This article restores an attribution for a sketchbook, now in the collection of the Getty Research Institute, shared by preeminent French woman artist of the nineteenth century Rosa Bonheur (1822–99) and her father and teacher, Raymond Bonheur (1796–1849). The sketchbook contains a range of entries in different media, including landscape studies by Raymond dating to the 1840s and drawings by Rosa from the early 1850s. Reidentified as a collaborative project spanning a period of two decades, the sketchbook offers a new material context for the artistic relationship between father and daughter as well as for the origins of Rosa’s great Salon successes The Horse Fair (1853–55) and Haymaking in the Auvergne (1855).

In 1934, the Soviet photo agency Soiuzfoto published an illustrated version of Joseph Stalin’s “Report to the Seventeenth Party Congress on the Work of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.(B.),” comprising seventy-five photomontages by a trio of young artists named Brigade KGK. In this essay, I treat the satirical photomontages that Brigade KGK created for Stalin’s report as a search for a suitable artistic idiom of official humor. I argue that Brigade KGK used stretched and distorted imagery to demonstrate the comic possibilities inherent in photography’s materiality, where others subordinated it to the traditional art of drawing. The essay situates Brigade KGK’s work in relation to debates in the final years of the first five-year plan, at a time when supporters of German artist John Heartfield criticized photomontage as a purely mechanical technique and discredited its supporters as petty-bourgeois formalists.

During the Third Republic, the French fine metalworking firm Christofle et Cie remade two of their most significant Second Empire projects, which had initially been grandiose official commissions for huge metallic table centerpieces. These works, both lost during the violence and conflagrations that marked the end of the Paris Commune, were revived in different material forms and circumstances for similar purposes of mourning and remembering. This article examines how the firm reconstituted the objects to become material witnesses to an era that was still familiar, if strongly reviled, in the late nineteenth century. Martyred and venerated, the two centerpieces in their remade forms actively negotiated the social memory of the past and secured a prominent place for the firm’s legacy in a nascent history of French design.

In 1993, a painting ascribed to Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco appeared in the exhibition South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1914–1947 at the Yale University Art Gallery. Soon after the opening, the present author, having organized the exhibition at Yale, discovered that the work was in fact by Bennett Buck, a little-known US American artist. This essay—part memoir, part art historical analysis, part detective story—revisits a curatorial lapse to recover the meanings of Buck’s painting and its inclusion in the show 1938: Dedicated to the New Deal, held in the fall of that year at Herman Baron’s American Contemporary Art (A.C.A.) Gallery in New York. Rather than a fake, the painting is a forgotten but important example of proletarian art that confirms the influence of Orozco’s New School and Dartmouth College murals on US American artists of the 1930s. Connoisseurship—a close reading of the painting and related documents—provides insight into how and why the painting was given a false attribution and provenance in the 1960s and 1970s.

The explosive growth in the recognition of photography as an art form by museums and collectors in the United States between the late 1960s and 1970s is often referred to as the photography boom. In this period, the status of the photograph evolved from functional image to valuable and collectible fine-art object. This article addresses the significance of the limited-edition portfolio during the 1970s in light of this phenomenon, considering, as a case study, the portfolio Lisette Model: Twelve Photographs. Published in 1976 by Washington, DC–based art dealer Harry Lunn, the modern portfolio features Austrian-born US American photographer Lisette Model’s street photographs and portraits from the 1930s and 1940s printed by Gerd Sander for the edition. Sander’s role as established professional printer, in which he created an object for the market, together with Lunn’s strategic capacity as photography dealer, produced rarity—a key mechanism that generated the collectability of modernist photography in the United States.

Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, a decommissioned state prison in Philadelphia that reopened as an interpretive site in 1994, reflects what philosopher Charles Taliaferro refers to as an open museum, one that is concerned with dialogue on res publica. It is also an example of how curators use material culture to convey knowledge and foster such dialogue. This article follows the curatorial progression at Eastern State, from its initial preservation as a stabilized ruin to the descriptive historical framing of the site, and subsequently to the critical frameworks offered through art installations and an interpretation center, all of which unlock the heritage site from the past and bring it to bear on contemporary issues of justice in the criminal legal system. In following this progression, I find that the particular effectiveness of Eastern State lies in the way material culture suffuses and informs res publica, in which a direct encounter with the historic site distinctively shapes the public conversation.

In the early 1970s, David Antin became known for talking. A well-regarded poet, Antin began appearing at poetry readings with a tape recorder but without anything to read, speaking off the top of his head. Antin effectively ceased writing poetry; instead, he transcribed his recordings and created work from the transcripts. While Antin’s turn to talking has been much discussed in the context of poetry, it has been considered less in the context of art criticism—and, significantly, he was also an established art critic. By framing Antin’s work of the 1970s as a kind of oral criticism, or talking criticism, tied to the uniqueness of the voice, this essay charts his move from a high-modernist style of criticism toward a postmodernist one focused on embodiment, context, and social relations.