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.

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.

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.

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.

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."