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Looking East
Rubens’s Encounter with Asia
Stephanie Schrader
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2013

Peter Paul Rubens’s fascinating depiction of a man wearing Korean costume of around 1617, in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, has been considered noteworthy since it was made. Published to accompany an exhibition of Rubens’s Man in Korean Costume at the J. Paul Getty Museum from March 5 to June 9, 2013, Looking East: Rubens’s Encounter with Asia explores the various facets of Rubens’s compelling drawing of this Asian man that appears in later Rubens works. This large drawing was copied in Rubens’s studio during his own time and circulated as a reproductive print in the eighteenth century. Despite the drawing’s renown, however, the reasons why it was made and whether it actually depicts a specific Asian person remain a mystery. The intriguing story that develops involves a shipwreck, an unusual hat, the earliest trade between Europe and Asia, the trafficking of Asian slaves, and the role of Jesuit missionaries in Asia.

The book’s editor, Stephanie Schrader, traces the interpretations and meanings ascribed to this drawing over the centuries. Could Rubens have actually encountered a particular Korean man who sailed to Europe, or did he instead draw a model wearing Asian clothing or simply hear about such a person? What did Europeans really know about Korea during that period, and what might the Jesuits have had to do with the production of this drawing? All of these questions are asked and explored by the book’s contributors, who look at the drawing from various points of view.

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Playing the Fool
Subversive Laughter in Troubled Times
Ralph Lerner
University of Chicago Press, 2009

The role of the fool is to provoke the powerful to question their convictions, preferably while avoiding a beating. Fools accomplish this not by hectoring their audience, but by broaching sensitive topics indirectly, often disguising their message in a joke or a tale. Writers and thinkers throughout history have adopted the fool’s approach, and here Ralph Lerner turns to six of them—Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, Pierre Bayle, Benjamin Franklin, and Edward Gibbon—to elucidate the strategies these men employed to persuade the heedless, the zealous, and the overly confident to pause and reconsider.

As Playing the Fool makes plain, all these men lived through periods marked by fanaticism, particularly with regard to religion and its relation to the state. In such a troubled context, advocating on behalf of skepticism and against tyranny could easily lead to censure, or even, as in More’s case, execution. And so, Lerner reveals, these serious thinkers relied on humor to move their readers toward a more reasoned understanding of the world and our place in it. At once erudite and entertaining, Playing the Fool is an eloquently thought-provoking look at the lives and writings of these masterly authors.

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Rubens in Repeat
The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America
Aaron M. Hyman
J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 2021
Winner of the Latin American Studies Association's 2022 Best Book in Colonial Latin American Studies.

This book examines the reception in Latin America of prints designed by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, showing how colonial artists used such designs to create all manner of artworks and, in the process, forged new frameworks for artistic creativity.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) never crossed the Atlantic himself, but his impact in colonial Latin America was profound. Prints made after the Flemish artist’s designs were routinely sent from Europe to the Spanish Americas, where artists used them to make all manner of objects.

Rubens in Repeat is the first comprehensive study of this transatlantic phenomenon, despite broad recognition that it was one of the most important forces to shape the artistic landscapes of the region. Copying, particularly in colonial contexts, has traditionally held negative implications that have discouraged its serious exploration. Yet analyzing the interpretation of printed sources and recontextualizing the resulting works within period discourse and their original spaces of display allow a new critical reassessment of this broad category of art produced in colonial Latin America—art that has all too easily been dismissed as derivative and thus unworthy of sustained interest and investigation. This book takes a new approach to the paradigms of artistic authorship that emerged alongside these complex creative responses, focusing on the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that the use of European prints was an essential component of the very framework in which colonial artists forged ideas about what it meant to be a creator.
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Working Space
Frank Stella
Harvard University Press, 1986

Working Space affords a rare opportunity to view painting from the inside out, through the eyes of one of the world’s most prominent abstract painters. Frank Stella describes his perception of other artists’ work, as well as his own, in this handsomely illustrated volume.

Stella uses the crisis of representational art in sixteenth-century Italy to illuminate the crisis of abstraction in our time. The artists who followed Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian searched for new directions to advance their work from beneath the shadow of these great painters. Caravaggio pointed the way. So today, Stella believes, the successors to Picasso, Kandinsky, and Pollock must seek a pictorial space as potent as the one Caravaggio developed at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Stella sees Caravaggio as the pivot on whom painting turns, his consummate illusionism prompting the advance of a more flexible, more “real” space that allows painting to move and breathe, to suggest extension and unrestricted motion. Following Caravaggio, Rubens’ broad vision of fullness and active volume gave painting a momentum that helped propel it into the nineteenth century, where it came to rest in the genius of Géricault and Manet, themselves the precursors of modern painting.

Unfortunately, both contemporary abstract art and figurative painting have become trapped by ambiguous pictorial space and by a misguided emphasis on materiality (pigment for pigment’s sake). Pictorial qualities have given way to illustrational techniques. Abstract art has become verbal, defensive, and critical, caught up in theology masquerading as theory. Stella asserts that painting must understand its past, make use of the lucid realism of seventeenth-century Italy, and absorb a Mediterranean physicality to reinforce the lean spirituality of northern abstraction pioneered by Mondrian and Malevich. Working Space will provoke discussion and argument, not least because Stella offers nontraditional evaluations of the works of giants such as Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo, Picasso, and Pollock, as well as lesser-known figures including Annibale Carracci, Paulus Potter, and Morris Louis. The artist’s powers of discernment and the profusion of his ideas and opinions will dazzle and engage professionals, amateurs, and students of art.

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