Includes section: Notes and reviews.

Jan van Eyck's surviving work comprises a series of painstakingly detailed oil paintings of astonishing verisimilitude. In a fascinating recovery of the neglected human dimension that is clearly present in these works, Craig Harbison interrogates the personal histories of the worldly participants of such masterpieces as the Virgin and Child with George van der Paele, the Arnolfini Double Portrait and the Virgin and Child with Nicolas Rolin. With the aid of abundant visual evidence in color and in black and white, Harbison reveals how van Eyck presented his contemporaries with a more subtle and complex view of the value of appearances as a route to understanding the meaning of life. "I found this an enthralling study"--"The Sunday Telegraph "A fascinating investigation into the nature of the great pioneer's clients ... some fine photo details"--"Art Review Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

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"How did modern Chinese painters see landscape? Did they depict nature in the same way as premodern Chinese painters? What does the artistic perception of modern Chinese painters reveal about the relationship between artists and the nation-state? Could an understanding of modern Chinese landscape painting tell us something previously unknown about art, political change, and the epistemological and sensory regime of twentieth-century China? Yi Gu tackles these questions by focusing on the rise of open-air painting in modern China. Chinese artists almost never painted outdoors until the late 1910s, when the New Culture Movement prompted them to embrace direct observation, linear perspective, and a conception of vision based on Cartesian optics. The new landscape practice brought with it unprecedented emphasis on perception and redefined artistic expertise. Central to the pursuit of open-air painting from the late 1910s right through to the early 1960s was a reinvigorated and ever-growing urgency to see suitably as a Chinese and to see the Chinese homeland correctly. Examining this long-overlooked ocular turn, Gu not only provides an innovative perspective from which to reflect on complicated interactions of the global and local in China, but also calls for rethinking the nature of visual modernity there."

Presenting a paradigm-shifting view of early Latin American modernism, this book looks at how a transnational intellectual community of writers and critics forged an anticolonial aesthetic based in abstract artistic forms.

The Eye, the Hand, the Mind, celebrating the centennial of the College Art Association, is filled with pictorial mementos and enlivening stories and anecdotes that connects the organization's sixteen goals and tells its rich, sometimes controversial, story. Readers will discover its role in major issues in higher education, preservation of world monuments, workforce issues and market equity, intellectual property and free speech, capturing conflicts and reconciliations inherent among artists and art historians, pedagogical approaches and critical interpretations/interventions as played out in association publications, annual conferences, advocacy efforts, and governance.

Emanuel Leutze's life-size "Washington Crossing the Delaware" commemorates the critical moment in the American Revolution when George Washington led a surprise attack against troops supporting the British forces in Trenton. When Leutze created the painting in 1850, after he had returned from America to his native Germany, he was hoping to rally support for the revolutionary movements then sweeping Europe. He sent the work to New York in 1851, and within four months 50,000 people had paid to see it. Today the painting is an icon of American visual culture and one of the most beloved objects in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2007, Leutze's masterpiece became the focus of the most ambitious conservation and reframing project in the museum's history. This book is a behind-the-scenes report on that project, prefaced by an account of the history of the painting's acquisition and display at the museum.

Published on the occasion of the centenary of World War I, this Bulletin, which accompanies the related exhibition “World War I and the Visual Arts,” on view at The Met until January 7, 2018, explores the myriad and often contradictory ways in which artists responded to the world’s first modern war. Drawn primarily from The Met’s collection of works on paper and supplemented with loans from private collections, both presentations move chronologically from the initial mobilization in early August 1914 to the tumultuous decade that followed the armistice of November 1918. Ranging from expressions of bellicose enthusiasm to sentiments of regret, grief, and anger, the selected works—from prints, photographs, and drawings to propaganda posters, postcards, and commemorative medals—powerfully evoke the conflicting emotions of this complex period. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}

From antiquity to the present day, color has been embedded with cultural meaning. Associated with blood, fire, fertility, and life force, the color red has always been extremely difficult to achieve and thus highly prized." "This book discusses the origin of the red colorant derived from the insect cochineal, its early use in Precolumbian ritual textiles from Mexico and Peru, and the spread of the American dyestuff through cultural interchange following the Spanish discovery and conquest of the New World in the 16th century. Drawing on examples from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, it documents the use of this red-colored treasure in several media and throughout the world.

The funerary shrine of the Confucian scholar Wu Liang, created in AD 151, is the most important surviving pre-Buddhist monument in China. That is to say, it is the most important single work of visual art from the centuries that set the patterns of Chinese thought for almost two millennia. The importance of the shrine lies in the beauty of the stone reliefs on its walls and, especially, in the remarkably comprehensive iconography of its nearly one hundred scenes. They constitute, in effect, a coherent symbolic structure of the universe as the Han Chinese conceived it. This structure consists of three sections: the ceiling carvings present the Mandate of Heaven; the scenes on the two gables depict the paradise of the immortals; and the 44 stories related on the walls illustrate the history of mankind, starting with the creators of human culture and ending with a portrait of Wu Liang, who designed his own memorial. The author finds the shrine comparable, in the comprehensiveness and cultural significance of its iconography, to the cathedral at Chartres or the Sistine Chapel.