The Mediterranean is an invented cultural space, on the frontier between North and South, West and East. Modern Art and the Idea of the Mediterranean examines the representation of this region in the visual arts since the late eighteenth century, placing the 'idea of the Mediterranean' - a cultural construct rather than a physical reality - at the centre of our understanding of modern visual culture. This collection of essays features an international group of scholars who examine competing visions of the Mediterranean in terms of modernity and cultural identity, questioning and illuminating both European and non-European representations. An introductory essay frames the analysis in terms of a new spatial paradigm of the Mediterranean as a geographic, historical, and cultural region that emerged in the late eighteenth century, as France and Britain colonized the surrounding territories. Essays are grouped around three vital themes: visualization of the space of the new Mediterranean; varied uses of the classical paradigm; and issues of identity and resistance in an age of modernity and colonialism. Drawing on recent geographical, historical, cultural and anthropological studies, contributors address the visual representation of identity in both the European and the 'Oriental, ' the colonial and post-colonial Mediterranean.

For centuries artists, diplomats, and merchants served as cultural intermediaries in the Mediterranean. Stationed in port cities and other entrepôts of the Mediterranean, these go-betweens forged intercultural connections even as they negotiated and sometimes promoted cultural misunderstandings. They also moved objects of all kinds across time and space. This volume considers how the mobility of art and material culture is intertwined with greater Mediterranean networks from 1580 to 1880. Contributors see the movement of people and objects as transformational, emphasizing the trajectory of objects over single points of origin, multiplicity over unity, and mutability over stasis.

Widely regarded as one of the foremost cultural critics of the last century, Walter Benjamin's relation to Modernism has largely been understood in the context of his reception of the aesthetic theories of Early German Romanticism and his associated interest in avant-garde Surrealism. But this Romantic understanding only gives half the picture. Running through Benjamin's thought is also a critique of Romanticism, developed in conjunction with a positive engagement with the philosophical, artistic and historical writings of J. W. von Goethe. In demonstrating the significance of these Goethean elements, this book challenges the dominant understanding of Benjamin's philosophy as essentially Romantic and instead proposes that Goethe's Classicism, conceived as the counterpoint to Romanticism, permits a corrective to the latter's deficiencies. Benjamin's Modernist concept of criticism, it is argued, is constituted in the movement between these polarities of Romanticism and Classicism. Conversely, placing Goethe's Classicism in relation to Benjamin's practice of literary criticism reveals historical tensions with Romanticism that constitute the untimely – indeed, it will be argued, cinematic – Modernism of his work. Adopting a transcritical approach, this book alternates between Benjamin and Goethe in relation to the experiences of colour, language and technology, assembling a constellation of philosophical and artistic figures between them, including the writings of Kant, Nietzsche, Cohen, Deleuze, Koselleck, Klages, and the work of Grünewald, Marées, Klee, Turner, Hulme, Eisenstein, Tretyakov, and Murnau.

The Mediterranean is a multifaceted conglomeration of parts that cannot be assembled into a whole. Its various histories characterised by imperial and nationalistic aspirations, imbalances of power and economies, political struggles, diverse cultural, religious and linguistic realities as well as the countless myths spawned by people over the ages all contribute to the world's fascination with this region and simultaneously make it difficult for anyone to speak sensibly about it without resorting to the plural form – the Mediterraneans. So, can we speak of a Mediterranean pedagogy of the arts? The authors in this volume argue in different ways that the answer to this question cannot be carved out of a singular, monolithic interpretation of the region. Instead, we need to look for provisional answers in the region’s dynamic developments, historic and contemporary exchanges of ideas and cultural codes and in the shifting nature of a sea that invites journeying, inquisitive people to discover new routes. The cover image, “La fenêtre intérieure”, is by the French photographer Sébastien Cailleux and shows a multiple exposure portrait of a child and her drawing created during a workshop called “Dessine-moi la Méditerranée”, organised by L’École d’Art au Village (Edaav) at the Museum of Illumination, Miniatures and Calligraphy at the Casbah in Algiers.

The Islamic world's artistic traditions experienced profound transformation in the 19th century as rapidly developing technologies and globalizing markets ushered in drastic changes in technique, style, and content. Despite the importance and ingenuity of these developments, the 19th century remains a gap in the history of Islamic art. To fill this opening in art historical scholarship, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean charts transformations in image-making, architecture, and craft production in the Islamic world from Fez to Istanbul. Contributors focus on the shifting methods of production, reproduction, circulation, and exchange artists faced as they worked in fields such as photography, weaving, design, metalwork, ceramics, and even transportation. Covering a range of media and a wide geographical spread, Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean reveals how 19th-century artists in the Middle East and North Africa reckoned with new tools, materials, and tastes from local perspectives.

Studies of the pivotal historic place of the Mediterranean have long been dominated by specialists of its northern shores, that is, by European historians. The seven leading authors in this groundbreaking volume challenge views of Mediterranean space as shaped by European trajectories, and in doing so, they challenge our comfortable notions. Drawing perspectives from the Mediterranean’s eastern and southern shores, they ask anew: What is the Mediterranean? What are its borders, its defining characteristics? What forces of nature, politics, culture, or economics have made the Mediterranean, and how long have they or will they endure? Covering the sixteenth century to the twentieth, this timely volume brings the early modern world into conversation with the modern world in new ways, demonstrating that only recently can we differentiate the north and south into separate cultural and political zones. The Making of the Modern Mediterranean: Views from the South offers a blueprint for a new generation of readers to rethink the world we thought we knew.

Examining Marseille as a significant center for the evolution of architectural and urban modernism.