The culmination of a two-part project, this volume takes an extended look at recent, important acquisitions by the Art Institute of Chicago's departments of American Arts, Architecture, Asian Art, European Painting, and Prints and Drawings. Bringing the museum's collecting activities into wide public view, it showcases over forty notable works handpicked by Art Institute curators and the museum's director and president, James N. Wood. Together with its companion issue, which was published in Fall 2003, this publication explores art works acquired between 1992 and 2003, years that have brought significant additions to every area of the Art Institute's holdings. This volume surveys an impressive array of objects, including a glittering Empire card table from early nineteenth-century New York; a fragment of Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel, Tokyo (1923); and important paintings and works on paper by artists as diverse as Lee Krasner, Edvard Munch, Ni Zan, and Rembrandt van Rijn. Illuminated by striking, full-colour reproductions and a lively, accessible text, this is an indispensable guide to the newest and finest the Art Institute has to offer.

Whether antiquities should be returned to the countries where they were found is one of the most urgent and controversial issues in the art world today, and it has pitted museums, private collectors, and dealers against source countries, archaeologists, and academics. Maintaining that the acquisition of undocumented antiquities by museums encourages the looting of archaeological sites, countries such as Italy, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, and China have claimed ancient artifacts as state property, called for their return from museums around the world, and passed laws against their future export. But in Who Owns Antiquity?, one of the world's leading museum directors vigorously challenges this nationalistic position, arguing that it is damaging and often disingenuous. "Antiquities," James Cuno argues, "are the cultural property of all humankind," "evidence of the world's ancient past and not that of a particular modern nation. They comprise antiquity, and antiquity knows no borders." Cuno argues that nationalistic retention and reclamation policies impede common access to this common heritage and encourage a dubious and dangerous politicization of antiquities--and of culture itself. Antiquities need to be protected from looting but also from nationalistic identity politics. To do this, Cuno calls for measures to broaden rather than restrict international access to antiquities. He advocates restoration of the system under which source countries would share newly discovered artifacts in exchange for archaeological help, and he argues that museums should again be allowed reasonable ways to acquire undocumented antiquities. Cuno explains how partage broadened access to our ancient heritage and helped create national museums in Cairo, Baghdad, and Kabul. The first extended defense of the side of museums in the struggle over antiquities, Who Owns Antiquity? is sure to be as important as it is controversial. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

In The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s-1980s, Catherine Dossin challenges the now-mythic perception of New York as the undisputed center of the art world between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, a position of power that brought the city prestige, money, and historical recognition. Dossin reconstructs the concrete factors that led to the shift of international attention from Paris to New York in the 1950s, and documents how ’peripheries’ such as Italy, Belgium, and West Germany exerted a decisive influence on this displacement of power. As the US economy sank into recession in the 1970s, however, American artists and dealers became increasingly dependent on the support of Western Europeans, and cities like Cologne and Turin emerged as major commercial and artistic hubs - a development that enabled European artists to return to the forefront of the international art scene in the 1980s. Dossin analyses in detail these changing distributions of geopolitical and symbolic power in the Western art worlds - a story that spans two continents, forty years, and hundreds of actors. Her transnational and interdisciplinary study provides an original and welcome supplement to more traditional formal and national readings of the period.