These life-sized painted figures, popular in Europe and colonial America in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, were designed to amuse and confuse.

Beginning with texts written in the 1970s, this reading list shows how the major questions, critiques, and debates developed in the field of feminist art history.

First named such in Belgium, Art Nouveau was intimately tied up with that country’s brutal rule of the Congo.

The French painter Edgar Degas was Impressionism’s most energetic and inventive frame designer.

Need to clean your sixteenth-century distemper painting? Try a piece of bread (at your own risk).

Though vidding is now generally a part of online culture, it originated in the grassroots editing efforts of female television fans.

The men and women who tracked down looted art after WWII didn’t just go after stuff stolen by the Nazis. They also searched for treasures stolen by the Japanese. Sort of.

A Spanish princess who became a German queen, Margarita Teresa lived a life structured by Catholicism and cut short by consanguinity.

A deeply ingrained interest in stolen objects and their recovery reflects our collective uncertainty over how we value art.

California citrus growers drew on mass-printing techniques and advances in color lithography to create distinctive brands for their boxes.