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“Vive la Sociale”: This rousing, revolutionary statement, written on a bright red banner across the top of James Ensor's Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889, served as a visual manifesto and call to action by the Belgian artist (1860-1949), one that announced with an insistent, public voice the centrality of his art practice to the cultural discourse of modern Belgium. This provocative declaration serves as the title for this new study of Ensor's art focusing on its social discourse and the artist's interaction with and at times satirical encounter with his contemporary milieu. Rather than the alienated and traumatized Expressionist given preference in modern art history, Ensor is prese...
A beautiful book that showcases how circus figures and artifacts have been portrayed in art over the past two centuries The circus is a dazzling world filled with acrobats and harlequins, tumblers and riders, monsters and celestial creatures. Now this engaging book sets that world in a new light, examining how painters, sculptors, and photographers from the eighteenth century to the present have used the circus as a springboard for their imaginative expression and have envisioned the clown as a metaphor for the modern artist. The book presents more than 175 works by such artists as Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rouault, Picasso, Chagall, and Léger. Some of these are masterful works shown for the first time; these range from the 18-meter stage curtain Picasso designed in 1917 for Erik Satie's ballet Parade to more intimate works such as Nadar and Tournachon's photographs of Pierrot as played by celebrated mime Charles Debureau.
The complex interweaving of different Western visions of China had a profound impact on artistic exchange between China and the West during the nineteenth century. Beyond Chinoiserie addresses the complexity of this exchange. While the playful Western “vision of Cathay” formed in the previous century continued to thrive, a more realistic vision of China was increasingly formed through travel accounts, paintings, watercolors, prints, book illustrations, and photographs. Simultaneously, the new discipline of sinology led to a deepening of the understanding of Chinese cultural history. Leading and emerging scholars in the fields of art history, literary studies and material culture, have authored the ten essays in this book, which deal with artistic relations between China and the West at a time when Western powers’ attempts to extend a sphere of influence in China led to increasingly hostile political interactions.
"Published on the occasion of the exhibition Face to Face: Neo-Impressionist Portraits, 1886-1904. ING Cultural Centre, Brussels, February 19-May 18, 2014, Indianapolis Museum of Art, June 13-September 7, 2014."
The idea of light and darkness is one of the central ideas of the Symbolist movement, since this is a movement of contrasts. It encompasses the major themes of Symbolism, such as good and evil, beauty and ugliness, the visible and the invisible, and the divine and the earthly. This volume brings together a range of studies in order to understand the notion of light and darkness and a variety of its Symbolist interpretations. It also stresses the interdisciplinary nature of the concepts of light and darkness in Symbolism, as well as the cohabitation and symbiosis of both, which are together or separately at the core of this movement.
The brash young artist James Ensor painted Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 during a period of extraordinary artistic and political fomentation in his native Belgium. It is one of the most dazzling, innovative, and perplexing paintings created in Europe in the late nineteenth century, rivaling any work of its period in audacity and ambition. Huge in scale, complex in design and execution, and brimming with social commentary, the startling canvas presents a scene filled with clowns, masked figures, and--barely visible amid the swirling crowds--the tiny figure of Christ on a donkey entering the city of Brussels. This insightful volume examines the painting in light of Belgium's rich artistic, social, political, and theological debates in the late nineteenth century, and in the context of James Ensor's exceptional career, in order to decipher some of the painting's messages and meanings.
This book explores the responses of leading European avant-garde painters to the operas of Richard Wagner, the most influential composer of the late nineteenth century. The term avant-garde represents a twenty-first century evaluation of certain nineteenth-century artists working in a variety of advanced styles, rather than a phrase the artists applied to themselves. Chapters are on individual artists or groups, rather than an attempt to survey all of nineteenth-century Wagnerian visual art. They deal with paintings and drawings inspired by Wagner and his operas, not with the composer’s larger cultural influence through his writings and personal example. Thus artists such as Vincent Van Go...
Edited by Anna Swinbourne. Text by Anna Swinbourne, Susan Canning, Michel Draguet, Robert Hoozee, Laurence Madeline, Jane Panetta, Herwig Todts.
Two continents and five centuries are spanned and visual strategies collide as Belgian artist Luc Tuymans and Yu Hui, curator of the Palace Museum in Beijing, initiate a dialogue about art from the Low Countries and art from China during the same period. Drawings and paintings by Van Eyck, Brueghel, Ruebens, Van Dyck, Jordaens, Ensor, Mellery, Spilliaert and Magritte are considered alongside works on paper and silk from the Ming and Qing dynasties through the early Chinese Republic. "We try to open up the dialogue via the visual image, without detracting from the two traditions," says Tuymans. "How do the artists depict movement? How do they deal with distance and detail? With scale and depth?" The Forbidden Empire is published in conjunction with an exhibition traveling from the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels to the Palace Museum in Beijing, which has been housed in the Forbidden City since the 1920s.