The Art Bulletin

Hans Burgkmair’s woodcut frieze depicting peoples of Africa and India marks a move toward ethnography in the representation of non-Europeans, partly the result of the artist’s opportunity to make recordings based on empirical evidence. Equally important was Burgkmair’s exposure to a humanist milieu in Augsburg that organized his visual thinking. A new view of humanity evolved from visual practices that tried to capture the particularity of the “world around”: the surveying that characterized mapmaking, formulas for proportions, and physiognomy. Burgkmair was the first to combine all these innovations into a format that organizes cultural differences, the basis of modern ethnography.

The frescoes by Giambattista Tiepolo for the palazzina of the Villa Valmarana are commonly and benignly described in the art historical literature as taking for their theme “stories of love.” The political dynamics of gender, which inform their subjects, intentions, production, and reception, have never been recognized, let alone contextually probed. I argue here that the program for these frescoes embodied reactionary social norms and a conservative societal backlash in the mid-eighteenth century, engendered by the threat of dramatically changing conditions in the domestic and public lives of both women and men in the Veneto during this era.

In late-nineteenth-century America, the Hungarian artist Mihály Munkácsy’s Christ before Pilate and Christ on Golgotha enjoyed a phenomenal success, praised by critics, scholars, and ministers; thirty-five thousand Americans bought copies of the works to hang in their homes, schools, offices, and churches and millions viewed them in traveling exhibitions. John Wanamaker, the founder of what was arguably the most important department store empire at the turn of the century, bought the originals and displayed them in his store. The story of these paintings in the United States illuminates the confluence of business, art, and religion in this period.

From about 1916 to 1918, Sophie Taeuber and Hans Arp collaborated on a set of closely related works—cross-stitch embroideries, collages, and sketches. Radically abstract, these vertical-horizontal compositions epitomize Zurich Dadaism’s attempt to transform society by undermining bourgeois conventions—except they were not made public. An examination of the differences between Taeuber’s and Arp’s public and private identities reveals why they kept their most “advanced” work to themselves. It was only in private that they could develop a model of equal relations between a man and a woman that eliminated the hierarchical divisions between the arts and their gendered makers.