The history of art from the early nineteenth century on- ward is commonly viewed as a succession of conflicts between innovatory and established styles that culminated in the formalism and aesthetic autonomy of high modernism. In Art and Crisis, first published in 1948, Hans Sedlmayr argues that the aesthetic disjunctures of modern art signify more than matters of style and point to much deeper processes of cultural and religious disintegration. As Roger Kimball observes in his informative new introduction, Art in Crisis is as much an exercise in cultural or spiritual analysis as it is a work of art history. Sedlmayr's reads the art of the last two centuries as a fever chart of the modern age in its greatness and its decay. He discusses the advent of Romanticism with its freeing of the imagination as a conscious sundering of art from humanist and religious traditions with the aesthetic treated as a category independent of human need. Looking at the social purposes of architecture, Sedlmayr shows how the landscape garden, the architectural monument, and the industrial exhibition testified to a new relationship not only between man and his handiwork but also between man and the forces that transcend him. In these institutions man deifies his inventive powers with which he hopes to master and supersede nature. Likewise, the art museum denies transcendence through a cultural leveling in which Heracles and Christ become brothers as objects of aesthetic contemplation. At the center of Art in Crisis is the insight that, in art as in life, the pursuit of unqualified autonomy is in the end a prescription for disaster, aesthetic as well as existential. Sedlmayr writes as an Augustinian Catholic. For him, the underlying motive for the pursuit of autonomy is pride. The lost center of his subtitle is God. The dream of autonomy, Sedlmayr argues, is for finite, mortal creatures, a dangerous illusion. The book invites serious analysis from art cri
Blue Book of Art Values: Artists & Their Works from Around the World
Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster, The Century (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 154. 8. Time-Life Editors, This Fabulous Century, Vol. IV, 23. 9.
Offers a selection of eighty-seven full-color reproductions of Timberlake's paintings, with an introduction by the painter
THE FERRELL BROTHERS, WILBUR AND WARREN , in their own words "were not known as singular artists but a duo." Wilbur began his career as a motion picture ...
Adelson, Warren, “John Singer Sargent and the 'New Painting,'” in Stanley Olson, Warren Adelson, and Richard Ormond, Sargent at Broadway: The Impressionist ...
This is a rich undiscovered history—a history replete with competing art departments, dynastic scenic families, and origins stretching back to the films of Méliès, Edison, Sennett, Chaplin, and Fairbanks.
Through careful research, Carol Gibson-Wood exposes the mythology surrounding the Morellian method, especially the mythology of the coherence and primacy of his method of attribution. She argues that it “could also be said that Berenson ...
Gibson translates from the Phoenician: “Beware! Behold, there is disaster for you ... !” (SSI 3, no. 5=KAI nr. 2). Examples from Cyprus include SSI 3, no. 12=KAI nr. 30. Gibson's translation of the Phoenician reads (SSI 3, ...
Examines the emergence of abstract organic forms and their assimilation into the popular arts and culture of American life from 1940-1960, covering advertising, decorative arts, commercial design, and the fine arts.
... S. Newman ACCOUNTING Christopher Nobes ADAM SMITH Christopher J. Berry ADOLESCENCE Peter K. Smith ADVERTISING ... ALGEBRA Peter M. Higgins AMERICAN CULTURAL HISTORY Eric Avila AMERICAN HISTORY Paul S. Boyer AMERICAN IMMIGRATION ...