New Books in Art

Irina Shevelenko's Russian Archaism: Nationalism and the Quest for a Modernist Aesthetic (Cornell University Press, 2024) discusses the late-19th and early 20th century search for an archaic Russian folk tradition that could ground Russian art in an idiom independent of “The West.” While the [re]discovery of 14th and 15th century icon painting partially achieved this goal, Russian Modernists most often ended up creating art that was entirely new and which owed little to Russian folk tradition; the audience for this art was, after all, that same Western and Westernized elite.   

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Understanding the world of art—particularly antiquities and archaeological artifacts—requires tracing how objects are removed from the ground, displaced by conflict or economic hardship, and ultimately reappear in the international art market. The odyssey of an artifact from its excavation site to an auction house, a private collection, or a museum display case raises a host of pressing concerns about the fragility of cultural heritage but also the global mechanisms that sustain its circulation. In recent years, growing awareness of a possible link between the illegal antiquities trade and terrorist financing has brought new scrutiny to regions marked by war and instability, particularly in the Middle East. In such places, archaeological sites are especially vulnerable to looting and illicit excavation, with the profits from these "blood antiquities" sometimes flowing back to fund further violence.

Art for War: Heritage Looting, Blood Antiquities, and the International Fight Against Terrorism Financing (Stanford UP, 2026) by Dr. Costanza Musu examines how this transformation in perception—from an archaeological concern to a matter of international security—reshaped the global response to antiquities trafficking. Viewing the trade through a security lens, the book offers scholars, policymakers, and students of international affairs a new way to understand how the protection of cultural heritage became entangled with the politics of counterterrorism and global security, sparking new debates over art, heritage, and security.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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When Neil Selkirk first saw one of Arbus’s photographs as a young man at someone’s house in London, it almost sent him screaming into the street. Unsettled and shaken, the encounter instead opened his eyes to the uncanny powers of photography. It turned Selkirk into an important photographer and, ultimately, an indispensable collaborator to some of the greatest photographers of all time, including Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, and other greats. In our conversation on great photographers and the art of photography, based on Selkirk’s edited book Why Photographs? (Warbler, 2026) we discuss essential dimensions of photography, including riveting detail, spontaneity, credibility, and the gift of chance, and how they were celebrated by early photographers but soon denounced by an establishment that saw photography as a threat to painting. 

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Katrin Kogman-Appel is a professor of Medieval Jewish history with research focusing on book culture, readers, and reading practices in medieval Europe and beyond. In The Kennicott Bible: A Masterpiece of Jewish Book Art (Bodleian Library, 2023) she discusses the text of the 24 canonized books of the Bible that is paired with David Kimchi's grammatical treatise “Sefer Miklol”. Katrin discussed the Kennecott Bible, a medieval Hebrew manuscript that contains unique illustrations and Masoretic text annotations. She explained that the manuscript draws inspiration from various sources including the Severa Bible and playing cards from the Rhineland and Netherlands, with some illustrations depicting animals in unusual positions and a political allegory involving hares, wolves, cats, and mice. Katrin described the Masoretic text as a lexical apparatus designed for precision in transmitting the canonical Hebrew text, and emphasized that the Bible served as a status symbol and public art piece for Jewish elites despite having no public art in synagogues. 

A collection of reproduced images from the Kennicott Bible, a remarkable artifact from the Middle Ages. The Kennicott Bible is one of the most celebrated Hebrew Bibles that survives today, having delighted readers since its creation in 1476. Originating from La Coruña in northern Spain, it features lavish carpet pages, gold leaf silhouettes, and abundant marginal decorations. This extraordinary manuscript is a treasure trove of history, culture, devotion, art, and cross-cultural collaboration. This book features reproductions of the decorated pages of the stunning manuscript, accompanied by four chapters authored by experts in the fields of Bible study, book history, and medieval Jewish art. The authors discuss the Bible from several perspectives, explaining the Hebrew text of the Bible, the scribe who created the pages, the layout and paleography, and the illuminator who produced the Bible's decoration and its imagery. This volume also includes an analysis of the early medieval commentary on the Old Testament, the Masorah. Richly illustrated throughout, this beautiful book makes a treasure of Jewish art available for a new audience, alongside the latest scholarship on its origins, provenance, and creation. 

Analyzing these ancient texts in historical context helps to enrich our understanding of the effects and reactions to historical and cultural events.

Be sure to follow Jewish Tapestry for more on Jewish history and culture.

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This is the first episode in a series that explores the intersections of science and the humanities in university life. In today’s conversation, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera is joined by artists Yasmín Hernández and Baruch Vergara for a discussion about Herlihy-Mera's article “The humanities should really matter to STEM disciplines.” They explore the relationship that art and the humanities have with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—and consider why that relationship matters more than ever.

The discussion begins with a central question: What can the arts and humanities contribute to STEM education? If art cultivates forms of observation, experimentation, imagination, interpretation, and creative problem-solving that are essential to scientific and technological work, how can educators work within institutions that separate the Humanities from STEM experiences? What might change if scientists used art and visual thinking as approaches to problem solving? How would science change if art became a tool for empirical inquiry? And, looking in the other direction, what can science teach the humanities about the mind, perception and the boundaries of what we know?

These questions become especially urgent in the age of artificial intelligence.

This series asks us to reconsider the boundaries between disciplines. At stake is more than the future of the university. It is what kinds of intelligence we want our universities to cultivate - and also, what kinds of experiences we want students to have as they learn, explore, and make sense of their worlds.

The Instituto Nuevos Horizontes is housed at the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez.

Quotes, themes, and ideas from this conversation:
 

• The STEM-ification of the university, expansion of majors and programs

• Decline and elimination of humanities, arts, and language programs

• When engineering is a model for other disciplines

• “STEAM” initiatives that add Arts to STEM

• Emphasis on technical skills over interpretive faculties

• “Career readiness” over “citizenship” as an institutional objective

• The STEM-ification of the university

“Painting is solving a problem on canvas.” -Yasmín Hernández

“Children are conditioned to make that division (between STEM and the Arts) since elementary school.” -Yasmín Hernández 

“Experimentation is what brings curiosity. It is not a precise thing. Art is a new way to look.” -Baruch Vergara

“An image can express a pre-linguistic relationship that we have with the idea.” -Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera

“Play is the first form of experimentation...you free yourself from the expected outcome.” -Yasmín Hernández

“From art comes a new level of awareness, freeing ourselves from the expected outcome to access something that is beyond.” -Yasmín Hernández

“Music is an activity that can access concepts that are beyond consciousness.” -Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera

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The Soviet Union’s rise as a totalitarian state and economic rival to the United States sparked a cultural cold war. The conflict was colored by paranoia and a mindset that pitted the USSR’s state-sponsored Socialist Realism against its so-called opposite: Western art in general and Abstract Expressionism in particular. But can one version of art be the opposite of another?

Julia Tatiana Bailey teases out the complexity and artificiality of the persistent narrative of US and Soviet artistic otherness. She explores why this notion was introduced and how it shaped the art of both countries. She also analyzes and deconstructs the ideological frameworks that have estranged the art of the USSR in Western art history. In doing so, Bailey reveals the Cold War biases and institutionalized responses that influence the politicized histories of art even today. 

Drawing on previously unpublished archival material from Russia and the US, Painting Paranoia: Cold War Art and Anti-Communism (University of Illinois Press, 2026) investigates how the myth of Soviet otherness contributed to America’s postwar artistic identity.

Julia Tatiana Bailey is an art historian and curator and Director of Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague.

Matthis Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory.

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Eminent historian Peter Burke joins Jana Byars to discuss his new book, The Connoisseur: A Cultural History (Reaktion, 2026), considering the art connoisseur from the Renaissance to the present day. Connoisseurs have been an influential, if somewhat mysterious, figure in the history of art, responsible for making or breaking high-profile collections and reputations and influencing taste, the art market, and the field of art history with their pronouncements. But what did it take to become a connoisseur, and how reliable were the great connoisseurs of previous centuries? With the advent of scientific techniques and artificial intelligence, what future is there for expertise based on the trained eye? This book offers the first history of the art connoisseur, from the Renaissance to its professionalization in the nineteenth century and on to the present. Featuring portrayals of many leading connoisseurs, such as Bernard Berenson, Roberto Longhi, and Giovanni Morelli, this is a highly readable history of the extraordinary characters and intellects that have shaped the art world through a mixture of intuition, learning, and chutzpah.

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Strange and Familiar History of Byzantine Ar: Interpretation, Risk, and Empathy (ARC Humanities Press, 2026) represents a risky experiment in art-history writing. It takes objects of Byzantine art—manuscript illustration, frescos, mosaic, sculpture—and reads them through the lenses of disability studies, media studies, and gender studies in order to reveal something about their significance not only in that historical culture, but also in our own. Moreover, it uses lenses of personal history and self-reflection as a way to model an open-ended and faceted art history. Modern works of film, fiction, and art likewise appear frequently so that the Byzantine objects can emerge as both more strange and more familiar, and as both of the past and of our world. Their capacity for holding multiple times, generating multiple meanings, and for multiple subjectivities is fully embraced, and perhaps a different kind of art history emerges, one that eschews argument and mastery for humility, openness, empathy—thinking with, rather than about.

New Books in Late Antiquity is Presented by Ancient Jew Review

Glenn Peers is Emeritus Professor, Art History at University of Texas Austin and Syracuse University

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston

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Kahlil Joseph has collaborated with musicians FKA twigs, Flying Lotus, Sampha and Shabazz Palaces among many others. He has directed numerous films, music videos and advertisements across Africa, America and Europe. The award-winning filmmaker's disruptive style – which frequently merges visual representations of transcontinental experiences with the countercultural energies of Afrodiasporic music – challenges the Eurocentric biases underpinning Western media. At the same time, his works generate various contradictions and tensions because they are themselves products situated within an economic framework of neoliberal capitalism, at once offering alternative ways of being while, simultaneously, participating in and thereby sustaining the social structures that they otherwise seek to subvert and dismantle.

Kahlil Joseph and the Audiovisual Atlantic (Bloomsbury, 2024) generates ground-breaking new dialogues between a range of audial and visual theories that are shaped by Paul Gilroy's conceptualisation of The Black Atlantic (1993). The book analyzes Joseph's work through intersections of emergent music video and new media concepts as well as film theories from African, American and European perspectives. Vitally, it argues that such an interdisciplinary and transcontinental approach to film, music and new media scholarship enriches the possibilities of their respective and, simultaneously, entwined branches of knowledge

In the episode, we discuss Joe Jackson's pathway into studying Joseph's scholarship, his work's dialogue with Paul Gilroy (alongside a host of other vital scholars of the audiovisual and race) - and make the case for greater focus on the music video as a distinctive field of study.

Follow this link for a sample of Joseph's work here   

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Panel painters in both the middle ages and the fifteenth century created works that evoke the luster of precious stones, the sheen of polished gold and silver, and the colorful radiance of stained glass. Yet their approaches to rendering these materials were markedly different. In The Varnish and the Glaze: Painting Splendor with Oil, 1100–1500 (U Chicago Press, 2023), Dr. Marjolijn Bol explores some of the reasons behind this radical transformation by telling the history of the two oil painting techniques used to depict everything that glistens and glows—varnish and glaze.

For more than a century after his death, the fifteenth-century painter Jan van Eyck was widely credited with inventing varnish and oil paint, on account of his unique visual realism. Once this was revealed to be a myth, the verisimilitude of his work was attributed instead to a new translucent painting technique: the glaze. Today, most theories about how Van Eyck achieved this realism revolve around the idea that he was the first to discover or refine the glazing technique. Bol, however, argues that, rather than being a fifteenth-century refinement, varnishing and glazing began centuries before. Drawing from an extensive body of recipes, Dr. Bol pieces together how varnishes and glazes were first developed as part of the medieval art of material mimesis. Artisans embellished metalwork and wood with varnishes and glazes to imitate gold and gems; infused rock crystal with oil, resin, and colorants to imitate more precious minerals; and oiled parchment to transform it into the appearance of green glass. Likewise, medieval panel painters used varnishes and glazes to create the look of enamel, silk, and more.

The explorations of materials and their optical properties by these artists stimulated natural philosophers to come up with theories about transparent and translucent materials produced by the earth. Natural historians, influenced by medieval artists’ understanding of refraction and reflection, developed theories about gems, their creation, and their optical qualities.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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