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This paper shows how African American artist Hale Woodruff's 1950–1 mural cycle The Art of the Negro depicts a transcultural art history that embeds the genealogy of modern art within the history of mankind, colonial violence and the politics of liberation. It discusses the specific ways that Woodruff used the murals to negotiate the divergent requirements of abstract expressionism and black historiography on the eve of the civil rights movement in the United States.

The concept of the Formalesque preoccupied Bernard Smith during the last decades of his life. First propounded in Modernism's History (1998), the Formalesque is a proposed period style describing the art of the 20th century. Yet, despite his ambitions for the Formalesque as a new classification for modern art, the idea failed to appeal to academic art history. This paper does not attempt to salvage the Formalesque from art-historical obscurity. But it does argue Smith's work on this topic is relevant by virtue of the contribution it makes to debates about modernism and art history. Although Smith's thesis emphasizes the necessity of period styles and the perennial development of art history, paradoxically, the Formalesque also highlights the limitations of art history. If the Formalesque has a place in art historiography, it belongs to a speculative discourse describing the end of the history of art.

Contemporary art is increasingly concerned with swaying the opinions of its viewer. To do so, the art employs various strategies to convey a political message. This book provides readers with the tools to decode and appreciate political art, a crucial and understudied direction in post-war art

This book tells the previously untold stories of six major art thefts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, written by its former Chief Security Officer, John Barelli. Reader will be taken into the loading docks and curatorial offices, to the Temple of Dendur and the American Wing and its magnificent Engelhard Courtyard, the majestic Main Hall where the author stood opening many mornings as the world poured in, the Astor Courtyard and the Valez Blanco Patio. In the museum's Arms and Armor department the author will point out that museum staff helped create the helmets that our soldiers used in World War, he'll share with readers what happen to the coins in the museum's fountains. At the heart of this book there will always be art-those who love it and those who take it, two groups of people that are far from mutually exclusive.

Cold-War Twins: Mikhail Alpatov's a Universal History of Arts and Ernst Gombrich's the Story of Art

This article deals with the "afterlife" of a methodological disagreement in the Vienna School of Art History between the positions of Alois Riegl and Julius von Schlosser in Mikhail Alpatov's and Ernst Gombrich's art history survey texts published during the Cold War on different sides of the Iron Curtain. Though these surveys are methodological antipodes, the difference itself, I argue, is possible only within the framework of the larger art historical discourse they share. In addition, I will draw on the radical ideological critique of Alpatov's survey inside the Soviet Union and the case of the Stalinist survey meant to replace it, in order to address the ideological commonality between Alpatov's and Gombrich's surveys.