Mouse Muse: The Mouse in Art

ISBN-10: 1580933947
ISBN-13: 9781580933940
Category: Art
Pages: 168
Language: English
Published: 2014-11-18
Publisher: The Monacelli Press, LLC
Author: Lorna Owen

Description

A beautifully designed introduction to art history by way of artworks that feature the mouse—from the ancient world to drawings by Picasso, Disney, and Art Spiegelman. Across centuries and civilizations, artists have used the mouse—the planet’s most common mammal after us—to illustrate our myths and beliefs. Mice have appeared as Japanese symbols of good luck or medieval emblems of evil, in Arab fables, Russian political satire and Nazi propaganda, as scientific tools and to help us challenge the way we see nature. With more than 80 rarely reproduced works—including paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and Gustav Klimt, a silkscreen by Andy Warhol, a print by Hokusai, a photograph by André Kertész, a sculpture by Claes Oldenburg, a video installation by Bruce Nauman, a performance by Joseph Beuys, and many more—Lorna Owen has created an engaging presentation of an extraordinary range. The pieces, which represent every period of visual art, are accompanied by Owen’s intriguing text about the story behind each work. She has combined her passion for art and her empathy for the unsung archetype of the animal kingdom to explain not only how or why the artist came to use the mouse as a subject, but how the art, in the end, reveals more about us than it could ever reveal about this humble creature.

Get the book

Similar books

The Muse: Psychoanalytic Explorations of Creative Inspiration
By Adele Tutter
Fully interdisciplinary, it is also accessible to readers in the fields of art, art history, literature, memoir, and film. The Muse sheds new light on that most mysterious dyad, the artist and muse—and thus on the creative process itself.
Muse Cells: Endogenous Reparative Pluripotent Stem Cells
By Mari Dezawa
... Muse cells and a lower proportion of Muse cells. On the other hand, unlike naïve pluripotent stem cells, Muse cells do not respond to LIF or BMP4 (unpublished data). When mouse Muse cells derived from embryoid body-like clusters were ...
The Mouse and the Myth: Sacred Art and Secular Ritual of Disneyland
By Dorene Koehler
Disneyland is an example of the kind of container necessary for the construction of rituals of play. This work explores the original Disney theme park in Anaheim as a temple cult.
John Fowles's Fiction and the Poetics of Postmodernism
By Mahmoud Salami
This book presents a deconstructive reading of the novels and short stories of John Fowles.
Mouse Morality: The Rhetoric of Disney Animated Film
By Annalee R. Ward
In this book, Annalee R. Ward uses a variety of analytical tools based in rhetorical criticism to examine the moral messages taught in five recent Disney animated films—The Lion King, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, and ...
Space Mice
By Lori Haskins Houran
When two hungry mice spot a giant yellow ball of cheese in the night sky, they get right to work building a rocketship so they can take a big bite out of that glowing full moon.
An Etymological Dictionary of the French Language
By Edward Pick
... mouse; Sp. Port musaraña; mus ar aneus, lit. spider-mouse. muse, s. m. musk; muscus, odozos; comp. Ge. most hus. muscade, S. f. nutmeg; see muscat. muscadier, S. m. nutmeg-tree. museadin, s. m. musk-lozenge; see In u 8 C. museat, adj ...
The Wounded Muse: A Novel
By Robert F Delaney
Based on real events, Robert F. Delaney's The Wounded Muse takes readers to a city and country undergoing a transformation on a scale previously unseen, where in the shadowed wreckage of forgotten communities people are pushed to ...
Signs for an Exhibition
By Eliza, Kentridges
Kentridges, Eliza. SIGN POEM 21 Word play It's a human need The mouse muse The love vole The pilot who loses an eye Finds the plot Sacred are the scared cedars Oh my little mouse muse Oh my little love vole The violet violence of violins ...