Many museum professionals today believe that university-based art history focuses too much on theory and the social agency of art, neglecting the aesthetic dimensions of the art object. Conversely, many academics feel that museums have become preoccupied with the quest for money and audiences, making them an increasingly unlikely source of innovative scholarship. In this provocative book, seventeen eminent figures from both sides of the art world—museum professionals and university scholars—explore the questions underlying the often tense relationship between the two main branches of the discipline.

The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University (Clark Studies in the Visual Arts)

Arts & Photography

Charles W. Haxthausen

History & Criticism

Clark Art Institute

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) was the only Impressionist artist to paint Orientalist themes, yet little has been written about the two journeys he took to the French North African colony of Algeria in 1881 and 1882. There he created more than two dozen stunning works, depicting exotic scenes of ancient stone mosques, milling crowds at a festival in the Casbah, and spectacular palm fronds in the botanical garden. This important book, published to accompany a traveling exhibition organized by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, assembles for the first time all of Renoir’s Algerian paintings as a coherent body of work. Handsomely illustrated, the book situates Renoir’s early studio Orientalism within the great tradition of French Orientalist painting. The landscapes and figure paintings Renoir completed in Algiers, several of which are previously unpublished, are discussed in the context of the topography of the city and of the ethnography of its people. Fascinating period photographs, engravings, maps, and postcards, together with an essay exploring the Algeria beyond Renoir’s canvases, provide important historical and cultural background on the country and on the French presence there.

Renoir and Algeria

Roger Benjamin

David Prochaska

Art history, aesthetics, and visual studies today find themselves in contested new philosophical and institutional circumstances. This fascinating and challenging volume explores the connections and differences among these three methods of investigating visual representation. What are the dominant aesthetic assumptions underlying art historical inquiry? How have these assumptions been challenged by visual studies? Are questions of quality, form, content, meaning, and spectatorship culturally specific? Can we still define the parameters of what should properly constitute the objects of the history of art? Fifteen distinguished scholars answer these and other questions, critically examining the relationships among these three scholarly fields from their founding moments through their contemporary practices.

Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies (Clark Studies in the Visual Arts)

Keith Moxey

Michael Ann Holly

With essays by Cao Yiqiang, Rita Eder, James Elkins, Arlene K. Fleming, Derek Gillman, Jyotindra Jain, Cecelia F. Klein, Yves Le Fur, Dominic Marner, Anitra Nettleton, John Onians, Edmund P. Pillsbury, Michael Rinehart, David Summers, Wilfried van Damme, and Georges S. Zouain _____________________________________________ How do we do justice to art when we treat it not as a discrete European or other regional tradition, but as a worldwide phenomenon with a long history? In this groundbreaking book, leading academics, curators, bibliographers, and representatives of international organizations from every continent explain the ways they deal with the conflict between the need to compress and the desire to express. Anyone who faces this challenge, whether in developing a course at university or school, writing a textbook, installing a museum collection, mounting an exhibition, or otherwise presenting the world’s cultural heritage will want to read it.

Compression vs. Expression: Containing and Explaining the World’s Art (Clark Studies in the Visual Arts)

Despite its origins in European models, the practice of art history in the United States has evolved into institutional protocols distinct from those of countries such as Germany, France, England, and the Netherlands. Fourteen international scholars examine how these varying disciplinary practices might be characterized, in theory and actuality, in the past and the present, comparing the function of higher education in different national contexts and the extent that professionalization encourages or limits critical innovation.

The Art Historian: National Traditions and Institutional Practices (Clark Studies in the Visual Arts)

Michael F. Zimmermann

Perfect for artists, illustrators, art and art history students and art lovers! Over-sized book, 78 pages, profusely illustrated with beautiful color and b/w reproductions. A must for every Goltzius, Tetrode, Classical sculpture and print, and 16th century European drawing, painting and sculpture fan; and all aspiring painters! An ideal gift and great value for the Holidays, birthdays or graduation! See our complete inventory of art books by clicking on Srebnik Gallery at right.

Goltzius and the Third Dimension

James A. Ganz

Senior Curator Stephen Goddard

Graphic Design

Turner: The Late Seascapes

The English romantic painter J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) is renowned for his sublime and dramatic landscapes and seascapes. The sea held a particular fascination for the artist, exemplified not only by the subject matter of many of his paintings but also by his own collection of ship models and personal experiences as an amateur sailor. This handsome book - written by Turner expert James Hamilton and published in conjunction with a traveling exhibition organized by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and Manchester City Galleries - focuses primarily on the artist's spectacular seascapes dating from the 1840s, the last decade of his illustrious career. Turner: The Late Seascapes provides new and provocative insights into these powerful works, relating them to the artist's interest in poetry and drama as well as his curiousity about science, optics, and photography. Turner's extensive travels - which clearly fed his imagination and inspired his choice of subject matter - are explored in depth, as is the relationship between Turner's paintings and seventeenth-century Dutch precedents. Hamilton also examines the important role of the pendant in Turner's late art, arguing that his paired works have intentional associative narrative, stylistic, and chromatic meanings. In addition, the author traces the evolution of Turner's famous Whaling series, offering a new source for it, and examines Turner's captain Elisha Morgan and the English photographer John Mayall, both of which have been previously overlooked in the literature on the artist. Including more than 90 examples of Turner's dramatic and lively marine pictures - 70 of which are reproduced in full color - this elegant book sheds fascinating new light on one of the world's most beloved artists.

Hamilton, James

With contributions by Emily Apter, George Baker, Malcolm Baker, John Brewer, Martha Buskirk, Margaret Iversen, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Karen Lang, Mark A. Meadow, Helen Molesworth, Marcia Pointon, Christian Scheidemann, Edward J. Sullivan, and Martha Ward This latest volume in the critically acclaimed Clark Studies in the Visual Arts series examines the force of art history’s attraction to particular objects and the corresponding rhythms of attachment and detachment that animate the discipline. In a series of thought-provoking essays, distinguished curators, conservators, and scholars from various disciplines within the humanities consider how artists, the public, and art historians have encountered objects in periods ranging from the Renaissance to Surrealism and contemporary art. They grapple with the questions of how art and art history are shaped by the confrontation with the object―painted, drawn, and sculpted; lost, found, and ready-made; exhibited and conserved; made and unmade. Art historian Stephen Melville provides the introduction to the volume. Other contributors include Emily Apter, George Baker, Malcolm Baker, John Brewer, Martha Buskirk, Margaret Iversen, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Karen Lang, Mark Meadow, Helen Molesworth, Marcia Pointon, Christian Scheidemann, Edward J. Sullivan, and Martha Ward.

The Lure of the Object (Clark Studies in the Visual Arts)

This lovely book provides the first comprehensive examination of Eastman Johnson’s vivid paintings of a quintessential New England theme―the making of maple sugar. This series of pictures, executed during the 1860s, is perhaps the most ambitious project in the artist’s career.Brian T. Allen discusses the ways in which Johnson’s maple sugar paintings reflect a New England on the edge of vast changes, both in the technology of farming and in the social structures of small communities. He notes how Johnson conveys the tense, shifting relationship that existed between industrial innovation and New England’s distinctive brand of community spirit, evident through maple sugar’s close association with free labor, as opposed to cane sugar’s connection with slavery. Presented here in full color, Johnson’s maple sugar paintings are both a celebration of New England and a commentary on a bygone era.

Sugaring Off: The Maple Sugar Paintings of Eastman Johnson

Allen, Brian

Previously announced
Edouard Baldus (1813–1889) was the most important French architectural photographer of the mid-19th century. This book offers an in-depth exploration of one of his most intriguing projects―a remarkable series of views of the Château de La Faloise, in which his subject was not primarily the country house but the owner and his family at leisure on its grounds. James A. Ganz locates the photographs at a key moment in Baldus’s career and during one of the most eventful decades in the history of French photography, showing that they stand at a crossroad between the English “conversation piece” and the birth of Impressionist portraiture in the early paintings of Monet and Bazille.

Edouard Baldus at the Chateau de La Faloise

Ganz, James A.

Individual Artists

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