Why was New York abstract expressionism so successful after World War II? To answer that question, Serge Guilbaut takes a controversial look at the complicated, intertwining relationship among art, politics, and ideology. He explores the changing New York and Paris art scenes of the Cold War period, the rejection by artists of political ideology, and the coopting by left-wing writers and politicians of the artistic revolt.

Luigi Pericle (1916-2001) was a rare talent-a self-taught illustrator and painter, a man of letters, mystic, theosophist, and intellectual whose work and legacy eludes any categorization. Under his proper name Pericle Luigi Giovanetti he had great success as an illustrator and cartoonist in the 1950s. His cartoons were published worldwide in daily newspapers, such as the Washington Post or Herald Tribune, as well as in satirical magazines like Punch. His comic strip Max the Marmot, published in newspapers and books, was hugely popular across Europe, the United States, and Japan. In 1958, he turned to explore abstract expression through painting and ink drawing. He quickly gained international recognition as an artist and his paintings were exhibited in gallery and museum shows in Britain and Switzerland during the 1960s. Yet recognition was not what he was looking for, and he disappeared voluntarily from the art world to lead an increasingly secluded life dedicated entirely to his art and writing. His home Casa San Tomaso on the legendary Monte Verita in Ascona, in southern Switzerland, offered ideal surroundings for an artist so strongly drawn to spirituality. Luigi Pericle. Ad Astra, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the MASI Museo d'arte della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, offers a fresh look at how the spiritual environment and tradition of Monte Verita influenced Pericle as an artist and how Asian calligraphy and Zen Buddhism were influential to his drawing practice. Moreover, the book investigates Pericle's understanding of abstraction in art and his own syncretism of modern mysticism. Text in English, German and Italian.

Simulating the Marvellous presents important new research on Surrealism and the culture from which it arose. Offering fresh interpretations of Surrealist art and literature based around the theme of simulation, the book shows, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that the notion of simulation originated in a number of discrete contexts, in relation to hysteria and war neuroses; more broadly it shadows the emergence of our concept of "the unconscious."Acknowledging simulation's relevance to Surrealism, this book argues, radically alters our understanding of the Surrealists' project and the terms in which one gauges its success or failure. It leads one to question the naive assumption that automatic writing or drawing represent an authentic outpouring of the unconscious and gives renewed significance to a figure such as Salvador Dali who embraced simulation and made it the basis of his art and aesthetic. Resonances are also explored with postmodern theory and art practice, around the themes of simulation and the simulacrum.It also points to one of the ways in which Surrealism chimes with a core preoccupation of contemporary art and theory. Written accessibly, and ranging across many of the core ideas of Surrealism, David Lomas balances coverage of both Surrealist art and literature, looking at such figures as Dali, Eluard, Masson, Desnos, Brouillet, Picasso, Tanning and Janet, as well as Glenn Brown, Douglas Gordon and Sarah Lucas. The book will interest not only art historians and theorists, but also students and those with a general interest in Surrealism.

From the time of his first trip to Ireland in 1913 and his last trip in 1928, American artist Robert Henri created masterful paintings of the Irish landscape and people, particularly children. These engaging paintings offer a fascinating window onto the genre about which Henri felt most strongly--portraiture--and also serve as a way to chart his experiments with paint handling and color theories. In Ireland, he was able to focus on his painting without the distractions of life in New York. The periods Henri spent in Ireland were among his most prolific, and the paintings that he produced there among his most accomplished.

Essays explore Henri's familiarity with Irish subjects and culture prior to his first trip to Ireland, and focus on the striking portraits that he created during his Irish sojourns.

Jonathan Stuhlman is curator of American art at the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina. Valerie Ann Leeds is an independent scholar and curator and adjunct curator of American art at the Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan.

Since the rediscovery of British Surrealism at the Children of Alice exhibition at Marcel Fleiss's Galerie 1900-2000 in Paris in 1982, there has been a major revival of interest in Surrealism outside France. Surrealism in Britain is the first comprehensive study of the British Surrealist movement and its achievements. Lavishly illustrated, the book provides a year-by-year narrative of the development of Surrealism among artists, writers, critics and theorists in Britain, from the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London right through to the present day. Michel Remy has conducted personal interviews with many of the artists involved and the book includes an examination of the work of, among others, Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, Len Lye, Humphrey Jennings, David Gascoyne, Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff, Roland Penrose, F. E. McWilliam, Conroy Maddox, Emmy Bridgwater, Edith Rimmington, Desmond Morris, Lee Miller, Julian Trevelyan and John Tunnard. Poetry, prose, painting, sculpture, photography and artists' texts all have their place in this fascinating and attractive book.

A mural renaissance swept the United States in the 1930s, propelled by the New Deal Federal Art Project and the popularity of Mexican muralism. Perhaps nowhere more than in New York City, murals became a crucial site for the development of abstract painting Artists such as Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Lee Krasner created ambitious works for the Williamsburg Housing Project, Floyd Bennett Field Airport, and the 1939 World's Fair. Modernism for the Masses examines the public murals (realized and unrealized) of these and other abstract painters and the aesthetic controversy, political influence, and ideological warfare that surrounded them. Jody Patterson transforms standard narratives of modernism by reasserting the significance of the 1930s and explores the reasons for the omission of the mural's history from chronicles of American art. Beautifully illustrated with the artists' murals and little-known archival photographs, this book recovers the radical idea that modernist art was a vital part of everyday life.

This excellent overview of new research on Dada and Surrealism blends expert synthesis of the latest scholarship with completely new research, offering historical coverage as well as in-depth discussion of thematic areas ranging from criminality to gender. * This book provides an excellent overview of new research on Dada and Surrealism from some of the finest established and up-and-coming scholars in the field * Offers historical coverage as well as in depth discussion of thematic areas ranging from criminality to gender * One of the first studies to produce global coverage of the two movements, it also includes a section dealing with the critical and cultural aftermath of Dada and Surrealism in the later twentieth century * Dada and Surrealism are arguably the most popular areas of modern art, both in the academic and public spheres

Winner, Canadian Museums Association's Outstanding Achievement in Research Award and IPPY Awards Silver Medal -- Fine Art CategoryA Toronto Star Holiday Gift Guide SelectionA Like Vision is a lavish celebration of the legacy of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, Canada's canonical landscape painters. The Group's depiction of the rugged beauty of the Canadian landscape -- from the coastal mountains of British Columbia to the north shore of Lake Superior, the villages of rural Quebec, and the rocky, windswept coves of Newfoundland -- charged Canadians to experience their country in a bold new light and changed the face of Canadian art forever. Through their vigorous and expressive painterly style and vibrant colours, the Group of Seven significantly contributed to Canada's sense of autonomy and identity as a modern state in the aftermath of the First World War. Featuring three hundred full-colour images, A Like Vision includes a lead essay by Ian A. C. Dejardin, Executive Director of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, and contributions by a host of artists, curators, and writers. Among them are Indigenous art historian and curator Gerald McMaster, filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, novelists David Macfarlane and Jane Urquhart, painters John Hartman and Robert Houle, and Inuk writer Tarralik Duffy. One hundred years on from the Group's first exhibition in 1920, A Like Vision is both a chance to review the Group's legacy and a tribute to these giants of Canadian art and culture.

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.

This is a book about artistic modernism contending with the historical transfigurations of modernity. As a conscientious engagement with modernity's restructuring of the lifeworld, the modernist avant-garde raised the stakes of this engagement to programmatic explicitness. But even beyond the vanguard, the global phenomenon of jazz combined somatic assault with sensory tutelage. Jazz, like the new technologies of modernity, re-calibrated sensory ratios. The criterion of the new as self-making also extended to names: pseudonyms and heteronyms. The protocols of modernism solicited a pragmatic arousal of bodily sensation as artistic resource, validating an acrobatic sensibility ranging from slapstick and laughter to the pathos of bereavement. Expressivity trumped representation. The artwork was a diagram of perception, not a mimetic rendering. For artists, the historical pressures of altered perception provoked new models, and Ezra Pound's slogan 'Make It New' became the generic rallying cry of renovation. The paradigmatic stance of the avant-garde was established by Futurism, but the discovery of prehistoric art added another provocation to artists. Paleolithic caves validated the spirit of all-over composition, unframed and dynamic. Geometric abstraction, Constructivism and Purism, and Surrealism were all in quest of a new mythology. Making it new yielded a new pathos in the sensation of radical discrepancy between futurist striving and remotest antiquity. The Paleolithic cave and the USSR emitted comparable siren calls on behalf of the remote past and the desired future. As such, the present was suffused with the pathos of being neither, but subject to both.

It was the decade of Coco Chanel and Josephine Baker, Art Deco and Surrealism, cafe culture and cabarets. Americans Hemingway and Man Ray mingled with emigres Brancusi, Chagall and Archipenko and painters from Matisse and Picasso to Dali in the bohemian arts scene of Montparnasse, while Brassai photographed the pulsating dance halls of Montmartre. This portrait spanning literature, painting, fashion and film takes a fresh look at the annees folles of 1920s Paris.

The political and social turmoil of the twentieth century took Magda Nachman from a privileged childhood in St. Petersburg at the close of the nineteenth century, artistic studies with Leon Bakst and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin at the Zvantseva Art Academy, and participation in the dynamic symbolist/modernist artistic ferment in pre-Revolutionary Russia to a refugee existence in the Russian countryside during the Russian Civil War followed by marriage to a prominent Indian nationalist, then with her husband to the hardships of emigre Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, and finally to Bombay, where she established herself as an important artist and a mentor to a new generation of modern Indian artists.

In 1941 the Swiss art critic Pierre Courthion interviewed Henri Matisse while the artist was in bed recovering from a serious operation. It was an extensive interview, seen at the time as a vital assessment of Matisse's career and set to be published by Albert Skira's then newly established Swiss press. After months of complicated discussions between Courthion and Matisse, and just weeks before the book was to come out-the artist even had approved the cover design-Matisse suddenly refused its publication. A typescript of the interview now resides in Courthion's papers at the Getty Research Institute.; This rich conversation, conducted during the Nazi occupation of France, is published for the first time in this volume, where it appears both in English translation and in the original French version. Matisse unravels memories of his youth and his life as a bohemian student in Gustave Moreau's atelier. He recounts his experience with collectors, including Alfred Barnes. He discusses fame, writers, musicians, politicians, and, most fascinatingly, his travels. Chatting with Henri Matisse, introduced by Serge Guilbaut, contains a preface by Claude Duthuit, Matisse's grandson, and essays by Yve-Alain Bois and Laurence Bertrand Dorleac. The book includes unpublished correspondence and other original documents related to Courthion's interview and abounds with details about avant-garde life, tactics, and artistic creativity in the first half of the twentieth century.

The first decades of the twentieth century were pivotal for the historical and formal relationships between early cinema and Cubism, mechanomorphism, abstraction, and Dada. To examine these relationships, Jennifer Wild's interdisciplinary study grapples with the cinema's expanded identity as a modernist form defined by the concept of horizontality. Found in early methods of projection, film exhibition, and in the film industry's penetration into cultural life by way of film stardom, advertising, and distribution, cinematic horizontality provides a new axis of inquiry for studying early twentieth-century modernism. Shifting attention from the film to the horizon of possibility around, behind, and beyond the screen, Wild shows how canonical works of modern art may be understood as responding to the changing characteristics of daily life after the cinema. Drawing from a vast popular cultural, cinematic, and art-historical archive, Wild challenges how we have told the story of modern artists' earliest encounter with cinema and urges us to reconsider how early projection, film stardom, and film distribution transformed their understanding of modern life, representation, and the act of beholding. By highlighting the cultural, ideological, and artistic forms of interpellation and resistance that shape the phenomenology of a wartime era, The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900 1923 provides an interdisciplinary history of radical form. This book also offers a new historiography that redefines how we understand early cinema and avant-garde art before artists turned to making films themselves.

"Wartime Kiss" is a personal meditation on the haunting power of American photographs and films from World War II and the later 1940s. Starting with a stunning reinterpretation of one of the most famous photos of all time, Alfred Eisenstaedt's image of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day, Alexander Nemerov goes on to examine an array of mostly forgotten images and movie episodes--from a photo of Jimmy Stewart and Olivia de Havilland lying on a picnic blanket in the Santa Barbara hills to scenes from such films as "Twelve O'Clock High" and "Hold Back the Dawn." Erotically charged and bearing traces of trauma even when they seem far removed from the war, these photos and scenes seem to hold out the promise of a palpable and emotional connection to those years.

Through a series of fascinating stories, Nemerov reveals the surprising background of these bits of film and discovers unexpected connections between the war and Hollywood, from an obsession with aviation to Anne Frank's love of the movies. Beautifully written and illustrated, "Wartime Kiss" vividly evokes a world in which Margaret Bourke-White could follow a heroic assignment photographing a B-17 bombing mission over Tunis with a job in Hollywood documenting the filming of a war movie. Ultimately this is a book about history as a sensuous experience, a work as mysterious, indescribable, and affecting as a novel by W. G. Sebald.

Surrealist women's writing: A critical exploration is the first sustained critical inquiry into the writing of women associated with surrealism. Featuring original essays by leading scholars of surrealism, the volume demonstrates the extent and the historical, linguistic, and culturally contextual breadth of this writing. It also highlights how the specifically surrealist poetics and politics of these writers' work intersect with and contribute to contemporary debates on, for example, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, otherness, anthropocentrism, and the environment. Drawing on a variety of innovative theoretical approaches, the essays in the volume focus on the writing of numerous women surrealists, many of whom have hitherto mainly been known for their visual rather than their literary production. These include Claude Cahun, Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage, Colette Peignot, Suzanne Cesaire, Unica Zurn, Ithell Colquhoun, Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, and Rikki Ducornet. -- .

During the mid-twentieth century, Latin American artists working in several different cities radically altered the nature of modern art. Reimagining the relationship of art to its public, these artists granted the spectator a greater role than ever before in the realization of the artwork. The first book to explore this phenomenon on an international scale, Abstraction in Reverse traces the movement as it evolved across South America and parts of Europe. Alexander Alberro demonstrates that artists such as Tomas Maldonado, Jesus Soto, Julio Le Parc, and Lygia Clark, in breaking with the core tenets of the form of abstract art known as Concrete art, redefined the role of both the artist and the spectator. Instead of manufacturing autonomous artworks prior to the act of viewing, these artists presented a range of projects that required the spectator in order to be complete. Importantly, as Alberro shows, these artists set aside regionalist art in favor of a modernist approach that transcended the traditions of any nation-state. Along the way, the artists fundamentally altered the concept of the subject and of how art should address its audience, a revolutionary development with parallels in the greater art world.

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.

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

Baroque between the Wars is a fascinating account of the arts in the twenties and thirties. We often think of this time as being dominated by modernism, yet the period saw a dialogue between modern baroque - eclectic, playful, camp, open to influence from popular culture but connected with the past, and unafraid of the grotesque or surreal - and modernism, which was theory-driven, didactic, exclusive, and essentially neo-classical. Jane Stevenson argues that both baroque and classical forms were equally valid responses to the challenge of modernity. Setting painting and literature in the context of 'minor arts' such as interior design, photography, fashion, ballet, and flower arranging, and by highlighting the social context and sexual politics of creative production, Stevenson offers a new and exciting interpretation of one of the most renowned artistic movements of the 20th century. Accessibly written and generously illustrated, the volume focuses on artists, artefacts, clients, places, and publicists to demonstrate how baroque offered a whole new way of being modern. The modern baroque was an active subversion of the tenets of modernism, practised by the people that modernism habitually excluded. Stevenson brings those excluded groups into the centrefold of the modern baroque movement in a rich history of the alternative style which has influenced much of the art, architecture, performance and literature of today.

A pioneer not only of the art but also the fashion world, Frida Kahlo is beloved for her signature portraits and the bold, innovative clothing she wore in them. This fabulous paper doll set features Frida and 30 of her signature ensembles. Bilingual explanatory captions contextualise how and when she wore each outfit. Also includes a bonus paper doll of husband Diego Rivrera complete with two outfits of his own.