Enfilade

Published by Reaktion and also distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Shane McCausland, The Art of the Chinese Picture-Scroll (London: Reaktion Books, 2023), 299 pages, ISBN: 978-1789147964, £35 / $50.

The Chinese picture-scroll, a long painting or calligraphic work held within a horizontal scrolling mount, has been China’s pre-eminent aesthetic format for the last two millennia. This first extended history of the picture-scroll explores its extraordinary longevity, and its adaptability to social, political, and technological change. The book describes what the picture-scroll demands of a viewer, how China’s artists grappled with its cultural power, and how collectors and connoisseurs have left their marks on scrolls for later generations to judge. The return to mass appeal of scrolling—a media technology that seemed long outdated yet persists in our digital age—provides urgent and fascinating context to this book.

Shane McCausland is Percival David Professor of the History of Art at SOAS University of London. His many books include The Mongol Century: Visual Cultures of Yuan China, 1271–1368 (Reaktion Books, 2014), and he has curated numerous exhibitions in Europe, North America, and China.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
1  On Origins and Uses over the First Millennium
2  Inscribing the Artist and the Collector: The Picture-Scroll in the Song–Liao–Jin Period
3  Handscrolls in Mongol Palaces
4  Musing on Shadows: Reading the Ming Picture-Scroll
5  Qing: Reading the ‘Baroque’ Handscroll
6  Modernist Uses of the Chinese Picture-Scroll
7  The Medium of Silent Poetry in the Late Modern World

References
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Index

Isabelle Tillerot’s Orient et ornement: l’espace à l’oeuvre ou le lieu de la peinture was published in 2018; an English edition will soon be available from The Getty:

Isabelle Tillerot, East Asian Aesthetics and the Space of Painting in Eighteenth-Century Europe, translated by Chris Miller (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2024), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1606067970 (paperback), $70.

This volume offers the first critical account of how European imports of East Asian textiles, porcelain, and lacquers, along with newly published descriptions of the Chinese garden, inspired a revolution in the role of painting in early modern Europe. With particular focus on French interiors, Isabelle Tillerot reveals how a European enthusiasm for East Asian culture and a demand for novelty transformed the dynamic between painting and decor. Models of space, landscape, and horizon, as shown in Chinese and Japanese objects and their ornamentation, disrupted prevailing design concepts in Europe. With paintings no longer functioning as pictorial windows, they began to be viewed as discrete images displayed on a wall—and with that, their status changed from decorative device to autonomous work of art. This study presents a detailed history of this transformation, revealing how an aesthetic free from the constraints of symmetry and geometrized order upended paradigms of display, enabling European painting to come into its own.

Isabelle Tillerot is an independent scholar of eighteenth-century French art.

From Harvard UP:

Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, The Borders of Chinese Architecture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022), 448 pages, ISBN: 978-0674241015, $57.

An internationally acclaimed expert explains why Chinese-style architecture has remained so consistent for two thousand years, no matter where it is built.

For the last two millennia, an overwhelming number of Chinese buildings have been elevated on platforms, supported by pillars, and covered by ceramic-tile roofs. Less obvious features, like the brackets connecting the pillars to roof frames, also have been remarkably constant. What makes the shared features more significant, however, is that they are present in Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, and Islamic milieus; residential, funerary, and garden structures; in Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and elsewhere. How did Chinese-style architecture maintain such standardization for so long, even beyond China’s borders?

Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt examines the essential features of Chinese architecture and its global transmission and translation from the predynastic age to the eighteenth century. Across myriad political, social, and cultural contexts within China and throughout East Asia, certain design and construction principles endured. Builders never abandoned perishable wood in favor of more permanent building materials, even though Chinese engineers knew how to make brick and stone structures in the last millennium BCE. Chinese architecture the world over is also distinctive in that it was invariably accomplished by anonymous craftsmen. And Chinese buildings held consistently to the plan of the four-sided enclosure, which both afforded privacy and differentiated sacred interior space from an exterior understood as the sphere of profane activity. Finally, Chinese-style buildings have always and everywhere been organized along straight lines. Taking note of these and other fascinating uniformities, The Borders of Chinese Architecture offers an accessible and authoritative overview of a tradition studiously preserved across time and space.

Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt is Professor of East Asian Art and Curator of Chinese Art at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Chinese Architecture: A History (2019). Her work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, Getty Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society.

c o n t e n t s

Preface
Introduction: The Borders Problem
1  Chinese Architecture before China
2  Han
3  Architecture before Reunification
4  Seeing the Sixth Century as the Seventh and Eighth
5  Tang Internationalism
6  Defining Chinse Architecture and Borders during Liao
7  Western Xia, Song, Japn, Jin
8  A Revisionist History of Yuan Architecture
9  Ming
10  The Long Eighteenth Century
Afterword

We now have two books on pockets (Carlson’s joins that of Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux, published by Yale UP in 2019). From Hachette Book Group:

Hannah Carlson, Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close (Algonquin Books, 2023), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-1643751542, $35.

Who gets pockets, and why? It’s a subject that stirs up plenty of passion: Why do men’s clothes have so many pockets and women’s so few? And why are the pockets on women’s clothes often too small to fit phones, if they even open at all? In her captivating book, Hannah Carlson, a lecturer in dress history at the Rhode Island School of Design, reveals the issues of gender politics, security, sexuality, power, and privilege tucked inside our pockets.

Throughout the medieval era in Europe, the purse was an almost universal dress feature. But when tailors stitched the first pockets into men’s trousers five hundred years ago, it ignited controversy and introduced a range of social issues that we continue to wrestle with today, from concealed pistols to gender inequality. See: #GiveMePocketsOrGiveMeDeath.

Filled with incredible images, this microhistory of the humble pocket uncovers what pockets tell us about ourselves: How is it that putting your hands in your pockets can be seen as a sign of laziness, arrogance, confidence, or perversion? Walt Whitman’s author photograph, hand in pocket, for Leaves of Grass seemed like an affront to middle-class respectability. When W.E.B. Du Bois posed for a portrait, his pocketed hands signaled defiant coolness.

And what else might be hiding in the history of our pockets? (There’s a reason that the contents of Abraham Lincoln’s pockets are the most popular exhibit at the Library of Congress.) Thinking about the future, Carlson asks whether we will still want pockets when our clothes contain ‘smart’ textiles that incorporate our IDs and credit cards. Pockets is for the legions of people obsessed with pockets and their absence, and for anyone interested in how our clothes influence the way we navigate the world.

Hannah Carlson teaches dress history and material culture at the Rhode Island School of Design. After training as a conservator of costume and textiles at the Fashion Institute of Technology, she received a PhD in material culture from Boston University. She has contributed articles to Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life; Dress; and MacGuffin: The Life of Things.

From Bloomsbury (and on sale for $76 until the 10th December) . . .

Heidi Strobel, The Art of Mary Linwood: Embroidery, Installation, and Entrepreneurship in Britain, 1787–1845 (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1350428096, $120.

The first book on Leicester textile artist Mary Linwood, with a catalogue of her work

When British textile artist and gallery owner Mary Linwood died in 1845 just shy of 90 years old, her estate was worth the equivalent of £5,199,822 in today’s currency. As someone who made, but did not sell, embroidered replicas of famous artworks after artists such as Gainsborough, Reynolds, Stubbs, and Morland, how did she accumulate so much money? A pioneering woman in the male-dominated art world of late Georgian Britain, Linwood established her own London gallery in 1798 that featured copies of well-known paintings by these popular artists. Featuring props and specially designed rooms for her replicas, she ensured that her visitors had an entertaining, educational, and kinetic tour, similar to what Madame Tussaud would do one generation later. The gallery’s focus on picturesque painters provided her London visitors with an idyllic imaginary journey through the countryside. Its emphasis on quintessentially British artists provided a unifying focus for a country that had recently emerged from the threat of Napoleonic invasion.

This book brings to the fore Linwood’s gallery guides and previously unpublished letters to her contemporaries, such as Birmingham inventor Matthew Boulton and Queen Charlotte. It also includes the first and only catalogue of Linwood’s extant and destroyed works. By examining Linwood’s replicas and their accompanying objects through the lens of material culture, the book provides a much-needed contribution to the scholarship on women and cultural agency in the early 19th century.

Heidi A. Strobel is Associate Dean of Academic and Student Affairs at the University of North Texas.

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgements
List of Plates
List of Figures

Introduction
1  Embroidery, Education, and Commerce: Linwood’s Early Years
2  The Pantheon and Hanover Square Exhibitions
3  Portraiture, Publications, and Promotion
4  The Leicester Square Gallery: Performing British Patriotism
5  Of Students and Studying: The Academic Tradition and the Scripture Room
6  Linwood’s Legacies

Appendix: Catalogue of Linwood’s Textiles
Notes
Bibliography