Volume 3, Issue 1 | Spring 2004
 E-mail
Smalls | Portrait d'une negresse

Slavery is a Woman: Race, Gender and Visuality in Marie Benoist's Portrait d'une négresse (1800)
by James Smalls
This essay examines the multi-layered and multi-directional historical, theoretical and sytlistic dynamics of race, gender and visuality in Marie Benoist's Portrait d’une négresse of 1800.




Floyd | The Puzzle of Olympia

The Puzzle of Olympia
by Phylis A. Floyd
When Edouard Manet's Olympia hung in the Salon of 1865, the artist complained to his friend Charles Baudelaire: "all this outcry is disturbing and clearly somebody is wrong," a reaction that has confused historians who read the nude simply as a courtesan. This essay argues that Manet's painting depicts a different type of sexualized woman—a camélia—and that it alludes to a specific individual, Marguerite Bellanger.
Bryzski | The Album Polish Art

Constructing the Canon: The Album Polish Art and the Writing of Modernist Art History of Polish 19th-Century Painting
by Anna Brzyski
A look at the serial album Polish Art, published in Krakow in the early twentieth century, and its role in establishing the modernist canon of Polish nineteenth-century painting.
Menon | Anatomy of a Motif

Anatomy of a Motif: The Fetus in Late 19th-Century Graphic Art
by Elizabeth K. Menon
A number of fin-de-siècle artists created images of fetuses modeled after specimens in French medical collections. This multivalent motif is considered within the context of depopulation fears and the rise of the Women’s Rights movement.
van der Plaat | Architecture, Mysticism and Myth

The Significance of the "temple idea" in William Lethaby's Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (1891)
by Deborah van der Plaat
In Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, the English architect and theorist William Lethaby developed a syncretic theory of modern architectural invention in which the subjective world of the “imagined” is reconciled with that of the objective or "known."