Georg Simmel is one of the most original German thinkers of the twentieth century and is considered a founding architect of the modern discipline of sociology. Ranging over fundamental questions of the relationship of self and society, his influential writings on money, modernity, and the metropolis continue to provoke debate today.
Fascinated by the relationship between culture, society, and economic life, Simmel took an interest in myriad phenomena of aesthetics and the arts.  A friend of writers and artists such as Auguste Rodin, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Stefan George, he wrote dozens of pieces engaging with topics such as the work of Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rodin, Japanese art, naturalism and symbolism, Goethe, “art for art’s sake”, art exhibitions, and the aesthetics of the picture frame.

This is the first collection to bring together Simmel’s finest writing on art and aesthetics, and many of the items appear in English in this volume for the first time. The more than forty essays show the protean breadth of Simmel’s reflections, covering landscape painting, portraiture, sculpture, poetry, theater, form, style, and representation. An extensive introduction by Austin Harrington gives an overview of Simmel’s themes and elucidates the significance of his work for the many theorists who would be inspired by his ideas.

Something of an outsider to the formal academic world of his day, Simmel wrote creatively with the flair of an essayist. This expansive collection of translations preserves the narrative ease of Simmel’s prose and will be a vital source for readers with an interest in Simmel’s trailblazing ideas in modern European philosophy, sociology, and cultural theory.

An illuminating intellectual biography of a pioneering and singular figure in American art history.
 
Art historian George A. Kubler (1912–1996) was a foundational scholar of ancient American art and archaeology as well as Spanish and Portuguese architecture. During over five decades at Yale University, he published seventeen books that included innovative monographs, major works of synthesis, and an influential theoretical treatise. In this biography, Thomas F. Reese analyzes the early formation, broad career, and writings of Kubler, casting nuanced light on the origins and development of his thinking.
 
Notable in Reese’s discussion and contextualization of Kubler’s writings is a revealing history and analysis of his Shape of Time—a book so influential to students, scholars, artists, and curious readers in multiple disciplines that it has been continuously in print since 1962. Reese reveals how pivotal its ideas were in Kubler’s own thinking: rather than focusing on problems of form as an ordering principle, he increasingly came to sequence works by how they communicate meaning. The author demonstrates how Kubler, who professed to have little interest in theory, devoted himself to the craft of art history, discovering and charting the rules that guided the propagation of structure and significance through time.

One of the greatest and most admired artists of the twentieth century, Georgia O’Keeffe led a life rich in intense relationships—with family, friends, and especially with fellow artist Alfred Stieglitz. Her extraordinary accomplishments, such as the often eroticized flowers, bones, stones, skulls, and pelvises she painted with such command, are all the more remarkable when seen in the context of the struggle she waged between the rigorous demands of love and work.

When Roxana Robinson’s definitive biography of O’Keeffe was first published in 1989, it received rave reviews and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. This new edition features a new foreword by the author setting O’Keefe in an artistic context over the last thirty years since the book was first published, as well as previously unpublished letters of the young O’Keeffe to her lover, Arthur MacMahon. It also relates the story of Robinson’s own encounter with the artist. As interest in O’Keeffe continues to grow among museum-goers and scholars alike, this book remains indispensable for understanding her life and art.

The Getty Research Journal is an open-access publication presenting peer-reviewed articles on the visual arts of all cultures, regions, and time periods. The journal will be published through Getty’s Quire software beginning with this issue and made available free of charge in Web, PDF, and e-book formats. Topics relate to Getty collections, initiatives, and broad research interests. The journal welcomes a diversity of perspectives and methodological approaches, and seeks to include work that expands narratives on global cultures.

This issue features essays on a fragmentary Kufic Qurʼan of Early Abbasid style produced in Central Iran; cuttings from a twelfth-century Bible written in southeastern France for a Carthusian monastery in the orbit of the Grande Chartreuse; French archaeologist Jane Dieulafoy’s nineteenth-century documentation of Ilkhanid monuments, particularly the Emamzadeh Yahya, one of Iran’s most plundered tombs; the wartime encounter between Polish painters stationed in Baghdad and Iraqi artists during the British military reoccupation of Iraq in 1941–45; and the integration of photography and poetry in East German samizdat artists’ books of the 1980s. Shorter texts include a notice on a large folding panorama of the city of Salvador in the state of Bahia, taken around 1880 by Brazilian photographer Rodolpho Lindemann.

The free online edition of this open-access publication is at www.getty.edu/publications/grj/19/ and includes zoomable illustrations. Free PDF and EPUB downloads of the book are also available.

A call-to-arms for creatives to make their work widely accessible as a political and communal act.

There are many ways to go public in art. There’s exhibiting, publishing, or reviewing. It is only through making artworks public that they become accessible to audiences—a performative act that also involves a marketplace of money and attention. Yet reception is an essential aspect of production.

This book looks at why such reception should not be limited to the art public, positing that going public as an aesthetic and political strategy necessitates an emancipatory practice of public communication that allows, and aspires to, uncertainties, questions, and complexities.