Böcker av Wendy Bellion

In this richly illustrated study, the first book-length exploration of illusionistic art in the early United States, Wendy Bellion investigates Americans' experiences with material forms of visual deception and argues that encounters with illusory art shaped their understanding of knowledge, representation, and subjectivity between 1790 and 1825. Focusing on the work of the well-known Peale family and their Philadelphia Museum, as well as other Philadelphians, Bellion explores the range of illusions encountered in public spaces, from trompe l'oeil paintings and drawings at art exhibitions to ephemeral displays of phantasmagoria, "Invisible Ladies," and other spectacles of deception. Bellion reconstructs the elite and vernacular sites where such art and objects appeared and argues that early national exhibitions doubled as spaces of citizen formation. Within a post-Revolutionary culture troubled by the social and political consequences of deception, keen perception signified able citizenship. Setting illusions into dialogue with Enlightenment cultures of science, print, politics, and the senses, Citizen Spectator demonstrates that pictorial and optical illusions functioned to cultivate but also to confound discernment. Bellion reveals the equivocal nature of illusion during the early republic, mapping its changing forms and functions, and uncovers surprising links between early American art, culture, and citizenship.

From porcelain to betel leaves, Chumash hats to natural history cabinets, this book examines how objects embody imperialism, knowledge, and resistance in various ways. While every era witnesses change, the eighteenth century experienced artistic, economic, and demographic transformations that exerted unique pressures on material cultures around the world. Featuring ten essays from leading historians of British, Spanish, and West African art, this global survey brings a fresh approach to the study of eighteenth century material culture, foregrounding cultural connections, translation, and movement over static and rooted perspectives. Each chapter takes a diverse scholarly approach, identifying a specific historical example of early modern transnationalism, and engages with a number of dynamic fields of enquiry and practice, ranging from material culture and ecocriticism, through to global history and decolonization. Underpinned by case studies which feature objects and practices that span Asia, Europe, Australasia Africa and North America, the book expands beyond Eurocentric perspectives to discover the mobile, transcultural nature of eighteenth-century art worlds.Ranging from California to China, Bengal to Britain, this timely book illuminates the transformations within and between artistic media, follows natural and human-made things as they migrate across territories, and reveals how objects catalyzed change in the transoceanic worlds of the early modern period. Going beyond Eurocentric perspectives, it reveals the innate mobility and transculturality of eighteenth-century art worlds; charting new directions for global art history and cultural history of the period.