Book Description

In Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century France, Julie Anne Plax engages in an interdisciplinary examination of several categories of Watteau's paintings--theatrical, military, fetes, and the art dealer. Arguing that Watteau consistently applied coherent strategies of representation aimed at subverting high art, she shows how his paintings toyed ironically with conventions and genres and confounded traditional categories. Plax connects these strategies to broader cultural themes and political issues that Watteau's art addressed throughout his career, thereby revealing the substantial unity of his oeuvre. ... Read more

Book Description

Poetry. From one direction Ed Barrett's PRACTICAL LULLABIES FOR JOE, from the other Joseph Torra's THE LETTERS TO ED, with gorgeous collages by Gian Lombardo, these poems literally collide on the page, encounter each other as the authors encounter each other's work and ideas in the poems themselves. Torra's LETTERS is a numbered series of prose poems that infuse daily life with a quiet and questioning desire to know. "What were the four virtues of the true woman? What is duality of the text? A secured loan, title to property and large house close to the river reconcile community, family, emotional crisis and writing's role. Why do men do what they do outside the normal spleen?" Barrett's PRACTICAL LULLABIES range from lyrical to cynical, from verse to prose, bemused, musing, exploratory. "Love/and an outdoor movie in daytime/would be different depending on how powerful/the projector is: either you could only/hear the sound without a picture,/a funny kind of unrelated story booming out,/surrounding the bushes,/or you could see grayish clay or/pastel erasures taking the form ideas have/before we speak them" (from "The Same Sad Song They Whistle in the Future"). ... Read more