Art.

This book explores a range of experimental self-portraits made in France between 1840 and 1870, including remarkable images by Hippolyte Bayard, Nadar, Duchenne de Boulogne, and Countess de Castiglione. Adapting photography for different social purposes, each of these pioneers showcased their own body as a living artifact and iconic attraction. Jillian Lerner considers performative portraits that exhibit uncanny transformations of identity and embodiment. She highlights the tactical importance of photographic demonstrations, promotions, conversations, and the mongrel forms of montage, painted photographs, and captioned specimens. The author shows how photographic practices are mobilized in diverse cultural contexts and enmeshed with the histories of art, science, publicity, urban spectacle, and private life in nineteenth-century France. Tracing calculated and creative approaches to a new medium, this research also contributes to an archaeology of the present. It furnishes a prehistory of the “selfie” and offers historical perspectives on the forces that reshape human perception and social experience. This interdisciplinary study will appeal to readers interested in the history of photography, art, visual culture, and media studies.

Due to the technological advances of the nineteenth century, an abundance of black drawing media exploded onto the market. Charcoal, conte crayon, and fabricated black chalks and crayons; fixatives; various papers; and many lifting devices gave rise to an unprecedented amount of experimentation. Indeed, innovation became the rule, as artists developed their own unique—and often experimental—processes. The exploration of black media in drawing is inextricably bound up with the exploration of black in prints, and this volume presents an integrated study that rises above specialization in one over the other. Noir brings together such diverse artists as Francisco de Goya, Maxime Lalanne, Gustave Courbet, Odilon Redon, and Georges Seurat and explores their inventive works on paper. Sidelining labels like “conservative” or “avant-garde,” the essays in this book employ all the tools that art history and modern conservation have given us, inviting the reader to look more broadly at the artists’ methods and materials. This volume accompanies an eponymous exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from February 9 to May 15, 2016.

In the years 1890 to 1905, Paris was swept by a craze for prints. Almost all French artists of the time experimented with lithography, etching, or woodcuts as an artistic medium. Marvellous and often colourful works of art were the result. The Van Gogh Museum holds a significant collection of more than 1,300 prints that illustrate the printmaking of this period in its full glory. The exhibition and the book will display the highlights of this print collection. Artists like Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, Steinlen, and Toulouse-Lautrec will be represented by limited-edition prints, as well as mass-produced illustrated theatrical programmes, sheet music, books and their world-famous posters. The richly illustrated book contains a fine representative selection from the print collection. Four essays sketch the context for the printmaking craze. The book includes a detailed exposition of the major participants, graphic techniques, and forms of publication. 0Exhibition: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2.2.-23.9.2012).

"An indispensable addition to the literature, this informative publication is not only one of very few books available in English on the subject, but it also reproduces for the first time all the featured prints in full colour. Authors examine the history, marketing, and collecting of these prints, as well as the tools, techniques, and papers used in making them."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 1, 2013-January 5, 2014.