Gustave Doré and the Modern Biblical Imagination explores the role of biblical imagery in modernity through the lens of Gustave Doré (1832-83), whose work is among the most reproduced and adapted scriptural imagery in the history of Judeo-Christianity. First published in France in late 1865, Doré's Bible illustrations received widespread critical acclaim among both religious and lay audiences, and the next several decades saw unprecedented dissemination of the images on an international scale. In 1868, the Doré Gallery opened in London, featuring monumental religious paintings that drew 2.5 million visitors over the course of a quarter-century; when the gallery's holdings travelled to the United States in 1892, exhibitions at venues like the Art Institute of Chicago drew record crowds. The United States saw the most creative appropriations of Doré's images among a plethora of media, from prayer cards and magic lantern slides to massive stained-glass windows and the spectacular epic films of Cecile B. DeMille.

This book repositions biblical imagery at the center of modernity, an era that has often been defined through a process of secularization, and argues that Doré's biblical imagery negotiated the challenges of visualizing the Bible for modern audiences in both sacred and secular contexts. A set of texts whose veracity and authority were under unprecedented scrutiny in this period, the Bible was at the center of a range of historical, theological, and cultural debates. Gustave Doré is at the nexus of these narratives, as his work established the most pervasive visual language for biblical imagery in the past two and a half centuries, and constitutes the means by which the Bible has persistently been translated visually.

Published to coincide with "Helen Frankenthaler: Radical Beauty," Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (15 Sept 2021 - 18 Apr 2022) which celebrates Helen Frankenthaler’s woodcut works. Sarah Kirk Hanley looks at how the artist’s technical innovations changed the world of printmaking and reassesses her masterful contribution to woodcut. There was an associated online talk with Phil Sanders for his "Prints and Their Makers" Book Club on September 16, 2021. We discuss the recent criticism that places Frankenthaler more centrally in the canon of late 20th Century art on a par with her male peers. We also discuss what makes an artist great, and how the contributions of women should generally be reconsidered in this regard.

Film, like the printed imagery inaugurated during the Renaissance, spread ideas – not least the idea of the power of visual art – across not only geographical and political divides but also strata of class and gender. Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History examines the early flourishing of film, from the 1920s to the mid-1960s, as partly reprising the introduction of mass media in the Renaissance, allowing for innovation that reflected an art free of the control of a patron though required to attract a broad public. Rivalry between word and image, between the demands of narrative and those of visual composition, spurred new ways of addressing the compelling nature of the visual. The twentieth century also saw the development of the discipline of art history; transfusions between cinematic practice and art historical postulates are part of the story told here.

This essay reinterprets Karl Bodmer’s North American frontier watercolor portraits from the 1830s through their intended future destination and involvement in European print processes. I argue that Bodmer “painted print,” whereby the image separations required by print technologies shaped Bodmer’s working methods. Thus, Bodmer’s North American portraits are not complete representational spaces within themselves. Instead, their uneven completion, visual notations, blank backgrounds, and selected sections of detailed focus reflect their status as ever-moving image-objects within a larger print culture.

Herme oder Terme? Texte und Bilder zur Klärung der Begriffe aus: Achilles Statius, Inlustrium viror[um] ut extant in urbe expressi vultus Romae 1569/Formis Antonij Lafrerj und: Achilles Statius’ Inlustrium virorum … vultus: Hermen oder Termen? von Claudia Echinger-Maurach (FONTES 89)

This publication contains the transcripts of Achilles Statius' dedication to Antoine de Granvelle and his important, unpublished introduction into Lafrery's edition of the "Inlustrium virorum" from 1569 with a translation of both texts into German. In the following article Statius' explanation why these figures, which we today call herms, are called terms is embedded not only into the early history of these "terms" in art and architecture, but also into the history of publications on portraits of famous men and women in the 16th century.

This essay explores Sol LeWitt's printmaking from the 1970s and the 1990s, specifically a lithograph, a silkscreen, and several etchings that employ a medium-specific strategy of rotating the print matrix to produce single images or series. Interpreted in light of the artist's 1979 venture into film and dance (in collaboration with Lucinda Childs and Philip Glass), these prints reveal a system of choreographed moves (quarter turns, half turns, a reversal) that must be mentally and perceptually deciphered and thus re-created by viewers. Set in motion, LeWitt's lines and brushstrokes interact in unpredictable and chaotic ways, yet an organizing structure emerges.

This article examines Jules and Edmond de Goncourt’s novels in the context of the nineteenth-century etching revival and the brothers’ personal experience as aquafortistes, proposing that their engagement with etching influenced their novels in three ways. First, it suggests that the fragmented narrative, structure, and style of the Goncourts’ novels draw on the same principles as nineteenth-century print albums, which similarly emphasized discontinuity and juxtaposition. Secondly, an investigation of the brothers’ use of Charles Méryon’s etchings in their novel Manette Salomon reveals their interest in both textual transpositions of Méryon’s style and the literary topos associated with his work. Finally, the article concludes by exploring how the Goncourt brothers incorporated vocabulary and techniques from etching into their écriture artiste, moving beyond prior readings of their novels in relation to painting and demonstrating the diversity of artistic inspiration for their writing.

German printmaker Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) is known for her unapologetic social and political imagery; her representations of grief, suffering, and struggle; and her equivocal ideas about artistic and political labels. This volume explores Kollwitz’s obsessive printmaking experiments and the evolution of her images, and assesses the unusually rich progressions of preparatory drawings, proofs, and rejected images behind Kollwitz’s compositions of struggling workers, rebellious peasants, and grieving mothers.

This selected catalogue of the Dr. Richard A. Simms collection at the Getty Research Institute provides a bird’s-eye view of Kollwitz’s sequences of images as well as the interrelationships among prints produced over multiple years. The meanings and sentiments emerging from Kollwitz’s images are not, as is often implied, unmediated expressions of her politics and emotions. Rather, Kollwitz transformed images with deliberate technical and formal experiments, seemingly endless adjustments, wholesale rejections, and strategic regroupings of figures and forms—all of which demonstrate that her obsessive dedication to making art was never a straightforward means to political or emotional ends.

This volume was published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center December 3, 2019, through March 29, 2020; and the Art Institute of Chicago May 30 through September 13, 2020.

Exploring the intersections of visual culture, design and politics in Beirut from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, this interdisciplinary study critically examines a global conjuncture in Lebanon's history, marked by anticolonial struggle and complicated by a Cold War order. Cosmopolitan Radicalism uncovers the transnational circuits that animated Arab modernist pursuits and sheds light on the forgotten trajectories and graphic design practices of its protagonists: Egyptian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian artists who wove through Beirut, in and out of its flourishing art galleries, publishing industry and political movements. Drawing on uncharted archives of everyday print media, the book reveals the translocal visuality that emerged with—and, crucially, shaped—Beirut’s development as a nodal city in the global sixties. It does so by focusing on three interrelated themes: the first is concerned with state promotions of Beirut as a Mediterranean site of international tourism and modern leisure; the second, with the city’s rise as a cultural nexus of modern art, pan-Arab publishing and anticolonial contestation, covert CIA funding notwithstanding; and the third, with its transformation, through the rise of the Palestinian Resistance, as a node in Third Worldist revolutionary anti-imperialism and transnational solidarity. Against a celebratory reminiscence of the ‘golden years’, Beirut's long sixties is conceived of as a liminal juncture, an anxious time and place when the city held out promises at once politically radical and radically cosmopolitan.