New Books In Art

In his new book The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing (Crown, 2017), Damion Searls presents the first biography of Hermann Rorschach and the history of the Rorschach Test. A story that is largely untold, Searls starts with the childhood of Rorschach and brings readers through his growth as a psychiatrist as he created an experiment to probe the mind using a set of ten inkblots. As a visual artist, Rorschach incorporated his ability to think about visuals and his belief that what is seen is more important than what we say. After his early death, Rorschach’s Test found its way to America being used by the military, to test job applicants, to evaluate defendants and parents in custody battles and people suffering from mental illness. In addition, it has been used throughout advertising and incorporated in Hollywood and popular culture. A tragic figure, and one of the most influential psychiatrists in the twentieth century, The Inkblots allows readers to better understand how R

Paul LeValley’s Art Follows Nature: A Worldwide History of the Nude (Edition One Books, 2016) is the first comprehensive study of the nude in art from around the world written by a naturist. Based on a series of columns LeValley wrote for Naturally magazine starting in 1988, the book is a deeply researched analysis of the nude in the history of art across Western and Non-Western cultures including Greece, Egypt, India, China, the Middle East, and Africa. Examples are examined within multiple contexts from the aesthetic to the philosophical and religious to the concern of popular culture. LeValley’s study includes over 700 color illustrations and the author has visited many of the sites in the narrative. To purchase the book please visit the author’s website. Kirstin L. Ellsworth has a Ph.D. in the History of Art from Indiana University (2005) and currently, is an Assistant Professor of Art History at California State University Dominguez Hill. Email: kellsworth@csudh.edu. Learn more about your ad choices.

In Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siecle Vienna (Brandeis University Press, 2016), Elana Shapira, Lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, examines the complex histories of Jewish cultural patronage in Vienna. She offers a nuanced and compelling account of the cultural networks of the time. This book is an important contribution, which overturns established ideas about the Jewishness of Viennese cultural figures of this period. Shapira brings into question dominant ideas about assimilation, modernism and cultural interchange. This book will be an important reference on this subject for many years to come. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Daniel Magaziner’s latest book, The Art of Life in South Africa (Ohio University Press, 2016, and UKZN Press, 2017), is a welcome addition to the intellectual history of South Africa. Rich in color images and documentary history, The Art of Life tells the story of African art in white apartheid South Africa, juxtaposing the beauty of an ordinary life well lived, against the random cruelty of the apartheid state. The book follows the story of the Ndaleni Art School in modern-day KwaZulu-Natal from 1952 until its closing in 1981. The school was set up to teach the art teachers of the Bantu education system, but in doing so, it opened up the student’s lives to more complex discussions of creativity, beauty and resilience. Magaziner sets up the tale by spinning the individual lives against the opposing pressures of both the apartheid state and the black consciousness movement. On the one side, rigid oppression, and on the other, the push to fight apartheid or be deemed a collaborator. The individual stories of

The Hereditary Estate by Daniel W. Coburn, is published by Kehrer Verlag (2015), with an essay by Karen Irvine, Curator and Associate Director at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and Kristen Pai Buck, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of New Mexico, 112 pages. The Hereditary Estate is the first major monograph by photographer Daniel W. Coburn. It functions as a ten-year retrospective and as a conceptual work of art. Coburn’s work and research investigates the family photo album employed as the visual infrastructure for the flawed ideology of the American Dream. Frustrated by the lack of images that document the true and sometimes troubling nature of his own familial history, the photographer set out to create a new archive, a potent supplement to the broken family album that exists in the collection of many families. Using photographs made over the last decade, and altered amateur photographs, he weaves a family narrative that is simultaneously beautiful and terrif

“Artaud lived with his neck placed firmly in the noose.” -Bauhaus* David Shafer’s new biography, Antonin Artaud (Reaktion Books and the University of Chicago Press, 2016), situates the life of this enigmatic and fascinating figure in historical context. From his bourgeois family background, through a life that included a variety of physical and mental health challenges, drug use, and institutionalization, Shafer traces the ways that Artaud’s intellectual and artistic development was shaped by broader historical and political events and forces. An actor of stage and screen, a poet, and theatre director, Artaud emerges in these chapters as the embodiment of the French revolutionary tradition in the cultural realm. Shafer traces his subjects geographic movements from his Mediterranean origins to the streets of Paris, and on to other destinations, Mexico and Ireland among these. In addition to these sites, Artaud held in his imagination a number of other locales, including the physical and cultural landscapes o

Photographer Leon Borensztein began Sharon (Kehrer Verlag, 2016), his most personal project, thirty years ago when his daughter was born: “Throughout my artistic career, I have been driven by the need to give voice to the unheard and unseen. This desire became a personal passion when my daughter Sharon was born. Just after her birth I felt there was something wrong, and slowly we learned that she was born with disabilities. I started photographing my daughter before she was born and I have never stopped.” When Sharon was in her early teens, Leon gained full custody of her when he split with her mother. His book is certainly a unique opportunity to increase awareness about disability, but is also a love letter to Sharon. It is both human and heartbreaking, beautiful and bold. Filled with poetic metaphor, Sharon has no text, which provides an intriguing and emotional experience. It is a book that demands and deserves multiple viewings. Leon Borenszstein earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1

In “Georgia O’Keeffe: At Home in the Wonderful Nothing,” a text accompanying the exhibition catalogue Georgia O’Keeffe: Watercolors 1916-1918 (Radius Books and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 2016), Amy Von Lintel investigates a lesser studied period in O’Keeffe’s life and work: the artist’s time in West Texas. In 1916, at the age of twenty-eight, O’Keeffe moved to Canyon, Texas to accept a position as founding faculty of the West Texas State Normal College. O’Keeffe had first journeyed to West Texas in 1912 to teach in the newly founded Amarillo City Public School District. During her time in Canyon, she produced 51 watercolors (46 of which are reproduced in the book), characterized by a level of experimentation that foreshadows her later work. The dry, flat lands of the region, and the stark horizons with their dramatic shadows and sunsets, appealed to O’Keeffe. From 1916-1918, she used watercolor to render landscapes, abstract images, and nude studies of her own body while learning to live in an American Wes

What is the future for Arts and Humanities in Europe? The podcast discusses these questions with Paul Benneworth, one of the authors, along with Magnus Gulbrandsen and Ellen Hazelkorn, of The Impact and Future of Arts and Humanities Research (Palgrave, 2016). Dr. Benneworth, from the University of Twente’s Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, was part of a pan-European project to consider the impact of Impact and the way Arts and Humanities narrate their public value, research which was the basis for the book. The book draws on a wealth of empirical and theoretical material, including comparative case studies from Ireland, Norway, and The Netherlands. The comparative approach allows the book to contextualise engagements with science policy, the role and purpose of the university, public value, and innovation, to offer a new vision of Arts and Humanities research that avoids instrumentalisation. The book is important and essential reading for all interested in the future of higher education and research

Amani Willett: Disquiet by Amani Willett, is published by Damiani Factory (2013), with an afterward by Marvin Heiferman, 128 pages. “Disquiet’s cinematic look suggests the palpable spaces in which Willett pondered both the depth and fragility of social and family relationships. And as we become immersed in the work, we imagine or remember ourselves in similar places and situations. While many photographic projects about parents and children have, in recent years, adopted a decidedly cool stance to keep sentimentality at bay, Willett takes a risk by so openly acknowledging our reflex to love, desire to protect, and the vulnerability we face once we do. This is the core subject or his work, without apology.” – Marvin Heiferman, excerpted from the essay, “Beneath the Surface in Disquiet.” New York-based photographer Amani Willett weaves intimate family pictures with broader portrayals of American society and its current economic and political instability in his book, Disquiet. Taken between 2010 and 2012, the p

Runaway slave Sojourner Truth gained fame in the nineteenth century as an abolitionist, feminist, and orator and earned a living partly by selling photographic carte de visite portraits of herself at lectures and by mail. Cartes de visite, similar in format to calling cards, were relatively inexpensive collectibles that quickly became a new mode of mass communication. Despite being illiterate, Truth copyrighted her photographs in her name and added the caption “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance. Sojourner Truth.” Featuring the largest collection of Truth’s photographs ever published, Enduring Truths: Sojourners Shadows and Substance (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is the first book to explore how she used her image, the press, the postal service, and copyright laws to support her activism and herself. A Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities at the University of California at Berkeley, the book’s author, Dr. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, specializes in 18th- through early 20th-cen

On today’s program, I talk with Scot McKendrick and Kathleen Doyle about their new book, The Art of the Bible Illuminated Manuscripts from the Medieval World, published by Thames and Hudson (and distributed in the United States by W. W. Norton) in November 2016. The book looks at 45 featured manuscripts from across the globe and through 1,000 years of history, including the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Queen Mary Psalter, the Canterbury Royal Bible, the Old English Hextateuch, the Welles Apocalypse, and the Paduan Bible Picture Book, among others. With more than 300 illustrations, which have been meticulously color corrected for this new book, the authors shed light on some of the finest but least-known paintings from the Middle Ages and on the development of art, literature, and civilization as we know it. Dr. Scot McKendrick is the head of Western Heritage Collections at the British Library. His publications include Codex Sinaiticus: New Perspective on the Ancient Biblical Manuscript; Illuminating the Renaiss

Assistant Professor Federica Goffi fills a blind spot in current architectural theory and practice with this book, Time Matter(s): Invention and Re-Imagination in Built Conservation: The Unfinished Drawing and Building of St. Peter’s, the Vatican (Routledge, 2013). In proposing a hybrid approach which merges architectural and conservation theory the work offers the reader a counter-viewpoint to common understandings of preservation as singular moment from the past which has been frozen and brought forward to the present. Through a micro-historical study of a Renaissance concept of restoration, a theoretical framework to question the issue of conservation as a creative endeavor arises. It focuses on Tiberio Alfarano’s 1571 ichnography of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, into which a complex body of religious, political, architectural and cultural elements is woven. By merging past and present temple’s plans, Alfarano created a track-drawing questioning the design pursued after Michelangelo’s death (1564),

Proof: Photographs from Four Generations of a Texas Family by Byrd Williams, with text by Byrd Williams IV, forward by Roy Flukinger and afterword by Anne Wilkes Tucker, is published by the University of North Texas Press, (2016). 224 pages. The Byrd Williams Collection at the University of North Texas contains more than 10,000 prints and 300,000 negatives, accumulated by four generations of Texas photographers, all named Byrd Moore Williams. Beginning in the 1880s in Gainesville, the four Byrds photographed customers in their studios, urban landscapes, crime scenes, Pancho Villa’s soldiers, televangelists, and whatever aroused their unpredictable and wide-ranging curiosity. When Byrd IV sat down to choose a selection from this dizzying array, he came face to face with the nature of mortality and memory, his own and his family’s. In some cases, these photos are the only evidence remaining that someone lived and breathed on this earth. The 193 photos selected here are organized into thematic sections such as

The value of the arts is a constant and vital question in contemporary culture. In Locating the Audience: How People Found Value in National Theatre Wales (Intellect Books, 2016) Kirsty Sedgman, British Academy Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, approaches this question from the point of view of the audience. The book offers an introduction to the question of what an audience is, as well as thinking through the best methods to study the audience, before turning to the story of National Theatre Wales (NTW). The book discusses the tensions between aesthetics and participation, using places and performances from NTW to illustrate the range of responses, and the range of value, that different types of audience can derive from theatre. An engaging and accessible introduction to both the theoretical and practical questions surrounding cultural value, measurement, audiences, and theatre, the book will interest a range of humanities and social science scholars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap

Why is it controversial to cast light-skinned actress Zoe Saldana as the lead character in a film about the performer Nina Simone? How should we understand the coexisting desire and revulsion of the black body that traces its roots to Thomas Jefferson’s longstanding relationship with his slave Sally Hemings and extends to contemporary attitudes towards black hair? In Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), Paul C. Taylor examines primary themes in racialism from the perspective of aesthetic culture. Taylor, Associate Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies and an Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies and at Penn State University, considers such issues as black invisibility, expressive culture and politics, and the problem of authenticity and cultural appropriation. He also lays the foundation for analytic philosophical tools to be brought more widely to bear on scholarly discussion of issues related to race and racialism. Learn more about your ad choices.

“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” Oscar Wilde famously observed. Wilde’s waning romanticism can be read in stark contrast with Nietzsche, who argued around the same time, “art is nothing but a kind of applied physiology.” Robert Brain’s The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (University of Washington Press, 2015) unveils a fascinating world of exchange between artistic studios and physiology laboratories concealed by such pithy aphorisms. Brain argues that the influence and stature of physiological aesthetics have been overlooked in accounts of modernism in science and art, and seeks to recover experimental systems that were incredibly influential and fertile in their cultural situation. Brain first sets himself to chart the development of physiological recording in the sciences, first as experimental technique, then as ontology, in a fascinating chapter on the protoplasm theory of life and on to its application to the human qua human problems of linguisti

Sister Mary Corita, IHM (1918-1986), was a beloved artist and teacher whose role as the rebel nun continues to inspire contemporary audiences. Corita joined the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1936 when she was just eighteen years old, and soon after became an initially reluctant Art teacher at Immaculate Heart College. Corita remained part of the community on Franklin and Western Avenues in Hollywood until 1968 when Los Angeles archbishop Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, and other conservatives, targeted the orders reformist ways. Corita’s Pop Art styled prints celebrating the presence of God in the most ordinary of everyday subjects (Mary is the juiciest tomato of all) drew the ire of McIntyre in particular. At age fifty, she took one of many unconventional steps and left the order to start life anew as an independent woman. In Corita Kent: Art and Soul: The Biography (Angel City Press, 2015), April Dammann traces Corita’s path as an artist and religious woman who participated in the heady scen

Piksa Niugini by Stephen Dupont, with forward by Robert Gardner and essay by Bob Connolly, is published by the Peabody Press and Radius Books, (2013). Volume 1: 144 pages, 80 duotone, 6 color images. Volume 2: 144 pages, 120 color images. Piksa Niugini records noted Australian photographer Stephen Dupont’s journey through some of Papua New Guinea’s most important cultural and historical zones – the Highlands, Sepik, Bougainville and the capital city Port Moresby. The project is contained in two volumes in a slipcase one of portraits of local people, and the second of personal diaries. This remarkable body of work captures one of the world’s last truly wild and unique frontiers. Stephen’s work for this book was conducted with the support of the Robert Gardner Fellowship of Photography from Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The first volume of portraits reproduced in luscious duotone and 4 color; the second is an eclectic collection of the diaries, drawings, contact sheets and documentary

How is the notion of the avant-garde in art relevant today? What can contemporary social movements learn from the Situationists? What is the meaning of artistic value to forms of resistance? These, and many other, questions associated with the role of art in modern society are at the heart of The Composition of Movements to Come (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). Stevphen Shukaitis, a senior lecturer in work and organisation at the University of Essex, approaches these issues from an Autonomist Marxist perspective, thinking through a diverse range of issues, for example cultural labour, and practices, for example the art strike. The book also uses a range of artistic examples, including a detailed engagement with Neue Slowenische Kunst to think through the composition of movements to come. The podcast discusses a forthcoming exhibition of the work of Gee Vaucher at Firstsite in Essex, UK. The book will be of interest to critical theorists, as well as scholars from art, politics and social movement studies. Learn