Search

This essay locates a late 19th-century category of objects variously named as 'industrial' or 'decorative arts' within the specifically imperial institutional circuit of the World Exhibitions. Taking up a segment of the World Exhibitions of the 1880s, it traces a history which connects the three cities of Calcutta, London and Glasgow and creates a trail of travelling exhibits and museum collections of this most proliferating category of objects. It follows in particular the career of the Bengali exhibition commissioner and museum curator Trailokya Nath (T.N.) Mukharji and the anthology he compiled on the Art-Manufactures of India for the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888 to map a specific network of commissioning, collecting, cataloguing and documenting India’s 'art-manufactures'.

In the concentration camp, many artists drew at the risk of their lives. These productions can tell us a lot about the condition of life in the camps, but they also raise several questions that are related to the philosophy of art. Why draw? Does the artist respond to an inner urge to reproduce? Is this idea of beauty a response of the mind to the horrible? Could atrocity push us to see beauty where we have never seen it? In this article we propose to present some clandestine productions made in the camps and to question their status which seems to defy the concept of decorative art and pushes us to rethink the notion of beauty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can writers work in an Art Nouveau house? The coherence and unity of style of these interiors designed down to the smallest detail by all-powerful architects seem to dispossess the writer/artist of his interior, and perhaps of his interiority. This article aims to study some fictional texts which, around 1900, show aesthetes and authors in Art Nouveau interiors -- often evoked under the malefic and grimacing figure of the "modern style" -- which prevent creation but also arouse satirical texts against and thanks to these fashionable walls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on history of dramatic art is a series of fifteen prints, works by engraver L.C. Rousseau, featuring actors in costumes surrounded by a few decorative elements. It mentions prints in the National Library from France, these have not been brought together in a collection but have been edited independently on cardboard sheets. It also mentions illustrated story of the theater of the French Revolution and painters and advertising shows the importance of this kind of prints.

Copyright of Revue des Sciences de l'Education is the property of Revue des Sciences de l'Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Oriental influences present in Polish culture since the Middle Ages and incarnated by the idea of “sarmatisme” were re-evaluated or outright rejected by the young modernist generation. In fact, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century the traditional Polish “Orientality” was replaced by a wave of interest for the aesthetics of Islamic art, a reflection of the European “Oriental renaissance”. The Polish imaginarium had long associated the art and culture of Islam uniquely to the Middle East and its craft. The romantic epoch brought with it a new interest for medieval Spain, Granada in particular, its history and monuments, reflected in the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz and the museographic realisations of Izabela Czartoryska at Puławy or Tytus Działyński at Kórnik. If architectural projects, principally of “Moorish” synagogues and internal decorations for aristocratic and bourgeois palaces still belong to a nineteenth century oriental current, they do however already reveal a will typical of pre-war decades by virtue of granting significance to Islamic decorative principles. In the first decades of the twentieth century, “à l’orientale” motifs recurrent in fashion and the visual universe, as witnessed by contemporary novels, found a sort of counterpoint in propositions made by representatives of the Polish applied art revival movement, successful hybridization of European, oriental and popular models: fabrics, carpets, metal and leather objects of artists from the Warsztaty Krakowskie (Cracow workshops, founded 1913) such as Józef Czajkowski, Wojciech Jastrzębowski, Bonawentura Lenart, and Karol Tichy, “javano-cracovian” batiks of young workshop apprentices or even the glazed ceramics of Stanisław Jagmin. Displayed at the 1925 Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, the Cracow Workshop adherent’s productions draw the attention of the European public and critics on this peculiar breed of national “primitivist” style tainted with Orientalism.

Oriental influences present in Polish culture since the Middle Ages and incarnated by the idea of “sarmatisme” were re-evaluated or outright rejected by the young modernist generation. In fact, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century the traditional Polish “Orientality” was replaced by a wave of interest for the aesthetics of Islamic art, a reflection of the European “Oriental renaissance”. The Polish imaginarium had long associated the art and culture of Islam uniquely to the Middle East and its craft. The romantic epoch brought with it a new interest for medieval Spain, Granada in particular, its history and monuments, reflected in the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz and the museographic realisations of Izabela Czartoryska at Puławy or Tytus Działyński at Kórnik. If architectural projects, principally of “Moorish” synagogues and internal decorations for aristocratic and bourgeois palaces still belong to a nineteenth century oriental current, they do however already reveal a will typical of pre-war decades by virtue of granting significance to Islamic decorative principles. In the first decades of the twentieth century, “à l’orientale” motifs recurrent in fashion and the visual universe, as witnessed by contemporary novels, found a sort of counterpoint in propositions made by representatives of the Polish applied art revival movement, successful hybridization of European, oriental and popular models: fabrics, carpets, metal and leather objects of artists from the Warsztaty Krakowskie (Cracow workshops, founded 1913) such as Józef Czajkowski, Wojciech Jastrzębowski, Bonawentura Lenart, and Karol Tichy, “javano-cracovian” batiks of young workshop apprentices or even the glazed ceramics of Stanisław Jagmin. Displayed at the 1925 Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, the Cracow Workshop adherent’s productions draw the attention of the European public and critics on this peculiar breed of national “primitivist” style tainted with Orientalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Ruskin’s claim that what is essential in all art is to fashion by hand what the eye sees clearly, blurred the divide between the fine arts and the decorative arts. Advocating a renewed experience of nature proper to disclose truth to the beholder, he inspired William Morris with a new form of interior design that promoted craftsmanship as a way to counter mass production and restore man’s dignity. The revival of the gothic style was for him a way to renew Victorian culture by emphasizing the close observation of nature, as well as the values of craftsmanship. While the decorative arts created an environment conducive to a better appreciation of natural beauty, they also sheltered the aesthete from the ugliness of the industrial age. Patterns designed by Morris were loved by aesthetes who wanted their homes to mirror their dreams and aspirations and who embraced Walter Pater’s epicurean aesthetics. Pater’s celebration of music in The Renaissance as the ideal towards which all arts aspire, fostered the idea of interior design as a musical composition enhancing pure perception for the aesthetic mind. The essay examines to what extent aesthetic interiors show this ambiguity between the desire to re-discover natural beauty and truth and the retreat into aesthetic dreams.

This paper aims to assess the influence of Ruskin’s ideas on Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic theories. It examines to what extent Wilde’s aesthetic stance is indebted to the teachings of the Slade Professor, but also why Wilde ultimately disavowed his Ruskinian heritage. The series of lectures Wilde gave in the US in 1882 testify to the influence of one of his mentors. As Wilde was tasked with spreading the Aesthetic gospel overseas, he decried the ugliness of the modern urban and industrial environment as well as the capitalistic modes of production, thus echoing Ruskin’s writings. He highlighted the importance of beauty in the artist’s environment, asserted the link between beauty and utility, and put forward the social mission of art. Yet, almost ten years later, as Wilde rejects imitation in Intentions (1891) and dissociates art and utility in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), his theories run counter to Ruskin’s teachings. Even though this rejection of Ruskin’s ideas can partly be accounted for by the evolution of Wilde’s stance itself, it may also be seen as symptomatic of the deeply ambivalent relationship that Ruskin had with the Aesthetic Movement as a whole, and with the doctrine of art for art’s sake in particular. On the one hand, the importance given to beauty and to the purely aesthetic qualities of works of art sets Ruskin as a precursor to the Aesthetic Movement. On the other hand, the link between art and morals in his scheme of thought makes him one of the strongest and most vocal opponents to the doctrine of art for art’s sake. Thus, the ambivalence of Wilde’s Ruskinian heritage actually reveals Ruskin’s own paradoxical position towards the Aesthetic Movement and towards aesthetic modernity in general.

The participation of Henriette Grandjean-Bourquin (1887–1968) in the art nouveau movement of the mountains of Neuchâtel, known as“style sapin” (fir-tree style), was little-known. After having honed her technical skills in Germany and France, Grandjean-Bourquin became interested in pottery and produced a series of eighty-two glazed terracotta pieces at the Liotard de Ferney-Voltaire workshop at the end of 1911. The pieces, very well-documented in the workshop archives, bear witness to a unique production that helped combine the popular arts with new motifs inspired by the stylisation of pine trees, snowflakes and alpine flowers. In her skilful work, which attempted to give an account of the invisible forces that governed nature, it is possible to see the evolution of ornamentation in the 1910s towards a rigorous, geometric style.

Copyright of Journal of Mosaic Research is the property of Uludag University, Mosaic Research Center and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Centre national des Arts plastiques, the national centre for the plastic arts, is the heir to a service of fine arts, sciences and theatre first created in 1791 in order to support artistic creation. In 1996, the Centre undertook a retrospective inventory of all the works of art commissioned and purchased by the State since the French Revolution. The part of the inventory carried out at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA), the Paris fine arts school, permitted the identification of a remarkably diversified collection of about 15,000 items which were deposited at this school, intended principally for the ‘study museum’, officially founded on 17 September 1834, or the reserve collections of the library, opened in 1863. By a close examination of the archives left by the fine arts administration and by the administration of the school itself (series F 21 and AJ 52 at the national archives), we were able to show how these deposits were closely related to the pedagogical and institutional evolutions of the school. Illustrations of this conclusion are to be seen in the number of models and plaster casts given to the school during the neo-classical period, the number of copies of paintings during the Second Empire—the logical consequence of the creation of painting ateliers in 1863—or the number of ornamental drawings during the Third Republic, destined to accompany the new courses in the decorative arts.

The aim of the paper is to give a glimpse of the syncretism and complexness of the work of Nikolay Raynov and to propose an approach that would show his methods of implication of artistic historical ideas into paintings and works of decorative art. Furthermore, it is a reflection about the 130th anniversary exhibition of Raynov's paintings at the Sofia City Art Gallery1 from the perspective of its historical place in European art and its actual insight.

In 1861 France purchased part of the Campana collection with a view to founding a museum for the decorative and industrial arts capable of rivalling similar institutions in Europe. The collection was presented to the public in an ephemeral “Musée Napoléon III” for a few months in 1862. But there was no consensus on the location of the collection in the French and Parisian museum landscape being elaborated: should the Musée Napoléon III be made an autonomous institution and should it be given missions similar to the South Kensington Museum in London? Or should it be made part of the Louvre, and thus add to its collections of masterpieces? Press articles and caustic publications punctuated the debate. The partisans of the first solution hoped that Paris could endow itself with a museum of industrial arts that would stimulate the French economy, while the partisans of the second solution, who won the day, wanted to reinforce the universal museum that was the Louvre.

When Albert Lévy (1891–1976) took over the publishing house La Librairie Centrale des Beaux-Arts in 1919, it had enjoyed a certain fame since the late 19th century. The publications of Lévy, at the helm of the family business until 1936, were part of a period rich in critical developments, both for the revival of decorative arts and for that of the recognition of photography. The publishing house’s photographic archives, now in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, also find themselves at the crossroads of early twentieth-century decorative arts and photography. From 1928, the publisher seems to have abandoned black-and-white photography in favour of stencil-coloured illustrations. Thus it was necessary to examine the roles occupied by photography and photographers in his editorial project and how the concession of the photographic laboratory of the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs, run by the Lévy family from 1907 to 1936, became part of its activities.

By studying objects from the former collection of the French collector Gaston de Saint-Maurice (1831-1905) now in the Louvre and the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris, this article elucidates different aspects of the taste for reuse of architectural elements and decorative artefacts in the 19th century. Known for his collection of Islamic art (acquired by the South Kensington Museum in 1883), Saint-Maurice also collected European decorative arts showing his taste for historical decors. This article also raises the question of the appropriation of such artefacts by museums today.

The Musée d'art et d'histoire at Saint-Denis holds an important collection of archives and objects left by Francis Jourdain, an artist of multiple talents and facets. The collection include several hundred designs whihc are representative of his work as a whole:paintings, drawings, preparatory sketches for interior designs and decorative arts, furniture ensembles, ceramic and glass pieces. Jourdain was a painter and a skilled art worker and, following in the footsteps of the Austrian architecte Adolphe Loos, he preached simplicity as a value in its own right. He brought revolutionary change to furniture design with the principle of interchangeable pieces of furniture, and opened a shop where his creations could be purchased or ordered by catalogue. His designs are presented in different parts of the museum: the bedroom of Hélène Henry, a textile designer, and the salon of George Besson, an art critic and collector.

Though Walter Crane is very famous for his illustrations, his work as a theoretician is sometimes overlooked. Strongly influenced by John Ruskin and William Morris, Walter Crane developed the idea of the unity of art as an essential condition for a rewarding artistic production and a satisfactory social life. In The Claims of Decorative Art, a collection of essays, he successfully mixed a presentation of architecture and the decorative arts influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement with a sharp criticism of an alienating industrial society based on profit and individualism and a description of socialism as the only way to regain harmony. Opposing division in all its manifestations, he consistently encouraged a cooperation between artists and artisans while working with different socialist groups, trying to transcend the political tensions that often tore them and adopting a patient but firm political position. His unflinching artistic, political and educational commitment is obvious in his writings and his career and testifies to his major role in the resistance to what he described as the negative forces of commercialism.

The recent “Cult of Beauty” touring exhibition (Victorian and Albert Museum, 13 September 2011, 15 January 2012) has convincingly shown the role such key pre-Raphaelite artists as Dante Gabriel Rossetti played in the transition from the mid-Victorian age to British aestheticism by dedicating much space to such emblematic paintings as Bocca Baciata (1859) or The Day Dream (1880). However, Rossetti’s exact artistic involvement with the Arts and Crafts design movement, which emerged in Britain around 1860 (but only took its official name after the foundation of the Crafts Exhibition Society in 1887) and his exploration of lesser forms of art in his own artistic career have not yet been widely examined: how could the leader of the Preraphaelite Brotherhood—an artistic endeavour renowned for its insistence on transparent, true-to-nature symbolism—have inspired the decorative, overcharged designs and furniture of the Arts and Crafts movement? Did Rossetti’s art also move towards aestheticism, and if so, does this change the way we should interpret his paintings and his poetry?This paper hopes to address these issues by looking at Rossetti’s experiments with mixed media, with a special focus on Rossetti’s interest in and collecting of ceramics. It also aims to look at Rossetti’s artistic production in a broad and inclusive manner and to balance his ideas against those expressed by John Ruskin in his conferences on art and architecture in the mid-1850s.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, when the progress of industrialization and mass production transforms the material and symbolic vision of ornament, theorists, artists and architects question its origin and its revival in contemporary culture. The British context provides an interesting case study. In the Department of Practical Art and the Museum of Ornamental Art in Marlborough House emerge a discourse on ornament in which it appears as the central element in a strategy of economic competition and moral reform. The stylised forms of Islamic and tribal art are seen as potential sources of renewal for British ornament. Those forms are however not to be copied but are only to serve as objects of study, in order to extract from them fundamental principles, of an essentially formal. These ornaments appear as the source of an ancient and rational esthetical knowledge, which can be reused in the development of a modern and normative discourse on ornament.

In the present study I aim to highlight the importance of the Polish School of tapestry. The Polish artists broke the canons of the tapestry renouncing at the traditional-bidimensional; they introduced the sculptural forms and they began to weave with nonconventional materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the contributions of Eugène Véron in the history of aesthetics. Véron wrote a new aesthetics whose principles were the contents of the metaphysical idea of beauty and discoveries in anthropology, physiology, and psychology. He also revealed the characteristics of the epistemological changes in aesthetics such as experimental sciences as an ideal, expressionistic art and others.

Dans ce texte inédit intitulé « Les Affiches du départ »1, Cocteau associe de façon pour le moins non conventionnelle la publicité pour les voyages et la poésie. Autant les affiches publicitaires incitant à visiter d'autres contrées ou pays que le poème « L'Invitation au voyage » de Baudelaire offrent le privilège de pouvoir s'échapper de la réalité « morne » et « sinistre » pour découvrir un autre monde dans lequel passant et lecteur peuvent jouer leur propre rôle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The shelters of the Aragon containing paintings are gathered together in two areas: one around the río Martin valley to the north of Teruel and one in the Sierra de Guara at the east of Huesca. In every case they coexist with sites containing Levantine paintings but the proportions between the two types of expression are variable. We suppose that this association or even competition, of these two different iconographies is related to the differences of Neolithic economies establishment in each region. Punctual excavations underside the schematic figures give for them different dating throughout the Neolithic period. It seems probant that shelters with schematic paintings were chosen among a multitude of potential sites following four particular conditions: their dominant position, their southern orientation, the orange colour of the cliff walls and the humidity of the place. Lastly, the detailed study of the ornated sites at the confluence of the Vero and the Choca valley reveals the existence of the groups of richly shelters and, on the over hand, the existence of isolated ones with a most soker decoration. Or, a good knowledge of the field shows that the first ones cannot be accessible if we do not pass by the second ones. Consequently, we propose the existence of a precise approaching paths allowing precise the arrival to the groups of richly decorated sites. The studied area would thus represent a structured sanctuary served by an access way that was marked out deliberately. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]