CAA Reading List 2025

Posted by zoeturner - Thursday, 23 Jan 2025

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To mark this year’s College Art Association Conference in New York from the 12th-15th February, we’ve put together a reading list of essential titles in Art and Design History from MUP.

If you’re attending CAA 2025, our Editorial Director, Emma Brennan, will be there to talk you through our latest one-off titles, Art History series, and how you might publish with us.

Even if you can’t make it, you can get 30% off any of the titles on our reading list below using our exclusive conference discount code online – use EVENT30 at checkout on Manchester University Press.

Want to be the first to hear about our new Art and Design History titles? Sign-up to our newsletter.

The picture politics of Sir Francis Carruthers Gould

The picture politics of Sir Francis Carruthers Gould

The first major study of Britain's pioneering graphic satirist, Sir Francis Carruthers Gould (1844-1925), the first staff political cartoonist on a daily newspaper in Britain, and the first of his kind to be knighted.

Becoming couture

Becoming couture

Becoming couture explains how post-war Italian fashion reinvented itself through the persuasive strategies of intermediaries in Italy and the United States, beyond the myth of Giovanni Battista Giorgini and the Sala Bianca.

Mexican muralist, international Marxist

Mexican muralist, international Marxist

This book interprets the later murals of the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros in light of his Marxist internationalism.

Cases of citation

Cases of citation

This collection investigates the methodological problem of how to see, or read, art that references literature through a series of object-focused chapters on post-1960 artworks. Variously eccentric, playful, reverential and procedural, the diverse range of works engage with literary history by testing the limits of artistic form.

Art against censorship

Art against censorship

Art against censorship traces the centrality of literary and theatrical satire to the artistic and political expression of the artist Honoré Daumier. Daumier drew on seventeenth-century theatre and literature in moments of stifling censorship, foregrounding the subversive potential of a newly glorified literary past.

The traumatic surreal

The traumatic surreal

The traumatic surreal is the first major study to examine the leading role Germanophone women artists have played in deploying surrealism to respond to the traumatic events and legacies of the Second World War.

The medium of Leonora Carrington

The medium of Leonora Carrington

A critical survey of Leonora Carrington's legacies in contemporary creative practice. The medium of Leonora Carrington explores why creative people, especially women, are preoccupied with making work in her legacy today.

Decolonizing images

Decolonizing images

Decolonizing images focuses on Egypt's local visual heritage and continues the urgent process of decolonizing the canon of photography. It presents a new account of the visual cultures produced and exhibited in Egypt by interpreting the camera's ability to conceal as much as it reveals in a complex vision of decolonial difference.

Threads of globalization

Threads of globalization

Threads of globalization is an interdisciplinary volume that brings fashion-specific garments, motifs, materials, and methods of production-into dialogue with gender and identity in various cultures throughout Asia during the long twentieth century.

Transmodern

Transmodern

Transmodern examines the global dimension of modern art by tracing the crossroads of modernisms in Asia, Europe and the Americas. It explores path-breaking transcultural art practices from the 1920s to the 1960s in the framework of decolonial movements and transcultural thinking.

Painting her pleasure

Painting her pleasure

Painters Marie Vassilieff, Émilie Charmy and Suzanne Valadon explored sexuality and questioned gender identity. Working in early twentieth-century Paris, these women contravened social mores, challenged traditional and avant-garde artistic practices and partook in the making of the modern nude.

Baroquemania

Baroquemania

Baroquemania offers a new account of Italian post-unification visual culture through its entanglement with the Baroque. Interrogating the Baroque's fraught afterlife in the work of Giorgio de Chirico, Armando Brasini, Lucio Fontana and others, the book reveals its role in crafting a distinctively Italian approach to modern art.

Art and knowledge after 1900

Art and knowledge after 1900

This book explores the relationship between art and various disciplines of knowledge from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day.

Transcultural things and the spectre of Orientalism in early modern Poland-Lithuania

Transcultural things and the spectre of Orientalism in early modern Poland-Lithuania

Is it possible for foreign things to be perceived as local? Transcultural things sets out to examine this seeming paradox, focusing on artefacts from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Colouring the Caribbean

Colouring the Caribbean

The first monographic study of the painter Agostino Brunias, this book offers a compelling, original analysis of his representation of race in the British colonial West Indies, reconsidering the way in which the artist's oeuvre has previously been understood.

Charting space

Charting space

Taking its inspiration from the spatial turn in the humanities, this volume examines conceptual art's diverse forms of mapping between the 1960s and the 1990s to critically engage with space and spatiality.

Russian Orientalism in a global context

Russian Orientalism in a global context

This volume features new research by an international group of scholars on Russia's historic relationship with Asia and the ways in which it was mediated and represented in the fine, decorative, and performing arts and architecture from the mid-eighteenth century to the first two decades of Soviet rule.

Albrecht Dürer's material world

Albrecht Dürer's material world

This highly illustrated catalogue presents new essays on Albrecht Dürer, focusing on an understudied aspect of his practice: the material worlds of manufacture, design and trade.

The invisible painting

The invisible painting

In this memoir, Gabriel Weisz Carrington, son of the renowned Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, draws on remembered conversations and events to demythologise his mother and declare her not an icon or a goddess but, first and foremost, an artist.

Narrative painting in nineteenth-century Europe

Narrative painting in nineteenth-century Europe

How do pictures tell stories? This ground-breaking book analyses visual narrative in nineteenth-century history and genre paintings across Europe. It reveals how artists constructed plots via objects, managing the tension between narrative and style and prompting viewers to weave their own tales.

Nineteenth-century women illustrators and cartoonists

Nineteenth-century women illustrators and cartoonists

This is the first book to focus on women illustrators in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It features critical essays by an international group of scholars on fourteen women illustrators from Britain, Canada and the United States.

Surrealist sabotage and the war on work

Surrealist sabotage and the war on work

Surrealist sabotage and the war on work is an art historical study devoted to international surrealism's critique of wage labour between 1920 and 1980. Topics such as automatism, artworks across media, radical publications and social interventions are examined in relation to the movement's ongoing demand for non-alienated work.

Taking place

Taking place

This book presents examination of queer and feminist alternative art spaces in Canada and the United States from the late-1960s to the present. It explores how queer and feminist artists have responded to the institutions and histories they have inherited.

Monumental cares

Monumental cares

Monumental cares links the monument debate of the last decade to the history of realism, showing how art can address problems like the climate crisis, migration and authoritarian politics. Case studies range from Chicago and Berlin to Oslo, Bucharest and Hong Kong, in media ranging from marble and glass to cardboard, graffiti and re-enactment.

"I am Jugoslovenka!"

"I am Jugoslovenka!"

Coining the term "Jugoslovenka" to designate the unique history of Yugoslav women's resistance to patriarchy during and after socialism, this book shows how Yugoslavia's anti-fascist, transnational and feminist legacies manifest in performance, conceptual, video and activist works.

Staging art and Chineseness

Staging art and Chineseness

Questioning what the term 'Chinese art' means in the era of global art, this book situates Chinese contemporary art in the matrix of global expositions and political transnationalisms. Its case studies explore the changing political concept of Chineseness by examining performative, body-oriented video and eco-feminist works.

Gee Vaucher

Gee Vaucher

This book situates and critically assesses the substantial body of work created by Gee Vaucher within a lineage of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art history, including radical art production of the 1970s, political protest and street art and punk design, as well as cultural, socio-economic, political and historic contexts.

German Expressionism

German Expressionism

This book presents new research on the histories and legacies of the German Expressionist group Blaue Reiter, the founding force behind modernist abstraction. It offers a novel perspective on familiar aspects of Expressionism and abstraction, taking seriously the inheritance of modernism for the twenty-first century.

Ford Madox Brown

Ford Madox Brown

This original book explores the thinking behind Brown's murals in Manchester Town Hall. It argues that Brown was the most innovative artist in Victorian Britain and that he used this public commission to contest the liberal model of British history favoured by the Manchester Corporation.

Killing Men & Dying Women

Killing Men & Dying Women

This book explores how theories of embodiment, the gesture, hysteria and subjectivity can deepen our understanding of New York abstract painting. Providing readings of paintings by Krasner and examining images of Pollock and Frankenthaler at work, it builds a bridge between the New York artist-women and their other, Marilyn Monroe.

Counterpractice

Counterpractice

This groundbreaking book highlights a generation of women who made art as a way of defining a culture of experimental thought and practice, against the backdrop of the French women's movement or Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (1970-81)

The ABC of the projectariat

The ABC of the projectariat

The ABC of the projectariat contributes new thinking and practical responses to the widespread problem of precarious labour in the field of contemporary art. It works as both a critical analysis and a practical handbook, speaking to and about the vast cohort of artistic freelancers worldwide.

Painting Dublin, 1886-1949

Painting Dublin, 1886-1949

This book explores artists' visualisations of Dublin during a key period of the city's political and social history. Based on close and contextual readings of original paintings and prints, along with new archival research, it shows how artists in Ireland creatively responded to the urban environment where they lived and worked.

Above sea

Above sea

A counter-touristic guide to one of the world's fastest developing megacities, this book intervenes in global contemporary art discourse by exploring the cross-cultural histories and creative conflicts buried beneath Shanghai's glamorous cosmopolitan façades.

Empires of light

Empires of light

Empires of light is a study of light, vision and power in colonial India. It examines the material cultures of light within imperial networks, drawing the colonial experience into contemporary debates on vision and optics to provide an art historical account of how a modern consciousness was forged amidst these dramatic transformations.

The ecological eye

The ecological eye

This book synthesises a variety of approaches to the visual, drawn from politics, theory, feminism and activism, in order to provide the blueprint for an ecocritical art history.

Productive failure

Productive failure

This monograph provides novel methods for writing transnational South Asian art history outside of genealogy.

Otherwise

Otherwise

A crucial resource for specialists and students seeking to enrich their understanding of the relationship between gender politics and visual culture.

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