This edited collection traces the impact of monographic exhibitions on the discipline of art history from the first examples in the late eighteenth century through the present. Roughly falling into three genres (retrospectives of living artists, retrospectives of recently deceased artists, and monographic exhibitions of Old Masters), specialists examine examples of each genre within their social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. Exhbitions covered include Nathaniel Hone’s 1775 exhibition, the Holbein Exhibition of 1871, the Courbet retrospective of 1882, Titian's exhibition in Venice, Poussin's Louvre retrospective of 1960, and El Greco's anniversaty exhibitions of 2014.

This Companion authoritatively points to the main areas of enquiry within the subject of African American art history. The first section examines how African American art has been constructed over the course of a century of published scholarship. The second section studies how African American art is and has been taught and researched in academia. The third part focuses on how African American art has been reflected in art galleries and museums. The final section opens up understandings of what we mean when we speak of African American art. This book will be of interest to graduate students, researchers, and professors and may be used in American art, African American art, visual culture, and culture classes.

An anthology of writings on exhibition practice from artists, critics, curators and art historians which address the contradictions posed by museum and gallery staged exhibitions, and the challenge of staging art presentations and displays.

Museums of Language and the Display of Intangible Cultural Heritage presents essays by practitioners based in language museums around the world. Describing their history, mission, and modes of display, contributors demonstrate the important role intangible heritage can and should play in the museum. Arguing that languages are among our most precious forms of cultural heritage, the book also demonstrates that they are at risk of neglect, and of endangerment from globalisation and linguistic imperialism. Including case studies from across Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia, this book documents the vital work being done by museums to help preserve languages and make them objects of broad public interest. Divided into three sections, contributions to the book focus on one of three types of museums: museums of individual languages, museums of language groups – both geographic and structural – and museums of writing. The volume presents practical information alongside theoretical discussions and state-of-the-art commentaries concerning the representation of languages and their cultural nature. Museums of Language and the Display of Intangible Cultural Heritage is the first volume to address the subject of language museums and, as such, should be of interest to academics, researchers, and postgraduate students in the fields of museum and cultural heritage studies, applied linguistics, anthropology, tourism, and public education.

Spaces of Connoisseurship explores the ‘who’, ‘where’ and ‘how’ of judging Old Master paintings in the nineteenth-century British art trade, via a comparison of family art dealers Thomas Agnew & Sons (“Agnew’s) and London’s National Gallery.

In recent years, Marcel Dzama (born 1974) has expanded his widely acclaimed drawing practice to incorporate theatrical realizations of his magical, myth-laden cosmology in three-dimensional dioramas and films. Behind Every Curtain provides a kind of sketchbook companion or dossier on the making of his latest film, A Game of Chess. This work draws on the importance of chess for the early twentieth-century avant-garde (Man Ray, Duchamp, Picabia) and the game's curious overlap with dance, in films and ballets by René Clair and--of especial significance for Dzama--Oskar Schlemmer, whose 1922 Triadic Balletincluded puppet-like masked figures performing on a checkered surface. In Dzama's film, characters based on chess pieces, clad in costumes made from papier-mâché, plaster and fiberglass and wearing elaborate masks, dance across a checkered board to engage their opponents in fatal skirmishes. Distinctions between reality and fiction collapse as both costumed and "real-life" characters in the film are killed. The filming and the creation of the costumes for A Game of Chess were carried out in Guadalajara, Mexico, and the influence of local crafts and religious traditions can also be felt throughout this body of work. Published on the occasion of Dzama's sixth solo exhibition at David Zwirner, this charming and affordable artist's book is packed with full-bleed drawings, sculptures, dioramas and film and production stills that give vivid testimony to the craft and thoroughness of his immensely popular art.