Alain Locke (1885–1954), leading theorist of the Harlem Renaissance, maintained a lifelong commitment to the visual arts. Offering an in-depth study of Locke’s writings and art world interventions, Kobena Mercer focuses on the importance of cross-cultural entanglement. This distinctive approach reveals Locke’s vision of modern art as a dynamic space where images and ideas generate new forms under the fluid conditions of diaspora.

Positioning the philosopher as an advocate for an Afromodern aesthetic that drew from both formal experiments in Europe and the iconic legacy of the African past, Mercer shows how Aaron Douglas, Loïs Mailou Jones, and other New Negro artists acknowledged the diaspora’s rupture with the ancestral past as a prelude to the rebirth of identity. In his 1940 picture book, The Negro in Art, Locke also explored the different ways black and white artists approached the black image. Mercer’s reading highlights the global mobility of black images as they travel across national and ethnic frontiers. Finally, Mercer examines how Locke’s investment in art was shaped by gay male aestheticism. Black male nudes, including works by Richmond Barthé and Carl Van Vechten, thus reveal the significance of queer practices in modernism’s cross-cultural genesis.

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The Age of Undress explores the emergence and meaning of neoclassical dress in the 1790s, tracing its evolution from Naples to London and Paris over the course of a single decade. The neoclassical style of clothing—often referred to as robe à la grecque, empire style, or “undress”—is marked by a sheer, white, high-waisted muslin dress worn with minimal undergarments, often accessorized with a cashmere shawl. This style represented a dramatic departure from that of previous decades and was short lived: by the 1820s, corsets, silks, and hoop skirts were back in fashion.

Amelia Rauser investigates this sudden transformation and argues that women styled themselves as living statues, artworks come to life, an aesthetic and philosophical choice intertwined with the experiments and innovations of artists working in other media during the same period. Although neoclassicism is often considered a cold, rational, and masculine movement, Rauser’s analysis shows that it was actually deeply passionate, with women at its core—as ideals and allegories, as artistic agents, and as important patrons.

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The celebrated American artist Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993) was a singular figure in postwar American art. Early in his career, he created abstract paintings that combined landscape influence, aerial perspective, and a deeply personal calligraphic language. Then, in late 1955, he began working in a representational mode (landscapes, figure studies, and still lifes) and was associated with the Bay Area figurative movement. Diebenkorn later abandoned figurative references in the 1960s and embarked on monumental abstract, geometrical compositions, including his celebrated Ocean Park works.

This four-volume catalogue raisonné is the definitive resource on Diebenkorn’s unique works, including his paintings, works on paper, and three-dimensional objects. The fourth volume covers his later periods, as well as his sketchbooks and other little-known private drawings: cat. nos. 3762–5197.

Hieronymus Bosch’s (c. 1450–1516) Garden of Earthly Delights has elicited a sense of wonder for centuries. Over ten feet long and seven feet tall, it demands that we step back to take it in, while its surface, intricately covered with fantastical creatures in dazzling detail, draws us closer. In this highly original reassessment, Margaret D. Carroll reads the Garden as a speculation about the origin of the cosmos, the life-history of earth, and the transformation of humankind from the first age of world history to the last. Upending traditional interpretations of the painting as a moralizing depiction of God’s wrath, human sinfulness, and demonic agency, Carroll argues that it represents Bosch’s exploration of progressive changes in the human condition and the natural world.

Extensively researched with a robust illustration program, this groundbreaking secular analysis draws on new findings about Bosch’s idiosyncratic painting technique, his curiosity about natural history, his connections to the Burgundian court, and his experience of contemporary politics. The book offers fresh insights into the artist and his most beloved and elusive painting.

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Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) emerged onto the Los Angeles art scene with paintings that incorporated consumer products, such as Spam and Sun-Maid raisins. In this revelatory book, Jennifer Quick looks at and beyond the consumer imagery in Ruscha’s work, examining it through the tools, techniques, and habits of mind of commercial art and design. Quick shows how his training and early work as a commercial artist helped him become an incisive commentator on the presence and role of design in the modern world.

Back to the Drawing Board explores how Ruscha mobilized commercial design techniques of scale, paste-up layout, and perspective as he developed his singular artistic style. Beginning with his formative design education and focusing on the first decade of his career, Quick analyzes previously unseen works from the Ruscha archives alongside his celebrated paintings, prints, and books, demonstrating how Ruscha’s engagement with commercial art has been foundational to his practice. Through this insightful lens, Quick affirms Ruscha as a powerful and witty observer of the vast network of imagery that permeates visual culture and offers new perspectives on Pop and conceptual art.

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In the spring of 1974, the artist Anne Truitt (1921–2004) committed herself to keeping a journal for a year. She would continue the practice, sometimes intermittently, over the next six years, writing in spiral-bound notebooks and setting no guidelines other than to “let the artist speak.” These writings were published as Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1982). Two other journal volumes followed: Turn (1986) and Prospect (1996). This book, the final volume, comprises journals the artist kept from the winter of 2001 to the spring of 2002, two years before her death.

In Yield, Truitt’s unflinching honesty is on display as she contemplates her place in the world and comes to terms with the intellectual, practical, emotional, and spiritual issues that an artist faces when reconciling her art with her life, even as that life approaches its end. Truitt illuminates a life and career in which the demands, responsibilities, and rewards of family, friends, motherhood, and grandmotherhood are ultimately accepted, together with those of a working artist.

The celebrated American artist Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993) was a singular figure in postwar American art. Early in his career, he created abstract paintings that combined landscape influence, aerial perspective, and a deeply personal calligraphic language. Then, in late 1955, he began working in a representational mode (landscapes, figure studies, and still lifes) and was associated with the Bay Area figurative movement. Diebenkorn later abandoned figurative references in the 1960s and embarked on monumental abstract, geometrical compositions, including his celebrated Ocean Park works.

This is the third volume of a four-volume catalogue raisonné: the definitive resource on Diebenkorn’s unique works, including his paintings, works on paper, and three-dimensional objects. This volume features his representational works during the Berkeley period: cat. nos. 1535–3761.

For more than half of the nineteenth century, French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) depicted the rapidly changing appearance of the fashionable woman with meticulous attention to detail and with rare perception and empathy. Working in a period that witnessed the development of a consumer society and the beginnings of couture, Ingres charted in his portraits how clothes were worn and what part they played in definitions of identity and status. This book explores for the first time the ways in which clothing, accessories, and fabrics define and display women in Ingres’s portraits. With more than 150 illustrations that include the artist’s portraits, fashion plates, portraits by contemporaries, and surviving items of costume, the book illuminates Ingres’s work and its relation to the social and artistic discourse of his time.

Eminent dress historian Aileen Ribeiro analyzes in detail Ingres’s attitudes, his skill in depicting clothing, and how he portrays the real and idealized woman in his paintings and drawings of the fashionable mainstream—the grandes dames of elite society, the newly opulent bourgeoisie, English visitors to Italy, and family and friends. Ribeiro also devotes a section of the book to the part played by textiles and accessories in Ingres’s images of bathers and odalisques.

Some editorial changes have been made by the author to this electronic version.

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Protest fashion from the Vietnam War years is widely familiar, but today few are aware that dramatic fashion and textile designs served as patriotic propaganda for the Japanese, British, and Americans during the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945). This fascinating book presents hundreds of examples of how fashion was employed by those on all sides of the conflict to boost morale and fan patriotism.

From a kimono lined with images of U.S. planes blowing up to a British scarf emblazoned with hopeful anti-rationing slogans, Wearing Propaganda documents the development of the role of fashion as propaganda first in Japan and soon thereafter in Britain and the United States. The book discusses traditional and contemporary Japanese styles and what they revealed about Japanese domestic attitudes to war, and it shows how these attitudes echoed or contrasted with British and American fashions that were virulently anti-Japanese in some instances, humorously upbeat about wartime deprivations in others. With insights into style and design, fashion history, material culture, and the social history of Japan, the United States, and Britain, this book offers unexpected riches for every reader.

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This fascinating and important book puts the life of artists at the center of innovative art history, narrating a biography of five painters at the heart of events in Revolutionary France: Jacques-Louis David and his extraordinarily precocious students Drouais, Girodet, Gérard, and Gros. Their shared ambition was to build an alternative, exalted life in art, one committed to rigorous classical erudition while suffused with the emotional depth of familiar bonds. In this experiment of enlightened teaching, the roles of master and pupil were frequently reversed.

Distinguished scholar Thomas Crow tells how the personal histories and aesthetic choices of these artists were played out within the larger arena in which a whole social order was being overturned, a king embodying all patriarchal authority was put to death, and a republic of equal male brotherhood was proclaimed.

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It was at the free, open Salon exhibitions of the French Academy that artists were first consistently confronted by a "public"—a large and broadly based audience encouraged to look on works of art in an attitude of aesthetic contemplation. This book discusses the growth of public opinion about the arts in eighteenth-century France and the reciprocal effect of that opinion on official institutions and differing styles of painting.

As he analyzed the history of the Salon under the Old Regime, Crow discovers that it encompassed a complex process in which a number of groups of very different social character and political outlook sought to enlist painting as an expressive vehicle for their various agendas. Even the art of Watteau—seemingly so private in character—was decisively informed by new urban forms of artistic culture. The most important artists of the later eighteenth century—Greuze and David—were initially useful to the state in their common ability to grasp official priorities and embody them in a narrative art that was accessible to a broad public audience. But both artists, stimulated by the vigorous, new interest being shown in the Salons by Painters and public alike, also broke new ground with works that announced the advent of modernism.

Tracing the patterns and interplays between the ambitions of the artist and the wishes and tastes of the authorities, collectors, and crowds of salon visitors, Crow makes a fascinating and highly original contribution to art history.

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Twice imprisoned after the fall of Robespierre, French painter Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) faced an artistic and personal crisis as the political and cultural values he had embraced crumbled in the mid-1790s. This strikingly original book examines the crucial period of David’s artistic career as he struggled both to "save his neck" and to recast his identity in the aftermath of the Reign of Terror. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth examines David’s work in the context of the larger cultural and social formations emerging in France and offers a fascinating new perspective on his paintings and on French artistic culture at an important moment in its history.

The book begins with a close examination of the work David produced while in prison. Lajer-Burcharth first considers the artist’s self-representations, focusing on Self-Portrait and Abandoned Psyche, and addresses his crisis of individual identity. She goes on to look at David’s effort to redefine himself as a history painter after the Terror and at his engagement with the collective memory of the Revolution. In her analysis of the broader search for a new republican identity, the author frames her discussion around David’s Sabine Women, the sketches for which he had prepared in prison, and places special attention on the privileged role of women and femininity as signs that both David and other citizens employed to establish distance and difference from the Terror. The book concludes with a brilliant interpretation of David’s unfinished portrait of Juliette Récamier and its complex relation to the process of cultural reinvention of the self as a function of desire.

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