The Department of Art History has recently announced the publication of several new titles from researchers and academics, each covering vastly unique and insightful subject matter.
Details of each publication can be found below, from ground-breaking critiques to inspiring artbooks.
Dr Charlie Miller Radical Picasso: The Use Value of Genius
Radical Picasso , Lecturer in Art History and Theory, Dr Charlie Miller, has dispensed with the privatised clichés that have dominated the reception of modernism’s most celebrated oeuvre, Pablo Picasso, and instead observes the artist’s practice as an assemblage whose density and agitation, negativity and excess, cannot be contained by hero worship, nor its inverse. Ranging across histories of art, literature, philosophy, and science, Miller critiques the Picasso myth, rethinks cubism and surrealism, and in the process transforms our understanding of European modernism.
Dr Claire Reddleman Pennine Street
Pennine Street is an art book that deals in movement, adopting the format of a walking guidebook to an imagined route that Lecturer in Digital Humanities, Dr Claire Reddleman, has coined ’Pennine Street 2012.’ This route, a mash-up of the Pennine Way and High Street 2012, is designed to be a space between the empirical and the imagined, a progression from Aldgate to Stratford in an imagined procession toward an equivocal end point.
Dr Colin Trodd Ford Madox Brown: The Manchester Murals and the Matter of History
Senior Lecturer, Dr Colin Trodd, extends his expertise to the work of Ford Madox Brown, specifically to the British painter’s murals in the Great Hall of Manchester Town Hall. In his exceptional book, Trodd examines and explains how each of Brown’s murals contributes to a radical vision of social and cultural life, drawing a parallel between Brown and Thomas Carlyle to reveal how the artists challenged the perceived truths of British liberalism.
Dr Cordelia Warr Stigmatics and Visual Culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy
Stigmata has consistently suffered controversial discourse, the term being when a person exhibits wounds that duplicate or represent those which Jesus Christ is said to have endured. This book, crafted by Senior Lecturer in Art History Dr Cordelia Warr focuses on Italy and female stigmatics and the complex questions and reflections surrounding the representation of stigmata in visual art.
Dr Edward Wouk Dominicus Lampsonius’ The Life of Lambert Lombard (1565); and Effigies of Several Famous Painters from the Low Countries (1572)
Dominicus Lampsonius’s The Life of Lambert Lombard (1565) has been beautifully resurrected and translated by Reader in Art History and Visual Studies, Dr Edward Wouk. This originally neo-Latin account is the earliest published biography of a Netherlandish artist, capturing the life of painter, architect, and draftsman, Lambert Lombard of Liege, and offers a theoretical exposition on the nature and ideal practice of Netherlandish art that emphasises Lombard’s intellectual curiosity, interest in antiquity, attentive study of the human body, and exemplary generosity as teacher.
