New Books in Art

This is the second in a series of podcasts from Zoe Kontes’ terrific “Looted.” Marble figurines made ca. 5,000 years ago in the Cycladic Islands of the Aegean became all the rage for collectors, and a great influence in Modernist Art. Easily looted and almost as easily faked, these objects have a unique role in the modern world. The question is, what was their role in the ancient world? More to see, read and hear: Gill, D. W. J., and C. Chippindale. “Material and intellectual consequences of esteem for Cycladic figures.” American Journal of Archaeology 97 (1993): 601-59. Chippindale, C., and D. W. J. Gill. “Cycladic figurines: art versus archaeology?” In Antiquities: trade or betrayed. Legal, ethical and conservation issues, edited by K. W. Tubb (1993): 131-42. Review: A Seductive and Troubling Work. Reviewed Work:The Cycladic Spirit: Masterpieces from the Nicholas P. Goulandris Collectionby Colin Renfrew, Christos Doumas. Review by: Ricardo J. Elia,Archaeology. Vol. 46, No. 1 (JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1993), pp. 64, 66-69 http://www.jstor.org/stable/41766251 Renfrew, C. “Keros: Rethinking the Cycladic Early Bronze Age,” Penn Museum lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epwk71maFRc On Looted: The Podcast, we uncover the hidden stories of ancient artifacts and their journeys in the illicit antiquities trade. I’m Zoe Kontes, and I’m an archaeologist. When we archaeologists dig, we carefully record what we find so we can make the best sense of the evidence. But go to any museum, auction house, or dealer with an antiquities collection—Ebay even—and you’ll be sure to find objects that have been removed from the ground without this kind of proper excavation. Looting destroys the context of artifacts, and while they may look beautiful in a display case, we lose any information about their significance or function in the culture that made them. This is a loss of our common human history, and it affects us all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Just after World War II, West Indians began moving to London in large numbers. The artists, writers, and musicians among them found a place to create, and they found ways to express their complex notions of belonging to both the Caribbean and to the British Empire. Amanda Bidnall‘s The West Indian Generation: Remaking British Culture in London, 1945-1965 (Liverpool University Press, 2017) traces their paths and their fortunes, their successes and their troubles. Bidnall writes against a prevailing interpretation of immigrant London as torn apart with racial divisions. While this generation may have encountered degrees of racial animosity, they were at also intent on participating in and contributing to a burgeoning scene that welcomed them as newcomers.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Edgar Degas died in the fall of 1917. Marking this 100th anniversary, Kathryn Brown‘s edited collection, Perspectives on Degas (Routledge, 2016) brings together a range of authors and methodologies to consider the French artist in context, to examine aspects of his practice in terms of form and technique, and to think and rethink critical approaches to Degas and his legacies. Working in Europe, North America, and Asia, the volume’s fascinating and provocative essays introduce the reader to the artist in a number of ways while building on, responding to, and challenging some of the traditions and conclusions of previous Degas scholarship. Featuring an introduction as well an essay by its editor, the collection is divided into three parts. In the first section, Art in Context; Gender, Race, and Labour, authors Norma Broude, Shao-Chien Tseng, Mary Hunter, and Anthea Callen examine Degas’s representation of working women and horses, racecourses, the “cafe-concert,” female spectators, and circus performers. The second part of the book, Making and Materiality highlights the production and physicality of the art that Degas produced as objects. Exploring the relationship of Degas’s painting to photography, the internal structures of his sculptures, and aspects of his printmaking and illustration, the essays by Marni Reva Kessler, Patricia Failing, Jonas Beyer, and Brown herself, are analyses grounded in the very practical and technical aspects of what and how the artist made. In the third section of the book, Writing Degas, authors Ruth Iskin, Heather Dawkins, and Anna Gruetz Robbins all pursue the testimonies and criticism of Degas’s friends, colleagues, and art historians, as well as his own reflections on his relationships, and the studio space where he worked. Moving in many different directions, the essays nevertheless cohere as a set with the aim of complicating our understanding of the artist, reconsidering previous assumptions, and opening up new questions about his oeuvre. This was my first interview with an author/editor of a collection and it was a pleasure learning more about how this group of essays came together in such an impressive volume. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as “hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-Up Comedy (The University Press of Mississippi, 2014), Ian Brodie, an associate professor of folklore at Cape Breton University, brings a folkloristic approach to the study of stand-up comedy. By focusing on comedic performance, Brodie shows stand-up comedy to be a collaborative act between comedian and audience similar to folk performance around the world, even as mediatization sees professional comedians transcend the initial performance to reach mass audiences. Timothy Thurston is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds. His research examines language at the nexus of tradition and modernity in China’s Tibet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Can we change minds about Confederate monuments? Kevin Levin is a historian and educator studying the American Civil War and memory. His book, Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), was just released in paperback and he is the author of a recent article in the Atlantic Why I Changed My Mind About Confederate Monuments.The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

This is the first in a series of podcasts from Zoe Kontes’ terrific “Looted.” Listen to the story of a gold funerary wreath, looted from Northern Greece in the 1990s, smuggled into Germany, and eventually purchased by an illustrious U.S. museum. With their abundance of gold and other luxury items, the royal tombs of Macedonia in this area have been the target of looters (and archaeologists) for years. The debates about the VIPs who may or may not be interred within (the father of Alexander the Great, for one) continue, and demonstrate the essential importance of archaeological context. On Looted: The Podcast, we uncover the hidden stories of ancient artifacts and their journeys in the illicit antiquities trade. I’m Zoe Kontes, and I’m an archaeologist. When we archaeologists dig, we carefully record what we find so we can make the best sense of the evidence. But go to any museum, auction house, or dealer with an antiquities collection—Ebay even—and you’ll be sure to find objects that have been removed from the ground without this kind of proper excavation. Looting destroys the context of artifacts, and while they may look beautiful in a display case, we lose any information about their significance or function in the culture that made them. This is a loss of our common human history, and it affects us all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Richard Rabinowitz is one of the leading public historians in the United States. He has helped conceptualize, design, organize, and build over 500 history programs across the U.S. at such sites as the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York; the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute; and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. Between 2004 and 2011, Richard curated six blockbuster history exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society, including Slavery in New York and Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn. He also drew up the interpretive and curatorial plan for the Slavery and Freedom exhibition at the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Most of this work has come out of his founding and directing the American History Workshop. The journey he has taken—from receiving his PhD in the History of American Civilization at Harvard to becoming a public historian and working on these exhibits—is the subject of his recent book: Curating America: Journeys through Storyscapes of the American Past (University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Over the course of the hour, I talk with Richard about the changing ways people have come to engage with the past and how this has impacted, and been shaped by, his many museum projects and exhibitions. Richard focuses on the materiality of lived experience. From it he culls knowledge of big ideas (such as freedom, revolution, and oppression) and uses places, objects, and the bodily sensorium to create “storyscapes” in which audiences can recognize themselves. Crucial to this process is the knowledge that audiences and museum-goers bring with them. Richard speaks to how he has, together with these stakeholders, generated a new historical awareness that is more reflective of our ever-changing present. Michael Amico holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: The True Story of the Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy of the American Civil War, is about the romance between Henry Clay Trumbull and Henry Ward Camp of the Tenth Connecticut Regiment. He is the author, with Michael Bronski and Ann Pellegrini, of “You Can Tell Just by Looking”: And 20 Other Myths about LGBT Life and People (Beacon, 2013), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Nonfiction. He can be reached at mjamico@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Slavery as a system of torture and bondage has fascinated the optical imagination of the transatlantic world for centuries. Scholars have examined various aspects of the visual culture that was slavery, including its painting, sculpture, pamphlet campaigns, and artwork, yet an important piece of this visual culture has gone unexamined: the popular and frequently reprinted antislavery illustrated books that were utilized extensively by the antislavery movement in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Illustrated Slave: Empathy, Graphic Narrative, and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement, 1800-1852 (University of Georgia Press, 2017) analyzes some of the more innovative works in the archive of antislavery illustrated books published from 1800 to 1852 alongside other visual materials that depict enslavement. The author argues that some illustrated narratives attempt to shift a viewing reader away from pity and spectatorship into a mode of empathy and interrelationship with the enslaved. She also contends that some illustrated books characterize the enslaved as obtaining a degree of control over narrative and lived experiences, even if these figurations entail a sense that the story of slavery is beyond representation itself. Through exploration of famous works and unfamiliar ones she delineates a mode of radical empathy that attempts to destroy divisions between the enslaved individual and the free white subject and between the viewer and the viewed. Author Martha J. Cutter is a Professor in the Department of English and in the Africana Studies Institute at the University of Connecticut. She received her Ph.D. in English from Brown University, and is currently the editor of the journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. Her previously book-length projects include Unruly Tongue: Language and Identity in American Womens Fiction, 1850-1930 and Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic American Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity. She has published articles in numerous academic journals and remains intrigued by the interrelationships between literary texts and cultural contexts. James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.org.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

In her new book, Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany (Routledge 2015), Marion Deshmukh, the Robert T. Hawkes Professor of History Emeritus at George Mason University, examines the life and career of the prolific German artist Max Liebermann. Liebermann, a pioneer of German modernism, portrayed scenes of the Dutch countryside and rural life, along with portraits of Germany’s cultural and political elites. Deshmukh describes Liebermann’s life and career in wonderful detail, while also demonstrating how the art world in Germany impacted and was impacted by the wider events of German history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Best remembered today for his work as a muralist, the Russian-American artist Victor Arnautoff lived a life worthy of Hollywood. In Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Robert Cherny details the both range of Arnautoff’s activities and how the views born of those experiences influenced his work. Born in Russia, Arnautoff’s service as a cavalry officer for the anticommunist White forces in the Russian Civil War forced him to abandon his homeland for an involuntary exile, first in China, then in the United States. Long interested in a career as an artist, his studies of art in San Francisco during the 1920s led to a two-year period working for the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Returning to San Francisco during the depth of the Great Depression, Arnautoff quickly emerged as one of the greatest talents on the regional art scene, with works that championed the working man and criticized the brutalities of capitalism. Arnautoff’s embrace of Communism by the end of the 1930s and his association with Soviet consular officials both during and after World War II brought increasing attention from the U.S. government during the postwar “Red Scare” era, with their monitoring of his activities ending only with his return to the Soviet Union in 1957. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art