Central Europe occupies a prominent place in many realms of eighteenth-century culture. This volume is the catalogue of an exhibition of drawings, organized in 1989 by The Art Museum, Princeton University, which presents some of the little-known accomplishments of artists from the region of present-day East and West Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and parts of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. Providing the first available survey of drawings of the period in English, the illustrated introduction to the catalogue considers the works in historical and artistic context. The book includes important drawings by artists such as Cosmas Damian Asam, Egid Quirin Asam, Matthus Gnther, and Adrian Zingg. Published for the first time are unique drawings by such important sculptors as Georg Raphael Donner and Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. The fully illustrated catalogue contains 105 entries, many of which deal with major issues of art of the time and treat the drawings exhibited in relation to works elsewhere. Biographies are presented for all the artists exhibited.

Rethinking the Baroque explores a tension. In recent years the idea of ?baroque? or ?the baroque? has been seized upon by scholars from a range of disciplines and the term ?baroque? has consequently been much in evidence in writings on contemporary culture, especially architecture and entertainment. Most of the scholars concerned have little knowledge of the art, literature, and history of the period usually associated with the baroque. A gulf has arisen. On the one hand, there are scholars who are deeply immersed in historical period, who shy away from abstraction, and who have remained often oblivious to the convulsions surrounding the term ?baroque?; on the other, there are theorists and scholars of contemporary theory who have largely ignored baroque art and architecture. This book explores what happens when these worlds mesh. In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines retrieve the term ?baroque? from the margins of art history where it has been sidelined as ?anachronistic?, to reconsider the usefulness of the term ?baroque?, while avoiding simply rehearsing familiar policing of periodization, stylistic boundaries, categories or essence. ?Baroque? emerges as a vital and productive way to rethink problems in art history, visual culture and architectural theory. Rather than attempting to provide a survey of baroque as a chronological or geographical conception, the essays here attempt critical re-engagement with the term ?baroque? - its promise, its limits, and its overlooked potential - in relation to the visual arts. Thus the book is posited on the idea that tension is not only inevitable, but even desirable, since it not only encapsulates intellectual divergence (which is always as useful as much as it is feared), but helps to push scholars (and therefore readers) outside their usual runnels.

"Five centuries of drawing in Central Europe are surveyed in this interpretive and fully illustrated catalogue featuring one of the oldest public collections in the United States. Included are the works of well-known masters Albrecht Durer, Johan Rottenhammer, and Johan Georg von Dillis, artists whose production influenced successive generations. This catalogue also offers a unique look at rare sheets by important figures such as Karel Skreta, Wenzel Hollar, and Johann Holzer. Overall, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann's achievement is realized in bringing this important collection of Old Master drawings from Central Europe together in a beautiful volume sure to provide an invaluable resource to scholars, connoisseurs, and art enthusiasts alike." --Book Jacket.

In this book, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann chronicles more than three hundred years of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Ukraine, Lithuania and western parts of the Russian Federation. Massive in scale, the book is highly accessible and lavishly illustrated. The readability of the text and the entirely new insights it provides into three hundred years of Central European history make this a vital introduction to one of the least understood periods in the history of art.

This book traces the psychology, history and theory of the compulsion to collect, focusing not just on the normative collections of the Western canon, but also on collections that reflect a fascination with the "Other" and the marginal – the ephemeral, exotic, or just plain curious. There are essays on the Neoclassical architect Sir John Soane, Sigmund Freud and Kurt Schwitters, one of the masters of collage. Others examine imperialist encounters with remote cultures – the consquitadors in America in the sixteenth century, and the British in the Pacific in the eighteenth – and the more recent collectors of popular culture, be they of Swatch watches, Elvis Presley memorabilia or of packaging and advertising. With essays by Jean Baudrillard, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Nicholas Thomas, Mieke Bal, John Forrester, John Windsor, Naomi Schor, Susan Stewart, Anthony Alan Shelton, John Elsner, Roger Cardinal and an interview with Robert Opie.

"Kaufmann situates Maulbertsch as a fresco painter at a time of transition to easel painting, a colorist at a time when color was not fully appreciated by contemporary observers, and an interpreter of religious themes at a time when secular subjects were becoming more popular. Although he has been dismissed as an eccentric by previous scholars, Kaufmann's analysis shows Maulbertsch involved in the intellectual and aesthetic issues of his day."--BOOK JACKET.