Matthew Rampley’s The Vienna School of Art History is the first book in over seventy-five years to study in depth and in context the practices of art history from 1847, the year the first teaching position in the discipline was created, to 1918, the collapse of Austria-Hungary. It traces the emergence of art history as a discipline, the establishment of norms of scholarly inquiry, and the involvement of art historians in wider debates about the cultural and political identity of the monarchy. The so-called Vienna School plays the central role in the study, but Rampley also examines the formation of art history elsewhere in Austria-Hungary. Located in the Habsburg imperial capital, Vienna art historians frequently became entangled in debates that were of importance to art historians elsewhere in the Empire, and Rampley pays particular attention to these areas of overlapping interest. He also analyzes the methodological innovations for which the Vienna School was well known. Rampley focuses most fully, however, on the larger political and ideological context of the practice of art history—particularly the way in which art-historical debates served as proxies for wider arguments over the political, social, and cultural life of the Habsburg Empire.

This provocative study argues that some of the most inventive artwork of the 1890s was strongly influenced by the methods of experimental science and ultimately foreshadowed twentieth-century modernist practices. Looking at avant-garde figures such as Maurice Denis, Edouard Vuillard, August Strindberg, and Edvard Munch, Allison Morehead considers the conjunction of art making and experimentalism to illuminate how artists echoed the spirit of an increasingly explorative scientific culture in their work and processes. She shows how the concept of "nature's experiments"-the belief that the study of pathologies led to an understanding of scientific truths, above all about the human mind and body-extended from the scientific realm into the world of art, underpinned artists' solutions to the problem of symbolist form, and provided a ready-made methodology for fin-de-siecle truth seekers. By using experimental methods to transform symbolist theories into visual form, these artists broke from naturalist modes and interrogated concepts such as deformation, automatism, the arabesque, and madness to create modern works that were radically and usefully strange. Focusing on the scientific, psychological, and experimental tactics of symbolism, Nature's Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form demystifies the avant-garde value of experimentation and reveals new and important insights into a foundational period for the development of European modernism.

In Soviet Salvage, Catherine Walworth explores how artists on the margins of the Constructivist movement of the 1920s rejected “elitist� media and imagined a new world, knitting together avant-garde art, imperial castoffs, and everyday life. Applying anthropological models borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Walworth shows that his mythmaker typologies—the “engineer� and “bricoleur�—illustrate, respectively, the canonical Constructivists and artists on the movement’s margins who deployed a wide range of clever make-do tactics. Walworth explores the relationships of Nadezhda Lamanova, Esfir Shub, and others with Constructivists such as Aleksei Gan, Varvara Stepanova, and Aleksandr Rodchenko. Together, the work of these artists reflected the chaotic and often contradictory zeitgeist of the decade from 1918 to 1929 and redefined the concept of mass production. Reappropriated fragments of a former enemy era provided a wide range of play and possibility for these artists, and the resulting propaganda porcelain, film, fashion, and architecture tell a broader story of the unique political and economic pressures felt by their makers. An engaging multidisciplinary study of objects and their makers during the Soviet Union’s early years, this volume highlights a group of artists who hover like free radicals at the border of existing art-historical discussions of Constructivism and deepens our knowledge of Soviet art and material culture.

Surveying the Avant-Garde examines the art and literature of the Americas in the early twentieth century through the lens of the questionnaire, a genre as central as the manifesto to the history of the avant-garde. Questions such as "How do you imagine Latin America?" and "What should American art be?" issued by avant-garde magazines like Iman, a Latin American periodical based in Paris, and Cuba's Revista de Avance demonstrate how editors, writers, and readers all grappled with the concept of "America," particularly in relationship to Europe, and how the questionnaire became a structuring device for reflecting on their national and aesthetic identities in print. Through an analysis of these questionnaires and their responses, Lori Cole reveals how ideas like "American art," as well as "modernism" and "avant-garde," were debated at the very moment of their development and consolidation. Unlike a manifesto, whose signatories align with a single polemical text, the questionnaire produces a patchwork of responses, providing a composite and sometimes fractured portrait of a community. Such responses yield a self-reflexive history of the era as told by its protagonists, which include figures such as Gertrude Stein, Alfred Stieglitz, Jean Toomer, F. T. Marinetti, Diego Rivera, and Jorge Luis Borges. The book traces a genealogy of the genre from the Renaissance paragone, or "comparison of the arts," through the rise of enquetes in the late nineteenth century, up to the contemporary questionnaire, which proliferates in art magazines today. By analyzing a selection of surveys issued across the Atlantic, Cole indicates how they helped shape artists' and writers' understanding of themselves and their place in the world. Based on extensive archival research, this book reorients our understanding of modernism as both hemispheric and transatlantic by narrating how the artists and writers of the period engaged in aesthetic debates that informed and propelled print communities in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Scholars of modernism and the avant-garde will welcome Cole's original and compellingly crafted work.

This important new study reevaluates British art writing and the rise of formalism in the visual arts from 1900 to 1939. Taking Roger Fry as his starting point, Sam Rose rethinks how ideas about form influenced modernist culture and the movement’s significance to art history today. In the context of modernism, formalist critics are often thought to be interested in art rather than life, a stance exemplified in their support for abstract works that exclude the world outside. But through careful attention to early twentieth-century connoisseurship, aesthetics, art education, design, and art in colonial Nigeria and India, Rose builds an expanded account of form based on its engagement with the social world. Art and Form thus opens discussions on a range of urgent topics in art writing, from its history and the constructions of high and low culture to the idea of global modernism. Rose demonstrates the true breadth of formalism and shows how it lends a new richness to thought about art and visual culture in the early to mid-twentieth century. Accessibly written and analytically sophisticated, Art and Form opens exciting new paths of inquiry into the meaning and lasting importance of formalism and its ties to modernism. It will be invaluable for scholars and enthusiasts of art history and visual culture.

Depicting characters like the eponymous young sculptor in Roderick Hudson and spaces like the crowded galleries in The Wings of the Dove, Henry James’s iconic novels reflect the significance of the visual culture of his society. In this book, novelist and critic Colm Tóibín joins art historian Marc Simpson and Declan Kiely of The Morgan Library & Museum to reveal how essential the language and imagery of the arts—and friendships with artists—were to James’s writing. The authors consider the paintings, photographs, drawings, and sculpture produced by artists in James’s circle, assess how his pictorial aesthetic developed, and discuss why he destroyed so many personal documents and what became of those that survived. In examining works by figures such as John La Farge, Hendrik Andersen, and John Singer Sargent alongside selections from James’s novels, personal letters, and travel writings, Tóibín, Simpson, and Kiely explore the novelist’s artistic and social milieu. They show him to be a writer with a painterly eye for colors and textures, shapes and tastes, and for the blending of physical and psychological impressions. In many cases, the characters populating James’s fiction are ciphers for his artist friends, whose demeanors and experiences inspired James to immortalize them on the page. He also wrote critically about art, most notably about the work of his friend Sargent. A refreshing new perspective on a master novelist who was greatly nourished by his friendships with artists, Henry James and American Painting reveals a James whose literary imagination, in Tóibín’s words, “seemed most at ease with the image� and the work of creating fully realized portraits of his characters.

All too often, the historical avant-garde is taken to be incommensurate with and antithetical to the world inhabited by the museum. In The Curatorial Avant-Garde, by contrast, Adam Jolles demonstrates the surrealists’ radical transformation of the ways in which spectators encountered works of art between the wars. From their introduction in Paris in 1925, surrealist exhibitions dissolved the conventional boundaries between visual media, language, and the space of public display. This intrusion—by a group of amateur curators, with neither formal training nor professional experience in museums or galleries—ultimately altered the way in which surrealists made, displayed, and promoted their own art. Through interdisciplinary analyses of particular exhibitions and works of art in relation to the manner in which they were displayed, Jolles addresses this public face of surrealism. He directs attention to the venues, the contemporary debates those venues engendered, and the critical discourses in which they participated. In so doing, he shines new light on the movement’s artistic and intellectual development, revealing both the political stakes attached to surrealism within the historical context of interwar Europe and the movement’s instrumental role in the trajectory of modernism.

Patrons and collectors Barbara and James Palmer have long played a vital role in the museum that bears their name. A Gift from the Heart: American Art from the Collection of James and Barbara Palmer documents in its entirety what is arguably one of the finest private collections of American art in the country. Amassed over more than three decades, the collection features notable works by well-known nineteenth-century artists and boasts strengths in Ashcan realism and Stieglitz-circle modernism, as well as works by noted artists of the mid- to late twentieth century.

Much of the book comprises thematic essays written by invited scholars--university professors, museum and gallery professionals, and independent curators--who each consider the broader sociohistorical context of American art and culture as they delve into the particulars of the collection. Interspersed throughout the book are a series of short "In Focus" essays, highlighting a number of the most notable works in the collection. The remainder of the book is an extensive, fully illustrated catalogue of the 200+ paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and ceramics collected by the Palmers, including works that have already been donated to the museum and the remaining works, all of which will be gifted in the future.

Aside from the editor, the contributors are Robert Cozzolino, John Driscol, Randall R. Griffey, Molly S. Hutton, Lauren Lessing, G. Daniel Massad, Leo G. Mazow, Patrick J. McGrady, Jan Keene Muhlert, Marshall N. Price, Sarah Rich, and Elizabeth Hutton Turner.

The fifteen years in Germany between the end of World War I and the National Socialists' rise to power in 1933 stand out as one of the twentieth century's most tumultuous periods. These years of political and economic upheaval famously spawned significant and lasting changes in the arts. However, one noteworthy product of Weimar Germany's booming cultural life has escaped significant critical attention: the photo essay. The Photography of Crisis examines narrative photography and creates a snapshot of where Germany was after World War I and what it would become with the rise of National Socialism. By reading Weimar photo essays within their historical and literary context, Daniel Magilow shows how German photographers intervened in modernity's key political and philosophical debates regarding the changing notions of nature, culture, personal identity, and national identity.

In The Other American Moderns, ShiPu Wang analyzes the works of four early twentieth-century American artists who engaged with the concept of “Americanness�: Frank Matsura, Eitar� Ishigaki, Hideo Noda, and Miki Hayakawa. In so doing, he recasts notions of minority artists’ contributions to modernism and American culture. Wang presents comparative studies of these four artists’ figurative works that feature Native Americans, African Americans, and other racial and ethnic minorities, including Matsura and Susan Timento Pose at Studio (ca. 1912), The Bonus March (1932), Scottsboro Boys (1933), and Portrait of a Negro (ca. 1926). Rather than creating art that reflected “Asian aesthetics,� Matsura, Ishigaki, Noda, and Hayakawa deployed “imagery of the Other by the Other� as their means of exploring, understanding, and contesting conditions of diaspora and notions of what it meant to be American in an age of anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation. Based on a decade-long excavation of previously unexamined collections in the United States and Japan, The Other American Moderns is more than a rediscovery of “forgotten� minority artists: it reconceives American modernism by illuminating these artists’ active role in the shaping of a multicultural and cosmopolitan culture. This nuanced analysis of their deliberate engagement with the ideological complexities of American identity contributes a new vision to our understanding of non-European identity in modernism and American art.

Passage into the modern world left the Russian icon profoundly altered. It fell into new hands, migrated to new homes, and acquired new forms and meanings. Icons were made in the factories of foreign industrialists and destroyed by iconoclasts of the proletariat. Even the icon's traditional functions--whether in the feast days of the church or the pageantry of state power--were susceptible to the transformative forces of modernization. In Alter Icons: The Russian Icon and Modernity, eleven scholars of Russian history, art, literature, cinema, philosophy, and theology track key shifts in the production, circulation, and consumption of the Russian icon from Peter the Great's Enlightenment to the post-Soviet revival of Orthodoxy. Alter Icons shows how the twin pressures of secular scholarship and secular art transformed the Russian icon from a sacred image in the church to a masterpiece in the museum, from a parochial craftwork to a template for the avant-garde, and from a medieval interface with the divine to a modernist prism for seeing the world anew.

In addition to the editors, the contributors are Robert Bird, Elena Boeck, Shirley A. Glade, John-Paul Himka, John Anthony McGuckin, Robert L. Nichols, Sarah Pratt, Wendy R. Salmond, and Vera Shevzov.

A Touch of Blossom considers John Singer Sargent in the context of nineteenth-century botany, gynecology, literature, and visual culture and argues that the artist mobilized ideas of cross-fertilization and the hermaphroditic sexuality of flowers in his work to "naturalize" sexual inversion. In conceiving of his painting as an act of hand-pollination, Sargent was elaborating both a period poetics of homosexuality and a new sense of subjectivity, anticipating certain aspects of artistic modernism.

Assembling evidence from diverse realms--visual culture (cartoons, greeting cards, costume design), medicine and botany (treatises and their illustrations), literature, letters, lexicography, and the visual arts--this book situates the metaphors that structure Sargent's paintings in a broad cultural context. It offers in-depth readings of particular paintings and analyzes related projects undertaken by Sargent's friends in the field of painting and in other disciplines, such as gynecology and literature.

Paintings of a "kept woman" sitting in her lover's lap, of the Lady of Shalott, of Merlin the magician, of an explosive, abstract pattern--some rendered in meticulous detail, others only sketched--appear side by side in David Peters Corbett's book on English art. The sharp differences in style and in subject matter are striking and significant, but they are not presented in any of the usual ways. They are not seen as markers of a progressive development, expressions of strong personalities, or signs of English artists' inability or reluctance to master French Impressionism. All these familiar narratives are abandoned in Corbett's book, which, in their stead, proposes a new way of looking at English painting from the Pre-Raphaelites to Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists. An award-winning art historian, Corbett contends that from 1848 to 1914, English artists confronted a world in which the rise of science and decline in religion deprived painting of many of its traditional functions and powers. Yet these same changes, according to Corbett, presented the possibility that painting could become a crucial means of mediating the widely decried materialism of industrial society. It could expose the values that had been lost, reveal hidden spiritual and emotional resources, or, alternatively, welcome and champion the dynamics of modernism. Corbett makes persuasive use of a wide range of sources, including contemporary art criticism, artists' letters, literature, and, not surprisingly, the torrent of publicity touched off by the Whistler versus Ruskin trial of 1877. But what gives his book originality is its incisive discussion of aesthetic issues that art historians, intent on social history,have generally overlooked. Corbett puts readers in contact with debates about visual experience, the handling of paint, codes of beauty, and questions of meaning. Many of Corbett's points entail close analysis of art. The World in Paint is amply illustrated with high-quality color and black-and-white reproductions.