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…

A major rethinking of twentieth-century abstract art mobilized by the work of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark.

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…

This book assesses the role of relief in the representation of space in Graeco-Roman artistic practice and its study – from Winckelmann to the mid-twentieth century – when Classical art developed as a theoretical discipline. The role of relief in the history of ancient sculpture has long been acknowledged, yet the problems posed by an…

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…

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

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…

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…

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…

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,…

A true story of vendetta and intrigue, triumph and tragedy, exile and repatriation, this book recounts the interwoven microhistories of Count Girolamo Della Torre, a feudal lord with a castle and other properties in the Friuli, and Giulia Bembo, grand-niece of Cardinal Pietro Bembo and daughter of Gian Matteo Bembo, a powerful Venetian senator…

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…

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 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…

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 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 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…

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…

Written by Chika Okeke-Agulu, the award-winning art historian and critic, and profusely illustrated in full colour, this book provides an unprecedented historical overview and critical examination of the Grillo’s place within the history of 20th-century Nigerian art. Through persuasive reading of the artist’s work, it argues that Grillo is…

This book contains a total of seven essays, taking the research approach of "Internet" and "class" to explore the social and cultural phenomena of art from the late Ming to the heyday of Qing. The so-called "network" refers to the connection or contrast formed by different people, groups, regions or fields (such as the palace and civil society)…

A draftsman, printmaker, architect, and archaeologist, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78) is best known today as the virtuoso etcher of the immersive and captivating Views of Rome and the darkly inventive Imaginary Prisons. Yet Carolyn Yerkes and Heather Hyde Minor argue that his single greatest art form—one that combined…

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…

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…

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…

Bringing together established and emerging specialists in seventeenth-century Italian sculpture, Material Bernini is the first sustained examination of the conspicuous materiality of Bernini’s work in sculpture, architecture, and paint. The various essays demonstrate that material Bernini has always been tied (whether theologically,…

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…

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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…

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…

This book is a critical study of the drawings of influential Nigerian artist and poet Obiora Udechukwu.  It argues, quite compellingly, that the radical fusion of lyrical formalism and socio-political critique in Udechukwu’s drawings is a direct outcome of his lifelong commitment to the graphic, pictorial and rhetorical properties of line…

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…

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…

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:…

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…

The designer and architect Pierre Chareau (1883–1950) was a pivotal figure in modernism. His extraordinary Art Deco furniture is avidly collected and his visionary glass house, the Maison de Verre, is celebrated, but the breadth of his design genius has been little explored. Chareau linked architecture, fine arts, and style; designed furniture…

Hélio Oiticica (1937–80) was one of the most brilliant Brazilian artists of the 1960s and 1970s. He was a forerunner of participatory art, and his melding of geometric abstraction and bodily engagement has influenced contemporary artists from Cildo Meireles and Ricardo Basbaum to Gabriel Orozco, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Olafur Eliasson…

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,…

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…

Postcolonial Modernism chronicles the emergence of artistic modernism in Nigeria in the heady years surrounding political independence in 1960, before the outbreak of civil war in 1967. Chika Okeke-Agulu traces the artistic, intellectual, and critical networks in several Nigerian cities. Zaria is particularly important, because it was…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

As they had during the Renaissance, ruins in the 18th century continued to serve as places of exchange between antiquity and modern times and between one architect and another. Rome functioned as a cultural entrepôt, drawing to it architects of the caliber of Filippo Juvarra, Robert Adam, Charles-Louis Clérisseau, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi…