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This book explores the year 1971, when two exhibitions opened that brought modernist painting and sculpture into the burning heart of United States cultural politics: Contemporary Black Artists in America, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The DeLuxe Show, a racially integrated abstract art exhibition presented in a renovated movie theater in a Houston ghetto. The book looks at many black artists' desire to gain freedom from overt racial representation, as well as their efforts—and those of their advocates—to further that aim through public exhibition. Amid calls to define a “black aesthetic,” these experiments with modernist art prioritized cultural interaction and instability. Contemporary Black Artists in America highlighted abstraction as a stance against normative approaches, while The DeLuxe Show positioned abstraction in a center of urban blight. The importance of these experiments, the book argues, came partly from color's special status as a cultural symbol and partly from investigations of color already under way in late modern art and criticism. With their supporters, black modernists—among them Peter Bradley, Frederick Eversley, Alvin Loving, Raymond Saunders, and Alma Thomas—rose above the demand to represent or be represented, compromising nothing in their appeals for interracial collaboration and, above all, responding with optimism rather than cynicism to the surrounding culture's preoccupation with color.

Art historians have long looked to letters to secure biographical information, affirm patronage patterns, and establish the identity of an artist as a modern, self-aware individual. But letters are also objects that endure episodes of travel, and are sometimes rerouted to reach readerships that far exceed the scope of their initial intent. As agents of communication, letters are uniquely poised to provide analogies for how works of art address their audiences. In a period before the establishment of a reliable public postal system, handwritten correspondences faced interception and delay. The printing press threatened to expose intimate exchanges, disturbing relationships of privacy to publicity. These risks sharpened during the volatile years of the Reformation. Summoning evidence of the complicated travel patterns of sixteenth-century missives, Brisman argues that uncertainties surrounding the sending and receiving of letters shaped how Germany’s most famous artist conceived of the communicative efficacies of the work of art. Albrecht Dürer’s success was due in large part, she argues, to his development of pictorial strategies that lure the mind of the distanced beholder. Balancing intimacy with publicity and immediacy with delay, Dürer’s images mimic the letter’s ability to connect author and recipient through dialectics of advertisement and concealment.

The first extended study of authorship in twentieth-century abstract painting in the US, this book describes how artists and critics used the medium of painting to advance their own claims about the role authorship should play in dictating the value, significance, and social impact of the art object. Beginning with an overview of the history of the “death of the author” thesis, the book shows that, while Roland Barthes didn’t publish his essay of the same name until 1967, there was already a lively discussion at work concerning the stakes of authorship in and around American Modernist painting as early as the 1940s. The book tracks the question of authorship across two definitive periods: the “New York School” as it was consolidated in the 1950s and “Post Painterly Abstraction” in the 1960s. Chapters address key figures who helped define the Modernist field in the US, analyzing the paintings of Arshile Gorky, Jack Tworkov, Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam, and Agnes Martin, and the art criticism of Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, and Rosalind Krauss. By historicizing authorship this book shows that today’s debates over the author’s function—debates that only continue to proliferate in discussions of art theory today—are themselves outgrowths of a mode of questioning initiated in Modernist theory and practice.

Cruising the Dead River traces the queer history of the cruising ground of Manhattan’s West Side piers in the 1970s and early 1980s, arguing that the ruined buildings that dominated this queer landscape assumed a powerful erotic role in the cruising that took place there in the late 1970s and the art that was produced in and about this site, sparking a sense of erotic connection between past and present, land and sea. Drawing upon the art and writing of David Wojnarowicz, and incorporating discussions of art, activism, poetry, performance, and film, this book posits that the pleasure of the ruin cannot be seperated from the complex, sometimes violent, forces of urban regeneration and social cleansing that were reshaping the waterfront in the pre-AIDS era, which have been obscured as the neighbourhoods were gentrified in the AIDS crisis years that followed.

Throughout the history of European modernism, philosophers and artists have been fascinated by madness. Something different happened in Brazil, however, with the “art of the insane” that flourished within the modernist movements there. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the direction and creation of art by the mentally ill was actively encouraged by prominent figures in both medicine and art criticism, which led to a much wider appreciation among the curators of major institutions of modern art in Brazil, where pieces are included in important exhibitions and collections. Kaira M. Cabañas shows that at the center of this advocacy stood such significant proponents as psychiatrists Osório César and Nise da Silveira, who championed treatments that included painting and drawing studios; and the art critic Mário Pedrosa, who penned Gestaltist theses on aesthetic response. Cabañas examines the lasting influence of this unique era of Brazilian modernism, and how the afterlife of this “outsider art” continues to raise important questions. How do we respect the experiences of the mad as their work is viewed through the lens of global art? Why is this art reappearing now that definitions of global contemporary art are being contested? Learning from Madness offers an invigorating series of case studies that track the parallels between psychiatric patients’ work in Western Europe and its reception by influential artists there, to an analogous but altogether distinct situation in Brazil.

A thematic and gendered history of post-war American ceramics, this book focuses on three American women ceramists, Marguerite Wildenhain (1896-1985), a Bauhaus-trained potter who taught form as process without product at her summer craft school Pond Farm; Mary Caroline (M.C.) Richards (1916-1999), who renounced formalism at Black Mountain College in favor of a therapeutic model she pursued outside academia; and Susan Peterson (1925-2009), who popularized ceramics through live throwing demonstrations on public television in 1964-65. These artists utilized ceramics as a conduit for social contact through teaching, writing, and the performance of their medium. At mid-century, functional pottery was more than just an art form, it was a lifestyle, offering mid-century women extraordinary autonomy, both economically and socially, through experimental artistic communities that were collective in nature. Ceramics offers a compelling site for examining the sexism and media hierarchies embedded in modernist art histories. It became a viable alternative to the mainstream, urban art worlds of New York City and Los Angeles, a space in which women could innovate, teach, and create lasting pedagogical structures. This unorthodox, largely rural livelihood was beholden to the formal requirements of the craft: the making, storage, and firing of ceramic wares. The medium itself was ill-suited to an urban setting: strict fire codes made kilns illegal in most cities. Pottery’s emphasis on self-sufficient rural living offered proto-feminist women the opportunity to live and teach in cooperative, experimental, and self-initiated communities.

This book brings a new formal and conceptual rubric to the study of turn-of-the-century European modernism by arguing for the significance of a hitherto unexamined formal phenomenon: how artists working in the decades around 1900 departed from long-held conventions for posing the human figure. In this period, artists working in different countries and across different media began to present human figures in strictly frontal, lateral, and dorsal postures, breaking with the centuries-old tradition of rendering bodies in torsion, with poses designed to simulate the human being’s physical volume and capacity for autonomous movement and thought. The book examines the motivating circumstances and expressive consequences of this repudiation of inherited conventions of pose, emphasizing how it destabilized prevailing visual codes for communicating the character of the inner life of the human subject. Exploring major works by Georges Seurat, Gustav Klimt, and the dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, the chapters combine intensive formal analysis with inquiries into the histories of psychology and evolutionary biology, exploring scientific, psychological, and philosophical literature in which new concepts of mind and embodiment were articulated. In doing so, Butterfield-Rosen seeks to show how modern understandings of human consciousness and the relation of mind to body were materialized in art through a new vocabulary of postures and poses.

This book is a literary study of art writings around 1900. It traces evocations of air within and without an artwork, evocations between artwork as image and as material object. As such, it is about artworks that continue beyond their material confines and about air as the embodiment of their continuity. The book focuses on air as the material space surrounding an artwork, its milieu, surroundings, and environment or Umwelt. By looking closely at the linguistic efforts of the art historians Aby Warburg and Alois Riegl, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and the dance theorist and choreographer Rudolf Laban, the book investigates the artwork’s external space as an aesthetic category in its own right. What is the medium of the artwork’s externalism? It contends that air, the medium of continuity par excellence – air is the site of aesthetic ecologies; it is where artworks enact the permeable boundaries between art and life. The book rethinks entrenched narratives of aesthetics and modernism and recuperates alternative ones: self-transcending art objects complicate the discourse of empathy aesthetics and its attention to self-projecting subjects; furthermore, works of art that stray outside their limits challenge the notion of the enclosed aesthetic form and, in particular, that of the modernist self-contained artwork. In its concern with the continuity between form and space, the book also invites us to historicize the immersive spatial installations and environments of Minimalism from the 1960s onward, and to consider their origins in aesthetics around 1900.

This book argues that when the novelist Émile Zola defended his friend Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia in 1867, saying that it complied to what he called “la loi des valeurs,” “the law of values,” he employed a double coding. Until this moment, light and dark in painting were generally described in terms of musical metaphor—higher and lower tones, notes, and scales. But the word “valeurs” had quite another meaning—referring to stocks and securities exchanged on the Bourse. Zola’s “valeurs” does refer to light and dark, but it is also a trope for the political economy of slavery—Olympia and her maid are objects of exchange, commodities. They represent the Second Empire’s complicity in the ongoing slave trade in the American South, where Civil War raged, allowing the French to invade Mexico, even as the Union blockade of Confederate ports had decimated the French cotton industry, forcing many of its female workforce into prostitution. The book outlines attitudes toward slavery that Manet shared with his friend the poet Charles Baudelaire (and through him, Poe), suggests the possible influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on Manet’s painting, and focuses on the trope of woman as enslaved in the writings of both Zola and George Sand, culminating in Manet’s painting the U.S.S. Kearsarge sinking the Confederate sloop Alabama off Cherbourg harbor in June 1864 and the painter’s three-year dedication to portraying the execution of the Emperor Maximilian in Mexico. These are the politics—and the values—that define Manet’s art.