The rise of the diaristic mode in contemporary art might seem like the return of the dead author in a particularly self-absorbed frame of mind. Yet the diary is a form of writing that relinquishes authorial control to the passing moods and contingencies of the day. The diarist writes hastily, automatically, involuntarily, thereby giving access to insights unavailable to deliberation. An account of

Dearly Beloved or Unrequited? To Be ‘Black’ in Art's Histories Sonia Boyce and Dorothy Price Guided by Stuart Hall's essay ‘Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three “Moments” in Post-War History’ (2006), this special issue looks closely at the multi-faceted genealogies of Black British modernism since the arrival of the ‘Windrush generation’. It brings together a range of essays in different formats

Guided by Stuart Hall's essay ‘Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three “Moments” in Post-War History’ (2006), this special issue looks closely at the multi-faceted genealogies of Black British modernism since the arrival of the ‘Windrush generation’. It brings together a range of essays in different formats by artists and art historians on topics and methods that have been central to the AHRC-funded

This essay offers an account of the ways in which successive generations of Black artists in Britain engaged with modernism during the UK's transformation from a monocultural to a post-imperial society. Whereas the first wave (including Frank Bowling and Anwar Shemza) sought to reconcile their late colonial backgrounds with the tenets of high modernism – the autonomy of the artwork, the disinterested

This essay examines two paintings by Denis Williams, Human World (1950) and Painting in Six Related Rhythms (1954), and their accompanying critical reception, to consider the transformation that takes place from an early interest in social realism and narrative approach in representing the post-war urban environment and the experience of migration in London, to a radically geometric abstraction that

The unpublished travel photographs of Singapore-born British artist Kim Lim (1936–97) reveal the diverse reference points for her sculptures. Thus far, critical literature on Lim's practice has not yet regarded the body of photographs taken by her across five decades, largely because her photography remained a private undertaking throughout her artistic career. As ephemera relating to her sculptural

This essay offers a close reading of Verdi Yahooda's work Photo Booth Classic (1974–present), its presentation as artists’ pages in n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal, 17, January 2006, and in the exhibitions Said (London: Camberwell Space, 2008) and Now! Now! In more than one place (London: Cookhouse and Triangle Space, Chelsea College of Art and Design, 2016) organized by the Black Arts

To what extent does the work of Black and other artists of colour tend to get debated only in terms of social and political discourse? Taking as its focus Gavin Jantjes's Korabra series (1986), this essay considers what becomes possible when aesthetic considerations are given renewed emphasis. Attention shifts away from constructions of meaning in terms of broad themes, such as ‘slavery’ and ‘oppression’

Detail from Lubaina Himid, 3 Women at the Fountain, 1985, originally reproduced in FAN, 2: 8, Autumn 1988, 9. The artistic practice of gathering and re-using is said to have been invented in Paris in the twenties by Picasso, a Spaniard. ‘Jazz Age’ Paris jumped for joy at the ‘discovery’ of Africa and her artefacts, and stole them. Spain cannot be described without the words ‘Moorish Influence’. The

Detail from Maud Sulter, Passion Plays, c. 1980, originally reproduced in FAN, 2: 8, Autumn 1988, 17. © Estate of Maud Sulter. Photo: DACS/Artimage.

Speaking at a conference in October 2016, Permindar Kaur asked, ‘Am I a Black artist?’ To be regarded as a ‘Black artist’ or not to be: what are the consequences for the trajectory of an artist's career; our understanding of the aesthetic affects of that artist's work; and their historicization within narratives of British art? This essay argues that the question of Kaur's ‘Blackness’, whether self-defined

This essay analyses a selection of work by British painter Lubaina Himid through the lens of time, specifically non-synchronous time as adumbrated by Ernst Bloch, conjunctural time after Stuart Hall, and constellations of Benjaminian time. It engages in close visual readings of Naming the Money (2004), Tousssaint L'Ouverture (1987), and a series of nine paintings Himid has referred to as the Walter

Beginning with an unsolicited letter to Barnett Newman written by the Indian modernist F. N. Souza, this essay seeks to reframe our understanding of the decline of modernism. Art-historical consensus holds that, as the 1960s progressed, modernist art was swept aside by demands for political engagement to which it could not adapt. Souza's letter complicates this. On one hand, it criticizes Newman's

This essay examines the stakes of walking on Carl Andre's sculptures during moments of protest, particularly from the 1990s onward, when his art became the target of feminist protest actions. Walking on Andre's sculptures has often been framed in highly generalized terms, as an almost universally shared experience that prompts an immanent connection between body and matter. To open up a space for addressing

A growing body of theories proposes rethinking chronic illness as a position from which to analyse and resist neoliberalism. Interest in these ideas has been steadily growing in the art world, especially in the United Kingdom and the United States. Following on from a period of renewed institutional engagement with the politics of identity, this phenomenon also reflects the rise of ‘crip theory’ as

In 1558, a year after his second widowing, and aware of Ottomans' increasing hold on lands to the east, the forty‐seven‐year‐old Nuremberg patrician scion Berthold Holzschuher devised a very unusual will and testament: a set of heavily illustrated designs, perhaps unique in the sixteenth century for their procedural detail and sense of scale, for war machines and a mill. Through examination of the

This essay makes a case for the historical importance and cultural and psychic complexity of Jean‐Auguste‐Dominique Ingres's representations of men, which have tended to be neglected in favour of the painter's much more celebrated and more thoroughly scrutinized representations of women. It focuses on an unfinished portrait of the artist's oldest and dearest friend, Jean‐Pierre‐François Gilibert. I

This essay asks why the art of Alphonse Legros (1837–1911) remained inconspicuous in the art history of the past generation, when the study of the nineteenth century played such a prominent role in the discipline. Legros's realist and politically committed practice is eminently suited to the art‐historical methods that dominated that period. He was an associate of Courbet and Whistler, and his work

Around 1962, ‘formalism’ could indicate methodological purity in the realms of both art and science. With camps in both disciplines attempting to minimize human intervention in the realm of decision‐making, ‘formalism’ could take on mechanical overtones, thereby linking art and science in profound ways. This essay considers the ways in which the austere abstract paintings of Morris Louis from the years

This essay argues that abstract colouristic effects were favoured in the arts of ancient Rome in a manner long overlooked. Taking the wall paintings of Cubiculum B from the Villa Farnesina as a case in point, the article demonstrates that these images display an interest in interlocking planes of colour and shape that might be described as formalist. It juxtaposes this visual evidence with overlooked

Between 1948 and 1954, Anne Ryan produced over 400 small‐scale collages out of worn fabrics and handmade paper. Although this work earned her a fruitful affiliation with the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York, its ‘feminine’ delicacy distinguished it from the bold styles generally associated with the artist's abstract expressionist peers. Revisiting the presupposition of a ‘feminine’ touch, this essay

Book Review article of: Spacing Philosophy: Lyotard and the Idea of the Exhibition, by Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Berlin: Sternberg, 2019, 252 pp., 4 b. & w. illus. paperback. Material Noise: Reading Theory as Artist’s Book, by Anne M. Royston, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019, 224 pp., 16 b. & w. illus., hardback.

A full account of the inception, reception, and cultural economics of Independent Art of Today, a major show at Agnew’s London gallery in 1906, illuminates a crucial – but often overlooked – moment in the story of modern art in Britain. Its analysis nuances our understanding of artistic practice, the art market, and viewers’ exposure to and understanding of modern art. The exhibition, which featured

This essay examines the use of Olmec colossal heads as a central motif in the late work of Aubrey Williams (1926-1990). Focusing on four key paintings, Chato Presence (1982), Night and the Olmec (1983), Chato III (1984) and Hymn to the Sun IV (1984), it connects the colossal heads’ appearance to themes of decolonialism, diaspora and cross-culturality, which are fundamental for understanding the artist’s

The development of Christian art in Denmark began c.960 under royal patronage and developed gradually over the following century, adopting and adapting ideas from other parts of western Europe. The canonisation of King Cnut (died 1086) provided a national saint. Around 1100, his sister Gunhild commissioned an ivory cross which may have been donated to Odense, where Cnut was martyred. The ideology of

Jean Delville's The School of Plato (1898) is remarkable not only as a statement piece of fin-de-siecle occulture, but also for its bold portrayal of Plato's pupils as a group of ephebes in intimate association. The canvas and its reception history lend themselves uniquely to a consideration of the complexities of an art-historiographical engagement with representations of male love, yet the majority

This article examines the photographs that Paul Strand made in the American Southwest between 1930-32, marking his crystallization as a photographer of interconnected people, objects, and places. Using Group Theatre director Harold Clurman’s appellation of ‘historical documents’ for these photographs, I argue that Strand’s photography witnessed the fluidity of the nascent discourse of documentary.

Through an examination of the miracles of Anthony of Padua painted by Girolamo da Treviso in the Saraceni Chapel (1525–26), I demonstrate here the complex ways in which monochrome painting would have created meaning for diverse audiences. I argue that the use of grisaille in the chapel, by visually evoking marble relief, did many things at once: it presented both established and lesser-known miracles

The now-destroyed Abbey of Maubuisson, situated just northwest of Paris, was a religious foundation that housed an unusual number of visceral objects. By charting a long and consistent history of distinctly bodily artworks commissioned for the institution, this article unearths a proclivity at Maubuisson for flipping human forms inside-out. From the abbey’s Shrine Madonna and the controversially divided

Images are double agents. They receive information from the world, while also projecting visual imagination onto the world. As a result, mind and world tug our thinking about images, or particular kinds of images, in contrary directions. On one common division, world traces itself mechanically in photographs, whereas mind expresses itself through painting. Scholars of photography disavow such crude

본 연구는 분단에 대한 이야기를 꾸준하게 직접적 또는 간접적으로 다루는 1960 년대~1970 년대 초반에 태어난 작가들을 대상으로 동시대 남한 작가의 작품에서 보이는 분단에 대한 시각을 고찰한다. 본문에서 분석한 박찬경, 노순택, 백승우, 함경아와 같은 동시대 미술가들은 앞선 세대들과 마찬가지로 분단이 ‘비극’이라는 것을 부정하지 않는다. 그러나 이들은 이전 세대보다 분석적이고 냉철하게 분단 상황을 바라보며 건조한 어조로 분단에 대해 말하는 특징을 보인다. 선배 세대가 전쟁에 대한 공포나 슬픔, 또는 우리는 한민족이라는 믿음을 강하게 전달하는 것이 특징이었다면, 동시대의 젊은 작가들의 작품에는 ‘의심’이 보인다. 북한이 보여주는 모습 그대로가 진실인지 휴전선 너머를 의심하며, 우리 인식 속의 북한과 분단 이후

This essay uses the term 'embodied' to define material things that engage people in a physical way and, in doing so, that prompt them to reflect on the bodily conditions of human existence, and on the social and cultural meanings of human practices. As both immediate physical experiences and culturally and socially shaped encounters, past interactions between humans and objects pose a twofold interpretive

국보 제 101호 ‘원주 법천사지 지광국사탑(原州 法泉寺址 智光國師塔)’은 고려 문종(文宗, 재위 1046-1083) 대에 왕사(王師)와 국사(國師)를 지냈던 해린(海麟, 984-1070)의 사리를 모신 승탑이다. 이 탑은 승탑이지만, 통일신라 시기에 정형화된 팔각원당형이 아니라 불탑(佛塔)과 같이 방형(方形)의 평면을 가지고 있는 매우 특색 있는 탑이다. 지광국사탑은 조형미나 장식미가 매우 뛰어난 아름다운 탑으로, 지금까지 그 화려함에 가려져 지광국사탑의 진면목을 보지 못했던 부분들이 있다. 본 논문에서는 지광국사탑의 형태를 추정할 수 있는 가장 이른 자료인 유리건판을 기준으로 탑의 형식과 장엄을 살펴보았다. 유리건판을 분석하여, 1957년에 보수된 지광국사탑 옥개석의 불보살상과 다른 원래의 형태를 확인하였다

본고에서는 송대 자기, 옥기, 금속기, 칠기 등의 공예품, 禮書, 金石學書, 문헌기록 등에 보이는 이룡문 관련 자료를 참고하여 고려청자 이룡문의 도상적 특징과 연원을 찾고, 제작되는 배경과 시기, 상징적 의미, 용도에 대해 살펴보았다. 이룡문 고려청자의 기종, 시문기법, 번조받침 등을 분석한 결과, 이룡문은 특정한 기형의 청자에만 보이며, 시문방법은 주로 음각과 압출양각기법이 사용되었다. 번조받침은 대부분 규석을 사용하여 최고 품질로 제작되었고, 백색내화토빚음 받침도 일부 확인되었다. 이룡문 고려청자의 이러한 특징을 통해서 제작 시기를 12세기 전반 경으로 좁혀볼 수 있었다. 송대 공예품에서 이룡의 등장은 고대 옥기나 청동기 등에 대한 수집 및 연구가 본격화되고, 이와 관련된 자료가 수록된 呂大臨의 考古圖가

본고에서는 겸재 정선이 제작한 詩意圖에 대해서 살펴보았다. 시의도는 조선 후기 화단의 새로운 경향으로 주목되는 회화분야로서 크게는 사의산수화의 한 경향이다. 정선은 진경산수화의 대가로서 높은 명성을 누렸지만, 평생동안 꾸준히 사의산수화도 제작하면서 진경과 사의의 경계를 넘나드는 畫境을 추구하였다. 본고에서는 먼저 정선이 제작한 시의도의 전반적인 면모를 확인하기 위해서 현존하는 시의도 관련 기록과 작품을 종합적으로 정리하였다. 이를 통해서 정선이 陶潛의 「歸去來辭」를 토대로 한 시의도를 지속적으로 제작하였고, 그 이후의 시로는 唐詩를 자주 인용하였으며, 宋詩나 明詩, 朝鮮詩는 상대적으로 소극적으로 인용하였음을 알 수 있었다. 당시 중에서도 半官半隱을 추구한 王維의 시를 가장 자주 인용하였는데, 이는 관직에 있으면서도

This essay is interested in the role that destruction ans undoing play in the work of the American Ashcan painter George Bellows, and in the relation of these things to the perception of memory and past. It charts the vivid love affair with destruction in a series of four paintings Bellows made between 1907 and 1909. The excavations for a new Pennsylvania Station building in mid-town Manhattan fascinated

Conflicts over cultural memory represent a significant stake in definitions of Frenchness advanced by opposing nacionalist groups in the years before the First World War. The concept of a new 'renaissance francaise', broached by conservative critics and historians of art and literature often at odds with prevailing democratic republicanism, looked to the past to fashion a programme of renewal that

Caravaggio's late painting, "Sleeping Cupid", had long been recognized as a mimetic engagement, as well as a reversal, of the antique sculptural tradition of sleeping cupids that commonly decorated ancient funerary monuments. Destined for a Florentine patron, the work has been understood as intencionally troubling the art-historical legacy of Michelangelo's famous lost sculpture of this subject. Caravaggio

To look back over the last forty years of the journal is to be struck by the changes in intellectual climate and the successes and failures in meeting the goals of the original editorial vision. Most disappoiting is the neglect of neuroscience, which is particularly striking considering its earlier productive role in the principal tradition of art history. Most surprising is the way that postmodernism

This essay proposes a two-fold approach to the historiography of our subject. On one hand, art history can be traditionally conceived as a set of ideas, the evolution of which might be charted through textual analysis of its archives. But on the other, it might also be though of as a set of material objects lending themselves to an all-too-often-overlooked additional process of visual analysis. This

This essay explores the relationships between the black (or near black) dress of men as depicted in late nineteenth-century French portraiture and the professional practices of tailoring and dyeing. Moving beyond issues of style and fashion it identifies semantic congruence between the material character of certain works on canvas and the technical processes of producing 'black' textile and turning

This essay explores the making of memory in two artworks dating from the later 1980s. Chila Kumari Burman’s Convenience Not Love (1986–87) and Zarina Bhimji’s She Loved to Breathe – Pure Silence (1987) are among many artworks by diaspora artists that imagine and reinvent individual, familial and collective memory, and in which autobiography connects to wider histories of voluntary and forced migration

Published in the first issue of a new magazine, "The Arts", in late 1946, Herbert Read's commentary on the work of French painter Edouard Pignon testifies to a confused crossroads for the Ecole de Paris. In the exhausted and uncertain situation following the dark years of war and occupation, artists and critics alike were tasked with a humanist mission: to discern the key directions for modern art

My interest in the relationship between London and its historical misprisions, by which I mean our failure to appreciate the city's identity. Two well-known early nineteenth-century examples are indexical of the ways that ruins can project social, political and cultural distinctiveness in an urban context. Joseph Gandy's "Bird's-eye view of the Bank of England" (1830) emphasizes the monumentality of

This essay looks at the reception of Paul Gauguin's work in France between 1948 and 1953 by a surrealist group fascinated by histories of Brittany. This reflected a greater interest in post-war surrealism in the Celtic and medieval past of Brittany, which became a focus of writing and curating in the movement from that period. Critical accounts of Gauguin's stereotypes of Brittany by the New Art History

Eduardo Paolozzi’s ceiling paper (1952) for the office of the engineer Ronald Jenkins suggests the significance of ornament to New Brutalism and, indeed, how New Brutalist concern with visual form linked categories of art, architecture, and design. This article argues that examination of the ceiling paper exposes not just New Brutalist re-working of an older modernist problematic, but also points to

This article explores Charles Henri Ford’s Poem Posters series of 1964–5 and the ‘Having Wonderful Time Wish You Were Here’: Postcards to Charles Henri Ford exhibition at the Iolas Gallery (New York, 1976). Ford’s editorship of View magazine (1940–7) is well known in scholarship on surrealism’s reception in America, but less frequently explored are the ways in which his later artistic and curatorial

In studies of early-modern self-portraiture, palettes are usually overlooked as references to style and identity, whether individual or collective (family, gender, age, and nationality). Palettes, however, are not only mute attributes of painting in general but potent sites of self-declaration: this is who I am; this is my style; this is how I make paintings; this is who I aspire to be. At its most

The sources of Le Corbusier’s status as the most influential architect of the twentieth-century may be traced above all to his theoretical writing, as communicated in his own carefully supervised book publications. A detailed and profound response to them comes in the form of unique artist’s books made from several of these works by the architect’s own cousin Louis Soutter, an artist often categorized

Between 1615 and 1640, Parisian goldsmiths were known throughout Europe for a decorative motif called the cosse de pois (peapod). This design for ornament was based on the representation of the garden pea (pisum sativum), a common staple of the French diet and one of the oldest cultivated crops on the planet. Trained to carve designs into metal, goldsmiths who were unable to join the Parisian guild

This essay examines a set of photographs taken by Wallace Berman of Jay DeFeo in her San Francisco studio in 1959. The series encompasses contradictory representations of artistic practice, gender, and authorship by portraying DeFeo as both a godlike creator and an artist’s model. The essay makes these contradictions ‘speak’ by analysing the ambiguous images through Berman’s interest in kabbalah. It

As German landscape painting increasingly focused on ‘truth to nature’ in the first half of the nineteenth century, an earlier tradition of idealizing landscapes by combining scenes from different locations for compositional, poetic or symbolic purposes gave way to the science of landscape painting. Intense observation and accurate recording were required to portray creatively the essential nature

Rosalind Krauss’s ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (1999) redeploys the concept of medium as a critical term for the examination of contemporary art. Building on Krauss’s analysis, this essay argues for the continuing usefulness of the concept of medium in relation to the work of the Spanish sculptor Juan Munoz (1953–2001), and proposes a critical and historical

The American illustrator Coles Phillips (1880-1927), who began his career in advertising, developed a remarkably successful commercial lure with his so-called fade-away girl, whose contours disappear into flat planes of colour, merging with the image ground, typically appearing on the cover of a magazine. Situated, in the magazine context, at the nexus of stilled visual form and kinetic mobility, and

In his decoration of the Capponi chapel, Jacopo Pontormo simultaneously emphasized and sought to transcend the limitations of the painted medium through a set of carefully deployed formal tensions that evoked the paragone with sculpture. A reconsideration of this monument in conjunction with a closer reading of his views on the paragone reveals the theological epistemology that underlies what has been

A study is a subcategory of drawing in which an artist tests elements that may not be worked out with the full clarity of a finalized composition. When such sketches depict fragments of bodies or forms in freefall with no contextualizing ground, they may, in hindsight, and with an awareness of the fate representations suffered during episodes of iconoclasm, look like depictions of images that have

This essay examines a unique project to revive the place, imagery, and cultural memory of solitude within a reformed Catholic context. Originating at the Munich court of the retired Duke Wilhelm V, the project was closely related to an increase in the practice of meditation across the Catholic world, in which 'controlled' interior spaces as well as material artefacts were given a pivotal role. The

This essay focuses on the dramatic seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Schneeberg Altarpiece (1539). The altarpiece was looted by imperial troops during the Thirty Years’ War, recovered by Schneeberg’s congregation and reinstalled in 1650. In 1709, however, it was dismantled during the baroque refurbishment of the church. Parts were then reset in an elaborate frame

For Protestant reformers, the Roman Catholic cult of saints, relics and devotional images shared a suspect form of mediation: the use of a flawed material world to provide access to the divine. Despite this dismissal, the reliquary genre continued to thrive after the Reformation and material aspects of post-Reformation reliquaries, like the "Reliquary with the Salus Populi Romani Madonna" in the Museu

Wittenberg reformer Andreas Karlstadt is notorious as one of the Reformation’s most hard-line iconoclasts, yet in collaboration with artist Lucas Cranach he created the first piece of evangelical visual propaganda. Karlstadt was the mastermind behind the “Wagen” broadsheet of 1519, which did not depict or refer to Martin Luther. Cranach’s woodcut of wagons, horses and men travelling to Heaven and to