Ocean Flowers

by Armstrong, Carol; De Zegher, Catherine

• ISBN13: 9780691119489
• ISBN10: 0691119481
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-07-01
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

A work of stunning beauty, Ocean Flowers explores a little-known moment of exhilarating artistic experimentation. The book focuses on natural-history imagery in the mid-nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on botanical drawings and photograms by the artist Anna Atkins (1799-1871) and her Victorian contemporaries.Besides providing a feast for the eyes, the book illuminates intriguing shifts in the way the natural world was represented. In the mid 1800s, the advent of photography provided new possibilities, generating as much creative fervor as digital media have in recent years. In addition to hand-made drawings, hand-colored prints, nature prints (direct imprints from plants), and natural illustrations (real specimens mounted on the page), artists began making photogenic drawings (as William Henry Fox Talbot first dubbed his early photographs) to record botanical specimens. A kind of "drawing with light," this new art form complemented, rather than superceded, the other forms of graphic media. Far from rendering conventional approaches obsolete, it encouraged experimentation with all kinds of media.Ocean Flowers demonstrates how this concept of "fluidity" in crossing the traditional borders between media is paralleled in the contemporary art world. Replete with 200 color illustrations, the book accompanies an exhibition of the same name organized by the Drawing Center in New York City in association with the Yale Center for British Art. More than just an exhibition catalog, it includes essays by the coeditors, as well as by the artist Craigie Horsfield and scholars Edward Eigen, Elaine Scarry, and Kathryn Tuma.Exhibition ScheduleThe Drawing CenterNew York, New York March 25-May 22, 2004The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British ArtYale University, New Haven, Connecticut June 12-August 8, 2004

Table of Contents

Plates	p. 7
Ocean Flowers and Their Drawings	p. 69
Introduction Acknowledgments	p. 87
Fron Natural Illustrations and Nature Prints to Manual and Photogentic Drawings and Other Botanographs
World and Word	p. 181
The Victorian ""Book of Nature""	p. 215
Modeling, Mimesis, and the Community of Forms
Imaging Flowers	p. 243
Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium)
On Purple and the Genesis of Photography	p. 271
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.