In my work, I strive to understand how diverse populations of people used and experienced architecture in the medieval Islamic world. The texts I have chosen for my personal canon explore these cultural interactions, bringing the complexity of medieval humanity to life. The Cairo Geniza The Cairo Geniza, which is
The five titles I have chosen are a mixed bag, but then so are the more than twenty books I have written over the last four decades, covering architecture, furniture, tools, urbanism, real estate, history, and biography. Yet when I look at my library, much reduced since our last downsizing
The books I have selected represent works that have figured into my thinking and writing for my scholarly publications. Obviously, some are acknowledgements to my teachers who taught as much by example as by text. Others just called for admiration. This selection comes from one shelf of my library while
Juan A. Martínez, Cuban Art and National Identity: The Vanguardia Painters, 1927-1950 (1994) In his classic account of Cuba’s historic vanguardia generation, Martínez developed a social history of modern Cuban art that remains a standard reference today. Published fifty years after the seminal exhibition, Modern Cuban Painters (Museum of Modern Art, 1944),
One of my favorite things in life is an accidentally curated small shelf of books in a place like a hotel or a break room. When I was thirteen, my family and I lived in Rome for a year and wound up in an apartment with just such a collection.
The art history I write and teach is stuck in the mid-century modern period across much of the globe–roughly 1945-1970–because those years saw the end of a “modern” way of thinking and the start of a contemporary, or some would still say “postmodern,” outlook. I want to go back and
Why would anyone write a book about the architect Gordon Bunshaft? The consensus is that he was a rude and unpleasant man and, though he was responsible for the design of prominent buildings (Beinecke Library, for one), there’s a chorus of disdain in the background saying that as the chief
“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
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