4Visual Culture

Abstract

Abstract This chapter addresses books published in the field of visual culture in 2019 and is divided into three sections: 1. Race and Art; 2. Art and the Body; 3. Art in Eastern Europe The books under review cover a broad range of subjects within their specialities, but reflect general trends in contemporary writing and study in the field of visual culture. The first section looks at two publications that deal with the black experience in art: Darby English’s To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror and The Place Is Here, edited by Nick Aikens and Elizabeth Robles. The second section examines books that see art through bodies: Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School, edited by Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler; Sculpture, Sexuality and History: Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, edited by Jana Funke and Jess Grove; and Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry: Rethinking the Sexed Body in Verse and Visual Culture, edited by Jongwoo Jeremy Kim and Christopher Reed. The third and final section looks at publications about art and eastern Europe: Marta Filipová’s Modernity, History, and Politics in Czech Art and Klara Kemp-Welch’s Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe, 1965–1981.