In Picasso's Demoiselles, eminent art historian Suzanne Preston Blier uncovers the previously unknown history of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, one of the twentieth century's most important, celebrated, and studied paintings. Drawing on her expertise in African art and newly discovered sources, Blier reads the painting not as a simple bordello scene but as Picasso's interpretation of the diversity of representations of women from around the world that he encountered in photographs and sculptures. These representations are central to understanding the painting's creation and help identify the demoiselles as global figures, mothers, grandmothers, lovers, and sisters, as well as part of the colonial world Picasso inhabited. Simply put, Blier fundamentally transforms what we know about this revolutionary and iconic work.

The foundation stone for the exceptional collection of Gabriele and Anna Braglia was laid by an exhibition of German Expressionism in Venice. The collection will be made accessible to the public in Lugano starting in September. Fascinated by the vivid colours and great expressive power of the paintings, the Swiss couple acquired select paintings, watercolours and drawings, in particular those by Paul Klee, Emil Nolde and the Blauer Reiter artists. These are accompanied by works of art by Lyonel Feininger and Max Pechstein. This publication is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of the approximately fifty works of art, which represent important contributions to Expressionism.

Between spring and winter 1909, Picasso executed more than sixty portraits of his companion, Fernande Olivier. These works--produced in a variety of formats and mediums--exhibit a range of artistic approaches dedicated to a single subject that stands out in the history of portraiture. Even more significant, this series of works coincided with the invention of Cubism. Published to accompany a major exhibition originating at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, this richly illustrated volume illuminates Picasso's radical reformulation of human physiognomy.

Containing eighty-two color illustrations and sixty-eight duotones, the catalogue explores the Fernande portraits and related works as a single oeuvre culminating in the magnificent "Head of a Woman (Fernande)"--one of Picasso's rare pre-1912 excursions into sculpture. By so doing, it allows us to examine Picasso's process in an unprecedented fashion. What emerges is a new picture of the artist pursuing his subject with obsessive repetition and struggling to resolve artistic problems during a time of crisis in his work. Also included are previously unpublished studio photographs that offer further insight into the conceptual nature of the artist's process. The text narrates the internal development of the Fernande portrait series, situates it within the broader history of representation, and considers the powerful impact of Cezanne on Picasso's work during this period.

Seizing a single extended moment in the early history of Cubism, this catalogue reveals Cubism's great achievement--its startling invention, its remarkable expressive power, and its profound formal and psychological implications for modern art.

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE:

National Gallery of Art, Washington
October 1, 2003 - January 18, 2004

Nasher Sculpture Garden, Dallas
February 15 - May 9, 2004"

Jacob Lawrence was one of the best-known African American artists of the twentieth century. In Painting Harlem Modern, Patricia Hills renders a vivid assessment of Lawrence's long and productive career. She argues that his complex, cubist-based paintings developed out of a vital connection with a modern Harlem that was filled with artists, writers, musicians, and social activists. She also uniquely positions Lawrence alongside such important African American writers as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. Drawing from a wide range of archival materials and interviews with artists, Hills interprets Lawrence's art as distilled from a life of struggle and perseverance. She brings insightful analysis to his work, beginning with the 1930s street scenes that provided Harlem with its pictorial image, and follows each decade of Lawrence's work, with accounts that include his impressions of Southern Jim Crow segregation and a groundbreaking discussion of Lawrence's symbolic use of masks and masking during the 1950s Cold War era. Painting Harlem Modern is an absorbing book that highlights Lawrence's heroic efforts to meet his many challenges while remaining true to his humanist values and artistic vision.

This important publication accompanies a major exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, London, of paintings by Edvard Munch, one of the world's greatest modern artists. The exhibition and catalogue showcase 18 major works from the collection of KODE Art Museums in Bergen. The works span the most significant part of Munch's artistic development and have never before been shown as a group outside of Scandinavia. KODE houses one of the most important collections of paintings by Edvard Munch (1863-1944) in the world. The collection was assembled at the beginning of the 20th century by the Norwegian industrialist, mill owner and philanthropist Rasmus Meyer (1858-1916), who was one of the first significant early collectors of Munch's work. Meyer knew Munch personally and was astute in acquiring major canvases by the artist that chart his artistic development. Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen explores this group of remarkable works in detail and considers the important role of Rasmus Meyer as a collector. The exhibition and publication include seminal paintings from Munch's early 'realist' phase of the 1880s, such as Morning (1884), which was made when the artist was just twenty years old, and Summer Night (1889), a pivotal work that shows the artist's move towards the expressive and psychologically charged work for which he became famous. These paintings launched Munch's career and set the stage for his renowned, highly expressive paintings of the 1890s when his compositions became powerful projections of his emotions and imaginative states. Such works are a major feature of the exhibition that includes remarkable canvases from Munch's famous 'Frieze of Life' series, such as Evening on Karl Johan (1892), Melancholy (1894-96) and At the Death Bed (1895). Through his 'Frieze of Life' works, Munch intended to address profound themes of human existence, from love to death. The artist used his own experiences as source material to make visceral depictions of the human psyche, which he hoped would help others understand their own life. Munch's powerful use of colour and form to convey his subjects marked him out as one of the most radical painters at the turn of the 20th century. This fully illustrated publication includes a catalogue of the works, with contributions by leading experts in their fi eld from KODE and The Courtauld.

With radical formal innovations that scandalized the European art world, cubism revolutionized modern art and opened the path toward pure abstraction. Documenting the first heady years of this profoundly influential movement, "A Cubism Reader" presents the most comprehensive collection of cubist primary sources ever compiled for English-language publication.
This definitive anthology covers the historical genesis of cubism from 1906 to 1914, with documents that range from manifestos and poetry to exhibition prefaces and reviews to articles that address the cultural, political, and philosophical issues related to the movement. Most of the texts Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten have selected are from French sources, but their inclusion of carefully culled German, English, Czech, Italian, and Spanish documents speaks to the international reach of cubist art and ideas. Equally wide-ranging are the writers represented--a group that includes Guillaume Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Leger, Francis Picabia, Andre Salmon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Henri Le Fauconnier, and many others.
These diverse selections--unabridged and freshly translated--represent a departure from the traditional view of cubism as shaped almost exclusively by Picasso and Braque. Augmented by Antliff and Leighten's insightful commentary on each entry, as well as many of the articles' original illustrations, "A Cubism Reader" ultimately broadens the established history of the movement by examining its monumental contributions from a variety of contemporary perspectives.

Colourful, emotional, impulsive and modern - these are the qualities which characterise our ideas of German Expressionist painting. It is hard to believe that the works caused a scandal when they were first created. And yet, artists and writers were united in the vision of a new beginning combined with fundamental social criticism. Many aspects like the social problems of the big city, the sleazy glamour of the world of entertainment and the rejection of new technology remain surprisingly topical to this day. Immerse yourself in the powerful images and texts of world literature and embark on a journey of discovery through the world of the early 20th century with its atmosphere of change and decay. With works by Max Beckmann, Heinrich Campendonck, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Alexej von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, August Macke, Franz Marc, Ludwig Meidner, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Otto Mueller, Gabriele Munter, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Marianne von Werefkin et al. With texts by Walter Benjamin, Gottfried Benn, Anton Chekhov, Alfred Doblin, Theodor Fontane, Oskar Maria Graf, Franz Kafka, Else Lasker-Schuler, Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Vladimir Nabokov, Rainer Maria Rilke, Joseph Roth, Arthur Schnitzler, Herwarth Walden, Stefan Zweig et al.

This book aims to show how Picasso returned to a Barcelona in 1917 after many years in Paris, where he encountered a rich cultural scene, a city unlike the one he had left. This book intends to examine the nature of Picasso's relationships with the local artists on his return to Barcelona, the tourist outings he went on, the things he did in his spare time, and his artistic output during this period, which was particularly prolific. In this interlude in Barcelona, far from the oppressive climate in Paris, a city then at war, and from his Cubist circles, Picasso was able to work freely, searching for new forms of expression. This was a moment of stylistic transition in Picasso's uvre that would continue in the years immediately afterwards, when classical sources alternated totally freely with the achievements of Cubism.

Previous studies of William Carlos Williams have tended to look only for the literary echoes in his verse. According to Bram Dijkstra, the new movements in the visual arts during the 1920s affected Williams's work as much as, if not more than, the new writing of the period. Dijkstra catches the excitement of this period of revolutionary art, reveals the interactions between writers and painters, and shows in particular the specific and general impact this world had on Williams's early writings.

Played out against the backdrop of Paris before the start of the First World War, Tarr tells the blackly comic story of the lives and loves of two artists--the English enfant terrible Frederick Tarr, and the middle-aged German Otto Kreisler, a failed painter who finds himself in a widening spiral of militaristic self-destruction. When both become interested in the same two women--Bertha Lunken, a conventional German, and Anastasya Vasek, the ultra-modern international devotee of "swagger sex"--Wyndham Lewis sets the stage for a scathing satire of national and social pretensions, the fraught relationship between men and women, and the incompatibilities of art and life. Scott W. Klein's introduction places the novel in the context of social satire and the avant-garde, especially the artistic developments of the 1910s--including Cubism, Futurism, and Lewis's own movement, Vorticism--and explores the links between Tarr and other Modernist masterpieces. The book also features Lewis's Preface to the 1918 American edition, comprehensive notes, a glossary of foreign words and phrases, and a map of Paris.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

For Bataille, the absence of myth had itself become the myth of the modern age. In a world that had lost the secret of its cohesion, Bataille saw surrealism as both a symptom and a beginning of an attempt to address this loss. His writings on this theme are the result of a profound reflection in the wake of World War Two. The Absence of Myth is the most incisive study yet made of surrealism, insisting on its importance as a cultural and social phenomenon with far-reaching consequences. Clarifying Bataille's links with the surrealist movement, and throwing revealing light on his complex and greatly misunderstood relationship with Andre Breton, The Absence of Myth shows Bataille to be a much more radical figure than his postmodernist devotees would have us believe: a man who continually tried to extend Marxist social theory; a pessimistic thinker, but one as far removed from nihilism as can be.

'The idea of one form inside another form may owe some of its incipient beginnings to my interest at one stage when I discovered armour. I spent many hours in the Wallace Collection, in London, looking at armour.' Henry Moore, 1980. Coinciding with the major exhibition of the same name, Henry Moore: The Helmet Heads traces the footsteps of the artist through the armouries of the Wallace Collection, where he encountered 'objects of power' that profoundly influenced his work for the rest of his career. Captivated by helmets in particular, Moore saw in them a fundamental form idea - an outer shell which could protect something vulnerable inside. Tobias Capwell identifies the specific helmets which inspired the artist and examines these alongside Moore's sculptures for the very first time. The reasons for his fascination with armour and the implications it had on his art, are explored by Hannah Higham and set in the context of Moore's life and work - one punctuated by global conflicts and artistic experiment. Richly illustrated, this catalogue reveals the origins of some of Henry Moore's most innovative works and examines in depth for the first time this largely unknown aspect of his career.

Apocalypse, the city, war, religion, the portrait, exile and existential trauma - Ludwig Meidner (1884-1966) is regarded as one of the outstanding artists of German Expressionism. With the accuracy of a seismograph he recorded in his pictorial and literary works the shocks which reverberated through his time. To mark the 50th anniversary of the death of the Jewish artist Ludwig Meidner attention has been focused on the works produced during his period of exile in London between 1939 and 1953 - sketchbooks, watercolours and charcoal and chalk drawings produced under the most difficult conditions. They represent an intense mixture of internal experience and contemporary commentary. With merciless directness and symbolic condensation the works tell of terror, isolation, persecution and destruction as well as a grotesquely absurd world which Meidner spotlighted in an idiosyncratic way, combining mockery with mordant humour and sarcasm with bizarre exaggeration.

In Picasso's Demoiselles, eminent art historian Suzanne Preston Blier uncovers the previously unknown history of Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, one of the twentieth century's most important, celebrated, and studied paintings. Drawing on her expertise in African art and newly discovered sources, Blier reads the painting not as a simple bordello scene but as Picasso's interpretation of the diversity of representations of women from around the world that he encountered in photographs and sculptures. These representations are central to understanding the painting's creation and help identify the demoiselles as global figures, mothers, grandmothers, lovers, and sisters, as well as part of the colonial world Picasso inhabited. Simply put, Blier fundamentally transforms what we know about this revolutionary and iconic work.

This graphic novel by an Expressionist master offers a stunning depiction of urban Europe between the world wars. First published in Germany in 1925, it presents 100 woodcuts of remarkable force and beauty that depict scenes of work and leisure, wealth and deprivation, and joy and loneliness.

Over 100 works by Beckmann, Feininger, Kirchner, Kollwitz, Nolde, Marc, others.

Part of a new series of beautiful gift art books this book focuses on Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. Renowned especially for his style of painting that featured grids of black lines with blocks of primary colour, Mondrian was regarded as a true pioneer of abstract art. Featuring a fascinating introduction to Mondrian's life and art, this stunning new book brings together a wide selection of his magnificent work.

The artists as explorers: the Expressionist artists Kirchner and Nolde studied non-Western lifestyles and incorporated them into their artistic projects. Between "armchair anthropology" practised in the museums and "field-work anthropology", which also took place in the colonies, both artists contributed to the construction of an (imagined) "other", offering an alternative to bourgeois, "civilised" society in Germany. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde both spent time between 1910-11 studying objects and materials in ethnographic museums, but before long they expanded their investigations to include travels to colonial regions (Nolde) and the staging of "exotic" studio environments (Kirchner). The publication examines how both approaches evolved through an interplay between art, early German anthropology and colonial enterprise within the German Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. It contains not only paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, posters and documents, but also a variety of texts offering a broad overview as well as relating a specific narrative. Languages: English, Dutch, Danish

The complex facets of Cubism remain relevant subjects in art history today, a century after Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque developed the revolutionary style. This impressive collection of essays by international experts presents new lines of inquiry, including novel readings of individual objects or groups of works through close visual, material, and archival analysis; detailed studies of how Cubism related to intellectual and political movements of the early 20th century; and accounts of crucial moments in the reception of Cubism by curators, artists, and critics. Generous illustrations of paintings, drawings, and sculptures, some familiar but others virtually unknown, support this wide range of approaches to the pioneering works of Picasso, Braque, Fernand Leger, Juan Gris, and others. Distributed for the National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts