New Books in Art

In Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920-1930 (Park Publishing, 2020), Anna Bokov examines the history of the Higher Art and Technical Studios (Vysshie khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie) in Moscow, known most commonly by its acronym Vkhutemas. Operating between 1920 and 1930, Vkhutemas was a centre for developing new pedagogical methods to support mass education in art and technology. In this richly illustrated study, Bokov traces how radical experiments in art, architecture, and design were translated into systematic body of knowledge – and how this knowledge was then applied in various projects aimed at shaping modern Soviet society. From small utensils and furniture pieces to large-scale urban designs, the Vkhutemas influence was visible everywhere, and Bokov foregrounds the school’s impact both on the formation of modernism, along with its lasting creative legacy.Anna Bokov is an architect, urban designer, and historian specialising in the history of the avant-garde movements and design pedagogy. She is a faculty member at the Cooper Union and the City College in New York and Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Architecture at ETH Zürich.Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Firebird and the Fox: Russian Culture under Tsars and Bolsheviks (Cambridge UP, 2019) by Jeffrey Brooks, Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, is a summa of his lifetime study of Russian culture. In doing so, Brooks provides a needed corrective to the prior standard work, now over 50 years old. Firebird and the Fox chronicles a century of Russian artistic genius, including literature, art, music and dance, within the dynamic cultural ecosystem that shaped it.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are at https://strategicdividendinves... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Part of the series CAHIM Connecting Art Histories in the Museum, Anna McSweeney's book From Granada to Berlin: The Alhambra Cupola (Kettler Verlag, 2020) is the story of an extraordinary survivor from the Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain: the Alhambra cupola, now in the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin. The cupola, a ceiling crafted from carved and painted wood, was made to crown an exquisite mirador in one of the earliest palace buildings of the Alhambra. The book is the cupola's biography from its medieval construction to its imminent redisplay in Berlin. It traces the long history of the Alhambra through the prism of the cupola, from the Muslim craftsmen who built it, to its adaptation by the Christian conquerors after the fall of Granada in 1492, to its creation as a heritage site. The cupola was sketched by artists from across Europe before it was dismantled by a German financier and taken to Berlin in the 19th century. It witnessed the dramatic events of the 20th century in Germany and was eventually bought by the Museum in 1978. In recent decades, the new visibility of the cupola to the wider public has prompted questions about the object and its movement from Granada to Berlin. Its removal from the Alhambra and the complex reasons behind this loss is central to this biography. Setting the cupola within the wider context of Islamic heritage, it considers the role of collecting practices in the transformation of living monuments into heritage sites in the 20th century. This book presents a focused study of this unique object that cuts across academic disciplines and geographic boundaries to reveal a new perspective on the legacy of Islamic art in Europe and its continuing relevance today.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

One of the most famous rulers in Chinese history, the Yongle emperor (r. 1402–24) gained renown for constructing Beijing’s magnificent Forbidden City, directing ambitious naval expeditions, and creating the world’s largest encyclopedia. What the Emperor Built: Architecture and Empire in the Early Ming (U Washington Press, 2020) is the first book-length study devoted to the architectural projects of a single Chinese emperor.Focusing on the imperial palaces in Beijing, a Daoist architectural complex on Mount Wudang, and a Buddhist temple on the Sino-Tibetan frontier, Aurelia Campbell demonstrates how the siting, design, and use of Yongle’s palaces and temples helped cement his authority and legitimize his usurpation of power. Campbell offers insight into Yongle’s sense of empire—from the far-flung locations in which he built, to the distant regions from which he extracted construction materials, and to the use of tens of thousands of craftsmen and other laborers. Through his constructions, Yongle connected himself to the divine, interacted with his subjects, and extended imperial influence across space and time.Spanning issues of architectural design and construction technologies, this deft analysis reveals remarkable advancements in timber-frame construction and implements an art-historical approach to examine patronage, audience, and reception, situating the buildings within their larger historical and religious contexts.Noelle Giuffrida is a professor and curator of Asian art at the School of Art and the David Owsley Museum of Art at Ball State University. Email: ngiuffrida@bsu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Rayna Denison’s Anime: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2015) uses genre as a window into the evolving global phenomenon of Japanese animation. Denison’s wide-ranging analysis tackles the anime themselves – including classics such as Astro Boy, Akira, Urotsukidōji, Spirited Away, and Natsume’s Book of Friends – but also the mechanics behind anime production and distribution in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Tracking anime’s circulation through these locations over time reveals key differences in how generic terms such as horror, nichijōkei/slice-of-life, and even anime itself are understood. Examining production and distribution contexts like the industry and fan event, Tokyo International Anime Fair, further discloses how companies and fans contextualize and re-contextualize anime to encourage its popularization in new time periods and markets. Denison depicts anime as an intricate global phenomenon that is constantly metamorphosing even on the level of individual anime texts, which are at the extreme re-cut, re-scripted, and re-dubbed to fit new contexts in an eternal evolution.Amanda Kennell is an Assistant Teaching Professor of International Studies at North Carolina State University. She writes about Japanese media and is currently finishing up a book on Japanese adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Japanese comics, commonly known as manga, are a global sensation. Critics, scholars, and everyday readers have often viewed this artform through an Orientalist framework, treating manga as the exotic antithesis to American and European comics. In reality, the history of manga is deeply intertwined with Japan’s avid importation of Western technology and popular culture in the early twentieth century.Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History (Rutgers UP, 2021) reveals how popular U.S. comics characters like Jiggs and Maggie, the Katzenjammer Kids, Felix the Cat, and Popeye achieved immense fame in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Modern comics had earlier developed in the United States in response to new technologies like motion pictures and sound recording, which revolutionized visual storytelling by prompting the invention of devices like speed lines and speech balloons. As audiovisual entertainment like movies and record players spread through Japan, comics followed suit. Their immediate popularity quickly encouraged Japanese editors and cartoonists to enthusiastically embrace the foreign medium and make it their own, paving the way for manga as we know it today.By challenging the conventional wisdom that manga evolved from centuries of prior Japanese art and explaining why manga and other comics around the world share the same origin story, Comics and the Origins of Manga offers a new understanding of this increasingly influential artform.Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The object as solid, having three dimensions, is not just a different formal trend, but a paradigm shift; a reconceiving of how the architectural object is produced and experienced, changing the very concept of objectivity and meaning of architecture. This book celebrates the potential of the strange object, which finds its origin in the proto-space―the moment between the becoming of the idea and the ultimate shape it takes; the state of the still obscure and ‘uninhibited’ object outside the established framework of signification. As seen through an examination of 10 projects by Archi-Tectonics, this strange object is proof of the very capacity of the object to generate new habits and meanings.For close to a century, modernism was the norm, presented to culturally aware citizens as the expression of modern life. It arrived hand in hand with medical advances, mass standardization, and a shared ideal of what the ease and speed of the modern lifestyle could offer. Only in the early years of the 21st century did our widespread allegiance begin to shift away from modernism and towards a new social realm. The digital revolution introduced online societies, niche cultures, and digital design. Digital manufacturing facilitated opportunities of surface patterning and the fabrication of one-off special building components, removing the constraints of standardization in the construction industry and celebrating the experimental. Testing designs through prototypes allows for a much more informed decision-making process. The focus is on precise, rigorous research and development, rather than representational models.Now, after nearly two decades of implementing digital tools, we have reached a new platform where digital design and robotic production are the norm, and by extension, digital craft and integral design are as the future. This has been particularly important in the rethinking of advanced digital design processes. As showcased and examined in Strange Objects, New Solids and Massive Forms (Actar, 2022), from the earliest projects and regardless of scale, Archi-Tectonics has valued performance over form, design intelligence over style. Through prototypes and mock-ups, process documentation and testimonials, the book presents 10 current and recent projects that celebrate the particular and singular over the ideal and universal.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 Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

A ground-breaking volume examining the transnational conditions of the European Enlightenment, Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks (Voltaire Foundation, 2021) argues that artisans of the long eighteenth-century on four different continents created and disseminated ideas that revolutionized how we understand modern-day craftsmanship, design, labor, and technology. Starting in Europe, this book journeys through France across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas and then on to Asia and Oceania. Highlighting diverse identities of artisans, the authors trace how these historical actors formed networks at local and global levels to assert their own forms of expertise and experience. These artisans – some anonymous, eminent, and outside the margins – translated European Enlightenment thinking into a number of disciplines and trades including architecture, botany, ceramics, construction, furniture, gardening, horology, interior design, manuscript illustration, and mining. In each thematic section of this illustrated volume, two leading scholars present contrasting case studies of artisans in different geographic contexts. These paired chapters are also followed by shorter commentary that reflects on pertinent themes from both chapters. Emphasizing how and why artisanal histories around the world impacted civic and private life, commerce, cultural engagement, and sense of place, this book introduces new richness and depth to the conversations around the ambivalent and fragmented nature of the Enlightenment.Lauren R. Cannady, assistant clinical professor in University Honors at the University of Maryland, is a historian of early modern art and architecture with an interest in intellectual and cultural history. Jennifer Ferng is Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Postgraduate Director at the University of Sydney. She received her PhD from MIT. Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

From 1952 to 1985, Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) underwent extensive Freudian analysis that probed her family history, marriage, motherhood, and artistic ambition--and generated inspiration for her artwork. Examining the impact of psychoanalysis on Bourgeois's work, this volume offers insight into her creative process. Philip Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois's literary archivist, provides an overview of the artist's life and work and the ways in which the psychoanalytic process informed her artistic practice. An essay by Juliet Mitchell offers a cutting-edge feminist psychoanalyst's viewpoint on the artist's long and complex relationship with therapy. In addition, a short text written by Bourgeois (first published in 1991) addresses Freud's own relationship to art and artists. Featuring excerpts from Bourgeois's copious diaries, rarely seen notebook pages, and archival family photographs, Louise Bourgeois, Freud's Daughter (Yale UP, 2021) opens exciting new avenues for understanding an innovative, influential, and groundbreaking artist whose wide-ranging work includes not only renowned large-scale sculptures but also a plethora of paintings and prints.Isak de Vries is psychoanalyst in private practice in New York, NY. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Originally published in 2006, Art of the Northwest Coast offers an expansive history of this great tradition, from the earliest known works to those made at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although non-Natives often claimed that First Nations cultures were disappearing, Northwest Coast Native people continued to make art during the painful era of colonization, often subtly expressing resistance to their oppressors and demonstrating the resilience of their heritage. Integrating the art’s development with historical events following contact with Euro-Americans sheds light on the creativity of artists as they appropriated and transformed foreign elements into uniquely Indigenous statements. A new chapter discusses contemporary artists, including Marianne Nicholson, Nicholas Galanin, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, and Sonny Assu, who address pressing issues ranging from Indigenous sovereignty and destruction of the environment to the power of Native women and efforts to work with non-Natives to heal the wounds of racism and discrimination.Kirstin L. Ellsworth holds a Ph.D. in the History of Art from Indiana University and is Associate Professor of Art History at California State University Dominguez Hills. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art