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.

Dal. Picasso. Ernst. Magritte. Maddox. Breton. Artaud, Fondane, Masson--all are to be found in this gallery of surrealist artists. Focussing on surrealist visuality--defined as the visual expression of internal perception or, in Andr Breton's words, internal representation--the contributors to this handsomely illustrated volume shed new light on one of the twentieth century's most exciting cultural movements.

This collection of new essays addresses emotion in relation to the arts. The essays consider such topics as the paradox of fiction, emotion in the pure and abstract arts, and the rationality and ethics of emotional responses to art.

With his graphic style, figural distortion, and defiance of conventional standards of beauty, Egon Schiele (1890-1918) was a pioneer of Austrian Expressionism and one of the most startling portrait painters of the 20th century. Mentored by Gustav Klimt, Schiele dabbled in a glittering Art Nouveau style before developing his own much more gritty and confrontational aesthetic of sharp lines, lurid shades, and mannered, elongated figures. His prolific portraits and self-portraits stunned the Viennese establishment with an unprecedented psychological and sexual intensity, favoring erotic, exposing, or unsettling poses in which he or his sitters cower on the floor, languish with legs akimbo, glower at the viewer, and thrust their genitalia into the foreground. His models are at times skeletal and sickly, at other times strong and sensual. Many contemporaries found Schiele's work to be not only ugly but morally objectionable; in 1912, the artist was briefly imprisoned for obscenity. Today, his oeuvre is celebrated for its revolutionary approach to the human figure and for its direct and particularly fervent, almost furious brand of draftsmanship. This book presents key Schiele works to introduce his short but urgent career and his profound contribution to the development of modern art, which reaches right through to such contemporary talents as Tracey Emin and Jenny Saville. 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

A book of heroic dimensions, this is the first full-length biography of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century--a man as fascinating, difficult, and compelling as the paintings he produced. Drawing on exclusive access to Mark Rothko's personal papers and over one hundred interviews with artists, patrons, and dealers, James Breslin tells the story of a life in art--the personal costs and professional triumphs, the convergence of genius and ego, the clash of culture and commerce. Breslin offers us not only an enticing look at Rothko as a person, but delivers a lush, in-depth portrait of the New York art scene of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s--the world of Abstract Expressionism, of Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, and Klein, which would influence artists for generations to come.
"In Breslin, Rothko has the ideal biographer--thorough but never tedious, a good storyteller with an ear for the spoken word, fond but not fawning, and possessed of a most rare ability to comment on non-representational art without sounding preposterous."--Robert Kiely, "Boston Book Review"
"Breslin impressively recreates Mark Rothko's troubled nature, his tormented life, and his disturbing canvases. . . . The artist's paintings become almost tangible within Breslin's pages, and Rothko himself emerges as an alarming physical force."--Robert Warde, "Hungry Mind Review"
"This remains beyond question the finest biography so far devoted to an artist of the New York School."-Arthur C. Danto, "Boston Sunday Globe"
"Clearly written, full of intelligent insights, and thorough."--Hayden Herrera, "Art in America"
"Breslin spent seven years working on this book, and he has definitely done his homework."-Nancy M. Barnes, "Boston Phoenix"
"He's made the tragedy of his subject's life the more poignant."--Eric Gibson, "The New Criterion"
"Mr. Breslin's book is, in my opinion, the best life of an American painter that has yet been written . . . a biographical classic. It is painstakingly researched, fluently written and unfailingly intelligent in tracing the tragic course of its subject's tormented character."--Hilton Kramer, "New York Times Book Review," front page review
James E. B. Breslin (1936-1996) was professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of "From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965" and "William Carlos Williams: An American Artist."

This book highlights sport as one of the key inspirations for an international range of modernist artists. Sport emerged as a corollary of the industrial revolution and developed into a prominent facet of modernity as it spread across Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. It was celebrated by modernists both for its spectacle and for the suggestive ways in which society could be remodelled on dynamic, active and rational lines. Artists included sport themes in a wide variety of media and frequently referenced it in their own writings. Sport was also political, most notably under fascist and Soviet regimes, but also in democratic countries, and the works produced by modernists engage with various ideologies. This book provides new readings of aspects of a number of avant-garde movements, including Italian futurism, cubism, German expressionism, Le Corbusier's architecture, Soviet constructivism, Italian rationalism and the Bauhaus. -- .

Since the early years of the 20th century, Western abstract art has fascinated, outraged and bewildered audiences. Its path to acceptance within the artistic mainstream was slow. Anna Moszynska traces the origins and evolution of abstract art, placing it in broad cultural context. She examines the pioneering work of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian alongside the Russian Constructivists, the De Stijl group and the Bauhaus artists, contrasting European geometric abstraction in the 1930s and 40s with the emphasis on personal expression after the Second World War. Op, Kinetic and Minimal art of the postwar period is discussed and illustrated in detail, and new chapters bring the account up to date, exploring the crisis in abstraction of the 1980s and its revival - in paint, fabric, sculpture and installation - in recent decades. The first edition of this book, published in 1990, was acclaimed by reviewers; now in full colour and comprehensively revised, it will serve as the best introduction to abstract art for a new generation.

From men in bowler hats, floating in the sky, to a painting of a pipe above the caption "this is not a pipe", Rene Magritte (1898-1967) created an echo chamber of object and image, name and thing, reality and representation. Like other Surrealist works, Magritte's paintings combine a precise, mimetic technique with abnormal, alienating configurations which defy the laws of scale, logic, and science: a comb the size of a wardrobe, rocks that float in the sky, clouds that drift through an open door. The result is a direct yet disorientating realm, often witty, often unsettling, and always prompting us to look beyond the visible, to "what is hidden by what we see." This introductory book explores Magritte's vast repertoire of visual humor, paradox, and surprise which to this day makes us look and look again, not only at the painting, but at our sense of self and the world. 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

When is a urinal no longer a urinal? When Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) declared it to be art. The uproar that greeted the French artist's Fountain (1917), a porcelain urinal installed in a gallery, sent shock waves through the art world establishment that reverberate right through to today. This essential introduction distills all the daring and the scandal of Duchamp's practice into one essential overview not only of a pioneering creative but also of a critical moment in Western culture. From his groundbreaking blend of abstraction, Cubism, and Futurism in Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) to his forays into the now-iconic "readymades" such as Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Bottle Rack (1914) we explore how Duchamp consistently challenged the notion of what art is and, in so doing, opened up a world of conceptual possibilities beyond the "retinal" experience. 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

Allen W. Seaby's life has been described as "a classic tale of Victorian self-improvement." But there is more to the tale than just upward mobility. A. W. Seaby was a pioneering, innovative and inspirational man who rose to become a prominent print-maker, teacher, author and illustrator. Best-known for his colour woodcut printing using traditional Japanese methods, and as a prominent wildlife artist, the story of Seaby's many accomplishments is recounted by his grandson, who inherited Seaby's love of birds and became internationally renowned in his own right, Robert Gillmor. Alongside this personal recount, Martin Andrews (Seaby's successor as President of the Reading Guild of Artists) selects aspects of his career and expands upon his techniques, his illustrative methods, his circle of fellow artists and the books he published to give a full and rounded account of a man whose work is currently enjoying a well-deserved renaissance.

Egon Schiele (1890 - 1918) is nowadays regarded as one of the leading pioneers of Modernism in Austria. Although he already enjoyed some success during his lifetime and came to be considered Austria's greatest artist following his death, his outstanding impo rtance for art was recognized only in the early 1950s. Rudolf Leopold, the early collector of Schiele who first became interested in Schiele in the 1950s, has been instrumental in raising the international profile of Egon Schiele. Today, his art treasures are housed in the Leopold Museum in Vienna, which holds the world's largest and most outstanding collection of works by Schiele. Diethard Leopold, the collector's son and author of this volume, naturally grew up with Schiele's works, developing a special affinity and familiarity with the artist and his works. In this monograph he examines the life of the painter, who died prematurely at the age of 28, and based on major works from every one of his creative periods he presents an artist who captivates the viewer with emotional subjects and technical ingenuity al ike. In the archive section of this volume, special finds from the rich trove of documents he left behind show the copious talent of Egon Schiele who not only excelled as a painter and graphic artist, but also awaits discovery for his expressionist poetry.

Despite being one of the foremost American intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, Harold Rosenberg (1906-1978) was utterly incapable of fitting in-and he liked it that way. Signature cane in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he cut a distinctive figure on the New York City culture scene, with his radiant dark eyes and black bushy brows. A gangly giant at six foot four, he would tower over others as he forcefully expounded on his latest obsession in an oddly high-pitched, nasal voice. And people would listen, captivated by his ideas. With Harold Rosenberg: A Critic's Life, Debra Bricker Balken offers the first-ever complete biography of this great and eccentric man. Although he is now known mainly for his role as an art critic at the New Yorker from 1962 to 1978, Balken weaves together a complete tapestry of Rosenberg's life and literary production, cast against the dynamic intellectual and social ferment of his time. She explores his role in some of the most contentious cultural debates of the Cold War period, including those over the commodification of art and the erosion of individuality in favor of celebrity, demonstrated in his famous essay "The Herd of Independent Minds." An outspoken socialist and advocate for the political agency of art, he formed deep alliances with figures such as Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Mary McCarthy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, all of whom Balken brings to life with vivid accounts from Rosenberg's life. Thoroughly researched and captivatingly written, this book tells in full Rosenberg's brilliant, fiercely independent life and the five decades in which he played a leading role in US cultural, intellectual, and political history.

Lee Miller: Photography, surrealism, and beyond offers a major new critical discussion of the work of one of the most significant twentieth-century photographers. Applying art-theoretical analyses and insights afforded by previously unseen material in archives and collections, Patricia Allmer undertakes revisionary readings of many of Miller's works, including Portrait of Space, Severed Breast from Radical Mastectomy and the famous series of war photographs produced for Vogue. At the same time she sheds new light on Miller's relations with surrealist groups and American avant-gardes, on her experiences in Paris, Egypt and World War II Europe and on her critically neglected post-war activities. Above all, Lee Miller: Photography, surrealism, and beyond focuses critical attention on the works themselves. As a result it will be of great interest to students and scholars of twentieth-century photography, modernism and surrealism. -- .

During 1889, Belgian artist James Ensor (1860-1949) painted a monumental canvas that would be his magnum opus: The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889. The work is one of the most complex paintings ever painted. It was only 40 years after its completion that the monumental canvas was first publicly exhibited at the James Ensor retrospective at the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts in 1929. Needless to say, therefore, that the exhibiting of Ensor's work in 1929 was for many a revelation. Until then it had been seen and was known only to a limited group of visitors and insiders. Between 1889 and 1929, a veritable revolution had taken place in the visual arts. Before and during World War I, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, and Dadaism all came into being. Few explanations can accommodate the full daring and frenzy of such a painting which chaotic composition and barbaric style seem revolutionary, and look far beyond the early 20th century. Since the purchase of the work in 1987 by the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), The Entry has acquired cult status. No other work depicts the notion of belgitude so aptly as The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889, and yet the painting can in the first place be regarded as a somewhat quirky but striking representation of Ensor's vision of humanity.

In the mid-1950s, Yves Klein (1928-1962) declared that "a new world calls for a new man." With his idiosyncratic style and huge charisma, this bold artist would go on to pursue a brief but bountiful career, producing more than 1,000 paintings over seven years in an oeuvre now considered a mainstay of postwar modernism. Klein made his name above all with his large monochrome canvases in his own patented hue of blue. International Klein Blue (IKB), composed of pure pigment and binding medium, is at once rich and luminous, evocative and decorative, and was conceived by Klein as a means of evoking the immateriality and infinitude of the world. The works of this "Blue Revolution" seem to draw us into another dimension, as if hypnotized by a perfect summer sky. Klein was also renowned for his deployment of "living brushes," in which naked women, daubed in International Klein Blue, would make imprints of their bodies on large sheets of paper. This Basic Art introduction presents key Klein works to introduce an artist who was at once a showman, inventor, and pioneer of performance art. With page after page of the ever-alluring International Klein Blue, it is both an essential guide to a modern art master and a meditation on the unique effects of a single color. 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

What would it mean to be avant-garde today? Arguing against the notion that the avant-garde is dead or confined to historically "failed" movements, this book offers a more dynamic and inclusive theory of avant-gardes that accounts for how they work in our present. Innovative in approach, Provisional Avant-Gardes focuses on the medium of the little magazine-from early Dada experiments to feminist, queer, and digital publishing networks-to understand avant-gardes as provisional and heterogeneous communities. Paying particular attention to neglected women writers, artists, and editors alongside more canonical figures, it shows how the study of little magazines can change our views of literary and art history while shedding new light on individual careers. By focusing on the avant-garde's publishing history and group dynamics, Sophie Seita also demonstrates a new methodology for writing about avant-garde practice across time, one that is applicable to other artistic and non-artistic communities and that speaks to contemporary practitioners as much as scholars. In the process, she addresses fundamental questions about the intersections of aesthetic form and politics and about what we consider to be literature and art.

A year of weekly interviews (1949-1950) with artist Diego Rivera by poet Alfredo Cardona-Pena disclose Rivera's iconoclastic views of life and the art world of that time. These intimate Sunday dialogues with what is surely the most influential Mexican artist of the twentieth century show us the free-flowing mind of a man who was a legend in his own time; an artist who escaped being lynched on more than one occasion, a painter so controversial that his public murals inspired movements, or, like the work commissioned by John D. Rockefeller, were ordered torn down. Here in his San Angelin studio, we hear Rivera's feelings about the elitist aspect of paintings in museums, his motivations to create public art for the people, and his memorable, unedited expositions on the art, culture, and politics of Mexico. The book has seven chapters that loosely follow the range of the author's questions and Rivera's answers. They begin with childlike, yet vast questions on the nature of art, run through Rivera's early memories and aesthetics, his views on popular art, his profound understanding of Mexican art and artists, the economics of art, random expositions on history or dreaming, and elegant analysis of art criticisms and critics. The work is all the more remarkable to have been captured between Rivera's inhumanly long working stints of six hours or even days without stop. In his rich introduction, author Cardona-Pena describes the difficulty of gaining entrance to Rivera's inner sanctum, how government funtionaries and academics often waited hours to be seen, and his delicious victory. At eight p. m. the night of August 12, a slow, heavy-set, parsimonious Diego came in to where I was, speaking his Guanajuato version of English and kissing women's hands. I was able to explain my idea to him and he was immediately interested. He invited me into his studio, and while taking off his jacket, said, "Ask me..." And I asked one, two, twenty... I don't know how many questions 'til the small hours of the night, with him answering from memory, with an incredible accuracy, without pausing, without worrying much about what he might be saying, all of it spilling out in an unconscious and magical manner. A series of Alfredo Cardona-Pena's weekly interviews with Rivera were published in 1949 and 1950 in the Mexican newspaper, El Nacional, for which Alfredo was a journalist. His book of compiled interviews with introduction and preface, El Monstruo en su Laberinto, was published in Spanish in 1965. Finally, this extraordinary and rare exchange has been translated for the first time into English by Alfredo's half-brother Alvaro Cardona Hine, also a poet. According to the translator's wife, Barbara Cardona-Hine, bringing the work into English was a labor of love for Alvaro, the fulfillment of a promise made to his brother in 1971 that he did not get to until the year before his own death in 2016.

In the 1920s and 1930s, anthropology and ethnography provided new and striking ways of rethinking what art could be and the forms which it could take. This book examines the impact of these emergent disciplines on the artistic avant-garde in Paris. The reception by European artists of objects arriving from colonial territories in the first half of the twentieth century is generally understood through the artistic appropriation of the forms of African or Oceanic sculpture. The author reveals how anthropological approaches to this intriguing material began to affect the ways in which artists, theorists, critics and curators thought about three-dimensional objects and their changing status as 'art', 'artefacts' or 'ethnographic evidence'. This book analyses texts, photographs and art works that cross disciplinary boundaries, through case studies including the Dakar to Djibouti expedition of 1931-33, the Trocadero Ethnographic Museum, and the two art periodicals Documents and Minotaure. Through its interdisciplinary and contextual approach, it provides an important corrective to histories of modern art and the European avant-garde. -- .

Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) lived art in the fast lane. With an appetite for glamour and fame as much as Left Bank bohemianism, she fled her native Russia after the Bolshevik revolution and set about taking Paris by storm. Her prolific, monumental oeuvre remains one of the most vivid visual documents of 1920s Art Deco. De Lempicka's style deployed cool colors and tight post-cubist forms into an at once neoclassical and voluptuous figuration. Her subjects are often nude and always sensual, aloof, and powerful. Bedecked in seductive light and textures, they command our attention but typically avert their gaze with an aspect of haughty grandeur. They include both high-society patrons and progressive portraits of emancipated and lesbian women, such as Women Bathing and Portrait of Suzy Solidor. De Lempicka's notorious Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti, meanwhile, was commissioned for the cover of German magazine Die Dame and became an icon of speed, sophistication, and female independence. Through some of de Lempicka's finest, most compelling portraits, this introduction explores the artist's unique visual language and its privileged place not only in the annals of interwar art but also in the history of female artists and our collective consciousness of the Roaring Twenties. 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

Like no other 20th-century movement, Surrealism was keenly inspired by tropes of magic, myth and the occult. In their engagement with the irrational and the unconscious, numerous of its members looked to magic as a poetic and deeply philosophical discourse, related to both arcane knowledge and individual self-empowerment. In their works, they heavily drew on esoteric symbols and cultivated the image of the artist as a magician, visionary, and alchemist. This catalog explores the myriad ways, in which magic and the occult informed the development of the Surrealist movement in international perspective, from the "metaphysical paintings" of Giorgio de Chirico through to works of the post-war period. Lavishly illustrated, it combines longer research essays with focused chapter introductions, all penned by leading scholars in the field. Amongst the many fascinating artists included in the volume are Victor Brauner, Leonora Carrington, Paul Delvaux, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Leonor Fini, Rene Magritte, Roberto Matta, Kay Sage, Kurt Seligmann, Dorothea Tanning, Yves Tanguy, and Remedios Varo.

This is the most thorough and detailed monograph on the artwork of Raymond Jonson. He is one of many artists of the first half of the twentieth-century who demonstrate the richness and diversity of an under-appreciated period in the history of American art. Visualizing the spiritual was one of the fundamental goals of early abstract painting in the years before and during World War I. Artists turned to alternative spirituality, the occult, and mysticism, believing that the pure use of line, shape, color, light and texture could convey spiritual insight. Jonson was steadfastly dedicated to this goal for most of his career and he always believed that modernist and abstract styles were the most effective and compelling means of achieving it.

Modernism, referring to the period dating roughly from the late 19th century to 1970, is regarded as a crucial moment in the history of American art. Although Modernist artists adopted a wide range of styles, they were linked by a desire to interpret a rapidly changing society and to cast aside the conventions of representational art. Some, such as Stuart Davis and Joseph Stella, responded to consumerism, urbanism and industrial technology; others, such as Arthur Dove and Georgia O'Keeffe, found inspiration in nature and the Native American culture of the Southwest. This magnificent new book presents the works of the Vilcek Collection, an unparalleled private collection of American Modernist paintings, drawings and sculpture. Art historian Lewis Kachur explores almost 100 rarely seen works by 20 leading artists active during the first half of the last century, while William C. Agee contributes an incisive introduction. Lavishly illustrated throughout, Masterpieces of American Modernism provides an outstanding overview of the radical shift in art driven by this major aesthetic movement.

In A Surrealist Stratigraphy of Dorothea Tanning's Chasm, Catriona McAra offers the first critical study of the literary work of the celebrated American painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012). McAra fills a major gap in the scholarship, repositioning Tanning's writing at the centre of her entire creative oeuvre and focusing on a little-known short story "Abyss," a gothic-flavoured, desert adventure which Tanning worked on intermittently throughout her creative life, finally publishing it in 2004 as Chasm: A Weekend. McAra performs a major reassessment of the visual and literary principles upon which the surrealist movement was initially founded. Combining a groundbreaking methodological approach with reference to cultural theory and feminist aesthetics as well as Tanning's unpublished journals and notes, McAra reveals Tanning as a key player in contemporary art practice as well as in the historical surrealist milieu.

The first substantial book on the French Neo-Romantics, a cosmopolitan group working in 1920s Paris who turned against modernist abstraction in favour of a new form of figurative painting. In 1926, the Galerie Druet in Paris made waves presenting a group of young painters who had spurned modernist abstraction and returned to a form of figurative painting. For most of them this was the first time they had exhibited, but their impact was considerable. Art critic Waldemar George baptized them the 'Neo-Romantics' or the 'Neo-Humanists'. They were influenced by Picasso, in particular his Blue and Rose periods, but went beyond him to forge new ways of painting. These were artists who liked to play with forgotten references and obsolete visual devices such as trompe l'oeil. They produced work for secondary art forms including the theatre, set design and ballet. In some ways they were the first post-modernists in the history of art, yet until now there has only ever been one book about them, After Picasso, published ten years after their exhibition. Only more recently has their influence on contemporary artists and thinkers including Max Jacob, George Hugnet and Gertrude Stein been recognized. Though friends, these painters never formed a formal group or movement. The Second World War sent them on different paths, with the Berman brothers and Tchelitchev moving to the United States. Before their departure, however, their activities attracted the attention and admiration of a cosmopolitan group of characters, including Gertrude Stein, Alfred Barr, Lincoln Kirstein, George Balanchine and many others including leading fashion figures of the day, Christian Dior and Elsa Schiaparelli.