New Books In Art

For more than thirteen centuries, caravans transported millions of enslaved people from Africa south of the Sahara into what is now the Kingdom of Morocco. Today there are no museums, plaques, or monuments that recognize this history of enslavement, but enslaved people and their descendants created the Gnawa identity that preserves this largely suppressed heritage. This pioneering book describes how Gnawa emerged as a practice associated with Blackness and enslavement by reviewing visual representation and musical traditions from the late nineteenth century to the present. Cynthia J. Becker addresses the historical consciousness of subaltern groups and how they give Blackness material form through modes of dress, visual art, religious ceremonies, and musical instruments in performance. She examines what it means to self-identify as Black in Morocco (a country typically associated with the Middle East and the Arab world), especially during this time of increased contemporary African migration, which has made B

In this episode, Steven Fine, Churgin Professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, Israel, discusses his new book Arch of Titus: From Jerusalem to Rome—and Back, published in Brill’s Religious Studies, Theology and Philosophy E-Books Online collection. He explores how the Arch has been a symbol of subjugation as well as empowerment for both Jewish and Christian cultures as they evolved across centuries; how it is a door to the story of the Jewish community’s resilience; how it has inspired other monuments of power over globally; the layers of meaning it contains; and the reverberation, and thus enhancement, of its meaning in the digital age. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

We live in a networked world. Online social networking platforms and the World Wide Web have changed how society thinks about connectivity. Because of the technological nature of such networks, their study has predominantly taken place within the domains of computer science and related scientific fields. But arts and humanities scholars are increasingly using the same kinds of visual and quantitative analysis to shed light on aspects of culture and society hitherto concealed. Written by Ruth Ahnert, Sebastian Ahnert, Nicole Coleman, and Scott Weingart, The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities (Cambridge UP, 2021) contends that networks are a category of study that cuts across traditional academic barriers, uniting diverse disciplines through a shared understanding of complexity in our world. Moreover, we are at a moment in time when it is crucial that arts and humanities scholars join the critique of how large-scale network data and advanced network analysis are being harnessed for the purpos

Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art (Princeton UP, 2021) presents a groundbreaking blend of art historical and social scientific methods to chart, for the first time, the sheer scale of nineteenth-century artistic production. With new quantitative evidence for more than five hundred thousand works of art, Diana Seave Greenwald provides fresh insights into the nineteenth century, and the extent to which art historians have focused on a limited—and potentially biased—sample of artwork from that time. She addresses long-standing questions about the effects of industrialization, gender, and empire on the art world, and she models more expansive approaches for studying art history in the age of the digital humanities. Examining art in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Greenwald features datasets created from indices and exhibition catalogs that—to date—have been used primarily as finding aids. From this body of information, she reveals the importance of access to t

Between the Stock Market Crash and the Vietnam War, American corporations were responsible for the construction of thousands of headquarters across the United States. Over this time, the design of corporate headquarters evolved from Beaux-Arts facades to bold modernist expressions. \ Grace Ong Yan's book Building Brands: The Architecture of Corporate Modernism (Lund Humphries, 2021) examines how clients and architects together crafted buildings to reflect their company’s brand, carefully considering consumers’ perception and their emotions towards the architecture and the messages they communicated. By focusing on four American corporate headquarters: the PSFS Building by George Howe and William Lescaze, the Johnson Wax Administration Building by Frank Lloyd Wright, Lever House by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and The Röhm & Haas Building by Pietro Belluschi, Building Brands shows how corporate modernism evolved. In the 1930s, architecture and branding were separate and distinct. By the 1960s, they were complet

In this wide-ranging and authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Christopher Wood tracks the evolution of the historical study of art from the late middle ages through the rise of the modern scholarly discipline of art history. Synthesizing and assessing a vast array of writings, episodes, and personalities, this original account of the development of art-historical thinking will appeal to readers both inside and outside the discipline. A History of Art History (Princeton UP, 2019) shows that the pioneering chroniclers of the Italian Renaissance—Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giorgio Vasari—measured every epoch against fixed standards of quality. Only in the Romantic era did art historians discover the virtues of medieval art, anticipating the relativism of the later nineteenth century, when art history learned to admire the art of all societies and to value every work as an index of its times. The major art historians of the modern era, however—Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Heinrich Wölfflin, Erwin Pano

Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe: Sarmatia Europea to Post-Communist Bloc (Routledge, 2021) puts images centre stage and argues for the agency of the visual in the construction of Europe's east as a socio-political and cultural entity. This book probes into the discontinuous processes of mapping the eastern European space and imaging the eastern European body. Beginning from the Renaissance maps of Sarmatia Europea, it moves onto the images of women in ethnic dress on the pages of travellers' reports from the Balkans, to cartoons of children bullied by dictators in the satirical press, to Cold War cartography, and it ends with photos of protesting crowds on contemporary dust jackets. Studying the eastern European 'iconosphere' leads to the engagement with issues central for image studies and visual culture: word and image relationship, overlaps between the codes of othering and self-fashioning, as well as interaction between the diverse modes of production specific to cartography, travel illustrations, cari

Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today I interview Sergio Lopez-Pineiro about his new book, A Glossary of Urban Voids (2020). It's one of the more fascinating books I've encountered in some time. And I say "encountered" because it's not only a book, in the traditional sense of something you read, but also a keen intellectual and aesthetic experience: the very design of the book and its use of the glossary as a form open up exciting ways of thinking and seeing. And this is very much to the point for Lopez-Pineiro, because the urban void about which he writes is a phenomenon that resists definition. It is, in his words, "unspecified and underspecified." And that's exactly what makes it so intriguing. Join me in hearing Lopez-Pineiro show us how some of the most seemingly overlooked and neglected areas of our urban environments may end up being the most crucial for our freedoms and our possibilities. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of

Federico Fellini’s distinct style delighted generations of film viewers and inspired filmmakers and artists around the world. In Fellini’s Films and Commercials: From Postwar to Postmodern, renowned Fellini scholar Frank Burke presents a film-by-film analysis of the famed director’s cinematic output from a theoretical perspective. The book explores Fellini’s movement from relatively classic filmmaking to modernist reflexivity and then to ‘postmodern reproduction’. Burke moves from analysis of stories told from a relatively ‘objective’ standpoint, to increased concentration on Fellini-as-author and on the cinematic apparatus, to Fellini’s dismantling of authorship and cinematic apparatus, to his postmodern signifying strategies. Grounded in poststructuralist approaches to texts and signification, Burke shows that Fellini is profoundly readable, if extremely complex. Revisiting Burke’s 1996 Fellini’s Films: From Postwar to Postmodern, this new edition includes revised material from the original, plus a new pref

Theological Stains: Art Music and the Zionist Project (Oxford UP, 2020) offers the first in-depth study of the development of art music in Israel from the mid-twentieth century to the turn of the twenty-first. In a bold and deeply researched account, author Assaf Shelleg explores the theological grammar of Zionism and its impact on the art music written by emigrant and native composers. He argues that Israeli art music, caught in the tension between a bibliocentric territorial nationalism on the one hand and the histories of deterritorialized Jewish diasporic cultures on the other, often features elements of both of these competing narratives. Even as composers critically engaged with the Zionist paradigm, they often reproduced its tropes and symbols, thereby creating aesthetic hybrids with 'theological stains.' Drawing on newly uncovered archives of composers' autobiographical writings and musical sketches, Shelleg closely examines the aesthetic strategies that different artists used to grapple with establi

Today on the podcast, Ruth Mazo Karras, the Lecky Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin talks about her new book, Thou Art the Man: The Masculinity of David in the Christian and Jewish Middle Ages, out this year, 2021 with University of Pennsylvania Press. "How do we approach the study of masculinity in the past?" Ruth Mazo Karras asks. Medieval documents that have come down to us tell a great deal about the things that men did, but not enough about what they did specifically as men, or what these practices meant to them in terms of masculinity. Yet no less than in our own time, masculinity was a complicated construct in the Middle Ages. In Thou Art the Man, Karras focuses on one figure, King David, who was important in both Christian and Jewish medieval cultures, to show how he epitomized many and sometimes contradictory aspects of masculine identity. For late medieval Christians, he was one of the Nine Worthies, held up as a model of valor and virtue; for medieval Jews, he was the paradigmatic king

Design and Spirituality: A Philosophy of Material Cultures (Routledge, 2021) examines the philosophical context of our current situation and its implications for design. It explores how modernity and our constricted notions of progress have contributed to today’s crisis of values, and argues for a re-establishment and re-affirmation of self-transcending priorities, together with an ethos of moderation and sufficiency. A wide range of topics are covered, including material culture and spiritual teachings; sustainability and the spiritual perspective; traditional and indigenous knowledge; technology and spirituality; notions of meaningful design; and how particular material things can have deeper, symbolic significance. There are also reflections on areas such as the language of design; busyness and its relationship to wisdom; design and social disparity; and traditional sacred practices. While not avoiding issues that are controversial, and sometimes hard-hitting, Design and Spirituality gets to the heart of t

It is now just over a decade since protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square started Egypt's chapter in the events of the Arab Spring. Much has been made in western criticism of art and culture's role in the revolution, but the everyday cultural production of studio artists, graffiti artists, musicians, and writers since has attracted less attention. How have artists responded personally and artistically to the political transformation ? What has social role of art been in these periods of transition and uncertainty? What are the aesthetic shifts and stylistic transformations present in the contemporary Egyptian art world? Caroline Seymour-Jorn speaks with Pierre d'Alancaisez about her many years of research in Cairo that goes beyond the current understandings of creative work solely as a form of resistance or political commentary, providing a more nuanced analysis of creative production in the Arab world. Caroline suggests that young artists like Hany Rashed or The Choir Project have turned their creative focus incr

What is the future for the museum? In The Museum as a Space of Social Care (Routledge, 2020), Nuala Morse, a Lecturer in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, rethinks the museum by foregrounding the importance of care, and though the framework of care thinking. Using a detailed ethnographic case study, the book explores participatory practice and community engagement, thinking through the rise of key professions within the museum, along with the auditing and management regimes shaping care by and in the museum. As cultural organisations re-emerge following the impact of the global pandemic, the book provides a starting point to reassess and reimagine the museum, and will be essential reading across arts, humanities, social sciences, and for cultural sector professionals. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! ht

The paintings and drawings Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) produced from 1835 to his death are seen by many as his most audacious and compelling work, a highly personal final vision that ranks with the late styles of the greatest artists. In this study, Sam Smiles shows how a richer account of Turner’s achievement can be presented once his historical circumstances are given proper attention. He discusses the style and subject matter of Turner’s later oil paintings and watercolours, his commercial dealings and his relations with patrons; he examines the artist’s critical reception and scrutinises accounts of his physical and mental health to see what can be reliably said about this last phase of creative endeavour. Emerging from this study is an artist who used his final years to consolidate the principles that had motivated him throughout his career. Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana

Today I talked to Jessica Helfand about her new book Face: A Visual Odyssey (MIT Press, 2019) Helfand is a designer, artist, and author. She’s taught at Yale University for more than 20 years, cofounded Design Observer, and has had additional roles at a variety of institutions ranging from the American Academy in Rome to the California Institute of Technology. We’ve always visited churches and museums to gaze at faces. So what’s now changed? Today, about two billion images get uploaded daily to social media – of which nearly 100 million are estimated to be selfies. As Daniel Boorstin presaged in his seminal 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, we’ve become consumed as a culture by our own self-reflections. In this episode, Helfand guides listeners through everything from caricatures (i.e., loaded portraits), to Facebook and selfie-sticks hitting the mainstream in 2006, to how now every third photograph taken by people from 18 to 24 years of age is of themselves. From the question of who’s

Erin Duncan O’Neill (Assistant Professor, University of Oklahoma) speaks with Elizabeth Emery (Professor, Montclair State University) about Emery’s recent book, Reframing Japonisme: Women and the Asian Art Market in Nineteenth-Century France, 1853-1914 (Bloomsbury, 2020). Women figured prominently among the leading collectors and purveyors of Asian art in mid-nineteenth-century France, but scholars no longer recognize their influence. In her latest book, Reframing Japonisme,Elizabeth Emery asks us to consider their disappearance in light of the gendered dynamics at play in practices of artistic production and circulation of that period.  She presents a trove of materials--art objects, literary accounts, and fragmentary records scattered among diverse archives—to bring renewed attention to women’s contributions to the French discover of Japanese art and its celebration in museums, social settings, and the global art market. In this conversation, Emery and Duncan O’Neill discuss two women at the heart of her st

It is almost twenty years since contemporary art took a ‘participation turn’. Now, just about every museum or theatre company has a participation or engagement department. It is nothing short of orthodoxy that one of art’s core roles is to reach out to audiences beyond art institutions - and paradoxically it is often art institutions that mandate this function. How can we reconcile the somewhat forgotten history - and ongoing practice - of the community arts with the recent rise of participatory art, social practice, or outreach and engagement? François Matarasso speaks to Pierre d'Alancaisez about his long-term engagement in community art practice, the meanings of participation and cultural democracy, and his proposals for thinking about cultural and artistic participation as a fundamental human right. We talk about the history of the community arts movement in the UK, his influential 1997 paper Use or Ornament, ways of supporting cultural democracy through projects like Fun Palaces, and reaching peak cultur

At the dawn of the 1950s, a promising and dedicated young painter named Helen Frankenthaler, fresh out of college, moved back home to New York City to make her name. By the decade's end, she had succeeded in establishing herself as an important American artist of the postwar period. In the years in between, she made some of the most daring, head-turning paintings of her day and also came into her own as a woman: traveling the world, falling in and out of love, and engaging in an ongoing artistic education. She also experienced anew—and left her mark on—the city in which she had been raised in privilege as the daughter of a judge, even as she left the security of that world to pursue her artistic ambitions. Brought to vivid life by acclaimed art historian Alexander Nemerov, these defining moments—from her first awed encounter with Jackson Pollock's drip paintings to her first solo gallery show to her tumultuous breakup with eminent art critic Clement Greenberg—comprise a portrait as bold and distinctive as the

Artwork as opposed to experiment? Engineer versus artist? We often see two different cultural realms separated by impervious walls. But some fifty years ago, the borders between technology and art began to be breached. In Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture (MIT Press, 2020), W. Patrick McCray shows how in this era, artists eagerly collaborated with engineers and scientists to explore new technologies and create visually and sonically compelling multimedia works. This art emerged from corporate laboratories, artists' studios, publishing houses, art galleries, and university campuses. Many of the biggest stars of the art world—Robert Rauschenberg, Yvonne Rainer, Andy Warhol, Carolee Schneemann, and John Cage—participated, but the technologists who contributed essential expertise and aesthetic input often went unrecognized. Coming from diverse personal backgrounds, this roster of engineers and scientists includes Frank J. Malina, the American rocket-pioneer turned k