Like the printing press, typewriter, and computer, paper has been a crucial agent for the dissemination of information. This engaging book presents an important new chapter in paper’s history: how its use in Islamic lands during the Middle Ages influenced almost every aspect of medieval life. Focusing on the spread of paper from the early eighth century, when Muslims in West Asia acquired Chinese knowledge of paper and papermaking, to five centuries later, when they transmitted this knowledge to Christians in Spain and Sicily, the book reveals how paper utterly transformed the passing of knowledge and served as a bridge between cultures.

Jonathan Bloom traces the earliest history of paper—how it was invented in China over 2,000 years ago, how it entered the Islamic lands of West Asia and North Africa, and how it spread to northern Europe. He explores the impact of paper on the development of writing, books, mathematics, music, art, architecture, and even cooking. And he discusses why Europe was so quick to adopt paper from the Islamic lands and why the Islamic lands were so slow to accept printing in return. Together the text and illustrations (of papermaking techniques and the many uses to which paper was put) give new luster and importance to a now-humble material.

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Recounting the biblical stories through visual images was the most prestigious form of commission for a Renaissance artist. In this book, Jules Lubbock examines some of the most famous of these pictorial narratives by prominent artists, including Giovanni Pisano, Giotto, Ghiberti, Donatello, and Masaccio. The author explains how artists portrayed biblical events so as to be easily recognizable and, at the same time, to captivate the viewer long enough to encourage the search for deeper meanings.

Lubbock shows that the Church favored the production of images that lent themselves to being read and interpreted in this way, and he demonstrates how the pleasurable activity of deciphering these meanings can work in practice. The book is richly illustrated, with many photographs specially taken to show how the paintings and relief sculptures appear in the settings for which they were originally designed.

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"Far and away the best monograph ever written on Rothko." —Yve-Alain Bois, Artforum

Originally published in 1998, this quintessential volume presents an overview of Mark Rothko’s stunning corpus of paintings on canvas and panel. With all works reproduced in color, the book includes the images for which Rothko is most famous—the large, hypnotic, poignant fields of color along with almost 400 additional paintings that are far less well known and reveal an artist who was attuned by turns to realism, expressionism, surrealism, and the avant-garde issues of his era.

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The painting and carving of altarpieces was one of the most important and characteristic tasks of Italian Renaissance artists, yet the altarpiece as an artistic genre has been surprisingly neglected by art historians. This book—the first detailed study of the altarpiece in a major center of Renaissance art—focuses on Venice from 1450 to 1530. Peter Humfrey, an authority on Venetian painting, explores a wide range of issues surrounding altarpieces as an art form. These include the traditions of decoration of Venetian churches, the sacred and secular functions that altarpieces were expected to perform, the market for altarpieces, and the professional world of the Venetian artist. He discusses altarpieces by Bellini, Cima, the three Vivarini, and the young Titian, as well as by numerous other painters and sculptors of the period.

A central theme of the book is the relation between the altarpieces and their original physical and liturgical context. Throughout, Humfrey tries to reintegrate altarpieces with their intended settings, both for the sake of recapturing their full visual effect and as a basis for examining the ideological relationship between their subject matter and the altar table below. He also examines the complex mixture of motives, worldly as well as pious, that prompted fifteenth-century Venetians to spend large sums of money on commissioning altarpieces for the churches of their city. The first part of the book is thematic, dealing with the making, placement, and function of the altarpiece. The second part is a chronological discussion of specific works, focusing on the ways in which the artists met challenges posed by specific commissions. An appendix to the book gives further factual and bibliographical information about one hundred major Venetian altarpieces of the period.

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"Horace Pippin shines in the midst of an overdue racial reckoning in the United States, to which it makes a substantial scholarly contribution." —Clara Barnhart, caa.reviews

Arguably the most successful African American artist of his day, Horace Pippin (1888–1946) taught himself to paint in the 1930s and quickly earned international renown for depictions of World War I, black families, and American heroes Abraham Lincoln, abolitionist John Brown, and singer Marian Anderson, among other subjects. This volume sheds new light on how the disabled combat veteran claimed his place in the contemporary art world. Organized around topics of autobiography, black labor, artistic process, and gift exchange, it reveals the range of references and critiques encoded in his work and the racial, class, and cultural dynamics that informed his meteoric career.

Horace Pippin, American Modern offers a fresh perspective on the artist and his moment that contributes to a more expansive history of art in the 20th century. Featuring over 60 of Pippin’s paintings, this volume also includes two previously unknown artist’s statements—“The Story of Horace Pippin as told by Himself” and “How I Paint”—and an exhibition history and list of artworks drawn from new research.

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Vanessa R. Schwartz engagingly presents the jet plane’s power to define a new age at a critical moment in the mid-20th century, arguing that the craft’s speed and smooth ride allowed people to imagine themselves living in the future. Exploring realms as diverse as airport architecture, theme park design, film, and photography, Schwartz argues that the jet created an aesthetic that circulated on the ground below.

Visual and media culture, including Eero Saarinen’s airports, David Bailey’s photographs of the jet set, and Ernst Haas’s experiments in color photojournalism glamorized the imagery of motion. Drawing on unprecedented access to the archives of The Walt Disney Studios, Schwartz also examines the period’s most successful example of fluid motion meeting media culture: Disneyland. The park’s dedication to “people-moving” defined Walt Disney’s vision, shaping the very identity of the place. The jet age aesthetic laid the groundwork for our contemporary media culture, in which motion is so fluid that we can surf the internet while going nowhere at all.

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The prehistory and the formation process of Chinese civilization have long been of interest to world historians.  However, knowledge of this period is constantly evolving because much of our understanding of ancient China is based on archaeological data that continues to come to light.

This fourth edition of K.C. Chang’s now-standard text on Chinese archaeology incorporates the latest information that has become available since the end of the Cultural Revolution.  Chang has rewritten and reorganized the material, using a new format to discuss the period from the early humans and their Palaeolithic cultures through the first agricultural settlements to the rise and development of the earliest civilizations around 1000 B.C.  Chang now demonstrates that several regional cultures developed independently of one another and began to be linked together around 4000 B.C.  According to Chang, the interaction of these cultures laid the foundation for the Chinese civilization that we recognize in the early dynasties and in China’s written history.  Chang also presents provocative views on the distinctive process of the rise of civilization, urbanism, and the state society in China, as embodied in the Chinese archaic bronzes.  The book includes more than 300 illustrations.

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Yale University Press/Pelican History of Art

This classic book provides an unsurpassed overview of Islamic art and architecture from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries, a time of the formation of a new artistic culture and its first flowering in the vast area from the Atlantic to India. The volume focuses special attention on the development of numerous regional centers of art in Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, Iraq, and Yemen, as well as the western and northeastern provinces of Iran. It traces the cultural and artistic evolution of such centers in the seminal early Islamic period and examines the wealth of different ways of creating a beautiful environment and provides new classifications of architecture and architectural decoration, the art of the object, and the art of the book.

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For many decades, impressionism has occupied a central place in the canon of art history, but new transnational approaches to the study of nineteenth-century art have complicated the perpetuation of Francocentric histories. As the field’s attention has increasingly turned to places outside of France, including Britain, the United States, Australia, and beyond, the time is ripe to place impressionism within a global context.

In this collection of 14 essays, a distinguished group of scholars deploy new methodological tools, theories, and paradigms to explore how impressionism as an artistic language simultaneously operated locally, nationally, and internationally around the world; how Europe, especially Paris, has existed as a privileged center of modernity and modern art; how a transnational network of artists, critics, scholars, curators, and dealers worked across linguistic, institutional, geographical, and political boundaries; and much more. These texts, while not abandoning France and French impressionism, contribute to the ongoing work to dismantle the franco-centrism of impressionism studies and the anglocentrism of art history as a discipline.

This born-digital publication is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.

Photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), often termed the father of the motion picture, presented his iconic Animal Locomotion series in 1887. Produced under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania and encompassing thousands of photographs of humans and animals in motion, the series included more than 300 plates of nude men and women engaged in activities such as swinging a baseball bat, playing leapfrog, and performing housework—an astonishing fact given the period’s standards of propriety.

In the first sustained examination of these nudes and the remarkable success of their production, wide circulation, and reception, Indecent Exposures positions this revolutionary enterprise as central to crucial advancements of the modern era. Muybridge’s nudes ushered in new attitudes toward science and progress, including Darwinian ideas about human evolution and hierarchy; quickened debates over the role of photography and scientific investigation in art; and offered innovative perspectives on the human body.

With this volume, the National Gallery of Art introduces a journal presenting the latest conservation research on works in its collection. Named for “the manner in which things are made,” Facture addresses aspects of conservation from treatment and technical art history to scientific research.

The inaugural volume focuses on great works of the Renaissance, studying sculpture, painting, and drawing from various points of view. With the publication of this biennial journal, the National Gallery maintains a tradition of fostering dialogue among art historians, scientists, and conservators working in the international museum community.


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In the late medieval and Renaissance period, paper transformed society—not only through its role in the invention of print but also in the way it influenced artistic production. The Art of Paper tells the history of this medium in the context of the artist’s workshop from the thirteenth century, when it was imported to Europe from Africa, to the sixteenth century, when European paper was exported to the colonies of New Spain. In this pathbreaking work, Caroline Fowler approaches the topic culturally rather than technically, deftly exploring the way paper shaped concepts of authorship, preservation, and the transmission of ideas during this period. This book both tells a transcultural history of paper from the Cairo Genizah to the Mesoamerican manuscript and examines how paper became “Europeanized” through the various mechanisms of the watermark, colonization, and the philosophy of John Locke. Ultimately, Fowler demonstrates how paper—as refuse and rags transformed into white surface—informed the works for which it was used, as well as artists’ thinking more broadly, across the early modern world.

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