This essay explores the untold histories opened up by Francis Picabia's painting The Spanish Night , 1922. Out of place within Dada but clearly in dialogue with the work of Marcel Duchamp and parodying conservative or neo-classical styles of painting but also undermining the avant-garde tactics of a still-nascent Surrealism, Picabia's canvas has been too simply dismissed as part of the artist's own return to figuration, a sudden retrenchment and embrace of a vehement anti-modernism. Instead, the work seethes with connection to underground tactics moving between Dada and Surrealism, and it establishes a formal structure that determines Picabia's painting for the following decades. This essay identifies and attempts to name the formal tactics of the work, tracing their implications for other artists—from Surrealism into the present moment. Among the other people and concepts discussed are William Copley, Man Ray, Hubert Damisch, Robert Desnos, the “return to order,” figuration, kitsch, Surrealism, Superrealism, and bad painting.

October distributed a questionnaire about Global Methods, asking the following: “Coming to terms with global modernisms and global contemporary art calls for an understanding of the different histories, social functions, and aesthetic genealogies that inform art of the 20th and 21st centuries in different localities throughout the world. Is the ‘comparative’ method (foundational in art history, elaborated in comparative literature) adequate anymore to the questions raised by global modernisms and contemporary art? Or are other critical categories or tools such as entanglement, assemblage, or intimacy more appropriate? Western art history's primary tools—formal analysis and nation-, community-, or subject-inflected historicization—carry inherently imperial hierarchies that tend to inscribe value judgments and artificially consolidate categories like race and nation. To build a genuinely global art history thus requires more than addressing an expanded archive. It also demands new theoretical perspectives founded in diverse ‘local’ values and functions of art as well as attending to the distortions that occur when they encounter one another in global circulation. What models for doing so have you developed in your work? What are their advantages and disadvantages? How can we expand our understanding of the global condition by proposing multiple models of modernity and their complex interrelationships?” The following authors responded: Zainab Bahranì, Peter Brunt, Zirwat Chowdhury, Iftikhar Dadi, Nikolas Drosos, Jaś Elsner, Finbarr Barry Flood, Gao Minglu, Atreyee Gupta, Jonathan Hay, Wu Hung, Jennifer Josten, Joan Kee, Anneka Lenssen, and Steven Nelson.

In 2007, artist Sharon Lockhart made a large-scale photograph of two young girls reading braille, based on a specific photograph by August Sander from the 1930s made in an institute for blind children. Turning to the widespread iconography of blindness in the history of photography, this essay considers the importance of such images for a larger theory of photographic spectatorship. Lockhart's image of blind children relates to Sander's photograph, but does not duplicate it in all respects; her alteration of the historical image opens onto the larger non-coincidence of vision that photographic seeing instantiates. Ultimately, Lockhart's relational practice of photography-connecting each photograph she makes to prior images, while never fully duplicating or replicating them-provides a model for understanding the relational dynamics of photographic spectatorship. The essay also discusses Paul Strand, Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida , Kaja Silverman's World Spectators , “straight photography,” and Michael Fried.

For the idea uniting the initial series of essays on photography in this issue, I wish to extend gratitude to Matthew Witkovsky, organizer of the 2012 Clark Art Institute conference “Photography as Model?”; and to Susan Bielstein, executive editor at the University of Chicago Press, who kept alive the idea of a publication of this conference and then allowed it ultimately to come to fruition and to be extended here.

From his films Empire (2002) and Anticultural Positions (2009) to a variety of his modes of drawing, a singular concentration on the photographic negative can be found throughout Paul Sietsema's artistic practice. Rather than grounding a medium, Baker argues, the location of photography's logic in the negative preserves the photograph as a space of reversal and inversion, a deep and powerful force of negation rather than a servant of the real. To return, as Sietsema does, to this history and to such processes now, after they have run their course, seems to insist on the negative as a kind of literal afterimage, and also, potentially, as an open image, considering how the negative transmutes the density of the world into transparency, inhabiting a space between the object and the image, the middle point between camera and print, a “medium” in the true but irremediably hybrid sense of the word.

While the relationship of the body and Cubism has often been posed as one of opposition, one in which the return of the body is described as a lapse back into figuration and realism that takes place after Cubism, George Baker argues that Francis Picabia's Cubist works, those like Dances at the Spring from 1912, are evidence of the intense coupling—as opposed to dissolution—of the terms. Baker asserts that the bodily intensity of Picabia's Orphism represents a long overlooked countermodel for post-Cubist painting, with the physical movement and spatial disorientation of these works extending to their phenomenological interaction with the viewer, and it requires a revision of our understanding of Cubism itself.

If it were married to logic, art would be living in incest, engulfing, swallowing its own tail.… —Tristan Tzara, Manifeste Dada 1918 The only word that is not ephemeral is the word death…. To death, to death, to death. The only thing that doesn't die is money, it just leaves on trips. —Francis Picabia, Manifeste Cannibale Dada , 1920