Reflections On The History Of Art

Essays discuss Greek and Chineese art, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Dutch genre painting, Rubens, Rembrandt, art collecting, museums, and Freud's aesthetics

'Experiences of Art: Reflections on Masterpiece's is a book that explores themes in the history of art through the insights of students. The book engages themes such as the origins of creativity in prehistoric art, the meaning and significance of the classical paradigm in art history since antiquity, the actual application of Renaissance art theory to an examination of famous masterpieces, an exploration of a new area of philosophical inquiry that reexamines the 18th century as both a period of rationalism and anti-rationalism (rather than the "Age of Reason"), and the tradition of individual subjectivity and expression in modern art reaching back to van Gogh. AUTHOR: Hilda Werschkul holds a doctorate in art history from Columbia University. Her areas of specialisation lay in the drawings of the Old Masters and drawing theory, as well as Post-War American art. 'Experiences of Art: Reflections on Masterpieces' draws upon her ten-plus years of teaching experience. SELLING POINTS: * A key reference text for students of art history, of interest to anybody who wants to learn more about this field * Sumptuous pictures accompany the text, allowing for detailed image study 200 colour

Toward Forever: Radical Reflections on History and Art is a diverse, colourful and eclectic set of essays of historical and cultural analyses. From the genesis of Islam as a social movement, to an account of Goya's art in the context of feudal absolutism and the Napoleonic wars, to The Da Vinci Code, and much more besides. McKenna is a classical Marxist not shy of addressing popular culture, past and present, works often ignored by other Marxist critics increasingly confined to Academia and its high-brow concerns.

This is a classic essay on how to approach the subject of art history. Pächt aims to sharpen perceptions by recreating the social and cultural context in which an art object was made.

Digital images, Internet resources, presentation and social software, interactive animation, and other new technologies offer a host of new possibilities for art history instruction. Teaching Art History with New Technologies: Reflections and Case Studies assists faculty in negotiating the digital teaching terrain. The text documents the history of computer-mediated art history instruction in the last decade and provides an analysis of the increasing number of tools now at the disposal of art historians. It presents a series of reflections and case-studies by early adopters who have not just replaced older materials with new, but who have advanced the discipline's pedagogy in doing so. The essays illustrate how new technologies are changing the way art history is taught, summarize lessons learned, and identify challenges that remain. Given the transitional state of the field, with faculty ranging from the computer-phobic to the computer-savvy, these case studies represent a broad spectrum, from those that focus on the thoughtful integration of new technologies into traditional teaching to others that look beyond the familiar art history lecture or seminar format. They provide both practical suggestions and theoretical models for historians of art and visual culture interested in what computer-mediated applications have been successful in art history teaching and where such new approaches may be leading us.

For thousands of years, art has interpreted the experience of war_its methods, human costs, and moral ambiguities_and has offered historians a wealth of testimony that is only beginning to be systematically explored. In this wide-ranging study, Peter Paret discusses forty-seven paintings and prints as complex documents of war in Europe since the Renaissance and as examples of the artist's use of war as a metaphor for the human condition. The images include works by such major artists as Uccello, Géricault, and Dix as well as academic history paintings and popular prints. By setting each in its historical environment and analyzing it from the perspective of the wars of its time, illuminates the place of war in Western consciousness and expands our understanding of works that are too often approached with little concern for the reality they depict or symbolically transform. Perhaps the most significant of the themes he traces over five centuries is the gradual change from the prince or general to the common soldier and civilian victim as central figures in the interpretation of war in art.

Provides a collection of essays on modern art covering such artists as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Robert Mapplethorpe

Rudolf Steiner understood that the history of art is a field in which the evolution of consciousness is symptomatically and transparently revealed. This informal sequence of thirteen lectures was given during the darkest hours of World War I. It was a moment when the negative consequences of what he called the age of the consciousness soul, which began around 1417, were made most terribly apparent. In these lectures he sought to provide an antidote to pessimism. After describing the movement of consciousness from Greece into Rome, coupled with influences from the Orthodox East, he showed how these influences transformed as the Middle Ages became the Renaissance. The process that begins with Cimabue and Giotto develops, deepens, and becomes more conscious in the great Renaissance masters Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Then this movement continues with the Northern masters, D rer and Holbein, as well as the German tradition. One entire lecture is devoted to Rembrandt, followed by one on Dutch and Flemish paintings. Themes are woven together to show how past epochs of consciousness and art live again in our consciousness-soul period. Replete with interesting information and more than 600 color and black-and-white images, these lectures are rich and dense with ideas, enabling us to understand both the art of the Renaissance and the transformation of consciousness it announced. These lectures demonstrate (to paraphrase Shelley) that artists truly are the unacknowledged legislators of the age.

Focusing on a unique arena, Thinking Through Art takes an innovative look at artists’ experiences of undertaking doctorates and asks: If the making of art is not simply the formulation of an object but is also the formation of complex ideas then what effect does academic enquiry have on art practice? Using twenty-eight pictures, never before seen outside the artists’ universities, Thinking Through Art focuses on art produced in higher educational environments and considers how the material product comes about through a process of conceiving and giving form to abstract thought. It further examines how this form, which is research art sits uneasily within academic circles, and yet is uniquely situated outside the gallery system. The journal articles, from eminent scholars, artists, philosophers, art historians and cultural theorists, demonstrate the complexity of interpreting art as research, and provide students and scholars with an invaluable resource for their art and cultural studies courses.

This is a classic essay on how to approach the subject of art history. Pächt aims to sharpen perceptions by recreating the social and cultural context in which an art object was made.