Research and Innovation

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.

This book focuses on several mythological paintings created by Rubens between 1610 and 1620. Even by the standards of erudition commonly applied to his oeuvre, these works demonstrate a particularly intense engagement on his part with questions of artistic originality and ideal style. Furthermore, their learned themes point to a rarefied audience steeped in classical and renaissance theories. Through these close readings, the author illuminates the importance of the rhetorical conventions of the period for Rubens’s mode of composition, or the intersection of the poetic and the “archaeological” in his approach to themes drawn from classical mythology.

The book has grown out of material presented at the Summer Institute of Connoisseurship of Chinese Calligraphy and Painting at the University of Maryland, funded by a generous three-year grant ($150,000) from the Henry Luce Foundation. The Institute was held from 2001 to 2003. It was attended by scholars from Harvard University, Princeton University, The Ohio State University, the University of California at San Diego, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Maryland, as well as the Palace Museum in Beijing and the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The institute was established to provide intensive training in connoisseurship through firsthand experience with works of art in the Washington, DC area. The goal of the institute was to promote the study both of original works of art and of the fundamental problems in the connoisseurship of Chinese calligraphy and painting, and to enhance the quality of art-historical research and teaching. All essays in the book were either presented or discussed extensively at the institute.

In 1969, Joseph Kosuth proclaimed that “aesthetics…are conceptually irrelevant to art.” More than 35 years later, discussions of conceptual art still focus on the ideas rather than on the material documentation, placing these ideas within a particular social or political discourse. Artists and scholars have continued to argue that the photograph, one of the most common objects used by these artists, is almost arbitrary, with no artistic value. Nancy Foote summarizes this argument in her 1976 essay “The Anti-Photographers,” where she states that conceptual art “strips the photograph of its artistic pretensions, changing it from a mirror to a window. What it reveals becomes important, not what it is.” Due to the context of its production and exhibition, many continue to read the photography of the conceptual artists as neutral, ignoring any artistic possibilities...."

The book provides us a point of entry into the nexus of relationships that structured the encounter between China and the West as experienced by the treaty-port Chinese in their everyday life. Exploring such relationships gives us a better sense of the ultimate significance of Shanghai’s rise as China’s dominant metropolitan center. This book will appeal not only to art historians, but also to students of history, gender studies, women’s studies, and culture studies who are interested in modern China as well as questions of art patronage, nationalism, colonialism, visual culture, and representation of women. The book was based on material produced through a project supported by two generous grants ($125,000) from the Henry Luce Foundation.

In this visually stunning companion volume to a New York Public Library exhibition, art historian S. A. Mansbach offers an overview of the progressive eastern European graphic artists and writers who, in the first four decades of the 20th century, redefined and reshaped culture and its social meanings as they sought to comprehend and interpret the dynamics of a modern, postwar age. Illustrated in color with more than 50 examples of modernist publications, it includes works on paper by such artists as El Lissitzky, Laszla Moholy-Nagy, Karel Teige, Niklavs Strunke, Victor Brauner, and others, all drawn from the Library's extensive holdings of eastern and southeastern European materials. The volume also includes an essay on the growth and development of the Library's collections in this field, as well as a checklist of the exhibition.