The International Conference on Insular Art (IIAC) is the leading forum for scholars of the visual and material culture of early medieval Ireland and Britain, including manuscript illumination, sculpture, metalwork, and textiles, and encompassing the work of Anglo-Saxon-, Celtic- and Norse-speaking artists. The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the eighth IIAC, which took place in Glasgow 11-14 July 2017. The theme of IIAC8 - Peopling Insular Art: Practice, Performance, Perception - was intended to focus attention on those who commissioned, created, and engaged with Insular art objects, and how they conceptualised, fashioned, and experienced them (with ‘engagement’ covering not only contemporary audiences, but later medieval and modern ones too). The twenty-one articles gathered here reflect the diverse ways in which this theme has been interpreted. They demonstrate the intellectual vibrancy of Insular art studies, its international outlook, its interdiscplinarity, and its openness to innovative technologies and approaches, while at the same time demonstrating the strength and enduring value of established methodologies and research practices. The studies collected here focus not only on made objects, but on the creative processes and intellectual decisions which informed their making. This volume brings Insular makers – the illuminators, pattern-makers, rubricators, carvers, and casters – to the fore.

During the early Hollywood sound era, studio director George Cukor produced nearly fifty films in as many years, famously winning theBest Director Oscar at the 1964 Academy Awards for My Fair Lady. His collaborations with so-called difficult actresses such as Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland, and Marilyn Monroe unsettled producers even as his ticket sales lined their pockets. Fired from Gone with the Wind for giving Vivien Leigh more screen time than Clark Gable, Cukor quickly earned a doublesided reputation as a “woman’s director. ” While the label celebrated his ability to help actresses deliver their best performances, the epithet also branded the gay director as suitable only for work on female-centered movies such as melodramas and romantic comedies. Desperate for success after a failed drag film nearly ended his career, Cukor swore to work within Hollywood’s constraints. Nevertheless, What Price Hollywood? Gender and Sex in the Films of George Cukor finds that Cukor continued to explore gender and sexuality on-screen. Drawing on a broad array of theoretical lenses, Elyce Rae Helford examines how Cukor’s award-winning and lesser-known films engage Hollywood masculinity and gender performativity through camp, drag, and mixed genres. Blending biography with critical analysis of more than twenty-five films, What Price Hollywood? tells the story of a once-ina- generation director who produced some of the best films in history.

Of Modernism presents original research by ten contemporary scholars of modern art. By turns provocative, insightful and informative, these essays – written in honour of the eminent British art historian Christopher Green – rethink some of the crucial artworks, problems and practitioners of European high modernism, from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon to Guernica, avant-gardism to internationalism, Joan Miró to Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe. Professor Christopher Green has made an outstanding contribution to the historiography of European modernism. As a teacher at the Courtauld Institute, his wide-ranging scholarship and generosity of mind have inspired several generations of students, many of whom have gone on to lead distinguished careers in the worlds of art and academia. Of Modernism is a collection written in his honour.Questions about modernism shape the ten essays presented here, explicitly or otherwise, and they come in as many different shapes. However, the subject-matter is predominantly European (which still includes Britain at the time of writing!); the method is historical, true to Chris’s conviction that ‘the work of an artist is, in its largest sense, inseparable from history thought of in its largest sense’; and finally, the canon is open, situating Picasso – a theme in the collection – alongside artists far more obscure, and in the context of a visual culture which is strikingly eclectic and often ephemeral. The ten contributors to this collection – Fae Brauer, Grace Brockington, Penelope Curtis, Linda Goddard, Nancy Ireson, William Jeffett, Silvia Loreti, C.F.B. Miller, Gavin Parkinson and Sarah Victoria Turner – all studied with Chris as postgraduates at the Courtauld, and several have also collaborated with him as curators. They have all moved on to distinguished careers worldwide, ranging from critics and historians to eminent professors and museum professionals.

Published to accompany a major new exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre, this book examines the spectacular and controversial vision of art practice that raged across the Western world from the end of the 19th century: Art Nouveau.The role of nature is a key focus of the exhibition. The common theme of translating plants into patterns will be explored as a defining feature of the modern style. Art and objects will represent Art Nouveau from different countries, where it appeared characterised as flowing, tensile line, and dramatic movement, or by organic imagery combined with an informal geometry. Artists and designers include René Lalique, Edgar Degas, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, William Morris; Alphonse Mucha and Gabriel Dante Rossetti.

Jean has painted scenes from all corners of Ireland, but her signature style evolved from architectural impressions of familiar Dublin landmarks and cityscapes – in oil, pen and ink, and watercolour. She has preserved the mood of “Old Dublin” for posterity in many of her works. Her paintings include views of Howth Harbour, Raheny Village, Trinity College Dublin, the Ha’penny Bridge, Custom House, St Anne’s Park, Dublin Bay, O’Connell Street, St Stephen’s Green, Clontarf Castle and many more.

How do people in an intensely multicultural city live alongside one another while maintaining clear boundaries? This question is at the core of Parameters and Peripheries of Culture, which illustrates how the Maroons (descendants of escaped slaves) of Suriname, on the northern coast of South America, have used culture-representational performance to sustain their communities within Paramaribo, the capital. Focusing on three collectives known locally as “cultural groups,” which specialize in the music and dance traditions of the Maroons, it marks a vital contribution to knowledge about the cultural map of the African diaspora in South America, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

The postwar period in Milan was a time in which the transformational possibilities of the Lombard metropolis were palpable. Architects looked to the future in planning an ideal city onto a pre-existing one heavily damaged in World War II. In doing so, they looked back to the relatively young tradition of modern architecture in Italy, while simultaneously re-ordering its narratives. Concentrating on three major elements of the new city, skyscrapers, housing, and city planning, this book approaches Milan as an ideal city of the postwar period through architecture, film, and print media.

Famed shoe designer Manolo Blahnik once claimed that Australia in the 1970s was ‘the most creative place in the world’. He was referring to the fashion and art worlds created by the principal characters in this book, first in Melbourne and then in Sydney, in the 1970s-90s. Four friends in particular are at the heart of this book: fashion designers Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson and artists Peter Tully and David McDiarmid.

“[The Australian artist] Percy Leason possessed an extraordinarily inquisitive mind. He was constantly developing new ideas and ways of thinking and eventually he developed a pioneering study in the role of visual perception in art. He was an art philosopher and theorist before his time. In the early 20th century, modernism was challenging to all artists but Leason saw modernism as a threat to the very survival of Art. To counteract the subjective validation of any practice being accepted as Art, he constructed an objective approach. This is the core of his treatise the Theory of Perceptual Art. By using objective criteria, Leason hoped to safeguard the future of art. He was disturbed by the dismissal of the centuries-old accumulated art experience by modernist practices and he sought to put in place a solid theory to maintain art practices for the future.” - from the Preface by Margot Tasca

Just how “Irish” is traditional Irish music? Trad Nation combines ethnography, oral history, and archival research to challenge the longstanding practice of using ethnic nationalism as a framework for understanding vernacular music traditions. Tess Slominski argues that ethnic nationalism hinders this music’s development today and in an increasingly multiethnic Ireland. She discusses early-twentieth century women whose musical lives were shaped by Ireland’s struggles to become a nation; follows the career of Julia Clifford, a fiddler who lived much of her life in England, and explores the experiences of women, LGBTQ+ musicians, and musicians of color in the early-twenty-first century.

The Danish neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844), who lived most of his life in Rome, was not only one of Europe’s most soughtafter artists; he was also a collector. In addition to his own works and drawings, he built extensive collections of paintings, prints, drawings and books – and of ancient artefacts from Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquity: coins, lockets, containers, vases, lamps, fragments of sculpture and more. He also acquired a large collection of plaster casts, primarily after ancient sculptures and reliefs, but also of works dating from the Renaissance and up until his own lifetime. Thanks to Thorvaldsen’s bequest to the city of Copenhagen, his birthplace, all of these collections are still largely intact and well preserved at his museum. Home to a total of 657 plaster casts, the Thorvaldsen Museum’s cast collection is unique for several reasons: The collection offers us insight into the sculptor’s working methods and the development of his work because it served a clear function as an image bank of forms, motifs and subjects for Thorvaldsen’s own endeavours. Furthermore, the dual fact that the collection is so well preserved and was established over a relatively brief period of time makes it a valuable example illuminating the trade and distribution of plaster casts during the first half of the nineteenth century. These areas of study form the central focal point of Volume I of this publication. Volume II contains a catalogue of the individual objects in the cast collection, while Volume III collects the overviews, inventories, concordances and primary sources referred to in the first two volumes. Arising out of many years of study of Thorvaldsen’s cast collection conducted by their author, the classical archaeologist Jan Zahle, these books contain comprehensive source material from the period, much of it previously unknown.

From Italy to France to Flanders, the arts of painting in the 14th century were practised in manuscript illumination, on panel, and in fresco. Recipes for pigments appropriate to all these arts are included in this collection. "Experiments upon Colours" were dictated by painters to a Frenchman, Jehan Alcherius, while the Italian artist, Cennino Cennini, was especially attentive to the practice and the pigments to be used in fresco painting in The Book of Art / Il Libro dell' Arte, of c. 1390. His descriptions reveal the craft of Giotto, whose works make up the plates in this collection.

A companion volume to 14th Century Colour Palettes -Volume 2, this book covers painting on the wall and onwood panel from Cennino Cennini, The Book of Art, of the late 1390s (extracts). The pigmentsand methods are drawn from the practice of Giotto, as Cennino writes.

From Italy to France to Flanders, the arts of painting in the 14th century were practised in manuscript illumination, on panel, and in fresco. Recipes for pigments appropriate to all these arts are included in this collection. "Experiments upon Colours" were dictated by painters to a Frenchman, Jehan Alcherius, while the Italian artist, Cennino Cennini, was especially attentive to the practice and the pigments to be used in fresco painting in The Book of Art / Il Libro dell' Arte, of c. 1390. His descriptions reveal the craft of Giotto, whose works make up the plates in this collection.

Hartford Seen is the first modern-day art photography book to focus on Connecticut’s capital. Comprising more than 150 full-color images, it has been in the making since Pablo Delano began teaching photography at Trinity College in 1996. In this personal meditation on the city’s built environment, he implements a methodical but intuitive approach, using color and meticulous compositions to evoke the city’s essence, particularly the way global population flows impact the city’s physical structures. Hartford Seen is meant to be taken as a whole, as a visual document that can shed light on the unique characteristics of one city’s past, present, and potential futures.

Moving Bodies, Navigating Conflict is a groundbreaking ethnographic examination of dance practice in Colombo, Sri Lanka, during the civil war (1983–2009). It is the first book of scholarship on bharata natyam (a classical dance originating in India) in Sri Lanka, and the first on the role of dance in the country’s war. Focusing on women dancers, Ahalya Satkunaratnam shows how they navigated conditions of conflict and a neoliberal, global economy, resisted nationalism and militarism, and advocated for peace. Her interdisciplinary methodology combines historical analysis, methods of dance studies, and dance ethnography.