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In praise of the human form : arts of Africa, Oceania and America : Josette and Jean-Claude Weill collection
While the foundations of the Josette and Jean-Claude Weill Collection lie in painting, their passion for seeking out exciting new forms soon led them to embrace the infinite diversity of tribal art. Expanded over the decades under the enthusiastic stewardship of their son Jean-Pierre, the collection now includes over 120 works of the very highest order, covering Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Several large categories can be discerned, reflecting the Weill family's liking for daring, expressionistic forms: Dogon and Tellem statues combining geometric shapes with textured surfaces, as well as Kongo powerful figures endowed with magic properties. The expressive arts of Nigeria, Cameroon, and Melanesia are also well represented in the collection. Among the more classic works there are pieces that have iconic status - such as the Bena Lulua statue that used to belong to Jacques Kerchache, Edward Robinson's Fang reliquary figure, or the Biwat powerful flute plug from the Lemaire Collection - that testify to the sureness of the Weill's taste and to the shrewd instinct that led them to appreciate this art from another world. An important group of finely carved small ivories makes up one-third of the whole collection.
Book
Like life : sculpture, color, and the body
Since the earliest myths of the sculptor Pygmalion bringing a statue to life through desire, artists have explored the boundaries between sculpture and the physical materiality of the body. This groundbreaking volume examines key sculptural works from 13th-century Europe to the global present, revealing new insights into the strategies artists deploy to blur the distinction between art and life. Sculpture, which has historically taken the human figure as its subject, is presented here in myriad manifestations created by artists ranging from Donatello and Degas to Picasso, Kiki Smith, and Jeff Koons. Featuring works created in traditional media such as wood and marble as well as the unexpected such as wax, metal, and blood, Like Life presents sculpture both conventional and shocking, including effigies, dolls, mannequins, automata, waxworks, and anatomical models. Containing texts by art and cultural historians as well as interviews with contemporary artists, this is a provocative exploration of three-dimensional representations of the human body.
BOOK
Race Experts
InRace ExpertsLinda Kim examines the complicated and ambivalent role played by sculptor Malvina Hoffman inThe
Races of Mankindseries created for the Chicago Field Museum in 1930. Although Hoffman had training in fine arts and was a protégé of Auguste Rodin and Ivan Meštrović, she had no background in anthropology or museum exhibits. She was nonetheless commissioned by the Field Museum to make a series of life-size sculptures for the museum's new racial exhibition, which became the largest exhibit on race ever installed in a museum and one of the largest sculptural commissions ever undertaken by a single artist. Hoffman'sRaces of Mankindexhibit was realized as a series of 104 bronzes of racial types from around the world, a unique visual mediation between anthropological expertise and everyday ideas about race in interwar America. Kim explores how the artist brought scientific understandings of race and the everyday racial attitudes of museum visitors together in powerful and productive friction. The exhibition compelled the artist to incorporate not only the expertise of racial science and her own artistic training but also the popular ideas about race that ordinary Americans brought to the museum. Kim situates theRaces of Mankindexhibit at the juncture of these different forms of racial expertise and examines how the sculptures represented the messy resolutions between them.Race Expertsis a compelling story of ideological contradiction and accommodation within the racial practices of American museums, artists, and audiences.
eBook
The lives of Sumerian sculpture : an archaeology of the early dynastic temple
\"This book examines the sculptures created during the Early Dynastic period (2900-2350 BC) of Sumer, a region corresponding to present-day southern Iraq. Featured almost exclusively in temple complexes, some 550 Early Dynastic stone statues of human figures carved in an abstract style have survived. Chronicling the intellectual history of ancient Near Eastern art history and archaeology at the intersection of sculpture and aesthetics, this book argues that the early modern reception of Sumer still influences ideas about these sculptures. Engaging also with the archaeology of the Early Dynastic temple, the book ultimately considers what a stone statue of a human figure has signified, both in modern times and in antiquity\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Color of Stone
In The Color of Stone, Charmaine A. Nelson brilliantly analyzes a key, but often neglected, aspect of neoclassical sculpture—color. By establishing the centrality of race within the discussion of neoclassical sculpture, Nelson provides a model for a black feminist art history that at once questions and destabilizes canonical texts.
eBook
Personal Styles in Early Cycladic Sculpture
Pat Getz-Gentle provides a clear and detailed survey of the Cycladic period, an early Bronze Age culture that thrived at the heart of the Aegean. In particular, she emphasizes the steps leading to the iconic, reclining folded-arm figure that uniquely defines the Cycladic era. Getz-Gentle also focuses on the personal aesthetics of fifteen carvers, several of whom are identified and discussed in this volume. New to this paperback edition is an expanded bibliography as well an addendum that contains additional works Getz-Gentle has attributed to some of the fifteen Cycladic sculptors she discusses in her book.
eBook
Caribbean Figure Pendants: Style and Subject Matter
This work synthesizes art-historical and anthropological methods in the analysis of a large corpus of indigenous figure pendants, commonly called “amulets,” from the Greater Antilles and Bahamas. Figure pendants, ubiquitous in Caribbean collections, are small carvings of spirit beings perforated for suspension against the body. The data are drawn from new photographs, measurements, and observations of 535 specimens compiled by the author during 2011-2018 in research visits to 34 museums and private collections in the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe. In analyzing this corpus, the author documents high stylistic diversity within the region, naming nine new figure pendant styles and situating these in space and time. This high diversity of local styles and subject matter suggests a previously undocumented religious pluralism in the ancient Caribbean, in accord with emergent understandings of cultural and political diversity within the region. The author finds that the subject matter of figure pendants is unconnected with elite cohoba spiritualism as documented ethnohistorically, which leads to a search for what the phenomenon represents socially and religiously. Figure pendants generally are far more common than the paraphernalia of cohoba, probably documenting the existence of a religious institution existing at the village level. The author hypothesizes that they were commissioned from pendant carvers by initiates of secret societies dedicated to healing or warfare. In this scenario, the supernatural subjects of the pendants were the patrons of regional sodalities with distinct histories. The book is intended for readers with interests in the indigenous art, religion and society of the ancient Caribbean and more broadly, Latin America.
eBook