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The Pensive Image
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Book Synopsis The Pensive Image by : Hanneke Grootenboer
Download or read book The Pensive Image written by Hanneke Grootenboer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grootenboer considers painting as a form of thinking in itself, rather than a subject of philosophical and interpretive thought. While the philosophical dimension of painting has long been discussed, a clear case for painting as a form of visual thinking has yet to be made. Traditionally, vanitas still life paintings are considered to raise ontological issues while landscapes direct the mind toward introspection. Grootenboer moves beyond these considerations to focus on what remains unspoken in painting, the implicit and inexpressible that manifests in a quality she calls pensiveness. Different from self-aware or actively desiring images, pensive images are speculative, pointing beyond interpretation. An alternative pictorial category, pensive images stir us away from interpretation and toward a state of suspension where thinking through and with the image can start. In fluid prose, Grootenboer explores various modalities of visual thinking— as the location where thought should be found, as a refuge enabling reflection, and as an encounter that provokes thought. Through these considerations, she demonstrates that artworks serve as models for thought as much as they act as instruments through which thinking can take place. Starting from the premise that painting is itself a type of thinking, The Pensive Image argues that art is capable of forming thoughts and shaping concepts in visual terms.
Book Synopsis Arcimboldo by : Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann
Download or read book Arcimboldo written by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis Pictures of Nothing by : Kirk Varnedoe
Download or read book Pictures of Nothing written by Kirk Varnedoe and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-17 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illuminating exploration of the meaning of abstract art by acclaimed art historian Kirk Varnedoe "What is abstract art good for? What's the use—for us as individuals, or for any society—of pictures of nothing, of paintings and sculptures or prints or drawings that do not seem to show anything except themselves?" In this invigorating account of abstract art since Jackson Pollock, eminent art historian Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, asks these and other questions as he frankly confronts the uncertainties we may have about the nonrepresentational art produced in the past five decades. He makes a compelling argument for its history and value, much as E. H. Gombrich tackled representation fifty years ago in Art and Illusion, another landmark A. W. Mellon Lectures volume. Realizing that these lectures might be his final work, Varnedoe conceived of them as a statement of his faith in modern art and as the culminating example of his lucidly pragmatic and philosophical approach to art history. He delivered the lectures, edited and reproduced here with their illustrations, to overflowing crowds at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the spring of 2003, just months before his death. With brilliance, passion, and humor, Varnedoe addresses the skeptical attitudes and misunderstandings that we often bring to our experience of abstract art. Resisting grand generalizations, he makes a deliberate and scholarly case for abstraction—showing us that more than just pure looking is necessary to understand the self-made symbolic language of abstract art. Proceeding decade by decade, he brings alive the history and biography that inform the art while also challenging the received wisdom about distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, and minimalism and pop. The result is a fascinating and ultimately moving tour through a half century of abstract art, concluding with an unforgettable description of one of Varnedoe's favorite works. Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.
Book Synopsis Sandro Botticelli by : Julia Cartwright
Download or read book Sandro Botticelli written by Julia Cartwright and published by . This book was released on 1920 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Ribbon of Darkness by : Barbara Maria Stafford
Download or read book Ribbon of Darkness written by Barbara Maria Stafford and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-06-21 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of her career, Barbara Stafford has established herself the preeminent scholar of the intersections of the arts and sciences, articulating new theories and methods for understanding the sublime, the mysterious, the inscrutable. Omnivorous in her research, she has published work that embraces neuroscience and philosophy, biology and culture, pinpointing connections among each discipline’s parallel concerns. Ribbon of Darkness is a monument to the scope of her work and the range of her intellect. At times associative, but always incisive, the essays in this new volume take on a distinctly contemporary purpose: to uncover the ethical force and moral aspects of overlapping scientific and creative inquiries. This shared territory, Stafford argues, offers important insights into—and clarifications of—current dilemmas about personhood, the supposedly menial nature of manual skill, the questionable borderlands of gene editing, the potentially refining value of dualism, and the limits of a materialist worldview. Stafford organizes these essays around three concepts that structure the book: inscrutability, ineffability, and intuitability. All three, she explains, allow us to examine how both the arts and the sciences imaginatively infer meaning from the “veiled behavior of matter,” bringing these historically divided subjects into a shared intellectual inquiry and imbuing them with an ethical urgency. A vanguard work at the intersection of the arts and sciences, this book will be sure to guide readers from either realm into unfamiliar yet undeniably fertile territory.
Download or read book Painting with Light written by and published by Amherst Media. This book was released on 2016-12-19 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throw your preconceptions about light-painting out the window and prepare for a creative journey that will revolutionize your photography. Light painting is a classic photography technique that involves selectively illuminating sections of a dark subject by moving a light source (like a flashlight) over the subject during the course of a seconds- or minutes-long exposure. This results in uniquely nuanced depictions with a high level of technical artistry. As Eric Curry shows, however, today’s hardware and software allow you to produce light-painting images that are anything but traditional! In this book, you’ll learn, step by step, how to plan and execute incredible, nuanced images using simple gear, a whole lot of imagination, and today’s powerful postproduction software. With these techniques, your imagination is the only limit to what you can create!
Download or read book 1971 written by Darby English and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-12-20 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, art historian Darby English explores the year 1971, when two exhibitions opened that brought modernist painting and sculpture into the burning heart of United States cultural politics: Contemporary Black Artists in America, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The DeLuxe Show, a racially integrated abstract art exhibition presented in a renovated movie theater in a Houston ghetto. 1971: A Year in the Life of Color looks at many black artists’ desire to gain freedom from overt racial representation, as well as their efforts—and those of their advocates—to further that aim through public exhibition. Amid calls to define a “black aesthetic,” these experiments with modernist art prioritized cultural interaction and instability. Contemporary Black Artists in America highlighted abstraction as a stance against normative approaches, while The DeLuxe Show positioned abstraction in a center of urban blight. The importance of these experiments, English argues, came partly from color’s special status as a cultural symbol and partly from investigations of color already under way in late modern art and criticism. With their supporters, black modernists—among them Peter Bradley, Frederick Eversley, Alvin Loving, Raymond Saunders, and Alma Thomas—rose above the demand to represent or be represented, compromising nothing in their appeals for interracial collaboration and, above all, responding with optimism rather than cynicism to the surrounding culture’s preoccupation with color.
Book Synopsis The Rhetoric of Perspective by : Hanneke Grootenboer
Download or read book The Rhetoric of Perspective written by Hanneke Grootenboer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006-12-31 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Rembrandt's Eyes written by Simon Schama and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 750 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Rembrandt, as for Shakespeare, all the world was indeed a stage, and he knew in exhaustive detail the tactics of its performance: the strutting and mincing, the wardrobe and face-paint, the full repertoire and gesture and gimace, the flutter of hands and the roll of the eyes, the belly-laugh and the half-stifled sob. He knew what it looked like to seduce, to intimidate, to wheedle and to console; to strike a pose or preach a sermon, to shake a fist or uncover a breast; and how to sin and how to atone. No artist had ever been so fascinated by the fashioning of personae, beginning with his own. No painter ever looked with such unsparing intelligence or such bottomless compassion at our entrances and our exits and the whole rowdy show in between.
Book Synopsis Image Politics of Climate Change by : Birgit Schneider
Download or read book Image Politics of Climate Change written by Birgit Schneider and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2014-06-30 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific research on climate change has given rise to a variety of images picturing climate change. These range from colorful expert graphics, model visualizations, photographs of extreme weather events like floods, droughts or melting ice, symbols like polar bears, to animated and interactive visualizations. Climate change graphics have not only increased knowledge about the subject, they have begun to influence popular awareness of global weather events. The status of climate pictures today is particularly crucial, as global climate change as a long-term process cannot be seen. When images are widely distributed, they are able to shape how the world is thought about and seen. It is this implicit basic assumption of the power of images to influence reality that this book addresses: today's images might become the blueprint for tomorrow's realities. »Image Politics of Climate Change« combines a wide interdisciplinary range of perspectives and questions, treated here in sixteen interdisciplinary case studies. The author's specializations include both visual practice and theory: in the fields of climate sciences, computer graphics, art, curating, art history and visual studies, communication and cultural science, environmental and science & technology studies. The close interlinking of these viewpoints promotes in-depth insights into issues of production and analysis of climate visualization.
Book Synopsis Photography: The Art of Deception by :
Download or read book Photography: The Art of Deception written by and published by Amherst Media. This book was released on 2016-10-17 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Photography is a lie. Just think about it: photographers create two-dimensional images that sometimes even lack color and then expect everyone who views the image to believe that this is how the subject and scene appeared in front of the lens, in real life. What is truly amazing is that people fall for the visual trickery readily, almost as if they want to be deceived. It gets better: people still believe that one can photograph only what is really there. In this book, Irakly Shanidze reveals the smoke and mirrors that the best photographers use to surprise, entertain, and inspire viewers. He explains that the individual features of photographer’s perception and technical limitations of his equipment make him do things that may eventually make a picture look very different from how a viewer would see the same scene with a naked eye and can lead to a ruined picture. Conversely, photographers who understand these phenomena can use the aforementioned “constraints” to deliberately adjust the level of truthfulness in their pictures. In each beautifully illustrated chapter, Shanidze discloses the photographic tools that enterprising photographers can use to create visual deception (e.g., to create a sense of dimension, create day-for-night effects, establish mood, simulate candid photographs, and generally suspend disbelief—without the time-consuming post-processing!). In doing so, he describes the image objectives (in other words, defines the image concepts) and introduces the tools needed to achieve them—whether a lens of a certain focal length, a light of a specific wattage, or a given shutter speed. He also deconstructs some of his favorite images to show readers how he was able to create a chiseled deception of his own. Armed with this book, photographers will learn to truly take the reins in their photographic pursuits and deliver supercharged, iconic, storytelling images.
Book Synopsis Audrey Flack on Painting by : Audrey Flack
Download or read book Audrey Flack on Painting written by Audrey Flack and published by ABRAMS. This book was released on 1981 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this landmark volume we see Audrey Flack at work and we see the works themselves in progress, together with many superb reproductions of completed paintings. Flack--a leading Photo-Realist and one of the world's foremost women artists--has achieved many distinctions. Flack began as an Abstract Expressionist and gradually became committed to Realism and then to Photo-Realism. But she is a Photo-Realist with a difference, and that difference is her keen interest in the sources of human strength and the causes of human suffering, in beauty, in the issues of her own time. As a result, she has produced a body of work that is exceptionally rich in content and technique."--book jacket.
Book Synopsis Death 24x a Second by : Laura Mulvey
Download or read book Death 24x a Second written by Laura Mulvey and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2006-03 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating exploration of the role new media technologies play in our experience of film.
Book Synopsis Aesthetics at Large by : Thierry de Duve
Download or read book Aesthetics at Large written by Thierry de Duve and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-02-27 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Thierry de Duve argues in the first volume of Aesthetics at Large, is as relevant to the appreciation of art today as it was to the enjoyment of beautiful nature in 1790. Going against the grain of all aesthetic theories situated in the Hegelian tradition, this provocative thesis, which already guided de Duve’s groundbreaking book Kant After Duchamp (1996), is here pursued in order to demonstrate that far from confining aesthetics to a stifling formalism isolated from all worldly concerns, Kant’s guidance urgently opens the understanding of art onto ethics and politics. Central to de Duve’s re-reading of the Critique of Judgment is Kant’s idea of sensus communis, ultimately interpreted as the mere yet necessary idea that human beings are capable of living in peace with one another. De Duve pushes Kant’s skepticism to its limits by submitting the idea of sensus communis to various tests leading to questions such as: Do artists speak on behalf of all of us? Is art the transcendental ground of democracy? Or, Was Adorno right when he claimed that no poetry could be written after Auschwitz? Loaded with de Duve’s trademark blend of wit and erudition and written without jargon, these essays radically renew current approaches to some of the most burning issues raised by modern and contemporary art. They are indispensable reading for anyone with a deep interest in art, art history, or philosophical aesthetics.
Download or read book Shara Hughes written by Andrew Russeth and published by DCV Editions. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hélio Oiticica written by Irene V. Small and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-02-03 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) was one of the most brilliant Brazilian artists of the 1960s and 1970s. He was a forerunner of participatory art, and his melding of geometric abstraction and bodily engagement has influenced contemporary artists from Cildo Meireles and Ricardo Basbaum to Gabriel Orozco, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Olafur Eliasson. This book examines Oiticica’s impressive works against the backdrop of Brazil’s dramatic postwar push for modernization. From Oiticica’s late 1950s experiments with painting and color to his mid-1960s wearable Parangolés, Small traces a series of artistic procedures that foreground the activation of the spectator. Analyzing works, propositions, and a wealth of archival material, she shows how Oiticica’s practice recast—in a sense “folded”—Brazil’s utopian vision of progress as well as the legacy of European constructive art. Ultimately, the book argues that the effectiveness of Oiticica’s participatory works stems not from a renunciation of art, but rather from their ability to produce epistemological models that reimagine the traditional boundaries between art and life.
Book Synopsis Treasuring the Gaze by : Hanneke Grootenboer
Download or read book Treasuring the Gaze written by Hanneke Grootenboer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The end of the eighteenth century saw the start of a new craze in Europe: tiny portraits of single eyes that were exchanged by lovers or family members. Worn as brooches or pendants, these minuscule eyes served the same emotional need as more conventional mementoes, such as lockets containing a coil of a loved one’s hair. The fashion lasted only a few decades, and by the early 1800s eye miniatures had faded into oblivion. Unearthing these portraits in Treasuring the Gaze, Hanneke Grootenboer proposes that the rage for eye miniatures—and their abrupt disappearance—reveals a knot in the unfolding of the history of vision. Drawing on Alois Riegl, Jean-Luc Nancy, Marcia Pointon, Melanie Klein, and others, Grootenboer unravels this knot, discovering previously unseen patterns of looking and strategies for showing. She shows that eye miniatures portray the subject’s gaze rather than his or her eye, making the recipient of the keepsake an exclusive beholder who is perpetually watched. These treasured portraits always return the looks they receive and, as such, they create a reciprocal mode of viewing that Grootenboer calls intimate vision. Recounting stories about eye miniatures—including the role one played in the scandalous affair of Mrs. Fitzherbert and the Prince of Wales, a portrait of the mesmerizing eye of Lord Byron, and the loss and longing incorporated in crying eye miniatures—Grootenboer shows that intimate vision brings the gaze of another deep into the heart of private experience. With a host of fascinating imagery from this eccentric and mostly forgotten yet deeply private keepsake, Treasuring the Gaze provides new insights into the art of miniature painting and the genre of portraiture.
