Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory

Jaleh Mansoor, Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction (Duke University Press, 2025).

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In Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction, Jaleh Mansoor provides a counternarrative of modernism and abstraction and a reexamination of Marxist aesthetics. Mansoor draws on Marx’s concept of prostitution—a conceptual device through which Marx allegorized modern labor—to think about the confluences of generalized and gendered labor in modern art. Analyzing works ranging from Édouard Manet’s Olympia and Georges Seurat’s The Models to contemporary work by Hito Steyerl and Hannah Black, she shows how avant-garde artists can detect changing modes of production and capitalist and biopolitical processes of abstraction that assign identities to subjects in the interest of value’s impersonal circulation. She demonstrates that art and abstraction resist modes of production and subjugation at the level of process and form rather than through referential representation. By studying gendered and generalized labor, abstraction, automation, and the worker, Mansoor shifts focus away from ideology, superstructure, and culture toward the ways art indexes crisis and transformation in the political economic base. Ultimately, she traces the outlines of a counterpraxis to capital while demonstrating how artworks give us a way to see through the abstractions of everyday life.

For more information:
https://www.dukeupress.edu/universal-prostitution-and-modernist-abstraction

Irene Choi

Morgan Sears-Williams

Samira Pourghanad

Tiffany Law

Alex Gibson

Francisco Berlanga

“Le Noyé” and “Construction Worker, Paris” in Hippolyte Bayard and the Invention of Photography

Jillian Lerner, “Le Noyé [The Drowned Man]” and “Construction Worker, Paris” in Hippolyte Bayard and the Invention of Photography, edited by Karen Hellman and Carolyn Peter. Los Angelos, CA: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2024.

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The first English-language volume about Hippolyte Bayard, one of the inventors of photography who helped transform the burgeoning medium into an art form.

Hippolyte Bayard (1801–1887) is often characterized as an underdog in the early history of photography. From the outset, his contribution to the invention of the medium was eclipsed by others such as Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851) and William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877). However, Bayard had an undeniable role in the birth of photography and its subsequent evolution into a form of art. He was a pioneer in artistic style, innovator in terms of practice, and teacher of the next generation of photographers.

Alongside an exploration of Bayard’s decades-long career and lasting impact, this volume presents—for the first time in print—some of the earliest photographs in existence. An album containing nearly 200 images, 145 of those by or attributed to Bayard, is among the Getty Museum’s rarest and most treasured photographic holdings. Few prints have ever been seen in person due to the extreme light sensitivity of Bayard’s experimental processes, making this an essential reference for scholars and enthusiasts of the very beginning of photography.

Edited by Karen Hellman and Carolyn Peter, with contributions by Éléonore Challine, Paul-Louis Roubert, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Art Kaplan,Tania Passafiume, Jillian Lerner, Anne McCauley, Anne de Mondenard, Nancy B. Keeler, Michel Frizot, James A. Ganz, Sarah Freeman and Ronel Namde, Luce Lebart, and Anne Lacoste. This volume is published to accompany an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum from April 9 to July 7, 2024.

For more information: https://shop.getty.edu/products/hippolyte-bayard-and-the-invention-of-photography-978-1606068939

“The Freedom to Work” in Mary Cassatt at Work

Nicole Georgopuluos, “The Freedom to Work” in Jennifer A. Thompson and Laurel Garber, Mary Cassatt at Work. Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2024.

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A new study of Mary Cassatt that explores the centrality of work to both her inventive technical practice and her distinctive approach to modern subjects.

In her sensitive depictions of the social, intellectual, and professional lives of modern women, Mary Cassatt (American, 1844–1926) often emphasized the work involved in the undervalued sphere of feminized activity. From her renowned portrayals of women and children that foreground the labor of caregiving—whether performed by hired help or mothers—to her representations of the myriad activities of bourgeois femininity in scenes of embroidering, theatergoing, and reading, her subjects are deeply engaged, and often engrossed, in what they are doing.

Highlighting Cassatt’s attention to women’s roles in the making of modern life, this study connects her recurring subjects and rigorous techniques to her own understanding of her status as a professional artist. Rather than inspiration, genius, or sentiment, it was intense effort that Cassatt most identified with, which resulted in an ever-evolving style that left the labors of art-making visible. Mary Cassatt at Work brings together more than 130 paintings, pastels, drawings, and prints to reveal what the artist referred to as her “hard work” and “effort upon effort.” Drawing on previously unpublished letters, Cassatt family correspondence, and groundbreaking insights from technical examination of her works, Cassatt’s carefully constructed professional identity is placed within the wider social context of Parisian modernity.

For more information: https://store.philamuseum.org/mary-cassatt-at-work/