Giotto's O

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Julia K. Murray

Ma Hezhi and the Illustration of the Book of Odes is the first comprehensive study of one of the major monuments of twelfth-century Chinese painting. Illustrating the Book of Odes (Shijing), an important Chinese anthology of poetry, the series of handscrolls is the final and most ambitious artistic project by which the emperor Gaozong sought to validate the Southern Song dynastic revival and his own legitimacy. The scrolls paired the 305 poems of the ancient anthology (reputedly transcribed by the emperor himself) with compositions by Ma Hezhi, a leading figure in the resurgence of classical illustration at the Hangzhou court. The illustrative program of the Odes scrolls, reconstructed here for the first time, is shown to be closely linked with currents in Song intellectual history and literary studies, as well as with politics and art . In this study, Julia Murray accounts for all previous scholarship on the Odes scrolls, summarizes the exegetical tradition of the text, and documents its illustration in pre-Song times. She then analyzes the Song emperor Gaozong's patronage of traditional culture as an instrument of statecraft, as well as his development as a calligrapher in this context. After discussing the life and art of Ma Hezhi, she examines the Odes scrolls in detail and demonstrates that Ma Hezhi conceived the illustrations through his own creative engagement with the poems and commentaries. A systematic and critical connoisseurship is used to identify the "genuine" scrolls, which the author suggests come from a court workshop that executed designs created by Ma Hezhi. Murray also includes a catalogue raisonne' of all of the scrolls in an appendix and discusses the significance of Ma Hezhi and the Odes scrolls in the larger context of Chinese painting theory.

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with texts by Lynne Cooke [and 3 others

"The German artist Rosemarie Trockel has gained international renown for a multifaceted practice encompassing painting, sculpture, video, and drawing. Issues including a concern with natural history, the creative expression of diverse species, and the representation and role of women in contemporary culture fuel her work"--Random House website (viewed November 26, 2012).

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Kathleen Nicholson

Now famous for their immediate impact of color, light, and atmostpheric effect, the landscapes of Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) were at first the object of opposing critical claims: from one side the British artist was charged with painting "pictures of nothing and very like," from the other, with allowing too much "content" to eclipse his presentation of nature. Taking this paradox as its starting point, Kathleen Nicholson's richly illustrated book proposes a thorough revision of how we understand the enigmatic artist who revolutionized landscape painting. Advancing the growing interest in Turner's handling of content, without ignoring questions of style, Nicholson shows how Turner used the themes of antiquity to explore the ways natural imagery can embody meaning, and how he came to view interpretation itself as a primary subject. Nicholson maintains that by seeking themes in ancient myth, culture, and history, Turner was able to reinvest nature with new values and concepts, thereby accomplishing a genuinely modern revision of classical landscape in an early nineteenth-century idiom. His inquiry into the nature of meaning, she argues, led him to articulate a narrative that engaged the viewer in "reading" or interpreting both symbolic and purely visual imagery - a narrative that finds its most striking enactment in his 1806 work The Goddess of Discord Choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides. Among the first to analyze systematically the themes treated in Turner's early sketchbooks, Nicholson traces the artist's understanding of a given legend, ancient author, or formal source as it developed over time, providing rare insight into the extent and character of his manipulation of subject matter. -- from dust jacket.

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Alexandra Anderson-Spivy

Robert Kushner's aim as an artist has been "to please the eye and thereby satisfy the human soul." This magnificent new midcareer survey proves how well he has succeeded during twenty-five years that have included flamboyant early performance and fabric pieces; a period as a leader of the Pattern and Decoration movement; his return to the figure in the 1980s; up to his current concentration on flower and other still lifes of unmatched sensuality and opulence. These recent works celebrate the cycle of creation and destruction, the fruition, decay, and renewal that compose the eternal rhythm of natural life.