Seminar Papers

In this volume, ten leading scholars examine the contradictions of modernity and Black agency that continue to define the Western art world. Illustrated essays explore the work of artists such as Roy DeCarava, Ben Enwonwu, James Hampton, Norman Lewis, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Augusta Savage, and Carrie Mae Weems, always with an eye toward reframing our understanding of Black artistic producers. The interdisciplinary avenues of inquiry remake the boundaries of modernist art—its notions time and again focused on the singular white male European or American artist—with another set of imperatives, ethics, and histories, broadening our understanding of the past and present of modernism. Published by the National Gallery of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.

The complex facets of cubism remain relevant subjects in art history today, a century after Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque developed the revolutionary style. This collection of essays by international experts presents new lines of inquiry, including novel readings of individual objects or groups of works through close visual, material, and archival analysis; detailed studies of how cubism related to intellectual and political movements of the early 20th century; and accounts of crucial moments in the reception of cubism by curators, artists, and critics. Generous illustrations of paintings, drawings, and sculptures, some familiar but others virtually unknown, support this wide range of approaches to the pioneering works of Picasso, Braque, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, and others. Published by the National Gallery of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.

This volume reexamines the establishment and early history of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, one of the most important centers of governance, education, and theory in the arts for the early modern period and the model for all subsequent academies of art worldwide. Eleven essays by an international group of historians, archivists, and art historians provide the most comprehensive history of the Accademia to be published in more than forty years, and the first in nearly two hundred years to be based almost entirely on primary and documentary material. The authors examine the institution’s founding and development through unpublished documents as well as reinterpretation of technical materials and theoretical treatises. In so doing, they also provide new means for following the progress of the most significant artists—in addition to a host of lesser-known painters, sculptors, and architects—who were working in Rome in the early seventeenth century. Published by the National Gallery of Art and distributed by Yale University Press.

The studies of artists and concepts in this volume present Dada as a prodigiously creative avant-garde that cohere, for all their diversity, around the radical reinvention of the nature of the art object. Among the strategies elaborated are the appropriation and transformation of the structures of a new media culture and marketplace, the performance of forms of modern identity, and the reworking of history and memory. Filling a broad gap in the history of modern art, this collection of twelve essays offers both an important revision of our understanding of this influential movement and a starting point for reflection on the origins of many forms of contemporary artistic practice. Published by the National Gallery of Art in association with Distributed Art Publishers.