At the time of his death in 1820, Benjamin West was the most famous artist in the English-speaking world, and much admired throughout Europe. From humble beginnings in Pennsylvania, he had become the first American artist to study in Italy, and within a few short years of his arrival in London, was instrumental in the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts (he succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds to become its second President) and became history painter to King George III. In his lifetime, West's meteoric rise to prominence and the great pleasure he took in his success attracted criticism, and his posthumous reputation took a savage mauling from Victorian critics, one of whom dubbed him 'The Monarch of Mediocrity'. But even at his critical nadir, West's most celebrated work, The Death of General Wolfe, commemorating the British victory at the Battle of Quebec in 1759 and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1771, continued to fascinate. Although it was not, as is sometimes claimed, the first history painting to feature contemporary costume, it was the first picture in such a vein to become a critical and popular success in Britain. West remains today the most neglected and misunderstood of Britain's great eighteenth-century artists, lacking the social bite of Hogarth, the bravura of Reynolds or the easy elegance of Gainsborough. Nor was he a forceful writer (unlike Hogarth and Reynolds), and he did not possess the intellectual credentials to which so many of his fellow artists aspired. And yet, as Loyd Grossman asserts in his new book, West was extraordinarily in tune with the artistic and intellectual currents that swirled through his turbulent times. He was in the vanguard of both Neoclassicism and Romanticism, and among the very first artists to give visual expression to the exciting and heroic qualities of contemporary events, as opposed to episodes dredged up from the biblical, classical or mythological past, which had long enjoyed the highest artistic status. West's Wolfe was painted at a time when Europeans were just beginning to abandon the tendency to look backwards. Men and women of letters, philosophers and historians were increasingly convinced that modernity could equal and even surpass the achievements of the ancient Greeks and Romans. This new-found ability to believe in the value of the present and to look forward to a progressive future is very much the foundation of the 'modern' attitude that has affected the way we live and think ever since. While acknowledging that West's reputation is still precarious, Grossman explains why Wolfe was such an instant success and why this thrilling work of art continues to exercise such a strong grip on our imaginations nearly 250 years after it was first shown to the public. He situates West in the midst of Enlightenment thinking about history and modernity, and seeks to demolish some of the prejudices about the talent and intentions of the young man from the Pennsylvania frontier who attained such eminence at the British court.

Focusing on national identity in the Netherlands, France, and Britian, The Nation Made Real offers an original interpretation of the role of visual art in the making of nations in Western Europe.

This significant historical study recasts modern art in Japan as a “parallel modernism” that was visually similar to Euroamerican modernism, but developed according to its own internal logic. Using the art and thought of prominent Japanese modern artist Koga Harue (1895–1933) as a lens to understand this process, Chinghsin Wu explores how watercolor, cubism, expressionism, and surrealism emerged and developed in Japan in ways that paralleled similar trends in the west, but also rejected and diverged from them. In this first English-language book on Koga Harue, Wu provides close readings of virtually all of the artist’s major works and provides unprecedented access to the critical writing about modernism in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s through primary source documentation, including translations of period art criticism, artist statements, letters, and journals.

Contemporary society has seen an unprecedented rise in both the demand and the desire to be creative, to bring something new into the world. Once the reserve of artistic subcultures, creativity has now become a universal model for culture and an imperative in many parts of society. In this new book, cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz investigates how the ideal of creativity has grown into a major social force, from the art of the avant-garde and postmodernism to the ‘creative industries’ and the innovation economy, the psychology of creativity and self-growth, the media representation of creative stars, and the urban design of ‘creative cities’. Where creativity is often assumed to be a force for good, Reckwitz looks critically at how this imperative has developed from the 1970s to the present day. Though we may well perceive creativity as the realization of some natural and innate potential within us, it has rather to be understood within the structures of a very specific culture of the new in late modern society. The Invention of Creativity is a bold and refreshing counter to conventional wisdom that shows how our age is defined by radical and restrictive processes of social aestheticization. It will be of great interest to those working in a variety of disciplines, from cultural and social theory to art history and aesthetics.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Shipwreck! Winslow Homer and 'The Life Line,' Philadelphia Museum of Art, September 22, 2012-December 16, 201

It is a truism to suggest that celebrity pervades all areas of life today. The growth and expansion of celebrity culture in recent years has been accompanied by an explosion of studies of the social function of celebrity and investigations into the fascination of specific celebrities. And yet fundamental questions about what the system of celebrity means for our society have yet to be resolved: Is celebrity a democratization of fame or a powerful hierarchy built on exclusion? Is celebrity created through public demand or is it manufactured? Is the growth of celebrity a harmful dumbing down of culture or an expansion of the public sphere? Why has celebrity come to have such prominence in today’s expanding media? Milly Williamson unpacks these questions for students and researchers alike, re-examining some of the accepted explanations for celebrity culture. The book questions assumptions about the inevitability of the growth of celebrity culture, instead explaining how environments were created in which celebrity output flourished. It provides a compelling new history of the development of celebrity (both long-term and recent) which highlights the relationship between the economic function of celebrity in various media and entertainment industries and its changing social meanings and patterns of consumption.

By 1650, the spiritual and political power of the Catholic Church was shattered. Thanks to the twin blows of the Protestant Reformation and the Thirty Years War, Rome, celebrated both as the Eternal City and Caput Mundi - the head of the world - had lost its pre-eminent place in Europe. Then a new Pope, Alexander VII, fired with religious zeal, political guile and a mania for building, determined to restore the prestige of his church by making Rome the must-visit destination for Europe's intellectual, political and cultural elite. To help him do so, he enlisted the talents of Gianlorenzo Bernini, already celebrated as the most important living artist: no mean feat in the age of Rubens, Rembrandt and Velazquez.0Together, Alexander VII and Bernini made the greatest artistic double act in history, inventing the concept of soft power and the bucket list destination. Their creation of Baroque Rome as a city more beautiful and grander than since the days of the Emperor Augustus continues to delight and attract. 0Famous as a TV Presenter for MasterChef and Through the Keyhole, Loyd Grossman has also been deeply involved in heritage and art history. His love of Rome was kindled by his first encounter with the enigmatic and strangely beautiful monument to this relationship between artist and pope: the elephant carrying on obelisk outside Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, just behind the Pantheon. Written with this as a starting point, An Elephant in Rome is a book for those who love the endless fascination of the Eternal City and want a deeper and more entertaining tale of how it came to be.