In Abstract Art Against Autonomy, Mark Cheetham provides a revolutionary account of abstraction in the visual arts since the decline of the formalist paradigms in the 1960s. He claims that abstract work remains a vital contributor to contemporary visual culture, but that it performs in a way that is different from its predecessors of the early and mid-twentieth century and cannot adequately be assessed without new models of understanding. Cheetham posits that abstraction has reacted to paradigms of purity with practices of impurity. By examining abstract art since the 1960s within a narrative of infection, resistance, and cure, Cheetham provides an opportunity to rethink paradigmatic genres - the monochrome and the mirror - and to link in new ways the work of artists whose work extends and complicates the tradition of abstract art, including Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, James Turrell, Gerhard Richter, Peter Halley. General Idea, and Taras Polataiko.

The lowly placard, a quick and efficient device used to spread news or advertise goods, ascended to the level of a respected art form in the late 1800's in France. The `art poster' was born at the convergence of new aesthetic movements, technological advances and societal changes. Fine artists were swayed from their lofty perches to join the practical arts, influenced by the egalitarian spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement. Artist Jules Cheret, "Father of the Modern Poster," perfected a means of high-quality printing that produced large, colour saturated images. An emerging middle class was the ready target for the consumption of newly manufactured goods, literary publications, theatrical events and leisure time entertainment. A sea of gorgeous images added a "joie de vivre" to everyday life, introducing a period of French life now know as the Belle Epoque. These posters, although ephemeral in intent, have been collected and continually reproduced over the subsequent decades, a testament to their timeless beauty and emotional depth. This book chronicles the influence of the art poster in France and its rapid spread across Europe and United States and offers to the readers an artist's poster tour of the development of the art poster.

Earl Krentzin (1929-2021) was a virtuoso silversmith who poured his considerable talents into figurative sculpture, creating whimsical theatrical settings in silver with a wry humour. He was an anomaly in the world of modern craft, having more in common with the 16th-century goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini than with his 20th-century peers. This first full scale monograph on the artist offers the breadth of Krentzin's engaging creations, which he based on his love of toys, movement, and the mechanical arts. Readers will find humour and pathos in his theatrical settings and verisimilitude in every tiny detail, set amidst the burgeoning crafts scene in Detroit. All will discover a modern master who used amusements and daydreams to unlock the imagination.

Now available in a paperback edition, this comprehensive volume on the great Danish painter Hammershoi places him within the context of his European contemporaries. This generously illustrated volume examines Hammershoi's work as a whole and in relation to the artists of his generation. Hammershoi's enigmatic paintings, with their rich and muted palettes, have always enjoyed enormous popularity in Scandinavia, and recently his work has received renewed attention across the globe. Thematically arranged, this volume includes beautiful reproductions and essays that focus on Hammershoi's isolated private life and travels; his time in London and Germany; and comparisons between him and such notable painters as Seurat, Gauguin, and Whistler. Fans of this remarkable painter, and anyone interested in modern art, will enjoy this celebration of Hammershoi as a part of the pantheon of great European painters."

Walter Sickert was one of the most influential artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An apprentice of Whistler and close associate of Degas, he engaged with the work of French artists of the time. Sickert in turn influenced many British painters up to the present day. This book will show how Sickert transformed the representation of everyday life, with his innovative approach to subject matter, radical compositions and the evocation of the materiality of existence in paint. It will explore the changing nature of his work - from an impressionistic approach in the 1880s to a pioneering use of photography in the 1930s - and how he returned over and over to locations and subjects, including his penetrating self-portraits. Sickert's imagination was fuelled by news and current events such as the Camden Town Murders and newspaper photography, but also by popular culture - music halls, the stage, the rise of cinema and celebrity. Featuring over 200 images from the exhibition and a wide range of essays by scholars, as well as reflections on Sickert's relevance and influence by a selection of contemporary painters including Kaye Donachie and Somaya Critchlow.

This 2005 study traces the development of Surrealist theory of visual art and its reception, from the birth of Surrealism to its institutionalization in the mid-1930s. Situating Surrealist art theory in its theoretical and discursive contexts, Kim Grant demonstrates the complex interplay between Surrealism and contemporary art criticism. She examines the challenge to Surrealist art raised by the magazine Cahiers d'Art, which promoted a group of young painters dedicated to a liberated and poetic painting process that was in keeping with the formalist evolution of modern art. Grant also discusses the centrality of visual art in Surrealism as a material manifestation of poetry, the significance of poetry in French theories of modern art, and the difficulties faced by an avant-garde art movement at a time when contemporary audiences had come to expect revolutionary innovation.

Salvador Dali (1904-89) was one of the most controversial and paradoxical artists of the twentieth century. A painter of considerable virtuosity, he used a traditional illusionistic style to create disturbing images filled with references to violence, death, cannibalism and bizarre sexual practices, from the extraordinary limp watches in The Persistence of Memory to the gruesome monster in Soft Construction with Boiled Beans: Premonition of Civil War and the fetishistic lobster in the famous Lobster Telephone. Born in Figueras, Spain, Dali was initially influenced by Impressionism and Cubism, but subsquently became involved with the Surrealists, the most revolutionary artists of the time. They regarded his paintings as revealing the normally hidden world of the unconscious. Indeed the Surrealists' leader, Andre Breton, remarked: "It is perhaps with Dali that for the first time the windows of the mind are opened fully wide". However, Breton later expelled him from the group for this right-wing sympathies and derided his commercial success in the United States, calling him 'Avida Dollars'. Dali's response was equally curt: " The difference between me and the Surrealists is that I am a Surrealist". Not restricting his interests to painting, Dali wrote three autobiographies, designed sets and costumes for a play by his friend Federico Garcia Lorca and collaborated with Luis Bunuel in the film Un Chien andalou, a medium which proved particularly apt for his provocative imagery.

Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s examines the intersection of Hegelian aesthetics, experimental art and poetry, Marxism and psychoanalysis in the theory and practice of the Surrealist movement. Locating Surrealist art and thought between modernist art and revolutionary politics, Steven Harris investigates the consequences of the Surrealists' efforts to synthesize these diverse concerns, through the invention, in 1931, of the object and in the recasting of their activities as a mode of revolutionary science. Providing a context for the cultural and political debates in France and the Soviet Union during the 1930s, he also analyzes the debate on proletarian literature, the Surrealists' reaction to the Popular Front, and their eventual defense of an experimental modern art following their break with the French Communist Party in 1935.

Surrealism was one of the most influential movements of the twentieth century and had a profound impact on all forms of culture. It was a philosophy and a way of life for some of the most brilliant artists of the century. This is the first book to examine in depth its impact in the wider fields of design and the decorative arts and its sometimes uneasy relationship with the commercial world. From the sensuality of Dali's Mae West Lips Sofa to Schiaparelli's extraordinary 'Tear' dress, Surrealism produced some of the most emotive objects ever created. In this ground-breaking book, works in all media from artists and designers such as Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, Max Ernst and Joan Miro will be used to explore some of Surrealism's dominant themes. Containing over 350 stunning illustrations, including previously unpublished works in private collections and specially commissioned photographs, the range of objects spans painting, sculpture, works on paper, bookbindings, jewellery, ceramics, glass, textiles, furniture, fashion, film and photography.

A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR The ten years leading up to the First World War were the most exciting, frenzied and revolutionary in the history of art. They were the crucible of Modernism, when Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism and Abstract Art all burst forth. Simultaneously the Old Master market boomed, and art itself was politically weaponised in advance of approaching war. What was the conventional art against which Modernism was rebelling? Why did avant-garde artists become so obsessed with themselves? What persuaded a few bold collectors to buy difficult modern art? And why did others pay so much money for Old Masters? Art expert Philip Hook brings to bear a unique perspective on the art of a unique and extreme decade.

These essays on abstract painting by eleven of its most incisive critics trace the development of such critical issues as hard-edge painting, deductive and serial structure, monochrome abstraction, the psychological analogy, regionalism, and the "death of painting" in Postmodernism. The introduction and commentary by Frances Colpitt situates the essays historically and examines their philosophical sources and influences, from formalism and phenomenology to structuralism and poststructuralism. What emerges is a coherent and optimistic picture of abstract painting--the definitive contribution of modern art.

Bursting with exciting and innovative techniques, best-selling author Jane Betteridge pushes watercolour to new heights, bringing nature to life with vibrancy, texture and dynamism. In this revised and revitalised edition of her best-selling book Dynamic Watercolours, Jane demonstrates an effective and vibrant use of a huge range of exciting ways of working, including the use of crackle paste, modelling pastes, metallic leaf, gilding flakes, print and much more. Inspired by nature on every page and showcasing 75 inspirational finished paintings, this book will excite and inspire watercolour artists of all abilities to experiment and approach their painting in a whole new way.

That incomparable melancholy in Edward Hopper's pictures occasionally leads us to look at the details of his life. Where exactly did this master of loneliness live and work? What were his most important influences while he was working on his great paintings of America? In this wonderful, simply structured, A-to-Z book, Ulf Kuster pursues these themes, which say a great deal about the painter and his interests, and yet he never loses sight of the artist and the necessary distance to his inimitable pictures. Thus, Kuster strolls through the ABCs of Hopper's life and work, from the "American landscape," "Buick" "Goethe," and "shadow and sunlight" to the key word, "time." On the way he opens up many new doors or insights, enriching the views of Hopper's paintings and make it possible to interpret them in new ways. An entertaining and informative book.

The first collection of critical essays on Luis Bunuel's 1972 Oscar-winning masterpiece, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, this anthology brings fresh perspectives to the most sophisticated film of this director whose narrative experimentation was always ahead of its time. Combining some of the world's most distinguished scholars on Bunuel and Spanish cinema with new voices in cultural theory, this volume helps us to rethink not only The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but also Bunuel's entire body of work. Among the topics examined are Bunuel's relationship to surrealism, the transnational (Spanish, French, Mexican, and American) nature of his work, and his dramatic and idiosyncratic rethinking of sex, narrative and gender. Also included are vintage reviews of the film, as well a selected Bunuel bibliography.

Concerned with the idea that Wyndham Lewis was a mass of unbound impulses released from the rationalizing censorship of a respectable consciousness, this text argues for a more nuanced and historically aware view of Lewis and his work. The eight contributors consider Lewis's career from its inception to his final novels within a major focus on World War I and the inter-war period. Their essays examine Lewis's art, his post-war politics and aesthetics, the new turn his painting and thought took in the 1930s, and the connections between modernism, war and aggression. Overall, the collection offers a reassessment of the conventional view of Lewis as the uncontrolled aggressor of British modernism.

Angry, outrageous, defiant, and courageous are some of the words that describe the American Abstract Expressionist artist Lee Krasner (1908-1984) - the subject of this very personal memoir inspired by Ruth Appelhof's 1974 summer with her in East Hampton, Long Island. Best remembered by many as Jackson Pollock's widow, she is regarded more by 'art-world insiders' as the producer of a major body of work that influenced the evolution of contemporary art - in particular, that made by women in the 20th and 21st centuries. As a scholar and a friend, Appelhof re-examines Krasner's contributions in light of the intellectual and emotional experiences that she so candidly shared with her in weeks of interviews. In addition, Appelhof explores Lee Krasner's relationships with others - friends, art-world luminaries, artists, and other 'summer sitters' allowed into her private sanctuary - through interviews. Those recollections will offer a window into the artist's intense and idiosyncratic personal life as well as into her contributions through the groundbreaking work she produced over the course of more than six decades. Contents: Prefaces by Helen Harrison, Director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, and Barbara Rose, Art Historian and Critic; Chapter 1: Driving Ms. Krasner; Chapter 2: The Tapes: Fact or Fiction; Chapter 3: Cards on the Table; Chapter 4: Swing of the Pendulum; Chapter 5: Summer Sitters; Chapter 6: In Spite of Herself. Published to accompany the Lee Krasner Retrospective at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, fromThursday 30 May-Sunday 1 September 2019, and at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, from Thursday 10 October 2019-Sunday 12 January 2020, and at Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, from Friday 7 February-Sunday 10 May 2020, and at the Guggenheim Bilbao, from Friday 29 May-Sunday 6 September 2020.

A poignant look into the psychological depths of the human mind-its possibilities and fragility. This is the impressive and sensitive legacy of the painter David Byrd. The artist joined the army during World War II and later worked as an orderly in the psychiatric ward of a Veterans hospital in Upstate New York. From 1958 to 1988, Byrd's keen observation of this world, filled with the crowded histories of its troubled patients, was recorded in the artist's sketchbook. This publication is a replica of the deeply personal, creative, and revelationary journal examining the human experience and its potential for pain and alienation on the fringe. Byrd's work was not publicly exhibited until 2013, only a few months before his death-an omission that seems absurd in the face of such a powerful output of artwork expressing the artist's perspective as a veteran himself and his empathy toward those living with psychological trauma.

For Rene Magritte, painting was a form of thinking. Through paintings of ordinary objects rendered with illusionism, Magritte probed the limits of our perception-what we see and cannot see, the nature of representation-as a philosophical system for presenting ideas, and explored perspective as a method of visual argumentation. This book makes the claim that Magritte's painting is about vision and the act of viewing, of perception itself, and the process of how we see and experience things in the world, including paintings as things.

Active at the Bauhaus between 1920 and 1931, teaching in the bookbinding, stained glass and mural-painting workshops, Paul Klee (1879-1940) brought his expressive blend of color and line to the school--and, with the second volume in the Bauhausb cher series, beyond its walls. In his legendary Pedagogical Sketchbook, Klee presents his theoretical approach to drawing using geometric shapes and lines. Evincing a desire to reunite artistic design and craft, and written in a tone that oscillates between the seeming objectivity of the diagram, the rhetoric of science and mathematics, and an abstract, quasi-mystical intuition, Klee's text expresses key aspects of the Bauhaus' pedagogy and guiding philosophies. And while Klee's method is deeply personal, in the context of the fundamentally multivocal Bauhaus, his individual approach to abstract form is typical in its idiosyncrasy. In the Pedagogical Sketchbook, Klee presents his own theories about the relationships between line, form, surface, color, space and time in art in the context of the Bauhaus. The book testifies to Klee's intensive theoretical explorations of art and exemplifies how the Bauhaus masters interconnected the various realms of art and design. In the present volume, the 1953 English translation of Pedagogical Sketchbook by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy is combined with the design and physical qualities of the original German edition from 1925.

One of the world's preeminent Abstract Expressionists, California-born painter Sam Francis (1923-1994) first travelled to Japan in 1957, quickly established studios and residences there, and became active in a circle of avant-garde artists, writers, filmmakers, architects, and composers, including members of the nascent Gutai and Mono-ha movements. This book chronicles those connections, as well as his complex and evolving relationship with East Asian aesthetics from the 1950s through the 1990s. From the very first exhibitions Francis had in Tokyo, critics linked his evocative use of negative space with the Japanese concept of "ma", a symbolically rich interval between objects or ideas. This shared pictorial and philosophical syntax laid the foundation for a feedback loop of mutual influence that spurred frequent collaborations between the artist and his Japanese contemporaries, extending into the realms of printmaking, ceramics, music, poetry, publishing, and performance. Written by art critic and curator Richard Speer, with a foreword by Debra Burchett-Lere, executive director/president of the Sam Francis Foundation, this is the first full-length monograph to explore an important but sometimes overlooked milieu in Post-World War II art-a dialogue between Eastern and Western sensibilities that prefigured our current era of global interconnectedness and cross-cultural exchange. Lavishly illustrated with colour plates and archival images, it is an adjunct publication for the related exhibition "Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing" (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021), co-curated by Speer.

Revolution: Russian Art, 1917-1932 encapsulates a momentous period in Russian history that is vividly expressed in the diversity of art produced between 1917, the year of the October Revolution, and 1932 when Stalin began to suppress the avant-garde and its debates. Based around the great exhibition of 1932 held at the State Russian Museum in Leningrad, the book explores the fascinating themes and artistic developments of the first fifteen years of the Soviet state, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, posters, graphics and film. The exhibition itself was to be the swansong of avant-garde art in Russia: new policies quickly ensured that Socialist Realism - collective in production, public in manifestation and Communist in ideology - was to become the only acceptable art form. This volume is a timely and authoritative exploration of how modern art in all its forms flourished, was recognised, celebrated, and broken by implacable authority all within fifteen years.

With a career spanning seven decades, Catalan-born Joan Miro (1893-1983) was a polymath giant of modern art, producing masterworks across painting, sculpture, art books, tapestry, and ceramics, and embracing ideologies as varied as Fauvism, Surrealism, Dada, Magic Realism, Cubism, and abstraction. Over the course of his prodigious output, Miro evolved constantly, seeking to eschew categorization and the approval of "bourgeois" art critics as much as he pursued his own dreamlike worlds. Emerging into the public spotlight in the early 1920s, he first experimented with Fauvism and Cubism before developing a distinctive style of symbols and pictograms, arranged in elusive visual narratives, with frequent reference to Catalan life. As his career progressed, Miro moved towards Surrealism, and, despite never fully identifying with the movement, emerged as one of its most celebrated practitioners with techniques including automated drawing, Lyrical Abstraction, and Color Field painting. In later years, he diversified his media further, working with ceramics, textiles, and even proposing sculptures made of gas. Through his vivid colors, dreamlike fantasies, and enigmatic symbols, this book brings together the numerous strands of Miro's kaleidoscopic oeuvre to introduce his fascinating career, its interaction with major modernist movements, and how it made him into a modernist legend. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Pollock and After: The Critical Debate brings together key writings on debates about Abstract Expressionism and Modernist art history. It is an essential resource for understanding post-war American art and culture. The second edition has been fully revised and updated in response to new critical approaches to post-war American art. It includes nine new articles and a substantial overview essay by Francis Frascina.
Articles are grouped into three parts, each with an introduction by Francis Frascina. Part One includes two foundational articles by the influential Modernist critic, Clement Greenberg, and represents the debate about Greenberg's work, with contributions by T.J. Clark and Michael Fried. Part Two focuses on revisionist writers, who questioned established ideas about Modernist art history, examining the relationship between Abstract Expressionism and the politics of McCarthyism and the Cold War.
The third part, which is new to the volume, is devoted to recent developments of revisionist critiques. Contributors explore the work of Greenberg's contemporaries, the relationship between critical and commercial responses to Abstract Expressionism, and perceptions of cultural value in the 1940s and 1950s, and challenge assumptions about ethnicity, gender and sexuality in the construction of the 'post-war American artist'.

The home is, for many people, the location for their most intense relationships with visual things. Because they are constructed through the objects we choose, domestic spaces are deeply revealing of a range of cultural issues. How is our interpretation of an object affected by the domestic environment in which it is placed? Why choose a stainless steel teapot over a leopard print one? How do the images hanging on the walls of our homes arrive there? In placing contemporary art in the context of the 'ordinary' home, this book embarks on the contentious topic of whether 'high' art impacts on 'ordinary' people. What is the size and nature of the audience for contemporary art in Britain? Do people really visit more art galleries than attend football matches? What is the significance of the home in relation to such questions? Indeed, what constitutes 'art' in the home?
This book carefully unpicks these questions as well as the troubled relationship between the home as a place of comfort and reassurance and the often unsettling and challenging images offered by contemporary art. Within the art world, the home has been addressed as a subject and even used as a temporary gallery and a space for installations, and yet it is not common for works by today's avant-garde artists to be conceived and marketed to participate in the domestic lives that most people live.
Handsomely illustrated, this book unites contemporary art, craft and design, with sociology, anthropology and cultural studies to provide an unusual and forthright addition to ongoing art and culture debates.