomparable draped and tailored creations of Charles James. In 2009, the Brooklyn Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art entered into a groundbreaking long-term partnership to steward Brooklyn's collection. The objects were transferred to The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan, with Brooklyn maintaining curatorial access. Exhibitions of costumes from the collection will be held at both institutions in early May 2010. |
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Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) was one of the most influential, imaginative and inspirational designers at the turn of the millennium. His fashions both challenged and expanded the conventional parameters of clothing beyond utility to a compelling expression of culture, politics and identity. Focusing on the most iconic and acclaimed designs of his prolific career, this stunning book examines McQueen's inimitable technical virtuosity and its subversion of traditional tailoring and dressmaking practices. This book also focuses on the highly sophisticated narrative structures found in McQueen's collections and in his astonishing and extravagant runway presentations, which suggested the most avant-garde installation and performance art. Intended as an assessment of Alexander McQueen's entire career, this book includes in-depth studies of six collections that illustrate and encapsulate thematic chapters as well as an interview with Sarah Burton, the new creative director of Alexander McQueen who had been the designer's right-hand design aide since 1996. |
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What woman can resist imagining herself in a beautiful designer dress? Here, for the first time ever, are 100 fabulous gowns from the permanent collection of the renowned Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, each of which is a reminder of the ways fashion reflects the broader culture that created it. Featuring designs by Paul Poiret, Coco Chanel, Madame Gres, Yves Saint Laurent, Gianni Versace, Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, and many others, this one-of-a-kind collection presents a stunning variety of garments. Ranging from the buttoned-up gowns of the late 17th century to the cutting-edge designs of the early 21st, the dresses provide a vivid picture of the sensibilities and excesses of each era while providing a vivid picture of how styles have changed — sometimes radically — over the years. A late 1600s wool dress with a surprising splash of silver thread; a large-bustled red satin dress from the 1800s; a short, shimmery 1920s dancing dress; a glamorous 1950s cocktail dress; and, a 1960s minidress — each tells a story about its period and serves as a testament to the enduring ingenuity of the fashion designer's art. Images of the dresses are accompanied by informative text and enhanced by close-up details as well as runway photos, fashion plates, works of art, and portraits of designers. A glossary of related terms is also included. |
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«With a consuming enthusiasm for the paintings of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), art collector Sterling Clark assembled one of the greatest private collections of Renoir's work during the first half of the twentieth century. Today the masterpieces he so admired form a vital part of the Impressionist holdings of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. «The Genius of Renoir: Paintings from the Clark» offers a fascinating, fresh look at the thirty-two Renoir paintings in the Clark collection, featuring beautiful digital colour reproductions created especially for this volume. This book brings to light new and often revelatory scholarship concerning the importance of each work both within Renoir's oeuvre and within the Clark collection. Among the richly varied paintings, encompassing portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, are such key works as «Marie-Therese Durand-Ruel Sewing», «A Box at the Theatre» (At the Concert), «Onions», and «Venice: the Doge's Palace». John House, a leading authority on Renoir, offers an in-depth analysis of each of the works in the collection, and curator-author James Ganz draws on extensive archival research on Sterling Clark's pursuits as an art collector and museum founder to illuminate this visionary and often enigmatic man.» |
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The 18th-century painter Johan Zoffany (1733-1810) was an astute observer of the many social circles in which he functioned as an artist over the course of his long career. This catalogue investigates his sharp wit, shrewd political appraisal, and perceptive social commentary (including subtle allusions to illicit relationships) — all achieved while presenting his subjects as delightful and sophisticated members of polite society. A skilled networker, Zoffany established himself at the court of George III and Queen Charlotte soon after his arrival in England from his native Germany. At the same time, he befriended the leading actor David Garrick and through him became the foremost portrayer of Georgian theatre. His brilliant effects and deft style were well suited to theatricality of all sorts, enabling him to secure patronage in England and on the continent. Following a prolonged visit to Italy he travelled to India, where he quickly became a popular and established member within the circle of Warren Hastings, the governor-general. Zoffany's Indian paintings are among his most spectacular and allowed him to return to England enriched and warmly welcomed. This volume provides a sparkling overview of his finest works. |
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«In recent decades Japanese art has achieved immense popularity in the West while being little understood. Critics have focused on the superficiality and infantilism they find prevalent in much of the work, while many Westerners are familiar with the country's artistic side solely through manga and anime. «Bye Bye Kitty!!!» offers a more incisive and wide-ranging view of the contemporary Japanese art scene, depicted through the works of fifteen artists, ranging in age from twenty-seven to forty-five and working in painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and video. The book's title invokes the subtle irony and subversive techniques adopted by this new generation of artists in their rebellion against the kawaii, or 'cute', aesthetic of mainstream Japanese culture. An essay by David Elliott provides an overview of the artists and explores many of the societal questions, such as the role of feminism, the rise of the 'salaryman', and reflections on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, featured in their works. A contribution by Tetsuya Ozaki illuminates the history and culture of Japan's current Heisei era, which began in January 1989 after the death of Emperor Hirohito. The artists featured in «Bye Bye Kitty!!!» demonstrate that they have the power not only to reconfigure international stereotypes about the current state of Japanese art but also to shape the very landscape of contemporary Japanese art itself.» |
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Traces the origins and growth of modern art, assessing the intrinsic qualities of individual works and describing the social forces in play. The book covers various areas including works of Impressionism, Cubism, Constructivism and Surrealism. |
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«The history of America is largely a history of the sea. This marvelous book features a selection of more than two hundred of the finest objects from Mystic Seaport that tell the history of America and its maritime heritage. Presented with accessible texts and beautiful reproductions are masterpieces of maritime painting, exquisite photographs of classic yachts and powerboat races, and diverse prints and watercolors. Unique examples of American folk art-yarn paintings, reverse paintings on glass, sailors' valentines, shadowbox ship models, and ships in bottles-are also explored in detail, along with watercraft, scrimshaw, ship figureheads, and silver yachting trophies. Essays written by distinguished experts describe the individual forms of expression, discuss the artists and craftsmen, and offer commentary on the ways in which America's maritime history is interwoven with its economic development and cultural history. Elegantly designed and lavishly produced, «America and the Sea «offers intriguing new evidence of the indisputable relevance of maritime history to American life and art.» |
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From the 1850s to the 1950s, American art and culture progressed from provincial status to international prominence, and American art transitioned from figurative depictions of the particular to abstract interpretations of universal ideals. This beautiful book chronicles this complex century of maturation through a selection of paintings from the extraordinary collection of the Addison Gallery of American Art. Coming of Age begins with Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, and the Hudson River School landscapes that embody the new nationalism of mid-nineteenth-century America. Their successors, Luminists like Jasper Cropsey and Fitz H. Lane, infused their immediate surroundings with glowing light and crystalline clarity, while contemporary Barbizon-influenced tonalists, such as George Inness, sought to capture the American ethos through an emotional, atmospheric landscape language. In the later 19th century, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and Eastman Johnson depicted native subjects through the lens of realism. Childe Hassam and Maurice Prendergast brought Impressionist aesthetics to America, while expatriates including John Singer Sargent and James McNeil Whistler established themselves in European art capitals. In New York, turn-of-the-century Ashcan school painters captured the gritty cityscape that would later host champions of modernism Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, and Marsden Hartley. In the 1930s, European-trained artist Josef Albers introduced a generation of American painters to new theories of color and space from which emerged the breakthrough Abstract Expressionists. By the 1950s, American art had come of age, as Americans securely held the vanguard position in the international art world. |
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Late in his career Thomas Gainsborough became preoccupied with the theme of the cottage door, and he created a group of paintings and drawings that show rustic figures clustered around the open door of a cottage set in a deeply wooded landscape. Often seen as exemplars of the rural idyll, these works were among the first landscape paintings to reflect the eighteenth-century aesthetic of sensibility. As a way of seeing, sensibility valued nature for its innocence and simplicity, and images, such as Gainsborough’s cottage subjects, for their power to move the viewer. This lovely book brings together the cottage door paintings and essays that discuss Gainsborough’s departure from the more naturalistic style of his earlier career and that place his new concern with sentimentalism and artificiality in the context of sensibility and the growing interest in expressive, even sensational, visual spectacles. To this end, contributors to the volume investigate new viewing practices associated with sensibility, the meaning of the cottage for Gainsborough and his contemporaries, the artist’s creation of affecting landscapes through the use of peasant subjects, and his theatrical treatment of these subjects in order to heighten his viewers’ emotional responses. |
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Federico Barocci was among the most admired painters in sixteenth-century Italy, but the distinctive nature of his compelling altarpieces and their historical importance have never been fully understood. This important study relates Barocci’s achievements to transformations in the theory and practice of painting during an era in which pictorial developments generated deep tensions for ecclesiastical art. Barocci was celebrated as one of the only painters whose religious works combined the sensuous allure increasingly desired in modern art with profound devotion. Through a close study of Barocci’s work and of documents ranging from letters to art theory, Stuart Lingo reconstructs how the painter accomplished his artistic and cultural miracle. In so doing, he offers new insights into critical artistic issues in the late Renaissance, from the cultural significance of stylistic choices to the early development of analogies between painting and music as affective arts. |
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Working in his villa in the south of France, Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947) suffused his late canvases with radiant Mediterranean light and dazzling color. Although his subjects were close at hand—usually everyday domestic scenes—Bonnard rarely painted from life. Instead, he made pencil sketches in diaries and relied on these, along with his memory, as he executed the works in his studio. These interiors thus often conflate details from the artist’s daily life with fleeting, mysterious evocations of his past. The spectral figures who appear at the margins of the canvases, overshadowed by brilliantly colored baskets of fruit or other props, create an atmosphere of profound ambiguity and puzzling abstraction: the mundane rendered in a wholly new pictorial language. The 75 paintings, drawings, and watercolors in this volume, some rarely seen treasures from private collections, all made between 1923 and 1947, are central to the ongoing reappraisal of Bonnard as a leading figure of French modernism. |
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During the decades from 1900 to 1940, art in France developed in ways that were of paramount importance to 20th-century art. This illustrated account sets these developments within the framework of the unstable social, political, intellectual and artistic worlds of the time and analyses the innovations of artists ranging from Matisse to Picasso, Duchamp to Dali. |
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This is the second volume of the catalogue raisonne of the work of the American painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). It comprises over 150 formal portraits and portrait sketches in oil and watercolour that he painted between 1889 and 1900. The catalogued works have been grouped into chronological sections, each with its own introduction to set the particular group in context. In addition, an overall introduction places Sargent in the context of European portraiture of the past and of his own time. Each work is documented in depth: entries include traditional data about the painting or watercolour; details of the work's provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography; a short biography of the sitter; a discussion of the circumstances in which the work was created; and a critical discussion of its subject matter, style, and significance in Sargent's career. With very few exceptions, all the works are reproduced in colour. There is also an illustrated inventory of Sargent's studio props and accessories and a cross-referenced checklist of the portraits in which they appear. |
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Mark Wilson Jones explores how the architects of ancient Rome approached design. Drawing on new archaeological discoveries and his own analyses of Roman monuments, the author discusses how the ancient architects dealt with the principles of architecture and the practicalities of construction as they engaged in the creative process. |
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Dürer and Beyond presents a selection of 100 works from the Metropolitan Museum's outstanding collection of German, Swiss, Austrian, and Bohemian drawings. Featured are numerous drawings by Albrecht Dürer, including his celebrated study sheet with a self-portrait. In addition to drawings by major artists such as Martin Schongauer, Albrecht Altdorfer, Urs Graf, Hans Holbein the Younger, Friedrich Sustris, and Wenceslaus Hollar, the selection also highlights work by lesser known but equally superb draftsmen from the 14th to the end of the 17th century. Richly illustrated and fully documented with artist biographies, comparative illustrations, and enlightening commentary on the variety, quality, and purpose of the featured drawings, this book makes a significant scholarly contribution to a field that has not been widely explored. |
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Born in Bologna, Annibale Carracci (1564–1609) was one of the most revolutionary artists of the late Renaissance. Even before turning twenty, he rebelled against convention by investing his art with a sense of naturalism uncommon to paintings of the period. His early painting The Butcher’s Shop, a cherished work in the Kimbell Art Museum’s collection, marks the beginning of Carracci’s artistic journey and remains one of his most powerfully naturalistic works. This fascinating study explores the origins and significance of The Butcher’s Shop, placing it within the artist’s own career as well as the broader context of Italian painting. Detailing the uniqueness and vitality of Carracci’s style, C. D. Dickerson emphasizes the remarkable plein-air quality of the painting and explains how Carracci may have achieved this utterly novel effect, though in fact executing the work indoors in his studio. He also sets Carracci’s work in the tradition of butcher’s shop paintings in Renaissance Italy, analyzes the painting in relation to the reality of the occupation at the time, and investigates where in Bologna such a butcher’s shop might have stood. |
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Noted for its vivid colors, elaborate use of symbols, and dedication to close observation of the natural world, the work of Pre-Raphaelite artists combines a deep engagement with the past and a modern realism that exemplifies the concerns of the age of steam travel. In Reading the Pre-Raphaelites, author Tim Barringer draws on an imaginative selection of paintings, drawings, and photographs to suggest that the dynamic energy of Pre-Raphaelitism arose out of the paradoxes at its heart. Past and present, historicism and modernity, symbolism and realism, as well as the tensions between city and country, men and women, worker and capitalist, colonizer and colonized all make appearances within Pre-Raphaelite art. By focusing on these issues, Barringer draws together the strands of revisionist thought on the Pre-Raphaelites and provides a range of stimulating new interpretations of their work. Beautifully illustrated, the revised edition of this authoritative survey traces the history of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and includes new sections on photography as well as a revised introduction and bibliography. |
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«Although separated by time, Miuccia Prada and Elsa Schiaparelli — both Italian, both feminists — share striking affinities in terms of their design strategies and fashion manifestoes. Presented as an intimate «conversation», Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations aims to tease out formal and conceptual similarities between the two designers. Striking photographs and insightful texts illustrate the parallels between the two, including their preferences for interesting textiles and prints, eccentric color palettes, and a bold and playful approach to styling and accessories. Schiaparelli, in the 1920s through 50s, and Prada, from the late 1980s to today, exploited the narrative possibilities of prints, sought out unconventional textiles, played with ideas of good and bad taste, and manipulated scale for surrealistic outcomes. Contemporary art plays a major role in the work of these inventive women — Schiaparelli in her famous collaborations with Dali and Cocteau, and Prada via her Fondazione Prada. Blending the historic with the contemporary, the catalogue brings the masterworks of both designers together into a grand conversation between the most important women fashion designers to ever emerge from Italy.» |
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This sumptuously illustrated book offers a completely new way of looking at the art of Vincent van Gogh, by exploring the artist's approach to nature through his innovative use of the close-up view. Focusing on the last years of the artist's career—from 1886 until his death in July 1890—an international team of leading scholars in the field examines Van Gogh's radical approach to the close-up and sets it in the context of contemporary and historical references, such as his hitherto unrecognized use of photography and his fascination with the Old Masters and with Japanese art and culture. One hundred key paintings dating from his arrival in Paris in 1886 to the end of his career show how Van Gogh experimented with unusual visual angles and the decorative use of color, cropping, and the flattening of his compositions. In some paintings he zoomed in on a tuft of grass or a single budding iris, while depicting shifting views of a field or garden in others. Van Gogh: Up Close not only reveals how these paintings became the most radical and innovative in the artist's body of work but also demonstrates that, far from being a spontaneous or undisciplined artist, Van Gogh was well aware of the history of art and was highly conscious of his efforts to break new ground with his work. |
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