After exploring her creative urges through journalism, sculpture, poetry, and theater, Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) found a home for her artistic talents in photography while working in Paris as a darkroom assistant to Man Ray. Abbott knew Ray from an earlier encounter in New York, and though at the beginning of
The renowned Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) created several landmarks of modern design in America—the Finland Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1939, the MIT’s Baker House dormitory completed in 1949, and the Mount Angel Abbey Library completed in 1947 in Oregon. Although Aalto’s career was,
Are you spending your holiday in the romantic city of Venice this summer? We’re not, either. We have happily entertained fantasies about such a getaway, though, thanks to two recent Yale University Press books about Venetian architecture. We also recently learned that one of our summer interns spent time in
When read together, Venice from the Water and Venice & Vitruvius present a multi-sided picture of the complex history and fate of the famous floating city of Venice. In many ways, the books complement one another, engaging in the same subject through different perspectives and offering interrelated conclusions. This dynamic
Contemporary curation must again and again situate art exhibition within a global conversation. The Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art exhibition currently at the Seattle Art Museum affords the museum an opportunity to embrace a fresh strategy for staging global art. The curatorial event provides an exchange among a diverse collection
Both before it was built and since, people have been boosting and bashing Boston’s Prudential Center, whose construction began in earnest fifty years ago. Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape, by architectural historian Elihu Rubin and published today by Yale University Press, captures and explains what the
With the end of summer in sight, it’s time to get out and explore the world of visual expression. For August, our theme is Modern and Contemporary Art, featuring catalogs from museum exhibitions around the world, groundbreaking studies on architecture and design, and new books on collecting, fashion, painting, photography,