This chapter explores Man Ray’s inventive approach to representing African objects within the realms of fashion and popular culture that resonated far beyond the avant-garde community where such objects had long become commonplace. How such photographs mirrored the shifting meanings and signification of the objects they featured and the manner in which they functioned are examined within the context of the ubiquitous assimilation of African forms into all facets of popular Western culture.

Alpha & Omega: Tales of Transformation. The twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet introduce twenty-four stories of transformation and metamorphosis from Greek and Roman history and mythology. Each story is illustrated with one or more object from across the collections of the University of Sydney held in the Nicholson Museum, the Macleay Museum and the University Art Gallery. In 2018, these same three collections will themselves be transformed into the new Chau Chak Wing Museum. This final Nicholson Museum exhibition represents the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega of what has been and what will be.

'This book is platypus-like, unclassifiable.' - Marina Warner, London Review of Books + Since the 19th century, dolls have served as toys but also as objects of obsession, love, and lust. That century witnessed the emergence of the term 'heterosexual' and of modern concepts of fetishism, perversity, and animism. Their convergence, and the demands of a growing consumer society resulted in a proliferation of waxworks, shop-window dummies, and customized love dolls, which also began to appear in art. Oskar Kokoschka commissioned a life-sized doll of his former lover Alma Mahler; Hans Bellmer crafted poupées; and Marcel Duchamp fabricated a nude figure in his environmental tableau Etant donnés. The Erotic Doll is the first book to explore men's complex relationships with such inanimate forms from historical, theoretical, and phenomenological perspectives. Challenging our commonsense grasp of the relations between persons and things, Marquard Smith examines these erotically charged human figures by interweaving art history, visual culture, gender, and sexuality studies with the medical humanities, offering startling insights into heterosexual masculinity and its discontents.

This catalogue is published as part of the exhibion 'The Tears of Eros. Moesman, Surrealism and the Sexes', Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 15 February - August 16, 2020. The main character in 'The Tears of Eros' is the Utrecht- born artist Joop Moesman (1909-1988), the only officially recognised Dutch Surrealist. He was a controversial artist, whose sexually charged paintings often caused a scandal. In this exhibition, we present his oeuvre in the context of his international Surrealist contemporaries. Surrealism is known as a movement of male artists, in which women were primarily assigned the role of muse. Their bodies became objects for the Surrealists’ sexual and often violent fantasies. Moesman’s art is exemplary in this respect. Few of the women in his paintings have an identity: their faces are omitted, masked and, in one case, even stripped of flesh. Moesman’s work is still unsettling today. That is why in The Tears of Eros we deliberately dive into the Surrealist world of sex, gender, fetishism and taboos. For this reason, we are also showing – for the first time in the Netherlands – many works by female Surrealists. How did they view these themes? And how did they depict their own identity and sexuality?