Chinese Art and Culture - Softcover

Vinograd, Richard Ellis; Thorp, Robert L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0130889695 ISBN 13: 9780130889690

Publisher: Pearson College Div, 2001

Synopsis

This book takes a look at Chinese art within a variety of contexts—archeological, cultural, historical, social, and ritual/religious. Organized both chronologically and thematically, it covers a full historical span and includes a wide range of media settings for art—from elite to popular. An emphasis on the dynamic processes that effect the history of Chinese art: social, economic, political competition, urbanization, markets and tastes, and quests for cultural authority, allows specific works of art to be discussed in extensive detail, while setting them within larger explanatory stories. A guide to Chinese art for individuals interested in one of the most abundantly artistic cultures in the history of the world.

About this title

About the Author:

ROBERT L. THORP, professor of art history and archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis, specializes in the art and archaeology of early China.

RICHARD ELLIS VINOGRAD chairs the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. An expert on later Chinese painting, he is the recipient of numerous academic honors. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

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PREFACE

Chinese Art & Culture is a refreshingly clear look at the oldest and most productive continuous artistic tradition on earth. From 7,000-year-old Neolithic pot-making and jade-carving cultures to contemporary artists' installation, video, and performance pieces, this engrossing survey embraces the richness and complexity of Chinese art and supports its teaching in the college classroom.

In all the right ways, this is a different kind of book on Chinese art. Departing from the predictable narration of dynasties and styles, author-scholars Robert L. Thorp and Richard Ellis Vinograd present art as a cultural expression of societal expectations, politics, material culture, belief systems, and wider fields of culture. They emphasize works of ancient art and architecture found in their original archaeological settings. Where that is not feasible, they reconstruct interconnections among individual pieces and with their contexts of production. To the broad cultural picture, they add considerations of the material of which an object is made and the distinctive techniques used to make it. Thus an early Ming vase is shown as the product of a new advance in firing technology that enabled control of copper red glazes and as a reflection—in its shape—of the lingering taste of the Early Ming emperors for things Tibetan.

Chinese art is one of the most active and mutable areas of cultural scholarship today. Thorp and Vinograd are leaders in a generation of scholars who are re-examining long-held conceptions about Chinese art—for example, the notion that Chinese art has essential and permanent characteristics and the idea that Chinese art and culture were untouched by outside influences. just as important, the authors give popular, religious, and craft arts their just due. Richly illustrated-some of the objects have almost never been pictured before-and enhanced with special-topic sidebars, this long-awaited book answers the needs of students and teachers of Chinese art for a work that is current in approach and scholarship and is at the same time reader-friendly.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pearson College Div
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0130889695
• ISBN 13: 9780130889690
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352