New Books in Art

In this segment of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Elizabeth “Libby” Otto, Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies and Executive Director of the Humanities Institute at the University of Buffalo about her forthcoming work, Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics (MIT Press, 2019). The MIT press release appropriately notes that Otto “liberates Bauhaus history” with this work, drawing the focus from the handful of male artists like Klee and Breuer outward as she considers the other 1200 odd Bauhäusler. Otto discusses spiritism, gender constructions, and the nature of queer before turning her attention to the unavoidable political landscape of the 1930s. Our conversation was wide ranging and as edifying as it was fun. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

A work of art about doing nothing; a work of art that invites people to take it apart; a work of art that consists of two people walking in a town in the Dominican Republic. These are just some examples Carlos Garrido Castellano takes up in Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art: Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere (Rutgers University Press, 2019), his provocative and complex exploration of conceptual art in the Caribbean as it has been presented over the last thirty years. He argues for a way of experiencing and writing about art that explodes all of our assumptions, and makes new spectators of us all. This book proposes that we can understand this art as creating agency in and through space. Its success is evident in the urgency it generates: we need to experience these creative interventions in order to better understand the Caribbean. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The Genji Album (1510) in the Harvard Art Museums is the oldest dated set of Genji illustrations known to exist. In The Tale of Genji. A Visual Companion, published by Princeton University Press in 2018, Melissa McCormick discusses all of the fifty-four paintings by Tosa Mitsunobu and calligraphies in the album, thus providing a unique companion to Murasaki Shikibu’s eleventh century masterpiece of prose and poetry, The Tale of Genji.Ricarda Brosch is an Assistant Curator at the V&A’s Asian Department, East Asia section. You can follow her on Twitter: @RicardaBeatrix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

If there’s one thing that conjures up the – rightly contested – idea of a ‘civilisation’, it is grand palatial or religious buildings, and many such structures are foremost in how China is imagined throughout the world. But as Nancy S. Steinhardt notes in Chinese Architecture: A History (Princeton University Press, 2019), many iconic edifices such Beijing’s Forbidden City or Shanxi’s temples share features in common with the humblest ordinary dwellings which people in what we now call China have inhabited for centuries.Steinhardt here draws on decades of exhaustive reading and tireless fieldwork to tell the story of Chinese building practices, principles and techniques across space and time, from the earliest archaeological traces of construction right up to the present day. Both highly accessible and richly illustrated with hundreds of colour photographs, as well as intricate technical diagrams, this extraordinary treasure trove of a book is much more than an architectural compendium. The countless insights Steinhardt offers into the wider worlds of art and urban planning, and the political, economic and religious contexts in which Chinese buildings have been built for thousands of years, will serve as an engrossing and materially-rooted account of Chinese ‘civilisation’ for anyone with even a fleeting interest in the country.Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

The metaphor “object lesson” is a familiar one, still in everyday use. But what exactly does the metaphor refer to?In her book Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World (Oxford University Press, 2018), my guest Sarah Anne Carter reveals that object lessons were a classroom exercise, in wide use during the nineteenth century. She traces them from the Swiss educational reformer Pestalozzi, through his English adherents, to seemingly unlikely outposts of educational revolution as the Oswego, New York school system. And she takes the story into politics, advertising, and racial segregation.Her book is study of intellectual history and of intellectual culture. But Sarah’s book, and this conversation, is also about asking questions of things which cannot speak. Sarah’s interest in objects comes not simply from her training as an intellectual historian, but as a curator of museums. She is curator and director of research at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, and is passionate about teaching people the history behind the objects that museums contain.Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

“Fashion is universal,” writes my guest Kimberly Alexander in her book Treasures Afoot: Shoe Stories from the Georgian Era (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), “enabling historians across time, place, and culture to form an understanding of the people who made clothes and who wore them. But shoes are different. As shoe scholar June Swann opines, ‘No other garment or accessory maintains the imprint of its wearer–even over long spans of time.’ A shoe molds to the foot and captures a facet of the physical characteristics of its wearer, as well as, by extension, an element of his or her personal history. We can study how much wear occurred and on what part of the shoe, how a shoe was altered or repaired, why a shoe or a pair of shoes were saved and handed down–and, from this, form a idea of the ordinary lives of the people who wore them.”Together Kimberly and I discuss her new book; why shoes are important; why fashion is important; and even how to talk about material culture in class.Al Zambone is a historian and the host of the podcast Historically Thinking. You can subscribe to Historically Thinking on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Along with the rapid expansion of the market economy and industrial production methods, such innovations as photography, lithography, and steam printing created a pictorial revolution in nineteenth-century society. The proliferation of visual prints, ephemera, spectacles, and technologies transformed public values and perceptions, and its legacy was as significant as the print revolution that preceded it. Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Oxford University Press, 2018) explores the significance of the pictorial revolution in one of its vanguard cities: San Francisco, the revolving door of the gold rush. In their correspondence, diaries, portraits, and reminiscences, thousands of migrants to the city by the Bay demonstrated that visual media constituted a central means by which people navigated the bewildering host of changes taking hold around them in the second half of the nineteenth century, from the spread of capitalism and class formation to immigration and urbanization. Amy K. Defalco Lippert, Assistant Professor of American History and the College at the University of Chicago, argues that images themselves were inextricably associated with these world-changing forces; they were commodities, but as representations of people, they also possessed special cultural qualities that gave them new meaning and significance.Visual media transcended traditional boundaries of language and culture that divided diverse groups within the same urban space. From the 1848 conquest of California and the gold discovery to the disastrous earthquake and fire of 1906, San Francisco anticipated broader cultural transformations in the commodification, implementation, and popularity of images. For the city's inhabitants and sojourners, an array of imagery came to mediate, intersect with, and even constitute social interaction in a world where virtual reality was becoming normative.____________________________________________________________________________Ryan Tripp is adjunct history faculty for Los Medanos Community College as well as the College of Online and Continuing Education at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Josef Stalin’s death in 1953 marked a noticeable shift in Soviet attitudes towards the West.  A nation weary of war and terror welcomed with relief the new regime of Nikita Khrushchev and its focus on peaceful cooperation with foreign powers.  A year after Stalin’s death, author and commentator Ilya Ehrenburg published the novel that would give a name to this era, “The Thaw,” which probed the limits of cultural expression, now expanded by Khrushchev’s political pivot.One of the critical hallmarks of The Thaw is an almost immediate deluge of foreign culture into the Soviet Union, which for most of the population was entirely new: in pre-revolutionary Russia, culture was the prerogative of wealthy aristocrats and intellectuals, and for the much of the first three decades of the nascent Soviet state, access to foreign culture was strictly forbidden.  Suddenly, the vast country was flooded with international books, films, paintings, and music.  The impact was seismic, and the reverberations are still felt today.To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture(Harvard University Press, 2018), by Eleonor Gilburd, is a deep dive into this phenomenon, which spans period from the death of Stalin in 1953 to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.  Gilburd looks at the perfect cultural and social storm created by the combination of more liberal politics, foreign culture and the technology to make it accessible to 11 time zones.  But Gilburd doesn’t limit herself to the impact of culture on the Soviet population, rather she examines the ways in which Soviet cultural interpreters made foreign cultural artifacts “about us.” In Gilburd’s study, we see how translators dug deep into Russian street language to bring Holden Caufield to the page, how film distributors brought Fellini’s neorealism to the steppes of Kazakhstan, and how Ilya Ehrenburg gently reintroduced a nation to the beauty of French Impressionism.  This is as much a story of translators, commentators, and curators as it is of their audience.“To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture” was short-listed for the 2019 Pushkin House Prize.Eleonor Gilburd is an Assistant Professor of Soviet History and the College at the University of Chicago, and the author of “The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s.”  She received her Ph.D. from the University of California Berkley in 2010.Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who divides her time between Riga, Latvia, and New England.  Jennifer writes about travel, food, lifestyle, and Russian history and culture with bylines in Reuters, Fodor’s, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life.  She is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander & Roberts, and the award-winning author of  Lenin Lives Next Door:  Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow.  Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In Graphic Satire in the Soviet Union: Krokodil’s Political Cartoons (University Press of Mississippi, 2019), Dr. John Etty explains how Krokodil magazine provided a venue in which the state, the the magazine’s editors, and readers all participated in defining what it was permissible to laugh at in the USSR. A standard view of Krokodil as propaganda would suggest that the magazine largely functioned as an arm of state ideology. In some cases, Krokodil did serve this function, but more often than not, its contents were the product of a process of co-creation, with all three groups playing a creative role in producing the magazine’s contents. With an engaging mix of visual analysis and theoretical sophistication, the author provides a window into everyday reading materials consumed by Soviet citizens.Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Linda M. Grasso's Equal under the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe & Twentieth-Century Feminism (University of New Mexico Press, 2017) provides an in-depth look at O'Keeffe's ambivalent relationship with feminism from her early beginnings as a New Woman of the 1910s, to the support she received from women to become a national icon for feminism. Along the way, she distanced herself in multiple ways from women and feminism seeking to establish herself as an artist rather than as a woman artist with art making serving as a personal form of activism. Her desire to control her career and image motivated her to seek gender-transcendence and embrace personal feminism of individualism, self-expression and professional achievement. O’Keeffe’s success, the modernism of her time, and feminism are deeply linked and demonstrate the complexities for women who excelled in their chosen fields and the enduring conflicts within the movement. How the meaning of feminism changed during the course of O’Keeffe’s lifetime and how she became a feminist icon disconnected from its politics are at the heart of this fascinating study.Linda M. Grasso is a professor of English at York College, City University of New York.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her most recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current research project is on the intellectual history feminism seen through the emblematic life and work of Simone de Beauvoir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art