Books
Modern Women & Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting
Cambridge University Press, 2007
Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting examines the encounter between Impressionist painting and Parisian consumer culture. Its analysis of Impressionist paintings depicting women as consumers, producers, or sellers in sites such as the millinery boutique, theater, opera, café-concert and market, revises our understanding of the representation of women in Impressionist painting, from excluding women from modernity to their inclusion in its public spaces, and from the privileging of the male gaze to a plurality of gazes.
* Chinese translation published by Cambridge University Press in collaboration with Jiangsu Fine Arts Publishing House, 2010.
“This ambitious and revisionist book is sure to generate reappraisals of the Impressionist movement, the œuvre of its individual artists and women's place in the public sphere of the late nineteenth century.”
Heather Belnap Jensen, French Studies
“Theoretically confident and freshly argued”
Richard Thomson, Art History
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"Ruth E. Iskin wonderfully excavates the broad visual culture that emerged from consumerism in the second half of the nineteenth century in Paris and its deep connection to women’s arrival in the public sphere. Iskin’s keen eye, guided by excellent historical contextualization, leads the reader to see how Impressionist art was bathed in the commercial ethos of its era and did not always stand in an oppositional relationship to it… This book superbly demonstrates the value of seeing the history of art refracted through the lens of the broader visual culture in which it developed."
Vanessa R. Schwartz, Professor of Art History and History, University of Southern California. Author, It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture and Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in fin-de-siècle Paris
"An important book which sheds new light on modern formations of gender, fashion, consumption, art and national identity."
Whitney Chadwick, Author, Women, Art, and Society
"A remarkably informative book, especially with regard to impressionist images of women, … so central to the advanced art of the era."
Richard Shiff, the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art, The University of Texas at Austin. Author, Cézanne and the End of Impressionism
"A wide-ranging, interesting and often original book. Its central argument is that Impressionist painting not only engaged with consumer culture but functioned as an agent in the shift towards its modern ubiquity."
Robert Lethbridge, Journal of European Studies
“Ruth Iskin’s book has an ambitious goal: to re-establish the links between consumer culture and avantgarde art in late-nineteenth-century France… The author’s impressive parade of primary sources forces a new engagement with the works discussed – no small feat considering the existing wealth of scholarship on Impressionism, which includes her own work.”
Natasha Ruiz-Go´mez, The ArtBook
“Iskin's well-researched work is a significant contribution to Impressionist studies. Her argument is clear and convincing, through both its practical nature and the wealth of support provided through primary sources and the paintings themselves… As Iskin demonstrates, these painters witnessed the rapid development of mass consumption, and knowing this development is critical to understanding the visual stimuli of the modern world with which Impressionist painters engaged.”
Francesca Bavuso, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide
“Ruth Iskin’s rich and engaging study explores the relationship between impressionist painting and Parisian consumer culture, bringing together two scholarly fields whose fascinating parallels have never before benefited from such a comprehensive and insightful exploration.”
Rachel Mesch, Nineteenth-Century French Studies
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“Challenges us to find new ways of understanding Impressionist paintings…excels in making us rethink traditional gender paradigms of the late-nineteenth-century Parisian visual market.”
Kiri Bloom, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
“A thought-provoking book that introduces many new ideas …an important resource for scholars of social, cultural, and art history as well as gender studies of the nineteenth century.”
Charlene Garnkle, H-Women
“Thanks to Iskin's study, both the content and the reception of art in France in the last decades of the nineteenth century will be far better understood.”
Laural Weintraub, Visual Resources
The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s-1900s
Dartmouth College Press, 2014. Distributed by The University of Chicago Press
The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s is a cultural history that situates the poster at the crossroads of art, design, advertising, and collecting. Though international in scope, the book focuses especially on France and England. Ruth E. Iskin argues that the avant-garde poster and the original art print played an important role in the development of a modernist language of art in the 1890s, as well as in the adaptation of art to an era of mass media. She moreover contends that this new form of visual communication fundamentally redefined relations between word and image: poster designers embedded words within the graphic, rather than using images to illustrate a text. Posters had to function as effective advertising in the hectic environment of the urban street. Even though initially commissioned as advertisements, they were soon coveted by collectors. Iskin introduces readers to the late nineteenth-century “iconophile”—a new type of collector/curator/archivist who discovered in poster collecting an ephemeral archaeology of modernity. Bridging the separation between the fields of art, design, advertising, and collecting, Iskin’s insightful study proposes that the poster played a constitutive role in the modern culture of spectacle. This stunningly illustrated book will appeal to art historians and students of visual culture, as well as social and cultural history, media, design, and advertising.
“Iskin’s definitive study of the poster restores it to its rightful place as one of the most important forms of fin-de-siècle visual culture…[and] permanently disables our old ideas regarding modernism in favor of modernity’s rich, colorful, and complex palette.”
Vanessa Schwartz, Professor of Art History and History and Director of the Visual Studies Research Institute, University of Southern California
“In this clearly written, attractively produced, and consistently surprising work, Ruth Iskin for the first time gives the illustrated poster of the Belle Époque the comprehensive attention it deserves.”
Daniel J. Sherman, Lineberger Distinguished Professor of History, University of North Carolina
“A towering monument to an oft-neglected subject, which should stand as a model of inquiry into ephemeral visual culture for generations of print historians.”
Sarah C. Schaefer, Art in Print
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“This work is by far the most thorough, comprehensive, and exhaustive title available on this topic covering this period… [the] bountiful coverage of the interplay between design and the evolution of advertising is superb…. Highly recommended.“
Choice
“Lively and compelling…demonstrates that the poster was a powerful agent of the visual cultural of modernity and captures the excitement as well as the fear the poster aroused.”
Mary Chapin, Curator of Prints and Drawings, The Portland Art Museum
“A landmark in art historical studies…Richly illustrated, international in scope, interdisciplinary in methodology.”
Patricia Mainardi, Professor Emerita of Art History, City University of New York, Graduate Center
“A beautifully illustrated, and nicely crafted, cultural history of the late nineteenth-century art poster.”
Journal of the History of Collections
“…filled with little nuggets of the history of this era and its affichomanie that broadened and enriched my understanding of its transformative energy.”
Design and Culture
“The first comprehensive examination of the emergence of the poster…this is a book worthy of noting, using, and applauding.”
Gabriel P. Weisberg, Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide
“A subtle and innovative cultural history of poster art that sets the standard for future studies. “
Lynda Nead, Chair of History of Art, Birbeck College, University of London
Edited Books
Editor and introduction
Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World
Routledge, 2017
Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon: Perspectives in a Global World seeks to dissect and interrogate the nature of the present-day art field, which has experienced dramatic shifts in the past 50 years.
In discussions of the canon of art history, the notion of ‘inclusiveness’, both at the level of rhetoric and as a desired practice is on the rise and gradually replacing talk of ‘exclusion’, which dominated critiques of the canon up until two decades ago. The art field has dramatically, if insufficiently, changed in the half-century since the first protests and critiques of the exclusion of ‘others’ from the art canon.
With increased globalization and shifting geopolitics, the art field is expanding beyond its Euro-American focus, as is particularly evident in the large-scale international biennales now held all over the globe. Are canons and counter-canons still relevant? Can they be re-envisioned rather than merely revised? Following an introduction that discusses these issues, thirteen newly commissioned essays present case studies of consecration in the contemporary art field, and three commissioned discussions present diverse positions on issues of the canon and consecration processes today.
This volume will be of interest to instructors and students of contemporary art, art history, and museum and curatorial studies.　
“Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon is a timely, necessary volume, one that asks—across lucid and jargon-free case studies and equally dynamic round-table discussions whither the place of the art historical canon in a contemporary art world. Answers diverge and for the better.”
Suzanne Hudson, Associate Professor of Art History and Fine Arts, University of Southern California
“Through a series of fascinating essays and well-written introductory sections, this book sets out the premises for a critical account of how contemporary art canons get created in a range of institutional and discursive contexts globally.”
Jonathan Harris, Professor in Global Art and Design Studies, Birmingham City University
“A wonderful contribution that examines art historical canons and the political, social, and ethical forces that shape and reshape them… this text pressures us to rethink how we understand and categorize art and the art world in our globalized present.”
Steven Nelson, University of California, Los Angeles
“At a time when geopolitical, gender and postcolonial perspectives are generating more inclusive methods in curating and art history, Re-envisioning the Contemporary Art Canon provides a compelling argument to not only critique the canon but to strategically reconceive it for the twenty-first century.”
Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher, Editors, Journal of Curatorial Studies
Collecting Prints, Posters and Ephemera: Perspectives in a Global World
Bloomsbury, 2019
Ruth E. Iskin and Britany Salsbury
Why did collectors seek out posters and collect ephemera during the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries? How have such materials been integrated into institutional collections today? What inspired collectors to build significant holdings of works from cultures other than their own? And what are the issues facing curators and collectors of digital ephemera today?
These are among the questions tackled in this volume the first to examine the practices of collecting prints, posters, and ephemera during the modern and contemporary periods. A wide range of case studies feature collections of printed materials from the United States, Latin America, France, Germany, Great Britain, China, Japan, Russia, Iran, and Cuba. Fourteen essays and one roundtable discussion, all specially commissioned from art historians, curators, and collectors for this volume, explore key issues such as the roles of class, politics, and gender, and address historical contexts, social roles, value, and national and transnational aspects of collecting practices. The global scope of Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera highlights cross-cultural connections and contributes to a new understanding of the place of prints, posters, and ephemera within an increasingly international art world.
“Remarkable for its global scope and historical range, Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera is a vital contribution to our understanding of printed images in all their variety and an indispensable guide to how collecting practices have shaped their meaning.”
Richard Taws, University College London