Arts & Architecture Hero Image
Arts & Architecture
Escape Velocity Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
ISBN: 9780819576590
Pub Date: 03 Jan 2017
Series: Wesleyan Film
Illustrations: 25 illus.
Description:
Today, movie theaters are packed with audiences of all ages marveling to exciting science fiction blockbusters, many of which are also critically acclaimed. However, when the science fiction film genre first emerged in the 1950s, it was represented largely by exploitation horror films—lurid, culturally disreputable, and appealing to a niche audience of children and sci-fi buffs. How did the genre evolve from B-movie to blockbuster?
Take Me to the River Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9781938086427
Pub Date: 16 Dec 2016
Illustrations: 185 ambrotype plates (including 10 foldouts), 2 duotones, and 2 color photographs by the author, 4 historic photographs, and 4 black-and-white maps
Description:
Take Me to the River explores four post-industrial rivers that flow into the Atlantic Ocean—the Androscoggin (Maine/New Hampshire), Schuylkill (Pennsylvania), James (Virginia), and Savannah (Georgia/South Carolina)—as they emerge from two centuries of use and neglect. With vastly improved water quality in each river since enactment of the 1972 Clean Water Act, public affection has gradually increased as memories of foul smells and fetid water fade. Today, these rivers still carry the legacies of longstanding pollution in their currents and sediments, yet they have become waterways, renewed and rediscovered, that our grandparents never could have envisioned.
America's Endangered Coasts Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 232
ISBN: 9781938086434
Pub Date: 06 Dec 2016
Illustrations: 168 color photographs
Description:
America’s Endangered Coasts: Photographs from Texas to Maine is a pioneering and thought-provoking photographic survey of coastal areas of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States that are already threatened by a rising sea. Using a topographic aesthetic that combines straightforward, highly detailed color photographs with GPS locations and elevations above sea level for each site, this book photographically responds to low-lying areas that are frequently over-developed and vulnerable to high tides and storms such as Hurricanes Katrina, Irene, and Sandy. This book contains 168 color photographs and two essays, one by Liz Wells, a prominent British writer who offers a photo/art perspective of the work, and one by Dr.
A Library of Manuscripts from India Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 72
ISBN: 9781911300120
Pub Date: 30 Nov 2016
Illustrations: 95 colour illus.
Description:
The rich variety of languages, religious traditions and schools of art of the Indian subcontinent are brought together in this exceptional library of Indian manuscripts. Religious and philosophical texts from Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Jain, Sikh and Zoroastrian schools of thought are all represented in illustrated manuscripts. This library shows how these various faiths borrowed, interacted and influenced one another in the subcontinent.
RRP: £20.00
Bringing Heaven to Earth Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 200
ISBN: 9780995557703
Pub Date: 30 Nov 2016
Illustrations: 150 images
Description:
The prowess of Chinese creative abilities in the decorative arts in the 19th and early 20th centuries was well known globally, but, while much has been written about Chinese textiles and on the influence of the East on European styles of the time, the story of the influence of Western formats and tastes on the manufacture of Chinese jewellery in the period has, amazingly, never been told. In examining 50 objects of exatraordinary quality from an important private North American collection, this book seeks to redress the situation and reveal the splendour of silver and silver-gilt jewellery of the late Qing dynasty. An ancient and sophisticated culture, the Chinese – who have since records begun made up about a quarter of world’s population – had almost everything they could need or want within their own borders … except for silver.
RRP: £40.00
Cinema is a Dream Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 232
ISBN: 9788869770661
Pub Date: 30 Nov 2016
Illustrations: 44 illustrations
Description:
The emergence and spread of new images - photography, film, television and audiovisual - have established an important epistemological revolution oriented contemporary man to take on a confident attitude not only towards the image but also to the real. The modern knowledge, that made explode man’s certainties in hundreds of relative truth, has been removed; the perfect double of reality offered by the new media has quietly deleted the doubt to the faithful restitution of reality into images, and, consequently, to the events of the outside world. To counter this credulity, this mental breakdown, so defined by Joseph Conrad, became widespread in contemporary society, we will need to recover the principles and themes of modern thought born in the seventeenth century.
Requiem for a Nation Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 156
ISBN: 9788869770562
Pub Date: 30 Nov 2016
Illustrations: 5 illustrations
Description:
The main objective of this edited collection is to examine the ways in which religion, culture and politics converge in configuring the contradictions of a post-war Italy’s cultural history. Starting from the assumption that to conduct a critical reflection on Italian post-war visual culture one must investigate the inevitable impact of Catholic religion on everyday life and its social, political and cultural dimensions, the volume employs the vantage point of cinema to propose a critique and exploration of religion’s influence on the Italian cultural landscape. The edited anthology thus seeks to examine how religion is lived, performed, criticized and represented from various methodological perspectives (historical, philological, aesthetic, psychoanalytical, popular studies etc), through four main sections: ‘Propaganda and Censorship’, ‘Auteurial Voices’, ‘Religion in Popular Italian Cinema’, ‘Modern rituals, Ancient myths’.
The Sovereign Artist Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 248
ISBN: 9781911300052
Pub Date: 30 Nov 2016
Description:
In his joint capacities of Premier peintre du roi, director of the Gobelins manufactory and rector of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, Le Brun exercised a previously unprecedented influence on the production of the visual arts – so much so that some scholars have repeatedly described him as ‘dictator’ of the arts in France. The Sovereign Artist explores how Le Brun operated in his diverse fields of activities, linking and juxtaposing his portraiture, history painting and pictorial theory with his designs for architecture, tapestries, carpets and furniture. It argues that Le Brun sought to create a repeatable and easily recognizable visual language associated with Louis XIV, in order to translate the king’s political claims for absolute power into a visual form.
RRP: £40.00
Daphne Oram - An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 160
ISBN: 9781910221112
Pub Date: 23 Nov 2016
Imprint: Anomie Academic
Illustrations: c. 12
Description:
Daphne Oram (1925–2003) was one of the central figures in the development of British experimental electronic music. Having declined a place at the Royal College of Music to become a music balancer at the BBC, she went on to become the co-founder and first director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Oram left the BBC in 1959 to pursue commercial work in television, advertising, film and theatre, to make her own music for recording and performance, and to continue her personal research into sound technology – a passion she had had since her childhood in rural Wiltshire.
Hollywood Divided Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 174
ISBN: 9780813168920
Pub Date: 15 Nov 2016
Series: Screen Classics
Illustrations: 13 b/w photos
Description:
On October 22, 1950, the Screen Directors Guild (SDG) gathered for a meeting at the opulent Beverly Hills Hotel. Among the group's leaders were some of the most powerful men in Hollywood -- John Ford, Cecil B. DeMille, Joseph L.
Showman of the Screen Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 296
ISBN: 9780813168715
Pub Date: 01 Nov 2016
Series: Screen Classics
Illustrations: 30 b/w images
Description:
Short, immaculately dressed, and shockingly foul-mouthed, Joseph E. Levine (1905--1987) was larger than life. He rose from poverty in Boston's West End to become one of postwar Hollywood's most prolific independent promoters, distributors, and producers.
Trisha Brown Cover Trisha Brown Cover
Format: 
Pages: 424
ISBN: 9780819576613
Pub Date: 01 Nov 2016
Illustrations: 129 illus.
Pages: 424
ISBN: 9780819576620
Pub Date: 01 Nov 2016
Illustrations: 129 illus.
Description:
Trisha Brown re-shaped the landscape of modern dance with her game-changing and boundary-defying choreography and visual art. Art historian Susan Rosenberg draws on Brown’s archives, as well as interviews with Brown and her colleagues, to track Brown’s deliberate evolutionary trajectory through the first half of her decades-long career. Brown has created over 100 dances, six operas, one ballet, and a significant body of graphic works.
Silk, Porcelain and Lacquer Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 440
ISBN: 9781911300014
Pub Date: 31 Oct 2016
Illustrations: 400 colour illus.
Description:
Focusing on the prolific trade, transport and consumption of Chinese silk and porcelain, and Japanese lacquer abroad between 1500 and 1644, this groundbreaking book will show how the material cultures of late Ming China and Momoyama/Early Edo Japan on one side of the globe, and Western Europe and the New World on the other, became linked for the first time, through an exchange of luxury Asian manufactured goods for currency. It offers new insight into these multi-layered long-distance commercial networks, which resulted in an unprecedented creation of material culture that reflected influences of both East and West. New research reveals evidence of the trade of these three Asian manufactured goods, first by Portugal and Spain, and later by the trading companies formed by the Northern Netherlands/Dutch Republic and England.
RRP: £75.00
Backscatter Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 112
ISBN: 9781938086380
Pub Date: 24 Oct 2016
Illustrations: 78 color photographs
Description:
"Backscatter is the reflection of particles, waves, or signals back to the direction from which they came: in underwater photography, back to the lens. The reflection, however, is diffuse, as opposed to clear like a mirror, thus softening images and even making them obscure.For this book, Tom Young has embraced backscatter as both subject and metaphor to render spaces below and above the water's surface—between here and there—in highly original ways.
The Power of Belief Cover
Format: Hardback
Pages: 176
ISBN: 9781938086397
Pub Date: 21 Oct 2016
Illustrations: duotone photographs by the author
Description:
Winner of the 2017 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Literature award for photography.The rural American South has no grand cathedrals or other wonder-of-the-world monuments to religious belief. Nor has it ever been the site of religious wars or large-scale religious persecutions we see throughout the world.
Rodin and Dance Cover
Format: Paperback
Pages: 192
ISBN: 9781907372995
Pub Date: 20 Oct 2016
Illustrations: 150 colour illus.
Description:
Rodin & Dance: The Essence of Movement is the first serious study of Rodin’s late sculptural series known as the Dance Movements. Exploring the artist’s fascination with dance and bodies in extreme acrobatic poses, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue give an account of Rodin’s passion for new forms of dance – from south-asian dances to the music hall and the avant garde – which began appearing on the French stage around 1900. Rodin made hundreds of drawings and watercolours of dancers.
RRP: £30.00