A cultural imaginary is a structuring space through which collective understandings of cultural and society phenomena are formed, reproduced, and accepted as the norm. Reading the Walls of Bogotá uses graffiti and street art to explore the urban imaginaries of violence in Bogotá, Colombia. These artistic forms are produced and received in different ways in different areas of the city and offer an insight into citizens’ everyday experiences and perceptions of violence from the political, to the personal, to that of structural inequality. Through graffiti, in which critiques of memory, space, politics, and aesthetics are embedded, artists and their viewers form vernacular theories through which they interpret the world and the spaces they inhabit. By focusing on creative expression, Alba Griffin shows how Bogotá’s residents respond to imaginaries of violence, how they critique the norms, how they appropriate space to challenge or negotiate violence, and how they push back against inequality.

This volume brings together over 25 scholarly essays, reviews and shorter contributions by Peter Hecht, preceded by an introduction on what he thinks his life in art history has taught him. The title indicates what his collected papers have in common: together they represent an attitude of listening to what you see. Hecht is very suspicious of applying a method and believes that looking at an image until it speaks is essential to understanding it. Also, he has done much to prove that it not only pays to study the subject of a picture as part of an iconographical tradition, but that one should study it within the oeuvre of the artist who made it as well.

John Carr of York (1723 – 1807) was one of the most prolific and significant architects of the eighteenth century, with an output of over 400 designs, most of which were executed. His designs vary from simple gateways through to the grandest schemes, such as that for the palatial hospital at Oporto in Portugal, Harewood House and village in Yorkshire, and Basildon Park in Berkshire.

A fully illustrated biography of London artist;Francophile and Western Australia colonial settler John de Mansfield Absolon painted superb ship-board scenes in an impressionistic style reminiscent of Edouard Manet's.

This beautifully illustrated and scholarly book presents the Frelinghuysen collection of Chinese and Japanese export porcelain. It is the first major publication to consider Chinese and Japanese blue and white together.This extraordinary collection, assembled carefully over fifty years, features an exceptionally wide array of Asian blue and white porcelain – that most ubiquitous and influential of all ceramics. Ranging from Chinese pieces specially made for Portuguese traders in the 16th century to late 19th century commissions for the Thai royal court, the collection also includes numerous Chinese classics from theera of the European trading companies and a notable selection of Japanese export porcelain. In its vast scope it speaks of the diverse impulses and historical forces that propelled the trade in Asian porcelain and provides a lens through which to view the interaction of East and West from the early modern age to the dawn of the 20th century.More than 300 pieces from the collection are illustrated and discussed in full and another 250 are illustrated in a compendium, all divided into thematic chapters that reflect the many ways Chinese and Japanese porcelain has been traded, collected and lived with around the world. Essays by William R. Sargent, former Curator of Asian Export Art at the Peabody Essex Museum, and noted armorial porcelain authorityAngela Howard, precede the thirteen chapters, which include Faith, Identity, For the Table, To European Design and Made in Japan. Great rarities are featured alongside small, amusing pieces and the many export porcelains made to elevate the practices of daily life.With its strict adherence to blue and white porcelain, the collection intensifies our focus on forms, patterns and designs, gathering together wares that are often considered only separately for study while also covering areas of little recent scholarship, such as the Thai market material. The specialized reader will find references to the latest research while the more general reader will appreciate a comprehensive overview of Asian export porcelain. There has not been a significant survey of either Chinese or Japanese blue and white since the 1990s, and they have never been considered together in a major publication.

R.B. Kitaj: London to Los Angeles explores the relationship between Kitaj’s art and the places where he lived. This is the first significant publication about the artist in over a decade and provides a chronological overview of Kitaj’s career. Published to accompany Piano Nobile’s exhibition of the same title, it includes 43 paintings and drawings with catalogue entries containing original research, in many cases presenting new information about Kitaj's sources and sitters for the first time.The book contains three essays, which describe the artist's lives in London and Los Angeles. Andrew Dempsey recounts Kitaj’s relationship with artists, institutions and art critics during his thirty-eight-year period in London. Colin Wiggins, who worked with Kitaj on his National Gallery exhibition in 2001, writes about the artist’s last decade in Los Angeles. Marco Livingstone in his essay remembers the long correspondence he shared with Kitaj. A further section includes extended excerpts from Kitaj’s letters to Livingstone, which are now held by the Tate Archive and are published here for the first time.

This publication has been developed from ideas first presented at the international symposium Late Hokusai: thought, technique, society, held at the British Museum in May 2017. The symposium was organised to enable specialists in a range of disciplines relating to early modern Japan to view and consider the critically acclaimed exhibition Hokusai: beyond the Great Wave, then being presented at the British Museum. The exhibition brought together representative works by the artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760−1849) in the various media in which he worked – colour woodblock printed, woodblock-printed illustrated books, brush paintings on paper or silk, and brush drawings − that were produced between the age of 61 and his death aged 90. Building on the themes of the exhibition, authors from the UK, Europe, Japan and USA have engaged with late Hokusai from a variety of perspectives, both intrinsic and extrinsic to his life and works. Essays have been grouped within the broad categories of ‘thought’ -- Hokusai’s intellectual concerns and the ways his art brought these to life; ‘technique’ – how the artist pursued excellence in a wide range of media, within a commercialised art market; and ‘society’ – dimensions of cultural interaction and patronage. A fourth section on ‘legacy’ looks at how stories of Hokusai have been as much generated by 130 years of scholarship, as they have by his works themselves. Challengingly, faked paintings and printed works have both contaminated and supported those stories. This innovative approach provides new insights into the work of one of the world’s most celebrated artists and suggests many new avenues for Hokusai research.

Artists and travel have for centuries been intertwined where the desire to explore beyond the confines of one’s home has provoked a truly astonishing outpouring of creativity, much of which was captured through drawings and prints. Comprising over 100 such works, Connecting Worlds: Artists& Travel will be the first exhibition to approach the subject through the lens of artists’ experiences of travel from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, before the establishment of the railroad and use of photography as a means of recording changed these experiences deeply. A collaboration between the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the Katrin Bellinger Collection, London, the exhibition will include works by major artists, lesser known professionals as well as amateurs, mostly from Northern Europe, amongst them Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein the Younger, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Wenceslaus Hollar, Zacharias Wagner, Valentin Klotz, Maria Sibylla Merian, Angelika Kauffmann, Franz Pforr, Augusta von Buttlar, Julie von Egloffstein,Ludwig Richter, and Friedrich Preller the Elder. Divided into three sections, “On the road”, “Destination Rome”, and “Dresden”, the exhibition begins by exploring artists on the road and what they regarded as important to record in sketchbooks and individual sheets. The second section looks at Rome as one of the most important destinations for Northern travellers, with its incomparable remains of antiquity and as the seat of the Catholic Church that celebrated its religious and administrative life through processions and public spectacle. The journey ends in Dresden, as a centre for collecting, cultural exchange and glamorous festivities, ambitiously competing with other international courts since the time of Augustus the Strong. A different kind of travel, made possible by collecting images and stories of landscapes, flora, fauna, and cultures previously unknown in Europe, is explored. This section closes with the story of the IndonesianRomantic artist Raden Saleh, who first visited Dresden in 1839, and was warmly welcomed by the Saxon court. The richly illustrated catalogue will feature essays by an international panel of experts addressing such topics as the uses of artist sketchbooks across time, written and visual accounts of travel in books and prints, encounters with the Ottoman world, travel and collecting at the Saxon court.

Brittle Beauty presents a superlative private collection of European porcelain – radical, rare and in many cases unique pieces assembled over thirty years. Lavishly illustrated and insightfully researched, the book showcases eighty vessels and sculptures, and includes accounts of their patrons and former owners, many as eccentric as the works themselves. One striking attribute of porcelain is its reflective glaze. Mirror-like in a wider sense, Brittle Beauty: Reflections on 18th Century European Porcelain examines the context in which this porcelain was created – including cultural, political, topographical and ceremonial aspects. It also looks at related materials such as silver, textiles and glass. The 18th century was the golden age of porcelain in Europe, which had previously been dependent on precious imports from the Far East. The discovery of the formula for hard-paste porcelain in Dresden in 1709 inspired the establishment of manufactories throughout the Continent. However, its popularity was not purely commercial: porcelain – with its meld of art and science, beauty and intellect, East and West – became a symbol of Enlightenment culture for every princely court. Oriental motifs and European forms were synthesised with deceptive subtlety; later, creations of pure fantasy emerged, often based on travellers’ accounts of exotic lands. Familiar Occidental themes such as nature, hunting or archaeology were paralleled by ironic narratives of love and vanity. Porcelain, with its fragile allure, is uniquely expressive of the human comedy, yet its destiny has often been brutal and tragic. This book features essays from several eminent scholars. It also showcases a wealth of stunning imagery from Sylvain Deleu, who expertly photographed the pieces, many for the first time.

Jean Cooke: Seascapes & Chalk Caves is the first publication about the artist in over ten years. It provides an original account of Jean Cooke and her connection with East Sussex, including a wide selection of paintings, pastels and watercolours made by the sea over a period stretching from 1963 to 2007. The book includes the first comprehensive chronology of the artist and an essay by Jane Alison, former Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican, which considers Cooke's work in the context of eco-feminism. Rarely seen photographs of Cooke and the artist's own photographs of Sussex are also published here for the first time.

Constant change and expansion have been the hallmarks of Swedish art history as an academic discipline since the first university chairs were established a hundred years ago. It has crossfertilized with related disciplines and benefited from the parallel emergence of art museums and other institutions in Sweden. Swedish art history should thus be seen as the result of people and institutions tapping into one another’s activities, united by their dedication to art and visual culture as an object of study and experience. In this edited volume – the first Swedish survey for an international readership – the authors dwell on their own understanding of the early formation of the discipline and examine its current identity and potential progress. The contributors elaborate on art history research and teaching at Swedish universities, but also at related institutions such as the Swedish Institute in Rome, Nationalmuseum, and Skissernas Museum – Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art in Lund. The book’s authors come from a variety of research fields, institutions, and generations and provide a multifaceted picture of the past and the future of Swedish art history.

In London in 1770 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) remarked, ‘What a work could be written on Shakespeare, Hogarth and Garrick! There is something similar in the genius of all three.’ Two-and-a-half centuries on, Robin Simon’s highly original and illuminating book takes up the challenge. William Hogarth (1697–1764) and David Garrick (1717–1779) closely associated themselves with Shakespeare, embodying a relationship between plays, painting and performance that had been understood since Antiquity and which shaped the rules for history painting drawn up by the Académie royale in Paris in the seventeenth century.History painting was considered the highest form of art: a picture illustrating a moment drawn from just a few lines in a revered text. Hogarth’s David Garrick as Richard III (1745) transformed those ideas because, although it looked like a history painting, it was also a portrait of an actor in performance. With it, Hogarth established the genre of theatrical portraiture, a new and distinctively British kind ofhistory painting.This book offers a fresh examination of theatrical portraits through close analysis of the pictures and of the texts used in performance. It also examines the central role of the theatre in British culture, while highlighting the significance of Shakespeare, Hogarth and Garrick in the European Enlightenment and the rise of Romanticism. In this context another trio of genius features prominently: Lichtenberg, GottholdEphraim Lessing and Denis Diderot.Familiar paintings and performances are seen in an entirely new light, while unfamiliar pictures are also introduced, including major paintings and drawings that have never been published.The final chapter shows that the inter-relationship between plays, painting and performance survived into the age of cinema, revealing the pictorial sources of Laurence Olivier’s legendary film Richard III.

This vibrant catalogue presents the work of contemporary artist Harmonia Rosales. Featuring over twenty paintings and a monumental sculptural installation, Harmonia Rosales: Master Narrative is the artist’s first major touring exhibition and first scholarly catalogue of her work. Los Angeles-based artist Harmonia Rosales (b. Chicago, 1984) rewrites the canon, or the master narrative of art history, from the perspective of an Afro-Cuban American woman in the twenty-first century. Her canvases seamlessly weave the tales and charactersrooted in West African Yorùbá religion, Greek mythology, and Christianity with the canonical works and artistic techniques of the European Renaissance. Through her visual storytelling, Rosales presents the notion of human and cultural survival on her own terms– one that highlights the beauty and strength of Black people, particularly women, while touching upon grand narratives of creation, tragedy, survival and transcendence. This beautifully illustrated publication includes a catalogue of works in the exhibition, a biography of the artist and new essays by noted scholars in their fields. These essays explore themes ranging from storytelling and narrative to gender and depiction of beauty to race and diaspora.

This fascinating book tells the story of the building of William M. Voelkle’s collection of fakes and forgeries of manuscript illumination. With thorough essays and beautiful illustrations, Voekle tells the story of nearly seventy fakes and forgeries. The book takes the reader on a journey that sheds light on the nature and detection of forgery of manuscript illumination. An engaging introduction by Christopher de Hamel raises tantalizing questions that touch on the very meaning of authenticity and our continuing fascination with forgery. Scientific analysis of pigments, the identification of sources, and the scrutiny of the materials all come into play in the unfolding story of the collection.An illustrated catalogue presents the group of nearly seventy fakes and forgeries that display astonishing breadth. They include not only the Spanish Forger and other Western European miniatures by Ernesto Sprega, Caleb William Wing, and Germano Prosdocimi, and others, but fascinating examples from the Christian East, from Ethiopia, from Mexico, and from Persia and India. Published here in its entirety for the first time, the Voelkle Collection is the only comprehensive one of fakes and forgeries of manuscript painting in private hands.Voelkle’s fifty-year career at the Morgan Library& Museum was inextricably interwoven with the construction of the collection, which is detailed in the foreword. The personal narrative reveals the author as a collector and a scholar. As an enthusiastic collector, he pursues examples of forgery, marveling at the range of skills of deception. As a scholar, he disentangles the sources that served forgers and the chains of provenance that sometimes led to their exposure. Included also in the book is a comprehensive list of William M. Voelkle’s publications.

Published by Ad Ilissvm in association with the Burlington Magazine.Hugely ambitious, Titian: Sources and Documents includes all known documents about Titian and his work dating from his lifetime, and all known references to him in contemporary publications. The relevant section of each text is transcribed in full, preceded by a short summary in English, with extensive annotation and, where necessary, a commentary. The intention of this incredible work of scholarship is to provide a comprehensive survey of the surviving historical evidence about Titian and his career.Titian was one of the most famous, successful and long-lived of Renaissance painters. Much of his output was for rulers or institutions whose archives have been in large part preserved, and many of his family papers have also survived. In addition, he was mentioned in more than a hundred and sixty different publications in his lifetime. Although hundreds of the documents about him and his work have been published, usually in specialised publications based on material in a single archive, there have only been two attempts to provide an overview of the entire body of documents and early published references to him, the first by Crowe and Cavalcaselle in 1877, the second by Adolfo Venturi in 1928. These publications were necessarily selective and included transcriptions of only a small part of the material which was used.The collection, amounting to over two thousand nine hundred items, includes not only texts specifically about Titian himself, but also those concerning his siblings and children, his principal assistants and the other members of the Vecellio family already active as painters before his death, as well as inscriptions on paintings and prints. In addition to texts dating from Titian's lifetime, the collection includes all biographical material published before 1700 and all other texts that could realistically be thought to reflect first- or second-hand anecdotal information about him. The particular strengths and limitations of the principal early printed sources and the circumstances in which they were produced are discussed in a substantial introduction, which also includes an overview of the main archival collections consulted in the preparation of the book. Most of these are in Italy, but others are in Spain, Austria and Germany. New transcriptions are provided for the great majority of the documents that have previously been published, and many hitherto unknown documents have been included. Consideration is given also to documents now known only via secondary sources, and to fake documents, of which a significant number were produced in the past two centuries.

This beautiful publication accompanies an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum of the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778). It is the most important study of Piranesi’s drawings to appear in more than a generation. In a letter written near the end of his life, Giovanni Battista Piranesi explained to his sister that he had lived away from his native Venice because he could find no patronsthere willing to support “the sublimity of my ideas. ” He resided instead in Rome, where he became internationally famous working as a printmaker, designer, architect, archaeologist, theorist, dealer, and polemicist. While Piranesi’s lasting fame is based above all on his etchings, he was also an intense, accomplished, and versatile draftsman, and much of his work was first developed in vigorous drawings. The Morgan Library& Museum holds what is arguably the largest and most important collection of these works, more than 100 drawings that include early architectural caprices, studies for prints, measured design drawings, sketches for a range of decorative objects, a variety of figural drawings, and views of Rome and Pompeii. These works form the core of the book, which will be published on the occasion of the Morgan’s Spring 2023 exhibition of Piranesi drawings. More than merely an exhibition catalogue or a study of the Morgan’s Piranesi holdings, however, this publication is a monograph that offers a complete survey of Piranesi’s work as a draftsman. It includes discussion of Piranesi’s drawings in public and private collections worldwide, with particular attention paid to the large surviving groups of drawings in New York, Berlin, Hamburg, and London; it also puts the large newly discovered cache of Piranesi material in Karlsruhe in context. The most comprehensive study of Piranesi’s drawings to appear in more than a generation, the book includes more than 200 illustrations, and while focused on the drawings it offers insights on Piranesi’s print publications, his church of Santa Maria del Priorato, and his work as a designer and dealer. In sum, the present work offers a new account of Piranesi’s life and work, based on the evidence of his drawings.