Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2015 - Humanities — Art & Architecture

Fong (emer., Chinese art history, Princeton Univ.) is perhaps the preeminent scholar of Chinese art history integrated with a Western art historical perspective.  His previous works include Landscapes Pure and Radiant (CH, May'09, 46-4834), with coauthor Chin Sung Chan; Chinese Calligraphy (CH, Jan'09, 46-2475), coauthored with Ouyang Zhongshi; andBeyond Representation (CH, May'93, 30-4789).  This work is, in many ways, his comprehensive summation of over 50 years of work.  In each chapter, he tackles an important aspect of Chinese art, such as the relationship of calligraphy to painting, the nature of copying, and forgeries from a Chinese perspective.  This book is absolutely essential to any library that has a section devoted to the art of China.  The book is also wonderfully designed and made.  The handling of the book, best done at a reading table because of its size and heft, communicates the seriousness of purpose that the contents of the work so ably deliver.Summing Up: Essential. All readership levels.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum,Come As You Are: Art of the 1990soffers a contextual analysis of contemporary art.  The curator, editor, and essayist, Schwartz, takes a long look at the decade, beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and concluding with the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001, and considers how globalization, technology, and identity politics shaped art.  Eight additional essays by established scholars employ these three, at times overlapping, themes to analyze the ways in which art engages with and reflects societal changes.  These erudite and well-written essays provide a much-needed contextual analysis of contemporary art.  The last three essays, written by Schwartz, organize the decade into three discrete units1989 to 1993, 1994 to 1997, 1998 to 2001and details how the three themes present in the works of art play out in contemporaneous exhibitions, discursive practices, and the art market broadly.  To clarify these themes and the period, a chronology is provided.  This study will prove invaluable to all students and scholars seeking an art historical account of contemporary art.Summing Up: Essential. Undergraduates at all levels, graduate students, and research collections.

Fiber: Sculpture 1960-Present goes considerably beyond recording an exhibition.  Four essays, combined with beautifully reproduced images and 34 artist biographies, ask important and engaging questions about sculptural fibers meaning and place in contemporary art.  The first essay by Jenelle Porter introduces the exhibition's/books themes and explores the history, concept, and materiality of dimensional fibers through ideas of both/and within art categories, the importance of critical exhibitions, and fiber arts connection with larger art movements.  Her essay finishes with ideas of gravity and gender, setting up Glenn Adamsons provocative essay on the male nude in the soft forms of the often feminist, fiber sculpture.  Tai Smiths essay shows tapestrys connection to sculptural forms and architecture through the lens of postmodernism and late capitalism.  The final essay, also by Porter, lays out the role exhibitions and art critics played in the establishment of fiber art inside and outside the art world.  The books serious examinations excel at investigating the scope and substance of fiber sculpture from the mid-20th century forward, making this book essential for programs seriously exploring the place of fibers in the art.Summing Up: Essential. General readers, undergraduate students, graduate students, and research faculty.

Artist, teacher, and theorist, Joseph Albers was the focus of a retrospective exhibition and accompanying catalogue organized by the Fundación Juan March.  In addition to two informative introductory essays, Jeanette Redensek's essay on Albers's use of materials and process is particularly interesting.  There are numerous color plates (with reproductions of some of his lesser-known early works).  The bulk of the catalogue is a treasure trove of rare primary source material, including 57 texts by Albers, 26 of them previously unpublished and 4 translated into English for the first time.  Fourteen additional essays are by Albers's students, colleagues, scholars, and other writers.  The texts by Albers vary in type from poems and essays to lectures and lessons.  They are organized chronologically according to the four main periods of his professional life: his 9 years at the Bauhaus, 16 years at Black Mountain College, 10 years at Yale, and finally his late career from 1961 to 1976, the year of his death.  The texts paint a picture of a man who was far more complex and nuanced than a quick look at his paintings might suggest.  This catalogue will no doubt prove to be an indispensable resource for scholars for years to come.Summing Up: Essential. All readership levels.

Blume (1906-92) is perhaps best known for his colorful if unsettling allegorical works painted with the Renaissance techniques and allusions that he admired.  This handsome book accompanies the 2015 retrospective exhibition of the artist's work at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art, the first such exhibit since 1976.  The exhibition and this publication aim to make better known an American artist who was more popular in the 1930s and 1940s.  The exhibit was curated by Robert Cozzolino, senior curator of the academy and organizer of past exhibits featuring George Tooker, David Lynch, and Jacob Lawrence, among others.  In addition to insightful essays by Cozzolino, who knew Blume as a family friend, the book includes chapters by Samantha Baskind, Sergio Cortesini, Robert Cowley, David McCarthy, and Sarah Vure.  The book is well illustrated throughout; about half the publication consists of a special section of stunning plates reproducing over 200 of Blume's intriguing paintings and drawings.  Supplements include a chronology of Blumes life, a selected bibliography, and a list of lenders to the exhibit.Summing Up: Essential. All readership levels.

This is a canonical history of posters and much more.  Guffey (SUNY, Purchase) emphasizes the social life of postershow they function in specific spaces and how large public audiences use them.  To this end, well-chosen photographs from 1844 to the present reveal posters in their everyday settings.  Posters used at rallies, as street advertisements, or as backdrops in cafes and workshops bring an added focus to this volume replete with discussion of important graphic design. The book highlights non-Western historical examples; 19th-century Indian advertising and calendar posters stand out.  It likewise examines contemporary global poster movements.  West African street news posters, Bollywood film, and Palestinian martyr posters are analyzed in terms of their cultural significance and digital production processes.  The author offers lengthy case studies of prominent graphic imagery such as April Greimans "breakthrough" work on the Macintosh computer, images of Che Guevara, and the Chinese Cultural Revolutions ubiquitous renderings of Mao Zedong.  Occasional wordiness distractsa 1974 feminist poster critiques pink, a furtively fussy and feminine colour.  The book accomplishes its invaluable objectives: it argues that as digital dialogs broaden posters remain relevant, and it demonstrates that posters provide serious research topics in visual cultural history.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All undergraduate, graduate, and research collections.

During the 19th century, prints and related works of art bore burgeoning cultural significance as evidenced by the growth of private collections, their exhibition in national and international expositions, and increases in the bequests and loans to the Smithsonian that aimed to shape the institution amid debates concerning connoisseurship and collecting practices.  Detailing these broader cultural phenomena and their association with the construction and legacy of a single collection, Wright offers a stunning look at the first public print collection in the US, the European engravings of Vermont Congressman George Perkins Marsh.  Marshs prints and acquisition methods are put into context with the practices and output of other collectors and are placed within the cultural landscape through acknowledgement of the value ascribed to prints and their importance to visual culture during the antebellum and postbellum years.  Meticulously researched with thorough notes as well as an ample bibliography of primary and secondary sources, this book acutely examines the importance of the Marsh Collection as a placeholder for art in the early history of the Smithsonian, its legacy of support of achieving national status for the institution, and the broader role of prints in preserving and presenting visual culture as part of national identity.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readership levels.