Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Images are beautiful bright and vivid. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> This volume is a study of images of blacks by white artists European and American that were painted drawn modeled and carved from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth. Some are among the most famous works of art of the period-Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus and Women of Algiers Turner’s The Slave Ship Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream. But the majority which include works by Austrian Belgian Danish Dutch German Italian Spanish and Swiss artists as well as American British and French will be familiar only to specialist students. Several are here reproduced for the first time. But all have something to tell us about white attitudes toward blacks during the period. This was the period in which slavery was abolished by one Western country after another ideological racism was formulated and Africa was colonized by Europeans. Hugh Honour discusses a careful selection of images in their historical contexts investigating to what extent the artists and their attitudes were conditioned by aesthetic preferences social pressures religious and philosophical beliefs anthropological theories and imperialist ambitions. The book begins with images prompted by the campaign for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade initiated by Christians (mainly Quakers) with a new ideal of benevolence as a moral imperative and by free-thinkers with a new notion of freedom as a natural right. It ends at a time when slavery had been abolished but racial discrimination was pervasive throughout the West-though not without growing opposition from blacks themselves. In the history of art it extends from the creation of the neoclassical style to the rupture with Western classical traditions by Symbolists Expressionists Cubists and nonrepresentational artists. (OS)