Enfilade

From Princeton UP:

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 352 pages, ISBN: 9780691165271, $35 / £25.

A picture’s title is often our first guide to understanding the image. Yet paintings didn’t always have titles, and many canvases acquired their names from curators, dealers, and printmakers—not the artists. Taking an original, historical look at how Western paintings were named, Picture Titles shows how the practice developed in response to the conditions of the modern art world and how titles have shaped the reception of artwork from the time of Bruegel and Rembrandt to the present.

Ruth Bernard Yeazell begins the story with the decline of patronage and the rise of the art market in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the increasing circulation of pictures and the democratization of the viewing public generated the need for a shorthand by which to identify works at a far remove from their creation. The spread of literacy both encouraged the practice of titling pictures and aroused new anxieties about relations between word and image, including fears that reading was taking the place of looking. Yeazell demonstrates that most titles composed before the nineteenth century were the work of middlemen, and even today many artists rely on others to name their pictures. A painter who wants a title to stick, Yeazell argues, must engage in an act of aggressive authorship. She investigates prominent cases, such as David’s Oath of the Horatii and works by Turner, Courbet, Whistler, Magritte, and Jasper Johns. Examining Western painting from the Renaissance to the present day, Picture Titles sheds new light on the ways that we interpret and appreciate visual art.

Ruth Bernard Yeazell is the Chace Family Professor of English and director of The Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University. Her books include Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature and Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton).

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C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Prologue (This is not a title)

I  Naming and Circulating: Middlemen
1  Before Titles
2  Dealers and Notaries
3  Early Cataloguers
4  Academies
5  Printmakers
6  Curators, Critics, Friends—and More Dealers

II  Reading and Interpreting: Viewers
7  Reading by the Title
8  The Power of a Name
9  Many Can Read Print
10  Reading against the Title

III  Authoring as well as Painting: Artists
11  The Force of David’s Oath
12  Turner’s Poetic Fallacies
13  Courbet’s Studio as Manifesto
14  Whistler’s Symphonies and Other Instructive Arrangements
15  Magritte and The Use of Words
16  Johns’s No and the Painted Word

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

From HBA:

The Historians of British Art is pleased to announce Book Award winners for publications from 2014. The winners were chosen from a nominating list of over eighty books from more than twenty different presses. Awards are granted in three different categories, and this year two books share the award for single-author books dealing with a subject before 1800. Paul Binski’s Gothic Wonders: Art, Artifice, and the Decorated Style, 1290–1350 sets a major and understudied episode in medieval art in conversation with its Continental neighbors, dramatically enlivening both in the process. Mark Hallett’s Reynolds: Portraiture in Action breathes new life into one of Britain’s most thoroughly studied portraitists by tracing his work from studio conception to exhibition and beyond. John Potvin is the winner of the post-1800 single-author category for Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain, a book that expands the scope of interior design and the insights that it can yield for British modern culture. Finally, British Art in the Nuclear Age, edited by Catherine Jolivette, is the winner of the multi-author category. Drawing on a wide array of artists and materials, this volume offers a subtle and surprising take on Britain’s cultural position during, and in relation to, the Cold War.

More information is available here»

From the U of Massachusets Press:

Andrew Hemingway and Alan Wallach, eds., Transatlantic Romanticism: British and American Art and Literature, 1790–1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-1625341143, $30.

That the Romantic movement was an international phenomenon is a commonplace, yet to date, historical study of the movement has tended to focus primarily on its national manifestations. This volume offers a new perspective. In thirteen chapters devoted to artists and writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, leading scholars of the period examine the international exchanges that were crucial for the rise of Romanticism in England and the United States.

In the book’s introduction, Andrew Hemingway—building on the theoretical work of Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre—proposes that we need to remobilize the concept of Weltanschauung, or comprehensive worldview, in order to develop the kind of synthetic history of arts and ideas the phenomenon of Romanticism demands. The essays that follow focus on the London and New York art worlds and such key figures as Benjamin West, Thomas Bewick, John Vanderlyn, Washington Allston, John Martin, J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Cole, James Fenimore Cooper, George Catlin, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Herman Melville. Taken together, these essays plot the rise of a romantic anti-capitalist Weltanschauung as well as the dialectic between Romanticism’s national and international manifestations.

In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Matthew Beaumont, David Bindman, Leo Costello, Nicholas Grindle, Wayne Franklin, Janet Koenig, William Pressly, Robert Sayre, William Truettner, Dell Upton, and William Vaughan.

Andrew Hemingway is professor emeritus of art history, University College London, and author of The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting and Machine Age America.
Alan Wallach is professor emeritus of art and art history, The College of William and Mary, and author of Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).

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C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Capitalism, Nationalism, and the Romantic Weltanschauung, Andrew Hemingway

I  The City
1  ‘The pit of modern art’: Practice and Ambition in the London Art World, William Vaughan
2  The Urban Ecology of Art in Antebellum New York, Dell Upton
3  Urban Convalescence in Lamb, Poe, and Baudelaire, Matthew Beaumont

II  History
4  Sublime and Fall: Benjamin West and the Politics of the Sublime in Early Nineteenth-Century Marylebone, Nicholas Grindle
5  Benjamin West’s Royal Chapel at Windsor: Who’s in Charge, the Patron or the Painter?, William Pressly
6  The Politics of Style; Allston’s and Martin’s Belshazzars Compared, Andrew Hemingway
7  James Fenimore Coooper and American Artists in Europe: Art, Religion, and Politics, Wayne Franklin

III  Landscape
8  John Martin, Thomas Cole, and Deep Time, David Bindman
9  ‘Gorgeous, but altogether false”: Turner, Cole, and Transatlantic Ideas of Decline, Leo Costello
10  Thomas Cole and Transatlantic Romanticism, Allan Wallach

IV  Race
11  Picturing the Murder of Jane McCrea: A Critical Moment in Transatlantic Romanticism, William H. Truettner
12  The Romantic Indian Commodified: Text and Image in George Catlin’s Letters and Notes (1841), Robert Woods Sayre
13  Romantic Racialism and the Antislavery Novels of Stowe, Hildreth, and Melville, Janet Koenig

Notes on Contributors
Index

From Duke UP:

William Craft Brumfield, Architecture at the End of the Earth: Photographing the Russian North (Duke University Press, 2015), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-0822359067, $40.

Carpeted in boreal forests, dotted with lakes, cut by rivers, and straddling the Arctic Circle, the region surrounding the White Sea, which is known as the Russian North, is sparsely populated and immensely isolated. It is also the home to architectural marvels, as many of the original wooden and brick churches and homes in the region’s ancient villages and towns still stand. Featuring nearly two hundred full color photographs of these beautiful centuries-old structures, Architecture at the End of the Earth is the most recent addition to William Craft Brumfield’s ongoing project to photographically document all aspects of Russian architecture.

The architectural masterpieces Brumfield photographed are diverse: they range from humble chapels to grand cathedrals, buildings that are either dilapidated or well cared for, and structures repurposed during the Soviet era. Included are onion-domed wooden churches such as the Church of the Dormition, built in 1674 in Varzuga; the massive walled Transfiguration Monastery on Great Solovetsky Island, which dates to the mid-1550s; the Ferapontov-Nativity Monastery’s frescoes, painted in 1502 by Dionisy, one of Russia’s greatest medieval painters; nineteenth-century log houses, both rustic and ornate; and the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Vologda, which was commissioned by Ivan the Terrible in the 1560s. The text that introduces the photographs outlines the region’s significance to Russian history and culture.

Brumfield is challenged by the immense difficulty of accessing the Russian North, and recounts traversing sketchy roads, crossing silt-clogged rivers on barges and ferries, improvising travel arrangements, being delayed by severe snowstorms, and seeing the region from the air aboard the small planes he needs to reach remote areas.

The buildings Brumfield photographed, some of which lie in near ruin, are at constant risk due to local indifference and vandalism, a lack of maintenance funds, clumsy restorations, or changes in local and national priorities. Brumfield is concerned with their futures and hopes that the region’s beautiful and vulnerable achievements of master Russian carpenters will be preserved. Architecture at the End of the Earth is at once an art book, a travel guide, and a personal document about the discovery of this bleak but beautiful region of Russia that most readers will see here for the first time.

William Craft Brumfield is Professor of Slavic Studies at Tulane University. Brumfield, who began photographing Russia in 1970, is the foremost authority in the West on Russian architecture. He is the author, editor, and photographer of numerous books, including Lost Russia: Photographing the Ruins of Russian Architecture, also published by Duke University Press. Brumfield is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center. In 2002 he was elected to the State Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences, and in 2006 he was elected to the Russian Academy of Fine Arts. He is also the 2014 recipient of the D. S. Likhachev Prize for Outstanding Contributions to the Preservation of the Cultural Heritage of Russia. Brumfield’s photographs of Russian architecture have been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums and are part of the Image Collections at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.