College Art Association Monograph – serie

This volume of the College Art Association Monograph series examines the Romanesque wood doors of Auvergne.

Rainbow Like an Emerald is the most comprehensive study of Lorraine stained glass as a regional style developed in conjunction with the typical Gothic architecture of the province.Situated between France and Germany, medieval Lorraine increasingly looked to France for it cultural standards. While French in inspiration, however, its Gothic architecture and stained glass quickly developed strong regional and distinctive characteristics. This architecture has only in the last decade been studied, and Lillich's work is the first serious analysis of the windows.Loraine has always been known as a glass-making center, and in the Gothic era it seems to have produced a range of handsome greens. However, the turbulent history of the region has left little glass from the period, and today no glass program survives in it entirety, while some, such as Metz, are now lost beyond retrieval. This book presents all the Gothic stained glass that remains in Lorraine: Toul Cathedral, Saint-Gengoult in Toul, the rural parish of Ménillot (just outside of Toul), Saint-Dié in the Vosges, the pilgrimage church of Avioth on the Belgian border, and the various groups now installed in Metz Cathedral, with appendixes dealing with fragments surviving at Sainte-Ségolène in Metz, Ecrouves near Toul, and the Cistercian abbey of La Chalade.Though many patches of the puzzle remain—and will remain—blank, some of the outlines are strong and some of the precious detail still commands the power to astonish and delight us.

Edgar Degas's painting entitled A Cotton Office in New Orleans is one of the most significant images of nineteenth-century capitalism, in part because it was the first painting by an Impressionist to be purchased by a museum. Drawing upon archival materials, Marilyn R. Brown explores the accumulated social meanings of the work in light of shifting audiences and changing market conditions and assesses the artist's complicated relationship to the business of art.Despite the financial failure of the actual cotton firm he represented, Degas carefully constructed his picture with a particular buyer—a British textile manufacturer—in mind. However, world events, including an international stock market crash and declines in the market for cotton and art, destroyed his hopes for this sale. It was under these circumstances that the canvas was exhibited in the second Impressionist show in Paris in 1876. While it received a more positive response than other works exhibited, its success was with the conservative audience. After considerable difficulty, Degas finally succeeded in selling the painting in 1878 to the newly founded museum in the city of Pau. The painting was probably regarded as an appropriate homage to the old textile manufacturing family who funded its purchase. It also appealed to "progressive" provincial and more cosmopolitan audiences in Pau. The picture's scattered form and atomized figures—in which some interpreters today read evidence of the artist's own ambivalence about capitalism—seemingly contributed to its "innovative" cachet in Pau. But the private and public meanings of the painting had shifted, in discontinuous fashion, between its production and consumption. Under the circumstances, Degas's unfixed and even mixed messages about business became, among other things, his most successful (if unwitting) marketing strategy. The official recognition Degas received in Pau in 1878 heralded the gradual upswing of his own financial status during the 1880s, but his attitudes towards success remained mixed.