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.

This essay explores aspects of the biographies and oeuvres of Mattheus Greuter and Philippe Thomassin to undertake an inflected case study of Catholic Counter-Reformation cross-cultural sublimation of the violent physical suffering of actual martyrdom (also called red martyrdom, bloody martyrdom, or martyrdom unto blood) into nonviolent spiritual martyrdom (or white martyrdom, lifelong martyrdom, martyrdom by desire, or martyrdom in intention) by means of somato-sensorial practices of image-making and viewing. Nonviolent spiritual martyrdom was neither new nor exclusive to the Catholic Counter Reformation. Rather, white martyrdom was rooted in the Gospels, expounded in patristic writings, and boasted a robust late medieval heritage. In plotting the paradox of early modern martyrdom against the contemporaneous culture of the convert(ing) imprint, I attend to how the incised line of northern-trained engravers, prized in Italy by 1600 for technical virtuosity and curvilinear aesthetic qualities, acquired new symbolic meanings in discourse surrounding conversion and sensual suffering internal to Catholicism following the Council of Trent (1545–63).

Diego Rivera’s mural 'Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central' is a fascinating critique of high society and wealthy elites. It also offers a multitude of other stories that intersect in a web of historical memory. The massive mural, the histories it depicts, and even its physical journey after a devastating earthquake, hold answers to many of the questions readers might ask about Mexico. It also demonstrates how cultural artifacts explain the world around us and expose intersections and entanglements of specific power dynamics.

Modern Mexican Culture offers an enriching and deep investigation of key ideas and events in Mexico through an examination of art and history. Experts in Mexican cultural and literary studies cover the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre, the figure of the charro (cowboy), the construct of the postrevolutionary teacher, the class-correlated construct of gente decente, a borderlands response to the rhetoric of dominance, and the “democratic transition” in late twentieth-century Mexico. Each essay is a rich reading experience, providing teachers and students alike with a deep and well-contextualized sense of Mexican life, culture, and politics.

Each chapter provides a historical grounding of its topic, followed by a multifaceted analysis through various artistic representations that provide a more complex view of Mexico. Chapters are accompanied by lists of readily available murals, political cartoons, plays, pamphlets, posters, films, poems, novels, and other cultural products. Modern Mexican Culture demonstrates the power of art and artists to question, explain, and influence the world around us.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key players in the formation of Anglo-American communities and eventually of American citizenship. Deftly interweaving analysis of images with furniture, architecture, clothing, and literary works, Van Horn reconstructs the networks of goods that bound together consumers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston.

Moving beyond emulation and the desire for social status as the primary motivators for consumption, Van Horn shows that Anglo-Americans’ material choices were intimately bound up with their efforts to distance themselves from Native Americans and African Americans. She also traces women’s contested place in forging provincial culture. As encountered through a woman’s application of makeup at her dressing table or an amputee’s donning of a wooden leg after the Revolutionary War, material artifacts were far from passive markers of rank or political identification. They made Anglo-American society.

Jennifer Van Horn is assistant professor of art history and history at the University of Delaware.

Series: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia

In 1970, photography curator Peter C. Bunnell organized the exhibition "Photography into Sculpture" for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, bringing together twenty-three photographers and artists from across the United States as well as Vancouver, British Columbia, whose work challenged accepted practices and categories. "The Photographic Object 1970" serves as an exhibition catalogue after the fact, an oral history, and critical reading of exhibitions and experimental photography during the 1960s and 70s. It proposes precedents for contemporary artists who continue to blur the boundaries between photography and other art mediums.