New Books in Art

In The Invention of Norman Visual Culture: Art, Politics, and Dynastic Ambition (Cambridge UP, 2020), Lisa Reilly establishes a new interpretive paradigm for the eleventh and twelfth-century art and architecture of the Norman world in France, England, and Sicily. Traditionally, scholars have considered iconic works like the Cappella Palatina and the Bayeux Embroidery in a geographically piecemeal fashion that prevents us from seeing their full significance. Here, Reilly examines these works individually and within the larger context of a connected Norman world. Just as Rollo founded the Normandy "of different nationalities", the Normans created a visual culture that relied on an assemblage of forms. To the modern eye, these works are perceived as culturally diverse. As Reilly demonstrates, the multiple sources for Norman visual culture served to expand their meaning. Norman artworks represented the cultural mix of each locale, and the triumph of Norman rule, not just as a military victory but as a legitimate succession, and often as the return of true Christian rule.Tanja Tolar is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa (Duke University Press, 2020) Delinda Collier provides a sweeping new understanding of technological media in African art, rethinking the assumptions that have conceptualized African art as unmediated, primary, and natural. Collier responds to these preoccupations by exploring African artworks that challenge these narratives. From one of the first works of electronic music, Halim El-Dabh’s Ta’abir Al-Zaar (1944), and Souleymane Cissé's 1987 film, Yeelen, to contemporary digital art, Collier argues that African media must be understood in relation to other modes of transfer and transmutation that have significant colonial and postcolonial histories, such as extractive mining and electricity. Collier reorients modern African art within a larger constellation of philosophies of aesthetics and technology, demonstrating how pivotal artworks transcend the distinctions between the constructed and the elemental, thereby expanding ideas about mediation and about what African art can do.Holiday Powers is Assistant Professor of Art History at VCUarts Qatar. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Africa and the Arab world, postcolonial theory, and gender studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Spanning the decades from the rise of photography to the age of the selfie, The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain: From the First Photographs to David Beckham (University of Chicago Press, 2021) traces the complex visual and consumer cultures that shaped masculine beauty in Britain, examining the realms of advertising, health, pornography, psychology, sport, and celebrity culture. Paul R. Deslandes chronicles the shifting standards of male beauty in British culture—from the rising cult of the athlete to changing views on hairlessness—while connecting discussions of youth, fitness, and beauty to growing concerns about race, empire, and degeneracy. From earlier beauty show contestants and youth-obsessed artists, the book moves through the decades into considerations of disfigured soldiers, physique models, body-conscious gay men, and celebrities such as David Beckham and David Gandy who populate the worlds of television and social media. Deslandes calls on historians to take beauty and gendered aesthetics seriously while recasting how we think about the place of physical appearance in historical study, the intersection of different forms of high and popular culture, and what has been at stake for men in “looking good.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Since the late-1990s, the fate of Nazi stolen art has become a cause célèbre. In Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern (Brandeis UP, 2021), Charles Dellheim turns this story on its head by revealing how certain Jewish outsiders came to acquire so many old and modern masterpieces in the first place - and what this reveals about Jews, art, and modernity. This book tells the epic story of the fortunes and misfortunes of a small number of eminent art dealers and collectors who, against the odds, played a pivotal role in the migration of works of art from Europe to the United States and in the triumph of modern art. Beautifully written and compellingly told, this story takes place on both sides of the Atlantic from the late nineteenth century to the present. It is set against the backdrop of critical transformations, among them the gradual opening of European high culture, the ambiguities of Jewish acculturation, the massive sell-off of aristocratic family art collections, the emergence of different schools of modern art, the cultural impact of World War I, and the Nazi war against the Jews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Hilton Judin's book Architecture, State Modernism and Cultural Nationalism in the Apartheid Capital (Routledge, 2021) is the first comprehensive investigation of the architecture of the apartheid state in the period of rapid economic growth and political repression from 1957 to 1966 when buildings took on an ideological role that was never remote from the increasingly dominant administrative, legislative and policing mechanisms of the regime. It considers how this process reflected the usurpation of a regional modernism and looks to contribute to wider discourses on international postwar modernism in architecture.Buildings in Pretoria that came to embody ambitions of the apartheid state for industrialization and progress serve as case studies. These were widely acclaimed projects that embodied for apartheid officials the pursuit of modernization but carried latent apprehensions of Afrikaners about their growing economic prospects and cultural estrangement in Africa. It is a less known and marginal story due to the dearth of material and documents buried in archives and untranslated documents. Many of the documents, drawings and photographs in the book are unpublished and include classified material and photographs from the National Nuclear Research Centre, negatives of 1960s from Pretoria News and documents and pamphlets from Afrikaner Broederbond archives.State architecture became the most iconic public manifestation of an evolving expression of white cultural identity as a new generation of architects in Pretoria took up the challenge of finding form to their prospects and beliefs. It was an opportunistic faith in Afrikaners who urgently needed to entrench their vulnerable and contested position on the African continent. The shift from provincial town to apartheid capital was swift and relentless. Little was left to stand in the way of the ambitions and aim of the state as people were uprooted and forcibly relocated, structures torn down and block upon block of administration towers and slabs erected across Pretoria.This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of architectural history as well as those with an interest in postcolonial studies, political science, and social anthropology.Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Government Affairs and as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he hosts the New Books Network – Architecture podcast, is an NCARB Licensing Advisor and helps coach candidates taking the Architectural Registration Exam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In Selling Black Brazil: Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia (University of Texas Press, 2022), Anadelia Romo argues that visual images were central to the shift from emulating Europe to valuing Brazil’s own local culture, which took place from the late 19th to the early 20th century. The book focuses on Salvador, Bahia, a city in the northeast of Brazil known for its rich Black culture, history of slavery, and tourism industry. Using print culture associated with tourism, Romo shows how representations of Afro-Brazilians engaged ideas of race and nation at the time. The book is filled with photographs and illustrations from Pierre Verger, Carybe, and other visual culture producers, which evidences how the city was rendered. These images featured Afro-Brazilians as central urban figures as well as the festive and religious culture of the city. Yet, in giving less attention to racism, these images masked deeply entrenched racial inequality.Anadelia A. Romo is an Associate Professor of History at Texas State University. She is the author of Brazil’s Living Museum: Race, Reform, and Tradition in Bahia.Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

American comics from the start have reflected the white supremacist culture out of which they arose. Superheroes and comic books in general are products of whiteness, and both signal and hide its presence. Even when comics creators and publishers sought to advance an antiracist agenda, their attempts were often undermined by a lack of awareness of their own whiteness and the ideological baggage that goes along with it. Even the most celebrated figures of the industry, such as Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Jack Jackson, William Gaines, Stan Lee, Robert Crumb, Will Eisner, and Frank Miller, have not been able to distance themselves from the problematic racism embedded in their narratives despite their intentions or explanations.In Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes: Whiteness and Its Borderlands in American Comics and Graphic Novels (University of Mississippi Press, 2022), Dr. Josef Benson and Dr. Doug Singsen provide a sober assessment of these creators and their role in perpetuating racism throughout the history of comics. They identify how whiteness has been defined, transformed, and occasionally undermined over the course of eighty years in comics and in many genres, including westerns, horror, crime, funny animal, underground comix, autobiography, literary fiction, and historical fiction. This exciting and groundbreaking book assesses industry giants, highlights some of the most important episodes in American comic book history, and demonstrates how they relate to one another and form a larger pattern, in unexpected and surprising ways.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Kim talks with Pardis about Theodor Adorno’s concept of the autonomous work of art, as articulated in his Aesthetic Theory, and The Dialectic of Enlightenment (with help from Max Horkheimer).Pardis Dabashi is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she specializes in 20th-Century literature and Film studies. Starbucks Christmas Blend is one of her many guilty pleasures. Adorno would be upset.Image source: Witches dancing in forest, in the Compedium Maleficarum of Francesco Mario Guazzo, published in 1608. Available on Wikimedia Commons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

For better or worse, artists write. But why would a visual artist write a novel? How should such a novel be experienced? How does the artist’s novel compare or compete with literary fiction as we know it?David Maroto, the author of The Artist's Novel: A New Medium (Mousse Publishing, 2020) considers the proliferation of artists writing novels as a sign of the emergence of a new medium. Artists engaging in this new medium do so in order to address artistic issues by means of novelistic devices, favouring a sort of art predicated on process and subjectivity, introducing notions such as fiction, narrative, and imagination. Maroto’s work is the first to explore the subject of the artist’s novel in depth.David Maroto speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the artist’s novel and the demands it makes on its readers and, as he found out through his own practice, on its curators and publishers. David reads from Benjamin Seror's Mime Radio and voices the mythical satyr Marsyas but, sadly, stops short of singing.David Maroto is a visual artist, researcher, writer, and curator based in Rotterdam. David Maroto’s first novel Illusion The Book Lovers, a project by David Maroto and Joanna Zielinska Benjamin Seror’s Mime Radio Goldin+Senneby‘s Headless Ale Cecchetti’s exhibition at Ujazdowski Castle Alex Cecchetti’s novel Tamam Shud Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

It can be easy to think of the recent history of India—especially for those who aren’t from there—as a straight line, from the Mughal Empire, through the British Empire, to independent India.That, of course, is hugely simplistic, missing the mess of competing polities, interests, and people that made up Indian history over the last few centuries.Manu Pillai’s False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma (Juggernaut, 2021), looks at a few of these political actors: the Maharajas of India, who led the “princely states”. Not quite sovereign entities, not quite directly-ruled colonies. Pillai portrays the stories of a few of these princes and princesses through the life of famed Indian artist Ravi Varma as he travels around India in the latter half of the nineteenth century.In this interview, Manu and I talk about the princely states, the Maharajas, and why Manu chose Ravi Varma to tell the stories of the Indian princes.Manu S Pillai is the author of the award-winning The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore (HarperCollins India: 2015), Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji (Juggernaut: 2018), and The Courtesan, the Mahatma & the Italian Brahmin: Tales from Indian History (Context: 2019).He can be followed on Twitter at @UnamPillai and on Instagram at @WaatCoconut.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of False Allies. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art