The Art History and Architecture Collection is a vital resource for academic libraries, offering extensive insights into various themes such as art movements, single-artist studies, decolonising art, gender and masculinity, citizenship, architecture and design. This collection aims to broaden the scope of art history, addressing a diverse range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.
The collection encompasses theories and histories of materiality, exploring the intricate relationship between making and thinking, fashion and culture, production and consumption, textiles and industry.
| Key series |
| Rethinking Art’s Histories |
| Studies in Design and Material Culture |
| Collection year | Titles |
| 2025 titles | 17 |
| 2023/4 titles | 28 |
| 2013-2022 titles | 74 |
| Total collection | 128 |
| Keywords |
| Singleartist studies |
| Subcultures |
| Design |
| Architecture |
| Citizenship |
| Surrealism |
| Art movements |
| Decolonising art |
| Queer art |
| Gender – masculinity |
| Modernism |
| Postmodernism |
| Thema subject categories |
| Architecture |
| Avant-garde |
| Ceramics, mosaics and glass: artworks |
| Colonialism and imperialism |
| History of art |
| Material culture |
| Performance art |
| Theory of art |
SDG coverage
Art history and architecture collection
Part of a series of four dialogues with contemporary art and writing practitioners whose work represents a critical intervention in thinking about gesture, politics, and embodiment – across art, writing, and theory – and the various entanglements found therein. This dialogue on gesture in artistic practice takes the form of a co-written performance piece between the artists Carl Gent, Alison Ballance, and Jessa Mockridge.
In a hybrid work of poetry and essay, Emma Bolland performs a scene from a 1920 silent film screenplay to explore ideas of ‘bad translation’ and auto-practice as strategies for a post-traumatic language of gaps and silences.
Catherine Gander considers the place and work of apology without reparation, in relation to Native Peoples of the United States, via the poetry of Layli Long Soldier. Gander takes the poetic innovations enacted by the muttering refrain ‘whereas’ in Long Solder’s work as a starting point for thinking about the Congressional occupation and erasure of linguistic, historical, and geographical sites.
Previous generations of historians often assumed that, before the Industrial Revolution, the families of husbandmen, craftspeople and labourers across rural England were clothed in a narrow range of coarse textiles, often homespun and largely unchanging. It is a view that has increasingly been challenged. Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, western Europe witnessed a tide of novelty in textiles. A wave of innovations, embracing both fabrics and tools, swept the continent. The impact of these innovations and how they extended to working people is the subject of this chapter. It falls into three parts. First, it examines the character of innovation in terms of materials and techniques. Two principal trends stand out: a shift towards lighter, more colourful and more highly patterned fabrics, and the dissemination of textiles employing new or unfamiliar techniques, such as knitting, lacemaking and silk ribbon weaving. Second, the chapter assesses the ways these innovations have been understood by historians, using English evidence to question how effectively they have integrated changes in production and changes in consumption. It argues that these innovations transformed the textiles worn by working people, drawing them deeper into market-driven forms of textile provision, both as consumers and as producers. Third and finally, it considers the impact of these changes on households making textiles for their own use; in other words, their impact on what has been termed ‘auto-consumption’, ‘household self-provisioning’ or, in an older historical literature, ‘homespun’.
Kim Dhillon’s poetic essay on artist-writer and filmmaker Theresa Hak Kyung Cha forms a dialogue with poet Cathy Park Hong’s work on Cha. Refusing the tasteful omission associated with the shadow of Cha’s brutal death, as well as the identity-markers that increasingly characterise the institutional art world, Dhillon explores the flourishing of Cha’s multidisciplinary art practice, taking the reader on an expanded journey into Cha’s topographies of bodily gesture, breath, space, and sound.
Hilary White uses the recursive structure of the dream to consider how Renee Gladman’s work slides between forms and disciplines, writing and drawing. Following Édouard Glissant’s theorisation of the grasp as a gesture of enclosure that seeks mastery, White instead suggests that Gladman’s writing eludes the grasp. This refusal to hold knowledge, or to be easily comprehended, is also an undercutting of the canonical, colonial legacy of knowledge-formation. In this consideration of Gladman’s work as writing dreaming drawing, White identifies an alternative method for thinking, writing, representing, which is based in hesitancy and bewilderment.
In this chapter the author examines in detail Gould’s contributions to three periodicals as well as his relationship to their owners: Henry Labouchère’s Truth (1879–95); Thomas Gibson Bowles’s Vanity Fair (1879, 1890–99); and George Newnes’s The Strand Magazine (1893–1902). There then follows a discussion of Gould’s parodies and pastiches. The first two were inspired by Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel’s ‘Alice’ books: The Westminster Alice (1900–2), with a text by ‘Saki’ (H.H. Munro); and John Bull’s Adventures in the Fiscal Wonderland (1903), with a text by Charles Geake. Then come the three political versions of Dr Heinrich Hoffman’s German comic book Struwwelpeter. These were The Political Struwwelpeter (1899), The Struwwelpeter Alphabet (1900) and Great Men (1901), each with texts by E.H. Begbie. Finally comes an examination of Gould’s own three-volume version of the works of Sir John Froissart’s medieval chronicles, entitled Froissart’s Modern Chronicles (1902, 1903, 1908), which tell the tale of recent political events as if they had happened in the fourteenth century.
This chapter begins by looking at Gould’s contemporaries and seeing how far he can be fitted into the Victorian tradition of Punch, focusing on the work of John Tenniel, Bernard Partridge, E.T. Reed and especially Harry Furniss. The author then goes on to look at the emerging political cartoonists of the new popular press, and examines how and why the political cartoonist’s style starts to change in these mass-market publications. In this context he first discusses the Daily Mail and the Daily Express and later gives particular attention to W.K. Haselden on the Daily Mirror, the Australian Will Dyson on the Daily Herald and the New Zealander David Low on the Star (and later the Evening Standard).
The author begins with the question: ‘What made Gould’s cartoons so good?’ He answers it by applauding his ability to get a likeness (especially at a time when press photography was rare) and his skill at ‘getting to the nub of an issue’, adding that Gould was ‘essentially a journalist who draws his leading articles instead of writing them’. He also used a wide range of imagery, which the author arranges into eight categories (broadly coinciding with those in E.H. Gombrich’s classic essay ‘The Cartoonist’s Armoury’). These are: 1) Common cultural references; 2) Everyday images and figures of speech; 3) Occupations (policeman, farmer); 4) Sport and games (swimming, chess, football); 5) Topical events (e.g. St Valentine’s Day, the Great Comet of 1895, Suffragettes); 6) Theatre/literature/visual arts; 7) History and 8) Animals. He also notes that Gould’s humour was an important contribution to his success. As the cartoonist himself said ‘I etch with vinegar, not vitriol’. The author concludes that ‘His geniality, courtesy, gentle caricature, lack of malice, all point towards the wry smile. His strength is in the humour of incongruity – the discovery of unexpected aptness in incongruous comparisons, the more unlikely the funnier.’
This book is the first major study of Britain’s pioneering graphic satirist, Sir Francis Carruthers Gould (1844–1925), the first staff political cartoonist on a daily newspaper in Britain, and the first of his kind to be knighted. Written by the distinguished media historian, Colin Seymour-Ure, author of Prime Ministers and the Media (2003), and co-author of an acclaimed biography of Sir David Low, it is essential reading for anyone interested in cartoons, caricature and illustration and will be welcomed by students of history, politics and the media. A personal ‘miscellany’ rather than a detailed biography, it examines Gould’s career from when he left work at the London Stock Exchange to become political cartoonist on the influential Pall Mall Gazette and later the Westminster Gazette (where he was also assistant editor) until his retirement after the First World War. It also discusses the monthly Picture Politics (which he edited and ran for twenty years), as well as his illustrations for magazines and books, including The Political Struwwelpeter (1899), The Westminster Alice (1902, with H.H. Munro ‘Saki’), and his own ‘Froissart’s Modern Chronicles’ series. In addition there is an analysis of the symbolism and literary allusion used in his drawings to lampoon such eminent politicians as Gladstone, Joseph Chamberlain and Arthur Balfour. Never unkind in his work (‘I etch with vinegar, not vitriol’), Gould was the leading satirical artist of his day. As Lord Baker says in his Foreword, this book is ‘a major contribution to our knowledge of British cartooning’.