Presented in conjunction with the September 2000 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, this volume presents the complex story of the proliferation of the arts in New York and the evolution of an increasingly discerning audience for those arts during the antebellum period. Thirteen essays by noted specialists bring new research and insights to bear on a broad range of subjects that offer both historical and cultural contexts and explore the city's development as a nexus for the marketing and display of art, as well as private collecting; landscape painting viewed against the background of tourism; new departures in sculpture, architecture, and printmaking; the birth of photography; New York as a fashion center; shopping for home decorations; changing styles in furniture; and the evolution of the ceramics, glass, and silver industries. The 300-plus works in the exhibition and comparative material are extensively illustrated in color and bandw. Oversize: 9.25x12.25". Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

The subject matter and iconography of much of the art in the U.S. Capitol forms a remarkably coherent program of the early course of North American empire, from discovery and settlement to the national development and westward expansion that necessitated the subjugation of the indigenous peoples. In Art and Empire, Vivien Green Fryd's revealing cultural and political interpretation of the portraits, reliefs, allegories, and historical paintings commissioned for the U.S. Capitol, the reader is given an enhanced appreciation for the racial and ethnic implications of these works. This latest contribution to the United States Capitol Historical Society's Perspectives on the Art and Architectural History of the United States Capitol series provides an affordable and accessible insight into one of our most visited, viewed, and revered national buildings. Professor Fryd demonstrates how the politics of our history is written in stone and painted on the walls of these hallowed halls.

What role might art need to play in the transition beyond consumer capitalism? Can 'culture jamming' contribute to the necessary revolution in consciousness? And might art be able to provoke social change in ways that rational argument and scientific evidence cannot? In this stimulating new book, "Art Against Empire: Toward an Aesthetics of Degrowth," degrowth scholar Samuel Alexander explores these questions, both in theory and practice. He begins with a novel theoretical defence of art and aesthetic interventions as activity that is necessary to effective social and political activism, and concludes by presenting over one hundred 'culture jamming' artworks from a range of contributors that challenge the status quo and expand the horizons of what alternatives are possible.

In recent years, art historians such as Johannes Deckers (Picturing the Bible, 2009) have argued for a significant transition in fourth- and fifth-century images of Jesus following the conversion of Constantine. Broadly speaking, they perceive the image of a peaceful, benevolent shepherd transformed into a powerful, enthroned Jesus, mimicking and mirroring the dominance and authority of the emperor. The powers of church and state are thus conveniently synthesized in such a potent image. This deeply rooted position assumes that ante-pacem images of Jesus were uniformly humble while post-Constantinian images exuded the grandeur of power and glory. The Art of Empire contends that the art and imagery of Late Antiquity merits a more nuanced understanding of the context of the imperial period before and after Constantine. The chapters in this collection each treat an aspect of the relationship between early Christian art and the rituals, practices, or imagery of the Empire, and offer a new and fresh perspective on the development of Christian art in its imperial background.

Between the ninth and twelfth centuries the Byzantine Empire encompassed a wide geographical territory extending from South Italy to Armenia, from the Danube to Cyprus. From the capital of the Empire, Constantinople, the all-powerful, God-elected emperor exercised autocratic control over the periphery. These structures of centralization stood in tension with the decentralizing force of local interests in the provinces. This present volume offers a comparative study of the form and patronage of surviving buildings and their painted decoration in four very different provinces-- Cappadocia, Cyprus, Macedonia, and South Italy--as a means of assessing the nature of Byzantine provincial art. All too often art historians have simplistically labeled high quality works in the provinces "metropolitan" and those of lesser aesthetic interests "provincial." The study establishes that a context in the hinterlands of the Empire affected the making of all provincial buildings--great and small. Local traditions and distinct patterns of patronage left their mark on even the most cosmopolitan structures. At the same time, the relative receptivity of the provinces to metropolitan artistic conventions indicates the ideological power of those conventions. Monumental works constructed in the provinces consistently served to reinforce Constantinopolitan hegemony. The reciprocity of these actions in the art of the Empire calls into question the facile equation of "provincial" with poor quality, derivativeness, and artistic insignificance. Most of the great fresco programs and buildings of the Byzantine Empire survive not in its capital, Constantinople, but in its provinces. Art of Empire is the only study to date which treats both the painting and architecture of these monuments comparatively within their geographical and social context. Though not a survey of provincial monuments, the book makes accessible to a broader audience a compendium of little-known and underappreciated works of great aesthetic and historical value.

"This publication is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)"--Page v.

Colour, Art and Empire explores the entanglements of visual culture, enchanted technologies, waste, revolution, resistance and otherness. The materiality of colour offers a critical and timely force-field for approaching afresh debates on colonialism. This book analyses the formation of colour and politics as qualitative overspill. Colour can be viewed both as central and supplemental to early photography, the totem, alchemy, tantra and mysticism. From the eighteenth-century Austrian Empress Maria Theresa to Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi, to 1970s Bollywood, colour makes us adjust our take on the politics of the human sensorium as defamiliarising and disorienting. The four chapters conjecture how European, Indian and Papua New Guinean artists, writers, scientists, activists, anthropologists or their subjects sought to negotiate the highly problematic stasis of colour in the repainting of modernity. Specifically, the thesis of this book traces Europeans' admiration and emulation of what they termed 'Indian colour' to its gradual denigration and the emergence of a 'space of exception'. This space of exception pitted industrial colours against the colonial desire for a massive workforce whose slave-like exploitation ignited riots against the production of pigments - most notably indigo. Feared or derided, the figure of the vernacular dyer constituted a force capable of dismantling the imperial machinations of colour. Colour thus wreaks havoc with Western expectations of biological determinism, objectivity and eugenics. Beyond the cracks of such discursive practice, colour becomes a sentient and nomadic retort to be pitted against a perceived colonial hegemony. The ideological reinvention of colour as a resource for independence struggles make it fundamental to multivalent genealogies of artistic and political action and their relevance to the present.

The book examines the interactions between Britain and India during the Raj in relation to issues of empire and visual culture. It explores the impact of the Anglo-Indian colonial encounter on the arts and aesthetic traditions of both cultures. Presenting a unique overview that ranges from painting, print-making and photography to architecture, exhibitions and Indian crafts, the book considers the art of urban elites and princely states alongside popular arts. The book highlights the key role of art in forging British colonial ideology. It offers accessible discussions of issues such as Orientalism and (post)colonialism and presents current approaches to questions of British art and empire. It is structured around visual examples which include early nineteenth-century British views of India, Indian negotiations of Western aesthetics represented by Company painting, Kalighat art, and the rise of Indian national art. It covers the display of Indian crafts both in India and at international exhibitions in Britain, as well as the place of India in the British Arts and Crafts movement. The role of the market and items of fashion such as the Kashmir shawl are also discussed, along with the role of photography in representing the colony and questions around national and imperial architecture. The book is aimed at students but will also be relevant to members of the general public with an interest in questions of art, visual culture and empire in relation to Britain and British India.

A collector of many lovers during her 34-year reign as Czarina of Russia at the end of the 18th century, Catherine the Great collected art as well. The extraordinary treasures she amassed for her Winter Palace, which is now the Hermitage Museum, laid the foundation for one of the worlds great collections. This catalogue of an exhibition jointly sponsored by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Gallery of Ontario reveals the grandeur of her ambitions and highlights her acquisitions. These include paintings by Chardin, Bourdon, Le Lorrain, Tiepolo, Vien, and Boucher, among others; precious stones, often adorning items like snuff boxes, jewelry, furniture, architectural models, and many other priceless objects, shown in 210 color images here.

An unmanageable, but lovable, eleven-year-old misfit learns to believe in himself when he gets to know the new school counselor, who is a sort of misfit too.