Melville and the Visual Arts

Melville and the Visual Arts PDF

Author: Douglas Robillard

Publisher: Kent State University Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780873385756

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Melville's allusions to works of art embellish his poems and novels. In this study, his use of the art analogy as a literary technique is traced, along with the influence of his predecessors and comtemporaries and how his sense of form was instructed by design in works of art.

Savage Eye

Savage Eye PDF

Author: Christopher Sten

Publisher: Kent State University Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780873384445

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He explains when and where in Melville's wanderings throughout America, Europe, and the Near East he saw these works, then describes how Melville made use of the life and work of these artists in his own fiction and poetry. The collection includes new essays on Moby Dick and J.M.W. Turner; Melville's fascination with Dutch genre painting; his appropriation of work by Cole and Vanderlyn for his magazine fiction; his use of early representations of the plague in Israel Potter; the relationship between the satirical cartoons of Daumier and the figures of The Confidence-Man; Timoleon's many artistic subjects; and the power of classical icons to shape the moral and aesthetic conflicts in Billy Budd. Also found here are theoretical essays on Melville and the picturesque; the modernism of Melville's aesthetic vision; his "anti-architectural" theory of literature; and his extensive reading in art history and art theory, from the classical to his own period.

The Lure of the Object

The Lure of the Object PDF

Author: Stephen W. Melville

Publisher: Clark Art Institute

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 9780300103373

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This volume examines the force of art history's attraction to particular objects and the corresponding rhythms of attachment and detachment that animate the discipline.

Writing Art History

Writing Art History PDF

Author: Margaret Iversen

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-12

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0226388263

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Since art history is having a major identity crisis as it struggles to adapt to contemporary global and mass media culture, this book intervenes in the struggle by laying bare the troublesome assumptions and presumptions at the field's foundations in a series of essays.

Unpainted to the Last

Unpainted to the Last PDF

Author: Elizabeth A. Schultz

Publisher:

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13:

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Endlessly pursued but ever elusive, Moby-Dick roams freely throughout the American imagination. A fathomless source for literary exploration, Melville's masterpiece has also inspired a stunning array of book illustrations, prints, comics, paintings, sculptures, mixed media, and even architectural designs. Innovative and lavishly illustrated, Unpainted to the Last illuminates this impressive body of work and shows how it opens up our understanding of both Moby-Dick and twentieth-century American art. The most continuously, frequently, and diversely illustrated of all American novels, Moby-Dick has attracted some remarkable book illustrators in Rockwell Kent, Boardman Robinson, Garrick Palmer, Barry Moser, and Bill Sienkiewicz, among others represented here. It has also inspired extraordinary creations by such prominent artists as Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Sam Francis, Benton Spruance, Leonard Baskin, Theodoros Stamos, Richard Ellis, Ralph Goings, Seymour Lipton, Walter Martin, Tony Rosenthal, Richard Serra, and Theodore Roszak. The artists reflect in equal measure the novel's realistic (plot, character, natural history) and philosophical modes, its visual and visionary dimensions. Some, like the obsessed and haunted Gilbert Wilson, claim Moby-Dick as their "Bible." Still others view the novel as a touchstone for feminist, multicultural, and environmentalist themes, or mock its status as a cultural icon.

The Art of Art History

The Art of Art History PDF

Author: Donald Preziosi

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 600

ISBN-13: 0199229848

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This anthology is a guide to understanding art history through critical reading of the field's most innovative and influential texts, focusing on the past two centuries.

Loomings

Loomings PDF

Author: Christopher Volpe

Publisher: Blurb

Published: 2021-05-24

Total Pages: 48

ISBN-13: 9781006941207

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Reproductions of paintings in tar, oil, and gold leaf titled with quotes from Moby-Dick invoke Melville's novel as a cautionary, foundational myth for our own age of accelerating climate change and social disruption. This selection pairs evocative tar paintings from Christopher Volpe's "Loomings" series with excerpts from Moby-Dick and two brief essays by the artist.

Melville & Turner

Melville & Turner PDF

Author: Robert K. Wallace

Publisher:

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 643

ISBN-13: 9780820313665

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In this ambitious interdisciplinary work, Robert K. Wallace explores the stylistic and aesthetic affinities of English landscape painter J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) and American novelist Herman Melville (1819-1891), establishing Turner as a decisive influence on the creation of Melville's Moby-Dick. Wallace begins his study by tracing the evolution of Turner's powerful aesthetic of the indistinct from his seascapes of the early 1800s through his whaling oils of the mid-1840s. He then examines Melville's self-education in the fine arts from 1846 through 1849, a period culminating in an 1849 visit to London, where Melville saw Turner's works side by side with those of the Old Masters. Wallace also shows how the aesthetic of Melville's first five novels evolved in direct relation to the art criticism he read in books by Hazlitt, Ruskin, and Eastlake, as well as in English and American periodicals. Wallace's discussion of how Melville's knowledge of painting influenced his successive novels illustrates an important part of Melville's mental and artistic landscape. The discussion of influence culminates with three chapters devoted to the composition of Moby-Dick, showing Turner's influence from the beginning to the end of Melville's masterpiece. The study ends with an examination of the artistic and spiritual legacies of each artist. Wallace shows how Melville and Turner lead us into comparable realms: the visible spheres of love as well as the invisible ones of fright. Richly illustrated to document the visual experience that influenced Melville's literary achievement, this study advances our understanding of Melville as a literary artist and connoisseur of art, of Turner as an influence on American culture, and of the interrelations between literature and painting--as well as between England and America--in the mid-nineteenth century.

Seams

Seams PDF

Author: Stephen Melville

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-07-04

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1134392583

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Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe brings to Melville's work the insight not only of an art critic and theorist, but of a practicing artist as well. Navigating through the complexity of contemporary thought and philosophy, Gilbert-Rolfe unravels the Gordian knot of the diverse discourses that circumscribe Melville's views, revealing the practicality and clarity of Melville's speculative narratives. Stephen Melville is one of the most thoughtful critics to emerge in recent years. He has applied the tools developed by Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan to the problems of contemporary art. With his roots in Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, he reopens questions of art's reception, interpretation, and commentary. Not only does he articulate the limitations of these categories, and how they are set into motion-stasis and balance are not the goal. He demonstrates how the territory of each of these discourses is maintained by their relationship to one another. Melville's texts not only represent the complexity of his subjec