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 |
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Art history and architecture collection
Upon his release from prison, Siqueiros completed work at Chapultepec, received the Lenin Peace Prize in the Soviet Union, and began work on a large-scale mural project that was to become The March of Humanity (1966/71), installed at the Polyforum complex in Mexico City. The mural, the subject of Chapter 7, was an articulation, with a broad and emotion-laden view of twentieth-century history, of the crisis of Marxist politics in Mexico and globally. It combines the emotional force of leftist existentialism, associated with Jean-Paul Sartre to whom Renau compared Siqueiros, with the analytical force of Marx’s method of historical materialism. The work is suffused with Siqueiros’s socialist humanism which in some respects, unlike the works of the late 1950s, de-emphasized class struggle and returned to abstracted allegories of larger historical structures. In its kaleidoscopic iconography of suffering, revolution, and cosmic hope, the mural does not foreclose on possibilities for radical change, but defers those changes to a distant future. The work is also concretely social, its iconography drawn from an attempt to convey the historical significance of contemporary events such as the Vietnam War, the prospect of atomic destruction, the pervasiveness of corruption, and the then-recent traumas of World War II and the Holocaust. Ultimately, the work is a kind of memorial to the working class and, in many respects resembles the great modernist war and holocaust memorials of the Eastern Bloc, which Siqueiros appreciated on his trips to East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union during the late 1960s.
Chapter 1 treats three of Siqueiros’s politically charged murals of the World War II era: Death to the Invader, completed in Chile in 1942, Cuauhtémoc against the Myth (1944), originally located in Siqueiros’s mother-in-law’s house, which doubled as his Center for Modern Realist Art, and New Democracy (1945), along with the accompanying panels Victims of War (1944/45) and Victims of Fascism (1944/45) at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. These murals are treated in the international context of communist resistance art during and just after World War II, during much of which Siqueiros was in exile after the attack on Trotsky but still in touch with his friends Neruda and Ehrenburg. The murals form a “war trilogy” in which Siqueiros reserved a central role for the Soviet Union even as he negotiated the possibility for nationally specific versions of communist politics to emerge in Latin America and Eastern Europe. The works use the abstract qualities of composition to reveal history in terms of larger structures and forces that appear to transcend the agency of particular people and groups. At the same time, Siqueiros’s representation of the body—often in highly eroticized ways—is very much in keeping with existentially inflected resistance art from the contemporaneous films of Roberto Rossellini to the contemporaneous texts of Italo Calvino, Bertolt Brecht, and Jean-Paul Sartre which tap into the elemental, biological rudiments of human existence as a potential source of revolutionary action.
In February 1902 a short notice in the London Times announced the intention of the authorities at Westminster Cathedral to conduct a tuning concert, the third in a series of large-scale experiments on the still uncompleted cathedral’s acoustic properties. Coverage of the first experiment, undertaken the previous summer, had been largely confined to the Catholic newspaper the Tablet. As the programme expanded, however, details began to filter with increasing regularity into the national press. Intended to showcase the effect of the new cathedral’s architecture on a particular musical style, the experiments capitalised on the specific acoustic context of the building to play with perception, creating ghost chords and ethereal effects. As a large-scale musical-acoustic experiment, the concerts were to resonate in the worlds of science and architecture for the next five decades, prompting a particular trajectory of scientific development and architectural innovation. This chapter explores those experiments and the role of Westminster Cathedral as a space for science and music. It examines the significance of the cathedral as a conceptual platform for further development in architecture, acoustics, and music, most publicly expressed in the renowned tuning concerts which informed the design of Royal Festival Hall in 1951.
Showcasing new scholarship by emerging and established art historians, Cases of Citation tracks a history of artists who incorporated literature into their work. In doing so, this collection investigates why literary citation emerged as a viable and urgent strategy in art made during and after the 1960s, and explores how we can account for such citational practices in contemporary scholarship. By spotlighting new voices in the field of art history, this book makes a significant, topical, and, above all, current contribution to a fast-growing field of inquiry. Structured as a series of in-depth case studies, the essays that form this volume generate their own specific questions about the relationship between art and literature through the analysis of a single artwork. The collection covers a diverse group of artists from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including David Wojnarowicz, Marcel Broodthaers, Lis Rhodes, Romare Bearden and Silvia Kolbowski. Cited authors range from Oscar Wilde to Frank O’Hara, Mary Shelley to Jean Genet. And together, the artworks and cited texts are approached from various critical angles, with each author questioning and complicating the ways in which we can ‘read’ textual citations in art. The book concludes with a richly illustrated conversation between the editors and the pioneering feminist artist Elaine Reichek, whose lifelong engagement with text serves as a foundational art historical touchstone for the collection as a whole.
Setting the tone for the essays that follow, this introduction begins with a single artwork: American artist Nancy Spero’s 1979 work Perhaps She Was Right. Incorporating a citation from a poem written by the modernist poet H.D. eighteen years prior, this work opens out many of the questions the wider book seeks to pose, questions about time, influence, and art history. After a discussion of Spero’s work, the Introduction then outlines the broader field and summarises the contributions.
This chapter shifts the focus from individual and domestic concerns to a broader international stage. It demonstrates a crystallising of the conceptual work that emerged in World War I through a series of controversies and catalysts surrounding the design and construction of Herbert Baker’s Assembly Chamber for the new city at Delhi in 1923. Baker’s Assembly Chamber was regarded as a scientific experiment (from drawing board to construction), and rather unusually, as this chapter demonstrates, scientists as well as architects were involved in its design. In the process, architectural acoustics was re-categorised from ‘special intelligence’ to ‘fundamental’ investigation, becoming embedded into a national programme of government-funded research, which marked the beginnings of formalised research in environmental science within the construction industry in Britain. Taking the Assembly Chamber at Delhi as a pivot point, this chapter explores the changing position of acoustics as a branch of environmental science in 1920s Britain. It demonstrates the manner in which the political and economic controversies surrounding the design and construction of the chamber acted as catalysts for the instigation of a new laboratory – located in a disused munitions factory near Perivale in London – and stimulated a broader programme of acoustic research. With reference to unpublished papers held in archives, this chapter brings to light the tensions that sustained early official research in the discipline of architectural acoustics.
This essay uses the publication of Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’ as a starting point to consider the changed status of citations in art made during and after the 1960s. Setting the scene for the ensuing essays, Julius argues that each of the instances of citation explored by the contributing authors variously belongs to an intellectual landscape shaped by the questions Barthes posed in this essay, questions that the American art critic Craig Owens claimed that ‘the art frequently referred to as “postmodernist”, can perhaps best be understood as a response or series of responses to.’ Owens’s name recurs throughout the collection; his writings toward a theory of postmodernism from the late 1970s and 1980s help to draw out the art-historical implications of Barthes’ essay. Although Owens’s vision for art after ‘The Death of the Author’ never came to pass, his art criticism reveals the context in which citations erupted into the expanded field of post-1960s art.
London’s Royal Festival Hall opened its doors on 3 May 1951. The first concert hall to be built in Britain after World War II, Festival Hall was not just an iconic piece of architecture but also an archetype of designing for musical tone. Its design fused architecture, music, and science, and its construction process was interspersed with a series of tuning concerts that were implemented throughout 1950 and 1951 to allow for acoustic adaptation as the building was finalised. Drawing on the trajectory of experimental work and interdisciplinary collaborations that were explored in previous chapters, the Conclusion demonstrates how these informed the process at Royal Festival Hall. It also explores the differing forms of experience and expertise that formed a valid part of the hall’s construction. and the contemporary social and cultural priorities which were brought to the fore as a result. This is the point when international knowledge-sharing was becoming a reality, and when the formal and informal work of the preceding decades was ultimately expressed in a landmark building. This is the contemporary era of architectural acoustics.
Looking closely at one early collage, Untitled (Genet after Brassai) (1979), this essay considers the queer literary influences on the art of David Wojnarowicz (1954–92). I argue that his inclusion of portraits of writers he admired within various artworks functions as a metonymic form of citation, focused on a lineage of queer, outsider writers like Jean Genet and Arthur Rimbaud. Moreover, such citation functions within his creative practice as a paradigmatically postmodern practice, which I link to writings by Douglas Crimp and Craig Owens. I end by considering the links between Wojnarowicz’s AIDS activism and postmodernist theory, centred on New York City and contemporaneous critical discourse.
On a Saturday in April 1924, a small group of musicians, architects, and physicists assembled in what was then the British government laboratory for research in building acoustics. The purpose of the gathering was to conduct a series of experiments to scientifically define acoustic conditions related to musical tone in buildings. Although they were not part of the official research agenda, these experiments were quietly sanctioned during a gap in the formal research programme for the Assembly Chamber at Delhi. Chapter 4 discusses the experimental work undertaken in 1924, the outputs, and their subsequent mid-century application in designing for musical tone in British concert halls. The chapter explores how the formal research programme for Delhi provided a framework for a new and informal research track in ‘designing for musical tone’ which was refined over the succeeding decades. It looks at the manner in which the numerical data from Delhi was used to quantify acoustic environmental conditions for concert hall design, and how the outputs were first implemented in the design of Cowles-Voysey’s White Rock music pavilion at Hastings.