In 1900, Dutch art historians Andre Jolles and Aby Warburg constructed an experimental dialogue in which Jolles supposed he had fallen in love with the figure of a young woman in a painting: "A fantastic figure – shall I call her a servant girl, or r...

K. G. Subramanyan is one of the most influential Indian artists, teachers, and theorists of the twentieth century. Born in 1924, Subramanyan has lived and worked during a transformative period in Indian history, one shaped by the contradictions of co...

W. E. B. Du Bois has described the African American at the end of the nineteenth century as "two souls in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder". In the United States today, the hyphen between these two souls – A...

In Martin Rowson's "The Waste Land", private detective Chris Marlowe is tasked with getting to the bottom of the most impenetrable of all modernist mysteries: namely T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland". Cunningly contrived, this irreverent graphic parody i...

Photographer Pedro Meyer is one of the pioneers of contemporary photography and was an early leader in its digital revolution. In "A Kind of Touching Beauty" his lens is focused on the American city, capturing its growth and transition through the 19...

In "The Avant-Garde", Mike Sell rejects the common idea that the avant-garde is only about art and insists that it is much more than a European phenomenon. In doing so, he redefines the historical, geographical, ideological, disciplinary, and theoret...

Tzvetan Todorov, one of Europe's leading intellectuals, explores the complex relations between art, politics, and ethics in the essays that make up "The Limits of Art". In one essay, "Artists and Dictators", Todorov traces the intimate relationship b...

Circuses provide surreal, fantastic entertainment. At times magical and at others chilling, the circus is a world of magic and spectacle for the viewer, but for the performer, a career in the circus often brings with it a nomadic, lonely life. In "Ci...

Located on the west coast of India along the Arabian Sea, Goa officially became an Indian state in 1987 after nearly 500 years of Portuguese rule. This conflict of cultures is captured by Indian photographer Prabuddha Dasgupta in "The Edge of Faith"....

"Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium" is a collection of essays covering a wide range of historical and theoretical topics, from Brecht in Japan to "children's" bodies in postmodern Japanese performances, f...