This book celebrates the work and career of the internationally renowned art historian, David Bindman, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, and is above all a tribute to him from his former students and colleagues.
Hogarth was one of the great 18th-century painters, a marvellous colourist and innovator at all levels of artistic expression. Art historian David Bindman surveys the works of this artist whose wry humour and sharp wit were reflected in his prolific paintings and prints including The Rakes Progress and Marriage-A-la-Mode. Hogarth was also a master of pictorial satire, highlighting the moral and political hypocrisies of the day with delightful detail and comedy themes that resonate deeply with our times. The artist was a keen observer of class and society; this new edition has been specially updated to include a discussion of Hogarths many representations of Black people in 18th-century Britain, a subject that has long been overlooked. Now revised with additional material and illustrated in colour throughout, this is a vivid and incisive study of the man and his art.
A timely and revealing look at the intertwined histories of science, art, and racism. ‘Race Is Everything’ explores the spurious but influential ideas of so-called racial science in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, and how art was affected by it. David Bindman looks at race in general, but with particular concentration on attitudes toward and representations of people of African and Jewish descent. He argues that behind all racial ideas of the period lies the belief that outward appearance—and especially skull shape, as studied in the pseudoscience of phrenology—can be correlated with inner character and intelligence, and that these could be used to create a seemingly scientific hierarchy of races. The book considers many aspects of these beliefs, including the skull as a racial marker; ancient Egypt as a precedent for Southern slavery; Darwin, race, and aesthetics; the purported “Mediterranean race”; the visual aspects of eugenics; and the racial politics of Emil Nolde.
Ape to Apollo is the first book to follow the development in the eighteenth century of the idea of race as it shaped and was shaped by the idea of aesthetics. Twelve full-color illustrations and sixty-five black-and-white illustrations from publications and artists of the day allow the reader to see eighteenth-century concepts of race translated into images. Human "varieties" are marked in such illustrations by exaggerated differences, with emphases on variations from the European ideal and on the characteristics that allegedly divided the races. In surveying the idea of human variety before "race" was introduced by Linneaus as a scientific category, David Bindman considers the work of many German and British thinkers, including J. F. Blumenbach, Georg and Johann Reinhold Forster, and Immanuel Kant, as well as Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon and Pieter Camper. Bindman believes that such representations, and the theories that supported them, helped give rise to the racism of the modern era. He writes, "It may be objected that some features of modern racism predate the Enlightenment, and already existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; certainly there was deep prejudice, but that, I would argue, is not the same as racism, which must have as a foundation a theory of race to justify the exercise of prejudice.
The reputation of William Hogarth (1697-1764) rests largely on his pictorial stories, a series of engravings that he called "modern Moral Subjects," the most famous being the Harlot's and the Rake's Progress. In this catalog, David Bindman works backward from Hogarth's reputation today--where he is seen by some as a conservative populist and by others as a political radical--and examines his impact on various artists over the past three centuries. Bindman also sets Hogarth's prints firmly in their historical context, discussing the artist's public and the different influences on his work, from Roman satire to the politics of the day. The result is an engaging and insightful portrayal not only of William Hogarth, but also of the middle years of the eighteenth century. Art lovers will enjoy this book, but so too will anyone with an interest in the literature and history of the mid-eighteenth century. The reputation of William Hogarth (1697-1764) rests largely on his pictorial stories, a series of engravings that he called "modern Moral Subjects," the most famous being the Harlot's and the Rake's Progress. In this catalog, David Bindman works backward from Hogarth's reputation today--where he is seen by some as a conservative populist and by others as a political radical--and examines his impact on various artists over the past three centuries. Bindman also sets Hogarth's prints firmly in their historical context, discussing the artist's public and the different influences on his work, from Roman satire to the politics of the day. The result is an engaging and insightful portrayal not only of William Hogarth, but also of the middle years of the eighteenth century. Art lovers will enjoy this book, but so too will anyone with an interest in the literature and history of the mid-eighteenth century.
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