Autumn 2009 Catalogue 4 pdfing:1 - Yale University Press

Susan L. Siegfried is Professor of ArtHistory and Women’s Studies at theUniversity of Michigan. She is theauthor of The Art of Louis-LéopoldBoilly: Modern Life in NapoleonicFrance, co-author of Staging Empire:Napoleon, Ingres, and David andco-editor of Fingering Ingres.October 320 pp. 256x192mm.100 b/w + 40 colour illus.ISBN 978-0-300-14883-1 £40.00*IngresArt 39Painting ReimaginedSusan L. SiegfriedJean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) produced a body ofwork that strongly appealed to his contemporaries while disconcertingthem. The odd qualities of his work continue to fascinate scholars,critics and artists today. For the most part scholars have sought to makesense of that strangeness either by examining the vicissitudes of theartist’s critical reputation or by appealing to his supposed intellectualand psychic limitations. Siegfried argues that this strangeness needs tobe located in the complex and richly invested nature of the work itselfas well as in Ingres’s very powerful, if often perverse, sense of artisticproject. She shows that his major re-thinking of pictorial narrative—inhis classical literary, historical and religious subjects—was as central tohis achievement as his distinctive rendering of the female figure inclassical nudes and portraits. He was engaged in a complex process ofgiving visual form to narrative, which he did in new and unusual waysthat involved him in a close reading of the texts on which he drew,including authors such as Homer, Virgil, Ariosto and Dante, as well asreligious narratives and stories about medieval and early modern Frenchhistory.This handsomely illustrated and elegantly written book takes fullaccount of the different and seemingly divergent aspects of Ingres’swork and encompasses a wide range of his activities as an artist and ofthe different registers in which he operated, including his obsessiveresearch into source material, his proliferating drawing practice and hisintensive working and reworking of his finished paintings.Romy Golan is Associate Professor ofArt History at CUNY Graduate Center.She is the author of Modernity andNostalgia: Art and Politics in Francebetween the Wars.MuralnomadThe Paradox of Wall Painting, Europe 1927–1957Romy GolanFrequently political and part of a concerted effort by artists and patronsduring the early decades of the twentieth century to address a broadpublic, murals and large mural-like works often had a greater visibilityand larger audience than paintings that are acknowledged today asmasterpieces. Large and monumental, and made in many differentmedia, they were also often ephemeral: their lifespan typically endedwith the closing of an exhibition.In this fascinating book, Romy Golan explores murals and mural-likeworks in Europe from the end of the First World War to the late1950s, beginning with Monet’s work on the Nymphéas installation inthe Musée de l’Orangerie and ending dramatically with Le Corbusier’shuge tapestries in Chandigarh, India. Along the way, she charts thework of Léger, Le Corbusier, Sironi, Pagano, Picasso and others, andmakes a convincing and elegant case for the important position muralart, and critical debates on monumental public painting, occupied inthis period.October 256 pp. 280x230mm.120 b/w + 40 colour illus.ISBN 978-0-300-14153-5 £40.00*