Art Museum Publications

A rich exploration of American artworks that reframes them within current debates on race, gender, the environment, and more

Object Lessons in American Art explores a diverse gathering of Euro-American, Native American, and African American art from a range of contemporary perspectives, illustrating how innovative analysis of historical art can inform, enhance, and afford new relevance to artifacts of the American past. The book is grounded in the understanding that the meanings of objects change over time, in different contexts, and as a consequence of the ways in which they are considered. 

Inspired by the concept of the object lesson, the study of a material thing or group of things in juxtaposition to convey embodied and underlying ideas, Object Lessons in American Art examines a broad range of art from Princeton University’s venerable collections as well as contemporary works that imaginatively appropriate and reframe their subjects and style, situating them within current social, cultural, and artistic debates on race, gender, the environment, and more.

Edited by Karl Kusserow, John Wilmerding Curator of American Art, Princeton University

Contributions by 

• Horace D. Ballard
• Kirsten Pai Buick
• Ellery E. Foutch
• Karl Kusserow
• Jeffrey Richmond-Moll
• Rebecca Zorach

Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum

Published (US): Mar 28, 2023

A diverse set of contributions to the expanding field of ecocritical studies 

Offering a broad reexamination of visual culture through the lenses of ecocriticism, environmental justice, and animal studies, Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective presents a diverse array of art historical criticism formulated within an ecological context. This timely compendium brings together contributors whose scholarship extends chronologically and geographically from 11th-century Chinese painting to contemporary photography of California wildfires, emphasizing the environmental dimensions inherent in the content and materials of aesthetic, sacred, and didactic images and objects. The book’s introduction and fifteen interdisciplinary essays provide a dynamic, cross-cultural approach to an increasingly vital area of study, advancing valuable new strategies for considering works of art in ways that are innovative, intellectually stimulating, and universally significant.

With contributions by Alan C. Braddock, Maura Coughlin, Rachael Z. DeLue, T. J. Demos, Mónica Domínguez Torres, Finis Dunaway, Stephen F. Eisenman, Emily Gephart, Karl Kusserow, De-nin D. Lee, Gregory Levine, Anne McClintock, James Nisbet, Andrew Patrizio, Sugata Ray, and Greg M. Thomas. 

Karl Kusserow is the John Wilmerding Curator of American Art at the Princeton University Art Museum. Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum 

Publication date: October 2021

Paperback:  304 pages. 150 color illustrations

Cezanne: The Rock and Quarry Paintings, edited by John Elderfield, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the  Princeton University Art Museum in Spring 2020.

From the mid-1860s until shortly before his death, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) created 27 canvases that take rock formations as their principal subjects. This is the first publication to focus exclusively on these extraordinary works. It illustrates all of Cézanne’s mature paintings of rock formations, including scenes of the terrain of the forest of Fontainebleau, the Mediterranean coastal village of L’Estaque, and the area around Aix-en-Provence, alongside examples of his watercolors of these subjects. 

An introductory essay by John Elderfield assesses these paintings in terms of their character, development, and relationship to Cézanne’s other works; their critical interpretations; and their geological and corporeal associations. Faya Causey’s essay examines the Provençal context of Cézanne’s rock and quarry paintings, as well as the status of geology in France during the second half of the 19th century. The catalogue section, introduced by Anna Swinbourne, chronicles the sites, presenting details of where specifically the paintings were made and of the features that they represent, together with technical aspects of particular works.

• Hardcover book
• 179 pages
• Color illustrations

Life Magazine and the Power of Photography, edited by Katherine A. Bussard and Kristen Gresh, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in Spring 2020.

This groundbreaking book considers how the magazine’s use of images fundamentally shaped the way its readers understood photography and experienced important historical events. Drawing on unprecedented access to Life Magazine's picture and paper archives, as well as some photographers' personal archives, this beautifully arranged volume presents new scholarship that sheds light on the collaborative process behind many now-iconic images and photo-essays. 

• Hardcover
• 245 illustrations 

 Winner of the 2020 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award, College Art Association 

The Eternal Feast: Banqueting in Chinese Art from the 10th to the 14th Century,  by curator Zoe S. Kwok, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum October 2019 - February 2020.  

The book brings to life the art of the feast during three transformative Chinese dynasties, the Song, Liao, and Yuan, which together enjoyed a thriving economy, cultural flourishing, and the intermingling of foreign and native traditions. Focusing on a rare group of surviving paintings from the period—along with ceramic, lacquer, metal, and stone objects as well as textiles—the exhibition reveals feasts to be singularly positioned to illuminate one of the most enduring and significant facets of the Chinese tradition: the continuum between life and the afterlife. 

The exhibition features 50 objects arranged in sections that focus on ladies banqueting in the past, gentlemen feasting in the present, and dining in the afterlife. Several other aspects of elite feasting—including costume, cuisine, music, and dance, as well as burial customs, architecture and gardens, artistic patronage, and painterly practice—are also explored, offering a window into life, death, and art during a time period whose cultural influence extends in China to the present day. 

• Hardcover

Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment,  by co-curators Karl Kusserow and Alan C. Braddock, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum October 2018 - January 2019.    

The book is a groundbreaking ecocritical exploration of American art that  examines the complex and evolving relationship between art and the  environment. The authors present more than 120 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, videos, and works of decorative art, from the colonial period to the present, exploring for the first time how American artists of different traditions and backgrounds have both reflected and shaped environmental understanding while contributing to the development of a modern ecological consciousness. 

• Hardcover
• 400 pages

  Winner of the 2019 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award, College Art Association  

The essays in More than One examine sequentiality and serialism in the practice of photography from the medium’s earliest years to the present. Contributors explore nuances of syntax and sense raised by works like photographic albums, books, thematic portfolios, journalistic photo features, and documentations of performance art.

Fully illustrated essays discuss, among other topics, the little-known volume Beyond This Point (1929), a collaborative experiment by American photographer Francis Bruguiere and London radio producer Lance Sieveking; the evolving relationship between public space and sexual self-definition in the early work of Minor White; and an important performance work by artist Ana Mendieta. The title essay surveys the social conditions and expressive motives that have given rise to serial and sequential forms throughout the history of photography.

About the Contributors: 

Joel Smith is curator of photography and Kelly Baum is the Locks Curatorial Fellow for Contemporary Art, both at the Princeton University Art Museum. Peter Barberie is curator of photography at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Anne McCauley is the David Hunter McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art at Princeton University. Kevin Moore is an independent scholar and curator.

Recarving China's Past: Art, Archaeology, and Architecture of the "Wu Family Shrines," by curator Cary Y. Liu, et. al, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2005.

The “Wu Family Shrines,” one of the most important cultural monuments of early China, comprise approximately 50 stone slabs from the so-called Wu cemetery in Shandong province. Depicting emperors and kings, heroic women, filial sons, and mythological subjects, these famous carved and engraved reliefs may have been intended to reflect such basic themes as loyalty to the emperor, filial piety, and wifely devotion; centuries later, they vividly bring to life the art, social conditions, and Confucian ideology of the Eastern Han.

This generously illustrated book examines the stone slabs and their rubbings as artifacts with a complex cultural history from the second century to the present, and addresses questions about the traditional identification of the structures as Han dynasty shrines of the Wu family. Written by a team of distinguished scholars in the fields of Chinese art and history, the book includes a novel examination of Han burial items in relation to burial belief, pictorial carvings, and funerary architecture.

• Hardcover

Frank Stella Unbound: Literature and Printmaking, by curators Mitra Abbaspour and Calvin Brown, et. al., is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2018.

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. 

The authors 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. 

• Hardcover

The Berlin Painter and His World: Athenian Vase-Painting in the Early Fifth Century B.C., by curator J. Michael Padgett, et. al., is the catalogue to the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2017.

The Berlin Painter was the name given by British classicist and art  historian Sir John Beazley to an otherwise anonymous Athenian red-figure  vase-painter. The artist’s long career extended from about 505 B.C.  well into the 460s, and his elegant renderings of daily life and  mythological stories offer invaluable insight into the social,  political, religious, and artistic workings of early 5th-century Athens.

• Hardcover
   

Clarence H. White and His World: The Art and Craft of Photography, 1895-1925, by Anne McCauley, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum October 2017 - January 2018.

This exhibition spotlights the work of Clarence H. White (1871-1925), a founding member of the Photo-Secession, a gifted photographer celebrated for his beautiful scenes of quiet domesticity and outdoor idylls, and an influential teacher and photographic mentor. The first retrospective devoted to the photographer in over a generation, this exhibition and accompanying publication will survey White’s career from his beginnings in 1895 in Ohio to his death in Mexico in 1925 and, importantly, will locate his work within the contexts of the international Arts and Crafts movement, the development of photographic magazine illustration and advertising, and the redefinition of childhood and the domestic sphere. 

• Hardcover

The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960–1980, by curator Katherine A. Bussard, et. al., is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2015.

American cities underwent seismic transformations in the 1960s and '70s, from shifting demographics and political protests to reshaping through highways and urban renewal. Amid this climate of upheaval, photographers, architects, activists, performance artists, and filmmakers turned conditions of crisis into sites for civic discourse and artistic expression. The book explores photographic and cinematic responses to the changing fabric of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles that contributed to a reconsideration of cities in popular media and urban policy during this period. 

Featuring contributions from more than 20 noted scholars in fields including art history, urban planning, architecture, and cultural studies, this is the first publication to address an important shift in photographic, cinematic, and planning practices based on close observations of streets, neighborhoods, and seminal events in the country’s three largest cities. 

• Hardcover
• More than  200 illustrations 

Rothko to Richter: Mark-Making in Abstract Painting from the Collection of Preston H. Haskell, by Kelly Baum, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2014. 

 Featuring 27 paintings created between 1950 and 1990 by some  of the most important artists of the mid- to late 20th century,  including Karel Appel, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Jack Goldstein, Hans Hofmann, Morris Louis, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, and Frank Stella, this book provides a window onto a moment of remarkable  creative ferment, when the nature of abstract painting was being hotly  contested. For the artists featured here, the debate around abstraction occurred largely at the level of technique, and to this end, they developed radically new ways to make marks that alternately emphasized  or suppressed traces of the artist’s touch. Beautiful reproductions are  accompanied by insightful essays that examine how the works communicate the changing priorities of abstract art after World War II.   

• Hardcover

The Itinerant Languages of Photography is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum September 2013-January 2014.

While photographs have been exchanged, appropriated, and mobilized in different contexts since the 19th century, their movement is now occurring at an unprecedented speed. The Itinerant Languages of Photography examines photography’s capacity to circulate across time and space as well as across other media, such as art, literature, and cinema. Taking its point of departure from Latin American and Spanish photographic archives, the volume offers an alternative history of photography by focusing on the transnational dimension of technological traffic and image production at a time when photography is at the center of current debates on the role of representation, authorship, and reception in a global contemporary culture.Featuring a wide-range of photographs—images that converse across temporal, political, and cultural boundaries by artists such as Lola and Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marcelo Brodsky, Joan Colom, Marc Ferrez, and Joan Fontcuberta—the book argues that the photographic image comes into being only as a consequence of reproduction, displacement, and itinerancy.

• Hardcover

For the first time, this important volume features nearly all of the ancient glass objects in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum. Collected over the course of more than a century, the objects originate from locations across the eastern Mediterranean region. Taken together, the 509 ancient glass vessels and plaques provide a timeline of archaeological and cultural history from the middle of the second millennium B.C. to the rise of Islam in the 7th century.

An introductory essay by award-winning scholar Anastassios Antonaras summarizes the history of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine glass, with a special emphasis on people—workers, artisans, owners, and vendors—and on the processes they used to create and decorate these artifacts. Conveniently arranged according to production technique, each entry in Fire and Sand features a color photograph, ink drawing, and detailed description.

• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 11.7 x 10.3 x 1.7 inches
• Hardcover

Princeton University Art Museum Handbook of the Collections

 Revised and Expanded Edition.

The encyclopedic collections of the Princeton University Art Museum comprise more than 92,000 objects ranging from ancient to contemporary art. This essential guide features more than 450 of the Museum's best-loved and most important works--including Chinese bronzes and calligraphy, Roman sculptures and mosaics, Maya ceramics, African beadwork and sculpture, old master prints and drawings, European and American paintings, drawings, and sculpture, and outstanding examples of photography--all beautifully illustrated and accompanied by informative texts. An introduction by Director James Steward offers a brief history of the Museum from its origins in the 1750s to today. Available exclusively at the Museum Store.

Princeton and the Gothic Revival investigates America's changing attitudes toward medieval art around the turn of the twentieth century through the lens of Princeton University and its role as a major patron of Gothic Revival art and architecture. Johanna Seasonwein charts a shift from eclecticism to a more unified, "authentic" approach to medieval art, and examines how the language of medieval forms was used to articulate a new model of American higher education in campus design and the classroom.

The catalog for an exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton and the Gothic Revival breaks new ground by addressing why universities, and Princeton in particular, were so effective at bringing together what had been disparate interests in the Middle Ages. Revivalists and Medievalists were often at odds, yet at Princeton they used the language of the Middle Ages to create a new identity for the American university, one that was steeped in the traditions of Oxford and Cambridge but also embraced the model of the German research university.

Princeton and the Gothic Revival provides an overview of Princeton's Romanesque and Gothic Revival architecture and examines the changing approach to the idea of the "Gothic" by looking at three Princeton buildings and their stained glass windows: the Marquand Chapel, Procter Hall at the Graduate College, and the University Chapel.

• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.4 x 0.9 x 10.2 inches
• Hardcover

City of Gold: The Archaeology of Polis Chrysochous, Cyprus complements the  exhibition City of Gold: Tomb and Temple in Ancient Cyprus, which was on view at the Princeton University Art Museum October 2012 - February 2013. 

The modern Cypriot town of Polis Chrysochous—"City of Gold"—lies above the city of Arsinoe and the earlier city-kingdom of Marion. In 1885 excavators began exploring the extensive cemeteries of these cities. Since 1983 the Princeton Cyprus Expedition has focused on the remains of sanctuaries, public buildings, workshops, and private residences spanning the Geometric through Classical periods of Marion and the Hellenistic through Roman, early Christian, and medieval periods of Arsinoe.

Combining archaeological investigation and historical analysis, City of Gold relates the discoveries establishing that these cities had close ties with Greece and with regions from Egypt to Anatolia, findings best represented by the painted vases and terracotta sculptures of Marion and the architecture of Arsinoe. Nearly half of the 110 artifacts included in the catalogue are previously unpublished, and another third are published in detail for the first time.

• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 11.16 x 9.23 x 1.32 inches
• Softcover

Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vase Painting of the Ik' Kingdom

Dancing into Dreams explores 8th-century Maya vase painting of the Ik' kingdom, located in the tropical lowlands of present day Guatemala. Ik' vases are acclaimed for their naturalistic color, veristic portraiture, and calligraphic line. Their painted surfaces depict historical subject matter and often include the names of the artists and patrons, as well as hieroglyphic explanations of the portrayed events and vessel production. Collectively, such self-consciously historical works offer a precision and nuance, unparalleled in the ancient Americas, to the study of the role of art in elite society.

Authoritative and accessible, this handsomely illustrated volume presents a history of Ik' vase painting and describes the dramatic scenes represented on the vases with compelling and historically accurate vignettes.

In 1891, Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) traveled to Tahiti in an effort to live simply and to draw inspiration from what he saw as the island’s exotic native culture. Although the artist was disappointed by the rapidly westernizing community he encountered, his works from this period nonetheless celebrate the myth of an untainted Tahitian idyll, a myth he continued to perpetuate upon his return to Paris. He created a travel journal entitled Noa Noa (fragrant scent), a largely fictionalized account that recalled his immersion into the spiritual world of the South Seas. To illustrate his text, Gauguin turned for the first time to the woodcut medium, creating a series of ten dark and brooding prints that he intended to publish alongside his journal—a publication that was never realized. The woodcuts crystallized important themes from his work and are the focus of this major new study.