The Politics of Painting

The Politics of Painting
Author: Asato Ikeda
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2018-05-31
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0824872126

This book examines a set of paintings produced in Japan during the 1930s and early 1940s that have received little scholarly attention. Asato Ikeda views the work of four prominent artists of the time—Yokoyama Taikan, Yasuda Yukihiko, Uemura Shōen, and Fujita Tsuguharu—through the lens of fascism, showing how their seemingly straightforward paintings of Mount Fuji, samurai, beautiful women, and the countryside supported the war by reinforcing a state ideology that justified violence in the name of the country’s cultural authenticity. She highlights the politics of “apolitical” art and challenges the postwar labeling of battle paintings—those depicting scenes of war and combat—as uniquely problematic. Yokoyama Taikan produced countless paintings of Mount Fuji as the embodiment of Japan’s “national body” and spirituality, in contrast to the modern West’s individualism and materialism. Yasuda Yukihiko located Japan in the Minamoto warriors of the medieval period, depicting them in the yamato-e style, which is defined as classically Japanese. Uemura Shōen sought to paint the quintessential Japanese woman, drawing on the Edo-period bijin-ga (beautiful women) genre while alluding to noh aesthetics and wartime gender expectations. For his subjects, Fujita Tsuguharu looked to the rural snow country, where, it was believed, authentic Japanese traditions could still be found. Although these artists employed different styles and favored different subjects, each maintained close ties with the state and presented what he considered to be the most representative and authentic portrayal of Japan. Throughout Ikeda takes into account the changing relationships between visual iconography/artistic style and its significance by carefully situating artworks within their specific historical and cultural moments. She reveals the global dimensions of wartime nationalist Japanese art and opens up the possibility of dialogue with scholarship on art produced in other countries around the same time, particularly Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Politics of Painting will be welcomed by those interested in modern Japanese art and visual culture, and war art and fascism. Its analysis of painters and painting within larger currents in intellectual history will attract scholars of modern Japanese and East Asian studies.

The Politics of Art

The Politics of Art
Author: Hanan Toukan
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 393
Release: 2021-06-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1503627764

Over the last three decades, a new generation of conceptual artists has come to the fore in the Arab Middle East. As wars, peace treaties, sanctions, and large-scale economic developments have reshaped the region, this cohort of cultural producers has also found themselves at the center of intergenerational debates on the role of art in society. Central to these cultural debates is a steady stream of support from North American and European funding organizations—resources that only increased with the start of the Arab uprisings in the early 2010s. The Politics of Art offers an unprecedented look into the entanglement of art and international politics in Beirut, Ramallah, and Amman to understand the aesthetics of material production within liberal economies. Hanan Toukan outlines the political and social functions of transnationally connected and internationally funded arts organizations and initiatives, and reveals how the production of art within global frameworks can contribute to hegemonic structures even as it is critiquing them—or how it can be counterhegemonic even when it first appears not to be. In so doing, Toukan proposes not only a new way of reading contemporary art practices as they situate themselves globally, but also a new way of reading the domestic politics of the region from the vantage point of art.

American Genre Painting

American Genre Painting
Author: Elizabeth Johns
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1991-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780300057546

American genre painting flourished in the thirty years before the Civil War, a period of rapid social change that followed the election of President Andrew Jackson. It has long been assumed that these paintings--of farmers, western boatmen and trappers, blacks both slave and free, middle-class women, urban urchins, and other everyday folk--served as records of an innocent age, reflecting a Jacksonian optimism and faith in the common man. In this enlightening book Elizabeth Johns presents a different interpretation--arguing that genre paintings had a social function that related in a more significant and less idealistic way to the political and cultural life of the time. Analyzing works by William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, David Gilmore Blythe, Lilly Martin Spencer, and others, Johns reveals the humor and cynicism in the paintings and places them in the context of stories about the American character that appeared in sources ranging from almanacs and newspapers to joke books and political caricature. She compares the productions of American painters with those of earlier Dutch, English, and French genre artists, showing the distinctive interests of American viewers. Arguing that art is socially constructed to meet the interests of its patrons and viewers, she demonstrates that the audience for American genre paintings consisted of New Yorkers with a highly developed ambition for political and social leadership, who enjoyed setting up citizens of the new democracy as targets of satire or condescension to satisfy their need for superiority. It was this network of social hierarchies and prejudices--and not a blissful celebration of American democracy--that informed the look and the richly ambiguous content of genre painting.

Painting and Politics in Northern Europe

Painting and Politics in Northern Europe
Author: Margaret Deutsch Carroll
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2008
Genre: Art
ISBN:

" ... offers a chronological account of political engagement in works by early modern Northern European painters Jan van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, and Frans Snyders."--Page 4 of cover.

Fauve Painting

Fauve Painting
Author: James D. Herbert
Publisher:
Total Pages: 224
Release: 1992
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780300050684

Fauve paintings, with their bold distortion of forms and exuberant colour, created great controversy when they were first exhibited in the early years of the 20th century.

Frida and Diego

Frida and Diego
Author: Dot Tuer
Publisher:
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2013-01-31
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781894243728

A visual feast of Kahlo and Rivera's finest works that will leave readers intellectually challenged and emotionally awakened. He painted for the people. She painted to survive. Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) and Diego Rivera's (1886-1957) legendary passion for each other and for Mexico's revolutionary culture during the 1920s and 1930s made them two of the twentieth century's most famous artists. During their life together as a married couple, Rivera achieved prominence as a muralist, while Kahlo's intimate paintings were embraced by the Surrealist movement and the Mexican art world. After their deaths in the 1950s, retrospectives of Kahlo's work enshrined her as one of the most significant women artists of the twentieth century, partially eclipsing Rivera's international fame as Mexico's greatest muralist painter. Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting offers a new perspective on their artistic significance for the twenty-first century, one that shows how their paintings reflect both the dramatic story of their lives together and their artistic commitment to the transformative political and cultural values of post-revolutionary Mexico. Frida & Diego features colour reproductions of 75 paintings and works on paper by both Kahlo and Rivera, rarely reproduced archival photographs, and new biographical information on the couple assembled by scholar Dot Tuer.

"Painting, Politics, and the New Front of Cold War Italy "

Author: Adrian R. Duran
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 197
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351555162

The first English-language monograph on Il Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, this study explores the rise and fall of this postwar Italian artists' group as a representative instance of the tensions facing Italian painting during the transition out of two decades of Fascism and into the global divisions of the Cold War. Adrian Duran argues that the binary structures of the era - realism vs. abstraction, Communism vs. democracy, conformism vs. freedom - have monopolized the discourse surrounding the Fronte Nuovo and, with it, the historiography of Italian painting during this period, 1944-50. Beginning with the dialogues that framed the formation of the Fronte Nuovo, this book reconsiders artists' works, correspondence, critical writings, and manifestos. These are married to examinations of specific exhibitions, the most important of which are the group's 1947 inaugural exhibition and the 1948 and 1950 Venice Biennali. The critical responses to these exhibitions are reconsidered in light of their groundings in the heated political debates of the period. In total, these diverse sources reveal the vast divide between the internal discourse of the arts, generated by the participant artists and their works, and the surrounding politics of Cold War Italy.

"Painting, Politics and the Struggle for the ?ole de Paris, 1944?964 "

Author: Natalie Adamson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351555189

Painting, Politics and the Struggle for the ?ole de Paris, 1944-1964 is the first book dedicated to the postwar or 'nouvelle' ?ole de Paris. It challenges the customary relegation of the ?ole de Paris to the footnotes, not by arguing for some hitherto 'hidden' merit for the art and ideas associated with this school, but by establishing how and why the ?ole de Paris was a highly significant vehicle for artistic and political debate. The book presents a sustained historical study of how this 'school' was constituted by the paintings of a diverse group of artists, by the combative field of art criticism, and by the curatorial policies of galleries and state exhibitions. By thoroughly mining the extensive resources of the newspaper and art journal press, gallery and government archives, artists' writings and interviews with surviving artists and art critics, the book traces the artists, exhibitions, and art critical debates that made the ?ole de Paris a zone of aesthetic and political conflict. Through setting the ?ole de Paris into its artistic, social, and political context, Natalie Adamson demonstrates how it functioned as the defining force in French postwar art in its defence of the tradition of easel painting, as well as an international point of reference for the expansion of modernism. In doing so, she presents a wholly new perspective on the vexed relationships between painting, politics, and national identity in France during the two decades following World War II.