The pace and scale of the exchange of cultural goods of all sorts&—paintings, furniture, even ladies' fans&—increased sharply in nineteenth-century Spain, and new institutions and practices for exhibiting as well as valorizing &"art&" were soon formed. Oscar V&ázquez maps this cultural landscape, tracing the connections between the growth of art markets and changing patterns of collecting. Unlike many earlier students of collecting, he focuses not upon questions of taste but rather upon the discursive and institutional frameworks that came to regulate art's economic and symbolic worth at all levels of Spanish society. Drawing upon sources that range from newspaper reviews to notarial documents, V&ázquez shows how collecting acquired the power to mediate debates over individual, regional, and national identity. His book also looks at the emergence of a new state apparatus for arts administration and situates these social and political changes in the broader European context. Inventing the Art Collection will be of interest to historians and sociologists of Spain and Europe, as well as art historians and cultural theorists.

This book explores the development of abstraction from the moment of its declaration around 1912 to its establishment as the foundation of avant-garde practice in the mid-1920s. The book brings together many of the most influential works in abstractions early history to draw a cross-media portrait of this watershed moment in which traditional art was reinvented in a wholesale way. Works are presented in groups that serve as case studies, each engaging a key topic in abstractions first years: an artist, a movement, an exhibition or thematic concern. Key focal points include Vasily Kandinskys ambitious Compositions V, VI and VII; a selection of Piet Mondrians work that offers a distilled narrative of his trajectory to Neo-plasticism; and all the extant Suprematist pictures that Kazimir Malevich showed in the landmark 0.10 exhibition in 1915.0Exhibition: MoMA, New York, USA (23.12.2012-15.4.2013).

American art museums share a mission and format that differ from those of their European counterparts, which often have origins in aristocratic collections. This groundbreaking work recounts the fascinating story of the invention of the modern American art museum, starting with its roots in the 1870s in the craft museum type, which was based on London’s South Kensington (now the Victoria and Albert) Museum. At the turn of the twentieth century, American planners grew enthusiastic about a new type of museum and presentation that was developed in Northern Europe, particularly in Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. Called Kulturgeschichte (cultural history) museums, they were evocative displays of regional history. American trustees, museum directors, and curators found that the Kulturgeschichte approach offered a variety of transformational options in planning museums, classifying and displaying objects, and broadening collecting categories, including American art and the decorative arts. Leading institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, adopted and developed crucial aspects of the Kulturgeschichte model. By the 1930s, such museum plans and exhibition techniques had become standard practice at museums across the country.

A narrative history of the founding of the Louvre that also explores the ideological underpinnings, pedagogical aims, and aesthetic criteria of this, the first great national art museum.

“Readers curious about the making of Renaissance art, its cast of characters and political intrigue, will find much to relish in these pages.” —Wall Street Journal Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) was a man of many talents—a sculptor, painter, architect, writer, and scholar—but he is best known for Lives of the Artists, which singlehandedly established the canon of Italian Renaissance art. Before Vasari’s extraordinary book, art was considered a technical skill, and artists were mere decorators and craftsmen. It was through Vasari’s visionary writings that Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo came to be regarded as great masters of life as well as art, their creative genius celebrated as a divine gift. Lauded by Sarah Bakewell as “insightful, gripping, and thoroughly enjoyable,” The Collector of Lives reveals how one Renaissance scholar completely redefined how we look at art.

In a lavish, oversize format (12.25x12.25), this book features 40 extraordinary houses on five continents selected by veteran architecture writer Webb for their courageous and innovative design and their site integration. Plans, drawings, and full page color photos take center stage; the text supports the visuals, describing the houses in terms of

"Larry Shiner challenges our conventional understandings of art and asks us to reconsider its history entirely, arguing that the category of ine art is a modern invention - and that the lines drawn between art and craft emerged only as the result of key European social transformations during the long eighteenth century"--Publisher's description.