Art Museum Publications

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 

• Hardcover

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. 

• Softcover

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

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

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

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

by Marianna Shreve Simpson

with contributions by Louise Marlow

Princeton’s Great Persian Book of Kings presents the first comprehensive examination of a beautifully decorated yet relatively unknown manuscript of the Shahnama (Book of Kings), created in 1589–90 in the flourishing cultural center of Shiraz. Held by Princeton University and called the Peck Shahnama after its donor, the work ranks among the finest intact 16th-century Persian manuscripts in the United States.

Composed more than one thousand years ago, the epic poem Shahnama narrates the story of Iran from the dawn of time to the 7th century A.D. Its 50,000 verses and countless tales of Iran’s ancient kings and heroes have been a vital source of artistic inspiration in Persian culture for centuries. Author Marianna Shreve Simpson offers a detailed discussion of the Peck Shahnama, including its origins, history, and artistic characteristics. All of the manuscript’s intricately illuminated and illustrated folios are reproduced with stunning new photography, and each is accompanied by commentary on its narrative themes and artistic presentation. An essay by Louise Marlow explores the manuscript’s extensive marginal glosses, an unusual feature of the Peck Shahnama.

Winner of the Award for Excellence, Association of Art Museum Curators

• Published:Dec 1, 2015
• Pages: 208

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

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

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.

• Hardcover

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

Valle de Huacan. Arts and rituals of the indigenous peoples of ancient southern Mexico.

• Softcover
• 49 pages

Author/Creator: Pohl, John M. D. 

Publisher: Princeton University Program in Latin American Studies, c2007.

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
   

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.

• Softcover

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 

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

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

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