Results by title

The dispute over Edgar Degas’s Landscape with Smokestacks was featured in newspapers and on television. But because the suit was settled before trial, the story behind the headlines was never publicly presented. Howard J. Trienens, a lawyer for the defendant collector, traces the landscape’s travels from its prewar home to its current location in the Art Institute of Chicago, laying out the mystery surrounding the work and demonstrating the legal complexities that plague Holocaust restitution cases, yet are seldom examined in depth by the media.

The City of Refuge complex—commissioned by the Salvation Army as part of its program to transform social outcasts into spiritually renewed workers—represents a significant confluence of design principles, technological experiments, and attitudes on reform. It also provides rare insights into the work of one of the twentieth century's greatest architects, Le Corbusier.

Brian Brace Taylor draws on extensive archival research to reconstruct each step of the architect's attraction to the commission, his design process and technological innovations, the social and philosophical compatibility of the Salvation Army with Le Corbusier's own ideas for urban planning, and finally, the many modifications required, first to eliminate defects and later to accommodate changes in the services the building provided. Throughout, Taylor focuses on Le Corbusier's environmental, technological, and social intentions as opposed to his strictly formal intentions. He shows that the City of Refuge became primarily a laboratory for the architect's own research and not simply a conventional solution to residents' requirements or the Salvation Army's program.