Originating from the Shinto tradition, shinzjj (wooden statues of kami) are among the finest wooden sculptures in Japan and have long commanded great reverence from the Japanese people. This comprehensive examination of the stylistic and iconographic evolution of shinzjj from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries is the first of its kind. Primary attention is given to images of Hachiman, which are the earliest surviving examples of Shinto deities depicted in anthropomorphic form. Focus on this lineage of forms provides a clear view of the development of Shinto aesthetic attitudes and their relationship to Buddhist influences.

Three works are examined in detail: a ninth-century triad housed at Toji, Kyoto; a tenth-century triad made for Yakushiji, Nara; and a single statue carved by Kaikei in the thirteenth century for Todaiji, Nara. A less-detailed discussion of other portrayals of Hachiman and other deities amplifies the central focus. This authoritative text is enriched by the inclusion of 76 plates, many depicting hitherto unknown or seldom-seen sculptures. The book should be of great interest to scholars of art, religion, and history.

The curious course of silver through human history unfolds in this rich and engaging book, accompanied by striking illustrations from the British Museum.

Philippa Merriman takes the reader back to the earliest uses of silver: in ingots and coins, dowries, hoards, and college plate. She shows us how silver demonstrated status—whether for an individual, as ornament, furnishings, and a store of wealth; or for a society, as grave decor, civic regalia, and ritual goods. And she traces the long and fascinating history of silver’s service as personal adornment—on heads, hands, wrists, ears, legs, and feet, and as accessories ranging from swords and baldrics to snuffboxes, walking sticks, fans, and chatelaines.

From the practical aspects of working silver to its role in magic, myth, and ritual in cultures as disparate as the Vikings and the Bedouins of North Africa, this exquisite book offers a full and fitting reflection of this precious metal’s power to move us.

That Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) became the most fashionable painter of his time was not simply due to his artistic gifts or good fortune. The art of pleasing, Richard Wendorf contends, was as much a part of Reynolds’s success—in his life and in his work—as the art of painting. The author’s examination of Reynolds’s life and career illuminates the nature of eighteenth-century English society in relation to the enterprise of portrait-painting. Conceived as an experiment in cultural criticism, written along the fault lines that separate (but also link) art history and literary studies, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society explores the ways in which portrait-painting is embedded in the social fabric of a given culture as well as in the social and professional transaction between the artist and his or her subject. In addition to providing a new view of Reynolds, Wendorf’s book develops a thoroughly new way of interpreting portraiture.

Wendorf takes us into Reynolds’s studio to show us the artist deploying his considerable social and theatrical skills in staging his sittings as carefully orchestrated performances. The painter’s difficult relationship with his sister Frances (also an artist and writer), his complicated maneuvering with patrons, the manner in which he set himself up as an artist and businessman, his highly politicized career as the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts: as each of these aspects of Reynolds’s practice comes under Wendorf’s scrutiny, a new picture of the painter emerges—more sharply defined and fully fleshed than the Reynolds of past portraits, and clearly delineating his capacity for provoking ambivalence among friends and colleagues, and among viewers and readers today.

Over the last three decades, the visual artist William Kentridge has garnered international acclaim for his work across media including drawing, film, sculpture, printmaking, and theater. Rendered in stark contrasts of black and white, his images reflect his native South Africa and, like endlessly suggestive shadows, point to something more elemental as well. Based on the 2012 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Six Drawing Lessons is the most comprehensive collection available of Kentridge’s thoughts on art, art-making, and the studio.

Art, Kentridge says, is its own form of knowledge. It does not simply supplement the real world, and it cannot be purely understood in the rational terms of traditional academic disciplines. The studio is the crucial location for the creation of meaning: the place where linear thinking is abandoned and the material processes of the eye, the hand, the charcoal and paper become themselves the guides of creativity. Drawing has the potential to educate us about the most complex issues of our time. This is the real meaning of “drawing lessons.”

Incorporating elements of graphic design and ranging freely from discussions of Plato’s cave to the Enlightenment’s role in colonial oppression to the depiction of animals in art, Six Drawing Lessons is an illustration in print of its own thesis of how art creates knowledge. Foregrounding the very processes by which we see, Kentridge makes us more aware of the mechanisms—and deceptions—through which we construct meaning in the world.

In 1853, Eyre Crowe, a young British artist, visited a slave auction in Richmond, Virginia. Harrowed by what he witnessed, he captured the scene in sketches that he would later develop into a series of illustrations and paintings, including the culminating painting, Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia.

Social Fabric: Art and Activism in Contemporary Brazil brings together the work of ten artists who reflect upon the long-standing histories of oppressive power structures in the territory now known as Brazil. Blurring the line between art and activism and spanning installation, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and video, these artists contribute to local and global conversations about the state of democracy, racial injustice, and the violence inflicted by the nation-state. This first English-language, book-length study of contemporary Brazilian art in relationship to activism assembles artist-authored texts, interviews, essays, and a conceptual mapping of Brazilian history to illuminate the function of art as a platform for critical engagement with the historical, political, and cultural configurations of a particular place. By refusing to remain neutral, these artists create spaces of vibrant and vital community and self-construction to explore how healing and justice may be possible, especially in the Black, LGBTQIA+, and Indigenous communities to which many of them belong.

Hailed as a landmark in its field since its first publication in 1984, Denis E. Cosgrove’s Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape has been influential well beyond geography. It has continued to spark lively debate among historians, geographers, art historians, social theorists, landscape architects, and others interested in the social and cultural politics of landscape.

In Modris Eksteins’s hands, the interlocking stories of Vincent van Gogh and art dealer Otto Wacker reveal the origins of the fundamental uncertainty that is the hallmark of the modern era. Through the lens of Wacker’s sensational 1932 trial in Berlin for selling fake Van Goghs, Eksteins offers a unique narrative of Weimar Germany, the rise of Hitler, and the replacement of nineteenth-century certitude with twentieth-century doubt.

Berlin after the Great War was a magnet for art and transgression. Among those it attracted was Otto Wacker, a young gay dancer turned art impresario. His sale of thirty-three forged Van Goghs and the ensuing scandal gave Van Gogh’s work unprecedented commercial value. It also called into question a world of defined values and standards that had already begun to erode during the war. Van Gogh emerged posthumously as a hero who rejected organized religion and other suspect sources of authority in favor of art. Self-pitying Germans saw in his biography a series of triumphs—over defeat, poverty, and meaninglessness—that spoke to them directly. Eksteins shows how the collapsing Weimar Republic that made Van Gogh famous and gave Wacker an opportunity for reinvention propelled a third misfit into the spotlight. Taking advantage of the void left by a gutted belief system, Hitler gained power by fashioning myths of mastery.

Filled with characters who delight and frighten, Solar Dance merges cultural and political history to show how upheavals of the early twentieth century gave rise to a search for authenticity and purpose.

What do contemporary American movies and directors have to say about the relationship between nature and art? How do science fiction films like Steven Spielberg's A.I. and Darren Aronofsky's π represent the apparent oppositions between nature and culture, wild and tame?

Steven Dillon's intriguing new volume surveys American cinema from 1990 to 2002 with substantial descriptions of sixty films, emphasizing small-budget independent American film. Directors studied include Steven Soderbergh, Darren Aronofsky, Todd Haynes, Harmony Korine, and Gus Van Sant, as well as more canonical figures like Martin Scorcese, Robert Altman, David Lynch, and Steven Spielberg. The book takes its title and inspiration from Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris, a science fiction ghost story that relentlessly explores the relationship between the powers of nature and art. The author argues that American film has the best chance of aesthetic success when it acknowledges that a film is actually a film. The best American movies tell an endless ghost story, as they perform the agonizing nearness and distance of the cinematic image.

This groundbreaking commentary examines the rarely seen bridge between select American film directors and their typically more adventurous European counterparts. Filmmakers such as Lynch and Soderbergh are cross-cut together with Tarkovsky and the great French director, Jean-Luc Godard, in order to test the limits and possibilities of American film. Both enthusiastically cinephilic and fiercely critical, this book puts a decade of U.S. film in its global place, as part of an ongoing conversation on nature and art.

American mariners made more than 175 voyages to the Northwest Coast during the half-century after the ships Columbia and Washington pioneered the route from Boston in 1787. Although obtaining sea otter pelts for the China trade was the original purpose of the voyages, the art and culture of Northwest Coast Indians so intrigued and fascinated American sailors that the collecting of ethnographic artifacts became an important secondary trade. The Indians traded masks, hats, paddles, pipes, fishhooks, spoons, clothing, and canoe models from their canoes to the decks of Yankee vessels.

In this act of exchange, the artifacts moved from one world to another—first to shipboard, and later to the “cabinets of curiosities” of learned societies in Massachusetts, where many of them found homes. The objects were the first examples of Northwest Coast Indian material culture to enter American museums, and they influenced perceptions of Northwest Coast Indian people and their complex cultures.

By carefully researching the records of ten institutions and the shipboard journals of more than a dozen mariners, Mary Malloy has brought details about these early collections together for the first time. From utilitarian objects to artistic masterpieces, these souvenirs tell a story of commerce and cultural exchange that reached across the continent during the period when Americans were first beginning to look westward.

Bridging print culture and performance, Spectacular Wealth draws on eighteenth-century festival accounts to explore how colonial residents of the silver-mining town of Potosí, in the viceroyalty of Peru, and the gold-mining region of Minas Gerais, in Brazil, created rich festive cultures that refuted European allegations of barbarism and greed. In her examination of the festive participation of the towns’ diverse inhabitants, including those whose forced or slave labor produced the colonies’ mineral wealth, Lisa Voigt shows how Amerindians, Afro-descendants, Europeans, and creoles displayed their social capital and cultural practices in spectacular performances.

Tracing the multiple meanings and messages of civic festivals and religious feast days alike, Spectacular Wealth highlights the conflicting agendas at work in the organization, performance, and publication of festivals. Celebrants and writers in mining boomtowns presented themselves as far more than tributaries yielding mineral wealth to the Spanish and Portuguese empires, using festivals to redefine their reputations and to celebrate their cultural, spiritual, and intellectual wealth.

Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) was a true nineteenth-century visionary—a painter, printmaker, set designer, entrepreneur, inventor, and pioneer of photography. Though he was widely celebrated beyond his own lifetime for his invention of the daguerreotype, it was his origins as a theatrical designer and purveyor of visual entertainment that paved the way for Daguerre’s emergence as one of the world’s most iconic imagemakers.

In Speculating Daguerre, Stephen C. Pinson reinterprets the story of the man and his time, painting a vivid picture of Daguerre as an innovative artist and savvy impresario whose eventual fame as a photographer eclipsed everything that had come before. Drawing upon previously unpublished correspondence and unplumbed archival sources, Pinson mixes biography with an incisive study of Daguerre’s wide-ranging involvement in visual culture. From his work as a commercial lithographer to his coinvention of the Paris Diorama—a theater in the round in which Daguerre employed natural light and special effects to simulate time and movement in large-scale paintings—here we are given access to Daguerre the artist, whose tireless experimentation, entrepreneurial spirit, and exceptional talent for popular spectacle helped to usher in a new visual age.

Filled with more than one hundred illustrations and including the first complete catalogue of Daguerre’s paintings, works on paper, and daguerreotypes to appear in print, the publication of Speculating Daguerre will be a much-heralded event for anyone with even a passing interest in one of the most fascinating characters in the history of photography.