Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–1852) was one of the most influential architects and designers of the nineteenth century, a man whose ideas and design principles were adopted and developed by followers as diverse as William Morris and Frank Lloyd Wright. As an architect, Pugin created cathedrals, churches, colleges, convents, and a wide range of domestic buildings whose form and structure changed the nature of architecture in his era. As a designer, he was responsible for the Gothic Revival, the most popular decorative form in Britain and around the world, and he was the creator of stunning furniture and woodwork; silver, metalwork, and jewelry; pottery and tiles; textiles and wallpapers; and books. This important book, written by eminent scholars, presents a comprehensive picture of Pugin, his achievements, and his times.

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This special, expanded issue of Museum Studies focuses on the Art Institute of Chicago's growing collection of works by African Americans. Essays on the work of such influential artists as Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Marion Perkins, and Lorna Simpson are presented along with an article on the Art Institute’s striking daguerreotype of Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass. In addition to these essays, a portfolio section features twenty-nine images, with informative, brief entries examining each work. This important publication presents an overview of the concerns surrounding race in art, celebrates the achievements of a number of gifted African American artists, and provides a broad, multifaceted view of American art and culture.

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Votive objects or ex-votos are a broad category of material artifacts produced with the intention of being offered as acts of faith. Common across historical periods, religions, and cultures, they are presented as tokens of gratitude for prayers answered, as well as the physical manifestation of hopes and anxieties. Agents of Faith explores votive offerings in the context of material culture, art history, and religious studies to better understand their history and present-day importance. By looking at what humans have chosen to offer in their votive transactions, this volume uncovers their most intimate moments in life and questions the nature, role, and function of one of the most fundamental aspects of the relationship between people and things—the imbuing of objects with sentiment. Encompassing exquisite works of art as well as votives of humble origin and material, with objects dating from 2000 B.C. to the twenty-first century, the beautiful illustrations and wide-ranging text expose the global reach of votive practices and the profoundly personal nature behind their creation.

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In 1915 the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) embarked upon a mission to energize the American textile industry.  Curators sought to innovate a distinctly “American” design idiom drawing on a more universal “primitive” language. Ethnographic objects were included in study rooms; designers gained access to storage rooms; and museum artifacts were loaned to design houses and department stores. In order to attract designers and reluctant manufacturers, who quickly responded, collections were supplemented with specimens including fur garments from Siberia, Persian costumes, and Javanese textiles. This book positions the project at the AMNH in the broader narrative of early 20th-century design education in New York, which includes the roles of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Newark Museum.

The formation of the American Watercolor Society in 1866 by a small, dedicated group of painters transformed the perception of what had long been considered a marginal medium. Artists of all ages, styles, and backgrounds took up watercolor in the 1870s, inspiring younger generations of impressionists and modernists. By the 1920s many would claim it as “the American medium.”

This engaging and comprehensive book tells the definitive story of the metamorphosis of American watercolor practice between 1866 and 1925, identifying the artist constituencies and social forces that drove the new popularity of the medium. The major artists of the movement—Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, William Trost Richards, Thomas Moran, Thomas Eakins, Charles Prendergast, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, Charles Demuth, and many others—are represented.

Marking the Columbus quincentennial, this catalog of a traveling exhibition explores the common threads in fourteen pre-Columbian cultures, from the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec of Mexico and Guatemala through the Chavin culture (900–200 B.C.) of the Andes to the Moche, Chimu, and the Inca empire. The book contains essays from 26 scholars examining sacred geographies, myths, and ancient beliefs as they are transmitted through visual arts and architecture.

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This publication brings together prominent art historians, conservators, and scientists to discuss fresh approaches to the study of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern works of bronze. Featuring significant bronzes from the Harvard Art Museums’ holdings as well as other museum collections, the volume’s eight essays present technical and formal analyses in a format that will be useful for both general readers and students of ancient art. The text provides an overview of ancient manufacturing processes as well as modern methods of scientific examination, and it focuses on objects as diverse as large-scale statuary and more utilitarian armor, vessels, and lamps. Filling a current gap in the art historical literature, this book offers a much-needed, accessible introduction to ancient bronzes.

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This volume documents the splendid accomplishments of Ancient West Mexico, and brings together some of its finest examples of sculptural art, including representations of people, animals and plants, as well as vessels and models of houses, ceremonial centres, ball games and ritual scenes. All the extraordinary earthenware figures illustrated here have been recovered from burial sites and shaft tombs. They represent a wide range of subjects — warriors, chieftains, ladies, acrobats, shamans, musicians, ball players, festival couples and bound prisoners — in a variety of styles from about 200 BC to AD 800 — that compose the artistic canon of Ancient West Mexico, a region encompassing the modern states of Colima, Jalisco and Nayarit.

In the mid-1960s, at the height of his creative powers, Andy Warhol produced hundreds of three-minute cinematic portraits, called "Screen Tests." Although rarely screened now, these short films captured a virtual who's who of the avant-garde, including such cultural icons as Edie Sedgwick, Bob Dylan, Salvador Dalí, and Susan Sontag. In this initial volume of the authorized catalogue raisonné of Warhol's films, Warhol authority Callie Angell examines all 189 people captured by Warhol's lens. Stills from many of the films appear here for the first time. Drawing on 13 years of original research into the Screen Test subjects and their relationships to Warhol, Angell provides an unprecedented look at the pop art master's working method, and a unique record of his colorful social and professional life.

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The second volume of this catalogue raisonné project (The Films of Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: 1963–1965, edited by John G. Hanhardt [2021]) will be available on the A&AePortal at a later date.

 

Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744–1818) was one of the most talented still-life painters of the French school. Her exquisite paintings, today located in some of the world’s finest museums, were admired and collected by many of her contemporaries, including Marie Antoinette, who became the artist’s most important patron.

This book, the first devoted to Vallayer-Coster in over 30 years, presents a stunning array of the artist’s still-life works, many of which have never before been reproduced in color. Recently rediscovered works, including three royal portraits from the collection of Versailles and a hitherto unknown pastel of Marie-Antoinette, are published here for the first time. The authors draw on the most current research to examine Vallayer-Coster’s relationship with landscape painter Joseph Vernet; her response to her immediate predecessor, still-life painter Jean-Siméon Chardin; her role with contemporary collectors of her art; and her place in the larger context of the eighteenth-century art world. The book also includes new archival and conservation findings and an illustrated index of extant paintings by Vallayer-Coster.

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One of Italy’s greatest modern painters, Antonio Mancini (1852–1930) is best known for his daring and innovative painting methods. This overview of his career—the first comprehensive study in English—follows upon the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s recent acquisition of fifteen major oil paintings and pastels by Mancini, including the famous Il Saltimbanco (1877–78), all of which are included in this beautiful volume.

Mancini’s paintings are at once realistic and visionary, and they span a career that brought him from the legendary slums of Naples to Paris, Rome, and English country houses. Of particular interest is Mancini’s relevance to the American art world, where he was once a much-discussed controversial figure, supported by a small group of American patrons and artists before becoming famous in Italy. John Singer Sargent is said to have called Mancini the greatest living painter.

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Coinciding with the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade, this multi-disciplinary volume chronicles the iconography of sugar, slavery, and the topography of Jamaica from the beginning of British rule in 1655 to the aftermath of emancipation in the 1840s. Focusing on the visual and material culture of slavery and emancipation in Jamaica, it offers new perspectives on art, music, and performance in Afro-Jamaican society and on the Jewish diaspora in the Caribbean. Central to the book is Sketches of Character (1837–38)—a remarkable series of lithographs by the Jewish Jamaican artist Isaac Mendes Belisario—the earliest visual representation of the masquerade form Jonkonnu. Innovative scholarship traces the West African roots of Jonkonnu through its evolution in Jamaica and continuing transformation today; offers a unique portrait of Jamaican culture at a pivotal historical moment; and provides a new model for interpreting the visual culture of empire.

Mu Xin (b. 1927) is one of the leading expatriate artist-intellectuals of our time and is known for his complex writings and paintings. Clearly a formidable figure in the cultural and intellectual history of Chinese modernism, Mu Xin is admired for his unique synthesis of Chinese and Western aesthetic sensibilities. This catalogue focuses on a group of thirty-three landscape paintings that Mu Xin painted in 1978–79, in the immediate aftermath of the Great Cultural Revolution. Many of these works have never been exhibited or published in the West. In addition, the book features Mu Xin’s Prison Notes, some sixty-six calligraphic sheets that were written when the artist was in solitary confinement in China in 1972.

This essential guide features individual entries of exceptional frames from the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. An essay by Steven Starling charts the development and stylistic history of frames, referencing examples included in the catalogue. Additionally, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset's foundational essay illuminates the large, broader conceptual issues associated with the subject. The book includes a glossary of terms and an extensive, interdisciplinary bibliography.

By the end of the 16th century, Europe, Africa, and Asia were connected to North and South America via a vast network of complex trade routes. This led, in turn, to dynamic cultural exchanges between these continents and a proliferation of diverse art forms in Latin America. This monumental book transcends geographic boundaries and explores the history of the confluence of styles, materials, and techniques among Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas through the end of the colonial era—a period marked by the independence movements, the formation of national states, and the rise of academic art.

Written by distinguished international scholars, essays cover a full range of topics, including city planning, iconography in painting and sculpture, East-West connections, the power of images, and the role of the artist. Beautifully illustrated with some three hundred works—many published for the first time—this book presents a spectacular selection of decorative arts, textiles, silver, sculpture, painting, and furniture. Scholarly entries on each of the works highlight the various cultural influences and differences throughout this vast region. This groundbreaking book also includes an illustrated chronology, informative maps, and an exhaustive bibliography and is sure to set a new standard in the field of Latin American studies.

This book showcases 110 objects from the Dallas Museum of Art’s world-renowned African collection. In contrast to Western “art for art’s sake,” tradition-based African art served as an agent of religion, social stability, or social control. Chosen both for their visual appeal and their compelling histories and cultural significance, the works of art are presented under the themes of leadership and status; the cycle of life; decorative arts; and influences (imported and exported). Also included are many fascinating photographs that show the context in which these objects were originally used.

In recent years, the Dallas Museum of Art has expanded its collection of South Asian art from a small number of Indian temple sculptures to nearly 500 works, including Indian Hindu and Buddhist sculptures, Himalayan Buddhist bronze sculptures and ritual objects, artwork from Southeast Asia, and decorative arts from India’s Mughal period. Artworks in the collection have origins from the former Ottoman empire to Java, and architectural pieces suggest the grandeur of buildings in the Indian tradition.

This volume details the cultural and artistic significance of more than 140 featured works, which range from Tibetan thangkas and Indian miniature paintings to stone sculptures and bronzes. Relating these works to one another through interconnecting narratives and cross-references, scholars and curators provide a broad cultural history of the region.

The superb sculptures of the Baule people of the Ivory Coast have long been recognized in Europe and the United States as one of Africa's most significant art traditions. The work of many modern artists—Amedeo Modigliani in particular—reflects the direct influence of Baule invention and forms. This original book, filled with the insights of an author who has lived with the Baule and studied their art for more than twenty-five years, explores for the first time the full texture and details of Baule life and art. Abundant illustrations include field photographs showing artworks in the intimacy of daily lives and public performances, and museum photographs of Baule sculptures.

Susan Vogel focuses on the creation and uses of Baule works of art apart from their definition as "art" in Western eyes. She establishes a means for understanding Baule expressive culture from the perspective of the Baule individuals. In an extensive discussion of Baule experiences of art objects, she finds different kinds of looking and seeing—art that is watched (mask dances and entertainment performances), that is seen without looking (works of art too sacred or awesome to be scrutinized), that is glimpsed (sculptures made for personal shrines and kept in private rooms), and that is visible to all (elaborately decorated objects that fulfill the desire for beauty and for open display of talents).

Celebrating two collectors’ passion for Americana and the window it provides into the everyday beauty of the past

Becoming America offers a multifaceted view of one of the foremost collections of 18th- and 19th-century American folk and decorative art from the rural Northeast. Essays by leading specialists discuss the culture of furniture workshops, exuberant painted decoration, techniques of sewing and quilting, and poignant stories about the families depicted in the portraits. The collection itself includes Shaker boxes, a beaded Iroquois hat, embroidered samplers, metalwork, scrimshaw, handwoven rugs, ceramics, and a weather vane. The majority of these works have never before been published. With lively essays and profuse illustrations, this handsome volume brings to life the aesthetic of early Americans living in the countryside and is an essential exploration of the period’s taste and style.

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This insightful book surveys the varied ways in which Black American artists responded to the political, social, and economic climate of the United States from the time of the Great Depression through the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision. Featuring paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by artists including Jacob Lawrence, Horace Pippin, Augusta Savage, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, Norman Lewis, Walter Augustus Simon, Loïs Mailou Jones, and more, the book recognizes the contributions Black artists made to Social Realism and abstraction as they debated the role of art in society and community. Black artists played a vital part in midcentury art movements, and the inclusive policies of government programs like the Works Progress Administration brought more of these artists into mainstream circles.

Earnestine Jenkins discusses the work of Black artists during this period; the perspective of Black women artists with a focus on the sculpture of Augusta Savage; and the pedagogy of Black American art through the art and teaching of Walter Augustus Simon.

Published by Yale University Press in association with the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis

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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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This book explores the representation of women in the Byzantine Empire. Featuring nearly two hundred works of art, the volume illustrates how women in Byzantium were represented in both material and literary culture and explores the continuities and changes in their lives throughout the era.

The featured artworks—gathered from premier collections in North America—date from the fourth through the fifteenth century and represent a full range of media and subject matter. They include luxury objects such as ivories, silver vessels, and precious jewelry; utilitarian objects such as toiletries and weaving tools; official objects such as coins and seals; and ritual objects such as icons and amulets. Organized in two broad categories—women in the public sphere and women in the private sphere—these works of art and objects of everyday life illustrate the diverse roles of women in Byzantine society and offer a view of their personal and public lives. Introductory essays by leading Byzantinists Ioli Kalavrezou and Angeliki Laiou offer further insights into these themes.

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In the flourishing ancient Indian communities of the American Southwest and northwest Mexico, master potters created ceramic arts that are considered among the most accomplished in the world. The symbolic imagery and distinctive local styles of the region are unmistakable—simple volumetric shapes covered with complex, interlocking geometrical designs that are sometimes combined with bold abstract animal, human, and composite figures. Within this shared tradition are clearly identifiable local styles and symbolic vocabularies, and this lavishly illustrated book focuses on one of them: the ceramic works of the Casas Grandes-Paquimé area of northwest Mexico and adjoining parts of New Mexico and Arizona, c. A.D. 1200–1400.

For the first time on a comprehensive scale, expert art historians and an artist-teacher discuss the complex imagery of approximately ninety Casas Grandes vessels with fifty pieces representing other major styles of the Greater Southwest. Superb examples show polychromatic designs of real and mythological animals, together with abstract human figures and remarkably varied geometries, demonstrating the imaginative complexity and exceptional achievement of the Casas Grandes potters. Certain motifs reflect affinities with distant Mesoamerica, yet the authors show that these forms were absorbed into a visual vocabulary that reflected the unique artistic and cosmological outlook of Casas Grandes, within the native Southwestern cultural tradition.

This fascinating volume explores how research, craft, and technology are united in the Art Institute of Chicago’s mission to preserve its collection and further art-historical knowledge. Addressing the many challenges conservators face, the publication highlights their work on objects from throughout the museum, including books, furniture, electronic media, paintings, photographs, posters, sculpture, and textiles.

An introductory essay traces the development of the profession and its specific history at the Art Institute. Case studies written by the museum’s conservators and curators examine diverse works ranging from an ancient Egyptian statue of Osiris to Bruce Nauman’s video Clown Torture. The authors explore how they determine appropriate treatment, uncover an artist’s intentions and techniques, and employ pathbreaking new technologies.

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This handsome book presents more than seventy paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and sculptures by Edgar Degas (1834–1917) in Harvard University’s collections—one of the most important holdings of the artist’s work in the United States. In 1911, the Fogg Art Museum was the first museum to mount a one-man exhibition on Degas and was the only museum to do so during the artist’s lifetime. This book examines the history of Degas’s reception in the U.S., and in particular the pivotal role that Harvard played.

Marjorie Benedict Cohn offers a historical account of the formation of the prized collection of Degas’s works at the Fogg. Jean Sutherland Boggs provides an engaging personal recollection of her initial encounter in 1944 with Degas and his champion at the Fogg, associate director Paul J. Sachs, who inspired not only Boggs’s later work on Degas but also that of many other art historians, museum directors, and curators.

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A common theme of western American art—from the depictions of Indians by early explorers to the monumental landscapes of Albert Bierstadt to the vibrant images of Georgia O’Keeffe—is the transformation of the land through European-American exploration and resettlement. In this book, leading authorities look at western American art of the past three centuries, reevaluating it from the perspectives of history, art history, and American studies.

Jules David Prown begins the book by discussing the need for interdisciplinary approaches to broaden the study of western American art. Nancy K. Anderson then calls for a reconsideration of western art as art rather than documentation and for the adoption of new methods to probe its aesthetic, historical, political, and cultural complexities. William Cronon explores what an environmental historian might learn from American landscape art, concluding that each image must be read as a multilayered view intertwining past, present, and future within a larger context of progress and expansionism. Examining representations of American Indians, Brian W. Dippie finds that early works pictured them caught in a process of dramatic change while later artists showed them frozen outside of time: when the frontier ended, western art made nostalgia its defining characteristic. Martha A. Sandweiss argues that the ways in which views of the American west and its peoples reached nineteenth-century audiences—through large-edition prints, book illustrations, or theatrical exhibitions—significantly affected both the images and the meanings attached to them. Susan Prendergast Schoelwer challenges popular perceptions of the frontier as a womanless domain, discovering abundant pictures of Native American women in the art of the western fur trade. Howard R. Lamar concludes by discussing the changing perceptions of western artists and inhabitants of their region’s landscape in the twentieth century.

The aim of the present publication is to make visible the multifarious process of drawing’s emergence into modernity. To achieve this aim, the authors have dispensed with the traditionally privileged chronological, stylistic, or oeuvre-oriented formats of display in favor of a model of presentation based in a constellation of interrelated categories. The book is divided into three main sections (Medium, Discourse, and Object) and, within them, into several subsections that address specific aspects of these divisions. Grouped under these headings are drawings produced at different moments in time as well as different types of drawings.

This catalogue accompanied the exhibition "Drawing: The Invention of a Modern Medium," on view at the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from January 21 through May 7, 2017.

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From personal ornamentation to funerary practice, from palace decoration to private devotion, jade has played a major role in Chinese social, cultural, and political life for millennia. Exploring the history of this revered stone through the esteemed Grenville L. Winthrop Collection at the Harvard Art Museums—which includes some of the finest examples of ancient and archaizing jades outside China—this volume explains how and why jade developed its special significance. In-depth entries on over one hundred objects present recent archaeological discoveries and new information garnered from conservation analysis, while Jenny So’s broad and engaging narrative not only elucidates the layered meanings of the objects and their iconography but also delves into the unique qualities of the material and the craftsmanship involved in quarrying and working jade.

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Painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Elizabeth Catlett (b. 1915) played an influential role in America's African American and Mexico's revolutionary art communities in the mid-twentieth century. Catlett studied at the University of Iowa (where she briefly worked with Grant Wood), the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Art Students League in New York before moving to Mexico in 1947.

Focusing on Catlett’s evocative Negro Woman series from 1946–47, this book reveals Catlett’s commitment to social and political issues. All of the fifteen linoleum prints are featured together address the harsh reality of black women’s labor; renowned historical heroines such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Phillis Wheatley; and the fears, struggles, and achievements of ordinary African American women. Other notable works by Catlett are also included, and an absorbing essay by distinguished scholar Melanie Anne Herzog analyzes the artist’s powerful work from a biographical perspective.

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With contributions by Marina Belozerskaya, Till-Holger Borchert, Lorne Campbell, Reindert Falkenburg, Ivan Gaskell, Laura D. Gelfand, Peter Klein, Maximiliaan P. J. Martens, Carol J. Purtle, Victor M. Schmidt, Hugo van der Velden, Hélène Verougstraete, and Yvonne Yiu

This book features essays by leading scholars that explore a wide range of topics relating to 15th- and 16th-century Netherlandish diptychs. The text addresses the practical and social uses of the diptych, the history and origins of the format, and the philosophical issues related to the practice of researching these diptychs. It also analyzes the devotional function of these works in the context of contemporary texts and religious practices in northern Europe.

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