The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700-1950
About the Book Series
The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting provides a forum for the broad study of object acquisition and collecting practices in their global dimensions from 1700 to 1950. The series seeks to illuminate the intersections between material culture studies, art history, and the history of collecting. It takes as its starting point the idea that objects both contributed to the formation of knowledge in the past and likewise contribute to our understanding of the past today. The human relationship to objects has proven a rich field of scholarly inquiry, with much recent scholarship either anthropological or sociological rather than art historical in perspective. Underpinning this series is the idea that the physical nature of objects contributes substantially to their social meanings, and therefore that the visual, tactile, and sensual dimensions of objects are critical to their interpretation. This series therefore seeks to bridge anthropology and art history, sociology and aesthetics. It encompasses the following areas of concern: 1. Material culture in its broadest dimension, including the high arts of painting and sculpture, the decorative arts (furniture, ceramics, metalwork, etc.), and everyday objects of all kinds. 2. Collecting practices, be they institutionalized activities associated with museums, governmental authorities, and religious entities, or collecting done by individuals and social groups. 3. The role of objects in defining self, community, and difference in an increasingly international and globalized world, with cross-cultural exchange and travel the central modes of object transfer. 4. Objects as constitutive of historical narratives, be they devised by historical figures seeking to understand their past or in the form of modern scholarly narratives. The series publishes interdisciplinary and comparative research on objects that addresses one or more of these perspectives and includes monographs, thematic studies, and edited volumes of essays.
Collecting and Displaying China's “Summer Palace” in the West: The Yuanmingyuan in Britain and France
1st Edition
Edited
By Louise Tythacott
September 11, 2019
In October 1860, at the culmination of the Second Opium War, British and French troops looted and destroyed one of the most important palace complexes in imperial China—the Yuanmingyuan. Known in the West as the "Summer Palace," this site consisted of thousands of buildings housing a vast art ...
Hooked Rugs: Encounters in American Modern Art, Craft and Design
1st Edition
By Cynthia Fowler
June 07, 2019
Through a close look at the history of the modernist hooked rug, this book raises important questions about the broader history of American modernism in the first half of the twentieth century. Although hooked rugs are not generally associated with the avant-garde, this study demonstrates that they...
Private Collecting, Exhibitions, and the Shaping of Art History in London: The Burlington Fine Arts Club
1st Edition
By Stacey J. Pierson
June 04, 2019
The Burlington Fine Arts Club was founded in London in 1866 as a gentlemen’s club with a singular remit – to exhibit members’ art collections. Exhibitions were proposed, organized, and furnished by a group of prominent members of British society who included aristocrats, artists, bankers, ...
Silver in Georgian Dublin: Making, Selling, Consuming
1st Edition
By Alison FitzGerald
May 23, 2019
Georgian Dublin is synonymous with a period of unprecedented expansion in the market for luxury goods. At a time when new commodities, novel technologies and fashionable imports seduced elite society, silver enjoyed an established association with gentility and prestige. Earlier studies have ...
Materializing Gender in Eighteenth-Century Europe
1st Edition
Edited
By Jennifer G. Germann, Heidi A. Strobel
June 01, 2018
Art history has enriched the study of material culture as a scholarly field. This interdisciplinary volume enhances this literature through the contributors' engagement with gender as the conceptual locus of analysis in terms of femininity, masculinity, and the spaces in between. Collectively, ...
Textiles, Fashion, and Design Reform in Austria-Hungary Before the First World War: Principles of Dress
1st Edition
By Rebecca Houze
April 25, 2018
Filling a critical gap in Vienna 1900 studies, this book offers a new reading of fin-de-siècle culture in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy by looking at the unusual and widespread preoccupation with embroidery, fabrics, clothing, and fashion - both literally and metaphorically. The author resurrects ...
William Hunter's World: The Art and Science of Eighteenth-Century Collecting
1st Edition
Edited
By E. Geoffrey Hancock, Nick Pearce, Mungo Campbell
April 25, 2018
Despite William Hunter's stature as one of the most important collectors and men of science of the eighteenth century, and the fact that his collection is the foundation of Scotland's oldest public museum, The Hunterian, until now there has been no comprehensive examination in a single volume of ...
Craft, Community and the Material Culture of Place and Politics, 19th-20th Century
1st Edition
Edited
By Janice Helland, Beverly Lemire, Alena Buis
February 06, 2018
Craft practice has a rich history and remains vibrant, sustaining communities while negotiating cultures within local or international contexts. More than two centuries of industrialization have not extinguished handmade goods; rather, the broader force of industrialization has redefined and ...
British Models of Art Collecting and the American Response: Reflections Across the Pond
1st Edition
Edited
By Inge Reist
October 12, 2017
British Models of Art Collecting and the American Response - Reflections Across the Pond presents 14 essays by distinguished art - and cultural - historians. Collectively, they examine points of similarity and difference in the approaches to art collecting practiced in Britain and the United States...
The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments, 1400–1800
1st Edition
Edited
By Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin, Beth Fowkes Tobin
June 14, 2017
Although much has been written on the aesthetic value of color, there are other values that adhere to it with economic and social values among them. Through case studies of particular colors and colored objects, this volume demonstrates just how complex the history of color is by focusing on the ...
Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum (1881-1914): Privacy, Publicity, and Personality
1st Edition
By Elizabeth Emery
November 10, 2016
Why did writers' private homes become so linked to their work that contemporaries began preserving them as museums? Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum addresses this and other questions by providing an overview of the social forces that brought writers' homes to the ...
Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority
1st Edition
By John Ott
October 26, 2016
Through the example of Central Pacific Railroad executives, Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California redirects attention from the usual art historical protagonists - artistic producers - and rewrites narratives of American art from the unfamiliar vantage of patrons and collectors. ...