Research and Innovation

This interdisciplinary collection of essays investigates the processes by which Augustine of Hippo's writings were re-invented in other media, including the visual arts, drama and music. Thereby it highlights the crucial role of Augustine's readers in constructing his universal stature.

n 1981, NBC's Hill Street Blues combined the cop show and the soap opera to set the model for primetime serial storytelling, which is evident in The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad. In 1963, ABC's The Fugitive showed how an anthology series could tell a continuing tale, influencing The X-Files, House, and Fringe. In 1987, NBC's The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd changed the situation comedy into attitudinal comedy, leading to Weeds, Nurse Jackie, and Entourage. The DVD Novel: How the Way We Watch Television Changed the Television We Watch not only examines how American television shows changed, but also what television artists have been able to create. The book provides an alternate history of American television that compares it to British television, and explains the influence of Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective on the development of long-form television and the evolution of drama shows and sitcoms. The work considers a wide range of network and cable television shows, paying special attention to the work of Steven Bochco, David Milch, and David Simon, and spotlighting the influence of graphic novels and literary novels in changing television

This book illuminates the primacy of Buddhist icons in disseminating the worship of the Medicine Master Buddha (J. Yakushi) in Japan. Suzuki’s study explicates how the devotional worship of Yakushi, one of the earliest Buddhist cults imported to Japan from China and Korea, developed its own distinctive Japanese imprint after centuries of blending with local beliefs, dispositions and ritual practices. Worship of the Medicine Master Buddha became most influential during the Heian period (794-1185) and its sculptural forms were enshrined in temples across Japan and widely disseminated to people in various levels of society. The book also focuses on Saichō (767-822), the founder of the Tendai school of Buddhism, and his personal reverence for the deity. Suzuki proposes that after Saichō’s death, the Tendai school played a critical role in further popularizing the cult to memorialize their founding master. The study reconsiders the devotional cult of the Medicine Master Buddha and its icons as paradigmatic of Heian religious and artistic culture.

The contributors to this volume (historians of art, of literature, of linguistics, and of architecture, as well as a practicing artist), acknowledging the tectonic shifts in academic practice and historical self-awareness prompted by post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav events, rethink the nature, subjects, and objectives of the avant-garde, both the historical ones of the early twentieth century and their more recent iterations. The present selection affords a rich introduction to some of the most imaginative thinking currently being focused on Eastern European modernism.

In 1992, during the first retrospective of Basquiat's work, Richard Marshall lamented: "Jean-Michel Basquiat first became famous for his art, then he became famous for being famous, then he became famous for being infamous—a succession of reputations that often overshadowed the seriousness and significance of the art he produced." The artist's place is even now much more secure in pop culture than in academe, so the Basquiat retrospective that opened at the Fondation Beyeler in 2010 and subsequently traveled to the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris was not just a museum show to celebrate the artist's fiftieth birthday but also an argument for Basquiat's place in art history. Following precedent, this latest exhibition focused on the artist's larger, midcareer canvases, but this essay reads several of Basquiat's small-scale, early works as marked by often-overlooked inquiries into modernism, epistemology, and the potential of appropriation.

This study focuses on the life and public sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller (1877-1968). Ater examines the artist’s contributions to three early twentieth-century expositions: the Warrick Tableaux, as set of dioramas for the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition (1907); Emancipation, a freestanding group for the National Emancipation Exposition (1913); and Ethiopia, a single female figure for the America’s Making Exposition (1921). Ater argues that Fuller’s efforts to represent black identity in art provide a window on the Progressive era and its heated debates about race, national identity, and culture. At the heart of the book is a consideration of the ways in which Fuller negotiated race, the ideology of racial uplift, Black history, and visual representation.

Anthony Colantuono's monograph titled 'Titian, Colonna and the Renaissance Science of Procreation: Equicola's Seasons of Desire (Ashgate 2010 / Routledge paperback 2016) demonstrates that Bellini's and Titian's famous series of bacchanalian paintings (ca. 1511-25) for the camerino or personal study of Duke Alfonso I d'Este of Ferrara embodies the ancient medical theory of the 'libidinal seasons,' symbolically explicating how the masculine sexual drive and procreative potency changes throughout the four seasons of the year, and locating the optimal procreative moment in the season of spring. The study demonstrates that the artists received their iconographic instructions from the learned courtier Mario Equicola, who writes about this ancient theory in his book titled 'Libro de Natura De Amore,' composed precisely at the same moment. Relating this peculiar medical theme to the duke's dynastic role and his consequent obligation to produce legitimate offspring, the author shows that Francesco Colonna's literary romance, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) engages a similar set of themes, similarly inspired by the predicament of the impotent Duke Guidubaldo I of Urbino.

In this groundbreaking work, which is also the inaugural recipient of the Phillips Book Prize (awarded by the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art), Alicia Volk constructs a critical theory of artistic modernism in Japan between 1900 and 1930 by analyzing the work of Yorozu Tetsugorô, whose paintings she casts as a polemic response to Japan's late-nineteenth-century encounter with European art. Volk places Yorozu at the forefront of a movement that sought to define Japanese art's role in the world by interrogating and ultimately refusing the opposition between East and West. Instead, she vividly demonstrates how Yorozu reframed modern art's dualistic underpinnings and transposed them into an inclusive and synthetic relation between the local and the universal. By looking closely at questions of cultural exchange within modern art, In Pursuit of Universalism offers a new and vital account of both Japanese and Euroamerican modernism. Volk's pioneering study builds bridges between the fields of modern and Asian art and takes its place at the forefront of the emerging global history of modern art.

China's brush-and-ink traditions remain vital in contemporary Chinese art; the genre is continually under renewal by successive generations of artists. The first book-length survey in English on recent trends in this discipline, Chinese Ink Painting Now reflects the recent dissemination of Chinese art and the explosion of interest in this work in the West. Nearly 60 artists are discussed here, including leading figures of postwar modernism such as Liu Kuo-sung; “New Literati” artists like Li Jin and other figurative painters; calligraphers such as Gu Gan; New Wave figures and conceptual artists including Xu Bing, Wenda Gu and Qiu Zhijie; and landscape artists whose work ranges from the traditional—Li Huayi, Fang Jun and Yuan Jai—to the abstract, such as Jia Youfu and Qiu Deshu. There are colorful women-warriors by New York feminist Fay Ku, monochromes by Nobel literature laureate Gao Xingjian and social commentary by the likes of Yang Jiechang, Li Jin and Wei Qingji. Chinese Ink Painting Now fills a significant gap in English-language books on contemporary Chinese art, and is an essential addition to the library of anyone following Asian art trends of the past 30 years. In addition to highly informative textual materials, the book features more than 170 images drawn from the world's leading institutional and private collections.

Professor Shannon's first book, The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City (Yale University Press, 2009) considers how art in New York understood the transformation of the economy and of everyday life around 1960. A finalist for the book prize of the Phillips Collection's Center for the Study of Modern Art, the book also won a Wyeth Foundation Publication Grant from the College Art Association.