Over the past academic year, art history professor Darius Spieth has finalized publications from Baton Rouge to Bordeaux and Florence, and from London to Brussels, writing about subjects as diverse as the history of flea markets to Surrealism.

Among the highlights of this scholarship are:

• “The Transition from Prints to Photography in Auction Catalogue Illustrations,” in Studi di Memofonte, Special issue on photography and the art market (La fotografia e i suoi usi nel mercato artistico (1880-1939). Protagonisti, narrazioni, raccolte) 26, no. 2 (2026), 3-17. 

This article investigates the earliest use of photography in nineteenth-century art auction catalogues and the subsequent evolution of the role of photography in the art market.

“Gustave Debrie et la genèse artistique des chevaux marins du monument aux Girondins [Gustave Debrie and the Artistic Genesis of Sea Horses of the Monument to the Girondins],” La Revue Archéologique de Bordeaux 115 (2026), 1-16.

Gustave Debrie was a nineteenth-century French sculptor and scholar of anatomy, whose works were overlooked for a long time. This article is the first publication about his life and work, emphasizing in particular the bronze sea horses he created for the fountains of the Place des Quinconces in Bordeaux, France.

• “A Humanist Speaking from the Torture Chambers: The Life and Art of Cuba’s Surrealist, Jorge Camacho,” in The Unibrow, no 1 (Fall 2025), 16-23. See also online.

The Cuban painter Jorge Camacho was one of the very last artists to be admitted by André Breton into the Surrealist movement in Paris. In 2011, Spieth met Camacho near the end of the artist’s life in Paris. Partly based on memories of this encounter, the article is “an invitation to rediscover the compassionate side behind his Camacho’s often seemingly brutal art and its mysterious painterly content,” Spieth said. The article appeared in the very first issue of “The Unibrow,” a new art periodical edited by Evan Pricco, who previously oversaw the content of Juxtapoz magazine.

• “Waarom vlooienmarketn belangrijk zijn [Why Flea Markets Matter],” in De Witte Raaf (Belgium), no. 236, 40 (July-August 2025), pp. 9-12.

Spieth’s first publication in Flemish, translated by Christophe Van Gerrewey. It recounts how flea markets evolved from low-end recycling businesses in nineteenth-century Paris, in the suburb of St. Ouen. Soon major twentieth-century modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, found the markets at St. Ouen to be a never-ending source of artistic inspiration. It is also a study in urbanism, as currently the markets in St. Ouen are threatened by gentrification. The more extensive Flemish version of the essay contains some auto-biographical  considerations on the subject by the author that are absent from the forthcoming, scholarly version in English, to be published by Palgrave-Mcmillan in London:

“Flea Markets from a Historical Perspective and Their Contemporary Challenges: The Example of St. Ouen,” in Low-End Markets for Art and Cultural Goods, edited by Anne-Sophie Radermecker (London: Palgrave-Mcmillan). Summer 2026.

• “The Legal Status of the Commissaires-Priseurs and Its Long-Term Impact on the Genesis of the French Art Market,” in Law and Finance in International Art Markets, eds. Elisabetta Lazzaro, Nathalie Moureau, and Adriana Turpin (London: Routledge, 2026), 55-68.

An investigation into how a century-old, legal monopoly of the auctioneer’s profession in France, which was only abolished in 2000, still has an impact on twenty-first century marketing strategies in the international art market, and the reduced “name recognition” of French auctioneers internationally.  

• Preface to Blaise Ducos’ (Louvre Museum, Paris) Bodies as the End? The Inquiry into the Human Form in Rembrandt’s Time, ed. and tr. by Darius A. Spieth (LSU Press, 2026).  

Louvre curator Blaise Ducos visited LSU in 2023 as a Manship lecturer. LSU Press is publishing in 2026 the text of his presentation, dealing with human remains and early-modern scientific thought as manifest in seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish paintings. This is a bilingual English-French publication, edited, translated, and prefaced by Spieth.

Learn more about the LSU School of Art’s art history program.