Oxford Art Journal is celebrating its 40th anniversary with a collection of articles published in the journal over the years. The articles represent the various forms of critical innovative work the journal has published in its commitment to the political analysis of visual art, applied through a variety of theoretical perspectives.

The collection is free to read for a limited time: http://bit.ly/2wdhZt8

Throughout its forty years of publication, the Oxford Art Journal has been the result of collective discussion and work - on the part of its editorial group (which at the last count has been made up of 37 editors in total), its advisory editors, its authors, and its publishers. The journal has always been independent of institutions - its name arising from the place it came into being, and the conjunction of a group of more or less like-minded research students, and a supportive small local printing company, subsequently inherited by Oxford University Press. During the last forty years, the discipline has expanded and seen numerous shifts. Latterly, we have extended our geographical range, through editorial group membership, and content, in response to the nature of art-historical work being done. But our commitment to the political analysis of visual art, applied through a variety of theoretical perspectives, has remained consistent.

It seemed appropriate to mark our 40th year. We decided to flag up a selection of articles from earlier issues - an impossible task, since, in the spirit of collective dialogue, this ought to have been the result of all past editors having a say. These represent various forms of critical innovative work which the OAJ has published over the years. Nominating a small number of articles is in many ways at odds with the ethos of the OAJ, which has always been committed to challenging the academic star system and the pseudo-hierarchisation of authors and texts manufactured by the RAE/REF, and going against the tide of citation metrics. Fortunately, online access to the OAJ's entire run of past issues allows readers to sample the full extent and range of what we have published.

One for Sorrow, Two for Mirth: The Performance Work of Rose Finn-Kelcey
Lisa Tickner

Well Formed Phrases: Some Limits of Meaning in Political Print at the End of the Second Empire
Adrian Rifkin

Metaphor and Modernity: Russian Constructivism
Briony Fer

'Making a Man of Him': Masculinity and the Black Body in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture
Michael Hatt

Perfect Deformity, Ideal Beauty, and the Imaginaire of Work: The Reception of Annibale Carracci's Arti di Bologna in 1646
Sheila Mctighe

Cockfights and Other Parades: Gesture, Difference, and the Staging of Meaning in Three Paintings by Zoffany, Pollock, and Krasner
Griselda Pollock

Titian's Fire: Pyrotechnics and Representations in Sixteenth-Century Venice
Paul Hills

Trompe-l'Oeil and Trauma: Money and Memory after the Terror
Richard Taws

Points, Lines, Encounters: The World According to Lee Ufan
Joan Kee

The Christian Museum in Southern France: Antiquity, Display, and Liturgy from the Counter-Reformation to the Aftermath of Vatican II
Jaś Elsner

The Inventor of Painting
Hubert Damisch Translated by Kent Minturn and Eric Trudel

The Strand Symptom: A Modernist Disease?
Jorge Ribalta