Research and Innovation

Catalogue accompanying the retrospective exhibition by Tamás Konok. Ludwig Múzeum - Kortárs Művészeti Múzeum, Budapest.

William Pressly presents for the first time a close analysis of two important, neglected paintings, arguing that they are among the most extraordinary works of art devoted to the French Revolution. Johan Zoffany's Plundering the King's Cellar at Paris, August 10, 1792, and Celebrating over the Bodies of the Swiss Soldiers, both painted in about 1794, represent events that helped turn the English against the Revolution. Pressly places both paintings in their historical context—a time of heightened anti-French hysteria—and relates them to pictorial conventions: contemporary history painting, the depiction of urban mobs in satiric and festival imagery, and Hogarth's humorous presentation of modern moral subjects, all of which Zoffany adopted and reinvented for his own purposes. Pressly relates the paintings to Zoffany's status as a German-born Catholic living in Protestant England and to Zoffany's vision of revolutionary justice and the role played by the sansculottes, women, and blacks. He also examines the religious dimension in Zoffany's paintings, showing how they broke new ground by conveying Christian themes in a radically new format. Art historians will find Pressly's book of immense value, as will cultural historians interested in religion, gender, and race.

This book explores the ways in which Flemish painting between 1550 and 1650 both represented and reflected the burgeoning capitalism of Antwerp, Europe`s major trade center of the time. Honig focuses on representations of markets and the development of an aesthetic of display, and on the interaction between beholders and pictured markets – an aesthetic of exchange. She further argues that certain modern ways of collecting, displaying, and valuing paintings had their roots in the market aesthetics of this period.

Analyzing an enormous range of works, from art centers such as Prague, Warsaw and Budapest, (many published here for the first time), Modern Art in Eastern Europe shows that any understanding of Modernism is essentially incomplete without the full consideration of vital Eastern European creative output. He argues that Cubism, Expressionism and Constructivism, along with other great modernist styles, were merged with deeply rooted, Eastern European visual traditions. The art that emerged was vital modernist art that expressed the most pressing concerns of the day, political as well as aesthetic. Mansbach examines the critical reaction of the contemporary artistic culture and political state. A major groundbreaking interpretation of Modernism, Modern Art in Eastern Europe completes any full assessment of twentieth-century art, as well as its history.

Anthony Colantuono's monograph titled 'Guido Reni's Abduction of Helen' (Cambridge University Press, 1997) was the first major study of how the Barberini papacy (1623-44) used works of art as instruments of diplomatic discourse, furnishing artists with iconographic instructions encoding moral and political concepts designed to influence the intended recipient. Reni's 'Helen' for Philip IV of Spain is the prime example: The painting's imagery insinuates that the Spanish monarchy, like the Trojans of old, will receive divine punishment for their war-mongering behavior. The study also demonstrates that the peculiar flurry of encomiastic publications describing and interpreting the paintings were deliberately orchestrated to increase the fame of the painting after the Spanish ambsassador refused to accept it.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, July 26-Nov. 17, 1996 and at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, Dec. 13, 1996-Apr. 6, 1997.

An essay that explores the relationship of word and image in American comic book publishing.

The Folger Shakespeare Library contains the finest collection of Shakespearean art ever assembled. Its two hundred paintings include scenes from Shakespeare's plays, portraits of the actors, and portraits of the playwright and his contemporaries, works that have been painted by artists such as Benjamin West, Henry Fuseli, Thomas Sully, George Romney, and Thomas Nast. This book is the first analysis, history, and catalogue of this important collection. This catalogue forms an essential chapter in the history of the development of literary painting and of Shakespearean criticism, in changes in approach to stagecraft, and in the evolution of Shakespeare portraiture. It is a valuable reference source not only for art historians but for literary and theatrical historians as well.

A beautifully photographed monolith of the statues of Paris from the Bourbon monarchy, the revolution, the Napoleonic era, the restoration of the monarchy, the second Republic, the second empire, the third republic and the Vichy government to the present.

This comprehensive and fully illustrated book about the Statue of Liberty traces its history, its art, its technology and construction, its symbolism, its importance in American imagery, and its role as a monument to French-American friendship. The Statue represents a cooperative effort by French and American art historians, social historians, and architects to understand how the Statue came to be, how it fits into the Western tradition of art and ideas, what it has meant to Americans, and what issues were involved in its renovation and rededication. The book contains over 500 visual images, many in color, from French and American collections.