Focusing on the art of Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) and his colleagues Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Frédéric Bazille, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Fellow Men argues for the importance of the group as a defining subject of 19th-century French painting. Through close readings of some of the most ambitious paintings of…

Gawkers explores how artists and writers in late nineteenth-century Paris represented the seductions, horrors, and banalities of street life through the eyes of curious viewers known as badauds. Beautifully illustrated and drawing on a wealth of new research, Gawkers excavates badauds as a subject of deep significance in late…

In Black Bodies, White Gold Anna Arabindan-Kesson uses cotton, a commodity central to the slave trade and colonialism, as a focus for new interpretations of the way art, commerce, and colonialism were intertwined in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. In doing so, Arabindan-Kesson models an art historical approach that makes the…

Ashes, Images, and Memories: The Presence of the War Dead in Fifth-Century Athens argues that the institution of public burial for the war dead and images of the deceased in civic and sacred spaces fundamentally changed how people conceived of military casualties. In a period characterized by war and the threat of civil strife,…

The seventh century BC in ancient Greece is referred to as the Orientalizing period because of the strong presence of Near Eastern elements in art and culture. Conventional narratives argue that goods and knowledge flowed from East to West through cosmopolitan elites. Rejecting this explanation, Athens at the Margins proposes a new…

Studies of the icon in Byzantium have tended to focus on the iconoclastic era of the eighth- and ninth-centuries. This study shows that discussion of the icon was far from settled by this lengthy dispute. While the theory of the icon in Byzantium was governed by a logical understanding that had limited painting to the visible alone, the four…

Figure and Likeness presents a thought-provoking new account of Byzantine iconoclasm—the fundamental crisis in Christian visual representation during the 8th and 9th centuries that defined the terms of Christianity's relationship to the painted image. Charles Barber rejects the conventional means of analyzing this crisis, which seeks…

Charles Barber, professor of art and archaeology at Princeton University, and Stratis Papaioannou, associate professor of classics and director of the Program of Medieval Studies at Brown University, have co-edited a book titled Michael Psellos on Literature and Art: A Byzantine Perspective on Aesthetics. Psellos has long been known as a key…

Dans le système des beaux-arts, l’architecture, en tant qu’art utile, a toujours occupé une place singulière. Issue des arts du dessin, elle côtoyait sur un pied d’égalité la peinture et la sculpture dans les premières académies fondées par les humanistes de la Renaissance. Ces institutions connurent leur âge d’or au siècle des…

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A new revolutionary approach to architecture and the city emerged in France during the Enlightenment. This book shows how a novel architectural expression informed by ancient precedents and universal forms together with a new urbanism brought about a sense of what the city might be; a rational, hygienic, symbolic and evident deployment of a…

Architectural drawings of the Italian Renaissance were largely devoid of color, but from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, polychromy in architectural representation grew and flourished. Basile Baudez argues that colors appeared on paper when architects adapted the pictorial tools of imitation, cartographers’ natural signs,…

Textile in Architecture From the Middle Ages to Modernism investigates the interconnections between textile and architecture via a variety of case studies from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century and from diverse geographic contexts. Recently, architects have shown a renewed interest in the textile medium due to the use of…

Examining the work of contemporary Black artists who are dismantling the white gaze and demanding that we see—and see Blackness in particular—anew.

In A Black Gaze, Tina Campt examines Black contemporary artists who are shifting the very nature of our interactions with the visual through their creation and curation of a…

In Image Matters, Tina M. Campt traces the emergence of a black European subject by examining how specific black European communities used family photography to create forms of identification and community. At the heart of Campt's study are two photographic archives, one composed primarily of snapshots of black German families taken…

Contributions by Ariella Azoulay, Geoffrey Batchen, Ali Behdad, Elspeth H. Brown, Tina M. Campt, Clément Chéroux, Lily Cho, Nicole R. Fleetwood, Sophie Hackett, Patricia Hayes, Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Thy Phu, Leigh Raiford, Shawn Michelle Smith, Drew Thompson, Brian Wallis, Artur Walther, Laura Wexler, and…

In Listening to Images Tina M. Campt explores a way of listening closely to photography, engaging with lost archives of historically dismissed photographs of black subjects taken throughout the black diaspora. Engaging with photographs through sound, Campt looks beyond what one usually sees and attunes her senses to the other affective…

It's hard to imagine an issue or image more riveting than Black Germans during the Third Reich. Yet accounts of their lives are virtually nonexistent, despite the fact that they lived through a regime dedicated to racial purity.

Tina M. Campt's Other Germans tells the story of this largely forgotten group of…

Arthur Dove, often credited as America’s first abstract painter, created dynamic and evocative images inspired by his surroundings, from the farmland of upstate New York to the North Shore of Long Island. But his interests were not limited to nature. Challenging earlier accounts that view him as simply a landscape painter, Arthur Dove:…

George Inness (1825–94), long considered one of America’s greatest landscape painters, has yet to receive his full due from scholars and critics. A complicated artist and thinker, Inness painted stunningly beautiful, evocative views of the American countryside. Less interested in representing the details of a particular place than in rendering…

Artistic representations of landscape are studied widely in areas ranging from art history to geography to sociology, yet there has been little consensus about how to understand the relationship between landscape and art. This book brings together more than fifty scholars from these multiple disciplines to establish new ways of thinking about…

The history of American art is a history of objects, but it is also a history of ideas about how we create and consume these objects. As Picturing convincingly shows, the critical tradition in American art has given rise to profound thinking about the nature and capacity of images and formed responses to some of most pressing problems…

Acclaimed as the definitive work on the subject, Art Since 1900 is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the complexities of art in the modern age. Conceived by four of the most influential art historians of our time, this extraordinary book has now been brought right up to date to include the latest developments…

Hal Foster, author of the acclaimed Design and Crime, argues that a fusion of architecture and art is a defining feature of contemporary culture. He identifies a “global style” of architecture—as practiced by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano—analogous to the international style of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies.

Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror.

Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa…

In Brutal Aesthetics, leading art historian Hal Foster explores how postwar artists and writers searched for a new foundation of culture after the massive devastation of World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. Inspired by the notion that modernist art can teach us how to survive a civilization become barbaric, Foster examines…

Surrealism has long been seen as its founder, Andre Breton, wanted it to be seen: as a movement of love and liberation. In Compulsive Beauty, Foster reads surrealism from its other, darker side: as an art given over to the uncanny, to the compulsion to repeat and the drive toward death. Compulsive Beauty not only offers a…

Drawn from talks between celebrated artist Richard Serra and acclaimed art historian Hal Foster held over a fifteen-year period, this volume offers revelations into Serra’s prolific six-decade career and the ideas that have informed his working practice. Conversations about Sculpture is both an intimate look at Serra’s life…

In these diatribes on the marketing of culture and the branding of identity, the development of spectacle—architecture and the rise of global cities, Hal Foster surveys our new political economy of design. Written in a lively style, Design and Crime explores the historical relations of modern art and modern museum, the conceptual…

Two of the most important voices in art history discuss their intellectual foundations, the changing role of criticism, and the possibilities for artistic practice today.

In Exit Interview, the prominent art critics and historians Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh discuss their intellectual foundations and the projects they've…

Who branded painting in the Pop age more brazenly than Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha? And who probed the Pop revolution in image and identity more intensely than they? In The First Pop Age, leading critic and historian Hal Foster presents an exciting new interpretation of Pop art…

In Junkspace (2001), architect Rem Koolhaas itemized in delirious detail how our cities are being overwhelmed. His celebrated jeremiad is here updated and twinned with Running Room, a fresh response from architectural critic Hal Foster...“The manifesto is a modernist mode, one that looks to the future . . .  Junkspace…

How to imagine not only a new art or architecture but a new self or subject equal to them? In Prosthetic Gods, Hal Foster explores this question through the works and writings of such key modernists as Gauguin and Picasso, F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos and Max Ernst. These diverse figures were all fascinated by fictions of…

For the past few decades Hal Foster’s critical gaze has encompassed the increasingly complex machinery of the culture industry. His observations push the boundaries of cultural criticism to establish a vantage point from which the seemingly disparate agendas of artists, patrons, and critics have a telling coherence. Recodings has…

In The Return of the Real Hal Foster discusses the development of art and theory since 1960, and reorders the relation between prewar and postwar avant-gardes. Opposed to the assumption that contemporary art is somehow belated, he argues that the avant-garde returns to us from the future, repositioned by innovative practice in the…

In Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s most famous paintings, grapes, fish, and even the beaks of birds form human hair. A pear stands in for a man’s chin. Citrus fruits sprout from a tree trunk that doubles as a neck. All sorts of natural phenomena come together on canvas and panel to assemble the strange heads and faces that constitute one of Renaissance…

Central European Drawings in the Collection of the Crocker Art Museum presents a survey of five centuries of draftsmanship from Central Europe. An interpretive and fully illustrated (with many illustrations in color) catalogue of one of the oldest public collections in the United States, it considers a wide variety of types of…

Central Europe occupies a prominent place in many realms of 18th-century culture. This volume is the catalogue of an exhibition of drawings, organized in 1989 by the Princeton University Art Museum, which presents some of the little-known accomplishments of artists from the region of present-day Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and parts of…

The collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe opened the doors to cultural treasures that for decades had been hidden, forgotten, or misinterpreted. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann looks at Central Europe as a cultural entity while chronicling more than three hundred years of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Germany, Poland, the Czech…

This volume is the catalogue of an exhibition organized by the Princeton University Art Museum, consisting of eighty-eight drawings by artists active in Central Europe during the neglected period following the age of the Old German Masters (Dürer, Holbein, and their contemporaries) and preceding that covered by Central European Drawings…

This volume presents a selection of studies written during the past decades by Professor DaCosta Kaufmann on a variety of topics concerning the history of painting, sculpture, art theory, collecting, and architecture. It includes several of his ground-breaking essays interpreting art at the Prague court of Rudolf II (1576–1612). However, the…

Responding to ongoing debates over the role of humanism in the rise of empirical science, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann explores the history of Renaissance art to help explain the complex beginnings of the "scientific revolution." In a rich collection of new and previously published essays addressing conceptions of the mastery of nature, he discusses…

Franz Anton Maulbertsch (1724–1796) was an Austrian fresco painter known for his bold use of color. Although he has been recognized in the Central European regions where he worked, Maulbertsch has remained outside the general canon of art history. With Painterly Enlightenment, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann recovers the story of Maulbertsch,…

The School of Prague provides both a much-needed catalogue raisonné of painting in Rudolfine Prague and a significant reassessment of Renaissance art theory and practice. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann masterfully reconstructs the Prague court, discussing the "mannerist" art it patronized and the artists who were active in it. The book was…

Art history traditionally classifies works of art by country as well as period, but often political borders and cultural boundaries are highly complex and fluid. Questions of identity, policy, and exchange make it difficult to determine the “place” of art, and often the art itself results from these conflicts of geography and culture…

A volume that introduces new sources and offers fresh perspectives on a key era of transition, this book is of value to art historians and historians alike. From the dissolution of the Carolingian empire to the onset of the so-called 12th-century Renaissance, the transformative 10th-11th centuries witnessed the production of a significant…

In this book, Beatrice E. Kitzinger explores the power of representation in the Carolingian period, demonstrating how images were used to assert the value and efficacy of art works. She focuses on the cross, Christianity's central sign, which simultaneously commemorates sacred history, functions in the present, and prepares for the end of time…

The ancient Romans famously distinguished between civic life in Rome and military matters outside the city—a division marked by the pomerium, an abstract religious and legal boundary that was central to the myth of the city’s foundation. In this book, Michael Koortbojian explores, by means of images and texts, how the Romans used…

This book examines the new institution of divinization that emerged as a political phenomenon at the end of the Roman Republic with the deification of Julius Caesar. Michael Koortbojian addresses the myriad problems related to Caesar’s, and subsequently Augustus’s, divinization, in a sequence of studies devoted to the complex character of the…

Michael Koortbojian brings a novel approach to his study of the role of Greek mythology in Roman funerary art. He looks at two myths—Aphrodite and Adonis and Selene and Endymion—not only with respect to their appearance on Roman sarcophagi, but also with regard to the myths' significance in the greater fabric of Roman life. Moving beyond the…