Olin Library: Art & Art History: New Books 2019/07

As the site of royal coronations, Reims cathedral was a monument to French national history and identity. But after German troops bombed the cathedral during World War I, it took on new meaning. The French reimagined it as a martyr of civilization, as the rupture between the warring states. Despite a history of mutual respect, the bombing of the cathedral caused all social, scientific, artistic, and cultural ties between Germany and France to be severed for decades. The resulting battle of words and images stressed the differences between German Kultur and French civilisation. Artists and intelligentsia caricatured this entrenched cultural dichotomy, influencing portrayals of the two nations in the international press.   This book explores the structure's breadth of meaning in symbolic, art historical, and historical arenas, including competing claims over the origins of Gothic art and architecture as national style and issues of monument preservation and restoration. It highlights how vulnerable art is during war, and how the destruction of nation-al monuments can set the tone for international conflict--once again a timely and pressing issue. Thomas W. Gaehtgens articulates how these nations began to mend their relationship in the decades after World War II, starting with the courageous vision of Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, and how the cathedral of Reims was eventually transformed into a site of reconciliation and European unification.  

Winner, Arthur P. Whitaker Prize, Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies, 2019 In the 1930s, the artistic and cultural patronage of celebrated Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas transformed a small Michoacán city, Pátzcuaro, into a popular center for national tourism. Cárdenas commissioned public monuments and archeological excavations; supported new schools, libraries, and a public theater; developed tourism sites and infrastructure, including the Museo de Artes e Industrias Populares; and hired artists to paint murals celebrating regional history, traditions, and culture. The creation of Pátzcuaro was formative for Mexico; not only did it provide an early model for regional economic and cultural development, but it also helped establish some of Mexico's most enduring national myths, rituals, and institutions. In Creating Pátzcuaro, Creating Mexico, Jennifer Jolly argues that Pátzcuaro became a microcosm of cultural power during the 1930s and that we find the foundations of modern Mexico in its creation. Her extensive historical and archival research reveals how Cárdenas and the artists and intellectuals who worked with him used cultural patronage as a guise for radical modernization in the region. Jolly demonstrates that the Pátzcuaro project helped define a new modern body politic for Mexico, in which the population was asked to emulate Cárdenas by touring the country and seeing and embracing its land, history, and people. Ultimately, by offering Mexicans a means to identify and engage with power and privilege, the creation of Pátzcuaro placed art and tourism at the center of Mexico's postrevolutionary nation building project.

Beautifully illustrated with richly detailed photographs, this volume traces the living heritage of locally made pottery in the English-speaking Caribbean. Patricia Fay combines her own expertise in making ceramics with two decades of interviews, visits, and participant-observation in the region, providing a perspective that is technically informed and anthropologically rigorous. Through the analysis of ceramic methods, Fay reveals that the traditional skills of local potters in the Caribbean are inherited from diverse points of origin in Africa, Europe, India, and the Americas. At the heart of the book is an in-depth discussion of the women potters of Choiseul, Saint Lucia, whose self-sufficient Creole lifestyle emerged in the nineteenth century following the emancipation of plantation slaves. Using methods inherited from Africa, today's potters adapt heritage practice for new contexts. In Nevis, Antigua, and Jamaica, related pottery traditions reveal skill sets derived from multiple West and Central African influences, and in the case of Jamaica, launched ceramics as a contemporary art form. In Barbados, colonial wheel and kiln technologies imported from England are evident in the many productive clay studios on the island. In Trinidad, Hindu ritual vessels are a key feature of a ceramic tradition that arrived with indentured labor from India, and in Guyana potters in both village and urban settings preserve indigenous Amerindian culture. Fay emphasizes the integral role relationships between mothers and daughters play in the transmission of skills from generation to generation. Since most pottery produced is intended for domestic use as cooking pots, serving vessels, and for water storage, women have been key to sustaining these traditions. But Fay's work also shows that these pots have value beyond their everyday usefulness. In the process of forming and firing, the diverse cultural heritage of the Caribbean becomes manifest, exemplifying the continuing encounter between old and new, local and global, and traditional and contemporary. A volume in the series Latin American and Caribbean Arts and Culture, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

How museums' visual culture contributes to knowledge accumulation   Sarita See argues that collections of stolen artifacts form the foundation of American knowledge production. Nowhere can we appreciate more easily the triple forces of knowledge accumulation--capitalist, colonial, and racial--than in the imperial museum, where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved. The Filipino Primitive takes Karl Marx's concept of "primitive accumulation," usually conceived of as an economic process for the acquisition of land and the extraction of labor, and argues that we also must understand it as a project of knowledge accumulation.   Taking us through the Philippine collections at the University of Michigan Natural History Museum and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, also in Michigan, See reveals these exhibits as both allegory and real case of the primitive accumulation that subtends imperial American knowledge, just as the extraction of Filipino labor contributes to American capitalist colonialism. With this understanding of the Filipino foundations of the American drive toward power and knowledge, we can appreciate the value of Filipino American cultural producers like Carlos Bulosan, Stephanie Syjuco, and Ma-Yi Theater Company who have created incisive parodies of this accumulative epistemology, even as they articulate powerful alternative, anti-accumulative social ecologies.

The complex political and cultural relationship between the German state and the Ottoman Empire is explored through the lens of the Ottoman Railway network, its architecture, and material culture With lines extending from Bosnia to Baghdad to Medina, the Ottoman Railway Network (1868-1919) was the pride of the empire and its ultimate emblem of modernization--yet it was largely designed and bankrolled by German corporations. This exemplifies a uniquely ambiguous colonial condition in which the interests of Germany and the Ottoman Empire were in constant flux. German capitalists and cultural figures sought influence in the Near East, including access to archaeological sites such as Tell Halaf and Mshatta. At the same time, Ottoman leaders and laborers urgently pursued imperial consolidation. Germany and the Ottoman Railways explores the impact of these political agendas as well as the railways' impact on the built environment. Relying on a trove of previously unpublished archival materials, including maps, plans, watercolors, and photographs, author Peter H. Christensen also reveals the significance of this major infrastructure project for the budding disciplines of geography, topography, art history, and archaeology.

Michael Auping, one of America's foremost curators of contemporary art, explores process and technique through conversations he has had over the past four decades with the most significant artists during his career. At the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Michael Auping helped transform the museum into an internationally acclaimed institution. This book collects nearly eighty conversations with more than forty of the artists he worked with, including Georg Baselitz, Louise Bourgeois, Ellsworth Kelly, Anselm Kiefer, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, Kara Walker, and Lawrence Weiner. In his interviews - divided into thematic chapters such as "Dimensions of Drawing," "The Studio," "Figures of Speech," and "Light and Space" - Auping's probing and eloquent curiosity elicits illuminating and fascinating insights from his subjects and touches on every aspect of the artistic process, allowing many of the artists to reveal interests and influences not exposed in other contexts. AUTHOR: Michael Auping served as Chief Curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, in Texas, from 1993 to 2017.

Images can be studied in many ways - as symbols, displays of artistic genius, adjuncts to texts, or naturally occurring phenomena like reflections and dreams. Each of these approaches is justified by the nature of the image in question as well as the way viewers engage with it. But images areoften something more when they perform in ways that exhibit a capacity to act independent of human will. Images come alive - they move us to action, calm us, reveal the power of the divine, change the world around us. In these instances, we need an alternative model for exploring what is at work,one that recognizes the presence of images as objects that act on us. Building on his previous innovative work in visual and religious studies, David Morgan creates a new framework for understanding how the human mind can be enchanted by images in Images at Work. In carefully crafted arguments, Morgan proposes that images are special kinds of objects, fashioned andrecognized by human beings for their capacity to engage us. From there, he demonstrates that enchantment, as described, is not a violation of cosmic order, but a very natural way that the mind animates the world around it. His groundbreaking study outlines the deeply embodied process by which humanscreate culture by endowing places, things, and images with power and agency. These various agents - human and non-human, material, geographic, and spiritual - become nodes in the web of relationships, thus giving meaning to images and to human life. Marrying network theory with cutting-edge work invisual studies, and connecting the visual and bodily technologies employed by the ancient Greeks and Romans to secular icons like Che Guevara, Abraham Lincoln, and Mao, Images at Work will be transformative for those curious about why images seem to have a power of us in ways we can't alwaysdescribe.

The Art of Resistance surveys the lives of seven painters?Ding Cong (1916?2009), Feng Zikai (1898?1975), Li Keran (1907?89), Li Kuchan (1898?1983), Huang Yongyu (b. 1924), Pan Tianshou (1897?1971), and Shi Lu (1919?82)?during China's Cultural Revolution (1966?1976), a time when they were considered counterrevolutionary and were forbidden to paint. Drawing on interviews with the artists and their families and on materials collected during her visits to China, Shelley Drake Hawks examines their painting styles, political outlooks, and life experiences. These fiercely independent artists took advantage of moments of low surveillance to secretly ?paint by candlelight.' In doing so, they created symbolically charged art that is open to multiple interpretations. The wit, courage, and compassion of these painters will inspire respect for the deep emotional and spiritual resonance of Chinese art. For more information: http://arthistorypi.org/books/art-of-resistance

From 1921 until 1948, Paul J. Sachs (1878-1965) offered a yearlong program in art museum training, "Museum Work and Museum Problems," through Harvard University's Fine Arts Department. Known simply as the Museum Course, the program was responsible for shaping a professional field--museum curatorship and management--that, in turn, defined the organizational structure and values of an institution through which the American public came to know art. Conceived at a time of great museum expansion and public interest in the United States, the Museum Course debated curatorial priorities and put theory into practice through the placement of graduates in museums big and small across the land. In this book, authors Sally Anne Duncan and Andrew McClellan examine the role that Sachs and his program played in shaping the character of art museums in the United States in the formative decades of the twentieth century.   The Art of Curating is essential reading for museum studies scholars, curators, and historians.  

In 1857, George A. Lucas, a young Baltimorean who was fluent in French and enamored of French art, arrived in Paris. There, he established an extensive personal network of celebrated artists and art dealers, becoming the quintessential French connection for American collectors. The most remarkable thing about Lucas was not the art that he acquired for his clients (who included William and Henry Walters, the founders of the Walters Art Museum, and John Taylor Johnston, the founding president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) but the massive collection of 18,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and etchings, as well as 1,500 books, journals, and other sources about French artists, that he acquired for himself. Paintings by Cabanel, Corot, and Daubigny, prints by Whistler, Manet, and Cassatt, and portfolios of information about hundreds of French artists filled his apartment and spilled into the adjacent flat of his mistress. Based primarily on Lucas's notes and diaries, as well as thousands of other archival documents, Stanley Mazaroff's A Paris Life, A Baltimore Treasure tells the fascinating story of how Lucas brought together the most celebrated French artists with the most prominent and wealthy American collectors of the time. It also details how, nearing the end of his life, Lucas struggled to find a future home for his collection, eventually giving it to Baltimore's Maryland Institute. Without the means to care for the collection, the Institute loaned it to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where most of the art was placed in storage and disappeared from public view. But in 1990, when the Institute proposed to auction or otherwise sell the collection, it rose from obscurity, reached new glory as an irreplaceable cultural treasure, and became the subject of an epic battle fought in and out of court that captivated public attention and enflamed the passions of art lovers and museum officials across the nation. A Paris Life, A Baltimore Treasure is a richly illustrated portrayal of Lucas's fascinating life as an agent, connoisseur, and collector of French mid-nineteenth-century art. And, as revealed in the book, following Lucas's death, his enormous collection continued to have a vibrant life of its own, presenting new challenges to museum officials in studying, conserving, displaying, and ultimately saving the collection as an important and intrinsic part of the culture of our time.

Exploring the significance of metaphor in modern art "Where do the roots of art lie?"asked Der Sturm founder Herwarth Walden. "In the people? Behind the mountains? Behind the planets. He who has eyes to hear, feels."Walden's Der Sturm--the journal, gallery, performance venue, press, theater, bookstore, and art school in Berlin (1910-1932)--has never before been the subject of a book-length study in English. Four Metaphors of Modernism positions Der Sturm at the center of the avant-garde and as an integral part of Euro-American modern art, theory, and practice.Jenny Anger traces Walden's aesthetic and intellectual roots to Franz Liszt and Friedrich Nietzsche--forebears who led him to embrace a literal and figurative mixing of the arts. She then places Der Sturm in conversation with New York's Société Anonyme (1920-1950), an American avant-garde group modeled on Der Sturm and founded by Katherine Sophie Dreier, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray. Working against the tendency to examine artworks and artist groups in isolation, Anger underscores the significance of both organizations to the development and circulation of international modernism. Focusing on the recurring metaphors of piano, glass, water, and home, Four Metaphors of Modernism interweaves a historical analysis of these two prominent organizations with an aesthetic analysis of the metaphors that shaped their practices, reconceiving modernism itself. Presented here is a modernism that is embodied, gendered, multisensory, and deeply committed to metaphor and a restoration of abstraction's connection with the real.

This book presents an audacious account of the ways in which the arts in the Americas were modernized during the first half of the 20th century. Rather than viewing modernization as a steady progression from one "ism" to another, Edward Sullivan adopts a comparative approach, drawing his examples from North America, the Caribbean, Central, and South America. By considering the Americas in this hemispheric sense he is able to tease out many stories of art and focus on the ways in which artists from different regions not only adapted and experimented with visual expression, but also absorbed trans-national as well as international influences. He shows how this rich diversity is most evident in the various forms of abstract art that emerged throughout the Americas and which in turn had an impact on art throughout the world.

An unprecedented and comprehensive survey of Latin American artists in interwar Paris Paris was the artistic capital of the world in the 1920s and '30s, providing a home and community for the French and international avant-garde, whose experiments laid the groundwork for artistic production throughout the rest of the century. Latin American artists contributed to and reinterpreted nearly every major modernist movement that took place in the creative center of Paris between World War I and World War II, including Cubism (Diego Rivera), Surrealism (Antonio Berni and Roberto Matta), and Constructivism (Joaquín Torres-García). Yet their participation in the Paris art scene has remained largely overlooked until now. This vibrant book examines their collective role, surveying the work of both household names and an extraordinary array of lesser-known artists.   Author Michele Greet illuminates the significant ways in which Latin American expatriates helped establish modernism and, conversely, how a Parisian environment influenced the development of Latin American artistic identity. These artists, hailing from former Spanish and Portuguese colonies, encountered expectations of primitivism from their European audiences, and their diverse responses to such biased perceptions--ranging from rejection to embrace to selective reinterpretation of European tendencies--yielded a rich variety of formal innovation. Magnificently illustrated and conveying with clarity a nuanced portrait of modernism, Transatlantic Encounters also engages in a wider discussion of the relationship between displacement, identity formation, and artistic production.

Behind the fascinating public artist's practice of collaboration Judith F. Baca is best known for the Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976-83), a vibrant 2,740-foot mural in Los Angeles that presents an alternative history of California--one that focuses on the contributions of marginalized and underrepresented communities. The mural is emblematic of Baca's pioneering approach to creating public art, a process in which members of the community are essential contributors to the conception and realization of the work.Anna Indych-Lú3pez explores Baca's oeuvre, from early murals painted with local gang members in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles to more recently commissioned works. She looks in depth at the Great Wall and considers the artist's ongoing work with the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, California, a nonprofit group founded by Baca in 1976. Throughout, Indych-Lú3pez assesses what she calls Baca's "public art of contestation"and discusses how ideas of collaboration and authorship and issues of race, class, and gender have influenced and sustained Baca's art practice.

The first book-length study of Trecartin's artistic genealogy, evolving aesthetics, radical approach to digital and Internet culture, and impact on contemporary art, film, and media.

Winner, Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association for Latin American Art, 2019 Quito, Ecuador, was one of colonial South America's most important artistic centers. Yet the literature on painting in colonial Quito largely ignores the first century of activity, reducing it to a "handful of names," writes Susan Verdi Webster. In this major new work based on extensive and largely unpublished archival documentation, Webster identifies and traces the lives of more than fifty painters who plied their trade in the city between 1550 and 1650, revealing their mastery of languages and literacies and the circumstances in which they worked in early colonial Quito. Overturning many traditional assumptions about early Quiteño artists, Webster establishes that these artists--most of whom were Andean--functioned as visual intermediaries and multifaceted cultural translators who harnessed a wealth of specialized knowledge to shape graphic, pictorial worlds for colonial audiences. Operating in an urban mediascape of layered languages and empires--a colonial Spanish realm of alphabetic script and mimetic imagery and a colonial Andean world of discursive graphic, material, and chromatic forms--Quiteño painters dominated both the pen and the brush. Webster demonstrates that the Quiteño artists enjoyed fluency in several areas, ranging from alphabetic literacy and sophisticated scribal conventions to specialized knowledge of pictorial languages: the materials, technologies, and chemistry of painting, in addition to perspective, proportion, and iconography. This mastery enabled artists to deploy languages and literacies--alphabetic, pictorial, graphic, chromatic, and material--to obtain power and status in early colonial Quito.

Although liminality has been studied by scholars of medieval and seventeenth-century art, the role of the threshold motif in Netherlandish art of the late fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries -- this late medieval/early 'early modern' period -- has been much less fully investigated.　　Thresholds and Boundaries: Liminality in Netherlandish Art (1385-1550)　addresses this issue through a focus on key case studies (Sluter's portal of the Chartreuse de Champmol and the calendar pages of the Limbourg Brothers' Très Riches Heures),　and on important formats (altarpieces and illuminated manuscripts).　 Lynn F. Jacobs examines how the visual thresholds established within Netherlandish paintings, sculptures, and manuscript illuminations become sites where artists could address relations between life and death, aristocrat and peasant, holy and profane, and man and God--and where artists could exploit the "betwixt and between" nature of the threshold to communicate, paradoxically, both connections and divisions between these different states and different worlds. Building on literary and anthropological interpretations of liminality, this book demonstrates how the exploration of boundaries in Netherlandish art infused the works with greater meaning.　 The book's probing of the -- often ignored --meanings of the threshold motif casts new light on key works of Netherlandish art. en" nature of the threshold to communicate, paradoxically, both connections and divisions between these different states and different worlds. Building on literary and anthropological interpretations of liminality, this book demonstrates how the exploration of boundaries in Netherlandish art infused the works with greater meaning.　 The book's probing of the -- often ignored --meanings of the threshold motif casts new light on key works of Netherlandish art.

What does it mean to render the processes of making art--cutting, pasting, and projecting light--as a series of metaphors for how we think and how we live? And why would an artist embark on such an enterprise? This book considers how renowned artist William Kentridge spins the material operations of the studio into a web of politically astute and historically grounded metaphors, likening erasure to forgetting, comparing animation to the flux of history, and marshaling drawing as a form of nonlinear argument. Placing Kentridge's visual vocabulary and unorthodox methods of production in the context of South Africa's history, Leora Maltz-Leca explores studio process in all of its metaphoric and philosophical dimensions.

A provocative and challenging new conceptual framework for the study of images This book builds on the groundbreaking theoretical framework established in Whitney Davis's acclaimed previous book, A General Theory of Visual Culture, in which he shows how certain culturally constituted aspects of artifacts and pictures are visible to informed viewers. Here, Davis uses revealing archaeological and historical case studies to further develop his theory, presenting an exacting new account of the interaction that occurs when a viewer looks at a picture. Davis argues that pictoriality--the depiction intended by its maker to be seen--emerges at a particular standpoint in space and time. Reconstruction of this standpoint is the first step of the art historian's craft. Because standpoints are inherently mutable and mobile, pictoriality constantly shifts in form and possible meaning. To capture this complexity, Davis develops new concepts of radical pictorial ambiguity, including "bivisibility" (the fact that pictures can always be seen in ways other than intended), pictorial naturalism, and the behavior of pictures under changing angles of view. He then applies these concepts to four cases--Paleolithic cave painting; ancient Egyptian tomb decoration; classical Greek architectural sculpture, with a focus on the Parthenon frieze; and Renaissance perspective as invented by Brunelleschi. A profound new theory of the work of both makers and viewers by one of the discipline's most esteemed and engaged thinkers, Visuality and Virtuality is essential reading for art historians, architects, archaeologists, and philosophers of art and visual theory.

In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of "craftivism"--the politics and social practices associated with handmaking--Fray explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval. Closely examining how amateurs and fine artists in the United States and Chile turned to sewing, braiding, knotting, and quilting amid the rise of global manufacturing, Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that textiles unravel the high/low divide and urges us to think flexibly about what the politics of textiles might be. Her case studies from the 1970s through the 1990s--including the improvised costumes of the theater troupe the Cockettes, the braided rag rugs of US artist Harmony Hammond, the thread-based sculptures of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, the small hand-sewn tapestries depicting Pinochet's torture, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt--are often taken as evidence of the inherently progressive nature of handcrafted textiles. Fray, however, shows that such methods are recruited to often ambivalent ends, leaving textiles very much "in the fray" of debates about feminized labor, protest cultures, and queer identities; the malleability of cloth and fiber means that textiles can be activated, or stretched, in many ideological directions. The first contemporary art history book to discuss both fine art and amateur registers of handmaking at such an expansive scale, Fray unveils crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles--high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.  

Enchanted Ground is about the challenge to modernist criticism by Surrealist writers - mainly André Breton but also Louis Aragon, Pierre Mabille, René Magritte, Charles Estienne, René Huyghe and others - who viewed the same artists in terms of magic, occultism, precognition, alchemy and esotericism generally. It introduces the history of the ways in which those artists who came after Impressionism - Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh - became canonical in the 20th century through the broad approaches we now call modernist or formalist (by critics and curators such as Alfred H. Barr, Roger Fry, Robert Goldwater, Clement Greenberg, John Rewald and Robert L. Herbert), and then unpacks chapter-by-chapter, for the first time in a single volume, the Surrealist positions on the same artists. To this end, it contributes to new strains of scholarship on Surrealism that exceed the usual bounds of the 1920s and 1930s and that examine the fascination within the movement with magic.

Taxidermy, once the province of natural history and dedicated to the pursuit of lifelike realism, has recently resurfaced in the world of contemporary art, culture, and interior design. In Speculative Taxidermy, Giovanni Aloi offers a comprehensive mapping of the discourses and practices that have enabled the emergence of taxidermy in contemporary art. Drawing on the speculative turn in philosophy and recovering past alternative histories of art and materiality from a biopolitical perspective, Aloi theorizes speculative taxidermy: a powerful interface that unlocks new ethical and political opportunities in human-animal relationships and speaks to how animal representation conveys the urgency of addressing climate change, capitalist exploitation, and mass extinction. A resolutely nonanthropocentric take on the materiality of one of the most controversial mediums in art, this approach relentlessly questions past and present ideas of human separation from the animal kingdom. It situates taxidermy as a powerful interface between humans and animals, rooted in a shared ontological and physical vulnerability. Carefully considering a select number of key examples including the work of Nandipha Mntambo, Maria Papadimitriou, Mark Dion, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Roni Horn, Oleg Kulik, Steve Bishop, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, and Cole Swanson, Speculative Taxidermy contextualizes the resilient presence of animal skin in the gallery space as a productive opportunity to rethink ethical and political stances in human-animal relationships.

The British engagement with India was an intensely visual one. Images of the subcontinent, produced by artists and travellers in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century heyday of the East India Company, reflect the role it played in Indian life. They mirror significant shifts in British policy and attitudes towards India. The Company's story is one of wealth, power, and the pursuit of profit. It changed what people in Europe ate, what they drank, and how they dressed. Ultimately, it laid the foundations of the British Raj. But few historians have considered the visual sources that survive and their implications for the link between images and empire, pictures and power. This book draws on the unrivalled riches of the British Library, telling the story of individual images, their creators, and the people and places they depict. It will present a detailed picture of the Company and its complex relationship with India, its people and cultures.

Dedicated to an articulation of the earth from broadly ecological perspectives, eco art is a vibrant subset of contemporary art that addresses the widespread public concern with rapid climate change and related environmental issues. In Landscape into Eco Art, Mark Cheetham systematically examines connections and divergences between contemporary eco art, land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and the historical genre of landscape painting. Through eight thematic case studies that illuminate what eco art means in practice, reception, and history, Cheetham places the form in a longer and broader art-historical context. He considers a wide range of media--from painting, sculpture, and photography to artists' films, video, sound work, animation, and installation--and analyzes the work of internationally prominent artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Nancy Holt, Mark Dion, and Robert Smithson. In doing so, Cheetham reveals eco art to be a dynamic extension of a long tradition of landscape depiction in the West that boldly enters into today's debates on climate science, government policy, and our collective and individual responsibility to the planet. An ambitious intervention into eco-criticism and the environmental humanities, this volume provides original ways to understand the issues and practices of eco art in the Anthropocene. Art historians, humanities scholars, and lay readers interested in contemporary art and the environment will find Cheetham's work valuable and invigorating.

From the walls of the Salon to the pages of weekly newspapers, war imagery was immensely popular in postrevolutionary France. This fascinating book studies representations of contemporary conflict in the first half of the 19th century and explores how these pictures provided citizens with an imaginative stake in wars being waged in their name. As she traces the evolution of images of war from a visual form that had previously been intended for mostly elite audiences to one that was enjoyed by a much broader public over the course of the 19th century, Katie Hornstein carefully considers the influence of emergent technologies and popular media, such as lithography, photography, and panoramas, on both artistic style and public taste. With close readings and handsome reproductions in various media, from monumental battle paintings to popular prints, Picturing War in France,1792-1856 draws on contemporary art criticism, war reporting, and the burgeoning illustrated press to reveal the crucial role such images played in shaping modern understandings of conflict.

This hybrid book examines the art and politics of "The Nude" in various cultural contexts, featuring books of canonical western art pirated and either digitally- or hand-censored in Iran by anonymous government workers. Author Glenn Harcourt uses several case studies brought to the fore by American painter Pamela Joseph in her recent "Censored" series. Harcourt's rigorous, culturally-measured and art historical approach complements Joseph's appropriation ofthese censored images as feminist critique. Harcourt argues that her work serves as a window toward larger questions in art. These include an examination of the evolution of abstraction; the role of women in western society, as seen through the history of painting the body; the effects of western art on cultures outside the west (sometimes referred to in Iran as "west-toxication"); and how artists in non-western countries, specifically those in Iran living under rules of censorshipthat specifically prohibit representation of the body, engage with the history of western art found in the censored books. Harcourt's discussion of Iranian contemporary artists focuses on censorship tropes in portraiture, including works by Aydin Aghdashloo, Gohar Dashti, Katayoun Karami, Daryoush Qarezad, Manijeh Sehhi, Newsha Tavakolian, and others. Issues of privacy and security prevent some Iranian artist insiders from being named, but studio images as well as recipes for removal of the censored marks along with testimony from artists who are now living outside Iran provide reference for many English-speaking readers who don't otherwise have knowledge of the country's strict policies. Image reproductions ranging from the pages of the censored books themselves, to Joseph's paintings, to artwork by contemporary Iranian artists, make the book visually intriguing, timely, and visually fascinating reading.

The Pacific world has long been recognized as a hub for the global trade in art objects, but the history of art and architecture has seldom reckoned with another profound aspect of the region's history: its exposure to global conflict during the British and US imperial incursions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Art and War in the Pacific World provides a new view of the Pacific world and of global artistic interaction by exploring how the making, alteration, looting, and destruction of images, objects, buildings, and landscapes intersected with the exercise of force. Focusing on the period from Commodore George Anson's voyage to the Philippine-American War, J. M. Mancini's exceptional study deftly weaves together disparate strands of history to create a novel paradigm for cultural analysis.

The Nasrid builders of the Alhambra - the best-preserved medieval Muslim palatial city - were so exacting that some of their work could not be fully explained until the invention of fractal geometry. Their design principles have been obscured, however, by the loss of all archival material.This book resolves that impasse by investigating the neglected, interdisciplinary contexts of medieval poetics and optics and through comparative study of Islamic court ceremonials. This reframing enables the reconstruction of the underlying, integrated aesthetic, focusing on the harmoniousinterrelationship between diverse artistic media - architecture, poetry and textiles - in the experience of the beholder, resulting in a new understanding of the Alhambra.

Ancient history, midcentury modernism, Cinemascope, humanism and monumentality, totalitarianism and democracy: transformations in American culture and architecture. In  Flintstone Modernism, Jeffrey Lieber investigates transformations in postwar American architecture and culture. He considers sword-and-sandal films of the 1950s and 1960s--including forgotten gems such as  Land of the Pharaohs,  Helen of Troy, and  The Egyptian--and their protean, ideologically charged representations of totalitarianism and democracy. He connects Cinemascope and other widescreen technologies to the architectural "glass curtain wall," arguing that both represented the all-encompassing eye of American Enterprise. Lieber reminds us that until recently midcentury modern American architecture was reviled by architectural historians but celebrated by design enthusiasts, just as sword-and-sandal epics are alternately hailed as cult classics or derided as camp. Lieber's argument is absorbing, exuberant, and comprehensive. Following Hannah Arendt, who looked for analogies in the classical past in order to understand midcentury's cultural crisis, Lieber terms the postwar reckoning of ancient civilizations and modern ideals "Flintstone modernism." In new assessments of the major architects of the period, Lieber uncovers the cultural and political fantasies that animated or impinged on their work, offering surprising insights into Gordon Bunshaft's commonsense classicism; Eero Saarinen's architectural narratives of ersatz empire and Marcel Breuer's mania for Egyptian monoliths; and Edward Durell Stone's romantic "flights of fancy" and Philip Johnson's wicked brand of cynical cultural and sociopolitical critique. Deftly moving among architecture, film, philosophy, and politics, Lieber illuminates the artifice that resulted from the conjunction of high style and mass-cultural values in postwar America.

How architectural drawings emerged as aesthetic objects, promoted by a network of galleries, collectors, and institutions, and how this changed the understanding of architecture. Prior to the 1970s, buildings were commonly understood to be the goal of architectural practice; architectural drawings were seen simply as a means to an end. But, just as the boundaries of architecture itself were shifting at the end of the twentieth century, the perception of architectural drawings was also shifting; they began to be seen as autonomous objects outside the process of building. In Drawing on Architecture, Jordan Kauffman offers an account of how architectural drawings--promoted by a network of galleries and collectors, exhibitions and events--emerged as aesthetic objects and ultimately attained status as important cultural and historical artifacts, and how this was both emblematic of changes in architecture and a catalyst for these changes. Kauffman traces moments of critical importance to the evolution of the perception of architectural drawings, beginning with exhibitions that featured architectural drawings displayed in ways that did not elucidate buildings but treated them as meaningful objects in their own right. When architectural drawings were seen as having intrinsic value, they became collectible, and Kauffman chronicles early collectors, galleries, and sales. He discusses three key exhibitions at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York; other galleries around the world that specialized in architectural drawings; the founding of architecture museums that understood and collected drawings as important cultural and historical artifacts; and the effect of the new significance of architectural drawings on architecture and architectural history. Drawing on interviews with more than forty people directly involved with the events described and on extensive archival research, Kauffman shows how architectural drawings became the driving force in architectural debate in an era of change.

The Lithic Garden offers innovative perspectives on the role of ornament in medieval church design. Focusing on the foliate friezes articulating iconic French monuments such as Amiens Cathedral, it demonstrates that church builders strategically used organic motifs to integrate the interiorand exterior of their structures, thus reinforcing the connections and distinctions between the entirety of the sacred edifice and the profane world beyond its boundaries. With this exquisitely illustrated monograph, Mailan S. Doquang argues that, contrary to widespread belief, monumental flora wasnot just an extravagant embellishment or secondary byproduct, but a semantically-charged, critical design component that inflected the stratified spaces of churches in myriad ways. By situating the proliferation of foliate friezes within the context of the Crusades, The Lithic Garden providesinsights into the networks of exchange between France, Byzantium, and the Levant, contributing to the "global turn" in art and architectural History.

Experiencing the resonant acoustics of the church of Hagia Sophia allowed the Byzantine participants in its liturgical rituals to be filled with the Spirit of God, and even to become his image on earth. Bissera Pentcheva's vibrant analysis examines how these sung rites combined with the church's architectural space to make Hagia Sophia a performative place of worship representative of Byzantine religious culture in all its sensory richness. Coupling digital acoustic models and video with a close examination of liturgical texts and melodic structures, Pentcheva applies art-historical, philosophical, archeoacoustical, and anthropological methodologies to provide insight into the complementary ways liturgy and location worked to animate worshippers in Byzantium. Rather than focus on the architectural form of the building, the technology of its construction, or the political ideology of its decoration, Pentcheva delves into the performativity of Hagia Sophia and explains how the "icons of sound" created by the sung liturgy and architectural reverberation formed an aural experience that led to mystical transcendence for worshippers, opening access to the imagined celestial sound of the angelic choirs. Immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully illustrated, this exploration of Hagia Sophia sheds new light on sacred space, iconicity, and religious devotion in Byzantium. Scholars of art and architectural history, religious studies, music and acoustics, and the medieval period will especially appreciate Pentcheva's field-advancing work.

Baltimore has been home to hundreds of theaters since the first moving pictures flickered across muslin sheets. These monuments to popular culture, adorned with grandiose architectural flourishes, seemed an everlasting part of Baltimore's landscape. By 1950, when the city's population peaked, Baltimore's movie fans could choose from among 119 theaters. But by 2016, the number of cinemas had dwindled to only three. Today, many of the city's theaters are boarded up, even burned out, while others hang on with varying degrees of dignity as churches or stores. In Flickering Treasures, Amy Davis, an award-winning photojournalist for the Baltimore Sun, pairs vintage black-and-white images of opulent downtown movie palaces and modest neighborhood theaters with her own contemporary full-color photographs, inviting us to imagine Charm City's past as we confront today's neglected urban landscape. Punctuated by engaging stories and interviews with local moviegoers, theater owners, ushers, and cashiers, plus commentary from celebrated Baltimore filmmakers Barry Levinson and John Waters, the book brings each theater and decade vividly to life. From Electric Park, the Century, and the Hippodrome to the Royal, the Parkway, the Senator, and scores of other beloved venues, the book delves into Baltimore's history, including its troubling legacy of racial segregation. The descriptions of the technological and cultural changes that have shaped both American cities and the business of movie exhibition will trigger affectionate memories for many readers. A map and timeline reveal the one-time presence of movie houses in every corner of the city, and fact boxes include the years of operation, address, architect, and seating capacity for each of the 72 theaters profiled, along with a brief description of each theater's distinct character. Highlighting the emotional resonance of film and the loyalty of Baltimoreans to their neighborhoods, Flickering Treasures is a profound story of change, loss, and rebirth.

Figural and non-figural supports are a ubiquitous feature of Roman marble sculpture; they appear in sculptures ranging in size from miniature to colossal and of all levels of quality. At odds with modern ideas about beauty, completeness, and visual congruence, these elements, especially non-figural struts, have been dismissed by scholars as mere safeguards for production and transport. However, close examination of these features reveals the tastes and expectations of those who commissioned, bought, and displayed marble sculptures throughout the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Drawing on a large body of examples, Greek and Latin literary sources, and modern theories of visual culture, this study constitutes the first comprehensive investigation of non-figural supports in Roman sculpture. The book overturns previous conceptions of Roman visual values and traditions and challenges our understanding of the Roman reception of Greek art.

2019 Finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the CAA. In Race Experts, Linda Kim examines the complicated and ambivalent role played by sculptor Malvina Hoffman in The Races of Mankind series created for the Chicago Field Museum in 1930. Although Hoffman had training in fine arts and was a protégé of Auguste Rodin and Ivan Mestrović, she had no background in anthropology or museum exhibits. She was nonetheless commissioned by the Field Museum to make a series of life-size sculptures for the museum's new racial exhibition, which became the largest exhibit on race ever installed in a museum and one of the largest sculptural commissions ever undertaken by a single artist. Hoffman's Races of Mankind exhibit was realized as a series of 104 bronzes of racial types from around the world, a unique visual mediation between anthropological expertise and everyday ideas about race in interwar America. Kim explores how the artist brought scientific understandings of race and the everyday racial attitudes of museum visitors together in powerful and productive friction. The exhibition compelled the artist to incorporate not only the expertise of racial science and her own artistic training but also the popular ideas about race that ordinary Americans brought to the museum. Kim situates the Races of Mankind exhibit at the juncture of these different forms of racial expertise and examines how the sculptures represented the messy resolutions between them. Race Experts is a compelling story of ideological contradiction and accommodation within the racial practices of American museums, artists, and audiences. 

Elbert Weinberg, a supremely gifted sculptor, was widely regarded as one of the most promising young artists of the 1950s and 1960s. His sculptures are imbued with historical, literary, mythological, and biblical subtext and so belong to the grand art historical tradition. Weinberg's work can be found in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and his home city of Hartford, and in public and private collections across the United States and Europe. He is perhaps best known for his two Holocaust memorials in Wilmington, Delaware, and West Hartford, Connecticut. In 2014, the Weinberg Trust donated several of Weinberg's sculptures, many of his prints and drawings, a large collection of manuscripts, ephemera, and photographs documenting his work to the Hartford History Center at the Hartford Public Library. This in-depth analysis of the artist's most important sculptures includes a brief biography, two interpretive essays, and more than fifty illustrations documenting his life and work.

This book takes the extraordinary art of the Tuscan sculptor Francesco Mochi (1580-1654) as the entry point for an inquiry into the historical and cultural forces reshaping sculpture at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Mochi has long been understood as an early innovator of the baroque style whose career was eclipsed by the rise of his younger contemporary Gianlorenzo Bernini. But for his sole seventeenth-century biographer, what distinguished Mochi's sculpture was his determination to adhere to the Florentine manner. This study argues that the post-Tridentine religious climate and the demands of consolidating absolutist regimes posed specific challenges for sculpture, particularly as the medium had been assertively developed during the first half of the sixteenth century by Florentine sculptors, most famously Michelangelo. As analyzed here, Mochi's highly distinctive sculptural style stemmed directly from his attempt to carry forward a Florentine and Michelangelesque tradition of sculpture-above all its commitments to the representation of the body, the materiality of sculpture, and the agency of the artist-and to reconcile that tradition with imperatives of his own day. Mochi's ambitious undertaking produced an extreme tension in his art that resulted in some of the century's most breathtaking sculptures, though ultimately fracturing his career. The book offers wholly new interpretations of Mochi's monumental works and a new, historically engaged account of the origins of baroque sculpture and the rise to dominance of Bernini's mature sculptural style. The volume is enriched by specially commissioned color photographs of Mochi's sculptures.

"The authoritative book on the origins, history, and influence of illustration. Bravo!" David Brinley, University of Delaware, USA History of Illustration covers image-making and print history from around the world, spanning from the ancient to the modern. Hundreds of color images show illustrations within their social, cultural, and technical context, while they are ordered from the past to the present. Readers will be able to analyze images for their displayed techniques, cultural standards, and ideas to appreciate the art form. This essential guide is the first history of illustration written by an international team of illustration historians, practitioners, and educators.

An essential African American artist of his era, Archibald Motley Jr. created paintings of black Chicago that aligned him with the revisionist aims of the New Negro Renaissance. Yet Motley's approach to constructing a New Negro--a dignified figure both accomplished and worthy of respect--reflected the challenges faced by African American artists working on the project of racial reinvention and uplift. Phoebe Wolfskill demonstrates how Motley's art embodied the tenuous nature of the Black Renaissance and the wide range of ideas that structured it. Focusing on key works in Motley's oeuvre, Wolfskill reveals the artist's complexity and the variety of influences that informed his work. Motley's paintings suggest that the racist, problematic image of the Old Negro was not a relic of the past but an influence that pervaded the Black Renaissance. Exploring Motley in relation to works by notable black and non-black contemporaries, Wolfskill reinterprets Motley's oeuvre as part of a broad effort to define American cultural identity through race, class, gender, religion, and regional affiliation.

Pollock's Modernism provides a new interpretation of the art of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), one that is based on a phenomenological investigation of the pictorial effects of particular paintings. Focusing on major works that span the artist's career - including Mural (1943), Cathedral (1947), Number 1A, 1948, One: Number 31, 1950, and Portrait and a Dream (1953) - Michael Schreyach argues that Pollock's achievement is best understood by attending to how, technically and formally, he instituted certain modes of pictorial address and structures of beholding in his paintings.  From this perspective, Pollock is shown to be an artist who transformed the means by which the phenomenological interdependence of sensation and cognition in our embodied experience could be represented.  Offering a provocative counter-argument to dominant accounts of Pollock's work, this book advances bold claims about Pollock's intentions as they are expressed in his art, and illuminates what constituted the artist's unique form of modernism at mid-century.  

Throughout his long and prolific career, Ray Stanford Strong (1905-2006) strove to capture the essence of the western American landscape. An accomplished painter who achieved national fame during the New Deal era, Strong is best known for his depiction of landscapes in California and Oregon, rendered in his signature plein air style. This beautiful volume, featuring more than 100 color and black-and-white illustrations, is the first comprehensive exploration of Strong's life and artistry. Through family papers, archives, photographs, and a two-year series of interviews conducted with the artist personally, Mark Humpal traces Strong's journey from his childhood on an Oregon berry farm to his artistically formative years in New York and San Francisco. After moving back to the West Coast, Strong produced important works for the WPA, executed major diorama projects for two world expositions, helped organize the Santa Barbara Art Institute, and served as teacher and mentor for a new generation of plein air artists. But, as Humpal emphasizes, Strong distinguished himself by resisting the drumbeat of the avant-garde. During an era when many artists were experimenting with abstract expressionism, Strong never relinquished his personal vision and adherence to a more traditional style. With his outgoing personality, he forged friendships and associations with such prominent artists as Frank Vincent DuMond, Maynard Dixon, Ansel Adams, Frank Lloyd Wright, and John Steinbeck. Ultimately, Strong had little concern for his place in the sweep of art history. The proficiency he achieved through years of formal and informal study allowed him to craft a personal style difficult to categorize but unique and engaging. By expanding our understanding and appreciation of Strong's artistic contributions, this book offers a fitting tribute to one of America's finest landscape artists.  

A new interpretation of the development of artistic modernity in eighteenth-century France What can be gained from considering a painting not only as an image but also a material object? How does the painter's own experience of the process of making matter for our understanding of both the painting and its maker? The Painter's Touch addresses these questions to offer a radical reinterpretation of three paradigmatic French painters of the eighteenth century. In this beautifully illustrated book, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth provides close readings of the works of François Boucher, Jean-Siméon Chardin, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, entirely recasting our understanding of these painters' practice. Using the notion of touch, she examines the implications of their strategic investment in materiality and sheds light on the distinct contribution of painting to the culture of the Enlightenment. Lajer-Burcharth traces how the distinct logic of these painters' work--the operation of surface in Boucher, the deep materiality of Chardin, and the dynamic morphological structure in Fragonard--contributed to the formation of artistic identity. Through the notion of touch, she repositions these painters in the artistic culture of their time, shifting attention from institutions such as the academy and the Salon to the realms of the market, the medium, and the body. Lajer-Burcharth analyzes Boucher's commercial tact, Chardin's interiorized craft, and Fragonard's materialization of eros. Foregrounding the question of experience--that of the painters and of the people they represent--she shows how painting as a medium contributed to the Enlightenment's discourse on the self in both its individual and social functions. By examining what paintings actually "say" in brushstrokes, texture, and paint, The Painter's Touch transforms our understanding of the role of painting in the emergence of modernity and provides new readings of some of the most important and beloved works of art of the era.

Several decades have now passed since postcolonial and feminist critiques presented the art-historical world with a demythologized Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), a much-diminished image of the artist/hero who had once been universally admired as "the father of modernist primitivism." In this volume, both long-established and more recent Gauguin scholars offer a provocative picture of the evolution of Gauguin scholarship in the recent postmodern era, as they confront and consider how the dismantling of the longstanding Gauguin myth positions us now in the 21st century to deal with and assess the life, work, and legacy of this still perennially popular artist.To reassess the challenges that Gauguin faced in his own day as well as those that he continues to present to current and future scholarship, they explore the multiple contexts that influenced Gauguin's thought and behavior as well as his art and incorporate a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, from anthropology, philosophy, and the history of science to gender studies and the study of Pacific cultural history. Dealing with a wide range of Gauguin's production, they challenge conventional art-historical thinking, highlight transnational perspectives, and offer clues to the direction of future scholarship, as audiences worldwide seek to make multicultural peace with Gauguin and his art.Broude has raised the bar of Gauguin scholarship ever higher in this groundbreaking volume, which will be necessary reading for students and scholars of art history, late 19th-century French and Pacific culture, gender studies, and beyond.

Not rediscovered until the twentieth century, the works of Georges de La Tour retain an aura of mystery. At first sight, his paintings suggest a veritable celebration of light and the visible world, but this is deceptive. The familiarity of visual experience blinds the beholder to a deeper understanding of the meanings associated with vision and the visible in the early modern period. By exploring the representations of light, vision, and the visible in La Tour's works, this interdisciplinary study examines the nature of painting and its artistic, religious, and philosophical implications. In the wake of iconoclastic outbreaks and consequent Catholic call for the revitalization of religious imagery, La Tour paints familiar objects of visible reality that also serve as emblems of an invisible, spiritual reality. Like the books in his paintings, asking to be read, La Tour's paintings ask not just to be seen as visual depictions but to be deciphered as instruments of insight. In figuring faith as spiritual passion and illumination, La Tour's paintings test the bounds of the pictorial image, attempting to depict what painting cannot ultimately show: words, hearing, time, movement, changes of heart. La Tour's emphasis on spiritual insight opens up broader artistic, philosophical, and conceptual reflections on the conditions of possibility of the pictorial medium. By scrutinizing what is seen and how, and by questioning the position of the beholder, his works revitalize critical discussion of the nature of painting and its engagements with the visible world.

The Norwegian painter, novelist, and social critic Christian Krohg (1852-1925) is best known for his highly political paintings of workers, prostitutes, and Skagen fishermen of the 1880s and for serving as a mentor to Edvard Munch. One of the Nordic countries' most avant-garde naturalist artists, he was highly influenced by French thinkers, including Emile Zola, Claude Bernard, and Hippolyte Taine, and shocked the provincial sensibilities of his time. Krohg's work reached beyond the art world when his book Albertine and its related paintings were banned upon publication. The story of a young seamstress who turns to a life of prostitution, it galvanized support for outlawing prostitution in Norway, but Krohg was punished for its sexual content. In Christian Krohg's Naturalism, Oystein Sjastad examines the theories of Krohg and his fellow naturalists and their reception in Scandinavian intellectual circles, viewing Krohg from an international perspective and demonstrating how Krohg's art made a striking contribution to European naturalism. In the process, he provides the definitive account of Krohg's art in the English language.

Changing how we look at and think about the color grey Why did many of the twentieth century's best-known abstract painters often choose grey, frequently considered a noncolor and devoid of meaning? Frances Guerin argues that painters (including Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Agnes Martin, Brice Marden, Mark Rothko, and Gerhard Richter) select grey to respond to a key question of modernist art: What is painting? By analyzing an array of modernist paintings, Guerin demonstrates that grey has a unique history and a legitimate identity as a color. She traces its use by painters as far back as medieval and Renaissance art, through Romanticism, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernism to show how grey is the perfect color to address the questions asked by painting within art history and to articulate the relationship between painting and the historical world of industrial modernity. A work of exceptional erudition, breadth, and clarity, presenting an impressive range of canonical paintings across centuries as examples, The Truth Is Always Grey is a treatise on color that allows us to see something entirely new in familiar paintings and encourages our appreciation for the innovation and dynamism of the color grey.

During the 1930s and 1940s, painters Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry formed a loose alliance as American Regionalists. Some lauded their depictions of the rural landscape and hardworking inhabitants of America's midwestern heartland; others deemed their painting dangerous, regarding its easily understood realism as a vehicle for jingoism and even fascism. Cultivating Citizens focuses on Regionalists and their critics as they worked with and against universities, museums, and the burgeoning field of sociology. Lauren Kroiz shifts the terms of an ongoing debate over subject matter and style, producing the first study of Regionalist art education programs and concepts of artistic labor.

Honorable Mention, Humanities Book Prize, Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association, 2018Honorable Mention, Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association for Latin American Art, 2019 REMEX presents the first comprehensive examination of artistic responses and contributions to an era defined by the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994-2008). Marshaling over a decade's worth of archival research, interviews, and participant observation in Mexico City and the Mexico-US borderlands, Amy Sara Carroll considers individual and collective art practices, recasting NAFTA as the most fantastical inter-American allegory of the turn of the millennium. Carroll organizes her interpretations of performance, installation, documentary film, built environment, and body, conceptual, and Internet art around three key coordinates--City, Woman, and Border. She links the rise of 1990s Mexico City art in the global market to the period's consolidation of Mexico-US border art as a genre. She then interrupts this transnational art history with a sustained analysis of chilanga and Chicana artists' remapping of the figure of Mexico as Woman. A tour de force that depicts a feedback loop of art and public policy--what Carroll terms the "allegorical performative"--REMEX adds context to the long-term effects of the post-1968 intersection of D.F. performance and conceptualism, centralizes women artists' embodied critiques of national and global master narratives, and tracks post-1984 border art's "undocumentation" of racialized and sexualized reconfigurations of North American labor pools. The book's featured artwork becomes the lens through which Carroll rereads a range of events and phenomenon from California's Proposition 187 to Zapatismo, US immigration policy, 9/11 (1973/2001), femicide in Ciudad Juárez, and Mexico's war on drugs.

With the shadow's seductive associations to sexuality, mystery, danger, intangible power, and death, the use of shadows as artistic technique saturates both classic and modern art forms, and yet the practice remains almost invisible. As the first full-length study of art shadows in over adecade, Grasping Shadows ranges from classic works by Rembrandt, Dickens, Picasso, Disney, and Warhol to contemporary street art, popular songs, billboards, and architecture to propose a general theory of how all shadows function in texts and visual media, ultimately offering four main categories.Sharpe explores the diverse ways shadows appear in literature, painting, photography, and film, insisting that literary and visual meanings of shadows cannot be separated, and that art-shadows must be analyzed as part of a cultural field in which words and images continually overlap and reinforceeach other's meanings. Beginning with a summary of scholarship to date, the introduction addresses how real-world shadows function, and gives an overview of the strategies involved in representing shadows from the Renaissance onward. The first chapter sets out a theory of how the meanings of shadows are generated.Subsequent chapters, each centered on an influential literary text, explore in detail the four kinds of shadows that visual artists and writers use. The last chapter presents a case study of how shadows have impacted the art of the modern city, from Renoir and Zola to film noir to advancedprojection systems capturing the shadows of passers-by on streets around the globe. The book concludes with a philosophical meditation on how living with shadows enriches everyday life.

When Buffalo Bill's Wild West show traveled to Paris in 1889, the New York Times reported that the exhibition would be "managed to suit French ideas." But where had those "French ideas" of the American West come from? And how had they, in turn, shaped the notions of "cowboys and Indians" that captivated the French imagination during the Gilded Age? In Transnational Frontiers, Emily C. Burns maps the complex fin-de-siècle cultural exchanges that revealed, defined, and altered images of the American West. This lavishly illustrated visual history shows how American artists, writers, and tourists traveling to France exported the dominant frontier narrative that presupposed manifest destiny--and how Native American performers with Buffalo Bill's Wild West and other traveling groups challenged that view. Many French artists and illustrators plied this imagery as well. At the 1900 World's Fair in Paris, sculptures of American cowboys conjured a dynamic and adventurous West, while portraits of American Indians on vases evoked an indigenous people frozen in primitivity. At the same time, representations of Lakota performers, as well as the performers themselves, deftly negotiated the politics of American Indian assimilation and sought alternative spaces abroad. For French artists and enthusiasts, the West served as a fulcrum for the construction of an American cultural identity, offering a chance to debate ideas of primitivism and masculinity that bolstered their own colonialist discourses. By examining this process, Burns reveals the interconnections between American western art and Franco-American artistic exchange between 1865 and 1915.  

A groundbreaking work on how the topic of scale provides an entirely new understanding of Inca material culture Although questions of form and style are fundamental to art history, the issue of scale has been surprisingly neglected. Yet, scale and scaled relationships are essential to the visual cultures of many societies from around the world, especially in the Andes. In Scale and the Incas, Andrew Hamilton presents a groundbreaking theoretical framework for analyzing scale, and then applies this approach to Inca art, architecture, and belief systems. The Incas were one of humanity's great civilizations, but their lack of a written language has prevented widespread appreciation of their sophisticated intellectual tradition. Expansive in scope, this book examines many famous works of Inca art including Machu Picchu and the Dumbarton Oaks tunic, more enigmatic artifacts like the Sayhuite Stone and Capacocha offerings, and a range of relatively unknown objects in diverse media including fiber, wood, feathers, stone, and metalwork. Ultimately, Hamilton demonstrates how the Incas used scale as an effective mode of expression in their vast multilingual and multiethnic empire. Lavishly illustrated with stunning color plates created by the author, the book's pages depict artifacts alongside scale markers and silhouettes of hands and bodies, allowing readers to gauge scale in multiple ways. The pioneering visual and theoretical arguments of Scale andthe Incas not only rewrite understandings of Inca art, but also provide a benchmark for future studies of scale in art from other cultures.

In Enchanted Islands, renowned art historian Mary D. Sheriff explores the legendary, fictional, and real islands that filled the French imagination during the ancien regime as they appeared in royal ballets and festivals, epic literature, paintings, engravings, book illustrations, and other objects. Some of the islands were mythical and found in the most popular literary texts of the day--islands featured prominently, for instance, in Ariosto's Orlando furioso,Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, and Fénelon's, Telemachus. Other islands--real ones, such as Tahiti and St. Domingue--the French learned about from the writings of travelers and colonists. All of them were imagined to be the home of enchantresses who used magic to conquer heroes by promising sensual and sexual pleasure. As Sheriff shows, the theme of the enchanted island was put to many uses. Kings deployed enchanted-island mythology to strengthen monarchical authority, as Louis XIV did in his famous Versailles festival Les Plaisirs de l'île enchantée. Writers such as Fénelon used it to tell morality tales that taught virtue, duty, and the need for male strength to triumph over female weakness and seduction. Yet at the same time, artists like Boucher painted enchanted islands to portray art's purpose as the giving of pleasure. In all these ways and more, Sheriff demonstrates for the first time the centrality of enchanted islands to ancient regime culture in a book that will enchant all readers interested in the art, literature, and history of the time.

The peculiar arrangement of the psychoanalyst's office for an analytic session seems inexplicable. The analyst sits in a chair out of sight while the patient lies on a couch facing away. It has been this way since Freud, although, as Nathan Kravis points out in On the Couch, this practice is grounded more in the cultural history of reclining posture than in empirical research. Kravis, himself a practicing psychoanalyst, shows that the tradition of recumbent speech wasn't dreamed up by Freud but can be traced back to ancient Greece, where guests reclined on couches at the symposion (a gathering for upper-class males to discuss philosophy and drink wine), and to the Roman convivium (a banquet at which men and women reclined together). From bed to bench to settee to chaise-longue to sofa: Kravis tells how the couch became an icon of self-knowledge and self-reflection as well as a site for pleasure, privacy, transgression, and healing.

Flash! presents a fascinating cultural history of flash photography, from its mid-nineteenth century beginnings to the present day. All photography requires light, but the light of flash photography is quite distinctive: artificial, sudden, shocking, intrusive, and extraordinarily bright.Associated with revelation and wonder, it has been linked to the sublimity of lightning. Yet it has also been reviled: it's inseparable from anxieties about intrusion and violence, it creates a visual disturbance, and its effects are often harsh and create exaggerated contrasts.Flash! explores flash's power to reveal shocking social conditions, its impact on the representation of race, its illumination of what would otherwise remain hidden in darkness, and its capacity to put on display the most mundane corners of everyday life. It looks at flash's distinct aesthetics,examines how paparazzi chase celebrities, how flash is intimately linked to crime, how flash has been used to light up - and interrupt - countless family gatherings, how flash can "stop time" allowing one to photograph rapidly moving objects or freeze in a strobe, and it considers the biggest flashof all, the atomic bomb.Examining the work of professionals and amateurs, news hounds and art photographers, photographers of crime and of wildlife, the volume builds a picture of flash's place in popular culture, and its role in literature and film. Generously illustrated throughout, Flash! brings out the central role ofthis medium to the history of photography and challenges some commonly held ideas about the nature of photography itself.

Michel Foucault had been concerned about painting and the meaning of the image from his earliest publications, yet this aspect of his thought is largely neglected within the disciplines of art history and aesthetic theory. In Foucault on Painting, Catherine M. Soussloff argues that Foucault's sustained engagement with European art history critically addresses present concerns about the mediated nature of the image in the digital age.Foucault's writing on painting covers four discrete periods in European art history (seventeenth-century southern Baroque, mid-nineteenth century French painting, Surrealism, and figurative painting in the 1960s and "870s) as well as five individual artists: Velázquez, Manet, Magritte, Paul Reyberolle, and Gérard Fromanger. As Soussloff reveals in this book, Foucault followed a French intellectual tradition dating back to the seventeenth century, which understands painting as a separate area of knowledge. Painting, a practice long considered silent in its operations and effects, afforded Foucault an ideal discipline to think about history and philosophy simultaneously. Using a comparative approach grounded in art history and aesthetics, Soussloff explores the meaning of painting for Foucault's philosophy, and for contemporary art theory, proposing a new relevance for a Foucauldian view of ethics and the pleasures and predicaments of contemporary existence.

Ranging from Homer to Picasso, and from the Iranian Revolution to The Wizard of Oz, this spirited and radiant book awakens us anew to the role of color in our lives Our lives are saturated by color. We live in a world of vivid colors, and color marks our psychological and social existence. But for all color's inescapability, we don't know much about it. Now authors David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing offer a fresh and imaginative exploration of one of the most intriguing and least understood aspects of everyday experience. Kastan and Farthing, a scholar and a painter, respectively, investigate color from numerous perspectives: literary, historical, cultural, anthropological, philosophical, art historical, political, and scientific. In ten lively and wide-ranging chapters, each devoted to a different color, they examine the various ways colors have shaped and continue to shape our social and moral imaginations. Each individual color becomes the focal point for a consideration of one of the extraordinary ways in which color appears and matters in our lives. Beautifully produced in full color, this book is a remarkably smart, entertaining, and fascinating guide to this elusive topic.

This handsome volume presents an innovative look at the imagery of libations, the most commonly depicted ritual in ancient Greece, and how it engaged viewers in religious performance. In a libation, liquid--water, wine, milk, oil, or honey--was poured from a vessel such as a jug or a bowl onto the ground, an altar, or another surface. Libations were made on occasions like banquets, sacrifices, oath-taking, departures to war, and visitations to tombs, and their iconography provides essential insight into religious and social life in 5th-century BC Athens. Scenes depicting the ritual often involved beholders directly--a statue's gaze might establish the onlooker as a fellow participant, or painted vases could draw parallels between human practices and acts of gods or heroes. Beautifully illustrated with a broad range of examples, including the Caryatids at the Acropolis, the Parthenon Frieze, Attic red-figure pottery, and funerary sculpture, this important book demonstrates the power of Greek art to transcend the boundaries between visual representation and everyday experience.

SECAC Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication In this volume, Olga Herrera tells the story of how the United States used modern art as a cultural defense strategy in South America during World War II. Organized by figures such as Nelson A. Rockefeller, John Hay Whitney, and Lincoln Kirstein as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's war preparedness program, the Art Section of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CI-AA) linked art and national security. In the process, modern art came to symbolize American values of social progress, peace, and democracy. The Art Section, a crucial yet rarely acknowledged arm of the CI-AA--a temporary wartime agency--supported traveling exhibitions of American paintings, furniture, and poster design competitions for artists across the Western Hemisphere, as well as widespread distribution of films with South American themes and circulation of Latin American art within the United States. These exchanges of art and ideas were meant to counter negative views of U.S. culture spread by Nazi and totalitarian sympathizers. Modern art became a tool to visually project U.S. culture and was used to unify the hemisphere against Axis influence in a cultural battlefield.Herrera illustrates how the program was an unprecedented public-private model of support for the arts, a driving force in the emergence of a Latin American art market in the United States, and a foundation for global art networks still in place today.A volume in the series Latin American and Caribbean Arts and Culture, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation