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The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects

This brilliant, penetrating, and ambitious book by a well-known literary theorist studies the complex relationship between the emotions on the one side and literary works and paintings on the other. A central aim of Charles Altieri's is to rescue our understanding of the affects from philosophical theories that subordinate them to cognitive control and ethical judgment. Altieri concentrates on two fundamental aspects of aesthetic experience: the first describes how representative texts and paintings compose intricate affective states; the second engages how we might generalize from the values involved in the affects made articulate by works of art. He addresses a range of affective states, distinguishing carefully among sensations, feelings, moods, emotions, and passions. He shows how art solicits, organizes, and reflects upon affective energies and how many of the qualities of the affects developed within artworks simply disappear when observers are content with adjectival labels such as "sad," "angry," or "happy. " The Particulars of Rapture proposes treating affects in adverbial rather than in adjectival terms, emphasizing the way in which text and paintings shape distinct affective states. Such an emphasis places the manner in which artwork acts upon the emotions central to the quality of the resulting affect. And that emphasis in turn enables Altieri to show how a more general expressivist model for establishing and assessing values can compete with perspectives based on rationality.

Partisan Canons

Whether it is being studied or critiqued, the art canon is usually understood as an authoritative list of important works and artists. This collection breaks with the idea of a singular, transcendent canon. Through provocative case studies, it demonstrates that the content of any canon is both historically and culturally specific and dependent on who is responsible for the canon's production and maintenance. The contributors explore how, where, why, and by whom canons are formed; how they function under particular circumstances; how they are maintained; and why they may undergo change. Focusing on various moments from the seventeenth century to the present, the contributors cover a broad geographic terrain, encompassing the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Taiwan, and South Africa. Among the essays are examinations of the working and reworking of a canon by an influential nineteenth-century French critic, the limitations placed on what was acceptable as canonical in American textbooks produced during the Cold War, the failed attempt to define a canon of Rembrandt's works, and the difficulties of constructing an artistic canon in parts of the globe marked by colonialism and the imposition of Eurocentric ideas of artistic value. The essays highlight the diverse factors that affect the production of art canons: market forces, aesthetic and political positions, nationalism and ingrained ideas concerning the cultural superiority of particular groups, perceptions of gender and race, artists' efforts to negotiate their status within particular professional environments, and the dynamics of art history as an academic discipline and discourse. This volume is a call to historicize canons, acknowledging both their partisanship and its implications for the writing of art history. Contributors. Jenny Anger, Marcia Brennan, Anna Brzyski, James Cutting, Paul Duro, James Elkins, Barbara Jaffee, Robert Jensen, Jane C. Ju, Monica Kjellman-Chapin, Julie L. McGee, Terry Smith, Linda Stone-Ferrier, Despina Stratigakos

The Pastel Book: Material and Techniques for Today's Artist

Absolutely the most thorough guide to pastel materials and techniques ever assembled in a single volume, this is the book for anyone working with pastels, from beginners to experienced artists looking to develop more professional skills. Defining the pastel medium broadly--color in stick form to be used for drawing and painting simultaneously--the author creates works of sensuous textures and colors, ranging from subtle to intense. He uses traditional soft and hard pastels, as well as oil pastels and oil sticks, showing the effects produced by each in step-by-step demonstrations. Included are sophisticated ways to combine pastels with water, acrylic, alkyd gels, and oil paint for stunning mixed-media results.

Pastel Step By Step

If you like working with color, then you'll love pastels! Pastel has recently experienced a renewed popularity as a serious painting medium, and several manufacturers now make high-quality materials readily available to artists. Pastels are easy to use, and you don't have to worry about drying times, toxicity, or odors--as you might if you were working with paint. And pastel is also attractive to many artists because of its versatility--it is both a painting and a drawing medium. Moreover, you can create a seemingly endless variety of textures and effects with the vast number of hues that are available. And pastel is an extremely fluid and forgiving medium, which makes it great for beginners. In this book, the author demonstrates a variety of techniques and show you how to render an array of subject matter. As you learn more about the vibrant and fascinating world of pastel, you'll begin to recognize the endless possibilities that this medium has to offer!

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

The second of three books published by the Center for Environmental Structure to provide a "working alternative to our present ideas about architecture, building, and planning," A Pattern Language offers a practical language for building and planning based on natural considerations. The reader is given an overview of some 250 patterns that are the units of this language, each consisting of a design problem, discussion, illustration, and solution. By understanding recurrent design problems in our environment, readers can identify extant patterns in their own design projects and use these patterns to create a language of their own. Extraordinarily thorough, coherent, and accessible, this book has become a bible for homebuilders, contractors, and developers who care about creating healthy, high-level design.

The Pentagon: The Untold Story of the Wartime Race to Build the Pentagon--and to Restore It Sixty Years Later

The creation of the Pentagon in seventeen whirlwind months during World War II is one of the great construction feats in American history, involving a tremendous mobilization of manpower, resources, and minds. In astonishingly short order, Brigadier General Brehon B. Somervell conceived and built an institution that ranks with the White House, the Vatican, and a handful of other structures as symbols recognized around the world. Now veteran military reporter Steve Vogel reveals for the first time the remarkable story of the Pentagon's construction, from it's dramatic birth to its rebuilding after the September 11 attack. At the center of the story is the tempestuous but courtly Somervell-"dynamite in a Tiffany box," as he was once described. In July 1941, the Army construction chief sprang the idea of building a single, huge headquarters that could house the entire War Department, then scattered in seventeen buildings around Washington. Somervell ordered drawings produced in one weekend and, despite a firestorm of opposition, broke ground two months later, vowing that the building would be finished in little more than a year. Thousands of workers descended on the site, a raffish Virginia neighborhood known as Hell's Bottom, while an army of draftsmen churned out designs barely one step ahead of their execution. Seven months later the first Pentagon employees skirted seas of mud to move into the building and went to work even as construction roared around them. The colossal Army headquarters helped recast Washington from a sleepy southern town into the bustling center of a reluctant empire. Vivid portraits are drawn of other key figures in the drama, among them Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president who fancied himself an architect; Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, both desperate for a home for the War Department as the country prepared for battle; Colonel Leslie R. Groves, the ruthless force of nature who oversaw the Pentagon's construction (as well as the Manhattan Project to create an atomic bomb); and John McShain, the charming and dapper builder who used his relationship with FDR to help land himself the contract for the biggest office building in the world. The Pentagon's post-World War II history is told through its critical moments, including the troubled birth of the Department of Defense during the Cold War, the tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the tumultuous 1967 protest against the Vietnam War. The pivotal attack on September 11 is related with chilling new detail, as is the race to rebuild the damaged Pentagon, a restoration that echoed the spirit of its creation. This study of a single enigmatic building tells a broader story of modern American history, from the eve of World War II to the new wars of the twenty-first century. Steve Vogel has crafted a dazzling work of military social history that merits comparison with the best works of David Halberstam or David McCullough. Like its namesake, The Pentagon is a true landmark. "Among books dealing with seemingly impossible engineering feats, this easily ranks with David McCullough's The Great Bridge and The Path Between the Seas, as well as Ross King's Brunelleschi's Dome. " -Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review) "Vogel artfully weaves architectural and cultural history, thus creating a brilliant and illuminating study of this singular (and, in many ways, sacred) American space. " -Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) "An amazing story, expertly researched and beautifully told. Part history, part adventure yarn, The Pentagon is above all else the biography of an American icon. "

Perceiving the Arts: An Introduction to the Humanities

Written for individuals who have little or no knowledge of the arts, Perceiving the Arts has a specific and limited purpose: to provide an introductory, technical, and respondent-related reference to the arts and literature. Intended to give basic information about each of the arts disciplines-drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, architecture, music, theatre, dance, cinema, landscape architecture, and literature-the book seeks to give its readers touchstones concerning what to look and listen for in works of art and literature.

The Perfect House: A Journey with Renaissance Master Andrea Palladio

"Palladio is the Bible," Thomas Jefferson once said. "You should get it and stick to it." With his simple, gracious, perfectly proportioned villas, Andrea Palladio elevated the architecture of the private house into an art form during the late sixteenth century -- and his influence is still evident in the ample porches, columned porticoes, grand ceilings, and front-door pediments of America today. In The Perfect House, bestselling author Witold Rybczynski, whose previous books have transformed our understanding of domestic architecture, reveals how a handful of Palladio's houses in an obscure corner of the Venetian Republic should have made their presence felt hundreds of years later and halfway across the globe. More than just a study of one of history's seminal architectural figures, The Perfect House reflects Rybczynski's enormous admiration for his subject and provides a new way of looking at the special landscapes we call "home" in the modern world.

Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties

The interaction of the performance artist Linda Montano with other performance artists to consider how early events associated with sex, food, money/fame, or death/ritual resurfaced in their later work has resulted in a talking performance that documents the production of art in a misunderstood community. Her discussions with more than 100 artists, focused on the relationship between art and life, history and memory, the individual and society, and the potential for individual and social change.

Perspective in the Visual Culture of Classical Antiquity

Linear perspective is a science that represents objects in space upon a plane, projecting them from a point of view. This concept was known in classical antiquity. In this book, Rocco Sinisgalli investigates theories of linear perspective in the classical era. Departing from the received understanding of perspective in the ancient world, he argues that ancient theories of perspective were primarily based on the study of objects in mirrors, rather than the study of optics and the workings of the human eye. In support of this argument, Sinisgalli analyzes, and offers new insights into, some of the key classical texts on this topic, including Euclid's De speculis, Lucretius' De rerum natura, Vitruvius' De architectura, and Ptolemy's De opticis. Key concepts throughout the book are clarified and enhanced by detailed illustrations.

Peter Selz: Sketches of a Life in Art

This absorbing biography, often conveyed through Peter Selz's own words, traces the journey of a Jewish-German immigrant from Hitler's Munich to the United States and on to an important career as a pioneer historian of modern art. Paul J. Karlstrom illuminates key historical and cultural events of the twentieth-century as he describes Selz's extraordinary career--from Chicago's Institute of Design (New Bauhaus), to New York's Museum of Modern Art during the transformative 1960s, and as founding director of the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley. Karlstrom sheds light on the controversial viewpoints that at times isolated Selz from his colleagues but nonetheless affirmed his conviction that significant art was always an expression of deep human experience. The book also links Selz's long life story--featuring close relationships with such major art figures as Mark Rothko, Dore Ashton, Willem de Kooning, Sam Francis, and Christo--with his personal commitment to political engagement.

Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger

This anthology is remarkable not only for the selections themselves, among which the Schelling and the Heidegger essays were translated especially for this volume, but also for the editors' general introduction and the introductory essays for each selection, which make this volume an invaluable aid to the study of the powerful, recurrent ideas concerning art, beauty, critical method, and the nature of representation. Because this collection makes clear the ways in which the philosophy of art relates to and is part of general philosophical positions, it will be an essential sourcebook to students of philosophy, art history, and literary criticism.

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again

The private Andy Warhol talks: about love, sex, food, beauty, fame, work, money, success; about New York and America; and about himself--his childhood in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, good times and bad times in the Big Apple, the explosion of his career in the sixties, and life among celebrities.

A Philosophy of Cinematic Art

A Philosophy of Cinematic Art is a systematic study of cinema as an art form, showing how the medium conditions fundamental features of cinematic artworks. It discusses the status of cinema as an art form, whether there is a language of film, realism in cinema, cinematic authorship, intentionalist and constructivist theories of interpretation, cinematic narration, the role of emotions in responses to films, the possibility of identification with characters, and the nature of the cinematic medium. Groundbreaking in its coverage of a wide range of contemporary cinematic media, it analyses not only traditional photographic films, but also digital cinema, and a variety of interactive cinematic works, including videogames. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book examines the work of leading film theorists and philosophers of film, and develops a powerful framework with which to think about cinema as an art.

Photography (8th edition)

The now venerable textbook continues its double focus on technique and visual awareness, updating the technical aspects to include the digital dimension infiltrating the profession, and placing more emphasis of ways to improve visual awareness. Auxiliary material includes an instructor's manual, a student laboratory manual and journal, and an interactive Web site. Annotation C. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Picasso: Creator and Destroyer

Surprise was a key characteristic of Picasso's art, and it was the most persistent emotion evoked in me during the years this book has been in the making. I was brought up, like so many of my generation, to see Picasso as the most extraordinary, the most compelling, the most original, the most protean, the most influential, the most seductive and certainly the most idolized artist of the twentieth century.

Picasso (Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists)

Briefly examines the life and work of the renowned twentieth-century artist, describing and giving examples from his various periods or styles.

Pictorial Webster's

Featuring over 1,500 engravings that originally graced the pages of Webster's dictionaries in the 19th century, this volume is an irresistible treasure trove for art lovers, designers, and anyone with an interest in visual history. Meticulously cleaned and restored by fine-press bookmaker Johnny Carrera, the engravings in Pictorial Webster's have been compiled into an alluring and unusual visual reference guide for the modern day. Images range from the entirely mysterious to the classically iconic. From Acorns to Zebras, Bell Jars to Velocipedes, these alphabetically arranged archetypes and curiosities create enigmatic juxtapositions and illustrate the items deemed important to the Victorian mind. Sure to inspire and delight, Pictorial Webster's is at once a fascinating historical record and a stunning jewel of a book.

A Picture for Harold's Room

Harold needs a picture for his bedroom wall. So he takes his purple crayon and begins to create a whole new world around him. But then he notices he has gotten very small-half the size of a daisy! Only a very clever artist can find his way home now.

Picturing the City: Urban Vision and the Ashcan School

Picturing the City takes a fresh look at the well-loved Ashcan School artists, a group of artists who sought to document everyday life in turn-of-the-century New York City, capturing it in realistic and unglamorized paintings and etchings of urban street scenes.

Picturing Victorian America

This is the first book-length account of the pioneering and prolific Kellogg family of lithographers, active in Connecticut for over four decades. Daniel Wright Kellogg opened his print shop on Main Street in Hartford five years before Nathaniel Currier went into a similar business in New York and more than twenty-five years before Currier founded his partnership with James M. Ives, yet Daniel and his brothers Elijah and Edmund Kellogg have long been overshadowed by the Currier & Ives printmaking firm. Editor Nancy Finlay has gathered together eight essays that explore the complexity of the relationships between artists, lithographers, and print, map, and book publishers. Presenting a complete visual overview of the Kelloggs' production between 1830 and 1880, Picturing Victorian America also provides museums, libraries, and private collectors with the information needed to document the Kellogg prints in their own collections. The first comprehensive study of the Kellogg prints, this book demands reconsideration of this Connecticut family's place in the history of American graphic and visual arts.CONTRIBUTORS: Georgia B. Barnhill, Lynne Zacek Bassett, Candice C. Brashears, Nancy Finlay, Elisabeth Hodermarsky, Richard C. Malley, Sally Pierce, Michael Shortell, Kate Steinway.

The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History

The Pilgrim Art explores the remarkable cultural influence of Chinese porcelain around the globe. Cobalt ore was shipped from Persia to China in the fourteenth century, where it was used to decorate porcelain for Muslims in Southeast Asia, India, Persia, and Iraq.

A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams

Michael Pollan's unmatched ability to draw lines of connection between our everyday experiences- whether eating, gardening, or building-and the natural world has been the basis for the popular success of his many works of nonfiction, including the genre-defining bestsellers The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. With this updated edition of his earlier book A Place of My Own, readers can revisit the inspired, intelligent, and often hilarious story of Pollan's realization of a room of his own-a small, wooden hut, his "shelter for daydreams"-built with his admittedly unhandy hands. Inspired by both Thoreau and Mr. Blandings, A Place of My Own not only works to convey the history and meaning of all human building, it also marks the connections between our bodies, our minds, and the natural world.

Pleasant Places: The Rustic Landscape from Bruegel to Ruisdael

Gibson focuses on Haarlem between 1600 and 1635, in his interpretation of Dutch landscapes and emphasizes prints, the medium in which the rustic view was first made available to the general art-buying public. Gibson begins by looking at the origins of the rustic landscape in the sixteenth-century Flanders and its later reformation by Dutch artists, a legacy very much alive today.