New Books in Art

Pauline Turner Strong‘s new book American Indians and the American Imaginary: Cultural Representation Across the Centuries (Paradigm Publishers, 2012) traces the representations of Native Americans across various public spheres of the American imaginary. Based on historical and ethnographic research, she documents how representations of Native Americans have circulated through time and into ever-w...

Sensuous Surfaces: The Decorative Object in Early Modern China  (University of Hawai’i Press, 2010) is a study of domestically produced, portable decorative arts in early modern China. Decorative objects connect us, visually and physically, to the world around us. In many ways they think with us, and an experience of pleasure emerges from this mutual relationship. This was as true in late Ming and...

Reporter Anne-Marie O’Connor uses the iconic gold portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer to engage us in the exciting cultural life of fin-de-siecle Vienna, where wealthy Jewish patrons supported the work of ground-breaking artists, lived in grand homes on the famous Ringstrasse, and thought life was good and they were valued as Austrians. With O’Connor’s background in art and her skills of investigative r...

The title says it all: Diana Vreeland was, in fact, that Empress of Fashion, reigning over Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute for half a century. As a result, her life story stretches the conventions of biography, which so often presents mid-century women’s lives merely as a series of relationships. Amanda MacKenzie Stuart‘s Empress of Fashion: Diana Vre...

It’s rare that a person’s name comes to represent an object, but such is the case with Lilly Pulitzer. Just say ‘Lilly’ and it conjures images of simple sheath dresses in vivid colors. But what of Lilly Pulitzer herself? As Kathryn Livingston’s Lilly: Palm Beach, Tropical Glamour, and the Birth of a Fashion Legend (Wiley, 2012) reveals, the woman was just as vivid as the dresses her name came to e...

Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei was prosecuted in the 1960s for producing work that imitated money. His single-sided, monochrome prints of the 1,000 yen note generated a wide-ranging set of debates over the nature of obscenity, the definition of counterfeiting, and the freedom of artists amid significant transformations in Japanese state, society, and politics. In Money, Trains, and Guillotines:...

You may come for the Astro Boy or Afro Samurai, but you’ll stay for the innovative ways that Ian Condry‘s new book brings together analyses of transmedia practice, collaboration, and materialities of democracy. The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story (Duke University Press, 2013) is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a range of spaces of anime production that in...

Gennifer Weisenfeld‘s gorgeous and thoughtful new book explores the visual culture that emerged in the wake of the Kanto earthquake of 1923. Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan’s Great Earthquake of 1923 (University of California Press, 2012) charts a path through the widely-circulating visual tropes that comprised the intermedia landscape of the earthquake’s aftermath. Along t...

The art salon is sadly less prevalent in our day than in days past, but it is far from obsolete. In its heyday, the salon provided people- particularly women Natalie Barney, orPerle Mesta)- with an extraordinary power to shape cultural tastes and contemporary art. In the early 20th century, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s salons in Florence and New York drew astonishing talents to her doorstep. Her gift for b...

Before the sixteenth century, bugs and other creepy-crawlies could be found in the margins of manuscripts.  Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, insects crawled their way to the center of books, paintings, and other media of natural history illustration. Janice Neri‘s wonderful book charts this transformation in the practices of depicting insects through the early modern per...

Daniela Bleichmar‘s new book is a story about 12,000 images. In Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2012), Bleichmar uses this vast (and gorgeous) archive of botanical images assembled by Spanish natural history expeditions to explore the connections between natural history, visual culture, and empire in the eighteent...

Shih-Shan Susan Huang‘s beautiful new book explores visual culture of religious Daoism, focusing on the tenth through the thirteenth centuries. Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2012) is divided into two sections, devoted loosely to esoteric and exoteric realms of knowledge. The “Inner Chapters” of Part I of the book consider esote...

When I was young I liked to go to bars, especially bars where bands were playing. But when I got there, I often didn’t listen very carefully. And in truth, I wasn’t there to see the band; I was there to “make the scene,” which is to say see and be seen by my peers. As Jennifer Hall-Witt explains in her fascinating book Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780-1880 (University of N...

Ben Cawthra‘s Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz (University of Chicago, 2011) discusses the way images of jazz and the musicians who played it both reflected and influenced our racial perceptions during the period between the 1930s and 1960s. Cawthra reveals the complex interactions between socially conscious photographers, magazine editors, record producers, jazz critics and the...

Miryam Sas’ Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Harvard University Asia Center, 2011) is an exceptionally rich study that has a great deal to offer scholars across the humanities. The book looks at the experimental arts in postwar Japan in a study that ranges across works of experimental theater, film, video, dance, photography, poetry, essay,...

“To think of Shanghai is to think of its nightlife: the two are synonymous.” From here, Andrew Field takes us on a dance across modern Chinese history, through its nightscapes and ballrooms, into the sprawls of its settlements and the pages of its pictorials. Based on a wide range of sources from architectural blueprints to oral interviews, Field’s book succeeds in both showing us new sides of cha...

If you’re a native-born American, you’re probably familiar with Aunt Jemima (pancake syrup), Uncle Ben (precooked rice), and Rastus (oatmeal)–commercial icons all. They were co-oped in whole or part from stock characters in American minstrel shows, largely because they suggested to white consumers a comforting though bygone hospitality. Aunt Jemima said “You might not have a loving mammy to do you...

When I was a kid, I used to pore over an illustrated history of American sports that I had received as a birthday gift. The oversized, hardcover book featured some of the iconic images of 20th-century sports: Lou Gehrig standing humbly at home plate on his day of tribute, teammates present and past encircling him, the packed bleachers and Bronx cityscape in the background; an exhausted and bloodie...

In Chapter 3 of Erin Haney’s excellent book Photography and Africa (Reaktion Books, 2010) there are seven photos taken in central Africa at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Six advertise progress – from the smartly dressed and armed native troops (though still barefoot) to a posed photograph of a caravan of ivory and a depiction of rubber tapping. These images were taken to show the succes...

Growing up in the suburbs of Indianapolis, Indy-car racing offered my friends and me some very exciting heroes. As children, we played “Indy 500” on our bikes in the cul-de-sac. As we became teenagers, the Indy-car drivers who descended on our city in April and May became some of our most tangible idols. Not surprisingly, this proximity to Indy racing also fueled a fascination with the cartoon ser...

Anyone who has been following the news this year has likely heard of Ai Weiwei. This provocative and gifted Chinese artist-activist has made 2011 headlines for his controversial work Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads and for his recent arrest by Chinese police. What has been less widely appreciated is Ai’s profound impact and insight as a cultural critic, Internet artist, and chronicler of contempora...

Bollywood, the Hindustani film genre based in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), has long been known for its lavish costumes and sets. Now comes a sumptuous book from a master costume designer, and the first ever Indian to win an Oscar, Bhanu Rajopadhye Athaiya. Her The Art of Costume Design (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2010), explores in lavish detail all the components that make a Bollywood movie so visua...

Ben Binstock‘s Vermeer’s Family Secrets: Genius, Discovery, and the Unknown Apprentice (Routledge, 2009) is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. It does what all good history books should do–tell you something you thought you knew but in fact don’t–but it does it ON EVERY PAGE. I thought Vermeer was X; now I know he was Y. I thought Vermeer was influenced by X; now I understand he w...

I’ll tell you something I’ve never really understood: the difference between “art” and “craft.” Yes, I get the sociological difference (“art” is made in New York and Paris; “craft” is made in Omaha and Wichita), but what about the substantive difference? One common way to differentiate the two is to say “art” is not functional and “craft” is functional. You can’t sit on a painting but you can sit...

If you grew up in the 1960s or 1970s in suburbia, you probably lived in a smallish ranch house that looked like this. That house probably had an “ultra modern” kitchen that probably looked like this. I grew up in such a house and it had such a kitchen. In fact, I think my mom, sister, and self were models for this ad. (Or may be not. My mom never baked, had a job, and generally dressed in what she...