The Art Bulletin

In 947 Cao Yuanzhong, military commissioner of the Hexi region and the de facto ruler of Dunhuang, began the construction of Cave 61 at Mogao in northwestern China. The structure’s architecture, location, and pictorial program bear a remarkable degree of similarity to the caves of his predecessors. The apparent repetition of the earlier designs has led past scholars to dismiss Cave 61 and the art of the time as formulaic and sterile. A closer look at Cave 61 reveals that this project was in fact motivated by a new understanding and practice of artistic appropriation in tenth-century Dunhuang.

The 1605 Shahnama (Book of Kings) presents an opportunity to consider the relation between portraiture and narrative illustration in Persian painting and to examine key political and artistic trends in early seventeenth-century Iran. Moving away from earlier modes of imperial iconography, which tended toward the idealized, the paintings in this manuscript are linked by their role as suggestive and surrogate portraits of the king, Shah ‘Abbas. An emphasis on emotions represented the character of the great ruler as heroic yet flawed, while unprecedented images of prayer served to guide Safavid religion toward a more normative form of Shi‘i Islam.

Henry van de Velde’s Werkbund Theater stood at the center of a controversy over the nature of artistic individualism and its relation to national identity, a debate that surfaced at the German Werkbund’s 1914 exhibition only months before World War I began. The artistic relationships that contributed to the design of the theater—conceived as a “total work of art” involving painters, sculptors, and theater directors—were no less complex. Van de Velde’s building reveals the central, but contested, role that theater architecture, and the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, played in the German Werkbund and the shaping of German modernism.

Picasso’s first construction, the 1912 paper Guitar, has long been considered the maquette for the later version executed in sheet metal (ca. spring–summer 1914). Instead, the paper Guitar should be seen as the inaugural work of modern sculpture. The materiality, facture, formal structure, and presentation of the 1912 Guitar show it to be related to contemporary collages and constructions. Picasso’s reuse of fragments of existing pictorial codes and materials constitutes a form of bricolage, while his de-skilled technique allows the paper Guitar to reflect on contemporary labor conditions and to become a conceptual model for subsequent works.