In 1854 the young aspiring photographer A. A. E. Disdéri patented the carte de viste, a relatively inexpensive photograph the size of a traditional calling card. This invention marked the beginning of popular photography, the first step in the transformation of the medium from a unique recording of the world on a daguerrian plate into a…

In March 2020, the Economist asserted that “contemporary art from Africa has become one of the hottest art markets”. Eight months later, the Art Newspaper upped the bid, with the headline, “Africa’s art market grows even amid adversity.”

Today there are specialist auctions at Sotheby’s and Bonhams dedicated to African art; well…

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…

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…

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…

Through close examination of Renaissance paintings, drawings, book illustrations, and other art works, Patricia Fortini Brown brings 14th- and 15th-century Venice alive. She explores the role of the guilds and the nobility, the unique island setting, the environment of the church and the private home, the political rivalries with other states,…

At its peak in the 12th and 13th centuries, the so-called Spanish Reconquest transformed the societies of the Iberian Peninsula at nearly every level. Among the most vivid signs of this change were the innovative images developed by Christians to depict the subjugated Muslims and Jews within their vastly expanded kingdoms. In Art of…

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.

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:…

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…

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…

Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), like all ambitious artists, imitated eminent predecessors. What set him apart was his lifelong and multifaceted focus on Michelangelo Buonarroti—the master of the previous age. Bernini’s Michelangelo is the first comprehensive examination of Bernini’s persistent and wide-ranging imitation of…

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…

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…

Brazil has long been called the “country of the future.” This book documents an exhibition that examines Brazil from the perspective of blindness as a critical category, a metaphor for the way in which the obstruction of perception can illuminate alternate modes of knowledge and experience. It features twenty emerging and mid-career artists…

In the Heat of the Sun and Devils on the Doorstep are two of the finest and most honored Chinese films ever made. Body in Question is the first book to thoroughly examine these groundbreaking works and one of the first books in English to study individual Chinese films in depth.

These two award-winning films…

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…

The lagoon city of Venice was home to some of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance. Among them was Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1465–1525), whose body of work largely remains to this day in the city in which he lived and died. Influenced by Early Netherlandish art and resistant to Humanist trends, Carpaccio is today known for having…

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…

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This innovative book narrates the history of a single object—a tea-leaf storage jar created in southern China during the 13th or 14th century—and describes how its role changed after it was imported to Japan and passed from owner to owner there. In Japan, where the jar was in constant use for more than seven hundred years, it was transformed…

Chikubushima, a sacred island north of the ancient capital of Kyoto, attracted the attention of Japan’s rulers in the Momoyama period (1568–1615) and became a repository of their art, including a lavishly decorated building dedicated to the worship of Benzaiten. In this meticulous and lucid study, Andrew Watsky keenly illustrates how private…

Since 1984, Chinese cinema has been the most dramatic entry onto the international film scene. China into Film is the first book to look at contemporary Chinese cinema as a visual art and to illustrate the ways in which it has been shaped by centuries of Chinese tradition. Jerome Silbergeld looks at the significance of gender roles,…

Westerners seeking to appreciate and understand Chinese art have long felt the need of a fundamental book that explains both the technical means used by Chinese artists and the traditional stylistic modes of artistic expression. In Chinese Painting Style Jerome Silbergeld addresses this need, beginning with a discussion of basic…

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…

Restoring a gifted art photographer to his place in the American canon and, in the process, reshaping and expanding our understanding of early 20th-century American photography Clarence H. White (1871–1925) was one of the most influential art photographers and teachers of the early 20th century and a founding member of the Photo-Secession. This…

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…

Contemporary African Art Since 1980 is the first major survey of the work of contemporary African artists from diverse situations, locations, and generations who work either in or outside of Africa, but whose practices engage and occupy the social and cultural complexities of the continent since the past 30 years. Its frame of analysis…

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…

Li Huasheng (b. 1944) represents the first generation of artists raised and trained in the People's Republic of China. His career spans the painting of Maoist propaganda in the 1960s, a decade of secretly studying forbidden traditional styles during the Cultural Revolution, an overnight rise from poverty to prominence during the artistic…

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…

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…

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…

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…

A groundbreaking work of scholarship that sheds critical new light on the urban renewal of Paris under Napoleon III

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…

Why did early modern architects continue copying drawings long after the invention of print should have made such copying obsolete? Carolyn Yerkes answers that question in a fresh investigation into the status of architectural drawing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her book explores a vast network of manuscripts and…

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…

The Ghanaian-born sculptor El Anatsui is one of the most significant artistic innovators of our time, merging personal, local, and global concerns in his visual creations. By weaving together discarded aluminum tops from Nigerian liquor bottles, Anatsui creates large-scale sculptures that demonstrate a fascinating interplay of color, shape, and…

Written by two acclaimed scholars Okwui Enwezor and Chika  Okeke-Agulu, 'El Anatsui. The Reinvention of Sculpture', is the most comprehensive, incisive and authoritative account yet on the work of El Anatsui, the world-renowned, Ghanaian-born sculptor.

The product of more than three decades of research, scholarship and…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…