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
The introduction explains the starting point of the book, a methodological reflection that assesses how the business vision of commissionaire Giovanni Battista Giorgini and his establishment of the Italian High Fashion Shows in Florence in 1951 have crystallised into a mythologised place in the history of Italian fashion. The text adopts the historical perspective of historian Marc Bloch’s preoccupation with origins to closely read the celebratory narrative that mythicized Giorgini in Italian fashion history until the early 2000s. It contextualises the research presented in the book with previous studies of fashion under Fascism, to highlight the continuity that exists between the regime and democracy in terms of business practices, fashion professionals and manufacturers. The chapter then presents the theoretical framework, grounded in the new business history of fashion studies and particularly on Regina Lee Blaszczyk’s work on fashion intermediaries. It outlines the need to understand the social realities of postwar Italian fashion through a detailed study of the activities situated between production and consumption, well represented by the main actors discussed in the book: the G.B. Giorgini firm, the non-profit agency Handicraft Development, Inc., its Italian branch CADMA, and other Italian fashion councils. Finally, after a critical evaluation of the primary sources discussed, especially those in the Giorgini archive in Florence, the chapter explains the book's contribution to the field of transnational history, as it rewrites a history of the cultural and commercial interactions of postwar Italy with North America within the larger configuration of the international fashion market.
The chapter explains how a non-profit agency called Handicraft Development, Inc. was established in the United States with joint efforts from Italians, Americans, and Italian Americans. This agency played a crucial role in helping Italian fashion merchandise emerge in the American market as luxury export goods. The chapter is divided into five sections that explain the multifaceted issues that were overcome. One of the main issues was the perception of American customers towards Italy in the immediate postwar years. Many Americans associated Italy with Fascist models of production and propaganda, which created a negative image of Italian fashion merchandise. Another issue was related to production: Italian handicraft makers needed training and consultancy to learn how to adapt local aesthetics to American consumers. This was important to ensure that Italian fashion merchandise became desirable to the American market. To bolster the reputation of Italian fashion merchandise in the United States, it was deemed necessary to enhance its perceived quality, which would require a corresponding increase in the price. However, it was important to ensure that the price increase did not render the goods unattainable, to maintain accessibility for interested buyers. This was a crucial step in positioning Italian fashion merchandise as a high-end commodity in the American market. The chapter ends by discussing the impact of the House of Italian Handicrafts showroom in New York on promoting Italian fashion as non-competitive to Americans, while also bolstering its artistic tradition.
The chapter discusses the state of international fashion and its circulation in 1944, as the war slowly drew to a close. It introduces some key figures who will appear later in other chapters, such as department store director Stanley Marcus, journalists Carmel Snow, Bettina Ballard and Marya Mannes, and socialite and fashion designer Simonetta Visconti. Their relevance is discussed here in terms of their contribution to the earliest discussions of the emerging novelty of Italian fashion as it appeared in US fashion columns and magazines before the end of the war. The chapter chronicles relevant appearances and mentions of Italian fashion in American fashion magazines. It focuses on Rome as the narrative was subjected to the latest developments of the war: liberated in June 1944, Rome became the first Italian city to have a fashion scene worth mentioning. It presents a brief account of the fashion houses that continued to operate, such as Gabriellasport; contextualises them with reports from the Italian fashion magazine Bellezza, which was still linked to the Fascist administration, and the supporting fashion houses based in northern Italy; and finally outlines the tropes often used by American journalists to describe products (leather accessories and sandals), people (Italian female socialites), and their characteristics (the timeless grace of the nobility, the hardworking stamina of the artisans). This, in turn, begins the rehabilitation that Italians need as a country to emerge on the international fashion market as a solid commercial and political ally of the United States.
The conclusion deals with some of the very thorniest questions of Siqueiros’s mural production. Siqueiros was indeed at times authoritarian. He never wavered in his support of a Soviet Union that was increasingly seen by progressive communists as an unsalvageable shill for Stalinism; he had a “star” position within the communist art world of the time that gave him privileges unavailable to the working class he sought to represent. Yet, the murals of his late career are highly valuable. They dramatize the need for organization, leadership, and analysis as core components of an effective left-wing politics. They never descend into the kind of theoretical solipsism that began to characterize Marxist debate in the academy in the 1970s. They were unfailingly attentive to the travails of the global working class and, as such, create a kind of dialogue with the dead meant as a productive spur to revolutionary political action. They stand as a testimony to the one-time power of the organized, international, communist movement which in many contexts—and despite its many problems—served as a progressive political force. Thus, they stand too as an emblem of the massive cultural and political gap that separates Siqueiros’s time period from our own, in which progressive politics lacks a coherent center and seems too often to fail at the day-to-day work of political organization based on a rationally arrived at program.
If Siqueiros’s political murals during the war had taken their energy from the hard edges of military struggle, his murals of 1950–51 had a plastic clarity and monumental directness that represented the painter’s closest approach to orthodox socialist realism. Chapter 2 interprets two murals of this period, painted at the Palace of Fine Arts—The Apotheosis of Cuauhtémoc (1950) and The Torment of Cuauhtémoc (1950/51)—along with his Man, Master Not Slave of Technology (1951) painted at the Polytechnic School. The strident dialectical duality and plastic clarity of these murals suggest that Siqueiros was sensitive to the amplified “anti-formalism” campaigns of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. The works emphasize the role of strong individual leadership to the mobilization of the “masses,” which helps explain the resemblance of the heroic human figures in the murals to contemporaneous sculptures of Lenin in the Eastern Bloc. The murals are national in outlook, but envision national resistance movements as dovetailing with Leninist ideas about the nature of revolution. Yet Siqueiros’s brand of socialist realism remained different from Soviet academic models: highly concentrated, dynamic, and committed to a complex understanding of communist ideas about anti-imperialist and the “new man” that were crucial in Marxist cultural production of the period. Cuauhtémoc is an emblem of the organized, anti-imperialist working class and a visual lens through which the proletarianization of the developed world is imagined. Man, Master Not Slave of Technology is similarly pared down and structural in its approach, but introduces to Siqueiros’s work in a new way of the theme of science, which he renders not as a historical force in its own right, but as a tool to be harnessed and controlled by the working class as it makes history.
Chapter 4 treats From Porfirianism to the Revolution (1957/66), Siqueiros’s large-scale mural at the Museum of National History, which was more directly agitational in its forms and iconography than the works of the late 1940s and early 1950s and placed much greater emphasis on the role of direct action and self-organized working-class agency, a quality that brings the work tentatively into the orbit of New Left de-Stalinization, especially in the Communist Party of Italy (PCI). Siqueiros had numerous friends in the PCI, including Guttuso and Zavattini, whom he visited in the fall of 1956, just before starting work on the mural. Yet the work’s portrait detail and panoramic sweep allow for interpreting it, in part, as an example of so-called “critical realism,” a sub-version of socialist realism that was hotly debated in nearly all communist parties in the period during which Siqueiros was conceiving and working on the mural. In addition, the work’s references to anarchist traditions in Mexico make it somewhat less orthodox and Soviet-oriented than the works of the 1944–55 period.
The Introduction explains Siqueiros’s significance, briefly sketches his biography, and states the main arguments of the book. Siqueiros used avant-garde visual innovations tactically to create a modernist aesthetic that blended monumentality and estrangement. His internationalism was based on a Marxist world view that saw the national liberation of oppressed peoples as dovetailing with the global ambitions of the communist movement. While Siqueiros remained loyal to the Soviet Union in the later part of his career, his artworks straddled the line between reformist and orthodox Marxism as his iconography drew on democratic working-class traditions and dramatizations of Soviet power. His work of the early 1950s was his most monumental and represented his closest approach to Socialist Realism. His work of the late 1950s, by contrast, was much more agitational and much more interested in representing a popular, emancipatory politics in line with the reformist impulses of de-Stalinization. His work of the 1960s was more elegiac: a profound rumination on the history of the global working class during a time of both hope and pessimism for the painter and his comrades in France, Italy, the Soviet Union, and the United States.
David Alfaro Siqueiros was perhaps the most important communist painter of the twentieth century. The realist and experimental murals he created in the later part of his career were strident yet intricate expressions of his political commitments. Meant to foster analysis, articulate political strategy, and provoke emotions, his works were attuned to the tactical needs of the working-class movement and to the international communist art of war-time and the post-war period. That art, from Mexico to Britain to France to Italy to the Soviet Union, remained committed to the representation of the human figure yet used abstraction to render the movements of history in a Marxist way and to heighten the emotional effect of scenes depicting the struggles of indigenous freedom fighters, the travails of striking workers, and the suffering of the global proletariat. Seeing Siqueiros in an international context makes clear that his politics, while strident and occasionally dogmatic, were highly complex: they provided a foundation for—rather than an obstacle to—his efforts to create an art embedded in the day-to-day concerns and theoretical debates of the worldwide mass movement he saw himself as a part of. Siqueiros’s late murals—at times troubling, at times prescient—are aesthetically innovative and politically provocative: they deserve the close interpretation and careful contextualization they are given in this book.
Chapter 6 treats Siqueiros’s History of Theater and Cinematography in Mexico (1959), painted at the Jorge Negrete Theater and not yet complete upon Siqueiros’s arrest in 1960. Like the other two murals from the late 1950s, the work stands somewhat closer to reformist strands of Marxism, again through references to Mexican anarchist traditions, but also in the media critique the work exacts. Painted at the dawn of the television age, the mural, in dialogue with Siqueiros’s Spanish–Mexican Marxist acquaintance Adolfo Sánchez-Vázquez, mourns the fading possibilities of a truly democratic media sphere in which the masses create theater and film growing from their own everyday lives and seeks to resurrect the possibility of such a sphere by pointing to the radical theater of the Mexican Revolution. The dead worker depicted in the mural comes to represent the death of media democracy as the painting depicts the capitalist degeneration of working-class culture. This loss of what Sánchez-Vázquez called, “truly popular culture,” is a tragedy that runs in tandem with the tragedy of the striking railroad workers, depicted in the mural being beaten down by federal goons. The result, here, is that the anarchist penchant for direct action appears less heroic than at Chapultepec, as a premature attempt at agitation meets with failure.
Apology for the Future Victory of Medical Science over Cancer (1958), the subject of Chapter 5, painted at the oncology hospital in Mexico City’s Centro Médico, was produced as part of a tentative dialogue about reformist Marxism and about the role of Marxism outside the Soviet Union. In its composition and iconography, Siqueiros poses a dialectic of technology and society that charts a middle course between the apocalyptic view of modern systems found in Frankfurt School thinkers such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse and the utopian technophilia of post-Stalinist culture in the Soviet Union. The mural is quite frank in its depiction not only of the horrors of cancer cells themselves but also of the machinery used to detect them. The radioscopy machine depicted is fearsome looking, inducing feelings of alienation even as it is meant to banish fear. Through the relationship of machines to figures in the painting, Siqueiros seeks to present technology not as a symbol of universal progress but as a tool to be instrumentalized democratically by mobilized masses for their own benefit. The mural’s depiction of the unevenness of modernization processes as created by capital makes it a more reformist Marxist vision than was usual for Siqueiros. In addition, its representation of an anti-imperialist group of doctors working in tandem with peasants indicates an increase in Siqueiros’s attention to rural contexts and a flirtation with the less dogmatic leftism of the non-aligned movement at a time when Siqueiros was in contact with Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.