Princeton University Press

As a pigment, white is often thought to represent an absence of colour, but it is without doubt an important colour in its own right, just like red, blue, green, or yellow―and, like them, white has its own intriguing history. In this richly illustrated...

 presents the first cultural history and anthropology of the face across centuries, continents, and media. Ranging from funerary masks and masks in drama to the figural work of contemporary artists including Cindy Sherman and Nam June Paik, renowned art historian Hans Belting emphasizes that...

In this provocative new account, David Joselit shows how art from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries began to function as a commodity, while the qualities of the artist, nation, or period themselves became valuable properties. Joselit explores repatriation, explaining that this is not...

Porcelain was invented in medieval China - but its secret recipe was first reproduced in Europe by an alchemist in the employ of the Saxon king Augustus the Strong. Saxony’s revered Meissen factory could not keep porcelain’s ingredients secret for long, however, and scores...

One of the most groundbreaking artists to emerge in American art in the 1960s, Hannah Wilke consistently challenged the prevailing narratives of women’s bodies and their representation throughout her career, until her untimely death in 1993. Wilke established a uniquely feminist iconography in virtually...

The first English translation of Erwin Panofsky's long-lost work on Michelangelo.In 2012, a manuscript by renowned art historian Erwin Panofsky was rediscovered in a safe in Munich, in the basement of the Central Institute for Art History. Hidden for decades among folders and administrative...