Bristling with demons, grotesques, and bizarre apparitions, the graphic work of Odilon Redon has often seemed to be the product of a mind unhinged. In The Temptation of Saint Redon, Stephen F. Eisenman argues instead that these works are Redon's conscious and considered response to changing social realities—an attempt to find refuge from the forces of modernization in an imaginative world of the macabre and the fantastic. Eisenman's careful attention to the circumstances of Redon's life (1840-1916) allows him to bring into focus the interconnections between Redon's complex style and the culture and society of his time. Born and raised on a sixteenth-century estate near Bordeaux, Redon was immersed as a child in traditional rural culture. "I spent my entire childhood in the Médoc completely free, among peasant children," he recalled in his memoirs. "I heard them tell supernatural tales—witches still exist there." Indeed, local tales and legends of witches, ghosts, one-eyed monsters, evil eyes, and wood fairies figure prominently in Redon's graphic works, which he called his noirs, or "blacks." After formal training at Bordeaux and Paris in the 1850s and 1860s, Redon began to chart his independent artistic course. Eisenman shows how, rejecting both naturalism and classicism, Redon, a prototypical Symbolist, found in grotesque and epic genres the expression of organic communities and precapitalist societies. He places Redon's desire for this imagined world of superstitious simplicity a desire manifest in his entire mature artistic practice in the context of contemporary avant-garde movements. Redon's great noirs of the 1870s and 1880s, dreamlike configurations of seemingly irreconcilable elements from portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, show an increasingly subtle control of connotation and a complex indebtedness to caricature, allegory, and puns. Many of the noirs also visually interpret works by like-minded authors, including Baudelaire, Flaubert, Poe, and Mallarmé, one of Redon's close friends. Eisenman's analysis of the noirs underscores Redon's interest in creating an imaginative, even fantastic art, that could act directly on the human spirit. In addition to deepening our understanding of Redon and his art, The Temptation of Saint Redon exposes a link between place, politics, personal history, and the artistic imagination.

Volume covers the Collection of Prints and Illustrated Books, not the collection of artists' books.

Legends, tales, and mysteries featuring saints captivated the French at the end of the nineteenth century. As Jean Lorrain pointed out in an 1891 article for the popular weekly Le Courrier Francais, the seemingly simple language of the saints' lives, their noble battles between good and evil and the atmosphere of religious mysticism appealed to many, especially those involved in the visual and performing arts. Ironically The Third Republic (1870-1940), a regime that claimed to reinforce and institute the secular ideas of the French Revolution, was witness to this great popular interest in the saints and religious imagery. The eight essays in this work explore the popularity of the saints from the 1850s to the 1920s. The essays evaluate the role they played in literature, art, music, science, history and politics, examine portrayals of the saints' lives in both low and high culture (from children's literature, shadow plays and the popular press to literature, opera and theological studies), and reveal the prevalence of the saints in fin-de-siecle France.

Exhibition catalogue for Strategic Ambiguity: The Obscure, Nebulous, and Vague in Symbolist Prints, December 6, 2012 to March 1, 2013 at the La Salle University Art Museum. The prints in this exhibition demonstrate how the Symbolist fascination with ambiguity seen in their choices of subject matter (i.e. half-human, half-animal hybrids such as harpies and sphinxes, gender ambiguity and androgyny) extended to formal strategies of representation that obscure form as well as content. This exhibition places Symbolist art in the context of Modernism by focusing on the ways in which artists experimented with print media and explored technical means of suggesting formal ambiguity (i.e. flattening, abstracting, obscuring) both to better match form and content and to push the boundaries of figurative art. The exhibition features work by artists Odilon Redon, Jan Toorop, Paul Gauguin, Maurice Denis, Édouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton, Henri Ibels, Pierre Bonnard, Félix Buhot, Pierre Roche, Henri Martin, Armand Point, Maurice Dumont, Jeanne Jacquemin, Georges de Feure,François-Marius Valère Bernard, Carlos Schwabe and others. Print techniques represented in this survey range from lithography and etching to gypsography. The exhibition catalogue features essays by the curator and La Salle faculty from the disciplines of art history and philosophy.

New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.

Focuses on the five-tiered representational structure in which the hermit's conflict and vindication present themselves through Hindemith's opera. Bruhn argues that the opera presents something akin to a confession of the composer's inner conflicts and his decision not to become involved in the Nazi confrontation. Three sections discuss: the dilemma of social responsibility vs. the eremitic quest in the lives of Saint Antony of Egypt, the fictional painter Mathis, and Paul Hindemith; hermits, anchorites, and ascetics as portrayed in literature, art, and music; and the form, content, and interpretation of Mathis der Maler. Appendices include synopses and translations of several operas by Hindemith. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The eighteenth century saw the rise of new and more sympathetic understanding of animals as philosophy, literature, and art argued that animals could feel and therefore possess inalienable rights. This idea gave birth to a diverse movement that affects how we understand our relationship to the natural world. The Cry of Nature details a crucial period in the history of this movement, revealing the significant role art played in the growth of animal rights. Stephen F. Eisenman shows how artists from William Hogarth to Pablo Picasso and Sue Coe have represented the suffering, chastisement, and execution of animals. These artists, he demonstrates, illustrate the lessons of Montaigne, Rousseau, Darwin, Freud, and others—that humans and animals share an evolutionary heritage of sentience, intelligence, and empathy, and thus animals deserve equal access to the domain of moral right. Eisenman also traces the roots of speciesism to the classical world and describes the social role of animals in the demand for emancipation. Instructive, challenging, and always engaging, The Cry of Nature is a book for anyone interested in animal rights, art history, and the history of ideas.

"The relations between eastern and western cultures have long been a neglected topic, and this careful and intelligent look at a small but significant part of those relations is most welcome."--Thomas McEvilley, author of The Shape of Ancient Thought "How wonderful that Jacquelynn Baas has seen the light of the Buddha's smile shining from faraway Asia into the realm of the art of modern times in what we think of as the West! . . . Her work reveals how some of our most influential artists explored and expressed the sophisticated perceptions and joyful energy emanating from the realm of Buddhist Asia."--Robert A. F. Thurman "As a Buddhist scholar and artist I welcome this thoughtful and richly detailed study of how many aspects of Buddhism have stimulated, invigorated, and enriched Western arts over the past 150 years."--Stephen Addiss, author of The Art of Zen "A crucial contribution to modern art studies, this high-spirited text surveys Western artists awakened by the wisdom of the East, from Monet and Duchamp to O'Keeffe to Martin. It is a thoughtful book about thoughtful artists, their values and their visions, with a lot to offer general readers and specialists alike."--Charles Stuckey, Associate Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago