Mist and fog engender fascination and mystery, enticing with their wispy veils and vapourous moods, and they are the stuff of dreams and visions. 'The mists of time' and 'in a fog' are common expressions that substantiate the long association of mist and fog with the passage of time, the vagaries of memory and feelings of uncertainty. Mist and fog obscure, conceal and when they dissipate, reveal. Vapourous atmosphere in art and life masks evil and can elicit presentiments of death. It also has been used in art to convey the splendours of the spiritual world and the terrors of the supernatural. The metaphorical meanings that have accrued to mist and fog, encouraged by their indeterminate and transitory nature, and the emotions to which they give rise, are variously evident in the work of major artists and their contemporaries. This book focusses on mist and fog from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries in the places they most proliferated. Examples of literature that employ mist and fog as metaphor and in allegory from antiquity to Joseph Conrad serve to amplify many of the paintings discussed.

About the Author
Evan R. Firestone is Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Georgia, USA.
Previous title: Animism and Shamanism in Twentieth-Century Art: Kandinsky, Ernst, Pollock and Beuys.


Book Information
ISBN 9781848225732
Author Evan R. Firestone
Format Hardback
Page Count 176
Imprint Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd
Publisher Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd
Dimensions(mm) 250mm * 190mm * 20mm