While her career remains vastly understudied, the Anglo-Italian narrative and portrait painter Maria Cosway (1760–1838) reached rare levels of recognition for an artist of any sex during her life by exhibiting to regular acclaim at London’s Royal Academy from 1781 to 1801. In these same years, and after she ceased exhibiting, Cosway also consistently engaged with print – an aspect of her artistic practice that has yet to be the subject of sustained scholarly work.

This chapter offers an initial foray into understanding Cosway’s relationship with and steady pursuit of the printed medium. Above all, it emphasises the implicitly professional nature of her published endeavours – according to definitions of professionalism at the time – by highlighting her contributions to five artistic, didactic printed series executed in London and Paris. Why print, and why these projects? What did she see in the medium that she may not have found in her painting practice? How might gender have factored into these decisions and, vitally, into her works’ reception? After two decades in the public eye, what was at stake for Cosway – might she have used print to claim a discrete identity as an artistic professional?

This chapter focuses on exhibitions of comics history curated by contemporary cartoonists. It maps out the stakes of this curatorial gesture in a context of comics museification and the narrative, aesthetic, and cultural challenges that it raises. Drafting in cartoonists as curators has been a way for some museums to navigate these issues, by commissioning a “cartoonist’s eye” to select and present material from archives. Two specific cartoonist-curated exhibitions are central case studies for this chapter: Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman in 2012 and Eye of the Cartoonist: Daniel Clowes’s Selections from Comics History in 2014. The exhibitions frame “their” histories in quite specific ways, relative to their material and institutional contexts. Both cases present visitors with completely different versions of comics history, based not only on the material that is exhibited but on how it is presented, framed, and organized. Based on interviews and archival research, the chapter offers an in-depth analysis of the layout strategies and museological discourses around the two exhibitions, describing how curating shapes a particular visual transmission of comics history.

Pairing David Garnett’s A Man in the Zoo (1924) with Franz Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’ (1917), this chapter demonstrates how both writers troubled species boundaries by drawing on historical shifts in the public display of human and nonhuman beings. The first part explores how Garnett’s story of a man who volunteers to be caged between a chimpanzee and an orang-utan offers an ironic transformation structured around abrupt plot turns and taxonomic confusion. Here Garnett exposes hierarchies of both gender and species and offers glimpses of more ethical creaturely relations. The second half of the chapter brings Kafka’s story of an ape who learns to behave like a human into a critique of animal capture and zoological trade, in particular concerning Carl Hagenbeck’s business. Hagenbeck is subtly alluded to in Garnett’s novella, where the historical phenomenon of animal spectatorship informs his satirical depiction of London’s zoo, even as his treatment of race and human exhibition remains ambivalent. The section brings to light material from Hagenbeck’s own writings and newspaper coverage, alongside literary connections to Samuel Butler, John Collier and Louis MacNeice.

The Epilogue moves from the museumification of Ichijōdani as a prefectural heritage site to the display of medieval urban archaeological materials in general. The excavation, analysis, and display of material culture from Ichijōdani provides us with an opportunity to rethink how we tell the story of medieval Japan and its relationship to modern history, particularly around issues of war, community, and national identity.

In the nineteenth century, visual culture became noted for spectacles such as panoramas, which sought to create an experience that offered more than simply viewing an engraving or a framed painting. The panorama placed the spectator at the centre of a circle, surrounded by a huge painting on a curved surface. This chapter focuses on the Arctic panorama Summer and Winter Views of the Polar Regions (1850) that opened in London in 1850. The chapter explains how a radically transformed Arctic was presented to a metropolitan audience, which anticipated education, entertainment, and an aesthetic experience at Leicester Square, London. Summer and Winter Views was based on the drawings of a recently returned officer, William Henry Browne, and made claims of authenticity in a competitive market. By closely reading the sources available for the panorama, including sketches, contemporary reviews, and prints, it argues that this affordable and persuasive spectacle of ‘savage horrors’ transformed the Arctic into a supernatural space of well-executed, yet sensationalistic, Gothic icescapes, masculine endeavour, and exotic meteorological effects.

In 1936, the first Surrealist Exhibition of Objects was held at the Charles Ratton Gallery in Paris, displaying the most diverse array of material objects in the history of surrealist exhibitions to date. André Breton elaborates on this aspect of the exhibition in his enigmatic “Crisis of the Object” which was written as a text to accompany the exhibition catalog. While it has been widely read as an interpretation for a scientific reckoning of surrealism, this chapter shows that “Crisis of the Object” was rather a reflection on Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Crisis of Verse” and his materialist conception of poetry published fifty years before. A reconsideration of Breton’s theory of objects through the recent lens of new materialism offers insight into how the surrealist engagement with things in the 1930s was – and still is – revolutionary in that it sought to propose an antianthropocentric poetics of the world.

This chapter examines Surrealist curatorial practice from its emergence in the 1920s until the last group exhibition prior to André Breton’s death in 1966. Rooted in the agitational French and German Dada demonstrations that immediately preceded them, Surrealist exhibitions aimed to transform their viewers through an evolving set of tactics that diverged markedly from normative gallery display practices. The chapter proposes that by recourse initially to the discursive, then to the tactile, and finally through fully immersive environments, these complex and often elaborate installations aimed to cultivate sensual, politicized, and postnational subjects. Eschewing those detached models of modernism that aimed either to privilege abstraction or to maintain medium specificity, the exhibitions curated by the Surrealists over half a century give shape to a coherent curatorial practice that engaged with some of the hallmark discourses and experiences of the twentieth century.

Surrealist writers and artists repeatedly turned to Eros (the life drive), as a concept and principle with which to explore the depths of dream and desire as well as a means to counter the prevailing tendency toward Thanatos (the death drive) in society. Using Sigmund Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents (1929) and Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation (1955) as two key theoretical texts to enable our understanding of Eros for this avant-garde circle, the chapter considers the ways in which the surrealists enacted a radical assault on bourgeois morality and totalitarian ideology by appealing to individual desires as a route to political consciousness and resistance. Looking at a range of media – text, object, photography, dance, exhibition practice – we find practitioners of Surrealism all shared a radical celebration of Eros both as a path to self-knowledge and as a means to harness the revolutionary potential of the life drive.

Focusing on Seamus Heaney: Listen Now Again, a National Library of Ireland exhibition running for the next 3-5 years at the Bank of Ireland, College Green, Dublin, this chapter examines the process of curating and exhibiting Heaney’s archive. In exploring the transition from the private space of the writer’s room to the public place of the exhibition, the chapter probes the relationship between texts, contexts and objects in Heaney’s work. The chapter follows the trajectory of the exhibition from the earth-bound bog poems of Heaney’s early career to the airy transcendence of crediting marvels in his later work. It considers the aura of objects as well as the transformative relationship between Heaney’s creative inspiration, his writing process, the poetry and its referents.

This chapter is centred on what was widely seen as the sale of the nineteenth century- the 1893 dispersal of the Spitzer collections. Austrian-born Frédéric Spitzer in many ways was the inheritor of the salvage crusade begun in earlier generations, building up a brilliant array of medieval and Renaissance artefacts (including some faked and composite pieces created on his commission). This chapter explores the visibility of Spitzer in French print culture in order to interrogate the claims for private collectors as patriots, and the attempt by the Third Republic to make collectors into auxiliaries of national policy. The scandal surrounding his sale exposes the anxieties about the interplay of private interest and public institutions, the sensitivity about curators like Émile Molinier when they operated in the market, as well as the virulence of anti-Semitic hostility to Jewish dealers. Most pervasive was the wider fear that French heritage was increasingly snapped up and repatriated by foreign buyers, so that the 1893 sale could be alternately depicted as a triumph, a swindle or a defeat for French culture.

Prompted by an encounter with a photograph of Vivien Leigh as Titania in an exhibition, this final section reflects on the book’s argument, particularly its attention to the idea of a photograph as index, in spite of its insistence that all photographs are constructed.