Interview with curator and author Anna Katz by David Ebony Pattern & Decoration (P&D) was an intense, but short-lived avant-garde art movement spanning the early 1970s, through the mid-1980s. It evolved from a coterie of young New York artists, but quickly took hold throughout the country, and also gained attention
Just because we can’t travel doesn’t mean our minds have to stay put. Here are some books to satisfy your wanderlust from the comfort and safety of your own home. A writer for whom the journey has always mattered reinvents the very form itself in this inviting collection of in-the-moment
As the great designer Elsa Schiaparelli once said, “In difficult times, fashion is always outrageous.” Explore outrageous fashion through the centuries in these beautiful tomes. Traces fashions from 1870 to the present along a conceptual, disruptive, and nontraditional timeline of fashion history. About Time traces the evolution of fashion, from 1870
“British Art” lay at the margins of art history until the 1980s – the very phrase an oxymoron, a Yale colleague told me, since there is no British art to speak of. A certain introspection haunted even brilliant interpretative essays such as The Englishness of English Art (1956), given as
My personal canon, especially in the world’s current political climate, cannot possibly belong to single field. The most important books for me now are calls from several corners of intellectual life, reminders of the urgency and possibilities of scholarship. They are all critical and humanizing. They remind me of the
A short Q and A with the author of a new book that explores the little-known early career of one of America’s most celebrated and beloved photographers: Making a Photographer: The Early Work of Ansel Adams. Yale University Press: Your book offers a different perspective on the entire arc of
My recent book, Picturing War in France, is ostensibly about war imagery produced during the first half of the nineteenth century in France. It is also a book about questions of taste, quality, and the hallowed canon of art history. The subject of war imagery allowed me to challenge my
Anne Monahan — Horace Pippin (1888-1946) painted two self-portraits in the 1940s on his way to becoming the decade’s most successful black artist. Both evince an indifference to illusionistic perspective in line with modern aesthetics, even as his self-taught pedigree appealed to those wary of avant garde styles and politics.
My development as an art historian has been profoundly shaped by the legacy of modernism and its relationship to decoration, craft, and design. In chronological order, here are five books that have motivated my thinking on the importance of applied arts in the conceptualization of modernism. Mark Wigley, White Walls,
Kate Fullagar— December 10, 1776: one day—three vastly distant corners of the world. In the southern-most peaks of the American Appalachians, a Cherokee warrior called Ostenaco sits before the fire in his winter house, churning over the biggest decision of his eventful life—to concede defeat to the revolutionaries or to