Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2017 -

This first major survey of Rhode Island furniture presents some of Colonial America's most significant artistic expression, with its emphasis on visual presence and fine workmanship. The 392 color plates are superb, as are the contributions by Kane (curator of American decorative arts, Yale University Art Gallery) and four historians, which consider the period from 1636 to 1740, cabinetmaking (1740-1830), chair making and upholstery, clockmaking, and Windsor chairs (l760-1830). All the essays have extensive notes. Explored are such famous makers as the Goddard and Townsend families, with their block-and-shell masterpieces; also discussed are characteristics of the styles, trade practices, export furniture, and customers. Research in primary sources--on craftsmen and the cities and towns where they worked and sold furniture--brought to light new attributions to Rhode Island furniture. With its excellent pictures, analysis of materials, dimensions, inscriptions, and information about provenance, this brilliant, scholarly presentation is an important addition to the literature on American decorative arts.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Rich in both ideas and ambition, this is the second in Onians's planned trilogy (following Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki, 2007) establishing a new art history that takes advantage of advances in neuroscience to lift E. H. Gombrich's project of understanding the history of art as a history of perception to a new level of biological sophistication. Onians (emer., Univ. of East Anglia, UK) argues that neural networks explain the history of style, to put a complicated theory somewhat crudely, and he intends his trilogy as a rebuttal of literary theory's model for art history. Onians's scope is impressive: cave paintings, classical architectural orders, the non-naturalistic imagination of the middle ages, Brunelleschi's orthogonality, absolute monarchs' often-failed attempts to control their subjects through art, Palladianism, the picturesque, Cezanne's Provencal aesthetic, Malevich and Corbusier. Some may be reminded of Arnold Hauser's social history of art more than of Gombrich, Michael Baxandall, or Hippolyte Taine, but Onians's basic project--to take more account of unconscious processes in the making and viewing of art--deserves respect. Readable, learned, provocative, and well illustrated, Onians's study, with its plenteous would haves and could haves, should provoke much discussion, both within and outside departmental boundaries.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates and above; professionals; general readers.

Skaggs (Hite Art Institute of the Univ. of Louisville) has written about graphic design theory for 20 years, and his experience is plainly evident. He masterfully balances sophisticated concepts with a mission to speak to the newcomer. Though dense in parts, theory here is readable and well worth a reader's effort. Today graphic design increasingly attracts non-visual thinkers from other fields, yet methods of design begin with seeing. Simply put, this book trains people to learn in a more visual way. Skaggs investigates complex processes of perception and then focuses on perception's relation to semiotics and the making of meaning. Every visual thing or visent (Skaggs's neologism) is a conveyor of ideas. The visent can be physical or sensorial (i.e., a color), and is best understood as a concept that unites perception with signification. This fascinating volume is packed with detail and replete with apt examples. Whether designers work with a single graphic element, interactive system, or entire branding campaign, they must recognize subtle yet strategic relationships between denotation and connotation. FireSigns looks to a future already visible. It enriches MIT Press's new "Design Thinking, Design Theory" series, which stresses that every design discipline is increasingly interdisciplinary and the uses of design are ever widening.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

During the early decades of the 20th century, American artist and poet Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944), together with her sisters Ettie and Carrie, held salons in her Manhattan apartment that hosted luminaries of modernist art, music, literature, and dance. After training at the Art Students League of New York, Stettheimer traveled extensively in Europe before returning to New York and bringing together such American notables as Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe, and European expats such as Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, and subsequently at the Art Gallery of Ontario, this beautifully illustrated book is a gem. Including biographical essays on the Stettheimers, along with archival photographs and reproductions of Florine's inimitable paintings and poetry, this book brings the life of this remarkable woman to the attention of a wider audience. Full of vitality and enchantment, Stettheimer's images conjure an elite world, populated by dancers, critics, artists, and poets from her own social circle, daring individuals who challenged past gender, creative, and intellectual constraints at the height of the Jazz Age, embracing the pioneers of the avant-garde from the Ballets Russes through surrealism.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Stourton's excellent biography of Kenneth Clark (1903-83) offers insight into a richly lived life. Clark's rise to prominence in the art world and his contributions to the appreciation of art led to his ambassador-like status, including in the US. Stourton (senior fellow, Institute of Historical Research, Univ. of London, UK; former chairman, Sotheby's UK) details Clark's personal life alongside his formidable professional service, beginning when Clark was appointed, at age 27, curator of fine arts at the University of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. Clark went on to make distinguished contributions as a scholar, philanthropist, and television presenter, thanks to his documentary BBC television series Civilisation (aired in 1969 and now available on Blu-Ray). Civilisation formally introduced Clark to millions of Americans and forever secured him an adulatory public. Stourton devotes the concluding chapters to the development, production, and reception of Civilisation, which determined Clark's legacy as the champion of public access to art and beauty. The series pioneered a new television genre, using rich imagery and educated restraint informed by reasoned insight to cast personal taste as popular Western cultural history. Carefully researched and boldly intimate, Stourton's biography benefits from his deep investigative analysis, which ensures a balanced treatment.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

The machine is a singular defining trait of the 20th century. Making the case for a persistent "machine aesthetic," Broeckmann (Leuphana Univ. of Luneburg, Germany) carefully analyzes early- and late-20th-century artists' embrace of the machine as medium, message, or both. Genealogy is central to the author's project; he demonstrates that diverse, contemporary machine art practices share a historical lineage in futurism, constructivism, and Dada. The book provides a clear and solid foundation for understanding the human relationship with technology through art. Broeckmann outlines a taxonomy that helps one gain traction in his detailed survey. He defines five "aspects" of the machine aesthetic guiding modern artists: associative, symbolic, formalist, kinetic, and automatic. Developing these aspects to dig deeper, Broeckmann analyzes artworks with close attention to their inventive physicality, the technologies they exploit, and the aesthetic assumptions they shake up. Additionally he considers the presumption (or not) of human interaction. Projects by Jean Tinguely, Stelarc, and Wim Delvoye play central roles, and numerous other examples remain critical to Broeckmann's thesis, which addresses both the utopic and dystopic scenarios machine art engenders. This is a fascinating exploration of the technological imaginary that grips the present age with questions of aesthetics, identity, complacency, determinacy, and indeterminacy.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals.

The popularity of typefaces and font designs is one of the more unexpected ramifications of the computer revolution. Because everyone can now select fonts, everyone pays attention to them in ways that previously only printers and graphic designers did. Fortunately, there are plenty of books being published to help satisfy the thirst for things typographic. One of the best recent volumes is this book by Shaw (Parsons School of Design and the School of Visual Arts), who designed or co-designed some 18 typefaces. Revival Type is more than eye candy, and its ambition does not rest with simply illustrating recent revivals of commercial signage and Victoriana. No, this little book, in fewer than 250 pages, offers a well-curated, authoritative history of some of the most important typeface designs over the entire scope of printing history. The fonts are organized into 16 categories, and one finds bite-sized histories of the work of Koch and Arrighi, Jenson and Granjon, Gill and Kis. A to Z, it's here. Beautifully illustrated, this book is a treasure for serious typographers and an invaluable resource for those interested in graphic arts.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Young's Street Art World offers a welcome, extended, thoughtful, and insightful critical positioning of an amorphous universe of public, deeply conflicted creative expression. For all the ink spilled in the study and interpretation of street art, it is remarkable how little of the discussion has moved beyond picture books, manifestos, gazetteers, or thinly argued "hip" engagements with visual culture. Anchoring the book in a distinction between street art and graffiti, Young (criminology, Univ. of Melbourne, Australia) changes the narrative arc and charts a path for considering art routinely assigned to the margins of contemporary art. She adroitly maps and blurs the intersections between street art, graffiti, contemporary art, and advertising, framing the discussion around such concepts as "streetness," "touristification," performance, commodification, property, reputation, and public/civic space. Written in the first person, Street Art World conveys its critical arguments in a memoir-like fashion that amplifies the experience of encountering and intellectually processing the work in the street. Young's rich, smartly illustrated intervention draws on extensive interviews with artists and on the author's urban explorations around the globe. Street Art World is a must read for all who are drawn to vernacular visual culture. This is an exceptional book.Summing Up: Essential. All readers.

Bravo to the Berlinsiche Galerie for bringing full attention to the work of German expressionist Paul Goesch and to those whose work inspired him. Trained as an architect, Goesch struggled with psychosis, and those struggless were manifested in an extraordinary trove of paintings and drawings. Goesch's phantasmagoric subjects and unique palette are unparalleled in the history of art. To peruse the color plates of this catalogue of the Berlinsiche Galerie exhibition is to peer into a mind that is haunted, searching, and joyous. Goesch's relationships with visionaries Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut and his reception by critics Adolf Behne and Paul Westheim are some of the subjects treated in essays by Thomas Kohler, Annelie Lutgens, Eva-Maria Barkhofen, Sabine Hohnholz, and Ralph Musielski. Hohnholz's essay, "'Remarkable': Hans Prinzhorn, His Collection, and Paul Goesch," is particularly welcome, since Prinzhorn's collection included a substantial portion of Goesch's work. After Prinzhorn's death in 1933, works in Prinzhorn's collection, Goesch's among them, were displayed as "degenerate art" by the Nazis, who deemed Goesch "unworthy to live" and executed him in 1940. In addition to the work itself, the volume includes biographies of Goesch, Taut, and Scheerbart.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.