Art History

This history of art collecting traces a multiplicity of aesthetic attitudes through the prism of certain key figures in the history of taste. Over the course of the chapters, we discover how art collecting reflects—or responds to—an individual's character.

An anthology of the constructivist movement, bringing together newly translated or previously unpublished writings by artists and theorists, accompanied by numerous illustrations and an extensive critical apparatus: this reference volume sheds new light on the multiplicity and diversity of the approaches of constructivism and productivism in the 1920s-30, and provides a major contribution to the studies of the Soviet avant-garde.

A wide-ranging study of the visual and theoretical practice of Anni Albers, a pivotal figure between two continents and two modernities, as part of a general history of art, design and textile production in the European and American women's avant-gardes.

Using an interdisciplinary approach inspired by science and technology studies, and combining museological and sociological perspectives, this groundbreaking study of museum storerooms sheds new light on the world of art and cultural heritage conservation.

An audacious account of the ways in which the arts in the Americas were modernized during the first half of the 20th century.

A genuine investigation, in the opposite direction to the narrative imposed by art historians, of artistic, cultural and political developments in the Western world after the Second World War, between Paris and New York.

From the negative hands on the walls of the Chauvet caves (minus 30,000 years ago) to the most recent experiments of a number of contemporary artists, an entire history of art can be written under the prism of breathing. Between these two milestones, this study attempts to highlight the innovative force of breath and the importance accorded to breathing as a creative gesture and artwork on its own.

The first major work on the history and current importance of the Biennale of Young Artists, known as the "Biennale de Paris", which took place between 1959 and 1985, bringing together thirty-five texts by international authors, including some testimonies from actors who took part in the Biennale.

A thorough investigation that renews the understanding of Japonism from the French art of the nineteenth century, avoiding the temptation of orientalist exoticism while reversing the logic of influence, with an abundant also entirely renewed iconographic corpus.

A transnational and transhistorical investigation carried out in the heart of museum and artistic practices between France and Senegal in the 1950s to 1970s, inviting us to decentralize our views in order to consider the globalized history of art of these years in a new light.

An exploration of the artistic myth of Michelangelo, which questions the multiple and contradictory uses of the past and the notions of reception, filiation and tradition that are revealed.

The various dimensions of the landscape—mental, cultural and ideological, real and pictorial—in the emblematic works of Poussin, Le Lorrain, Bourdon and their contemporaries of the 17th century.

A history of the museum of modern art, exhibitions and discourses on art and its public in the 20th century, from the trajectory of Jean Cassou (1897-1986), writer, resistance fighter, art critic, poet and chief curator of thenational museum for modern art of France from 1945 to 1965.

An investigation into how the discovery of "India" disrupted Western mimesis between 1800 and 1850, thereby contributing to artistic modernity.

An essay to account for the architectonics of Aby Warburg (1866-1929) by resituating his work within his project of general anthropology of expression: Lara Bonneau shows, from a text as little known as it is important, that the invention of iconology, which made the art historian famous, was underpinned by an ontology drawing on various sources, philosophical, psychological and biological as well as historical.

The little-known history of a major cultural encounter: a study of the reception of Chinese painting in the West and its artistic resonances, which underwent profound changes between the 19th century and the 1930s.

The Art history reconsidered as a scientific discipline and form of discourse in the twentieth century, through a critical analysis of the work of Charles Sterling.

The images of exile, escape, wandering and exclusion in art history, from classical painting to the most contemporary production.

The first comparative study of artistic culture in Europe under Soviet influence following the Yalta Accords, tracing the complex relationship between art and politics and the tensions between the avant-garde and traditional practices on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

The essential place of writing in the work of Josef Albers (1888-1976), one of the most important artists, painters and educators of the 20th century.

A critical and nuanced overview of the figures of the sleeping in the art and thought of the Renaissance, a source of inspiration for artists—Mantegna, Dürer, Brughel, Michelangelo or Tintoretto—as well as theologians, doctors and philosophers (from Aristotle to Zwingli, via Augustine and Montaigne), beyond the negative definition and the traditional condemnation of inactivity and unconciousness.

A study of representations of HIV and AIDS in American and European art, that opens up a vast political, economic and social history of two decades fatally haunted by the catastrophe.

The collection of writings on art by the French philosopher, historian, semiologist and art critic Louis Marin (1931-1992).

A historiography of impressionism: a historical and critical study of the writing of impressionist history as a documentary (de)monstration.

A study that explores the complex relationship between nationalism, traditionalism and the critique of modern culture in France in the decades preceding the First World War.

A reconstruction of the vast network of images and texts that give shape to Italian fascist totalitarianism.

A survey of the history of temporary exhibitions in France, through a series of interviews with 38 curators.

Why does a painter like Delacroix paint so many religious subjects?

An investigation into artistic reproduction and the role of the engravers in the shadows who made prints signed by others, questioning the relationships of domination and subordination in creation.

An historical perspective of the representation of non-western art in western museums and imagination / an essay on the relations between African arts and avant-garde.

A collective analysis of the emergence of the “contemporary” and the transnational and transhistorical logics at work in artistic practices in Dakar in response to questions raised by globalization since the Independances, opening up new territories for sociological, economic, political and aesthetic investigations.

Examining how things are sold and exchanged within diverse cultural environments, past and present through a collection of contributions by social anthropologists and historians, this book builds a bridge between social history, cultural anthropology and economics and marks a major step in our understanding of the cultural foundations of economic life and the sociology of culture.

Drawing on extensive documentation and unpublished sources, this collective publication proposes an ambitious re-examination of Hans Hartung's prolific work and eventful personal trajectory as an actor in a broader history of abstraction, which also provides a fertile matrix for many other reflections on twentieth-century art.

An in-depth study of the diorama in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, a place for the creation and mediation of knowledge but also for the political construction of history, between art, anthropology and natural sciences.

By renewing the dialogue with anthropology, this book invites the history of science to be refounded on other, more humanistic bases.

An ambitious and transversal study on the crisis of humanism resulting from modernity, and on the historical consequences of the universalist and absolute conception carried by Futurism and the Bauhaus, proposing little explored paths for a re-reading of the artistic stakes in the 20th century.

The stakes of Francis Picabia's creative process, between exaltation and rejection of the self, at the heart of the constitution of modernity.

The development of spatial and tridimensional drawing in American art, both in theory and in practice, from the 1960s through the 1970s.

An anthology.

How to explain the intersection, during the twentieth century, of the ideology and theories on violence and creativity?

A transdisciplinary study that sheds new light on the birth of modern architecture in France through its relations with the printed text, vector of the diffusion of the architectural ideal at the scale of the nation, and the emergence of the public sphere between the end of the 17th century and the French Revolution.

A pioneering approach to the history of emotions.

Jean Laude's writings on art.

First French edition of an essential manifesto of modern art written by Russian writer, poet and journalist Ilya Ehrenburg in 1921.

Conceived around an anthropology of the object, this book proposes to follow the course of royal objects of Abomey, former capital of the pre-colonial Kingdom of Dahomey (in present-day Benin).

This book traces the career of Kara Walker (born in 1969), the most internationally recognized African-American artist since Jean-Michel Basquiat, and explores the history of the reception of a work that faces the limits of representation, challenging the question of the figuration of the black body.