Published on behalf of the Bard Graduate Center, "West 86th" focuses on scholarship in material culture, design history, and the decorative arts. In this issue, Eric Anderson examines how Angerer's photographs of Hans Makart's studio were informed by...

Visual anatomy books have been a staple of medical practice and study since the mid-sixteenth century. But the visual representation of diseased states followed a very different pattern from anatomy, one we are only now beginning to investigate and u...

This stunning book charts the rich history of the blues, through the dazzling array of posters, album covers, and advertisements that have shaped its identity over the past hundred years. The blues have been one of the most ubiquitous but diverse ele...

The last forty years have seen the rise of the personal computer, a device that has enabled ordinary individuals to access a tool that had been exclusive to laboratories and corporate technology centers. During this time, computers have become smalle...

Though we think of the 1960s and the early '70s as a time of radical social, cultural, and political upheaval, we tend to picture the action as happening on campuses and in the streets. Yet the rise of the underground newspaper was equally daring and...

"Good exhibition design promotes thought and feeling through the creation of an emotionally charged space – an environment that engulfs visitors, pulls them forward, and draws them into the story and its meaning", writes Tom Klobe in "Exhibitions". H...

In 1934, New York's Museum of Modern Art staged a major exhibition of ball bearings, airplane propellers, pots and pans, cocktail tumblers, petri dishes, protractors, and other machine parts and products. The exhibition, titled "Machine Art", explore...

For over a century, the idea of primitivism has motivated artistic modernism. Focusing on the three decades after World War II, known in France as "les trentes glorieuses" despite the loss of most of the country's colonial empire, this probing and ex...

Emerging from the world of commercial art and product styling, design has now become completely integrated into human life. Its marks are all around us, from the chairs we sit on to the Web sites on our computer screens. One of the pioneers of desi...

"Discovering Design" reflects the growing recognition that the design of the everyday world deserves attention not only as a professional practice but as a subject of social, cultural, and philosophic investigation. Victor Margolin, cofounder and an...