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In Ruth Asawa's final year at Black Mountain College, c. 1948–49, she used a rubber stamp borrowed from the laundry room and featuring the college's initials (BMC) to make a body of work. Three years later, a pattern derived from this work was mass‐produced and marketed across the US under the name Alphabet – without attribution to Asawa, nor to the school for which the pattern's acronym stood. This essay examines the doubled abstraction of Asawa's stamp (in the sense of both material tool and figurative signature), as the letters that she first abstracted into images were subsequently disassociated from both her name and that of the school itself. By tracing Asawa's eventual reclamation of her authorship from this contextual abstraction, this essay makes a broader case for recognizing artistic practices of self‐definition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1706 Cristóbal de Villalpando signed a painting with an unusual, intensive calligraphic flourish, and sent it from Mexico City far to the north. This essay describes Villalpando's decision to invest so much pictorial energy in letterforms against this geographic backdrop. Doing so reveals several social registers in which writing had taken on particular professional charge, and opens on to a yet broader artistic sensitivity to writing: its forms and modes of production. The Spanish Empire's extensive bureaucracy of paper made imperial subjects highly sensitive to script's visual and material qualities, such that Villalpando and his fellow artists could capitalize upon them both to produce meaning within their pictures, and to engineer particular constructions of self. In juxtaposing distinct domains of writing – notarial, educational, performative – with paintings, this essay stakes a methodological claim for considering the archive, broadly conceived, as a place just as important for looking as for reading and transcription. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reconsiders the story of a pigment. Prussian blue, discovered at the beginning of the eighteenth century, is often described as a revolutionary colour that instantly transformed painters' palettes and practices. Grounded in a 'thick description' of the pigment's history in Paris, this article challenges the legendary account of Prussian blue through a more granular retelling of its development. It reconstructs the chaîne opératoire of Prussian blue through the laboratories of chemists, the factories of manufacturers, the shops of colour merchants, and the studios of artists. Emphasizing the intersections between the worlds of art, chemistry, and commerce, this essay points to the pigment's transformative impact in the larger history of artists' materials as a scientifically created and commercially marketed product. Shedding new light on the history of Prussian blue, this study also offers an interdisciplinary methodological approach to artists' materials through art history, social history, and conservation science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1971, Pakistan‐born lawyer and artist Iqbal Geoffrey (1939–2021) lodged a discrimination case against the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This essay connects Geoffrey's complaint, which he filed with the New York State Division of Human Rights, to MoMA's situation at the centre of activist debates over race and equality during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the museum's prominent role in exporting US art around the world during the Cold War. At a time when Asian modernists received a mostly transactional, diplomatic welcome from US cultural institutions including MoMA, Geoffrey mobilized his legal, artistic, and epistolary practices to stake his claim to permanent belonging within the US art world. Today, his case raises questions over where expanding histories of 'global modernism' meet incomplete histories of 'American' modernism, against a backdrop and the legacies of the Cold War era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'Persian' interior of the American landscape painter Frederic Church is a place crowded with paintings, objects and architectural ornament orchestrated as an installation that the artist both accrued and designed over a thirty‐year period. This regional orientalism, with its cosmopolitan claims and internationally networked cultural politics, is located outside Britain's geographic imperium but within its economic networks, unsettling the boundaries of our nationally circumscribed histories of art. Church's interior was informed by his own experience of travel within the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire, and was formed through a transatlantic web of British, French and American artists, dealers and collectors who were organizing and codifying Islamic art for Western consumers and audiences. But many of these objects that travelled across cultures brought with them a range of cultural narratives that only come into view if we expand the geographic scope of our art history beyond the transatlantic nexus to engage contemporaneous networks of state making and art making in the Islamicate world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines how images by the feminist documentary photographer Franki Raffles illuminate the possibilities for – and challenges involved in – the instigation of feminist solidary between different geographic sites. Drawing on Chandra Talpade Mohanty's distinction between 'solidarity' and 'sisterhood', whereby the former signals a process of active struggle that recognizes, rather than erases, differential experience, it argues that Raffles sought to examine how gender and labour coalesced across a number of sites – specifically, Scotland, the Soviet Union (Russia, Georgia and Ukraine) Israel and Palestine – while remaining attentive to specific socio‐political and cultural contexts. It situates Raffles's work in relation to the seismic geopolitical shifts that began in 1989, particularly the collapse of the Soviet Union and the acceleration of globalization. Raffles's work underscores the importance of feminist methodologies for analysing the relationship between the constructs 'British art' and 'the global', through her photographic examination of how globalizing processes led to gendered divisions and inequalities of labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the summer of the 2016 Brexit vote, the artist Al‐An deSouza (formerly known as Allan deSouza), in the persona of Hafeed Sidi Mubarak Mumbai, was in London conducting a performative expedition, Through the Black Country (TBC). The expedition culminated in a travelling exhibition consistent with deSouza's larger practice of 'restaging the material culture of the colonial period in order to identify its ongoing aftermath'. TBC rescripts Henry Stanley's published expedition diaries, Through the Dark Continent (1878), to describe instead a 'reverse' journey from Zanzibar to England. This essay contextualizes TBC and related projects through deSouza's history of multiple migrations, involvement in the Black Arts movement in 1980s Britain, and their claim to a multiple self as simultaneous self‐explication and resistant opacity. Central to deSouza's project are questions of what it means to be not‐British, a consideration of 'British art' as counter‐imperial, and their implications for post‐Brexit nationalism and empire‐nostalgia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyses a unique instance in western India around 1800 in which artists attempted to visualize rhythm (tālamālā) by co‐ordinating artistic with natural measures. While they looked to earlier templates of picturing music, such as of melody in rāgamālā, the artists sought forms of inspiration specific to rhythm. In particular, they turned to the workings of time, from a composition's tempo to a person's mental activity, to an animal's gait and to the moon's wax and wane. These intersecting temporal and rhythmic concepts, however, were abstract. To draw them into a visible realm, the painters relied on analogy as a method of comparison. They affiliated human‐made rhythms in texts, pictures, and dance with those produced in the natural world, by the sun and moon, termites and snakes, the earth and rivers. By mobilizing their understanding of the environment, and people's place within it, the artists of these paintings managed to picture rhythm through a rare turn to ecology in the history of South Asian painting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Originating in a critical examination of Vernon Lee's perceived ugliness and her excessive talking among her acquaintances, this essay situates historically a series of portraits in which she features as a sitter, subject of comment and commentator, to suggest that the interweaving of voices and faces can be useful to resist the elision of seeing and knowing on which art historians often base their understanding of gender and sexuality in portraiture. As an art critic, Lee maintained an ambivalent position with regard to portraits. Her familiarity with the new psychology informed a response whereby resonance could shift the sensorial boundaries of the genre beyond its function as likeness. By engaging with Lee's interrogation of the voice of portraits, both in art writing and fiction, the essay examines a series of queer attempts to challenge the authority of the look to identify, define or consume the subject of portraiture. As the late nineteenth century also saw the emergence of talking styles as audible articulations of the queer self, contemporary representations of Lee and her loquacity may be read as queer propositions at a time when dominant discourses around 'female inversion' and the 'speaking woman' were being fixed by sexologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay addresses an understudied drawing of a fictional coat of arms by the Swiss artist Niklaus Manuel, called Deutsch, suggesting that it gently subverts heraldic conventions, reflecting contemporaneous concerns about the instability of earthly insignia. By evoking iconographies of Fortuna and the homo viator, the drawing challenges the security of armorial prestige. Manuel – like Albrecht Dürer and Martin Schongauer before him – used the heraldic framework to probe pictorial conventions and to signal their artistic authority as arbiters of ornamental meaning. Produced on the eve of the Reformation, the drawing prefigures the intensified scrutiny of earthly and spiritual sign systems that would occur just a few years later. Art historians have tended to dismiss heraldry as a distinctly medieval and utilitarian category of image, too rule‐governed to nourish the imaginations of Renaissance artists. However, Manuel's drawing unlocks a window onto a world in which the heraldic provided a common point of reference for thinking about signification and identity during a period of transformative cultural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'[It] transported me a thousand miles from London, to a thousand years from the age of Mr. Gladstone', recalled Robert de la Sizeranne of Edward Burne‐Jones's Briar Rose series (1884–90). This essay argues, on the contrary, that the paintings were closer to contemporary concerns than Sizeranne allowed. In Burne‐Jones's briar, we find a remarkable example of one of the late nineteenth century's most promiscuous and ambiguous motifs: the tendril. Perhaps unexpectedly, this ornamental motif was at the centre of fin‐de‐siècle debates about time, capitalist expansion, and imperialism. In visual art, philosophy, and art history, the tendril figured anxieties about where Europe was heading. Tracing its movement through Burne‐Jones's canvases into texts by Henri Bergson and Alois Riegl, and decorative art by Victor Horta and William Morris, this essay contends that the tendril traverses a shared, but fragile, trans‐European imperial landscape at the end of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines spiritualist artist Evelyn De Morgan's representation of the self in several paintings c. 1900, including never before discussed portraits. Starting with the portraits' unusual treatment of the face as deflecting psychological legibility, it argues that the 'self' that they figure aligns with that described in contemporary scientific writings, notably by experimental psychologist and psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers and physicist Oliver Lodge. Writing from perspectives sympathetic to spiritualism, Myers and Lodge described the self as immortal, composite and mutable, invisible yet physical, exceeding the confines of the material body, and related somehow to ether. This essay draws on the entangled fin‐de‐siècle histories of science and spiritualism (and activates some of Gilles Deleuze's later theories) to argue that De Morgan summoned this self into a form at least contingently visible by exploiting the representational potential of the mutable, imponderable ether and its widely assumed properties: energic, (hyper‐)spatial, temporal, and spiritual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alexander Edouart's Blessing of the Enrequita Mine of 1860 commemorates the discovery of a mercury vein in New Almaden, California. It pictures the mine's Anglo‐American administrators, its primarily Mexican miners, and industry's impact upon the landscape. Despite the seemingly idyllic nature of the genre scene, the Enrequita Mine and its painted portrayal mark a contentious turning point in the economic and political relationship between the United States and Mexico in the mid‐nineteenth century, one whose effects still reverberate today. Two moments of tension between the two nations frame this artwork: the US–Mexican War of 1846–48; and the United States v. Castillero court case and appeals (1857–63). Using an ecocritical approach situating the painting in the geopolitics of extraction, this essay contends that the artwork participated in these territorial disputes by constructing ethnic hierarchy, bolstering legal battles, and not only representing but engendering further capitalist exploitation of the land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1952, the director of East Berlin's Märkisches Museum discovered three drawings by Matthias Grünewald pasted into a Luther Bible. This remarkable find set off a fascinating tale of art‐historical espionage, but also served as a generative moment for the construction of the well‐worn cliché of Grünewald as a revolutionary and peasant sympathizer. I examine the artist's transformation into an embodiment of the GDR's socialist ideals by interrogating East German art historian W. K. Zülch's analyses of the newly discovered drawings, which used formal analysis – rather than historical evidence – to figure Grünewald as an ideological accomplice in the German Peasants' War of 1525. Significantly, Zülch presented the tools of the artist's trade ('Kreidestift und Farben') as a way to reconcile form and political content, offering an alternative Socialist model to the SED's state‐sponsored culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines Ilia Repin's sustained engagement with European Orientalist painting and its impact on his oeuvre. Through close readings of three of his major works, Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom (1876), Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan (1885), and Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Letter to the Turkish Sultan (1880–91), it argues that Repin deployed Eastern motifs in order to unsettle entrenched East/West and self/other binaries that were prevalent in the Russian imperial context. A celebrated figure of the Russian national school, Repin was born and raised in Ukraine, and frequently turned to Ukrainian themes and subjects in his art. Considering Russia's turbulent political atmosphere in the 1880s and 1890s, and the evolving separation of Ukrainian and Russian imperial identities during this time, this essay posits that Repin harnessed the Orientalist idiom as a means to critique the Russian state, and to articulate an anti‐imperial and anti‐autocratic position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay searches for the meaning of the medal commemorating Bolognese painter Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614). While doing so, it rediscovers what has been regarded as an interesting but derivative object to be a most sophisticated artwork. Fontana's medal was not just an honour: it was a cultural intervention that addressed multiple cultural debates taking place across central Italy, from the nature of emblems to women's worth. While presenting some overlooked sources related to Fontana's medal and contemporary artistic production (a couple of treatises, a guidebook, and a thank you note), the essay introduces three new exemplars of the coin. This new evidence prompts a reconsideration of the circulation of Fontana's medal and the identity of its designer, a question that has so far escaped attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides new evidence for a historiographical re‐contextualization of the early artistic practice of Turkish artist Yüksel Arslan (1933–2017). Within this scholarship, Arslan is generally portrayed as an outsider figure who resisted traditional artistic categorizations; consequently, the historical conditions leading to his artistic posture in 1950s Istanbul, where his career began, remain underexplored. Arslan's fascination for prehistoric methods of image making, his erudite subject matters, and his contributions to the legacies of surrealism and of art brut have been mostly regarded by critics and art historians as idiosyncratic elements of his artistic identity. Focusing on Arslan's early production in 1950s Istanbul and its reception in art criticism and art historiography, the essay argues that Arslan's outsider status was informed by and contributed to widespread debates about artistic heritage and what its role should be in Turkey's fraught political scenario of the 1950s, torn between liberalism and centralized governance, and in the context of Turkey's contemporary artistic production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the work of New York‐based artist and poet Candace Hill‐Montgomery. In 1979, Hill‐Montgomery described her work as changing 'the containment we all live within', pointing both to the social and political investments of her practice, and to her formal transition from making art in her studio to making installations in public, often from found materials and detritus. Her desire for recognition and understanding across difference at a moment of rising neo‐conservatism was an investment in social and subjective repair. I trace this impulse across 'environmental sculptures', collages and artist's books made between 1979 and 1983, articulating a general impetus to be against containment that, I argue, is also instructive as an art‐historical method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces the emergence and development of the category of 'popular art' in Peru between the 1920s and the 1970s, and the relationship of that category to the formations of both modern and postmodern artistic practices in that country. Taking the awarding of the 1975 national prize of art to the retablista Joaquín López Antay as its fulcrum, it argues that this key event, which has been traditionally regarded as a watershed in the history of Peruvian art, was indeed the logical consequence of how indigenist painters framed the field of artistic production in Peru. It also analyses the simultaneous emergence of an alternative view of popular art that did away with notions of cultural authenticity and national representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The career of photographer Albert Renger‐Patzsch began in the early 1920s in the storerooms of Germany's ethnographic museums, and ended in 1966 with the publication of his last photobook, Gestein (Rock). His reputation as a leading exponent of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) developed in tandem with heated debates over sculptural facsimiles and contemporary art in the historical museum in the late Weimar Republic. These debates gave expression to the 'non‐simultaneity of the simultaneous' (Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen), a central concept for the crisis of historicism in the post‐inflation years. In an age of mass reproduction, could 'things' still reliably embody and convey the past into present? This question took on renewed urgency for Renger at the end of his life – as, indeed, it did for many writers of his generation, who, if they outlived Nazi terror, genocide, and war, looked back on the historical valence of objecthood as unfinished business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Histories of settler colonial art galleries have tended to present these institutions as distant attempts to replicate British models. This essay argues that settler/Indigenous interactions, and the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples, were fundamental to the formation of settler colonial art galleries, through a case study of the 1880s acquisition and reception of Danish painter A. F. A. Schenck's Anguish (1878) at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, on unceded land of the Kulin nation. Examining the career of the NGV's London art adviser, Alfred Taddy Thomson, from the violence of the colonial frontier in the 1840s, to his art advising practice in late nineteenth‐century London, it demonstrates the ways in which frontier violence permeated the formation of British settler colonial cultural institutions. The acquisition and reception of Anguish provides a stimulus to rethink approaches to histories of settler colonial art galleries, and to European paintings in their collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The portable mural Venceremos (We Will Win, 1959) by Guatemalan‐born Rina Lazo (1923–2019) draws rarely seen parallels between the United States' imperialist actions in North Korea and Guatemala during the 1950s. Using tactics and strategies of modern Mexican muralism, which she learned as an assistant to Diego Rivera, Lazo attempted to encourage Guatemalans to follow the North Korean example to overcome the US. This essay considers the qualities of Venceremos as a portable mural. As a work in progress, Venceremos functioned as a passport that allowed Lazo and her partner, Mexican artist Arturo García Bustos, to travel to Asia and Europe through the network of socialist nations in the 1950s. After its purchase by a Mexican politician in 1960, Venceremos was considered lost and remained out of view until 2010. This purchase functioned as an act of censorship that thwarted the revolutionary agency of Venceremos for half a century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces the histories and reverberations of the socialist scholarship programmes which brought art and graphic design students from Africa to the USSR during the 1980s. Drawing on the accounts and archives of art students and cultural workers who participated in or supported these programmes, it follows the path of one Mozambican cohort through a Graphic Design degree in Uzbekistan. It shows how, by navigating between the emancipatory opportunities offered by the programme, and the pedagogical expressions of state power that constrained it, the students developed affiliations and aesthetic positions which would survive, appropriate, and resist dominant geopolitical epistemologies. Ultimately, I argue that their artworks and recollections allow alternative, unofficial histories of Cold War solidarity networks to come into sharper focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines an understudied history of reciprocal art exhibitions between Cairo and Moscow during the Cold War period. It focuses on the work of Gamal El Sagini, Inji Efflatoun, and Hamed Owais, and sets out their role in forging new networks of revolutionary art in the Soviet Union. By addressing how post‐colonial art was received and utilized in Soviet Russia, this article uncovers the extent of Soviet cultural engagement with Egypt, the African national liberation struggles, pan‐Arabism, and international solidarity amongst the Second and Third Worlds more broadly. Offering a more complex reading of the processes behind Soviet involvement in the utopian project of socialist worldmaking, this essay argues for the need to assess critically Soviet claims to anti‐imperialism, peace, international solidarity, and friendship. It discusses the role of art in these processes, and addresses the changing definitions of realism, nationalism, and humanism in the socialist world, making a contribution to alternative understandings of post‐war figuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 1 November 1989, when the third edition of la Bienal de la Habana opened its doors, the show included ink paintings from North Korea called chosŏnhwa (literally 'Korean paintings'). By that time, the Korean–Cuban friendship had lasted for more than three decades, following its formation after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and based on the principle of Third World solidarity. But this encounter in 1989 illustrates that their contemporary art was out of sync with one another. The Korean presentation contrasted with the more installation‐oriented, inter‐media works submitted by Cuban artists who were part of the 'New Cuban art' wave. As an archeological study on these two starkly different visions of 'contemporary art', this essay sustains a bifurcated view onto Pyongyang and Havana as a method with which to reassess the culture of Third World politics and post‐coloniality at the Cold War's end, and to propose a translocational, South‐to‐South method of art history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1960s through the 1970s, and afterwards, a number of Vietnamese artists travelled to the Soviet Union to study at prestigious Soviet art and film academies. While Vietnamese artists did not develop a considerable body of work that can match the grandiose works of socialist realism under Josef Stalin, some artists did work in a socialist realist style that merged academic oil painting styles with local themes. This essay examines the work of Vũ Duy Nghı̃a (1935–2022), Lê Huy Tiếp (b. 1950) and Đào Châu Hải (b. 1955), who studied in the Soviet Union during this period and integrated various painting methods, styles and techniques into their art works. The legacy of Soviet–Vietnam relations is a still largely understudied field. While archival sources are difficult to access, the essay relies on interviews with two of the living artists. It looks into the significance of studying in the Soviet Union for these art workers, and assesses the impact that it had on the development of Vietnamese culture overall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Craft exhibitions were one of the major forms of cultural and economic exchange among socialist countries, a key feature of friendship exchanges that mapped Cold War alliances at mid‐century. This essay examines the implications of craft exhibitions exported between China and her 'brother' nations, especially in Eastern Europe. Export exhibitions enabled the circulation of objects, craftspeople, and students, and trod a grey zone between art and industry, mutual cultural appreciation, and mutual economic dependency. Promoting craft as the epitome of socialist culture's diversity also questioned Soviet hegemony over the forms associated with high state culture, opening the way for other routes of formal experimentation and abstraction. Mapping craft exhibitions underscores how the socialist valorization of the 'folk' was not solely an enterprise of national identity, but construed as part of a crafted internationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the efforts to construct an image of global socialist society in post‐war Albania, looking closely at the images published in a 1959 travelogue by artist and art critic Andon Kuqali, chronicling his visit to the People's Republic of China. This piece of writing and the accompanying sketches and prints created by the artist reflect the cultural aspects of Albania's efforts to position itself within the socialist world in the period after Stalin's death. In this decade, Albania broke with the Soviet Union and moved towards stronger political and economic alliances with socialist nations in East Asia, including China. Kuqali's travel essay represents a key document in the formation of a global socialist identity in Albania, an effort to find common ground and shared purpose – in both life and modes of artistic production – between peoples who had relatively little knowledge of each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Theodore Roszak's 1969 classic, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition, this essay argues that the difficulties experienced by members of the counterculture in establishing bonds of solidarity with potentially like‐minded groups were often shared by alternative artists working internationally post‐1968. Opening with a case study in hostile American feedback on the politics of Russian émigré art in early 1980s New York, the article works through a range of unintended and intentional misunderstandings among leftist art workers and countercultural figures, whose political positions were formed in different centres and peripheries. Arguing that alternative art should be viewed as part of a shared, anti‐technocratic project, the article proposes that glitches in communication are worth lingering over, as we continue to grapple with different accounts of historical developments, and seek to find ways of working across borders in polarized times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in the early 1950s, North Korea and Hungary forged a friendship in anticipation of building a new socialist world. In 1954, a team of Hungarian architects led by Emil Zöldy (1913–82) travelled to Pyongyang to design a broad spectrum of buildings and spaces in collaboration with North Korean architects and workers. Separate groups of Hungarian experts were also commissioned to design factories and plants in provincial North Korean cities such as Kusŏng. This essay examines how these large‐scale construction projects operated on the ground, including some of the fissures and give‐and‐take of the friendship that was built between the Korean and Hungarian comrades. Their designs and construction projects, we argue, concretized and cemented the ephemeral and contingent experiences of socialist friendship between Korea and Hungary, even if its memory has been subjected to erasure in both the North Korean and Hungarian contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores how lithographic printing connected colonial society in India to global developments in the making of middle‐class culture. It focuses on two print portrait series that the artist Colesworthy Grant (1813–80) released in illustrated periodicals: Lithographic Sketches of the Public Characters of Calcutta; and A Series of Miscellaneous Rough Sketches of Oriental Heads. The former defined white society in Bengal according to a masculine, agentic image of the public individual, whereas the latter engaged ambiguously with ideas about the colonial literary sphere and the nature of civic participation in order to distinguish so‐called Anglicized individuals from a taxonomic ordering of South Asian society. The article contextualizes these portraits in relation to the liberal social reforms that reshaped the East India Company's rule in the period 1833–57, arguing that lithographic periodical illustration worked to reconfigure the character and racial boundaries of the Company's increasingly middle‐class regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have for decades challenged the popular belief that Islam is intrinsically and implacably hostile to anthropomorphic art. Rooted in this literature, this essay argues that Islam was responsible for popularizing portraiture in Senegal, which previously featured none. With the founding of local Sufi brotherhoods such as the Mouridiyya in the 1880s, the eminence of religious leaders led to an unprecedented demand for their portraits. Glass painting became the privileged medium for reproducing images that appeared in other media, such as lithographs or photographs. Inspired by the respect for Muslim saints inherent in Sufi practices, the widespread desire to display portraits in one's home and for one's personal devotional practices made this genre indispensable. Rather than concentrating on any one medium, this essay focuses on the theoretical and formal interaction among chromolithographs, photographs, and glass paintings, and the migration of images across the three between the 1910s and the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay uses the art and travels of Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros to analyse the transnational antifascist artistic culture of the 1930s. Siqueiros was one of many artists who joined antifascist (and later Popular Front) organizations, and circulated their art beyond the traditional spaces of localized art worlds – into the streets and across national boundaries – to animate a global artistic network. The process of making the period transnational – artists and journal editors' work of clipping, replicating, and reusing images, texts, and ideas in new contexts, with new meanings – created chains of transnational iconography, and rendered montage as the period's central aesthetic. Period debates and polemics, waged at conferences and in journals, weaponized this culture. Siqueiros and Josep Renau's 1939–40 mural for the Mexican Electricians' Syndicate began as a final homage to the fallen Spanish Republic; the transformation of the mural, however, ultimately marked the end of Popular Front art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How might the meaning of monumental sculpture be ephemeral? At La Venta, objects from greenstone figurines to massive basalt sculptures were recycled, reworked, and moved around the landscape, their new configurations and associations creating new kinds of meaning and enabling new kinds of ritual interaction. This essay considers the assemblage, and not just the individual work, as an important category of art‐historical analysis. By considering the divergent materialities of stelae, celts, figurines, and colossal heads, as well as the role that ephemeral materials played in the construction of ritually significant assemblages, I explore the connections between monumentality, memory, and forgetting at La Venta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay centralizes representations of the Caribbean plantation in British art, and examines their importance to the development of landscape representation and the history of medicine. The plantation came into view through the overlapping conventions of the picturesque genre and colonial medicine. Tracing their relationship to, and distancing from, the development of British art 'at home', I address how these visual economies – connecting art and medicine – can challenge our conception of the 'global' nature of British art. This essay also considers what these terms – global/colonial/British – mean as we grapple with the legacy of these imperial histories by examining the work of contemporary artists Ingrid Pollard and Annalee Davis who conceive of, and visualize, alternative histories of relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the possibility of a 'global' account of a style, this essay examines the consequences of the idea of post‐impressionism. Around 1910, Roger Fry drew on histories of world art and international art historiography to cast post‐impressionism as putatively universal, a style that was not just a new development, but was a rediscovery of a natural form of artistic creation. Seen this way, post‐impressionism also had the potential to go global: to have a causal role in the development of multiple international modernisms following its spatial circulation across the globe. The essay goes on to explore first how even within Britain local variations and divisions quickly came to undercut this specifically British articulation of a universal style. It then turns to aspects of post‐impressionism's subsequent circulations in India, Nigeria, Japan, and China to examine further how its putative universalism was transformed in a variety of locally specific ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Althea McNish (1924–2020) defies many of art history's borders. Born in Trinidad, McNish trained in London; her work crosses the line between fine and decorative art; and she brings the history of modern pattern design into dialogue with the history of Black British art. Focusing on her textiles of the 1950s and 1960s, this article foregrounds the multivalence of McNish's practice, exploring the productive tensions and possibilities that arise from her work's location at multiple points of intersection. Examining her treatment of colour and line, it demonstrates that McNish's textiles embody in their complex screen‐printed surfaces the composite, multi‐layered character of cultures and identities. The article considers McNish's participation in activism, and argues that her work prefigures the Black British Art Movement of the 1980s and global postmodern appropriations of the decorative by exploiting the subversive power of pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1980s, Bridget Riley produced a series of paintings distinguished by their use of the same group of colours, said to have been inspired by the vividly preserved painted tombs that she encountered during a visit to Egypt in the winter of 1979–80. Though clearly related to the black‐and‐white paintings that propelled Riley to international fame in the 1960s, these new works represented a notable change in the artist's methods, combining an intuitive arrangement of colour with a simple compositional motif: the stripe. While determinedly abstract, the imaginative origins of Riley's stripe paintings are registered in many of the titles that they carry: Ka (1980); Ra (1981); Luxor (1982); Winter Palace (1981). This essay reconsiders the making, display and reception of Riley's so‐called 'Egyptian palette' within a longer history of encounter and exchange between Britain and Egypt, ranging across more than a century of military occupation and resistance, Cold War entrenchment, and neoliberal diplomacy. In doing so, it situates Riley's work between colonial and post‐colonial ways of seeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the work of British contemporary artist Sutapa Biswas (born 1962). Over the past forty years, Biswas has engaged, through film, photography and other media, with the complex structures and aesthetics of the global, in relation to her own migratory experience. Having come to Britain from West Bengal as a child, the artist's return in the 1980s to the place of her birth precipitated a series of works that deal with the complexity of homeland and identity, memory and desire, while also challenging a Eurocentric vision of the world. Through an analysis of two film works, Kali (1984–85) and Birdsong (2004), and by focusing on Biswas's own conceptualization of the synaptic, this essay addresses the way in which the artist challenges idealized notions of post‐colonial unity, while also pointing to the possibilities of seeing and knowing across different vantage points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean for art history to conjoin the terms 'British art' and 'the global'? What is carried by the liminal space of the conjuncture? And what is forsaken? This special issue seeks to think through the pressures placed on British art since the mid‐nineteenth century as a national category of enquiry in the wake of unstable definitions of post‐colonialism, neo‐colonialism, globalization and the decolonial. Drawing on recent scholarly debates about the role and definitions of British art, the co‐authors explore some of the tensions inherent in trying to operate within a nationally and geographically defined field, the artificial borders of which are porous, malleable, and subject to regular political and cultural change. Acknowledging the shortcomings of both the global and the national as frameworks for art‐historical enquiry, we suggest different ways of steering a path between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chattri Indian Monument, erected upon the Sussex Downs above Brighton in 1921, commemorates the Hindu and Sikh soldiers who died in hospitals in Brighton as a result of wounds received fighting for the British Empire in the First World War. The form and name of the monument reference the chatrī, an architectural element characteristic of historical palaces and tombs of northern India. The monument, designed by an Indian architect, Elias Henriques, was intended by the India Office and officials in Brighton to be legible as a hybrid structure, both Indian and British. Conceived as a respectful act of eulogy in honour of Indian soldiers who died in the imperial forces, it nonetheless enshrines the ideology of white supremacy upon which the British Empire rested, and thus embodies the ambiguities of imperial mourning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I explore relationships between Victorian artists' prolific production of autograph replicas and the wide global demand for these replicas. Autograph replicas, defined by Victorian artists as variations on a subject through changes in size, medium or image from a first version, were largely commissioned by patrons. This market was later driven by foreign collectors who avidly sought autograph replicas, believed to be original works, not copies, to raise their own nations' cultural image in the world. The functions and demands for autograph replicas have unique historical and cultural contexts, including conflicts between artists and patrons. I describe artists' surreptitious studio practices producing these works and the unique effect autograph replicas had on collecting and on art history in the context of this special issue's rethinking of British art and the global. Autograph replicas challenged boundaries between original and copy and disrupted art‐historical notions of chronology, originality, canonicity, and market intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Charles Ray's Plank Piece I‐II (1973), the artist creates a sculptural assemblage that holds him uncomfortably aloft. There has been little critical attention to his earliest performed sculptures created between from around 1973 to 1980, beyond characterizations as jejune experiments, homages, or hijinks. I seize on a statement by Ray that when he claimed in the 1970s that the works '[had] no meaning – or rather their meaning is dynamic, [...] my friends laughed at me and said, "You idiot, it looks like the aftermath of a car wreck or a Goya print".' I pursue his 'idiotic' invocations: an eerily reminiscent etching by Goya; automobile disasters; the American War in Vietnam; and other contingent phenomena. The effect is a sustained experiment in looking, reading, and writing. Reading against the grain, Plank Piece I‐II provokes hermeneutic challenges – and new methodologies for criticism – towards a refashioning of meaning and history in performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the high altar of San Marco in Florence, Fra Angelico painted a scene in which Saints Cosmas and Damian graft the black leg of a deceased Ethiopian onto the body of a white European devotee. The white man, upon awaking, 'saw nothing wrong'. Did he, or his audience around 1440, really have no objection to his new black leg? It would seem that to them the issue was not that the leg was black, but whether or not it came from a Christian. This essay uses Fra Angelico's image to ask broad questions about the contingency of skin colour and its associations in Florence before the advent of the transatlantic slave trade. It reviews the polarized position of recent scholarship on race in premodern Europe and seeks to follow a middle path. The development of this imagery after 1500, especially in Spain, shows racialized hostility towards the Ethiopian, which was not necessarily the case in the early fifteenth‐century examples discussed here. Instead, ideas of unity, rather than difference, will be employed as a framework for interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1948, the Science Museum, London, acquired a drawing by French artist Sébastien Le Clerc entitled The Physical Laboratory of the Académie des Sciences, bequeathed by the chemist and collector George Hugh Gabb. Separated from two other drawings by Le Clerc of the same composition, the drawing has been interpreted as a view of the French Académie des Sciences after its move to the Louvre in 1699. This essay considers the provenance and reception history of the drawing, paying attention to its research and interpretation by Gabb. His comparison of the related unfinished print to Le Clerc's most famous image, L'Académie des Sciences et des Beaux‐Arts, reveals similar employment of instruments and imagery by Le Clerc, showing both the artist and the Académie producing scientific knowledge through art. Gabb's drawing gives one rich example of how we can understand the entwined histories of art and science over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Worshipped by later folk artists as the god of painting, Wu Daozi (c. 686 to c. 760) was also praised by ninth‐century art historian Zhang Yanyuan as someone who 'did not look back and will have no successors'. But alas, this 'Sage of Painting' (Hua sheng) left no work to us (imagine if we knew Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo only by reputation). Can archaeology remedy this unfortunate situation as it has done for so many other fields from classical philosophy to ancient science? How should we utilize possible archaeological evidence in studying painting practices? This essay suggests that a set of newly discovered imperial tomb murals may allow us to approach Wu's style more closely than ever before, and also leads us to problematize the concept of authorship in an age when individual authorship was inseparable from workshop practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]