Abstract This essay identifies a defining moment in the intertwined histories of portraiture and selfhood: the emergence of the celebrity portrait in mid-eighteenth-century Europe. At its centre is a new phenomenon: sitters who failed to recognise themselves in their portraits and reflected, with unprecedented length and depth, on the experience. Focusing on Denis Diderot’s response to Louis-Michel Van Loo’s portrait, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s to Allan Ramsay’s, the essay argues that celebrity transformed portraiture from affirming social identity within fixed hierarchies into a paradoxical enterprise that promised to reveal authentic interiority, while turning the self into a spectacle for mass consumption, creating irresolvable tension between inner self-conception and public image. Diderot’s ambivalence exposes the self as multiple and performative; Rousseau’s rejection reveals anxiety about authenticity and exposure. Their divergent reactions — contrasted with David Hume’s pragmatic embrace of relational identity — show how portraiture became a critical site for negotiating selfhood in the emerging economy of celebrity.

Abstract This essay analyses the circumstances under which Greek and Chinese thinkers and artists became aware of aesthetic response as an intellectual problem, and how their formulations of art theory were shaped by larger social and cultural contexts. Focussing on Greek art theoretical writings of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, and their Chinese counterparts of the Six Dynasties era (third to sixth centuries CE), it addresses what categories of actor wrote about visual arts; for what audiences they were writing; how their writing about visual art fitted into a broader range of cultural practices in which they engaged; what models of writing they emulated in developing written art theory; and how such writing informed stylistic transformations in Greek painting during the classical period, and in Chinese painting from the Han to the Tang.

Abstract Celebrated as a glittering relic of the final decades of the Russian Empire, the Album of the Costume Ball at the Winter Palace (1903) showcases photographic portraits of imperial elites posing in seventeenth-century costumes worn to a series of balls in Saint Petersburg. This essay reconsiders the album as an exemplar of the visual artefacts that promoted a skewed vision of the whiteness of Russia’s leadership in the late imperial era. Such photographic commissions appropriated cultures east of the imperial centre, and erased the collaboration of leadership from Asia in securing imperial rule. The relationships between erasure and representation through form are explored through the conduits of photography, icons, and material culture, offering a multimedia approach to deflecting the spectacle of imperial whiteness.

Abstract Jean Béraud’s À la Salle Graffard was widely considered to be a highlight of the 1884 Paris Salon, singled out by critics for its witty take on leftist demagoguery. Béraud’s spectacle of a rowdy assembly was praised for its true-to-life vision, skewering those types of contemporary socialism familiar to a bourgeois audience from the mainstream press. This essay investigates the kind of political tourism that Béraud’s scene performs, including as it was critiqued by radical commentators such as Jules Vallès. It reconstructs the particularity of the meeting’s setting, and the new, troubling form of political deliberation such meetings represented in the wake of the Republic’s 1881 law on the freedom of assembly. More than a simple document of proletarian politics, Béraud’s barely-studied painting offers, I argue, a self-ironising vision of the people’s politics, which playfully reconfigures the ur-scene of Republican popular sovereignty: the Tennis Court Oath of 1789.

Abstract This essay analyses Op art in the 1960s: its modes of production, theories of perception, and the emerging technologies entangled with them both. Looking at two exhibitions (The Responsive Eye and Computer-Generated Pictures) establishes the centrality of uncertainty (and not, as usually argued, instrumentality) as a motivation for Op artists to engage new media. Turning to Bridget Riley and the centrality of perception in cybernetics, I demonstrate that even artists who did not use emerging technologies shared with these fields an interest in automated perception that challenged the integrity of the subject. This was recognised by Rudolf Arnheim, Anton Ehrenzweig, and Ernst Gombrich. Examining the unique role of Op in Gombrich’s oeuvre alongside his debate with perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson elaborates how Op’s interrogation of perception’s complexities has sociopolitical weight. I conclude by recasting Op’s irresponsible and (apparently) intolerable capaciousness as its most significant challenge to art history.

Abstract This essay examines how Alfonso Ongpin (1885–1975), a Filipino photographer, art conservator, and collector, constructed a vernacular counter-archive in early twentieth-century Manila partially through the use of Real Photo Postcards (RPPCs). It foregrounds the material and social life of these images, offering formal and historical readings of how they challenged the racialised visual regimes of American colonial rule. Drawing on theories of decolonial aesthetics and visual sovereignty, the study shows how Ongpin’s RPPCs intervened in ethnological photography, resisting the objectification of Filipino subjects. By creating a visual grammar of self-fashioning and civic memory, Ongpin’s work enacted a mode of authorship that aligns with counter-archival strategies developed across colonised contexts — particularly among Indigenous American communities — demonstrating how photography could serve as a medium for nationalist expression and political imagination under empire.

Abstract This essay reconsiders the personal relationship and artistic dialogue between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the early 1910s through the lens of homosocial desire. During their so-called ‘conjugal’ years, the two artists forged an intimate bond of collaboration and seclusion that produced the recalcitrant, idiosyncratic Cubist idiom. Close readings of artworks, biographical accounts, and the art-historical reconstruction of this partnership reveal how it both confirmed and challenged dominant heteronormative protocols as well as conventional narratives of Cubism as a masculinist fraternity-cum-rivalry. Instead, Cubism emerges as a practice shaped by queer opacity and homosocial desire: a language of furtive signs, oblique intimacies, and relational entanglements between men. By situating intimacy and desire as constitutive rather than incidental, the essay challenges the historiography of modernism, exposing its blind spots while proposing a queer art-historical method attentive to affective structures at the very core of the canon.