This engrossing book examines the particular importance of cities in Spanish and Hispanic-American culture as well as the different meanings that artists and cartographers invested in their depiction of New and Old World cities and towns. Kagan maintains that cities are both built structures and human communities, and that representations of the urban form reflect both points of view. He discusses the peculiar character of Spain’s “empire of towns”; the history and development of the cityscape as an independent artistic genre, both in Europe and in the Americas; the interaction between European and native mapping traditions; differences between European maps of urban America and those produced by local residents, whether native or creole; and the urban iconography of four different New World towns. Lavishly illustrated with a variety of maps, pictures, and plans, many reproduced here for the first time, this interdisciplinary study will be of interest to general readers and to specialists in art history, cartography, history, urbanism, and related fields.

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Winner of the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award, sponsored by the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA)

In 1916, John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) met Thomas Eugene McKeller (1890–1962), a young African American elevator attendant, at Boston’s Hotel Vendome. McKeller became the principal model for Sargent’s murals in the new wing of the city’s Museum of Fine Arts, among the painter’s most ambitious works. Sargent’s nude studies and sketches from this project attest to a close collaboration between the two men that unfolded over nearly ten years. Featuring drawings given by Sargent to Isabella Stewart Gardner and published in full for the first time, a portrait of McKeller, and archival materials reconstructing his life and relationship with Sargent, this book opens new avenues into artist-model relationships and transforms our understanding of Sargent’s iconic American paintings. Essays offer the first biography of McKeller and a window onto African American life in early-20th-century Boston. They also address the artist’s sexuality, his models, and questions of race and identity.

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Photographs by Rebecca Busselle and Sylvia Ardyn Boone

The Sande Society of the Mende is a widespread secret female regulatory society that both guards and transmits the ideals of feminine beauty that comprise the fundamental aesthetic criterion in Mende culture. The Sande initiation camp is conceived as a realm beneath the waters, a domain from which beauty and art emerge, a sacred space where women rule. In this eloquent and moving book, Sylvia Ardyn Boone describes the society, its organization, some of its rituals, and finally the mask worn by its members—an archetypal African sculpture called the Sande Sowo head. Her observations are not only an evocative account of Mende life and philosophy but are also a unique approach to the study of African art, an approach based on African conceptions about the human body and the person. Boone's engaging text is accompanied by extraordinary photographs of Mende women by Rebecca Busselle.

After introducing the reader to Mende history and ethnography, Boone discusses the Sande Society as a program for promoting the spiritual and physical beauty of Mende women. She then shows that an examination of the physical qualities and proportions of feminine beauty is a portal to an understanding of Mende ideas of morality and power. Under the tutelage of Mende elders Boone learned, for example, that the sight of a luxuriant head of hair arranged in an intricate style gives pleasure, but that is also encodes at higher levels notions of right behavior, successful social relations, progeny, and abundance. Equipped with this intimate knowledge, Boone is able to analyze in new ways the symbolism of the Sande Sowo head, and uncovers the meaning of this sculpture by viewing it against the background of the Mende natural and metaphysical world from which it emerges and to which it refers.

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This fascinating book asks a set of puzzling questions—why is early Chinese printing so little acknowledged, despite anticipating Gutenberg by centuries? Why are the religious elements of all early printing overlooked? And why did printing in China not have the immediate obvious impact it did in Europe?

T. H. Barrett, a leading scholar of medieval China, brings us the answers through the intriguing story of Empress Wu (AD 625–705) and the revolution in printing that occurred during her rule. Linking Asian and European history with substantial new research into Chinese sources, Barrett identifies methods of transmitting texts before printing and explains the historical context of seventh-century China. He explores the dynastic reasons behind Empress Wu’s specific interest in printing and the motivating role of her private religious beliefs. He also deduces from eighth- and ninth-century Chinese records an explanation for the lesser impact of the introduction of printing in China than in Europe. As Renaissance Europe was later astonished to learn of China’s achievement, so today’s reader will be fascinated by this engaging perspective on the history of printing and the technological superiority of Empress Wu’s China.

The A&AePortal edition of this book includes 5 additional images that were not featured in the original print version.

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As nations in the Americas gained independence in the early nineteenth century, a pictorial landscape tradition emerged. By 1840, landscape painting had become the primary medium for articulating conceptions of land and nation in the development of North and South American cultural identity. Picturing the Americas offers the first comprehensive treatment of this genre on both American continents, bringing into dialogue the landscape traditions of artists practicing between 1840 and 1940.

The book includes works by U.S. artists Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, and Georgia O’Keeffe; Canadian artists Joseph Légaré, Frances Anne Hopkins, and Lawren Harris; Mexico’s José María Velasco, Uruguay’s Joaquín Torres-García, and Brazil’s Tarsila do Amaral, among many others. Leading scholars offer a Pan-American perspective on these landscape traditions: essays consider the emergence of modernism, as well as how the development of landscape imagery reflects the intricately intertwined geographies and sociopolitical histories of the peoples, nations, regions, and diasporas of the two continents.

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In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, burgeoning American cities like New Orleans and Philadelphia seemed increasingly chaotic. Noise, odors, and a feverish level of activity on the streets threatened to overwhelm the senses. Growing populations placed new demands on every aspect of the urban landscape—streets, parks, schools, asylums, cemeteries, markets, waterfronts, and more. In this unique exploration of the early history of urban architecture and design, leading architectural historian Dell Upton reveals the fascinating confluence of sociological, cultural, and psychological factors that shaped American cities in the antebellum years.

Through contemporary travel accounts, diaries, and correspondence, as well as maps, architectural drawings, paintings, and prints—many previously unpublished—Upton investigates not only how buildings were designed, streets were laid out, and urban space was put to use, but also why. He offers original insights into the way cities were imagined, and an extensive selection of illustrations recreates the various features of the urban landscape in the nineteenth century.

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*Many of the black-and-white images in the original print edition have been replaced by color images in this ePortal version."

“Francesco Dal Co has reconstructed an incredible adventure and his account is revelatory. Upon reading it, I realized many things that I had personally experienced but had never before understood.”—Renzo Piano


The Centre Georges Pompidou, also called Beaubourg, is today considered an icon of contemporary Paris, the quintessence of a modern building, and a model for what a museum can be. In 1971, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, together with the engineering firm Ove Arup & Partners, won an international architecture competition with their innovative and irreverent design. Completed in 1977, the building was at first received skeptically by critics, yet it was quickly embraced by the public as a beloved monument of the modern city of Paris. This lively intellectual biography of the building explores its history and the reasons for its success, from its genesis as a politically calculated response to Paris’s turbulent 1968 student protests to the role played by architects in its construction, as well as the historical influences and the engineering solutions that inform its design. A key reason for the Centre Pompidou’s success indeed lies in its ability to channel architectural memory, connecting it powerfully to Paris’s historic urban fabric. This essential text on one of the twentieth century’s most significant buildings is accompanied by a portfolio of rare drawings and photographs. 

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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 is the first 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. It provides an overview of the artist’s career, featuring essays by noted scholars John Elderfield, Ruth E. Fine, Jane Livingston, Steven Nash, and Gerald Nordland, as well as an illustrated chronology, list of exhibitions, bibliography, and selection of studio notes.

When Andy Grundberg landed in New York in the early 1970s as a budding writer, photography was at the margins of the contemporary art world. By 1991, when he left his post as critic for the New York Times, photography was at the vital center of artistic debate. Grundberg writes eloquently and authoritatively about photography’s “boom years,” chronicling the medium’s increasing role within the most important art movements of the time, from Earth Art and Conceptual Art to performance and video. He also traces photography’s embrace by museums and galleries, as well as its politicization in the culture wars of the 80s and 90s.

Grundberg reflects on the landmark exhibitions that defined the moment and his encounters with the work of leading photographers—many of whom he knew personally—including Gordon Matta-Clark, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Mapplethorpe. He navigates crucial themes such as photography’s relationship to theory as well as feminism and artists of color. Part memoir and part history, this perspective by one of the period’s leading critics ultimately tells a larger story about the crucial decades of the 70s and 80s through the medium of photography.

With a revelatory analysis of how the postwar French tapestry revival provided a medium for modern art and a model for its discourse and marketing on both sides of the Atlantic, Weaving Modernism presents a fascinating reexamination of modernism’s relationship to decoration, reproducibility, and politics. Tapestry offered artists a historically grounded medium for distributing and marketing their work, helped expand the visibility and significance of abstraction at midcentury, and facilitated modernism’s entry into the dominant paradigm of the postwar period. K. L. H. Wells situates tapestry as part of a broader “marketplace modernism” in which artists participated, conjuring a lived experience of visual culture in corporate lobbies, churches, and even airplanes, as well as in galleries and private homes. This extensively researched study features previously unpublished illustrations and little-known works by such major artists as Helen Frankenthaler, Henri Matisse, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, and Frank Stella.

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This original book untangles fundamental confusions about historical relationships among Islam, representational images, and philosophy. Closely examining some of the most meaningful and best preserved premodern illustrated manuscripts of Islamic cosmographies, Persis Berlekamp refutes the assertion often made by other historians of medieval Islamic art that, while representational images did exist, they did not serve religious purposes.

The author focuses on widely disseminated Islamic images of the wonders of creation, ranging from angels to human-snatching birds, and argues that these illustrated manuscripts aimed to induce wonder at God's creation, as was their stated purpose. She tracks the various ways that images advanced that purpose in the genre's formative milieu—the century and a half following the Mongol conquest of the Islamic East in 1258. Delving into social history and into philosophical ideas relevant to manuscript and image production, Berlekamp shows that philosophy occupied an established, if controversial, position within Islam. She thereby radically reframes representational images within the history of Islam.

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Francisco Oller (1833–1917) was a Puerto Rican painter whose work was admired on both sides of the Atlantic. A native of San Juan, Oller spent over twenty years in Europe, establishing himself as one of the most distinguished transatlantic painters of his day. Oller participated in the pioneering movements of Realism, Impressionism, and naturalism, and he developed mutually influential relationships with such artists as Camille Pissarro and Gustave Courbet. These artistic trends informed his novel Realist-Impressionist approach, with which he would revolutionize the school of painting in his native Puerto Rico.

In this original and important book, Edward J. Sullivan advances close readings of works spanning Oller’s entire career and offers insights into the development of the Caribbean basin in the nineteenth century. From San Juan to Paris and Back recasts Oller as a central figure in nineteenth-century art and restores the significance of Oller’s work and his influence in shaping a uniquely Caribbean aesthetic.

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