The Photographically Illustrated Art Book, 1900-1955.
Edited by Steven Jacobs, Griet Bonne, and Elise Dupré.

In contrast with artist’s books or livres d’artiste (books as art), the run-of-the-mill illustrated art book (books on art) hardly received any critical attention. This proposed edited volume (to be published in 2026) attempts to remedy this situation by giving attention to seminal art books published between 1900, shortly after the development of half-tone printing processes that made possible the inclusion of photomechanical images in text pages, and 1955, when André Malraux had published various components and variations of his musée imaginaire (1947, 1951, 1952-54), which made a lasting impression on the centuries-old concept of the book as museum.
Apart from a general introduction written by the editors, the volume will contain 50 short entries, each focusing on a specific book or book series.

We invite authors from different fields and with divergent specializations to submit proposals for an entry on an art book published between 1900 and 1955, dealing with all kinds of art from different cultures, languages, mediums, and epochs.
The entry can briefly deal with the text and discourse of the book but should mainly address material, formal, and structural elements such as graphic design, measurements, weight, paper texture, and particularly the role of illustrations. Specific attention should be paid to the visual strategies of the book, e.g. the isolation, juxtaposition, and succession of images.
How are photographic details and close-ups, confrontations and sequences used to make a discursive argument? What meaning is conveyed through the reproductions, and do they support or contradict ideas expressed in the text?

The proposed book is based on a 2020 theme issue of the Flemish art journal De Witte Raaf, which included already 25 entries on key art books such as Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik (1915), El Lissitzky’s and Hans Arp’s Kunstismen (1925), Elie Faure’s L’Esprit des formes (1927), Ludwig Goldscheider’s Zeitlose Kunst (1934), and Kenneth Clark’s 100 Details from Pictures in the National Gallery (1938) as well as book series such as Klassiker der Kunst, Propyläen Kunstgeschichte, and The Penguin Modern Painters. For a full list of the 25 cases that are already covered, see De Witte Raaf 208 (https://www.dewitteraaf.be/site/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/DWR_208_LR.pdf).

Proposals for entries should include:
- Key bibliographical references (author, title, publisher, date, edition, number of pages and illustrations) and, if available, other relevant information (print run, printer, photographer, graphic design, paper, etcetera)
- 5 to 10 photographs of spreads
- A short argument (maximum 250 words) why this particular case should be included in the volume

Proposals can be sent to Elise Dupré (Elise.DupreUGent.be), no later than 30 June, 2025. A selection will be made, based on the intrinsic formal qualities of the proposed books and their complementary value to the corpus of the edited volume.

After selection, the entries themselves (maximum 1200 words; with no foot- or end notes and with up to five relevant bibliographical references) need to be submitted before 1 November, 2025.