A radical departure from Professor Albert Boime’s well-known social art history, The Birth of Abstract Romanticism examines the paintings of Kamran Khavarani. In this beautiful volume, Boime delves into the beauty, passion and intensity of Khavarani’s work, expressed in layered themes of landscapes, cosmologies, botanical micro worlds, and ecstatic visions. Lavished with over 100 images, this book offers a unique view of both an artist and a celebrated art historian.

A radical departure from Professor Albert Boime's well-known social art history, The Birth of Abstract Romanticism examines the paintings of Kamran Khavarani. In this beautiful volume, Boime delves into the beauty, passion and intensity of Khavarani's work, expressed in layered themes of landscapes, cosmologies, botanical micro worlds, and ecstatic visions. Lavished with over 100 images, this book offers a unique view of both an artist and a celebrated art historian.

In this beautifully written and brilliantly reasoned book, Ayn Rand throws a new light on the nature of art and its purpose in human life. Once again Miss Rand eloquently demonstrates her refusal to let popular catchwords and conventional ideas stand between her and the truth as she has discovered it. The Romantic Manifesto takes its place beside The Fountainhead as one of the most important achievements of our time.

Already in the century before photography's emergence as a mass medium, a diverse popular visual culture had risen to challenge the British literary establishment. The bourgeois fashion for new visual media - from prints and illustrated books to theatrical spectacles and panoramas - rejected high. Romantic concepts of original genius and the sublime in favor of mass-produced images and the thrill of realistic effects. In response, the literary elite declared the new visual media an offense to Romantic idealism. 'Simulations of nature,' Coleridge declared, are 'loathsome' and 'disgusting.' The Shock of the Real offers a tour of Romantic visual culture, from the West End stage to the tourist-filled Scottish Highlands, from the panoramas of Leicester Square to the photography studios of Second Empire Paris. But in presenting the relation between word and image in the late Georgian age as a form of culture war, the author also proposes an alternative account of Romantic aesthetic ideology - as a reaction not against the rationalism of the Enlightenment but against the visual media age being born.

At Delacroix' studio sale, held six months after his death in 1864, crowds and critics were astonished at both the abundance and the multi-disciplinary nature of the work on display, the life's vision of a man praised by Baudelaire for being the last great artist of the Renaissance period and the first of the Modern. But Delacroix himself was well aware of the position he wanted to occupy. Taking his cue from Rubens in both lifestyle and visual inventiveness, he took the order of classical composition and allied it to a universally appreciated symbolic and allegorical intent, producing from that marriage works of unmatched integrity and sensuality. From the spectacular Salon reception in 1824 to a work such as the major Scenes from the Chios Massacre (when the term Romantique was first applied to his style) through to the liberating and controversial carnality of The Agony in the Garden, Delacroix' genius in graphic design, in the liberation and reinvention of colour, and in the portrayal of bodies was never in doubt. His numerous sketchbooks attest to a personality committed to the most truthful results, in both his Goyaesque fantasias of horror, cruelty and sacrifice and in his huge historical canvases. Excessive, monumental, Byronic even, this Victor Hugo of the art world has proved profoundly influential, his technique studied by movements as diverse as Impressionism, Expressionism and the Abstract painters of mid-century. Leaving the self-indulgence of the Romantics far behind, the nobility of Delacroix' spirit will continue to speak to any and every age.

The Romantic period coincided with revolutionary transformations of traditional political and human rights discourses, as well as witnessing rapid advances in technology and a primitivist return to nature. As a broad global movement, Romanticism strongly impacted on the literature and arts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in ways that are still being debated and negotiated today. Examining the poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama, and the arts of the period, this book considers: Important propositions and landmark ideas in the Romantic period; Key debates and critical approaches to Romantic studies; New and revisionary approaches to Romantic literature and art; The ways in which Romantic writing interacts with broader trends in history, politics, and aesthetics; European and Global Romanticism; The legacies of Romanticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Containing useful, reader-friendly features such as explanatory case studies, chapter summaries, and suggestions for further reading, this clear and engaging book is an invaluable resource for anyone who intends to study and research the complexity and diversity of the Romantic period, as well as the historical conditions which produced it.