By examining images of the imaginary Chinese animal Sum Xu, this essay engages with questions about artistic origins and authorial originality, two art-historical concepts that so often exclude peripheral artists and their supposedly derivative artworks. Drawn by the Polish-Ruthenian Jesuit Michał Boym, the Sum Xu challenges the conventional accounts of images’ origins. As will be demonstrated, Boym’s image cannot be associated with a single place; its visual form derives its appearance from a multitude of sources, and the creature’s erratic afterlives further destabilize the concept of origin as an authorial act tied to a singular moment in space and time.

Miguel Orozco's Catalogue Raisonné of Picasso Posters is quite different from previous compendiums of his affiches. It contains 412 posters included in the Czwiklitzer DTV catalogue, which in total has 475 entries. But the Orozco catalogue gives full entries to 31 'subordinate' posters that in the German catalogue appear as letters accompanying the main entry, i.e., the first poster of the series. This means that the present compendium uses in fact only 381 'main' Czwiklitzer DTV entries and discards 94 Czwiklitzer posters, not counting the 'subordinate' posters we have not included. And it only oncludes 346 out of the total 630 posters contained in the Rodrigo catalogue, leaving out some 280 of them. None of the posters left out has any intrinsic artistic value.

The main objective, the main contribution the Orozco book makes is to put the emphasis on the main, the noble Picasso posters, providing as far as possible a description of Picasso's involvement and telling the story of the work. It also incorporates some 100 additional items, not counted in the total of 947 main entries, which seek to clarify and or support the value of the poster or to explain the origin of the illustration used. It also unveils over one hundred posters not covered by either Czwiklitzer or Rodrigo. It uncovers many Picasso poster projects that had not been tackled by the catalogues raisonnés. They undoubtedly have an interest in the study of Picasso's poster making endeavours. And last but not least, it publicizes tens of Picasso poster projects or realisations that were designed as posters and were displayed as such, but were formally only newspaper covers. They were actually poster-sized and were posted as posters in the press-kiosks in the cities they were published.

This book will reveal the secrets of the new experimental forms of printmaking that are pushing the traditional boundaries, including mixing conventional techniques with photo-emulsion, glass and paper, using Perspex and paint stripper, printing with sand, and digital prints mounted on relief surfaces. The book will also look at issues surrounding using the moving image, and encaustic wax techniques for printing, transferring, collaging and combining traditional prints with wax. There will be further information about displaying objects and installations, as well as a section covering the various advantages and disadvantages of a range of non-paper surface materials that can be used for printmaking.

The book will follow the usual handbook layout, with clear, practical, illustrated step-by-step demonstrations aimed at beginners or experienced printmakers looking for new techniques.

Indigenous America has long occupied a unique place in the imagination of non-Native artists. From the moment European explorers arrived in the so-called New World in the fifteenth century, (mis)representations of Native North Americans proliferated in the fine, decorative, and commercial arts. In order to personify peoples they knew little about, European artists invented a visual vocabulary to depict America, creating long-lasting stereotypes such as the "Indian princess" and the "noble savage." Artists working in the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries inherited these conventions and adapted them to create romanticized images of Native peoples existing apart from the modern world.

Facilitated by the advent of photography in the mid-nineteenth century, Indigenous Americans were increasingly subjected to ethnographic documentation, as their destiny as a "doomed race" was widely accepted by Euro-Americans. Nostalgia for the "vanishing Indian" also motivated artists at the turn of the twentieth century to look to Native cultures, notably in the Southwest, for authentic American subject matter. Occurring amid colonization, genocide, dispossession, and cultural destruction, these artistic encounters with Indigenous America reveal little about the realities of Native life; instead, they reflect the attitudes and anxieties of the artists and societies that produced them.

Featuring more than forty works from The Met collection, this exhibition includes drawings, prints, watercolors, photographs, and popular ephemera from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. To add a broader perspective to this complex historical imagery, contemporary artist Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke/Crow) was invited to author interpretative labels for the works of her choosing, included on the exhibition object pages below. Red Star draws on her cultural heritage as well as archival research to create art in a variety of media that questions, often in humorous and provocative ways, stereotypes of Native Americans.

Rudolph Ackermann (1764-1834) was a man of many talents; carriage-maker, artist, inventor, lithographer, publisher, bookseller, publicist and entrepreneur, he also worked tirelessly to raise funds to relieve  his native  Germany after the devastation of Napoleon's invasion. He published works which have created the most lasting visual images of the Regency period; illustrating and promoting the latest styles and fashions in dress, furnishing, domestic architecture, gardens and foreign travel. His monthly magazine The Repository of Arts (1809-1828) remains a primary visual source book for later historians of design. His Microcosm of London (1808-10), paired the talents of Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin to create a landmark work of topographical publishing. He also promoted innovations in carriage design, water-proofing material, chemistry, lithography and steam power. 

This new biography by John Ford includes extensive new research into Ackermann's life, drawing on his papers, accounts and other untapped sources and provides a wealth of material to those interested in early modern print culture and the arts of the Regency period.