Innovative study of animal art histories in modern art.
Animal Modernities challenges the traditional human-centered focus of art history and explores how modern art, visual culture, and modernity itself emerge from relationships between humans and animals. The essays in this volume reveal histories of exploitation and domination, as well as confusion and ambivalence, and occasional moments when affinities between humans and animals have been embraced, and animal agency asserted and acknowledged. The authors collectively point to the importance of thinking about animal–human relations for addressing today’s ecological challenges.
This book will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open, a program developed in partnership between JSTOR, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), University of Michigan Press, and The University of North Carolina Press to bring about equitable access and impact for the entire scholarly community, including authors, researchers, libraries, and university presses around the world. Learn more at https://about.jstor.org/path-to-open/
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Daniel Harkett and Katie Hornstein
- Rethinking the Animal in Art History: Charles Darwin, Karl Woermann, and the Bowerbird
Nina Amstutz - Photography Needs Animals: Materials, Processes, and the Colonial Supply Chains of Gelatine Dry Plates
Rosalind Hayes - Shooting Elephants and the Performance of Imperial Power
Niharika Dinkar - A Tale of Two Serpents
Laur a Nüffer - Mourning across Species: Ivory Miniatures and Elephant Death
Katherine Fein - War Horses, Commemoration, and Mutilation:
Copenhagen (1808–1836) and Marengo (ca. 1793–1831) Katie Hornstein - To Fool a Fish: Exploring Interspecies Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Fly-Fishing
Emily Gephart - Feline Creativity on the Eve of Modernity
Amy Freund and Michael Yonan - The Bird that Cuts the Airy Way: William Blake’s Avian Modernity
Alysia Garrison - Bovine Ubiquity
Maura Coughlin - Against the Visual: Seals, Indigenous-Settler Relations, and the Material Culture of Sealing since 1697
Catherine Girard - Mr. Crowley’s Signature: Race, Resistance, and the Queerness of American Animal Portraiture
Annie Ronan - Memory and Materiality: Commemorating Canine Companions in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Sean Weiss - Herd Mentality: Animal Relationality and QueerKinships in the Life and Work of Anton Braith
Stephanie Triplett
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index
“The volume is a valuable addition to the growing literature on artistic representations of human-animal relations, enriching scholarly discussions on both historical and contemporary interactions with animals and nature.” - Roni Grén, University of Turku
"Animal Modernities represents a much-needed addition and expansion to the history of art as well as to animal studies. The edited volume is a real eye-opener to how fundamental animals were for modern art. The authors challenge human exceptionalism by focusing on animals as singular personalities and on their agency. They offer either an innovative reading of old material, present material that is new to art historical discourse or develop innovative insights including an animal viewpoint. By doing so, they dismantle the structural violence in artefacts as well as art historical theories." - Jessical Ullrich, University of Fine Arts Münster
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