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

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 

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 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

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

by Laura M. Giles (Author), Lia Markey (Author), Claire Van Cleave (Author)

This richly illustrated volume offers a new look at the exceptional collection of Italian drawings at the Princeton University Art Museum. An introductory essay by Laura M. Giles chronicles the history and significance of the collection, and nearly one hundred of the collection’s masterworks are treated with essay-length entries and full-page images. The first scholarly examination of the collection since Felton Gibbons’s comprehensive publication of 1977, the catalogue includes an appendix of more than 150 drawings that have entered the collection since―many previously unpublished, and all fully documented with short entries. Highlights include works by celebrated masters, including Carpaccio and Modigliani, from the early Renaissance through the early Modern periods, with an emphasis on the collection’s renowned holdings of works by Luca Cambiaso, Guercino, and the two Tiepolos.

With contributions by Alessandra Bigi Iotti, Jonathan Bober, Giada Damen, Diane de Grazia, Rhoda Eitel-Porter, Frederick Ilchman, Anne Varick Lauder, John Marciari, Elizabeth Pilliod, John Pinto, David Stone, Catherine Whistler, and Giulio Zavatta.

• Hardcover, 324 pages
• Publication date: May 20, 2014

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

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

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.

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

Now in its seventy-ninth year, the Record of the Princeton University Art Museum is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal that publishes research based on the Museum’s collections. 

This issue, devoted to European Renaissance and Baroque art, features essays on works by Gianlorenzo Bernini written by the late Irving Lavin, Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, and by Charles Scribner III, Princeton Class of 1973 and Graduate School Class of 1977, a specialist in Baroque art. These essays are joined by six explorations of Northern Renaissance painting, the genesis for which was a seminar based on technical examination taught by Maryan Ainsworth, Alvaro Saieh Curator Emerita in the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, during her term as Robert Janson-La Palme, Graduate School Class of 1976, Visiting Professor. Ainsworth and five of her students—J. S. Hermán, Yifu Liu, Erene Rafik Morcos, Aleksander Musiał, and Sarah Rapoport—have written essays that provide new insights into several works in the Museum’s collections, including issues of attribution and dating as well as the meaning and context of inscriptions. These essays are joined by lists of the Museum’s acquisitions in 2017 and 2018.

• Paperback
• 192 pages

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

Christina Fernandez sees herself as equally artist and storyteller, one who employs photography to explore social and physical isolation and estrangement within marginalized communities while experimenting with composition and form. Her art is shaped by the concerns that powered the Chicano movement and the aesthetics and discourses of postmodernism. As she considers the questions and ideas that absorb her, Fernandez moves between landscape and portraiture, but she revises the visual language to suit her purpose, producing works that are deeply thoughtful and engaging.

This exhibition catalog examines the Los Angeles–based photographer’s work since the late 1980s. Among these works are María’s Great Expedition, in which the artist photographs herself as her immigrant grandmother, and the Lavanderia series, photographs created from layered images that offer glimpses into Eastside LA laundromats and the lives of their customers. The volume’s six essays are supplemented with excerpts from three interviews with the artist. Together, they offer critical perspectives on Fernandez’s radical intellectual and formal agenda and reveal the multiple senses of “exposure” that are at play in her art.

• Weight: 4.15 pounds
• Dimensions: 11" x 1.5" x 11.6"
• Hardcover
• 180 Pages

The Life and Death of Buildings: On Photography and Time

Buildings inhabit and symbolize time, giving form to history and making public space an index of the past. Photographs are made of time; they are literally projections of past states of their subjects. This visually striking meditation on architecture in photography explores the intersection between these two ways of embodying the past. Photographs of buildings, Joel Smith argues, are simultaneously the agents, vehicles, and cargo of social memory.

In The Life and Death of Buildings photographers as canonical as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Laura Gilpin, Lewis W. Hine, and William Henry Fox Talbot enter into visual dialogue with amateurs, architects, propagandists, and insurance adjusters. Rather than examine photographers’ aims in isolation, Smith considers how their images reflect and inflect the passage of time. Much as a building’s shifting function and circumstances substantially alter its significance, a photograph comes to be coauthored by history, growing layers of meaning to which its maker had no access.

• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.5 x 0.5 x 8.75 inches
• Softcover

The Princeton University Art  Museum’s collection of American drawings and watercolors is impressive  in both scope and quality, providing a comprehensive overview of the  nation’s artistic traditions. This lavishly illustrated book highlights 77 master drawings and watercolors chosen from the museum’s  extensive collection. The selections, which range from the 18th century to the present, include Benjamin  West, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, Andrew Wyeth, Georgia  O’Keeffe, Lee Bontecou, and Tom Wesselmann. 

The book also features an introduction by John Wilmerding  describing Princeton’s history of collecting American art, as well as an  essay by Kathleen A. Foster on the historiography of American drawings  and watercolors. A useful checklist of the Museum’s entire collection of more than 1,300 American drawings and watercolors, selectively illustrated  in color, concludes the book.

• Hardcover

The "Wu Family Shrines" pictorial carvings from Han dynasty China (206 BCE–220 CE) are among the earliest works of Chinese art examined in an international arena. Since the eleventh century, the carvings have been identified by scholars as one of the most valuable and authentic materials for the study of antiquity. This important book presents essays by archaeologists, art and architectural historians, curators, and historians that reexamine the carvings, adding to our understanding of the long cultural history behind them and to our knowledge of Han practices.

The authors offer a thorough analysis of surviving physical and visual sources, invoking fresh perspectives from new disciplines.  Essays address the ideals, practices, and problems of the "Wu Family Shrines" and Han China; Han funerary art and architecture in Shandong and other regions; architectural functions and carved meanings; Qing Dynasty Reception of the Wu Family Shrines; and more.

• Softcover

by John Wilmerding (Preface), Hal Foster (Introduction)

Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Indiana, and Alex Katz have all come to define the Pop art movement that emerged in America in the 1960s. This handsomely illustrated book focuses on 40 understudied and rarely seen late paintings, works on paper, and sculptures by these influential artists in the collection of the Princeton University Art Museum.

Pop Art offers fresh insights into the ways in which artists radically transformed the mediums of painting and sculpture. For example, Lichtenstein is repositioned as a classical “studio artist”; Wesselmann is shown to be playfully preoccupied with academic genres; and Indiana is interpreted less as a Pop artist than as a folk artist in a mass-cultural context. This important book also features an engaging introduction by Hal Foster that places these new interpretations in the context of the history of Pop art and its critical literature.

• Hardcover

by Karl Kusserow, the curator of American Art at the Princeton University Art Museum.

The almost three hundred portraits that once composed the New York Chamber of Commerce's renowned collection capture the giants of American business with aesthetic and symbolic power. The images of civic leaders and entrepreneurs, carefully assembled over two hundred years, tell the story of American industry as shaped and reflected in the life of a major institution. Interpreting these images as historical documents, Picturing Power traces the establishment, growth, and eventual decline of the nation's most powerful business organization. Lavishly illustrated, this book also charts the social and aesthetic course of institutional portraiture in the United States.

This book accompanied the exhibition Picturing Power: Capitalism, Democracy, and American Portraiture, held exclusively at the Princeton University Art Museum from March 9 through June 30, 2013.

• Hardcover