Art Museum Publications

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 Interpreting these images as historical documents, Picturing Power traces the establishment, growth, and eventual decline of the nation's most powerful business organization.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.

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Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire, 1540–1680: A Selection from North American Collections

This volume is the catalogue of an exhibition organized by the Princeton University Art Museum, consisting of eighty-eight drawings by artists active in Central Europe during the neglected period following the age of the Old German Masters (Dürer, Holbein, and their contemporaries) and preceding that covered by Central European Drawings 1690–1800.

An introductory essay considers the problem of historiography, and comments on the drawings in relation to the cultural history of the Holy Roman Empire, present-day Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and parts of Poland and Czechoslovakia, roughly between the two sieges of Vienna. Problems of style and stylistic definition are treated in relation to idea gained from poetry and rhetoric. The introduction and the fully illustrated catalogue entries, which are organized in chronological order and according to region, also deal with issues of the functions, collecting, technique, and theory of drawings. Discussions of individual drawings raise many of the most important issues of late-16th- and 17th-century art in Central Europe.

• Soft Cover

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.

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. 

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Fully illustrated, with over four hundred specially commissioned photographs, including twelve color plates, this book joins its companion volume, Greek Sculpture in The Art Museum, Princeton University, to offer one of the most comprehensive scholarly publications of any collection of classical sculpture in the United States. 

Edited by J. Michael Padgett, Associate Curator of Ancient Art, the catalogue is a collaborative project with entries on 163 sculptures by sixteen authors, including Hugo Meyer, Michaela Fuchs, Michal Gawlikowski, Robert Wenning, Christopher Moss, and John Pollini.

Each entry features a full description and analysis, with updated bibliography, accompanied by multiple views of the object. Among the works catalogued are some of the finest Roman sculptures in America: marble portraits of the emperors Augustus and Marcus Aurelius; two rare bronze heads of women from the reigns of the emperors Trajan and Hadrian; a statue of the wine god Dionysos draped with a panther skin; a relief of the god Silvanus holding the viscera of a sacrificial animal; and sarcophagi with reliefs of the infancy of Dionysos and Herakles battling the centaurs. Never exhibited and seldom seen by scholars, eighty-five pieces from the Princeton excavations at Antioch are here fully catalogued for the first time. Useful concordances and a comprehensive index complete a catalogue that will be a valuable addition to the collection of every university library and the bookshelf of every student of ancient Rome.

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The Centaur's Smile: The Human Animal in Early Greek Art is the catalogue for an exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum (October 11, 2003 to January 18, 2004).

This landmark book is the first to investigate representations of these human animals in early Greek art (ca. 850-450 B.C.). The Centaur's Smile discusses the oriental antecedents of these fantastic creatures, examining the influence of Egyptian and Near Eastern models on the formation of Greek monsters in the early Archaic period. Essays also explore the nature and origin of horse-men (centaurs and satyrs) and the ways in which they are represented in early Greek art. Furthermore, the book surveys the broader range of Greek composite creatures and discusses their evolving forms and changing roles and meaning. Over one hundred exquisite objects-all beautifully reproduced in color-are described and analyzed in detail. Among the featured works are reliefs and statuettes in stone, bronze, and terracotta; jewelry and metalwork in gold, silver, and electrum; engraved sealstones in rock crystal, jasper, and cornelian; and painted ceramic vases from Athens, Corinth, Rhodes, Miletus, Cyprus, and Etruria.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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
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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.

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
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Nobody's Property; Art, Land, Space, 2000-2010, by Kelly Baum, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum from October 2010-February 2011.

This generously illustrated volume surveys a new chapter in the history of environmental art, one in which space, geopolitics, human relations, urbanism, and utopian dreamwork play as important a role as, if not more than, raw earth. Discussed are case studies by seven artists and two artist teams—Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Yael Bartana, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Emre Hüner, Andrea Geyer, Matthew Day Jackson, Lucy Raven, and Santiago Sierra. While some of these artists explore historical and symbolic configurations of space, others parse the social, legal, and economic conditions of specific land-sites, including the Navajo Nation, the island of Vieques, the border town of Juarez, and the cities of Tongling, Jerusalem, and Beirut. Not confined to the displacement of matter, these artists employ a wide range of media, such as performance, animation, assemblage, and photography.

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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.

A Window into Collecting American Folk Art: The Edward Duff Balken Collection at Princeton

Princeton University Art Museum from March 5–June 7, 2009.

The art world is currently enthralled with contemporary Chinese art. This thoughtful book argues, however, that American audiences have been exposed only to a narrow range of what is available—with the majority of attention having been given to “avant-garde,” “experimental,” or politically charged art. Outside In discusses contemporary Chinese art in a far wider range of styles and subject matter and substantially expands on our understanding of this work.

The book features six artists—Arnold Chang, Michael Cherney, Zhi Lin, Liu Dan, Vannessa Tran, and Zhang Hongtu—all of whom are American citizens yet are widely diverse in age and experience as well as geographical and ethnic origins. In addition to extensive personal interviews and artists’ statements, there are essays that challenge the categorization of art into such focused genres as “Chinese,” “contemporary,” and “American,” and reexamine the factors that shape the development of “Chinese art” in America.

Jerome Silbergeld with contributions by Dora C. Y. Ching, Michellle Y. Lim, Cary Y. Liu, Gregory Seiffert, and Kimberly Wishart 

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Spanish-born Félix Candela (1910–1997) is acknowledged as a master builder who designed and built innovative thin shell concrete roof structures in Mexico. This book goes further, however, hailing Candela as a structural engineer whose elegant forms should be considered works of art.

This handsomely designed volume begins by presenting the lineage of master builders and structural artists who preceded him, including those from the period of the Industrial Revolution. The authors then examine Candela’s life, studies, and experiences, and analyze his early thin shell designs. They focus on the geometric form that Candela eventually used to create his most important works, examine several of the structures in detail, compare them to the works of other contemporary structural artists, and discuss the most important features of his legacy: the conservation of natural resources by minimizing materials; the reduction of cost by intimately connecting design to construction, and the creation of beautiful forms.

The Olmec World: Ritual and Rulership, by Michael Coe, is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum December 1995 - June 1996.

Between 1400 and 400 BC, in what is  now Mexico and Central America, the Olmec people created a magnificent  culture, one too often overshadowed by those of the Maya and the Aztec.  The exhibition featured over 250 Olmec works of art - ceramic, jade and  stone - and their images are captured in this book. Essays by prominent  scholars offer interpretations of such topics as the power of objects  within the context of the Olmec ritual system. These identify and  illustrate the fundamental themes of Olmec small-scale sculpture, the  sacred role of the maize in Olmec ideology, and the relationship of  Olmec culture to later civilizations. An illustrated glossary of motifs  and symbols is provided to clarify the often highly abstract style and  encoded iconography of the Olmec. The book also includes precise  mineralogical descriptions of the lithic materials they used.  

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From its foundation in 1888, the Princeton University Art Museum has amassed an impressive collection of ancient Greek sculpture, which, along with the museum's other collections of ancient art, has long played an integral role in the training of art historians and archaeologists. This book is a comprehensive catalogue of The Art Museum's ancient Greek sculpture. A team of scholars headed by Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway thoroughly documents each of the 40 pieces that constitute this broad and diverse collection. 

The catalogue covers both original works of Greek stone sculpture as well as Roman sculptures that copy or owe their inspiration to earlier Greek works. Photographs of each piece are accompanied by information on dating, provenance, material, dimensions, and condition and by a detailed description and an analysis placing the piece in its artistic and historical contexts.

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Photography at Princeton: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of Collecting and Teaching the History of Photography, by Peter C. Bunnell, complements the photography exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum  held  October 1998 - January 1999. 

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