Art in Theory (1648-1815) provides a wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of documents on the theory of art from the founding of the French Academy until the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Like its highly successful companion volumes, Art in Theory (1815-1900) and Art in Theory (1900-1990), its' primary aim is to provide students and teachers with the documentary material for informed and up-to-date study. Its' 240 texts, clear principles of organization and considerable editorial content o...

Art, with its finite means, cannot hope to record the infinite variety and complexity of Nature, and so contents itself with a partial statement, addressing this to the imagination for the full and perfect meaning. This inadequation, and the artificial adjustments which it involves, are tolerated by right of what is known as artistic convention; and as each art has its own particular limitations, so each has its own particular conventions. Sculpture reproduces the forms of Nature, but discard...

It is no coincidence that a historical figure such as Patrice Emery Lumumba, independent Congo’s first prime minister, who was killed in 1961, has lived in the realm of the cultural imaginary and occupied an afterlife in the arts. After all, his project remained unfinished and his corpse unburied. The figure of Lumumba has been imagined through painting, photography, cinema, poetry, literature, theatre, music, sculpture, fashion, cartoons and stamps, and also through historiography and in p...

Can parents ever overcome the loss of their children? Theirs was a happy family: Jaap and Ellen van den Bergh and their two daughters, Rosemarie and Marianne. Then the German army invaded the Netherlands in May 1940 and everything changed. The family was of Jewish descent and they were no longer sure of their lives. By selling a serene painting by Pissarro, The Girl Lying in the Grass, they funded the expenses of their hiding place. Jaap and Ellen van den Bergh survived the war. For a long ti...

Queer Exhibition Histories comprises case studies highlighting the countless efforts, both large and small, of LGBTQIA+ artists and curators, centring on queer art exhibitions and their modes of documentation and archiving. Often, the legacy of these projects largely depends on personal archives, memories, and paraphernalia, with the overriding notion, or need, for public display. In these contexts, ‘public’ is relative in events that were either short-lived, held under the veil of domest...

A unique guide to making sense of modern and contemporary art through seven different approaches, focusing on twenty major artworks from around the world.

This richly illustrated, four-colour textbook introduces the art and archaeology of ancient Greece, from the Bronze Age through to the Roman conquest. Suitable for students with no prior knowledge of ancient art, this textbook reviews the main objects and monuments of the ancient Greek world, emphasizing the context and function of these artefacts in their particular place and time. Students are led to a rich understanding of how objects were meant to be perceived, what 'messages' they transm...

THE LOVE between man and woman has been told in story and poem since long before the days of Sappho. It forms, indeed, the subject of the great bulk of what we call literature. In music, love's domain is less extended. With the exception song and the opera, most of the greatest music has, in its title at least, no hint of the great heart historyof human kind.

In this respect the plastic arts are more allied to music than to literature. The masterpieces in painting and sculpture generally not ...