The George Peabody Library in Baltimore, Maryland is not accessible from the street; one must traverse two anterooms before entering into that magnificent, public library. It is in one of these anterooms—a very large open room with wooden floors and tall windows open to the street—that the Gertrude Stein in Circles: Spheres of Life and Writing exhibition was held from September 22, 2024 through March 2, 2025 at Johns Hopkins University. With material drawn from archives across Johns Hopkins’s...

By the time I moved to Cairo to research Forster’s years in Egypt, late in the summer of 2018, I was already familiar with his cabinet of lost artifacts and vanished statues.

“Respectfully submitted for your perusal—a Kanamit. Height: a little over nine feet. Weight: in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds. Origin: unknown.” So begins Rod Serling’s characteristically clipped voice-over narration near the beginning of “To Serve Man,” a 1962 episode of the cannily uncanny half-hour television series The Twilight Zone, in which one such Kanamit arrives in his spaceship in New York City and soon afterward appears before the Security Council of the United Nations. There the hyperintelligent giant, speaking perfect English (though without moving his lips) offers Earthlings freedom from war, hunger, and disease—problems that the Kanamits themselves, he says, long ago overcame.[[{"fid":"2967","view_mode":"default","fields":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Stills from “To Serve Man.\"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"default","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Stills from “To Serve Man.\"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"link_text":null,"attributes":{"alt":"Stills from “To Serve Man.\"","class":"media-element file-default","data-delta":"1"}}]] Argentinian, French, and Soviet UN delegates are initially somewhat suspicious of the colossally-brained Kanamit, and pepper him politely but forcefully with questions in accented English, but after he passes a lie detector test, they (and, it seems, the entire UN General Assembly) are placated. The story focuses on Michael Chambers, an American “decoding specialist” whose initial responsibility it is to decipher the large book that the eloquent Kanamit leaves at the UN, the title of which Chambers’s assistant Patty soon renders as To Serve Man. But as the Kanamit’s promises have been borne out in a short time––there is no longer disease, hunger, or war anywhere in the world—Chambers’s task seems less and less necessary. Like many other Earthlings, he is planning to visit the plentiful, peaceful planet of the Kanamits, who have now established embassies in every major country on Earth. Just as Chambers is preparing to enter the Kanamits’ spaceship for his interplanetary journey, Patty, who has, off-screen, apparently been working assiduously on the translation, rushes toward the boarding ramp and, held back by a dapper Kanamit security guard, frantically cries out, “Mr. Chambers, don’t get on that ship! The rest of the book To Serve Man: it’s . . . it’s a cookbook!” But she is too late: the ramp is quickly closed and the spaceship lifts off in spectacularly low-tech fashion. The episode ends with Chambers on board the vessel being offered food gesturally by a Kanamit and verbally by his sinisterly unctuous voice: “Enjoy! Eat Hearty!”

“The task of a museum,” wrote Italian critic and curator Pietro Maria Bardi in 1951, “should be to make resound, to interpret with perspicacity and appropriate technique, those monuments that sing: thus will be avoided the risk of useless sentimentalities, dangerous neutralities, hybrid educations, and eclecticism.” Bardi’s proclamation was rooted in a line from Paul Valéry’s “Eupalinos, or the Architect” (1921), a Socratic dialogue in which the ancient Greek architect Eupalinos is said to have distinguished three types of buildings: those that sing, because they are created by master architects; those functional but unremarkable buildings that merely speak; and mute structures, so lacking in aesthetic vigor that they are inferior even to the amusing “accidental order” found in heaps of rubble “vomited” by the wagons of contractors. In his previous life, as a curator and architectural critic with links to the government of Benito Mussolini, Bardi might have deployed Valéry's dialogue to support the sweeping architectural refashioning of Italian cities by radical young architects, as the master builders of fascism's new social and political order. But by 1951, Bardi’s vision had narrowed. The fascist regime had fallen, and Bardi had emigrated from Italy to Brazil, where he found work as the director of a newly-founded art museum. Rather than advocating the creation of public works whose grandness would defy Neptune himself, Bardi arranged paintings. Even so, he retained the heroic rhetoric he had developed in fascist Italy, calling upon the museum to make its monuments sing. In postwar Italy, Bardi had seen that any future work would likely be circumscribed by the shadow of his activities during the recently-deposed fascist regime. Thus in 1946 he and his wife, architect Lina Bo Bardi, left Italy for Brazil. Almost immediately, the two were drawn into the orbit of media magnate Assis Chateaubriand, who enlisted the couple to work as director and architect, respectively, for his new art museum, the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) (fig. 1). Beginning with the opening of MASP in 1947, the Bardis used innovative exhibition designs as a way to spur the museum's involvement in social life beyond the space of the gallery. Best known are MASP's “crystal easels,” freestanding sheets of glass on which paintings were mounted throughout a large expanse of open gallery space (fig. 2). These crystal easels were first installed at MASP in the late 1960s, and they have long been understood as an antiteleological mode of display that disrupted canonical art histories, thus democratizing art viewing. But already in the late 1940s, two decades prior to the crystal easels, the Bardis’ exhibition practices began pushing the sensibility of the Brazilian art world from the salão (salon) of aristocratic or bourgeois sociability to the public museum sala (hall). With installations of artworks on industrial metal structures rather than within beaux-arts interiors, classes and pedagogical displays that mixed original artworks and reproductions, and the presence of contemporary design and commercial culture in the gallery, the Bardis sought to expand the range of social classes welcome at the museum.

In 2011, the Japanese government designated Yasuda Yukihiko’s Camp at Kisegawa ( Kisegawa no jin, 1940-41) as an Important Cultural Property ( Jūyō bunkazai) (fig. 1). The left half of the painting, which portrays Minamoto Yoshitsune (1159-1189), a famous warrior from the Kamakura period (1185-1333), was initially produced and exhibited in 1940 as The Arrival of Yoshitsune (Yoshitsune sanchaku). The right half, which depicts Yoshitsune’s older brother Yoritomo (1147-1199), was added later, and the artist then titled the completed work Camp at Kisegawa (Kisegawa no jin). The finished painting, executed in ink on two paper folding screens, shows the much-desired reunion between the two men before their battle against the rival Heike clan. Given that the list of Important Cultural Properties includes Dogū clay sculptures from the Neolithic Jōmon period and the Niō sculptures at Hōryūji temple in Nara, the designation made Yasuda’s painting a canonical work of Japanese art. What this downplays, however, is the fact that the work was produced during the Second World War and served a political function. Since the Meiji period (1868-1912), which witnessed the intensive modernization and Westernization projects of Enlightenment and Civilization ( Bunmei kaika), there have been two broad categories of Japanese painting: Japanese-style paintings ( nihonga), executed in ink/color on paper/silk, and Western-style paintings ( yōga), created with oil on canvas. Japanese-style paintings have most often been considered as supportive of tradition, while the Western-style paintings have been linked to modernity. Nevertheless, during the Second World War, many Western-style painters were dispatched to the front to depict battles and political events, because of the medium’s supposed ability for realism. Western-style painter Miyamoto Saburō, for example, depicted an encounter between Japanese and British generals on the occasion of the Japanese occupation of Singapore in his The Meeting of General Yamashita and General Percival ( Yamashita pāshibaru ryōshireikan kaikenzu, 1942). The painting communicates Japan’s victory over Britain through the generals’ contrasting gestures: Japanese General Yamashita sits near the center of the painting in an imposing posture while three British officials in the foreground look at each other, unable to confront Yamashita. Since, on the other hand, it was generally agreed that Japanese-style painting was not conducive to realism, few Japanese-style painters depicted contemporary soldiers or battles; instead, during the war years, they continued to take as their subject matter traditional iconography, such as religious and historical figures, scenes of nature, and beautiful women.