Editor’s Introduction

Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s IntroductionPaul StirtonPaul StirtonBard Graduate Center, New York City, USA Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreCamouflage—the use of visual effects for mimicry, concealment, or deception—emerged as a vital subject for biologists in the nineteenth century. Charles Darwin was only one of many scientists who took an interest in this phenomenon in nature. In the twentieth century, artists became involved, partly out of fascination with these same visual effects but also as a means of exploring how we see and apprehend visual imagery. Caroline van Eck takes a different tack entirely, acknowledging these earlier approaches but exploring camouflage as a cultural technique that ultimately manifests itself in various forms of human material culture. In a wide-ranging article that looks at the work of Vladimir Nabokov, Roger Caillois, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri de Saint-Simon, she uncovers ways in which we might reconsider the work of theorists like Gottfried Semper and Alois Riegl, especially with regard to their approach to the cultural meanings of objects. As she writes in her conclusion, this may be a tentative first definition, but it offers “a way of thinking about the relation between nature and culture.”Our other articles are concerned more with specific objects: a late eighteenth-century “calligraphic portrait” of the Spanish Viceroy of Mexico, which reveals something of the culture and politics of Spain’s imperial territory, and a study of the Chelsea ceramic figure modelers of interwar London. In the latter article, Marshall Colman points out that figurative ceramics were at the heart of the studio pottery movement, and while this aspect has survived in the collecting and scholarship of Central Europe, changes in taste have meant that it has been largely ignored in accounts of British ceramics.Aby Warburg’s foray into the ethnography of “Indian” culture in New Mexico and Arizona is a prominent feature in the vast corpus of writings on this foundational scholar of art history and iconography. What is less well known is that he was in contact with Franz Boas, the pioneer of the anthropology of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Their correspondence is published here in translation for the first time, complete with an introduction by Claudia Wedepohl and Brooke Penaloza Patzak. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by West 86th Volume 30, Number 1Spring–Summer 2023 Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/728329 © Copyright 2023 by The Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.