PUBLICATIONS

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder... and the color black is one of the most beautiful colors

Art historian, art collector, curator, and writer Charles Moore takes you on an exquisite journey through the world of the Black artists who revolutionized contemporary art and the patrons who dedicated their lives to collecting their works.

Through interviews and dialogues, Moore captures the essence of exceptional Black artists, exploring their quests for recognition of their brilliance.

Moore touches on the powerful relationships between collectors and artists, as well as on the intricate and fascinating business of art ownership, from managing your assets to supporting the growth of Black art through sponsorship and involvement.

The color black evokes a myriad of emotions, and that's what makes it one of the most impactful shades on the palette wheel.

By Dawn's Early Light: Jewish Contributions to American Culture from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War

By Dawn's Early Light: Jewish Contributions to American Culture from the Nation’s Founding to the Civil War by Leonard L. Milberg is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2016. 

This 352-page catalogue, with 13 scholarly essays, discusses how Jews began to speak publicly the colonial period. At the dawn of the Republic, they were new to American public life. Yet as the United  States started its grand experiment with liberty, and began to invent a culture of its own. Jews, too, began a grand experiment of living as  equals. In a society that promised exceptional freedom, this was both liberating and confounding. As individuals, they were free to  participate as full citizens in the hurly-burly of the new nation’s  political and social life. But as members of a group that sought to  remain distinctive, freedom was daunting. In response to the challenges  of liberty, Jews adopted and adapted American and Jewish artistic idioms  to express themselves in new ways as Americans and as Jews. In the  process, they invented American Jewish culture, and contributed to the  flowering of American culture during the earliest days of the Republic. 

The exhibition, organized by the Princeton University Library, featured more than 160 books, maps, manuscripts, prints, and paintings, including  some of the earliest novels, plays, scientific treatises, and religious  works produced by Jews in the United States.    

• Paperback
• 75 full-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

Chigusa and the Art of Tea is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum October 2014 - February 2015.

This innovative book narrates the history of a single object―a tea-leaf storage jar created in southern China during the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries―and describes how its role changed after it was imported to Japan and passed from owner to owner there. In Japan, where the jar was in constant use for more than seven hundred years, it was transformed from a humble vessel into a celebrated object used in chanoyu (often translated in English as tea ceremony), renowned for its aesthetic and functional qualities, and awarded the name Chigusa.

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

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

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

By Ronni Baer ; with essays by Henk van Nierop, Herman Roodenburg, Eric Jan Sluijter, Marieke de Winkel, and Sanny de Zoete ; essays translated by Diane Webb.

The Dutch Republic in the 17th century was home to one of the greatest flowerings of painting in the history of Western art. Freed from the constraints of royal and church patronage, artists created a rich outpouring of works that circulated through an open market to patrons and customers at every level of Dutch society. The closely observed details of daily life captured in portraits, genre scenes and landscapes offer a wealth of information about the possessions, activities and circumstances that distinguished members of the social classes, from the nobility to the urban poor. The dazzling array of paintings gathered here--by artists such as Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch and Gerard ter Borch, as well as Rembrandt and Vermeer--illuminated by essays from leading scholars, invites us to explore a vibrant early modern society and its reflection in a golden age of brilliant painting.

• Hardcover, 344 pages

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.

Houses or domestic buildings are often among the first projects young architects design. For David Adjaye, such early commissions connected him to a rising generation of creators with whom he shared a range of sensibilities. His artistry, clever use of space, and inexpensive, unexpected materials resulted in many innovative and widely published houses. 

This monograph presents the fifteen finest and most recent examples, from Africa to Brooklyn, from desolate farmlands to urban jungles. Chronicled through informed descriptions and detailed and photographically rich visual documentation, the results testify to the importance of Adjaye’s growing inventiveness and provide powerful ideas for residential architecture.

300+ illustrations, 250+ in color 

• Publication date: May 2, 2024
• 302 pages

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

Ringgold's most formative and influential political works are gathered in this beautifully designed clothbound volume

Alongside reproductions of key works made between 1967 and 1981, Faith Ringgold: Politics / Power provides an overview of Ringgold's seminal artistic and activist work, and its historical context during these years, including accounts by the artist herself.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Ringgold, a dedicated and impassioned civil rights advocate, established her voice as a feminist and within the Black Arts Movement. Her influential work expressed her in-depth knowledge of art history and contemporary art, as well as her activism. Spanning mediums such as painting, cut paper works, posters, collage and textile art, the works presented in this publication foreground the artist’s explicitly political pieces, for which she deployed new material and formal processes, and developed a radical aesthetics and vocabulary.
Organized chronologically, the book allows readers to retrace the artist’s foundational creative approaches to contemporaneous social, political and artistic questions. It includes illustrations of individual artworks together with previously unpublished work and archival materials.

Faith Ringgold (born 1930) is a painter, mixed-media sculptor, performance artist, teacher and writer best known for her narrative quilts. In 2020, the New York Times described her as an artist “who has confronted race relations in this country from every angle, led protests to diversify museums decades ago, and even went to jail for an exhibition she organized.” Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others. Ringgold lives and works in Englewood, New Jersey.

• Hardcover
• Published March 22, 2022
• 104 pages

 For 500 years the holy city of Vrindavan in northern India has been a haven for India's dispossessed widows.  Their ultimate dream is to reach Moksha--heaven--where they will find freedom from the cycle of death and rebirth and live surrounded by their gods forever. Fazal Sheikh's photographs capture the meditative mood of the city and his portraits of the widows convey their sense of acceptance of life's nearing its end and a longing for what is to come. 

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.

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

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

Frankenthaler completely reimagines John Elderfield’s landmark 1989 monograph, making it the most comprehensive book on the artist to date.

Helen Frankenthaler (1928–2011) has long been recognized as one of the great American artists of the twentieth century. A member of the second generation of American postwar abstract painters, she is widely credited with expanding the possibilities of abstraction through her invention of the soak-stain technique, and her highly personal references to figuration and landscape.

This monograph is a revised and expanded edition of John Elderfield’s landmark monograph (Frankenthaler, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1989) for the twenty-first century. It includes updated text throughout, along with a new chapter that covers work made post-1988. There are over 300 full-color reproductions of artworks by Frankenthaler, along with nearly 100 comparative illustrations and documentary photographs. As with the original book, this promises to be the definitive volume on Frankenthaler’s career, written by the leading expert on her oeuvre.

About The Author

John Elderfield is chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was formerly the inaugural Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Distinguished Curator and Lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey. He has written major monographic exhibition catalogues on a number of artists, including Kurt Schwitters (1985), Henri Matisse (1992), and Willem de Kooning (2011).

• Publish Date: December 31, 2024
• Format: Hardcover
• Publisher: Gagosian / Rizzoli
• Trim Size: 10-7/8 x 11-1/2
• Pages: 472

This invaluable guide enables students to get the most from their art history course. Written in an accessible style, the book introduces two basic art historical methods - formal analysis and contextual analysis. In this new edition revising author Michael Cothren has extended the discussion on iconography and iconology, as well as adding discussions on the effects of the market and museums on art. Greater emphasis is placed on the global and multicultural aspects of art creation and analysis with new images and more case studies. There is more step-by-step guidance on how to use these methods to prepare for exams and write papers.

• Paperback
• 168 pages
• Publication date:  August 10, 2021

Gainsborough's Family Album is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum  in 2019.   

Spanning more than four decades, Gainsborough's family portraits chart the period from the mid-1740s, when he plied his trade in his native Suffolk, to his most successful latter years at his luxuriously appointed studio in London's West End. Alongside this story of a provincial 18th-century artist's rise to fame and fortune runs a more private narrative, about the role of portraiture in the promotion of family values, at a time when these were assuming a recognizably modern form. 

In the first of three introductory essays, David H. Solkin writes on Gainsborough himself, placing his family portraits in the context of earlier practice. Ann Bermingham explores Gainsborough's portraits of  his daughters, with particular reference to two finished double  portraits painted seven years apart and the tragic story arising from  them. Susan Sloman discusses Margaret's role as her husband's business  manager, its effect on the family dynamic and hence the visual representation of its members. 

• Hardcover