One of Jacques-Louis David’s most ambitious and darkly enigmatic paintings, Leonidas at the Pass of Thermopylae, hangs today in the Louvre, largely ignored. Focusing on this painting, Chains embarks on a discourse about the perception of the body, sexuality, and subjectivity in early nineteenth-century European art.
In addition to David, Chains explores the sculptural oeuvre of David’s contemporary and rival, Italian sculptor Antonio Canova. Padiyar argues that, like David’s postrevolutionary work, Canova’s innovative sculptures embodied a new, distinctively modern type of subjectivity. The book aims to take a fresh view of the status of the male body in the work of these two late neoclassical artists by linking them in novel, sometimes unexpected ways with key figures of the late Enlightenment. In postrevolutionary Europe, philosophical and literary figures such as Immanuel Kant and the Marquis de Sade pushed the language of neoclassicism to its limits. Chains argues that such innovations produced a new, distinctively sexed, politicized, and aestheticized heroic male body that emerged as an incidental aftereffect of the French Revolution.

Chains: David, Canova, and the Fall of the Public Hero in Postrevolutionary France

Arts & Photography

Padiyar, Satish

History & Criticism

Penn State University Press

At the time of his death in 1806, the rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard had not painted for two decades. Following a period of huge public success, the painter's reputation fell. Fragonard: Painting Out of Time takes this prolonged artistic silence as a point of departure to investigate the maverick personality of Fragonard within the lively society of eighteenth-century France. Personally secretive, Fragonard nevertheless created revealing images that undermined a normal sense of space and time. Satish Padiyar investigates the life and work of the last of the libertine painters of the ancien regime, a contemporary of Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and presents dramatic new perspectives on works such as The Progress of Love, painted for Madame du Barry, the infamous The Bolt, and the ever-popular The Swing.

Fragonard: Painting out of Time

Reaktion Books

Leon Golub

Leon Golub (1922-2004) was one of postwar America's most politically engaged artists. His frieze-like figurations of human cruelty and the crimes of warfare kept political painting alive throughout the countless changings of the avant garde of the 1960s and 70s, and his vocal ethical stance and intransigent emphasis on content remains refreshing today. Golub addressed events as they unfurled, from Vietnam to South Africa to Iraq and Afghanistan, confronting chilling acts of brutality head-on, in a weathered, scratchy style synthesized from sources as various as Etruscan and Roman art, French history painting, pornography and sports photographs. This attractively designed full Golub overview accompanies a 2011 retrospective exhibition at the Reina Sofía. Including 150 color plates, it surveys paintings from the 1950s to the present, giving Golub's heroic life work its full due.

Bird, Jon

Isak, Jo Anna

GUILBAUT, Serge

Turner

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Books by Padiyar, Satish