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This book explores the historical and religious dynamics that led to the “golden age” of Tibetan printing in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It also examines the Mahayana Buddhist ideas that motivated the growth of early modern woodblock publishing and the religious use of books during that period.
The first extended history of the Chinese picture-scroll. The Chinese picture-scroll, a long, horizontal painting or calligraphic work, has been China’s pre-eminent aesthetic form throughout the last two millennia. This first history of the picture-scroll explores its extraordinary longevity and adaptability to social, political, and technological change. The book describes what the picture-scroll demands of a viewer, how China’s artists grappled with its cultural power, and how collectors and connoisseurs left their marks on scrolls for later generations to judge.
Things change. Broken and restored, reused and remade, objects transcend their earliest functions, locations, and appearances. While every era witnesses change, the eighteenth century experienced artistic, economic, and demographic transformations that exerted unique pressures on material cultures around the world. Locating material objects at the heart of such phenomena, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century expands beyond Eurocentric perspectives to discover the mobile, transcultural nature of eighteenth-century art worlds. From porcelain to betel leaves, Chumash hats to natural history cabinets, this book examines how objects embody imperialism, knowledge, and resistance in v...
Postmodernism has come and gone, but the belief that artists and works of art are exceptional is alive and well. Post-Exceptionalism speculates that this is so because postmodernism, when it declared the death of the author and celebrated the copy, failed to name political theology as its fundamental target. In a time when sovereignty is experiencing a dubious global revival, the moment has come to reconsider the artist and the work of art after political theology in search for a new, worldly, and emancipatory politics of aesthetics.
What is the relationship between anger and justice, especially when so much of our moral education has taught us to value the impartial spectator, the cold distance of reason? In Sing the Rage, Sonali Chakravarti wrestles with this question through a careful look at the emotionally charged South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which from 1996 to 1998 saw, day after day, individuals taking the stand to speak—to cry, scream, and wail—about the atrocities of apartheid. Uncomfortable and surprising, these public emotional displays, she argues, proved to be of immense value, vital to the success of transitional justice and future political possibilities. Chakravarti takes up the ...
"Featuring 70 works in various media--paintings, calligraphy, photographs, woodblock prints, video, and sculpture--that were created during the past three decades, Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China will demonstrate how China's ancient pattern of seeking cultural renewal through the reinterpretation of past models remains a viable creative path. Although all of the artists have transformed their sources through new modes of expression, visitors will recognize thematic, aesthetic, or technical attributes in their creations that have meaningful links to China's artistic past. The exhibition will be organized thematically into four parts and will include such highlights as Xu Bing's dramatic Book from the Sky (ca. 1988), an installation that will fill an entire gallery; Family Tree (2000), a set of vivid photographs documenting a performance by Zhang Huan in which his facial features--and his identity--are obscured gradually by physiognomic texts that are inscribed directly onto his face; and Map of China (2006) by Ai Weiwei, which is constructed entirely of wood salvaged from demolished Qing dynasty temples." --
This beautifully illustrated volume provides an in-depth look at some of the key works in the Wan-go H. C. Weng Collection of Chinese painting and calligraphy. Weng Tonghe (1830-1904), who gathered the greater part of the collection, was a preeminent statesman and scholar of late Qing-dynasty China, and the masterworks he collected reflect the refined taste of the scholars of his time. Weng's great-greatgrandson Wan-go H. C. Weng--the collection's current owner-- brought it to the United States for safekeeping in 1948. The fifty-one works reproduced in this catalogue, on exhibit at the Huntington in spring 2009, range from the twelfth century to the twentieth, and represent such renowned artists as Shen Zhou, Wen Zhengming, Dong Qichang, Wang Jian, Wang Hui, Wang Yuanqi, and other important painters and calligraphers. The exhibition is based on an exhibit organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2007.
Originally developed as an aid to professional herbalists, botanical illustration quickly blossomed into an art form in its own right. The first flower books were intended as medicinal guides, or else illustrated volumes that catalogued the elaborate and extensive gardens of the well-to-do. But when Carl Linnaeus first classified the plant kingdom in 1735, the botanical book quickly took on a more scientific cast. By the nineteenth century, the flourishing of botanical publications reflected both the rapid rise of gardening as an amateur hobby and the desire of artists and decorators for new visual resources. Gardens in Perpetual Bloom: Botanical Illustration in Europe and America 1600-1850 ...
Every two years the fall issue of The Met's quarterly Bulletin celebrates notable recent acquisitions and gifts to the collection. Highlights of Recent Acquisitions 2022–2024 include the monumental handscroll painting Streams and Mountains without End, a masterwork by the Qing-dynasty painter Wang Yuanqi; the nineteenth century painting Bélizaire and the Frey Children which offers a rare depiction of an identified Black teenager with the children of his enslaver; Helene Schjerfbeck’s The Lace Shawl, which is a layered, dramatic portrait of the artist’s friend and landlady. Meanwhile, Leopoldo Méndez’s linocut depiction of the great Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada expands the already distinguished collection of twentieth-century Mexican graphic arts in the Department of Drawings and Prints. This publication also honors the many generous contributions from donors that make possible the continued growth of The Met collection.
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