PUBLICATIONS

Cézanne and the Modern: Masterpieces of European Art from the Pearlman Collection

Cézanne and the Modern showcases fifty masterworks of late 19th- to mid-20th-century avant-garde European art from the Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection, one of the most distinguished private collections of modern art in the United States. Among the iconic images represented are Paul Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, Vincent van Gogh’s Tarascon Stagecoach, and Amedeo Modigliani’s portrait of Jean Cocteau, as well as an outstanding suite of sixteen watercolors by Cézanne. The volume opens with Henry Pearlman’s “Reminiscences of a Collector,” a fascinating first-person narrative, newly annotated to identify key individuals and dates mentioned in the text. An essay by art historian Rachael Z. DeLue places Pearlman in the context of mid-20th-century American collecting, and a detailed chronology illuminates Pearlman’s collecting practices in relation to noteworthy events in the art world. A series of sixteen brief essays by leading scholars focuses on each of the represented artists and their works, richly illustrated with sumptuous color plates, select details, and numerous comparative images. A comprehensive checklist documenting each of the works—including detailed provenance, exhibition history, bibliographic references, and commentary by a conservator—rounds out this handsome volume, which is published to accompany the first international tour of this important collection.

Rachael Z. DeLue is associate professor in the department of art and archaeology at Princeton University.

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.

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.

by John Ralph Willis

In the bicentennial year of 1976, the Princeton University Art Museum held its first exhibition on African American art, Fragments of American Life, which featured works by six contemporary painters: Romare Bearden, Joseph Delaney, Rex Goreleigh, Lois Mailou Jones, Jacob Lawrence, and Hale Woodruff. These artists were championed by Harlem Renaissance philosopher and critic Alain Locke in his seminal book The Negro in Art (1940). 

Consisting entirely of private loans, this exhibition was curated by Princeton faculty member John Ralph Willis, the renowned scholar of African and Islamic history, former president of the recently founded Program in African American Studies, and honorary secretary of the University’s chapter of the Alain Locke Society. Distinctively modernist, the paintings reflected Locke’s injunction to black artists to demonstrate and celebrate the African roots of black life in America.

• Softcover

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

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.

Giuseppe Vasi's Rome: Lasting Impressions from the Age of the Grand Tour

Giuseppe Vasi's Rome: Lasting Impressions from the Age of the Grand Tour serves as the catalogue of the exhibition of the same name, organized by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon and curated by Professors Harper and Tice. On view in Eugene, OR, from September 25 through January 2, 2010, the exhibition will also be shown at the Princeton University Art Museum in spring 2011. In a set of eight scholarly essays and more than one hundred catalogue entries and images by Vasi, his predecessors and his contemporaries, this richly illustrated volume examines the eighteenth-century printmaker Giuseppe Vasi and his world. Subject areas addressed include printmaking, patronage networks, cartography, contemporary architecture, early tourism and the Grand Tour, social history, the festival life of the papal city, and Vasi's complex relationship with his student, Piranesi. The publication offers a comprehensive treatment of the artist and his major works, the first ever in the English language, while also elucidating the political, social, and artistic worlds in which Vasi moved.

• Soft cover
• 200 Pages

Publisher: Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Arts

Publication date: November 1, 2010

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.

• Hardcover