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Between 1876 and 1882, Brazilian photographer Marc Ferrez produced a series of photographs documenting the construction and completion of dams, reservoirs, and various engineering projects for Rio de Janeiro’s new water supply systems. While the titled subject of each image is infrastructure, an unacknowledged presence marks many of the compositions: the human body. People constellate the series, captured by accident or intentionally posed by Ferrez as tools by which size can be made sense of, setting monumental constructions to scale. The use of the body as an informal scale legend signals unintended tensions in Ferrez’s photographs. In concert with the imperial constructions, Brazil’s government completed a tumultuous process of implementing new metric guidelines that redefined the country’s measurement system, enabled large-scale civil infrastructure projects, and sparked popular protest. More than a marker, the human body—a fundamentally inexact tool of measurement—renders a distinct ambiguity to the modernity and scientific rationality Ferrez’s images champion, returning to embodied modes of knowledge.

In 1967, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable embarked on an investigative journey to the USSR with a group of fourteen New York Times journalists. Upon her return, she published numerous writings on Soviet architecture and its protagonists, including newspaper articles, a report for Architectural Forum, and a book essay. The present article reconstructs the circumstances that led to the formulation of these stories and examines how the critic tailored them to a North American readership. By tracing the untold negotiations between public and personal expectations and individual perceptions that led to the final narrative through the documents held in her husband’s archive, that of industrial designer L. Garth Huxtable, this article explores the gray areas surrounding the critic’s assessment of the Soviet “architectural Sputnik.”

This article examines a panoramic photograph of the Brazilian city of Salvador, in the state of Bahia, taken around 1880 by Rodolpho Lindemann. Recently added to the collection of the Getty Research Institute, this large six-part folding work has not been mentioned in previous studies or in the foremost books on the history of photography in Brazil, suggesting that its existence has not been widely known. Although it bears no signature or stamp, comparison with a drawing based on the photograph made it possible to determine its authorship. This article explores connections with other panoramic images produced in the country in order to propose a framework for thinking about the representation of landscapes and cities according to the panoramic tradition, as well as the question of unknown authorship in photography.

This article restores an attribution for a sketchbook, now in the collection of the Getty Research Institute, shared by preeminent French woman artist of the nineteenth century Rosa Bonheur (1822–99) and her father and teacher, Raymond Bonheur (1796–1849). The sketchbook contains a range of entries in different media, including landscape studies by Raymond dating to the 1840s and drawings by Rosa from the early 1850s. Reidentified as a collaborative project spanning a period of two decades, the sketchbook offers a new material context for the artistic relationship between father and daughter as well as for the origins of Rosa’s great Salon successes The Horse Fair (1853–55) and Haymaking in the Auvergne (1855).

This article seeks to make visible the affective and immaterial labor that women performed in the 1920s within the male-dominated circuits of the avant-gardes. It centers on a long-forgotten agent of the European and Soviet avant-gardes—the Russian-speaking, Vienna-based Jewish art historian Fannina Halle (1881–1963). Although the whereabouts of most of Halle’s documents are unknown today, her name regularly appears in the letters that the Soviet artist El Lissitzky wrote to his manager and later wife, Sophie Küppers, in 1924. Yet the edited volume of Lissitzky’s letters published in 1967, which has served as a predominant source for scholars interested in the artist’s primary documents, elided most mentions of Halle. In order to recover the fragments that relate to Halle, I read the published volume of Lissitzky’s letters against his archive. Although the artist’s mentions of Halle might appear to be mundane, they reveal the many forms of invisible labor that mostly women performed in support of the avant-garde. In addition to offering her care, Halle sold and distributed Lissitzky’s work in Vienna as well as organized lectures and a major exhibition for him and his Russian comrades.

In 1966 Judy Chicago made a series of three sculptures, each consisting of a group of circular columns ranging in height from two to nine inches. Formal variations among the three Untitled works reveal a playful oscillation between representational subject matter and abstract forms. These exquisite works have been absent from Chicago historiography, and we do not know their whereabouts. But the Rolf Nelson Gallery records at the Getty Research Institute contain several photographs of these sculptures. They are valuable resources that provide new insights into Chicago’s practice during the mid-1960s and the challenges she faced as a woman artist working in a male-dominated art world. More broadly, the sculptures speak to the stylistic ambiguities among the registers of minimal art, pop art, and environments, and to artists’ interest in sexually allusive subject matter that questions static, binary, and hierarchical conceptions of gender.

Developed by the Getty Vocabulary Program, the Art & Architecture Thesaurus® (AAT) is a tool for cataloging and indexing works of art and other cultural objects. It was begun in 1979 by a group of librarians who needed specific art terms for cataloging art information. In the early 1980s, the AAT was incorporated into the Getty Art History Information Program. Originally comprising only English terms, it has become more inclusive over the years through translation into other languages, including Portuguese. The first Portuguese translation project began in 2016; the second project began in 2020 and was made possible through the Getty Graduate Internship Program. These AAT translation projects facilitate the access and retrieval of art collection information by Portuguese-language users around the world.