The Art of Looking in Hitchcock's Rear Window

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Steven C. Brown

"Bill Holm is internationally recognized as a leading expert on Northwest Coast, Plateau, and Plains Indian art. As curator emeritus of Native American art at the Burke Museum, professor emeritus of art history at the University of Washington, and author of numerous books and articles, he has established an unparalleled reputation as a scholar, teacher, and craftsman. For many years he has also produced detailed paintings that draw on his ethnographic expertise to recreate the settings in which the old Native American art objects were used."--BOOK JACKET.

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Sanford Sternlicht

"Stephen Spender is the last of the great British poets of the "Thirties". This group, lead[sic] by W H. Auden, used their art as an expression of political sympathy and solidarity with the oppressed and impoverished. Now spanning more than five decades, Spender's work--including The Still Centre and Collected Poems--has earned him both popular praise and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Although first a poet, Spender has made landmark contributions to literary criticism, prose fiction, political theory, and autobiography."--BOOK JACKET. "Stephen Spender, the first book-length study of the entire Spender canon, discusses all genres of the author's work. Sanford Sternlicht begins by providing the reader with a well researched, biographical sketch of the poet's development over several decades. He also includes a lengthy and insightful discussion of Spender's influential role as literary and political critic. By treating this multifaceted writer's craft, philosophy, politics, aesthetics, and sexuality in a Modernist context, the book fully illustrates Spender's place in the British literary pantheon."--BOOK JACKET.

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Witold Rybczynski

"Before Andrea Palladio began designing his simple, gracious, perfectly proportioned villas, architectural genius was reserved for temples and palaces. Palladio elevated the architecture of the private house into an art form, and he not only designed and built, he wrote. His late-sixteenth-century architectural treatises were read and studied by great thinkers as diverse as Thomas Jefferson and Inigo Jones, profoundly influencing the design of Monticello, the tidewater plantation houses of Virginia, and the White House. All across America today, Palladio's influence is evident in ample porches and columned porticoes, in grand ceiling heights and front-door pediments.". "In The Perfect House, Witold Rybczynski, whose books on domestic and landscape architecture have transformed our understanding of parks and buildings, looks at Palladio's famous villas, not with the eye of an art historian but with the eye of an architect. He wanted to know why a handful of houses in an obscure corner of the Venetian Republic should have made their presence felt hundreds of years later and halfway across the globe."--BOOK JACKET.

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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.