Publication Grants

Awarded Fall 2024 - Rodin’s Dancers: Art and Performance in Belle Époque Paris

This book traces Rodin’s interactions with dance makers during his late career. It shows that Rodin's exchanges with dancers were central to the development of his sculptural aesthetic and the construction of his celebrity persona. Conversely, it considers how these dancers mobilized the sculptor’s cultural authority to raise dance's status. In the vibrant spectacle culture of Belle Époque Paris, the name “Rodin” came to signify art, authorship, and creative genius.

Awarded Fall 2024 - Enchanted Wood: Engraving a Place for Women Artists in Rural Britain

This book redraws the boundaries of women’s art through examination of the work and lives of four mid-century British women wood engravers, book designers, and writers. It asks why and how modern artists Gwen Raverat, Agnes Miller Parker, Clare Leighton, and Joan Hassall, in taking up the materials and techniques of Thomas Bewick, were able to transform female living in rural and urban places, defying Depression and World War on their journeys to cultural prominence and artistic independence.

Image: Agnes Miller Parker, Herons, in Down the River by H. E. Bates (1937).

Awarded Fall 2024 - Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts

Taking advantage of the unusually broad range of Nadar’s claims to priority, the book describes the wider media and institutional ecosystems that co-produced Nadar's legacy and the history of photography as a modern medium. It argues that the production of Nadar’s firsts, like the claim that in 1858 he took the first aerial photograph from the basket of a balloon, are characteristic of the cultural processes that have shaped the origin stories of modern media technologies.

Image: Félix Nadar, 1ères [Premières] épreuves en ballon / trois vues aériennes de Paris, 1868. Photograph. Collection of the Département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque national de France, Paris.

Awarded Fall 2024 - The Social Portrait: Types and Antitypes in August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century

Through unprecedented archival access and striking close visual analyses, this book offers the first-ever coherent reading of Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century and introduces social status as a benchmark for all future analyses of modern art and visual culture. It will introduce into art history this central sociological paradigm as an essential quality of photographic portraiture, including its overlaps and deviations from racial and economic configurations of the social order.

Image: August Sander's People of the Twentieth Century at the Kölnische Kunstverein, installation photo, 1927.

Awarded Fall 2024 - Mixed Media: The Visual Cultures of Racial Integration, 1931–54

Rethinking Black and white artists’ efforts towards racial integration, each chapter of this book examines the visual ecologies of institutions committed to desegregation to varying degrees. It covers graphic print media of CIO-member labor organizations; Jacob Lawrence’s war paintings and other visual propaganda of the armed forces; and the efforts of abstract painters of African descent to navigate the criticism, institutions, and markets of the mainstream art world.

Image: Pele DeLappe, illustration from A Word to the New Men in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Association, C.I.O., 1945.

Awarded Fall 2024 - The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris

Reshaping understandings of the art-into-life ambition of the European historical avant-gardes, this book examines the desire of early twentieth-century artists to abandon traditional forms of artmaking and exhibition display. Focusing on Tristan Tzara’s performances, Sonia Delaunay’s fashions and self-branding, and the collective endeavors of the Surrealist Research Bureau, it reimagines an avant-garde art of living against the normative types of “lifestyle” in France from 1910 to 1930.

Image: Portrait of Sonia Delaunay in her home residence, 19 boulevard Malesherbes, Paris, 1924. Photographer unknown.

Awarded Spring 2024 - Cubism and Reality: Braque, Picasso, Gris

This book aims to refresh the study of Cubist works of art up to 1918 by taking a new, intensive look at around one hundred works, material things demanding an interactive visual response, engaging body and mind. It focuses on three artists based in Paris whose collaborative explorations were generative of many of the directions taken by Cubism and Modernism outside Paris. The grant will support high quality illustrations and rights costs.

Image: Juan Gris (Spanish, Madrid 1887–1927 Boulogne-sur-Seine). Violin and Engraving, 1913. Oil, sand, collage on canvas, 25 5/8 × 19 5/8 in. (65.1 × 49.8 cm). Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection, Purchase, Leonard A. Lauder Gift, 2022 (2022.150).

Awarded Spring 2024 - The popular roots of Cubist collage: Amateur crafts and the work of Braque, Picasso, Gris and Laurens

First published in French as "Racines populaires du cubisme," this study examines a new form of amateur practice that gained ground during the nineteenth century: handicrafts. It offers insights into the social and cultural history of Montmartre, and explores the creative practices of local, working-class residents. The grant will support the revised and expanded first English edition, contributing to illustration and some specialist copy editing costs.

Awarded Fall 2023 - Technologies for the Revolution: The Czech Avant-Garde in Print

The book offers a new take on Central European Modernism in the interwar period, exploring the ways in which the Devětsil group based in Prague and Brno utilized the production of printed matter to forge international networks of exchange in the 1920s. Its five chapters feature architecture and typography, poetry, photography and film, as well as performance. The publication grant will support production and illustration costs.

Image: Jindřich Honzl. Roztočené jeviště (Revolving Stage). Prague: Odeon, 1925. Cover photomontage by Jindřich Štyrský and Toyen. Graphic design by Karel Teige.

Awarded Fall 2023 - Dutch Neorealism, Cinema, and the Politics of Painting, 1927–1945

For her study of a group of realist painters in the Netherlands before and during the Second World War, exploring how their work expressed various political positions, in part through engagement with the visual languages of cinema. The book shows how the work of artists like Pyke Koch, Karel Willink and Charley Toorop was appropriated or traduced by the occupying Nazi regime. The grant will contribute to the illustration costs.

Image: Raoul Hynckes, Ex-Est (It’s Over), 1940, oil on canvas, 61.2 x 77.7 cm, Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. (Photo: Stedelijk Museum).

Awarded Fall 2023 - In the Shadow of Empire: Art in Occupied Japan

For her study of Japanese art during the U.S.-led occupation following World War II, considering the perspective of Japanese artists and their audiences as they navigated the geopolitical dimensions of the early Cold War. The grant will support the reproduction of a wide range of hitherto little-known paintings, prints, and sculptural monuments.

Image: Nii Hinoharu, Unemployed Workers—Hitachi, 1949, woodcut, 1950.

Awarded Spring 2023 - Adolphe Appia (MIT Press)

The book focuses on the important yet undervalued role that the atmospheric drawings made by the Swiss scenographer played in the development of modern architecture and aesthetics. The grant will contribute to his illustration costs.

Image: Appia, drawing for Act 2 of Orpheus und Eurydike, 1926 (Appia: 18b), Swiss Archive of Performing Arts (SAPA) in Bern, Switzerland.

Awarded Spring 2023 - El Lissitzky on Paper: Print Culture, Architecture, Politics, 1919-1933

The book locates the nexus of Lissitzky’s work as an architect and print designer in the material of paper, a precious commodity that supported both utopian projects and political control in the USSR. The grant will contribute to his illustration costs.

Awarded Spring 2023 - The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan

The book tells the story of the birth of commercial art in Japan from the turn of the twentieth century through its global efflorescence in the total design event of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The grant will contribute to the illustration costs.

Awarded Fall 2022 - Wolkenbügel (MIT Press)

This richly illustrated book will show how El Lissitzy’s architectural idea evolved through modern and not so modern communication networks, including the postal system. The grant will support his illustration costs.

Awarded Fall 2022 - The Street and the Screen: Architectures of Spectatorship in the Age of Cinema (University of Minnesota Press)

The book will offer the first global history of cinema architecture, considering how it shaped forms of spectatorship in Paris, Casablanca, Berlin, São Paolo, and New York. The grant will support illustrations and enable him to produce new maps of the cinemas in these cities.

Awarded Fall 2022 - Léonce Rosenberg’s Cubism: The Galerie L’Effort Moderne in Interwar Paris (Pennsylvania State University Press, Refiguring Modernism Series)

The book will examine the constructed nature of the category of Cubism during and after the First World War, rethinking the careers of major artists and offering new perspectives on less known figures. The grant will support his illustration and indexing costs.