When you turn on the television in China and flick through some channels, chances are you’ll happen upon several TV series set in Republican-era China. This is nothing new; Republican Fever, as it is …

In 1915, the American Modernist magazine 291 published a collection of Francis Picabia’s portraits mécaniques, tongue-in-cheek drawings imagining the proto-Dadaist’s fellow artists as machinery. At the center of the spread was Portrait d’une Jeune Fille Américaine dans l’État de Nudité (“Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity”), an exactingly rendered image…