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In the late 1750s a Parisian publisher brought out a luxury edition of Jean de La Fontaine’s fables, with engravings based on drawings by the great animal painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry. Oudry’s design for the fable “The Lion Beaten by the Man” shows a lion in conversation with a group of astonished men in turbans in front of an unstretched canvas hung from a tree depicting a human wrestling a lion into submission. In the accompanying text, the “real” lion remarks that the painter has deceived his human patrons: “We would have in truth prevailed / if my colleagues knew how… Full Review

“Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples.” This is of course Frantz Fanon’s famous (and perhaps overquoted, but here I am repeating that sin anyway) diagnosis from The Wretched of the Earth (English translation from Grove Press, 1963, 102). A few sentences earlier Fanon names “Latin America, China, and Africa” as key sites from which “Europe has stuffed herself inordinately with the gold and raw materials of the colonial countries.” Two years later, parallel formational geopolitics were explored in the first two books of… Full Review

In Vital Voids, Andrew Finegold opens, tongue in cheek, by saying that his book is “about nothing.” He then demonstrates—convincingly, and in engaging prose—that the sustained analysis of holes provides insight into the ways in which ancient Mesoamericans conceived of cavities as teeming with vital energies or pregnant with the possibility of emergence. Nothing truly was something for ancient Mesoamericans, but arriving at this conclusion requires skilled art historical analysis on the part of Finegold. Finegold employs a range of methodologies that takes the reader from objects and history to myth, symbolism, and ideology. He begins by contemplating the… Full Review

One gratifying consequence of an increasingly expansive, antiracist art history is the reframing of conventional subfields, allowing us to see familiar artworks with a fresh eye. Yet as Katherine Jentleson claims in her taut, well-argued Gatecrashers: The Rise of the Self-Taught Artist in America, the subfield, or even just the label, of so-called self-taught art has always made simple categorization difficult and continues to do so, as artists trained in settings beyond academic institutions gain more visibility. Recent high-profile exhibitions such as “Great and Mighty Things”: Outsider Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection (2013), Outliers and American… Full Review

This compendium offers a wide-angle view of the life and work of activist and writer Jane Jacobs (1916–2006). The volume, edited by Jesper Meijling and Tigran Haas, consists of fifteen chapters interspersed with carefully selected full-page images drawn from both Jacobs’s work and wider contexts. Through these images and the short, provocative essays, the book asks the reader to reconsider the work of Jacobs in a contemporary context in relation to how we read and understand cities. Beyond a eulogy or simple celebration, therefore, the texts suggest fresh insights, open up new questions, and develop an original set of critiques. … Full Review

How welcome it is to read a book, manifestly about fin-de-siècle Symbolism, whose ambitions are to parse communication itself. Andrei Pop’s A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century traces allied concerns among artists, scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians about the incommensurability of private thought and public expression and the symbol as an agent within those realms. The book argues that Symbolism arose from crises of confidence in knowledge production in Western philosophy and the sciences. While this is not a new claim, the insight that Pop offers is that Symbolism may be understood as a… Full Review

Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst: Anders de zichtbaere werelt (1678) is one of the most important sources for Dutch seventeenth-century art practice and art theory. The book has been frequently mined by art historians to support interpretative arguments on a variety of subjects, but few scholars have read Van Hoogstraten’s magnum opus cover to cover. The original text is difficult to understand, even for those well trained in seventeenth-century Dutch, due to its idiosyncratic vocabulary, highbrow writing style, and the abundance of quotations from antique and early modern sources. Jan Blanc’s Introduction à la haute… Full Review

Ever since his Kant after Duchamp (1996), Thierry de Duve has proved himself to be one of the most insistent Kantians today. Quite appropriately, the cover of his recent book, Aesthetics at Large, Volume 1: Art, Ethics, Politics, shows us a button telling us that “Kant Got It Right.”  De Duve’s Kant, however, is not the one who, in the wake of Jean-François Lyotard’s proposed reading, might be taken to suggest that the sublime holds the key to the momentum of the avant-garde; rather, he is the one who aspired to produce a theory of sensus communis as the… Full Review

Georges Seurat’s monumental A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884, Art Institute of Chicago) hung alongside paintings by Camille Pissarro and newcomer Paul Signac at the last Impressionist exhibition. Those who visited in May 1886 encountered a new painterly mode called “néo-impressionisme” as defined by Félix Fénéon. With their pointillist technique, Neo-Impressionists applied tight dabs of unblended paint, rather than employing the push-and-pull of the gestural, colorful strokes of the Impressionist painters. Complementary hues—red lake and viridian green, for example—appear side by side in pointillist imagery. These painters believed that those dabs of color mixed optically so that… Full Review

In the late 1710s the French and English governments sought to tackle their respective national debts by promoting share trading in state-controlled joint stock companies: the French Compagnie d’Occident (Company of the West), also known as the Mississippi Company, and the English South Sea Company. In 1720 spectacular rises in share prices spread from the French to the English and eventually to the more diversified Dutch financial markets. Each of these bull markets was soon followed by a dramatic collapse in the value of shares. Together these three “bubbles” generated the first international stock market crash and ushered in the… Full Review