Research and Innovation

The Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1690 became the first government in the Western world to print paper money, the imagery for which initiated an indigenous American art form of remarkable dynamism and originality. After the Revolutionary War, disillusioned by how quickly its promiscuous printing of Continental currency had led to hyperinflation, the U.S. government left it to private institutions such as state-chartered banks to carry on this artistic American tradition. Adorned with a vast variety of images, bank notes soon became the fledgling country’s primary currency. With pressures of the Civil War, the federal government in 1861 began taking charge of the paper-money supply by creating a national currency; simultaneously, the Confederate States of America was creating a competing self-image, making heavy use of bank-note vignettes. Later, collaboration between government engravers and well-known artists on the 1896 Silver Certificates marked the apex of U.S. government currency design. For two centuries, American creativity and technical ingenuity resulted in imagery on paper money that helped create and enhance the nation’s imagined self.

Augusta Savage intended to build monuments. In the 1930s and early 1940s, the
Harlem-based sculptor envisioned memorials to Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the vaudeville star
Florence Mills, the World War I service of the “Harlem Hellfighters,” and the writer and civil

rights leader James Weldon Johnson. None of these proposed works was erected, and they
have not been included in scholarship examining Savage’s work and career. This essay considers
Savage’s thwarted efforts as critical reminders that material absence does not connote a lack of
vision, intention, or labor. I argue that Savage’s unbuilt monuments reveal her ambition to
intervene in the Whiteness and maleness of the American memorial landscape and claim
monuments as sites where Black lives and concerns can be represented. Engaging critical
approaches to archival absence and the power of monuments, I explore the space these unbuilt
monuments would have taken up in the world.

This state-of-the-field article surveys the economic histories of Netherlandish art. Tracing major contributions by scholars following in the footsteps of Michael Montias, we present the developments of art historical econometrics and consider the evolving ways in which economic analyses address topics such as supply, demand, price, labor, and form. We show the various applications of economic methods and pay particular attention to the interrelations between quantitative research and other modes of inquiry: archival, technical, biographical, stylistic, digital, regional, global, and so forth.

Can a photograph capture a statue’s loss of meaning over time? Berenice Abbott’s 1936 photograph of Daniel Chester French’s Four Continents statues at the U.S. Custom House in New York asserts that it declares that it can.

Ongoing responsibilities as Chair of Rights, Responsibilities, and Protections subcommittee.

This article offers a belated reading of Guido Reni's Union of Disegno and Colore. I argue that Reni's painting, though allegorical by nature, is a visual summary of his biography and artistic consciousness. Although the concept of compendio (compendium) is key to early modern Bolognese art historiography, it has yet to be analyzed closely, let alone applied to the many messages conveyed through Reni's Union. By interpreting the Union through biography, iconography, sex, and gender, I propose that we take seriously the concept of a visual compendium, one that gives form to Reni's ideal union of art.

This book provides a conceptual and global overview of the field of Surrealist studies. Methodologically, the companion considers Surrealism’s many achievements, but also its historical shortcomings, to illuminate its connections to the historical and cultural moment(s) from which it originated and to assess both the ways in which it still shapes our world in inspiring ways and the ways in which it might appear problematic as we look back at it from a twenty-first-century vantage point. Contributions from experienced scholars will enable professors to teach the subject more broadly, by opening their eyes to aspects of the field that are on the margins of their expertise, and it will enable scholars to identify new areas of study in their own work, by indicating lines of research at a tangent to their own.

The companion will reflect the interdisciplinarity of Surrealism by incorporating discussions pertaining to the visual arts, as well as literature, film, and political and intellectual history.

Votvie banquet reliefs featuring a reclining elder male employed a visual language that to ancient viewers unambiguously defined the nature and identity of a hero. This highly flexible language appears to have been quickly adopted in the heroising realm of funerary monuments by the end of the Late Classical period, circa 400-323 BCE, and remained a desired aesthetic throughout the Hellenistic period, circa 323-33 BCE. In this lesser known and smaller corpus of votive banquet reliefs, few examples retain any vestiges of polychromy or inscriptions. An unstudied and unpublished relief of this type from the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, however, exceptionally retains both. A close study of this relief provides insight into the aesthetic tastes of the Late Classical period, as well as an understanding of how banqueting iconography, originally reserved for a hero rather than heroised deceased, was emphatically adopted into the funerary sphere at the end of the fourth century BCE.

Huang Binhong (1865-1955), a key twentieth-century artist and art historian, produced distinctive floral works and the rare figure painting but focused intently on landscapes. Influenced by early masters, he also studied nature directly. Near the end of his life, despite seriously compromised eyesight, he used rich and dark “burnt” ink to create sublime masterpieces that bridge representation and abstraction. Modern Ink: The Art of Huang Binhong will demonstrate how nature, art historical erudition, a finely tuned compositional sense, and an appreciation for rich and even tonality—derived from epigraphic rubbings—come together in this consummate painter’s late, great landscapes. It will also examine his work in other genres as well as the role of his extraordinary vision as a major force behind the persistence of traditional values in contemporary Chinese ink art.

The book is the fourth volume in the book series Modern Ink.

Vermeer and the Art of Love deals with private emotions evoked in domestic interiors in which a young woman may be writing a letter to her absent beloved or playing a virginal in the presence of an admirer. But it is also about the love we sense in the painter’s attentiveness to every detail within those rooms, which lends even the most mundane of objects the quality of something extraordinary. In this engaging book, the author uncovers the ways in which Vermeer challenges the dichotomies between 'good' and 'bad' love, the sensual and the spiritual, placing him within the context of his contemporaries, as well as within the broader discourse on love and art in early modern Europe.