Faculty Books – Department of the History of Art

Käthe Kollwitz in Los Angeles 1937: Eine Ausstellung zwischen antiquarischen Büchern und der Hollywood Anti-Nazi League
2022, DEUTSCH FORUM FÜR KUNSTGESCHICHTE, DFK PARIS
Françoise Forster-Hahn, author

In June 1937, Jacob Zeitlin opened an exhibition of graphics by Käthe Kollwitz in his bookstore gallery in Los Angeles. It was the first exhibition of Kollwitz’s work in Southern California. The exhibition and the glamorous vernissage were co-sponsored by the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of American Democracy. The evening’s speakers were German writer and activist Ernst Toller and American composer George Antheil. Among the illustrious guests were Fritz Lang, Richard Neutra, Arnold Schönberg, George Gershwin, Kurt Weill and other celebrities from the film industry and the German-Austrian exile community. The Kollwitz exhibition became the focal point of the city’s central areas of conflict: it was not just a cultural event in Zeitlin’s bookstore gallery, but above all a targeted political action by the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Kollwitz’s work was thus caught in the crossfire of the conflict between the anti-fascist struggle of the Anti-Nazi League and the violent actions of National Socialist groups in Los Angeles. In this political tension, Käthe Kollwitz was perceived as an “anti-Nazi artist” and her exhibition was ascribed an active role in the fight against Hitler. The chapters of the book trace how the exhibition became the crossroads of four biographies: Käthe Kollwitz, Jacob Zeitlin, Ernst Toller and George Antheil.

Sculpture Collections in Europe and the United States, 1500-1930
2021, Brill, in association with The Frick Collection
Malcolm Baker, co-editor

Exploring the variety of forms taken by collections of sculpture, this volume presents new research by twelve internationally recognized scholars. The essays delve into the motivations of different collectors, the modes of display, and the aesthetics of viewing sculpture, bringing to light much new archival material. The book underscores the ambiguous nature of sculpture collections, variously understood as decorative components of interiors or gardens, as objects of desire in cabinets of curiosity, or as autonomous works of art in private and public collections. Emphasizing the collections and the ways in which these were viewed and described, this book addresses a significant but neglected aspect of art collecting and contributes to the literature on this branch of art and cultural history.

This book evolved from a symposium “Sculpture Collecting and Display, 1600-2000,” organized by the Center for the History of Collecting, that was held at The Frick Collection on May 19 and 20, 2017. Both the book and the symposium were made possible through the generous support of the Robert H. Smith Family Foundation.

Art as Worldmaking: Critical Essays on Realism and Naturalism
2018, Manchester University Press
Malcolm Baker, co-editor

Art as Worldmaking is a response to Alex Potts’s provocative 2013 book Experiments in modern realism. Twenty essays by leading scholars test Potts’s recasting of realism through examinations of art produced in different media and periods, ranging from eighth-century Chinese garden aesthetics to video work by the contemporary Russian collective Radek Community. While the book does not neglect avatars of pictorial realism such as Menzel and Eakins, or the question of nineteenth-century realism’s historical antecedents, it is contemporary in orientation in that many contributors are particularly concerned with the questions that sculpture, photography and non-traditional media pose for realism as an aesthetic norm. It will be essential reading for students of art history concerned with art’s truth value or more broadly with conceptual problems of representation and the intersections of art and politics.

Humans
2021, TERra foundation for American art
Jason Weems, co-editor

Humans are organisms, but “the human being” is a term referring to a complicated, self-contradictory, and historically evolving set of concepts and practices. Humans explores competing versions, constructs, and ideas of the human being that have figured prominently in the arts of the United States. These essays consider a range of artworks from the colonial period to the present, examining how they have reflected, shaped, and modeled ideas of the human in American culture and politics. The book addresses to what extent artworks have conferred more humanity on some human beings than others, how art has shaped ideas about the relationships between humans and other beings and things, and in what ways different artistic constructions of the human being evolved, clashed, and intermingled over the course of American history. Humans both tells the history of a concept foundational to US civilization and proposes new means for its urgently needed rethinking.

Surrealism at Play
2019, DUKE UNIVERSITY Press
Susan Laxton, author

In Surrealism at Play Susan Laxton writes a new history of surrealism in which she traces the centrality of play to the movement and its ongoing legacy. For surrealist artists, play took a consistent role in their aesthetic as they worked in, with, and against a post-World War I world increasingly dominated by technology and functionalism. Whether through exquisite-corpse drawings, Man Ray’s rayographs, or Joan Miró’s visual puns, surrealists became adept at developing techniques and processes designed to guarantee aleatory outcomes. In embracing chance as the means to produce unforeseeable ends, they shifted emphasis from final product to process, challenging the disciplinary structures of industrial modernism. As Laxton demonstrates, play became a primary method through which surrealism refashioned artistic practice, everyday experience, and the nature of subjectivity.

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Friedrich Schlegel: “Athenaeum“-Fragmente und andere frühromantische Schriften (“Athenaeum“ Fragments and Other Early Romantic Writings: Edition, Commentary and Epilogue)
2018, Stuttgart: Reclams Universal Bibliothek
Johannes Endres, author

Friedrich Schlegel’s critical writings on literature and art played a central role in the emergence of European romanticism as an intellectual movement. The book assembles and annotates the most important of Schlegel’s texts, prior to his conservative turn in 1808. In addition to the texts, which the edition presents according to their first prints (undoing modifications and modernizations previous editions have introduced), the volume also provides extensive explanations of Schlegel’s language and the many references he makes. The epilogue sheds light on the various complexities of Schlegel’s thinking and, following the concept of the Reclam Universal Library, renders it accessible to a wider audience.