In 1886 Paul Cezanne left Paris permanently to settle in his native Aix-en-Provence. Nina M. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer argues that, far from an escapist venture like Gauguin's stay in Brittany or Monet's visits to Normandy, Cezanne's departure from Pari...

From its earliest history, Ireland has been contested land, claimed by waves of invaders, each attempting to inscribe and possess the island territory. The eire/Land exhibition, to be held at the McMullen Museum from February to May 2003, is the firs...

"Art" has always been contested terrain, whether the object in question is a medieval tapestry or Duchamp's "Fountain". But questions about the categories of "art" and "art history" acquired increased urgency during the 1970s, when new developments i...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! Originally published in Czech in 2002 and now available in English, "Medieval Painting in Bohemia" assesses the history of painting in Bohemia and Moravia from the emergence of the Czech s...

With "The Invention of Art", Larry Shiner challenges our conventional understandings of art and asks us to reconsider its history entirely, arguing that the category of fine art is a modern invention – that the lines drawn between art and craft resul...

In "Venus in Exile" renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner explores the twentieth century's troubled relationship with beauty. Disdained by avant-garde artists, feminists, and activists, beauty and its major symbols of art – the female subject and or...

The American West has had an enormous influence on the nation's imagination, including its fine art. From the Western Realists – as epitomized by the Cowboy Artists of America's mission to produce "authentic representations of life in the West" – to...

What does it mean to be German? Recent answers to this question have ranged from the general ("Germans are always the other") to the analytic ("They are a multiple identity with a constant wish for redefinition"). The catalogue for "Confronting Ident...

Long recognized as one of the most important eighteenth-century works on aesthetics and the visual arts, Johann Gottfried Herder's Plastik (Sculpture, 1778) has never before appeared in a complete English translation. In this landmark essay, Herder c...

Fashion – the question of what to wear and how to wear it – is a centuries-old obsession. Beyond superficial concerns with personal appearance, the history of dress points to deep preoccupations surrounding the social order, national identity, and mo...