Among the numerous explorations of the phenomenon of Futurism - the last Italian current that has vehemently influenced European art - this volume presents itself as a new and punctual study opportunity, dedicated to the printmaking activity of Marinetti's followers. Analyzing the copious patrimony of engraved sheets and printed directly from the matrices, one understands how widespread engraving practices - in particular woodcut and linocut - were used by Futurists, which, in their immediacy and simplicity of use, respected and even exalted the principles same as modernity. The study aims to give back to the widest possible panorama, which includes historical precedents and the latest propaganda of the artists involved: from the end of the nineteenth century, through the analysis of graphic works of symbolist, twilight or d 'Divisionist intonation, up to the post-WWII graphic works.

Focusing on the vital role of literature in the development of the artistic practice of Frank Stella (b. 1936), this insightful book looks at four transformative series of prints made between 1984 and 1999. Each of these series is named after a literary work—the Had Gadya (a playful song traditionally sung at the end of the Passover Seder), Italian Folktales, compiled by Italo Calvino, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, and The Dictionary of Imaginary Places by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi. This investigation offers a critical new perspective on Stella: an examination of his interdisciplinary process, literary approach, and interest in the lessons of art history as crucial factors for his artistic development as a printmaker. Mitra Abbaspour, Calvin Brown, and Erica Cooke examine how Stella’s dynamic engagement with literature paralleled the artist’s experimentation with unconventional printmaking techniques and engendered new ways of representing spatial depth to unleash the narrative potential of abstract forms.

*Forthcoming August 2018

Mitra Abbaspour is curator of modern and contemporary art and Calvin Brown is associate curator of prints and drawings, both at the Princeton University Art Museum. Erica Cooke is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.

Vincent van Gogh’s (1853–1890) encounter with Japanese ukiyo-e prints during his time in Paris was decisive for the direction that his art would take in the years to come. He enthusiastically assembled a collection of the prints with the idea of dealing in them, and soon was captivated by their colorful and cheerful imagery and style, which began to exert a dramatic influence on his own work. Gradually this enchanted world became his main artistic reference point. From then on, he positioned himself as an artist in the Japanese tradition in order to gain a reputation with the avant-garde of the day.

This gorgeous publication offers a detailed reassessment of the impact Japanese printmaking had on Van Gogh’s creative output. Featuring essays by the world’s leading Van Gogh experts, this book details the ways in which the artist constructed his understanding of a Japanese aesthetic and his utopian ideal of a so-called primitive society, and incorporated these into his own vision and practice. The size, nature, and importance of Van Gogh’s own collection of Japanese prints are also explored. Lavish illustrations include oil paintings and drawings by Van Gogh as well as a selection of the Japanese works that so captured his imagination.

Louis van Tilborgh is a senior researcher at the Van Gogh Museum and professor of art history at the University of Amsterdam. Cornelia Homburg is an independent art historian and curator. Nienke Bakker is curator of paintings at the Van Gogh Museum. Tsukasa Kodera is professor of art history at Osaka University.

Through large-scale installation, sculpture, photography, printmaking, and painting, Sonny Assu merges the aesthetics of Indigenous iconography with a pop-art sensibility. This stunning retrospective spans over a decade of Assu's career, highlighting more than 120 full-color works, including several never-before-exhibited pieces.

Through analytical essays and personal narratives, Candice Hopkins, Marianne Nicolson, Richard Van Camp, and Ellyn Walker provide brilliant commentary on Assu's practice, its meaning in the context of contemporary art, and its wider significance in the struggle for Indigenous cultural and political autonomy. Exploring themes of Indigenous rights, consumerism, branding, humor, and the ways in which history informs contemporary ideas and identities, Sonny Assu: A Selective History is the first major full-scale book to pay tribute to this important, prolific, and vibrant figure in the contemporary art world.

SONNY ASSU was raised in North Delta, BC, over 150 miles away from his ancestral home on Vancouver Island. At the age of eight, he discovered his Kwakwaka'wakw heritage, which would later become the conceptual focal point of his contemporary art practice. Assu graduated from Emily Carr University in 2002 and was the recipient of their distinguished alumni award in 2006. His work can be found in the National Gallery of Canada, Seattle Art Museum, Vancouver Art Gallery, Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Burke Museum at the University of Washington, and various other public and private collections across Canada, the United States, and the UK. In 2016, Assu and his family moved "home" to unceded Ligwilda'xw territory (Campbell River, BC).

On 20 February 1763, only days after the formal conclusion of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), the London engraver and geographer Thomas Jefferys published a large advertisement in Lloyd’s Evening Post. Although Jefferys typically published several advertisements every year, in many different papers, this one was special: unusually long, it declared that he had published a series of ‘American Views neatly engraved from Drawings taken on the Spot by several officers of the British [sic] Navy and Army’, and in addition, it listed over two dozen maps and plans which represented sites in North America and the West Indies.

Following Napoleon’s short-lived 1798 campaign in Egypt, a large number of illustrated books exploring Muslim civilization in general, and Islamic Cairo in particular, appeared to cater to the growing European fascination with the Muslim world. These publications were especially popular in France and Great Britain, countries that had strong political interests in Egypt during the nineteenth century. More recently, they have attracted the attention of art historians and scholars of Orientalism and the nineteenth-century culture of travel.

This article focuses on one of these books, namely the widely cited three-volume illustrated book on Islamic Cairo, L’Art arabe d’après les monuments du Caire depuis le VIIème siècle jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIème siècle (Arab Art: As Seen Through the Monuments of Cairo from the Seventh to the Eighteenth Century), by the French Egyptologist Émile Prisse d’Avennes (1807–79). L’Art arabe was published between 1869 and 1877 in Paris by the prestigious private press Veuve A. Morel et Cie. Well known among scholars, designers, and collectors of Islamic art, Prisse d’Avennes’s book has been widely disseminated and reprinted since the nineteenth century. This multi-volume work is important on its own terms, but its historical importance can be further augmented by an exploration of various archival sources—information that is rarely available for books published during the nineteenth century—which can help us to understand the circumstances surrounding its production.

This article looks closely at these primary documents, in particular, personal letters that Prisse d’Avennes sent to his friend and collaborator on L’Art arabe, the French artist Charles Cournault (1815–1904), which are held in a private collection but were published in the 2013 volume on Prisse d’Avennes. This study will also focus on documents related to the publisher August-Jean Morel: letters exchanged between Prisse d’Avennes and the French ministry sponsoring his travel to Egypt, in addition to relevant materials stored in Prisse d’Avennes’s archive at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. This latter collection encompasses manuscript notes and approximately 2,000 visual documents, including drawings, photographs, and prints authored by Prisse and other known or anonymous artists.

Looking at these various primary sources will shed light on the decision-making process of Prisse d’Avennes and his publishers that determined their choice of images for the publication. In examining the process of conceptualization of L’Art arabe, this study seeks to decenter Prisse d’Avennes as the sole defining authorial voice behind the publication; rather, it establishes that the multi-volume work that bears his name was a collaborative venture. L’Art arabe served as a forum for multiple and sometimes discordant viewpoints on how to represent Islamic architecture. Most importantly, Prisse d’Avennes’s relationships with the book’s sponsor and publisher, as well as the various printmakers with whom he worked, largely impacted the final product of the volume, which instigated a shift in focus away from the contextualized representations of Cairene architecture that Prisse d’Avennes favored toward the abstract images of Islamic ornament that were fashionable at the time.

History of Illustration covers image-making and print history from around the world, spanning from the ancient to the modern. Hundreds of color images show illustrations within their social, cultural, and technical context, while they are ordered from the past to the present. Readers will be able to analyze images for their displayed techniques, cultural standards, and ideas to appreciate the art form. This essential guide is the first history of illustration written by an international team of illustration historians, practitioners, and educators.

Landscape art in the early 19th century was guided by two rival concepts: the picturesque, which emphasized touristic pleasures and visual delight, and the sublime, an aesthetic category rooted in notions of fear and danger. British artists including J.M.W. Turner and John Constable raised landscape painting to new heights and their work reached global audiences through the circulation of engravings. Thomas Cole, born in England, emigrated to the United States in 1818, and first absorbed the picturesque and sublime through print media. Cole transformed British and continental European traditions to create a distinctive American form of landscape painting. The authors here explore the role of prints as agents of artistic transmission and look closely at how Cole’s own creative process was driven by works on paper such as drawings, notebooks, letters, and manuscripts. Also considered is the importance of the parallel works of William Guy Wall, best known for his pioneering Hudson River Portfolio. Beautifully illustrated with works on paper ranging from watercolors to etchings, mezzotints, aquatints, engravings, and lithographs, as well as notable paintings, this book offers important insights into Cole’s formulation of a profound new category in art—the American sublime.

Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor in the History of Art at Yale University. Gillian Forrester is senior curator of historic fine art at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. Jennifer Raab is assistant professor in the history of art at Yale University. Sophie Lynford and Nicholas Robbins are doctoral candidates in the history of art at Yale University.

Anticipated publication April 17, 2018

During states of emergency, normal rules and rights are suspended, and force can often prevail. In these precarious intervals, when the human potential for violence can be released and rehearsed, images may also emerge. This book asks: what happens to art during a state of emergency? Investigating the uneasy relationship between aesthetics and political history, Emilia Terracciano traces a genealogy of modernism in colonial and postcolonial India; she explores catastrophic turning points in the history of twentieth-century India, via the art works which emerged from them. Art and Emergency reveals how the suspended, diagonal, fugitive lines of Nasreen Mohamedi's abstract compositions echo Partition's traumatic legacy; how the theatrical choreographies of Sunil Janah's photographs document desperate famine; and how Gaganendranath Tagore's lithographs respond to the wake of massacre. Making an innovative, important intervention into current debates on visual culture in South Asia, this book also furthers our understanding of the history of modernism.