Art History最新文献

This essay uses the art and travels of Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros to analyse the transnational antifascist artistic culture of the 1930s. Siqueiros was one of many artists who joined antifascist (and later Popular Front) organizations, and circulated their art beyond the traditional spaces of localized art worlds – into the streets and across national boundaries – to animate a global artistic network. The process of making the period transnational – artists and journal editors' work of clipping, replicating, and reusing images, texts, and ideas in new contexts, with new meanings – created chains of transnational iconography, and rendered montage as the period's central aesthetic. Period debates and polemics, waged at conferences and in journals, weaponized this culture. Siqueiros and Josep Renau's 1939–40 mural for the Mexican Electricians' Syndicate began as a final homage to the fallen Spanish Republic; the transformation of the mural, however, ultimately marked the end of Popular Front art.

Scholars have for decades challenged the popular belief that Islam is intrinsically and implacably hostile to anthropomorphic art. Rooted in this literature, this essay argues that Islam was responsible for popularizing portraiture in Senegal, which previously featured none. With the founding of local Sufi brotherhoods such as the Mouridiyya in the 1880s, the eminence of religious leaders led to an unprecedented demand for their portraits. Glass painting became the privileged medium for reproducing images that appeared in other media, such as lithographs or photographs. Inspired by the respect for Muslim saints inherent in Sufi practices, the widespread desire to display portraits in one's home and for one's personal devotional practices made this genre indispensable. Rather than concentrating on any one medium, this essay focuses on the theoretical and formal interaction among chromolithographs, photographs, and glass paintings, and the migration of images across the three between the 1910s and the 1950s.

This essay explores how lithographic printing connected colonial society in India to global developments in the making of middle-class culture. It focuses on two print portrait series that the artist Colesworthy Grant (1813–80) released in illustrated periodicals: Lithographic Sketches of the Public Characters of Calcutta; and A Series of Miscellaneous Rough Sketches of Oriental Heads. The former defined white society in Bengal according to a masculine, agentic image of the public individual, whereas the latter engaged ambiguously with ideas about the colonial literary sphere and the nature of civic participation in order to distinguish so-called Anglicized individuals from a taxonomic ordering of South Asian society. The article contextualizes these portraits in relation to the liberal social reforms that reshaped the East India Company's rule in the period 1833–57, arguing that lithographic periodical illustration worked to reconfigure the character and racial boundaries of the Company's increasingly middle-class regime.

In 1971, Pakistan-born lawyer and artist Iqbal Geoffrey (1939–2021) lodged a discrimination case against the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This essay connects Geoffrey's complaint, which he filed with the New York State Division of Human Rights, to MoMA's situation at the centre of activist debates over race and equality during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the museum's prominent role in exporting US art around the world during the Cold War. At a time when Asian modernists received a mostly transactional, diplomatic welcome from US cultural institutions including MoMA, Geoffrey mobilized his legal, artistic, and epistolary practices to stake his claim to permanent belonging within the US art world. Today, his case raises questions over where expanding histories of ‘global modernism’ meet incomplete histories of ‘American’ modernism, against a backdrop and the legacies of the Cold War era.

How might the meaning of monumental sculpture be ephemeral? At La Venta, objects from greenstone figurines to massive basalt sculptures were recycled, reworked, and moved around the landscape, their new configurations and associations creating new kinds of meaning and enabling new kinds of ritual interaction. This essay considers the assemblage, and not just the individual work, as an important category of art-historical analysis. By considering the divergent materialities of stelae, celts, figurines, and colossal heads, as well as the role that ephemeral materials played in the construction of ritually significant assemblages, I explore the connections between monumentality, memory, and forgetting at La Venta.

Cecil Beaton's 1941 photograph Fashion is indestructible, published by British Vogue, depicts a model in a couture suit looking at Blitz ruins. The image claims fashion as timeless, contrasting it with ruins, which in their destruction hold out a promise for future rebuilding, time manifesting itself in the rubble of bombsites and the fabric of clothing. By reading the photograph as a historical document, we confront photography's complex relationship with time and the ambiguous boundaries between past, present, and future which defined the experience of the Home Front.