A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
For the first time, the pioneering book that launched the study of art and curiosity cabinets is available in English.
Julius von Schlosser’s Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance (Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance) is a seminal work in the history of art and collecting. Originally published in German in 1908, it was the first study to interpret sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cabinets of wonder as precursors to the modern museum, situating them within a history of collecting going back to Greco-Roman antiquity. In its comparative approach and broad geographical scope, Schlosser’s book introduced an interdisciplinary and global perspective to the study of art and material culture, laying the foundation for museum studies and the history of collections. Schlosser was an Austrian professor, curator, museum director, and leading figure of the Vienna School of art history whose work has not achieved the prominence of his contemporaries until now.
This eloquent and informed translation is preceded by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s substantial introduction. Tracing Schlosser’s biography and intellectual formation in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, it contextualizes his work among that of his contemporaries, offering a wealth of insights along the way.
Five studies by leading art scholars focus on key works in the collection and contribute to a new understanding of the origins of many of the pieces. Two introductory essays comment on the character of the collection as a whole, its acquisition by Duke University, and its conservation. Finally, the catalog section discusses the more important pieces in the collection and is followed by a checklist of entries and smaller photographs of all other objects.
Contributors. Ilene H. Forsyth, Jean M. French, Dorothy F. Glass, Dieter Kimpel, Jill Meredith, Linda S. Roundhill
This richly illustrated biography documents their lives from a unique perspective: that of their great-niece, who wrote this book with her daughter. Ellen B. Hirschland and Nancy Hirschland Ramage delve into Claribel’s and Etta’s world, following the sisters through letters and personal stories as they travel to meet some of the artists whose works would turn their adjoining apartments into a gallery. They bought art by Manet, Gauguin, and Cézanne, as well as of Picasso and Matisse, whom they came to know well. The sisters’ experiences in Paris from 1901 through the 1920s provide an exceptional view of the bright artistic ferment in the city at that time. They were two Victorian women from Baltimore buying avant-garde masterpieces, attending salons with friends Gertrude and Leo Stein, and building a collection that would initially enrage the conservative people around them. Only with time would their keen eyes and unwavering taste prove them right.
This new fascicule of the CVA—the tenth issued by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the first ever to be published open access—presents a selection of Attic red-figure column and volute kraters ranging from 520 to 510 BCE through the early fourth century BCE. Among the works included are a significant dinoid volute krater and a volute krater with the Labors of Herakles that is attributed to the Kleophrades Painter.
The free online edition of this open-access catalogue is available at www.getty.edu/publications/cva10/. Also available are free PDF, EPUB, and Kindle/MOBI downloads of the book, CSV and JSON downloads of the object data, and JPG downloads of the catalogue images.
In 1916 a clearly agitated Henry Ford famously proclaimed that “history is more or less bunk.” Thirteen years later, however, he opened the outdoor history museum Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. It was written history's focus on politicians and military heroes that was bunk, he explained. Greenfield Village would correct this error by celebrating farmers and inventors.
The village eventually included a replica of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory, the Wright brothers' cycle shop and home from Dayton, Ohio, and Ford's own Michigan birthplace. But not all of the structures were associated with famous men. Craft and artisan shops, a Cotswold cottage from England, and two brick slave cabins also populated the village landscape. Ford mixed replicas, preserved buildings, and whole-cloth constructions that together celebrated his personal worldview.
Greenfield Village was immediately popular. But that only ensured that the history it portrayed would be interpreted not only by Ford but also by throngs of visitors and the guides and publicity materials they encountered. After Ford's death in 1947, administrators altered the village in response to shifts in the museum profession at large, demographic changes in the Detroit metropolitan area, and the demands of their customers.
Jessie Swigger analyzes the dialogue between museum administrators and their audiences by considering the many contexts that have shaped Greenfield Village. The result is a book that simultaneously provides the most complete extant history of the site and an intimate look at how the past is assembled and constructed at history museums.
Winner of the 2026 PIA MidAmerica GraphEx Award for Best of Category, Hardcover Book Binding
Finalist for the 2026 Locus Awards in the Illustrated and Art Books category
"The Korshak Collection is a portrait and biography of a man and his family, who once looked upon the dark skies and saw Immortals, gods hunting in the storm clouds. Stephen Korshak decided to dedicate his life to tell us all how the thunder sounded and preserve the outlines of the cosmos for the awe of us all. Enjoy, believe—be amazed." —Guillermo del Toro, from the Foreword
Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from the Korshak Collection features artwork by pioneering artists from over 160 years of published works of science fiction and fantasy. The illustrations in the collection appeared on the covers of timeless novels such as the Tarzan series by Edgar Rice Burroughs and classic pulp magazines from the 1930s through 1960s, such as Amazing Stories and Weird Tales. They accompany images of mischievous satyrs, ethereal mermaids, and spell-casting witches for texts ranging from The Tempest, Don Quixote, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to works by Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells. Alongside essays about famous illustrators such as Arthur Rackham and Aubrey Beardsley, contributors engage in a critical reassessment of understudied artists such as José Segrelles, Wladyslaw Benda, Margaret Brundage, and Hannes Bok. The book includes a foreword by Guillermo del Toro, a preface by Kevin J. Anderson, an introduction by Michael Dirda, and an interview with renowned contemporary illustration artist Michael Whelan.
The 400 entries in this volume include all of the Latin inscriptions on stone or metal in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan; they represent the largest, and arguably the most important, collection of Latin inscriptions in the Western Hemisphere. The collection is notable not just for its size but for the fact that almost all the inscriptions were acquired by purchase for their scholarly and educational value to the members of the university community. Because of this, the collection is also an important testimony to a seminal phase in the development of the study of Classics at the University of Michigan. For the first time ever, this project makes the Latin inscriptions of the Kelsey available in one volume and has provided an opportunity to reexamine some texts that have not been edited in over a century. The commentaries for this edition have benefited from a wealth of recent scholarship resulting in some amended readings and reidentification of texts.
Steven L. Tuck is Assistant Professor of Classics at Miami University of Ohio.
The Kelsey Museum Studies series, edited by University of Michigan professors Elaine Gazda, Margaret Cool Root, and John Pedley, is designed to publish unusual material in the Museum's collections, together with reports of current and past archaeological expeditions sponsored by the University of Michigan.
Navajo Textiles provides a nuanced account the Navajo weavings in the Crane Collection at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science—one of the largest collections of Navajo textiles in the world. Bringing together the work of anthropologists and indigenous artists, the book explores the Navajo rug trade in the mid-nineteenth century and changes in the Navajo textile market while highlighting the museum’s important, though still relatively unknown, collection of Navajo textiles.
In this unique collaboration among anthropologists, museums, and Navajo weavers, the authors provide a narrative of the acquisition of the Crane Collection and a history of Navajo weaving. Personal reflections and insights from foremost Navajo weavers D. Y. Begay and Lynda Teller Pete are also featured, and more than one hundred stunning full-color photographs of the textiles in the collection are accompanied by technical information about the materials and techniques used in their creation. An introduction by Ann Lane Hedlund documents the growing collaboration between Navajo weavers and museums in Navajo textile research.
The legacy of Navajo weaving is complex and intertwined with the history of the Diné themselves. Navajo Textiles makes the history and practice of Navajo weaving accessible to an audience of scholars and laypeople both within and outside the Diné community.
Unlock the stories of Pablo Neruda’s rare nineteenth-century carved-wood ship figurehead collection in Chile, why they mattered in his tumultuous life, and how we benefit from them now.
Poet Pablo Neruda’s nineteenth-century ship figurehead collection in Chile is one of the most significant in the world. Containing carved wood images of dramatically postured men and women, these figures are now better understood due to years of research, a willingness to challenge Neruda’s ever-changing stories about them, and a realization that the names Neruda chose for his figureheads perhaps had more to do with his life than theirs. The rhythm and beauty of Neruda’s worn wood figures is counterpoint to his own tumultuous life as an author, politician, and communist dissident.
Collecting ship figureheads was central to Neruda’s passion for owning things made of wood, a material he said was his best friend, and for standing out among others as he gradually built the public persona that helped move him toward winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. With his choir of immobilized figureheads stationed upright in his living room and facing the Pacific Ocean, Neruda was surrounded by dramatic images from the sea that ignited his most powerful feelings.
The nineteenth century saw figureheads on the bows of ships of sail and steam, yet when a figurehead was lost or removed, its history soon disappeared. The significant ship figureheads that Neruda avidly collected preserve that history and reveal new dimensions concerning his life and work. Each year, his collection is viewed by thousands of visitors to the Pablo Neruda Foundation’s house museum at Isla Negra.
Portraits in a Nutshell showcases intricately carved snuff boxes and bottles sculpted from the Brazilian coquilla nut between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Both utilitarian and decorative, these bottles and boxes were produced and used by diverse people of wide-ranging geographic origin, racial background, and social standing. As a result, coquilla nut snuff boxes present a rich material archive of the Atlantic world and the central role of Indigenous and Black histories within it.
Despite being just three or four inches long, these coquilla nut snuff boxes encapsulate an early modern history of transoceanic movement and creativity. The carvings depict animals and fantastical creatures, scenes of religious and courtly life, portraits of political and military leaders, abolitionists and activists, and people at the margins of colonial society. These images are available to the public and to scholars for the first time in this book and will be of interest to antique collectors, art historians, social historians, and anyone interested in the unusual and the curious.
Over 250 detailed photographs of snuff bottles and boxes from the unique and wide-ranging collection of David Badger not only illustrate the exceptional skill of their creators but also tell the story of millions of Africans transported to Brazil during centuries of the transatlantic slave trade. The text demonstrates the interconnectedness of the Atlantic world, the movements of peoples and ideas, and the commercial exchange of goods and cultural and material objects in Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and North America. In this beautiful book, these objects reveal a story never before told.
With a preface by Matthew Francis Rarey, associate professor of African and Black Atlantic art history at Oberlin College, and an introduction by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, professor of art history at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Arthur Ross Gallery.
Among the first scholarly books dedicated to a private African American collection, Rethinking America’s Past: Voices from the Kinsey African American Art and History Collection both chronicles the reach of this important cultural collection and contributes to its project by sharing selected objects and stories with a broader audience. Essays range in subject from iconic African American artists, such as Loïs Mailou Jones and Beauford Delaney, to important historical figures such as Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, to individuals whose experiences might be lost to history but for the found objects that preserve their stories. Rethinking America’s Past demonstrates how the African American story, from slavery through the present, is represented and can be actively remembered through the act of collecting.
Rethinking America’s Past will appeal to audiences interested in African American history as well as art history, but its real power is in linking the two, showing how important collections are in constructing and repairing historical narratives, and how in the words of editor Tim Gruenewald, “Collecting overlooked aspects of our past and sharing such collections enables a deeper understanding of the present moment, and facilitates a more inclusive and just future.”
The forty-six pieces documented here include thirteen works that span the career of the great Romare Bearden, from his 1941 gouache painting Serenade to the important collages of the 1980s. Hill’s fascination with artists’ depiction of women is represented in Elizabeth Catlett’s lithographs, many of them from the 1992 series “For My People,” and her sculptures in stone, bronze, and onyx. In addition to these two giants of twentieth-century art, the Hill Collection features pieces by Phoebe Beasley, Arthello Beck Jr., John Biggers, Malcolm Brown, John Coleman, Edward Jackson, and Hughie Lee Smith.
Hill began collecting art in the early 1990s after learning from his parents to appreciate artworks not only as objects of beauty but as expressions of heritage and culture. According to the internationally known curator Alvia J. Wardlaw, he is part of an emerging group of young African American collectors who have “raised the bar for others.” Hill writes, “Getting to know yourself means understanding your background and appreciating those who have come before you. My father has a saying he uses in speeches: ‘To be ignorant of your past is to remain a boy. ‘The interest in my heritage as an African American is reflected in this collection.”
Something All Our Own features Wardlaw’s essay on the history of African American collecting. It also features articles about Bearden and Catlett by the scholars Elizabeth Alexander and Beverly Guy-Sheftall and reflections about Hill by the historian John Hope Franklin, Duke’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, and the sportswriter William C. Rhoden. Hill and his father, the NFL great Calvin Hill, contribute a dialogue that explores their motivations for collecting art.
At the heart of the book are the exquisite color photographs of the forty-six artworks included in the exhibition, with commentary by Wardlaw and by Hill himself.
As a star athlete, Grant Hill is well aware that African Americans who excel in sports and entertainment are more broadly recognized than their counterparts in artistic fields. He strives to inspire young people to explore their heritage and broaden their concept of excellence by learning more about African American art. By sharing his artworks with collectors and fans, Hill reminds us that while the jump shot is ephemeral, art is enduring.
This sumptuous volume begins with an introduction by Douglas Palmer that places Smith’s work in the context of earlier, concurrent, and subsequent ideas regarding the structure and natural processes of the earth, geographical mapping, and biostratigraphical theories. The book is then organized into four parts, each beginning with four sheets from Smith’s hand-colored, 1815 strata map, accompanied by related geological cross-sections and county maps, and followed by fossil illustrations by Smith contemporary James Sowerby, all organized by strata. Essays between each section explore the aims of Smith’s work and its application in the fields of mining, agriculture, cartography and hydrology. Strata concludes with reflections on Smith’s later years as an itinerant geologist and surveyor, plagiarism by a rival, receipt of the first Wollaston Medal in recognition of his achievements, and the influence of his geological mapping and biostratigraphical theories on the sciences—all of which culminated in the establishment of the modern geological timescale.
Featuring a foreword by Robert Macfarlane, Strata is a glorious testament to the lasting geological and illustrative genius of William Smith, a collection as colossal and awe-inspiring as the layers of the Earth themselves.
"This book will surely appeal not only to those who are interested in the Apache, material culture studies, or the potential of Native American museum resources as cultural and historical documents, but also to those who are concerned with the way humans adapted to the environment and thus 'utilized their world so well.'" —African Arts
"It is a remarkably beautiful and detailed catalog of the Goodwin and Guenther collections of Wester Apache artiffacts in the Arizona State Musuem—and a lot more! . . . A section of thirty-two color photographs by award-winning photographer Helga Teiwes is the delectable frosting on this rich and satisfying cake." —Journal of Arizona History
Woven from the Center presents breathtaking basketry from some of the greatest weavers in the Southwest. Each sandal and mat fragment, each bowl and jar, every water bottle and whimsy is infused with layers of aesthetic, cultural, and historical meanings. This book offers stunning photos and descriptions of woven works from Tohono O’odham, Akimel O’odham, Hopi, Western Apache, Yavapai, Navajo, Pai, Paiute, New Mexico Pueblo, Eastern Apache, Seri, Yaqui, Mayo, and Tarahumara communities.
This richly illustrated volume stands on its own as a definitive look at basketry of the Greater Southwest, including northern Mexico. It also serves as a companion to the peerless collection of U.S. Southwest and Northwest Mexican Native American basketry curated at the Arizona State Museum in Tucson, Arizona. Comprehensive in its coverage, this work is based on decades of research on weavers, collectors, and donors. It includes ample illustrations of basket weavers, past and present, bringing to life the people behind these wonderful woven treasures.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, “professional Yorkshireman” W. A. Ismay (1910–2001) amassed over 3,600 pieces by more than 500 potters. Surrounded by his family of pots, he lived in a tiny terraced house in Wakefield, Yorkshire, and left his collection and its associated archive to the city of York upon his death. This eclectic group of works contains objects created by many of the most significant potters working in the United Kingdom, including Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, Bernard Leach, and Michael Cardew, as well as lesser-known makers.
With new academic research into this little-studied collection and archive, Yorkshire Tea Ceremony explores Ismay’s journey as a collector and offers fresh perspectives on a marginalized area of British Modernism. Tracing the collection’s journey from private to public ownership illuminates issues surrounding the acquisition and reveals the transformative effect it has had on both curatorial practice and the ambition of regional public institutions. The W. A. Ismay Collection offers a well-documented example of the valuable contribution collectors can make to the British studio ceramics movement.
Published to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the collection’s move from private to public ownership, this volume accompanies an exhibition at York Art Gallery’s Centre of Ceramic Art (CoCA).
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