Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2018 -

Discussion of northern Renaissance art is normally dominated by its most famous painters--Jan van Eyck, Albrect Durer, Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Porras (Tulane University) offers an alternative. Judicious and measured, the book provides a narrative that identifies dozens of relevant themes in the course of a chronological survey of northern European art from roughly 1380 to 1560. The author investigates issues of patronage, artistry, commerce, religion, and more. The book is satisfyingly focused on objects and, though she concentrates on painting, Porras deliberately treats other art forms--such as manuscripts, prints, tapestries, sculptures, and reliquaries--on equal footing. This egalitarian balance avoids letting "canonical" works or artists dominate discussion while not ignoring them either. The book will be especially useful both as a complement to more traditional lines of study and for inquiry into politically charged topics such as gender, race, class, and sexuality. Beautifully produced, with about 150 full-color plates, this is a compelling introductory resource and survey of the period.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Global Clay is an expansive survey of the more than 25,000 years that humans have worked with clay. Burrison (folklore, Georgia State Univ.), who has written extensively on pottery traditions, does a magnificent job of weaving together themes that span vast periods of time and geographic boundaries. He begins with an introduction to the folk traditions of pottery, then leads readers through an exploration of how potters and sculptors used clay to capture and portray the roles played by animals, humans, and gods in the culturally diverse and unifying experiences of life and death. More than 200 thoughtfully selected and beautifully photographed images of functional and sculptural clay forms illustrate the book. Overall the book is both ambitious in scope and successful in describing the central role that works of clay have played preserving common cultural narratives.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Phibbs wrote this book to honor the tercentenary of Lancelot "Capability" Brown's birth. In his foreword, Alan Titchmarsh writes that Phibbs (a long-time expert on Brown) was the "architect of the [tercentenary] celebrations ... laboring tirelessly over five years to bring together sixteen different organizations, including Historic England and the National Trust, and posing a question: 'Why as a nation of gardeners do we have so little understanding of Brown's genius?'" Phibbs's research sheds new light on the 18th-century landscape movement in England. Capability Brown (?1716-83) represents in England the school of landscape design opposing that of French landscape architect Andre Le Notre (1613-1700), who created a world of tamed order in nature. Brown's sweeping landscapes, with their flowing lawns, water, and casual groups of trees shaped by natural forms, were a revolution in contrast. Place-making is ingeniously arranged in four thematic sections: "The Five Elements," "How Landscapes Worked," "How Landscape Was Designed and What It Meant," and "The Attack on Brown and His Defence." Luxuriously illustrated with drawings, plans, engravings, photographs, and paintings, the book beautifully brings to light the highlights of Brown's long career as a landscape designer.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Written by distinguished art historian and landscape designer Colta Ives (curator emer., Metropolitan Museum of Art), this lavishly illustrated book was published in conjunction with a delightful 2018 exhibition at the Met. The catalogue showcases a multitude of paintings, graphics, and photographs from the Met's own collections, in addition to some private loans. Inspired by the "spectacular transformation" of Paris during the 19th century into a city filled with parks and gardens, Impressionist artists and engravers of garden vedute and designs brought to life a world rich and splendid in colorful plant life. Importers of exotic flowers and trees transformed elegant interiors into private botanical paradises. Paintings by beloved and familiar artists such as Manet, Monet, Pissarro, and Rousseau can be enjoyed anew in this specialized context. The catalogue focuses on private and public parks and gardens, portraits in gardens, floral still life, and botanical and design books, with a delightful range of examples from long-distance perspectives to intimate private spaces. A well-documented, scholarly treatment of the material, the volume includes more than 160 illustrations, an illustration and exhibition checklist, and selected references. This is a must-have for all garden enthusiasts and landscape designers as well as scholars of art.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

This fascinating, impeccably produced catalogue was created to accompany an exhibition of 14th-17th-century northern European art representing death--primarily in carved ivory memento mori beads and other ivory sculpture but also in Illuminated manuscripts, illustrated printed texts, paintings, and jewelry. Perkinson (Bowdoin College), who curated the exhibition, does a masterful job of focusing on his subject, one heretofore little studied. Scholarly contributors write about death in manuscript illumination from northern France and the Netherlands; the estate inventory of Parisian ivory carver and workshop owner Chicart Bailly; the history of British collecting of carved ivory beads; and death in English poetry of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Together, the essays provide a broadly contextual discussion of the imagery of death during the period, connecting it to religious faith, various forms of artistic production, written texts and publishing, drama and literature, philosophy and scientific study, and patronage. They also reveal the shift over time from religious to humanist content. The catalogue is richly illustrated with many color plates of exhibition objects and other figures of this macabre art.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Written in English and French, this is a beautifully produced survey of color printmaking in late-19th-century France. Introductory essays discuss the history of color printmaking, the science of color, techniques of production, the Nabis, and Japonisme. Major artists include Odilon Redon, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Emile Bernard, Paul Gauguin, Paul Signac, Maurice Denis, and Jacques Villon. The limitations of the print room of the Musee Jenisch Vevey and several private collections, to which most of the works belong, are a plus: some of the better-known artists (e.g., Mary Cassatt, Edvard Munch) make only cameo (or no) appearances, and this serves well to highlight the more intimate, and less-known, works by other artists. The media included are lithography, woodcut, etching, and engraving, and all are well defined in a glossary. Since many of the prints reproduced are proofs, they are unfamiliar and provide welcome insights into the working creative process. This is particularly evident in Signac's lithographs, which, printed differently, take on distinctly different meanings. This is a wonderful contribution to the history of color printmaking, both commercially and as an art form, and to the meaning of color.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.