Northern Arts

Northern Arts is a magnificent and provocative exploration of Scandinavian literature and art. With intellectual power and deep emotional insights, writer and critic Arnold Weinstein guides us through the most startling works created by the writers and artists of Scandinavia over the past two centuries. Here readers will gain new perspectives on canonical giants such as Søren Kierkegaard, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Edvard Munch, Knut Hamsun, and Ingmar Bergman. Readers will also encounter popular favorites like children's writer Astrid Lindgren, and come to know the work of lesser-known masters such as the novelist Tarjei Vesaas and the painters Ernst Josephson and Lena Cronqvist. Weinstein uses the concept of "breakthrough"--boundary smashing, restlessness, and the exploding of traditional forms and values--as a thematic lens through which to expose the roiling energies and violence that course through Scandinavian literature and art. Defying preconceptions of Scandinavian culture as depressive or brooding, Weinstein invites us to imagine anew this transformative and innovative tradition of art that continually challenges ideas about the sacred and the profane, family and marriage, children, patriarchy, and personal identity. Through these works he brings us face-to-face with our most hidden selves and urges, enriching our understanding of the emotions and forces that govern our lives. Northern Arts is the essential introduction to Scandinavian literature and art, one that illuminates the fierce beauty and breathtaking reach of these incomparable works.

The 50th anniversary edition of this classic work on the art of Northwest Coast Indians now offers color illustrations for a new generation of readers along with reflections from contemporary Northwest Coast artists about the impact of this book. The masterworks of Northwest Coast Native artists are admired today as among the great achievements of the world’s artists. The painted and carved wooden screens, chests and boxes, rattles, crest hats, and other artworks display the complex and sophisticated northern Northwest Coast style of art that is the visual language used to illustrate inherited crests and tell family stories. In the 1950s Bill Holm, a graduate student of Dr. Erna Gunther, former Director of the Burke Museum, began a systematic study of northern Northwest Coast art. In 1965, after studying hundreds of bentwood boxes and chests, he published Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form. This book is a foundational reference on northern Northwest Coast Native art. Through his careful studies, Bill Holm described this visual language using new terminology that has become part of the established vocabulary that allows us to talk about works like these and understand changes in style both through time and between individual artists’ styles. Holm examines how these pieces, although varied in origin, material, size, and purpose, are related to a surprising degree in the organization and form of their two-dimensional surface decoration. The author presents an incisive analysis of the use of color, line, and texture; the organization of space; and such typical forms as ovoids, eyelids, U forms, and hands and feet. The evidence upon which he bases his conclusions constitutes a repository of valuable information for all succeeding researchers in the field. Replaces ISBN 9780295951027

An “episode of light” in Canada sparked by Expo 67 when new art forms, innovative technologies, and novel institutional and policy frameworks emerged together. Understanding how experimental art catalyzes technological innovation is often prized yet typically reduced to the magic formula of “creativity.” In Northern Sparks, Michael Century emphasizes the role of policy and institutions by showing how novel art forms and media technologies in Canada emerged during a period of political and social reinvention, starting in the 1960s with the energies unleashed by Expo 67. Debunking conventional wisdom, Century reclaims innovation from both its present-day devotees and detractors by revealing how experimental artists critically challenge as well as discover and extend the capacities of new technologies. Century offers a series of detailed cross-media case studies that illustrate the cross-fertilization of art, technology, and policy. These cases span animation, music, sound art and acoustic ecology, cybernetic cinema, interactive installation art, virtual reality, telecommunications art, software applications, and the emergent metadiscipline of human-computer interaction. They include Norman McLaren’s “proto-computational” film animations; projects in which the computer itself became an agent, as in computer-aided musical composition and choreography; an ill-fated government foray into interactive networking, the videotext system Telidon; and the beginnings of virtual reality at the Banff Centre. Century shows how Canadian artists approached new media technologies as malleable creative materials, while Canada undertook a political reinvention alongside its centennial celebrations. Northern Sparks offers a uniquely nuanced account of innovation in art and technology illuminated by critical policy analysis.

Master the northern style of Chinese Shaolin Kung Fu with this illustrated martial arts guide The Secrets of Northern Shaolin Kung-Fu: Pek Sil Lum is a comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of the traditional Chinese art known to the West as Northern Shaolin Kung-Fu. It includes a historical overview, basic positions, and authentic forms and techniques. Pek Sil Lum is especially renowned for its repertoire of kicking techniques, ranging from simple front kicks to jumping twirling crescent kicks to the dreaded tornado kick, and includes open- and closed-hand strikes and a number of weapons forms.

Offers a survey of the painting, sculpture, and graphic arts of the Renaissance in Northern Europe, discussing the era's artistic evolution, stylistic and iconographical themes, and art historical scholarship.

This compelling book offers a new paradigm for the periodization of the arts, one that counters a prevailing Italianate bias among historians of northern Europe of this era. The years after 1500 brought the construction of several iconic Late Gothic monuments, including the transept facades of Beauvais cathedral in northern France, much of King's College in Cambridge, England, and the parish church at Annaberg in Saxony. Most designers and patrons preferred this elite Gothic style, which was considered fashionable and highly refined, to alternative Italianate styles. Ethan Matt Kavaler connects Gothic architecture to related developments in painting and other media, and considers the consequences of the breakdown of the Gothic system in the early 16th century. Late Gothic architecture is recognized for its sensuous and abundant ornament. Its visually rich surfaces signify wealth and magnificence, and its flamboyant geometric designs portray a system of perfect and essential forms that convey spiritual authority, while often serving as signs of personal or corporate identity. Renaissance Gothic presents a groundbreaking and detailed study of the Gothic architecture of the late 15th and 16th centuries across Europe.