Michelle Stein— In The American Department Store Transformed, 1920-1960, Richard Longstreth documents the development of the department store as it moves from “a great, all-inclusive emporium that helped define the character and the purpose of the city” to its transformation into shopping centers and malls. Here in New York City,
Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945, edited by Art Institute of Chicago curators Peter Kort Zegers and Douglas Druick to accompany an exhibition on view there until October 23, 2011, examines an art form that had been forgotten until now. The stenciled, handmade posters made by the Soviet TASS news agency during WWII are now available to the English-speaking public for the first time.
Everything can be modernized: this is an idea that came close to being a “dogma” in the 1930s. Architecture, businesses, and infrastructure could progress, but so could corporate branding, family life, and even the human body. The push to advance socially and technologically is familiar today, but it had a
How could a man who lived a millennium and a half after Jesus have drawn him from life? Because Rembrandt was the first artist to use a live model for Christ, the origins of his portraits remained a mystery for a long time. Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus, edited by Lloyd DeWitt, discusses these paintings and drawings from an exhibition opening tomorrow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Covering the full breadth of Lyonel Feininger’s artistic career, a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, “Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World”, places him as a central figure in developing early 20th-century forms and the conversations that took place between German and American styles of art.
In September, Yale University Press is publishing Melissa Harris-Perry’s new book, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, titled after the author’s popular column for The Nation. As guest host this week on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, she steps in for Maddow’s role and brings her informed opinions to the news. We’ve compiled some of the highlights of Harris-Perry’s insightful commentary on the show this week and over the past year.
The information compiled in the R.R. Hawkins Award-winning Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, edited by David Eltis and David Richardson documents, in nearly 200 color maps, the paths of Europeans, Africans, merchants, slaves, and human life, showing how and when so many people went from port to port, hub to hub, as the many regions developed and evolved over the history of the slave trade.
In the search for truth, no fact is ever truly useless. Obtaining fact, not factoid, is crucial, because the public usually only hears one tiny facet of any major issue, Timothy Garton Ash argues in Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name.