Book Review
Unraveling the Imperial Impulses of Chinese Textiles
Like an art history detective, Mei Mei Rado mines textiles and techniques to reveal cross-cultural Chinese-European liaisons driven by nationalism and a keen interest in design.
Book Review
Book Review
A Mystical, Obsessive Encounter With the Ginseng Root
Craig Thompson’s rhizomatic new graphic novel about the root’s farming industry exposes the paradoxes of Trump’s America.
Book Review
Internet Misinformation Is the New Medieval Magical Thinking
Readers might enjoy the gross and gory fairy-tale quality of this new book — or its parallels to the Trumpian internet.
Book Review
Eadweard Muybridge and the Making of the Motion Picture
A new comic book is as much a social history of photography and its relationship to culture during the 19th century as it is one man’s life story.
Book Review
The Small Magazines That Birthed Surrealism
Surrealism through Its Journals reminds us that the movement began with, and cannot be understood without, the written word.
Book Review
The Story of Surrealism Isn’t Whole Without Gala Dalí
In Surreal, Michèle Gerber Klein asks us to confront the unjust eclipse of Gala’s legacy by that of her husband, Salvador, whose career she brought to fruition.
Book Review
Reading Georgia O’Keeffe Along Lines of Class and Race
A new book sets its sights on the artist’s lesser-known post-war career and her negotiations of identity.
Book Review
Adventures in the Louvre Is the Guidebook Nobody Asked For
Rife with descriptions of “seductive” works, the former “New York Times” Paris bureau chief’s book reads more like a travel guide than the impartial reporting of a journalist.
Book Review
An Artist’s Thirty-Year Affair With Copper
No Man’s Land, Pakistani artist Amin Gulgee’s first comprehensive monograph, maps his interest in exploring ritual, science, grief, and healing in a visual language all his own.
Book Review
Celia Paul Paints Her Place in the World
A new monograph brings the artist’s life into focus as she returns to the same subjects again and again: the women in her family, the British Museum, and the sea.
Book Review
Mary Cassatt Was Forever an American in Paris
In a new book, scholar Ruth E. Iskin emphasizes Cassatt as a distinctly transatlantic artist whose identification with the US and France were deeply entwined.
Book Review
The Artist Who Taught James Baldwin to Write Like a Painter
The essays in Speculative Light explore the many ways in which Beauford Delaney, another queer Black man, revolutionized Baldwin’s cultural perspective and imagination.