The Art Bulletin

Aspects of a Hindu temple founded at Krishnapuram in southern India in the 1560s, under the patronage of the Madurai Nayakas, governors of the Vijayanagara Empire, are resonant with meaning. Conservative design features and the temple’s status as an architectural “copy” of a famous sacred site commemorate the past and sacred geography of the Tamil poet-saints. Innovative architectural sculpture demonstrates the temple’s engagement with both the cultural and political past of the Tamil country and the more immediate imperial reality of the fragmenting Vijayanagara Empire as the Nayaka patrons sought to define themselves in a dynamic cultural and political arena.

Francisco Goya’s representation of the history of the bullfight in the Tauromaquia series (1815–16) provides important insights into national identity formation in early-nineteenth-century Spain. These prints give the Muslims of al-Andalus an unprecedented (and historically unfounded) role in the evolution of this quintessentially Spanish pastime. By equating national belonging with the development of cultural practices that transcend religious difference, the Tauromaquia absorbs the Islamic past into the fabric of Spanish history. In doing so it marks a significant departure from the ideology of Christian Reconquest, which took on renewed significance following the Peninsular War with Napoleonic France (1808–13).

Unlike the decorative and propagandist royal commissions and the paintings of fantastic Oriental hunts that flourished in mid-nineteenth-century France, Gustave Courbet’s hunting imagery became a vehicle for self-inquiry and the reinvention of history painting. Courbet’s writings and his revision of the genre engage in dialogue with the notions of hunting as a native heritage and masculine sport and the established tropes of the noble stag and the melancholy artist. The psychological intensity, ethical dilemma, and social struggles embedded in the hunting scenes resonate with themes central to the contemporaneous discourses on natural history and animal rights.

First shown at the sixth Impressionist exhibition in 1881, Jean-François Raffaëlli’s Absinthe Drinkers represents a location, an activity, and a social type—the banlieue, drinking, and the déclassé—which, when mixed together, offered a volatile cocktail to its original audience. A detailed historical examination of the social signification of these subjects demonstrates that the core meaning of the work resides in its representation of time. Recuperating a durational pictorial temporality from midcentury Realism, the painting managed to suggest, for certain viewers, a critical alternative to Impressionism and to the intensifying restructuring of the cultural experience of time under modernity.

To Josef Albers, art was the experimental arm of culture, investigating better forms that are the precondition of cultural production and progress. Albers’s largely unpublished writings and practical teaching materials reveal that he encouraged a reflexive relation between better art production and a better social performance. He claimed that “studying art is to be on an ethical basis.” Better design thus alters habits of perception and can improve society. A nervy claim, and yet a thoughtful argument for artistic responsibility: Albers’s ethics of perception maintains that the arrangement of a work of art mirrors the way one organizes life.