Rare Books

The English dreamers

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Description: "Irrationality and super-clarity are the two elements that all dreams seem to have in common. The life-like clarity causes one to overlook the rational flaws of a dream and to be swept up on its wings. Like a great work of fiction, a dream is totally convincing. Only when the grip of the irrational thrusts one into a vortex whose end is certain death does the dreamer rebel and rip away the cobwebs which bind him. The English Victorian painters whose works are shown in this book have dealt with this delicate mental balance between reality and illusion in a way which the later dream painters, the Surrealists, could not approach because of the very fact that pyschoanalysts like Freud and Jung had made attempts to explain and thus rationalize the nature of a dream." -- Introduction.
Type: Rare Books(Opens in new tab)
Publication date: 1975.
Call number: 608103
ISBN: 0330245023; 9780330245029
Provenance: Purchased from Sanford and Helen Berger, 1999. From the Sanford and Helen Berger Collection.

Dreamers of decadence : symbolist painters of the 1890s

Rare Books

"There have been few movements in the history of Western art as strange as that of the Decadents of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. While public attention (like that of most later critics) was preoccupied with the Impressionists, many painters were reacting in a totally different -- and more imaginative way -- to the grim horrors of the new industrial society around them. The roots of the Decadents, as these artists came to call themselves, were to be found in the poetic visions of the English Pre-Raphaelites of the 1850's. Their first great Continental exponent was a brilliant and neglected painter of the fantastic, Gustave Moreau; their most obvious expression was Art Nouveau, a style closely interwoven with sinuous and half-unconscious eroticism. Philippe Jullian takes the reader on a conducted tour through the bizarre symbolism of this half-forgotten world, introducing him to a large number of writers and artists. Many of these artists -- Moreau; Toorop, the brilliant half-Balinese, half-Dutch painter and draftsman; the French Odilon Redon, the great master of Symbolist art; the Viennese Klimt; and the Belgian Khnopff -- have been known for some time to a few enthusiasts: In this lively study their inventiveness and skill are explored afresh, and their fantastic imaginings and weird symbolism exposed to a sometimes ironic light. Proud of their romantic appearance, extravagant habits, and outragous conduct, the artists of the "mauve nineties" drew on a wide range of writers for their ideas, including not only Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire, Swinburne, and Wilde, but also a number of less well-known and stranger poets. The book ends with a short anthology of Symbolist themes taken from these writers, which form a counterpart to the 149 extraordinary pictures drawn from the neglected reserves of museums and collections all over Europe and America. Dreamers of Decadence brings to life a fascinating episode in the history of ideas, which foreshadows today's interest in fantasy and preoccupation with the symbols of love and apprehension"--Back cover.

608272

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Hunter green

Rare Books

"A truly original force in contemporary art--recently described as 'the Emily Dickinson of photography'--Weifenbach creates images based on scenes familiar to any viewer, with results that are dream-like and hauntingly familiar"--Publisher's description.

653292

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John Jacob Astor letter to Ogden Hoffman

Manuscripts

Astor writes of the removal of John Charles Frémont from his post in the California. He also tells Hoffman: "Since we parted on the steamboat dock a year ago last July, what strange times have come upon us, it sometimes seems to me like a dream," and gives updates on friends and family.

mssHM 19012

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Flora

Rare Books

"In Neeta Madahar's new series of allegorical portraits 'Flora,' the traditional procedure of personification is reversed: here, actual women appropriate imagery stretching back to antiquity to fashion and empowering public persona. A favourite subject of Renaissance and Baroque painters, Flora was traditionally depicted as a young woman surrounded by reveling devotees bearing floral tributes. Madahar, however, presents us with a different Flora. Her immediate inspiration was not Botticelli but the stylized portrait photography of the 1930s-50s including that of Cecil Beaton, Angus McBean and Madam Yevonde. These are images of real women whose bodies and comportment exemplify a willful sense of self-possession won through lived experience"--Publisher's description.

653251

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MacNab, Constance. 1 letter to Patrick Balfour, Baron Kinross, 1904-, A.L.S. (5 p.), (1964, May 14)

Manuscripts

Also: on verso of page with autograph postscript is a typewritten excerpt of a portion of a chapter from A Man and His Symbols by Carl G. Jung (in French). Cataloger's note: there is a possibility MacNab is spelled McNab. Removed to Oversize Box 155.

KIN 3762

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Six painters and the object

Rare Books

All of the painters in the 1963 exhibition Six Painters and the Object were born between 1923 and 1933, making them, at the time of the exhibition, either emerging artists or artists who were mid-career Although some of these six artists were commonly referred to as "object-makers," this exhibition focused on the artists as painters and the canvas as subject. The six artists who were highlighted in this exhibition include: Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol. In his catalogue essay, curator Lawrence Alloway underscores a shared similarity between the artists to be found in the common use of objects drawn from communications network and the physical environment of the city. On the cusp of Pop art's explosion in the art world, the exhibition marks a significant moment in art history and the accompanying catalogue an essential guide to understanding the nascent exhibitions leading up to a movement that would sweep the art world. The catalogue includes a list of works in the exhibition and reproductions of selected works in the exhibition.

637082

The English dreamers

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Dreamers of decadence : symbolist painters of the 1890s

Hunter green

John Jacob Astor letter to Ogden Hoffman

Flora

MacNab, Constance. 1 letter to Patrick Balfour, Baron Kinross, 1904-, A.L.S. (5 p.), (1964, May 14)

Six painters and the object