response to a dire social need, but also served as a key lever for building socialism and liberalism. Zooming into the interplay between ideologies and the production of space, this book shows that ideologies are never simply ‘written’ into space, but that their meaning is made and re-made, negotiated and contested, and sometimes cunningly subverted in and through space. How people live was and continues to be a profoundly political question that involves negotiations of and decisions on norms and ideals of citizenship, freedom, equality, property, democracy, family life, and gender relations – negotiations and decisions comes with legacies.

A revelatory exploration of one of Jean-François Millet’s most contentious paintings.

A monumentalizing portrayal of a peasant bowed over by brutal toil, Man with a Hoe (1860–62) by Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) is arguably the most art historically significant painting in the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of nineteenth-century European art. This volume situates the work in the arc of Millet’s career and traces its fascinating and contentious reception, from its scandalous debut at the 1863 Paris Salon to the years following its acquisition by American collectors in the 1890s. The essays examine the painting’s tumultuous public life, beginning in France, where critics attacked it on aesthetic and political grounds as a radical realist provocation; through its transformative movement in the art market during the remaining years of the artist’s life and following his death; to its highly publicized arrival in California as a celebrated masterpiece. In the United States it was enlisted to serve philanthropic interests, became the subject of a popular poem, and once again became embroiled in controversy, in this case one that was strongly inflected by American racial politics. This is the first publication dedicated to the work since its acquisition by the Getty Museum in 1985.

This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from September 12 to December 10, 2023.

The first book-length material study of the works of Belgian Surrealist René Magritte.
 
René Magritte (1898–1967) is the most famous Belgian artist of the twentieth century and a celebrated representative of the Surrealist movement. Much has been written about his practices, artistic community, and significance within the history of modernism, but little has been documented regarding his process.
 
This volume examines fifty oil paintings made by Magritte between 1921 and 1967, now held at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. This technical study of his works using noninvasive scientific imaging and chemical analysis reveals the artist’s painting materials, his habit of overpainting previous compositions, and the origins and mechanisms of surface and pigment degradation. Of interest to conservators, scientists, curators, and enthusiasts of twentieth-century art, this book expands our understanding of Magritte the artist and provides new and useful findings that will inform strategies for the future care of his works.

A critical reappraisal of one of the most popular architectural theories of the recent past on its fortieth anniversary.

Since its first appearance in 1981, critical regionalism has enjoyed a celebrated worldwide reception as an architectural theory that defends the cultural identity of a place resisting the homogenizing onslaught of globalization. Its principles of acknowledging the climate, history, materials, culture, and topography of a specific place are integrated into architects’ education across the globe. But at the same time, the richer cross-cultural history of critical regionalism has frequently been reduced to schematic juxtapositions of “the global” with “the local.”
 
This book uses more than fifty interviews and previously unpublished archival material from six countries to resituate critical regionalism within the wider framework of debates around postmodern architecture, the diverse contexts from which it emerged, and the cultural media complex that conditioned its reception. In so doing, it explores the intersection of three areas of growing historical and theoretical interest—postmodernism, critical regionalism, and globalization—and shows how the “periphery” was not just a passive recipient, but also an active generator of architectural theory and practice.