New Books in Art

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 th...

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 attent...

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 mus...

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 scholar...

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 fo...

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...

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 en...

Today we are joined by Martha Moffitt Peacock, Professor of Art History at Brigham Young University about her new book, Heroines, Harpies, and Housewives: Imaging Women of Consequence in the Dutch Golden Age, out in 2020 with Brill. In Heroines, Harpies, and Housewives, Peacock provides a novel interpretive approach to the artistic practice of imaging women of consequence in the Dutch Golden Age....

Artemisia Gentileschi is by far the most famous woman artist of the premodern era. Her art addressed issues that resonate today, such as sexual violence and women’s problematic relationship to political power. Her powerful paintings with vigorous female protagonists chime with modern audiences, and she is celebrated by feminist critics and scholars. Artemisia Gentileschi and Feminism in Early Mode...

In his pioneering study, Men in Metal: A Topography of Public Bronze Statuary in Modern Japan (Brill, 2020), Sven Saaler examines Japanese public statuary as a central site of historical memory from its beginnings in the Meiji period through the twenty-first century.  Saaler shows how the elites of the modern Japanese nation-state went about constructing an iconography of national heroes to serve...

In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, acclaimed scholar and critic Louis Menand, Professor of English at Harvard University and staff writer at The New Yorker, offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years. The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal....

Suzanne L. Marchand's new book Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2020) balances several histories at once through the story of a single commodity. Rather than a history of art or aesthetics per se—though it certainly touches style and artists— Porcelain is at once a business history of mercantile productions, a history of chemistry at the dawn of modern ind...

Today I talked to Carla Diana about her new book My Robot Gets Me: How Social Design Can Make New Products More Human (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021). Carla Diana is a robot designer responsible for the creative aspects of Diligent Robotics’ new hospital service robot named Moxi. She created and leads the 4D Design masters program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, wrote the world’s first chil...

In The Power of Artistic Thinking: Think Like an Artist and Innovate (Common Ground, 2019; 2021 paperback), Marisol D’Andrea, PhD explores the potential of artistic thinking and shares practical guidance to help us all harness the power of artistic thinking. Through in-depth interviews and conversations with artists, scholars, and thought leaders, she has arrived at core commonalities in artistic...

In 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a migratory stork for espionage. This incident is the focus of Heba Y. Amin’s The General’s Stork, an ongoing project that investigates the politics of aerial surveillance. It is also the subject of the most recent book in the Research/Practice edited by Anthony Downey. Research/Practice focuses on artistic research and how it contributes to the formation of...

Today I talked to Nicole Tersigni about her book Men to Avoid in Art and Life" (Chronicle Books, 2020). Nicole Tersigni is a comedic writer experienced in improve comedy and women’s advocacy. She lives in metro Detroit with her husband, daughter, and two dogs. This episode takes a romp through five types of men to avoid like the plague: the mansplainer, the concern troll, the comedian, the sexpert...

From kelly green to millennial pink, our world is graced with a richness of colors. But our human-made colors haven’t always matched nature’s kaleidoscopic array. To reach those brightest heights required millennia of remarkable innovation and a fascinating exchange of ideas between science and craft that’s allowed for the most luminous manifestations of our built and adorned world. In Full Spectr...

Now in its fifth edition, Analyzing Architecture has become internationally established as the best introduction to architecture. Aimed primarily at those wishing to become professional architects, it also offers those in disciplines related to architecture (from archaeology to stage design, garden design to installation art), a clear and accessible insight into the workings of this rich and fasci...

The Korean War is now America's seminal war. It was the first war conducted with the new United Nations, the first war fought against the Chinese Communists, and the first modern war the US didn't win. Louis Nelson designed the mural wall at the Korean Veterans Memorial on the Mall in Washington DC. His just published memoir, Mosaic: War Monument Mystery, An Historical Memoir (239 Productions, 202...

Diana Souhami talks about her new book No Modernism Without Lesbians, out 2020 with Head of Zeus books. A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2020. This is the extraordinary story of how a singular group of women in a pivotal time and place – Paris, between the wars – fostered the birth of the Modernist movement. Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. A trailblazing publisher; a patro...

Like the transdiscipline of cybernetics, the philosophical movement known as Existentialism rose to prominence in the decade following World War II, was communicated to the general public by a handful of charismatic evangelizers who, for a time, became bona fide celebrities in popular culture, generated much excitement and innovation on university campuses across Europe, the Americas and beyond, a...

Everything you use, from your home to your smartphone, from highways to supermarkets, was designed by someone. What did they get right? Where did they go wrong? And what can we learn from how these experts think that can help us improve our own lives? In How Design Makes The World, bestselling author and designer Scott Berkun reveals how designers, from software engineers to city planners, have su...

Chemistry is not just about microscopic atoms doing inscrutable things; it is the process that makes flowers and galaxies. We rely on it for bread-baking, vegetable-growing, and producing the materials of daily life. In stunning images and illuminating text, this book captures chemistry as it unfolds. Using such techniques as microphotography, time-lapse photography, and infrared thermal imaging, ...

How should we understand creative work? In Creative Control: The Ambivalence of Work in the Culture Industries (Columbia UP, 2021), Michael Siciliano, an assistant professor of sociology at Queen's University, Canada, explores this question through a comparison of a recording studio and a digital content creation company. The book considers the meaning and practice of ‘creative’ labour, considerin...

Often referred to as “the Russian Leonardo”, religious philosopher and Orthodox parish priest Pavel Florensky was a pivotal figure in the Russian religious renaissance at the turn of the 20th century. In Visual Thought in Russian Religious Philosophy: Pavel Florensky's Theory of the Icon (Routledge 2019), art historian Clemena Antonova (Research Director at Eurasia in Global Dialogue, Institute fo...