Elite Art Research Articles

The ‘Spleen’ and ‘Idéal’ of Opium: Baudelaire and Thomas De Quincey

De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821), translated and adapted by Baudelaire as Un Mangeur d’Opium in Les Paradis artificiels (1860), presciently anticipated two antithetical types of discourse on drugs: the first, a Romantic, subversive literary discourse that valorizes drugs as a creative muse or ‘idéal’; the second, a normative medical discourse that stigmatizes drugs as addictive (‘spleen’). This article argues that, despite their ostensibly divergent positions, both these discourses are in fact undermined by the same cultural prejudice: namely, an artistic elite should be afforded special dispensation for drug-taking on the grounds of its inherent and undisputed genius. However, an alternative, more nuanced, position on drugs is provided by Baudelaire, whose assimilation of both medical and literary discourses in the 1840s paved the way for his pragmatic realignment of genius with childhood rather than madness, a realignment that not only partially anticipates Freud, but also allows for a more ethically responsible rehabilitation of opium use.

Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde

True to their artistic goal of forging an alliance between dance and the other arts, the Ballets Russes worked in close collaboration with some of the foremost painters and musicians of the time. Yet surprisingly, perhaps, the rich intermedial exchanges between painting, music, and choreography on the Ballets Russes stage have received little critical attention until now. This blatant gap is filled by Juliet Bellow's masterful study of the interactions between sets, costumes, performance, and musical accompaniment in four exemplary ballets designed by Picasso, Sonia Delaunay, Matisse, and De Chirico. An introductory chapter maps out the evolution of choreographic style from the ‘oriental’ Schéhérazade (1910) to the modernist Le Sacre du printemps (1913), and examines the changing discourses in the reception of Ballets Russes productions. While Fokine's seemingly improvisational and instinctive dance language was hailed as a liberation of the body from the ills of civilization, the convulsive choreographies introduced when Nijinski took over as the troupe's lead choreographer not only generated controversy but challenged the racialized vision of Ballets Russes dance as a type of unmediated, ‘primitive’ art form. Chapter 2 looks at the complex ways in which Picasso referenced film in his set designs for Parade (1917) as a means of exploring new modes of spectatorship and experimenting with corporeality in space. Chapter 3 examines the crossover between ‘high’ and decorative art in Sonia Delaunay's costume designs for Cléopâtre (1918), paying particular attention to the articulation of female agency in her garment for the title character. In Chapter 4, Bellow offers a fascinating reading of the shifting definitions of the ‘oriental’ and the ‘decorative’ with regard to modernism in Matisse's designs for Le Chant du rossignol (1920). Finally, Chapter 5 examines De Chirico's disjunctive approach to classicism in the costumes and sets for Le Bal (1929) as an attack on the total artwork's promise of a harmonious union between different art forms. Through these case studies, the author explores wider questions of the modernist body, changing modes of spectatorship in the first decades of the twentieth century, the relationship between technology, performance, and the natural world, the tensions between elite art and popular culture, and, not least, the inherent conflict between the totalizing gesture of the nineteenth-century Gesamtkunstwerk, which the Ballets Russes consciously embraced, and modernism's insistence on the autonomy of the arts. Elegantly written and sumptuously illustrated, this wonderful book offers a fascinating journey through the rich intersections between music, painting, the decorative arts, and performance on the Ballets Russes stage. What is at stake here is no less than a rethinking of the concept of modernism from an intermedial perspective. Modernism on Stage is a tour de force not to be missed by anyone interested in the Ballets Russes and the Parisian avant-garde.

A Kabuki Innovator, Nakamura Kanzaburō XVIII, Dies Too Young: Where Does Kabuki Go from Here?

A Kabuki Innovator, Nakamura Kanzaburō XVIII, Dies Too Young: Where Does Kabuki Go from Here? Laurence Kominz (bio) Kabuki actor, producer, and director Nakamura Kanzaburō XVIII passed away on 5 December 2012, at age fifty-seven, of acute respiratory failure following a half-year battle with throat cancer. Kanzaburō was not just another kabuki star, he was the soul of the art for a huge number of fans, and the hope for kabuki moving in new directions in the future. The “XVIII” indicates that he was the eighteenth-generation actor to bear this name, and his branch of the Nakamura family has owned theaters, managed companies, and directed plays since the early seventeenth century, as well as occasionally providing star actors for the stage. Our Kanzaburō was more, and did more, than all of the above. At the same time that he assiduously studied the work of his illustrious father and other actors of the preceding generation, Kanzaburō’s dedication to kabuki’s heritage as a commoners’ art and his sense that kabuki needed to move in new directions in order to thrive led him to make three big innovations that proved to be immensely successful, both commercially and critically. The foundation of Kanzaburō’s success was his charisma on stage. He was a master of every sort of role—he played intense samurai [End Page 267] avengers, lovesick shopkeepers, and women of every sort, including the horrific avenging ghost of a brutally murdered wife. Small in physical stature, he avoided playing stripe-faced martial superheroes (aragoto roles), but no one on the kabuki stage could rival Kanzaburō as a master of kabuki comedy. He brought his charisma and warm personality to these roles—every member of the audience felt that Kanzaburō was acting “just for me,” and this gave him a fan base greater than any other performer. While other leading actors feel most comfortable in fancy restaurants in the company of wealthy patrons and the artistic elite, Kanzaburō rubbed elbows with fans on the street, hung out with lowbrow television comedians, and avidly followed popular trends in music and contemporary theater. No kabuki actor had a truer compass bearing on what today’s Japanese audiences enjoy. And Kanzaburō came to the conclusion that it was, in fact, just what kabuki audiences enjoyed in the heyday of kabuki in the Edo period (1600–1868): action, personality, intense emotionality, slapstick and wit, and creative hybridization of past and present on stage. He knew that the time had come to break some tried-and-true rules of the kabuki stage, but he often stated that an actor had to first master traditional forms in order to know how, when, and why to break or change them. Kanzaburō (then using the name Kankurō) began to put his ideas to the test in 1994 with Cocoon Kabuki. Theater Cocoon was a new venue in the Shibuya neighborhood—hangout of teenagers and twenty-year-olds, a very different milieu than the National Theater across the moat from the Imperial Palace, and the Kabuki-za, in the posh Ginza district. In Tokyo location means a lot, and collaborating with avant-garde playwright and director Kushida Kazuyoshi, Kan zaburō incorporated elements of underground theater and used a more intimate theater space to create dynamism, excitement, and intimacy reminiscent of Edo period kabuki. The fight scenes in Cocoon plays were incredible—in one play a battle took place in a pond with real water covering the width of the stage, splashing spectators in the front rows; in another play Kanzaburō’s hero fought off an army during a blizzard, to the accompaniment of music by alternative rock musician Ringo Shiina. Kanzaburō’s inherited position of authority, his on-stage brilliance, his imagination as a producer-director, and the commercial success that followed allowed him to assemble a company of actors to support him in his artistic experiments. In 2000 Kanzaburō opened his famous Heisei Nakamura-za, a temporary, moveable tent theater, seating about nine hundred people, that partially recreates an intimate Edo period playhouse. While often situated in Asakusa, Tokyo’s lowbrow entertainment district, Kanzaburō [End Page 268] took his tent theater all over Japan, and even...

The Aesthetics of Diaspora in Colonial Fields of Power: Elite Nationalism, Art and the Love to Die for

This paper explores the conditions of cultural production that enabled the invention of the Philippine nation from afar among literary and artistic diasporan elites in the metropolitan centres of Europe in the late nineteenth century. I draw together Bourdieu's analysis of the creation of the autonomous field of cultural production and Anderson's analysis of the origins of nationalism to demonstrate how affective and aesthetic investments in art and the nation enabled historically one group of people – the ilustrado (elite Filipino nationalist) – to overcome and exchange the estrangement and humiliations of race for national belonging and recognition in colonial fields of power. Doing so critically extends Bourdieu, moving beyond his methodological nationalism to foreground the racial hierarchies embedded in the making of the classed habitus and situate the aesthetics of diaspora within a translocal field of distinction.

Domestic Photography and the Minor: Hawarden and the Aesthetics of Morris

“Yes I repeat that the chief source of art is man's pleasure in his daily necessary work, which expresses itself and is embodied in that work itself; nothing else can make the common surroundings o...

ARTE E ARTISTA POPULAR

The subject “art and folk artist” is ample. Aspects such as the artist’s life, folk art and community, elite art and art of the people, tradition and creativity, social significance of folk art and religion are addressed in an associative way, with quotes from experts. Bibliographic references are added for eventual furthering in research.

Difference, aesthetics and the curatorial crisis of film festivals

This essay builds on debates from Screen's recent dossier on film festivals1 in order to promote discussion of the significance of film festivals in cohering communities around nationalistic identities and in shaping contemporary film culture. Drawing on my professional experience as a festival practitioner in the USA, I shall consider curatorial strategies that make space for audiences and cinematic practices otherwise marginalized or invisible within established film institutions and canons. Film festivals are one of the foremost dynamic curatorial mechanisms in our film culture. Festival programmers can use their role as gatekeepers to strategically challenge dichotomous valuations of film as either art or commerce, and to facilitate ways of looking that allow for difference rather than enforce nationalistic models of homogeneity. As digital technologies have provided greater access to the means of film and media production for those historically disenfranchised from the process, thousands more films are being made each year than can be catalogued or archived. This increase has created a crisis in curating – an urgent need to filter through these productions and connect films with audiences. The investments in this filtering process are relative. Some film critics claim that of these thousands of films, only a few (between twenty and sixty) are ‘outstanding’ or ‘good-to-great’ films that have value to cinema culture.2 The impulse to preserve cinema as an elite art form is understandable when conversations around film are overrun by regurgitations of box-office figures and an obsessive quest for smaller, more mobile delivery formats. Studio executives, on the other hand, approach film in terms of its profitability as a product, determined by a calculus of production budgets, print and advertising expenses, and distribution revenues. When the independent film industry in the USA collapsed in the spring of 2008, marked by the closure of film studios Picturehouse and Warner Independent, some blamed not only the number of film productions saturating the market but also the lack of quality (articulated as a consequence of poor taste) overseeing this production overflow.3

Retelling Hasidism for the Twenty-First Century

Retelling Hasidism for the Twenty-First Century

Film Discourse on the Praised and Acclaimed: Reviewing Criteria in the United States and United Kingdom

This research examines the aesthetic elements of contemporary film criticism. Although a restricted field of film production has arisen beside the large-scale field, including an elite critical discourse, the film industry remains relentlessly oriented to its goal of producing commercial products that achieve widespread popular appeal. This differentiation becomes apparent in the types of films validated by publics, peers, and critics. Our exploratory analysis examines whether the dichotomy of artistic versus popular forms of criticism still captures the complexity of films produced under conditions of increased commercialization, globalization, and digitization. We analyzed reviews published in newspapers of record in the United Kingdom and United States of films released in 2007 that received the utmost popular, professional, and critical recognition. Findings reveal that contemporary film criticism incorporates aesthetic elements drawn from popular interests as well as elite art considerations, thereby complicating critics' aesthetic systems and analysts' classificatory schemes.

CREATING AND PRESERVING A MYTH: CHANGING ATTITUDES ABOUT COUNTRY ESTATES IN LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

This article examines how small groups of artistic elites and amateurs attempted to re-contextualise the cultural importance of the Russian country estate in the early twentieth century, a period of formative nation-building, modernisation and industrialisation. The ‘myth’ of the estate was used as a tool to spur preservationist rhetoric in a society without an effective instrument to preserve its built heritage. The principal avenue used by preservationists to advance their agenda was the artistic journal.

Artscanada’s “Black” Issue: 1960s Contemporary Art and African Liberation Movements

In August 1967, as the slogan Black Power burst the confines of African American subcultures and global anti-colonial movements began to circulate prominently within mainstream mass media, seven men from two countries met via a transnational telephone connection to talk about the colour black. Their conversation, and its subsequent publication in the arts journal artscanada’s October 1967 issue titled “Black,” provides this article’s focus. While the thematic issue indexes a rare intersection between elite art and racial politics, and while it is unlikely that any of these representatives of innovative contemporary art practices intimate with the radical countercultures of Greenwich Village and Yorkville saw any cloying taint of bigotry compromise their views about art and art-making, the issue nonetheless enforces covert racism sustained by ideologies of Whiteness. The result is that rather than embracing creative expression associated with black, Black-as-race is construed as alien to contemporary art’s mise-en-scène.

Inventing the Exegetical Stained-Glass Window: Suger, Hugh, and a New Elite Art

Abbot Suger's art program at St-Denis has long been credited with the reintroduction of “allegory” into Western art after centuries of disuse. A new understanding of that reintroduction is caught up in a web of previously unrecognized issues: that inventing the exegetical stained-glass window acted as a justification of the monastic use of art, that this claim was contradicted by new thought on art and the senses, that this new art appeared first not at St-Denis but elsewhere, and that the construction of a new elite art for the literate layperson emerged from all this.

Why is the “KGB Bar” possible? Binary morality and its consequences

This article asks why a popular bar named after a criminal Soviet secret police organization has not provoked the outrage of the developed world's intellectual and artistic elites, who would surely condemn an SS Bar. It attributes this moral blindness to the Holocaust's centrality in Israeli, German, and American national discourse and the resultant binary morality that ascribes collective innocence to all Jews at all times and in all places and collective guilt to all Germans – and potentially to all non-Jews – at all times and in all places. The moral logic of the Holocaust thus transforms Jews into victims and non-Jews into victimizers; the moral logic and reality of the Gulag transform everybody into both victim and victimizer. The binary morality of the Holocaust insists that all human beings be heroes; the fuzzy morality of the Gulag recognizes that all humans are just humans constantly confronted by moral ambiguity. But because the Gulag's moral ambiguity concerns non-JewsandJews, the Gulag undercuts binary morality. The Holocaust and the Gulag are not just incompatible moral tales; they are incompatibleandintersecting moral tales. As a result, they cannot co-exist. We therefore fail to respond to the KGB Bar because to recognize the Gulag as a mass murder worthy of categorical moral condemnation would be to challenge the sacred status of the Holocaust. Ironically, the KGB Bar is possibleprecisely becausean SS Bar is impossible.

Hook to the Chin

Hook to the ChinWithin historical avant-garde movements from the beginning of the 20th century, a curious taste and fascination for boxing burst out, and developed later into the claim that art must become more similar to boxing, or to sport in general. This fascination with pugilism in the early stage of its popularity on the continent included such charismatic figures of the Parisian avant-garde as Arthur Cravan, who was Oscar Wilde's nephew, a pretty good boxer and an unpredictable organizer of proto-dada outrages and scandals.After WWI, the zenith of artists' and intellectuals' love for boxing was reached in Weimar Germany. One of the well known examples connecting boxing with art was Bertolt Brecht with his statement that we need more good sport in theatre. His and other German avant-garde artists' admiration for boxing included the German boxing star May Schmeling, who was, at least until he lost his defending championship match against Joe Louis, an icon of the Nazis as well. Quite contrary to some later approaches in philosophy of sport, which compared sport with an elite art institution, Brecht's fascination with boxing took its anti-elitist and anti-institutional capacities as an example for art's renewal.To examine why and how Brecht included boxing in his theatre and his theory of theatre, we have to take into account two pairs of phenomena: sport vs. physical culture, and avant-garde theatre vs. bourgeois drama. At the same time, it is important to notice that sport, as something of Anglo-Saxon origin, and especially boxing, which became popular on the European continent in its American version, were admired by Brecht and by other avant-garde artists for their masculine power and energy. The energy in theatre, however, was needed to disrupt its cheap fictionality and introduce dialectical imagination of Verfremdungseffect (V-effect, or distancing effect). This was "a hook to the chin" of institutionalized art and of collective disciplinary morality of German tradition.

Creating Our Own: Folklore, Performance, and Identity in Cuzco, Peru

Zoila Mendoza’s book, which complements her previous work Shaping Society through Dance: Mestizo Ritual Performance in the Peruvian Andes, constitutes a passionate defense of the study of folklore as an individual and collective field of creative activity. She shows that artistic expression is a suitable way to comprehend the social experience of practitioners of music, dance, and theater. Starting from the cultural postulates of Raymond Williams, Mendoza posits that no separation exists between the affective elements of consciousness, that is, feelings, and social and ideological thought. Rather, both concepts are equivalent and interrelated, so that folkloric expressions must be studied as autonomous realities and not as simple reflections of social processes. Mendoza proposes that the heterogeneous folkloric activity that flowered in the city of Cuzco between the decades of 1920 and 1950 inspired a creative revaluation of Incaism, indigenism, and mestizaje. This cultural view allows her to conclude that, by the end of the 1950s, the renewal and recreation of cuzqueño folklore by artists and intellectuals had succeeded in becoming a symbol of national identity, which afterwards was overshadowed by afrocriollo artistic expressions developing in Lima.Creating Our Own offers a chronological review of the artistic cuzqueño scene in the twentieth century. Mendoza challenges the view that the impulse of folkloric art was the result of manipulation by the intellectual and artistic elites, in which racist discourse and ethnic exclusion were fundamental. She shows, on the contrary, that there was a continuous interaction between elites and popular sectors, urban and rural populations, and criollos, Indians, and mestizos in the common wish to create and transmit a new feeling of regional identity. In other words, folklore was a field of redefined identities of all cuzqueños and therefore constituted a heritage shared by the upper and lower classes. To examine the popular results of the process of folklorization, the author describes the international tour of the Mision Peruana de Arte Incaico, led by the indigenist thinker Luis E. Valcárcel in 1923 and 1924; the massive regional contests of folklore organized by the Centro Qosqo de Arte Nativo in the 1920s and 1930s; the great popularity achieved by the radio program “The Charango Hour” in the 1930s; and, finally, the promotion of cuzqueño popular art undertaken by the Instituto Americano de Arte, founded in 1937 by the neo-indigenist writer Uriel García. All these examples show how self-taught and popular artists interacted with the criollo and mestizo musicians of the elite to develop new styles and repertoires that were soon adopted as typically cuzqueños. For instance, the author analyzes the individual paths of the arpista Manuel Pillco Cuba and the cha-ranguistas Pancho Gómez Negrón and Julio Benavente Díaz, and the leadership of popular groups like Centro Musical Cuzco, Conjunto Mosoc Llacta, and Centro Artístico Ollanta. All these show how artistic and cultural cuzqueñismo, in a complex process of negotiation, adopted Inca, mestizo, Indian, and cholo values as symbols of identity.Mendoza’s sources come from the newspapers of the period, the archives preserved in the Centro Qosqo and the Instituto Americano de Arte, and interviews with some actors directly involved in the spread of the cuzqueñista cultural phenomenon, such as the composer Armando Guevara Ochoa. Most of the protagonists are now deceased, but information provided by their descendants partly makes up for this, as in the case of the Pillco family. In sum, this book is a valuable contribution to the understanding of Peruvian cultural history in the past century, arising from an admirable methodological meeting between anthropology and musicology. Creating Our Own not only brings new ideas and knowledge, but the reader can enjoy the musical works studied here by purchasing recordings listed in the discography.

Was Killing the Queer Author Necessary to Liberate the Queer Text?: The Case of Andy Warhol's A: A Novel

In the decades since Roland Barthes' “The Death of the Author” (1968), Michel Foucault's “What Is an Author?” (1969), and Andy Warhol's novel A (1968), we have become comfortable with the idea that the author is separate from the text. In many ways, however, killing the author was an unnecessary act since critics inherently read their own ideas into texts. Within the span of less than two years, all three texts proposed the removal of the author from the text, all three by prominent gay men in academia and art. The act of removing the author represented a kind of closet protection, separating artist from art, author from text. This aricle examines the convergence of ideas of Barthes and Foucault and how they relate to Warhol's A. In these writers and texts, we see a sexuality eager to burst forth from the page, but one that is hesitant, worried that the sexual politics of the late 1960s are not so liberated as to freely accept homosexuality among the artistic and academic elite. This is the real tragedy in the death of the author, when the identity and spirit of the artist/writer is so denied by the audience that not only is the sexuality lost, but the artist as well.

Constructivism and Art Deco: the reaction of Elite art?

Constructivism and Art Deco: the reaction of Elite art?

Inventing Great Neck: Jewish Identity and the American Dream (review)

Inventing Great Neck: Jewish Identity and the American Dream, by Judith S. Goldstein. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. 205 pp. $24.95. In this popular history, Judith Goldstein traces the development of Great Neck, New York, through an intimate look at the personalities and problems that shaped this suburban enclave. She pays particular attention to the evolution of Jewish and non-Jewish relations, the limits of tolerance and liberalism, and the effects of Jewish migration on suburbanization. Goldstein begins her study in the 1920s, when Great Neck first gained attention on the national scene. Howevet, its renown stemmed not from its Jewish population, which then only numbered around two hundred families, but from its image as an affluent haven for New York City's businessmen and artistic elite, with such notables as Pulitzer's World editor Herbert Bayard Swope, Groucho Marx, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who memorialized the area in his famous novel, The Great Gatsby. With the exception of an old guat d Protestant elite, as labeled by Goldstein, who maintained their own small social network, the wealthy and notable Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants of Great Neck mingled socially with relative ease. This, according to Goldstein, set Great Neck apart from other suburbs, as it conducted a newsocial experiment, which tried to push aside the traditional barriers built on social separation (p. 22). Since most of the Jewish and non-Jewish residents of Great Neck had only recently moved into the area, few traditional social barriers for mixing stood in their way. Indeed, many of the guests frequenting parties such as those at the Swope residence knew one another from business ventures in New York City, only sixteen miles west, or through the introduction of a friend acquainted with those attending. Here, however, not much mention is made of the local Jewish and non-Jewish residents who would not have been issued an invitation to these upscale gatherings. Focus on the general population of the suburb appeared when Great Neck's reputation as a celebrity playground and tolerant environment towards minorities encouraged other Jews to settle in the area. Many Jews had attained a higher level of social mobility by the 1920s and 1930s, and this brought them to the hospitable suburban environment. They saw their chance to move to Great Neck and settle there as proof of their arrival into the middle class. While not all non-Jewish residents welcomed the influx of Jews into the neighborhood, the lack of formal residential restriction encouraged further growth. Proving the extent of their acculturation provided Jews the best answer for how to maintain positive relations with Great Neck's non-Jewish population, which still constituted the majority of the town's inhabitants. Those Jews who moved to Great Neck during this period successfully immersed themselves in the civic activities of the larger population while simultaneously creating new venues for Jewish communal life in a place where none previously existed. In 1930, at the beginning of the Depression, Temple Beth-El, a Reform congregation and the first synagogue in the area, opened its doors, displaying architectural details which blended perfectly with the tone of much of Great Neck's public architecture (p. 69). …

Tulle as Tool: Embracing the Conflict of the Ballerina as Powerhouse

The image and interpretation of the ballerina has shifted over time since she first took her place in the pantheon of romantic female performers in the early nineteenth century. For many, she is still romanticized, respected, and revered; in other circles, she has become suspect as a creature who may be obsessed, exploited, and retrogressive in light of the egalitarian strides women have made or are still trying to make. The female ballet dancer's basic contradiction—her ethereal exterior and her iron-willed interior—has not been sufficiently accounted for in either scheme, nor has it been woven into the kind of complex, contextualized analysis that includes practitioners who embody the form, audience members of various kinds, and the multiple, shifting locales and attitudes that surround them. As an elite art form, ballet has until recently relied on the more univocal discourse of bouquets and brickbats from critics and other specialists. In 1993, when dance anthropologist Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull called for a consideration of ballet's relationship of dance to life in ways that other cultural forms are investigated, few took up the call.

Thomas Moran's West: Chromolithography, High Art, and Popular Taste by Joni L. Kinsey

THOMASMORAN'SWEST: CHROMOLITHOGRAPHY, HIGHART, AND POPULAR TASTE byJoni L.Kinsey University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2006. Illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 271 pages. $45.00 cloth. Late in 1876,theyear ofPhiladelphia's Centen nial Exposition and also theBattle of theLittle Bighorn, L. Prang and Company of Boston published a deluxe portfolio offifteenchromo lithographsofThomas Moran's watercolors of the Yellowstone region.EntitledThe Yellowstone NationalPark, and the Mountain Regions of Por tions of Idaho, Nevada and Utah, it included an essay by Ferdinand Hayden, the explorer, scientist,and lobbyist fornational park status for Yellowstone. The publisher hoped to inter est awide audience of art lovers,scientists,fine book collectors,and all thosewho had a general curiosity about theAmerican West. Joni L. Kinsey, associate professor of arthistory at the University of Iowa, presents a fascinatingdis cussion of thegenesis, execution, publication, distribution, reception,and fateof theportfolio in thecontextofnineteenth-centuryAmerican values and economic conditions. Indeed, thisaccount isawash incontext.The author works hard to keep in focus the core subject ? fifteencolor lithographic facsimiles ofMoran's watercolors and nine additional Moran watercolors intended for the project but not published ? while also discussing the topographyof the Yellowstone area, the stateof itsexploration in the 1870s, the initial interest inand eventual disdain forchromolithography among artcritics,thereputation and ambitions ofLouis Prang (who sought high art status for chromos, as thecolor lithographswere called), the gender of those who bought original art and those who purchased reproductions (womenwere prone tobuy chromos forhome decoration, a factthatcontributed to evenhigh quality examples being scorned in elite art circles,according toKinsey), and the career of Thomas Moran, amajor landscape painter and illustratorof theAmerican West. Kinsey's challenge is to explore ever-widen ing circles ofmeaning and implication as the basis for understanding the significance of Prang's publication. Her project is to re-posi tion an artifactof the sortdeemed marginal in traditional arthistorical study so as tomake it central toher discourse. This upending of the canonical hierarchy ? inwhich oil paintings are paramount, watercolors secondary, and chromos definitely tertiary ? is a strategy much used by arthistorians in the twenty-first century and isone thatopens intriguingave nues of discussion, as Kinsey demonstrates. Still, theauthor asks a lotof readers tohelp keep things straight. In good art historical fashion, Kinsey compares and contrasts her primary subject (the setof chromolithographs) to allmanner of relatedworks byMoran, most importantlythe setofwatercolors ofwhich the chromos are copies. The watercolors in turn were based on field sketches by the artist as well as photographs byMoran's friend William Henry Jackson,and Kinsey brings these source materials into play as she assesses Moran's literal accuracy and Romantic re-visioning. Further,Moran executed versions of these same views in othermedia (wood engraving, etching) for illustrations inpublications such as Scribner's,and Kinsey frequently illustrates thosevariants, especiallywhen they may relate to the nine watercolors not included in the portfolio and now, except forone, unlocated. With somany examples under discussion, it would help to illustratetheappendix, "Moran's Paintings forLouis Prang," with a summary of all the images in the folio together with the likely parallels to theones intended forthefolio but not included. Seeing all the imagery inone place, byway of review, would make a sentence like thisone easier to assess: "Had DeviVs Den appeared in thePrang publication, it... would have offer[ed] an interesting contrast to the Reviews 507 sacred themes of TheMountain of theHoly Cross, the biblical allusions at Zion, and the rainbow inYellowstoneLake" (p. 178). The Yellowstone National Park set a new standard for chromolithographie reproduc tion, doing so at a timewhen chromos were being debased by the critics, who came to see them as garish, tasteless copies. Kinsey posits that this attitudewas an aspect of the incho ate agenda tomarginalize multiples in favor of unique originals ? a bias that, she argues somewhat tenuously, led to modernism's privi legingof purely original artby primarilymale artists.Although Prang had hoped that the portfolio would demonstrate once and forall thebeauty and artisticvalue of chromolitho graphs, the publication did not receivemuch criticalapplause in itsown day, though itisnow highly regarded.As illustratedinKinsey's book, thechromos are indeedverybeautiful ina clear, luminous, icy, magically colored way. Despite theirdocumentary nature and intent,theyare dream-like, almost surreal images for Ameri canswho were imagining terrain that...