Research and Innovation

The work of this prolific master ranged from sensuous Salon marbles to luxury objects in gold and modest utensils in zinc. He played a major role in integrating the decorative arts with fine art. The young Rodin collaborated with him intermittently over two decades.

Before his death at the age of twenty-seven, Jean-Michel Basquiat completed nearly 2,000 works. These unique compositions—collages of text and gestural painting across a variety of media—quickly made Basquiat one of the most important and widely known artists of the 1980s. Reading Basquiat provides a new approach to understanding the range and impact of this artist’s practice, as well as its complex relationship to several key artistic and ideological debates of the late twentieth century, including the instability of identity, the role of appropriation, and the boundaries of expressionism. Jordana Moore Saggese argues that Basquiat, once known as “the black Picasso,” probes not only the boundaries of blackness but also the boundaries of American art. Weaving together the artist’s interests in painting, writing, and music, this groundbreaking book expands the parameters of aesthetic discourse to consider the parallels Basquiat found among these disciplines in his exploration of the production of meaning. Most important, Reading Basquiat traces the ways in which Basquiat constructed large parts of his identity—as a black man, as a musician, as a painter, and as a writer—via the manipulation of texts in his own library.

This study provides a new analysis of the pictorial ensemble of the Torre de la Parada, the hunting lodge of King Philip IV of Spain. Created in the late 1630s by a group of artists led by Peter Paul Rubens, this cycle was completed by Diego Velázquez. Despite the lack of a written program, surviving works provide eloquent testimony of several themes revolving around Neostoic ideals of self-restraint and prudent governance. Rubens set the moral tone through his serio-comic Ovidian narratives, complemented by Velázquez’s portraits of ancient philosophers, and royals and fools of the court. This study is the first to consider in depth their joint artistic contributions and shared ambition.

From earliest times, angels have been instruments of salvation and retribution, agents of revelation, and harbingers of hope. In effect, they are situated at the intersections of diverse belief structures and philosophical systems. In this book, I focus mainly on medieval and Renaissance Italy, and I consider the Christian and Jewish traditions from which Early Modern conceptions and representations derived. I trace the iconography of angels in text and visual form, beginning with Dante and his precursors through such lights as Pico della Mirandola; and from Fra Angelico to Raphael and beyond. I argue that angels are touchstones and markers of each era’s intellectual self-understanding, theological doctrines, and artistic imagination.

Steven Mansbach stresses in the tradition of his own discipline the overwhelming importance of urban centers in his predominantly rural "Eastern Europe". It is cities which shape artistic regions, and this the more so in a part of Europe where there are fewer cities than in other parts. This is one of the reasons why Mansbach in his 2013 Oskar Halecki Lecture analyzes (and visualizes) the "capital modernism" of the only "Baltic metropolis" - Latvia's capital Riga.In looking at Riga's central role not only for Latvia but for all three Baltic countries and the wider Baltic Sea Region, Mansbach aptly applies Klaus Zernack's post-Haleckian meso-regional concept of "Nordosteuropa" which constructs a 'Mediterranean of the North' reaching from the Neva to the Kattegat - a region of enhanced economic, military, cultural, political, and ethnic cooperation and conflict from the Nordic Wars of the early modern period to the interwar years of the 20th century. As Mansbach demonstrates with the example of the city on the Daugava's modernism, after Hanseatic commercialism, Russian imperialism and Latvian nationalism also Soviet communism left its visible impact resulting in "a novel eclecticism" by "a quixotic intermingling of Riga's inventive modernism and constraining Soviet politics." Northeastern Europe lives on, and the Soviet legacy, unwelcome as it may be today, is a constituent part of it - as can be seen in Riga.

Born in 1940, in Jiangxi province in eastern China, Gao Xingjian is the first Chinese recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Gao's interest in theater, writing, and all-things-creative was instilled at an early age by his mother, an amateur actress. He began painting at age ten after his uncle gave him a notebook for his birthday. Mr. Gao describes it as: “just white pages, no grid and no lines,” and that it was in this book where he first began writing and drawing simultaneously. Throughout the course of Gao Xingjian's prolific career, he has had nearly thirty international exhibitions of his ink paintings and, also, illustrates all of the covers of his books.

This essay addresses the problematic notion of the “avant-garde” in the context of Japanese modern art. It looks at the formation in 1907 of the national salon, the Bunten, to elucidate the relational dynamics of art organizations in early twentieth-century Japan, especially during the Taisho period (1912 – 27) when the Fusain Society (Fyûzankai) and the Nika Society (Nikakai) came into being as alternatives to the Bunten. The essay elucidates one of the fundamental paradoxes of Taisho-period art — the simultaneous proliferation of art organizations and artistic individualism — and the dialectic between authority and autonomy that prevailed in art under the conditions of Japanese modernity.

The monograph is a study of the paintings by Gao Xingjian who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000 and was the first Chinese writer to receive the prize. He is a naturalized French citizen and lives in Paris. His style of ink painting belongs to the great Chinese literati tradition of xieyi (literally “writing the idea”); this style allows him to create subtle, intuitive settings and characters that move in the limits between figurative and abstract art, in a way that has been done by many of the great masters in Chinese art history. His paintings explore the expressive possibilities of ink and washes; the nuanced light and dark shadings, subtle washes, textures, and volumes in his paintings are both dramatic and refreshing.

In the past two decades, contemporary Chinese art and film have attracted a great deal of media and academic attention in the West, and scholars have adopted a variety of approaches in Chinese film and visual studies. The present volume focuses on the uses and status of theory originating in non-Chinese places in the creation, curating, narration, and criticism of contemporary Chinese visual culture (broadly defined to include traditional media in the visual arts as well as cinema, installation, video, etc.). Contributors reflect on the written and, even more interestingly, the unwritten assumptions on the part of artists, critics, historians, and curators in applying or resisting Western theories.The essays in the present volume demonstrate clearly that Western theory can be useful in explicating Chinese text, as long as it is applied judiciously; the essays, taken as a whole, also suggest that cultural exchange is never a matter of one-way street. Historically, ideas from traditional Chinese aesthetics have also traveled to the West, and it is a challenge to examine what travels and what does not, as well as what makes such travel possible or impossible. The present volume thus provides us an opportunity to rethink travels of theories and texts across cultures, languages, disciplines, and media.

A short essay for the online education platform Khan Academy on the group of artists known as "The Pictures Generation." I introduce the main critical concerns of these artists, as well as their legacy for contemporary art. Artists discussed include Sherrie Levine and Carrie Mae Weems.