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Georges Seurat’s monumental A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884, Art Institute of Chicago) hung alongside paintings by Camille Pissarro and newcomer Paul Signac at the last Impressionist exhibition. Those who visited in May 1886 encountered a new painterly mode called “néo-impressionisme” as defined by Félix Fénéon. With their pointillist technique, Neo-Impressionists applied tight dabs of unblended paint, rather than employing the push-and-pull of the gestural, colorful strokes of the Impressionist painters. Complementary hues—red lake and viridian green, for example—appear side by side in pointillist imagery. These painters believed that those dabs of color mixed optically so that… Full Review

In the late 1710s the French and English governments sought to tackle their respective national debts by promoting share trading in state-controlled joint stock companies: the French Compagnie d’Occident (Company of the West), also known as the Mississippi Company, and the English South Sea Company. In 1720 spectacular rises in share prices spread from the French to the English and eventually to the more diversified Dutch financial markets. Each of these bull markets was soon followed by a dramatic collapse in the value of shares. Together these three “bubbles” generated the first international stock market crash and ushered in the… Full Review

El arte antes de la historia: Para una historia del arte andino antiguo (Art before history: For a history of ancient Andean art) is an ambitious edited volume emerging out of an equally ambitious 2016 conference. The conference, co-organized by the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and University of California, Berkeley, brought together a diverse group of international scholars in Lima for three days. The book features essays that emerged from talks presented at the conference, and also integrates additional essays by a few authors who did not participate in the 2016 events. The goal of the volume is to… Full Review

Throughout the entire text of Eloquent Bodies, we encounter Jacqueline E. Jung’s tactile, sensual delight in sculpture and her awareness of the role played by the viewer’s presence in space. Her study fits well with the flourishing world of sensory studies, yet is still deeply invested in the exploration of the cultural production of art. Although she presents a study of objects by analyzing their “presence effects,” Jung retains a deep commitment to their “meaning effects.” Her analysis also brings us into contact with the work of many scholars, including the pioneers who first brought the sculptures to our… Full Review

With the global turn in early modern studies, more and more work has been done to understand better the artistic exchanges between distant lands. Questions of taste and appropriation and explorations of how art objects functioned as diplomatic gifts have been probed, though mostly with a Eurocentric focus. Italy has, in many of these studies, maintained its (anachronistic) primacy as artistic interlocutor with the world, and Florence (and, by necessity, the Medici) its identity as the umbilicus mundi of early modern art. This persists, despite the fact that other areas in and beyond Italy had more political, social, and artistic… Full Review

Darryl Dickson-Carr writes, “African American satire’s earliest purpose in both oral and written form was to lampoon the (il)logic of chattel slavery and racism itself” (African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel, University of Missouri Press, 2001). Despite the power of Black satire, there are few comprehensive studies of it. The early twenty-first century saw the publication of several books, including Dickson-Carr’s and Dana Williams’s edited collection of essays, African American Humor, Irony, and Satire (Cambridge Scholars, 2007). More recently Danielle Fuentes Morgan has published Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century (University… Full Review

In Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization, David Joselit seeks to remedy the biases that have prevented art historians working in the United States and Europe from recognizing the complex ways in which artists operating on the so-called periphery have invoked references to traditional culture. His endgame is to demonstrate how artists engage with heritage to produce work whose contemporaneity is posited in its response to the geopolitics of globalization. Joselit does this by asking how tradition has been put to contemporary uses by artists from regions that include Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe… Full Review

Art historical studies of Preclassic sculpture in Mesoamerica have long noted a “homocentric” focus on the representation of the human body. In her pioneering study of Olmec stone monuments, Los Hombres de la Piedra (Universidad Autónoma de Mexico, 1977), Beatríz de la Fuente dubbed their creators “the men of stone,” referencing a cultural predilection for sculpting near life-size human bodies in both two and three dimensions. Julia Guernsey returns us to a consideration of human bodies as the dominant subject of Preclassic art in Human Figuration and Fragmentation in Preclassic Mesoamerica, managing to both dramatically expand the field… Full Review

The Czech Surrealist known as Toyen (née Marie Čermínová, 1902–1980) has too long been relegated to the margins of the movement. Interest in her art grew after her death, spearheaded by a 1982 Centre Georges Pompidou retrospective devoted to her work alongside that of her Czech friends and collaborators Jindřich Štyrský and Jindřich Heisler, as well as a later 2000 retrospective at Prague’s City Gallery. This year, for the first time, she will be celebrated with a major solo retrospective at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, which will tour to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the National… Full Review

In 1893 Jules Luquiens (somewhat prematurely) lamented the failure of electric light. “It dazzles,” he wrote, “but does not clarify” (9). It is to this poetics of light that at once illuminates and blinds that Hollis Clayson’s Illuminated Paris attends, though fortunately, it does not suffer the same malady. Surveying artistic responses to the proliferation of lighting technologies in public spaces throughout Paris in the late nineteenth century, Clayson triangulates material and urban history with rigorous close looking. Rather than fixating on particular light sources and their corresponding technologies, she focuses instead on the phenomenological effects of nocturnal illumination and… Full Review