Before her death, the artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) had already garnered a cult following, with numerous creative people making the pilgrimage to meet her at her home in Mexico City. Since then, her fame has only increased. Thinking across contemporary art media, this book demonstrates how Carrington has posthumously become a medium in her own right, critically haunting the creative intellectuals who met or knew her. It explores the work of a remarkable variety of individuals and organisations, including the artists Lucy Skaer, Samantha Sweeting and Lynn Lu, the actress Tilda Swinton, the novelists Chloe Aridjis and Heidi Sopinka and the ensemble Double Edge Theatre. This long-awaited study provides essential reading for both new and established members of the burgeoning Carrington fan club. -- .

"I am interested only in expressing basic human emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom," - Mark Rothko (1903 - 1970) said of his paintings. "If you are moved only by their colour relationships, then you miss the point." Throughout his career, Rothko was concerned with what other people experienced when they looked at his canvases. As his work shifted from figurative imagery to luminous fields of colour, his concern expanded to the setting in which his paintings were exhibited. In a series of analytic, personal, and even poetic essays by contemporary scholars, this volume explains how Rothko's most compelling creations elicit such profound and varied responses. This volume also reproduces, for the first time, Rothko's "Scribble Book," in which he jotted down his ideas on teaching art to children, and a sketchbook, both dating to the early years of the artist's career. "Seeing Rothko" includes essays by David Antin, Dore Ashton, Thomas Crow, John Elderfield, Briony Fer, Charles Harrison, Miguel Lopez-Remiro, Sarah Rich, and Jeffrey Weiss, an introduction by Glenn Phillips, and a bibliography of Rothko's own writings.

What did it mean for painter Lee Krasner to be an artist and a woman if, in the culture of 1950s New York, to be an artist was to be Jackson Pollock and to be a woman was to be Marilyn Monroe? With this question, Griselda Pollock begins a transdisciplinary journey across the gendered aesthetics and the politics of difference in New York abstract, gestural painting. Revisiting recent exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism that either marginalised the artist-women in the movement or focused solely on the excluded women, as well as exhibitions of women in abstraction, Pollock reveals how theories of embodiment, the gesture, hysteria and subjectivity can deepen our understanding of this moment in the history of painting co-created by women and men. Providing close readings of key paintings by Lee Krasner and re-thinking her own historic examination of images of Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler at work, Pollock builds a cultural bridge between the New York artist-women and their other, Marilyn Monroe, a creative actor whose physically anguished but sexually appropriated star body is presented as pathos formula of life energy. Monroe emerges as a haunting presence within this moment of New York modernism, eroding the policed boundaries between high and popular culture and explaining what we gain by re-thinking art with the richness of feminist thought. -- .

Presents the essential ideas of the founder of French surrealism

Making van Gogh focuses on the œuvre of Vincent van Gogh in the context of its reception. The publication examines the particular role which German gallerists, collectors, critics and museums played in the story of his success. At the same time it sheds light on the importance of van Gogh as a role model for the avant-garde generation of artists.

“Van Gogh is dead, but the van Gogh-chaps are alive! And how alive they are! It is van Goghing everywhere”, was how Ferdinand Avenarius described it in 1910 in the magazine Der Kunstwart. Vincent van Gogh’s paintings exerted a particular fascination on young artists in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. Barely fifteen years after his death the Dutch artist was seen as one of the most important forerunners of modern painting. A selection of key works from all van Gogh’s creative phases are juxtaposed with works by Max Beckmann, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gabriele Münter, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and others.

Encountering the work of Alan Davie (1920-2014) at Wakefield Art Gallery in 1958, a young David Hockney (b.1937) was struck by Davie's landmark Abstract Expressionist paintings, which mirrored and stimulated his own fledgling experimentation with colourful abstraction. Juxtaposing the remarkable early work of two greats of post-war painting, this book provides an original perspective on an important aspect of two significant artistic careers. A richly illustrated text demonstrates points of convergence - such as the painterly surface, passion and poetry, and an exploration of text within the pictorial frame - while also presenting divergence, moving the discussion beyond comparison to reveal a moment when each artist expanded the expressive potential of the painted canvas. Seeking to suggest new relationships and continuities between two generations previously segregated, this beautifully produced publication is ambitious in its intention, pushing the boundaries of traditional interpretations of British art history.

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.

Leon Keer is the master of optical illusion. The 'Dutch JR' plays with perspectives and creates a whole new world. One in which Snow White is stuck under a door. Or a world in which you unexpectedly enter a seventies living room. This is his first monograph. He allows the reader an exclusive look into his world and imagination. How does he work? And how does a wild idea develop into a gigantic 3D artwork?

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.

Big art for little hands - this new "Salvador Dali Colouring Book" in Prestel's new "Colouring Book" range is a beautifully produced colouring-in book. With plenty of space to colour outside the lines, the book is also designed to give children an early interest in some of the great masters. Sections of Dali's masterpieces are there to inspire children's creativity, whatever their age.

To the interested observer the collected volumes of artist-designer Eric Ravilious's preparatory works and materials provide a veritable mine of information about his work and working methods, particularly regarding the masterful development of his signature pure pattern. Ravilious's scrapbooks represent a conscious accumulation of reference material, revealing his interest in subjects as diverse as tennis, cricket, fireworks and aeronautics, alongside a multitude of sketches, tracings and proofs of engravings. Ravilious' scrapbooks do not contain the mass of fascinating but disparate material, seen for example in similar volumes compiled by his great friend and artistic contemporary Edward Bawden. Rather, they document the considered progression of an inquisitive mind, grasping his chosen subjects in a unique and delicate visual language, where many of the artist's most famous motifs and images can be seen blossoming from embryonic stages. Bringing together over 170 images taken from the artist's 5 scrapbooks, accompanied by instructive commentary by the authors, this new book provides a fascinating record of the febrile imagination of one of Britain's best-loved artists.

The fact that Paul Klee (1879 - 1940) consistently intertwined the visual and the verbal in his art has long fascinated commentators from Walter Benjamin to Michel Foucault. However, the questions it prompts have never been satisfactorily answered - until now. In Paul Klee, Annie Bourneuf offers the first full account of the interplay between the visible and the legible in Klee's works from the 1910s and 1920s. Bourneuf argues that Klee joined these elements to invite a manner of viewing that would unfold in time, a process analogous to reading. From his elaborate titles to the small scale he favored to his metaphoric play with materials, Klee created forms that hover between the pictorial and the written, and his concern for literary aspects of visual art was both the motive for and the means of his ironic play with modernist art theories and practices. Through his unique approach, he subverted forms of modernist painting that were generally seen - along with film and other new technologies - as threats to a mode of slow, contemplative viewing. Tracing the fraught relations among seeing, reading, and imagining in early twentieth-century Germany, Bourneuf ultimately shows how Klee reimagined abstraction at a key moment in its development.

This publication is the first of four volumes in the catalogue raisonne of Francis Picabia (1879-1953), one of the most significant, challenging artists of the 20th century. The works in Volume I range from Picabia's early pieces as an Impressionist in the 1890s to his Cubist and abstract paintings of 1912-14, which constitute landmarks in the history of modern art. This volume allows for new critical and scientific readings of his work and piques interest in his lesser-known pieces. Along with illustrations of each featured work, the book includes an introduction, chronology, bibliography, list of exhibitions, and indices. Distributed for Mercatorfonds

Surrealism was launched as a literary and artistic movement by French poet Andre Breton in 1924, and by the time of his death in 1966 had become one of the most popular art movements of the 20th century. Its very name has entered everyday usage as a synonym for bizarre. Taking the reader on a narrative journey through the history of Surrealism, this book is a digestible introduction to the movement's key figures, their works and where to find them. Complete with a glossary of key terms and chronology, this new addition to the Art Essentials series provides an indispensable resource for anyone interested in learning about this most influential of art phenomena.

This book, like the exhibition it accompanies, takes as a starting point four important paintings in the collection of the Museo Novecento, which belonged to collector Alberto Della Ragione, including a rare watercolour of a female figure that reveals Morandi's extraordinary artistic abilities. It illustrates paintings, drawings, and prints that have been kept in various private collections. Exit Morandi also celebrates Morandi's relationship with art critics such as Roberto Longhi, Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Cesare Brandi and Francesco Arcangeli.

Modern living began with the homes of the 1950s. Casting aside the privations of the Second World War, American architects embraced the must-have mod-cons: they wrapped fitted kitchens around fridges, washing machines, dishwashers and electric ovens, gave televisions pride of place in the living room, and built integrated garages for enormous space-age cars. So why was this change so radical? In what ways did life change for people moving into these swanky new homes, and why has the legacy of the 1950s home endured for so long? Diane Boucher answers these questions and more in this colorful introduction to the homes that embody the golden age of modern design.

The Outsider (Patricide 6) is an investigation into the notion of the Outsider Artist. Including essays from Roger Cardinal (author of 'Outsider Art', 1972) and Michel Remy (author of 'Surrealism in Britain', 2001) alongside articles by Outsider Artists (including George Widener, Chris Hipkiss and Tony Convey) and those who have worked with them.

The Sculpture of William Edmondson: Tombstones, Garden Ornaments, and Stonework is the first large-scale museum examination of the artist's career in over twenty years. Organized by Cheekwood Curator of Sculpture, Dr. Marin R. Sullivan, the exhibition draws upon new scholarship and methodologies to contextualize Edmondson's sculpture, both within the histories of Nashville during the Interwar years and the art histories of modern art in the United States. Edmonson has largely been confined to narratives that focus on his artistic discovery by white patrons in the 1930s, his work's formal resonance with so-called primitivism and direct carving techniques, and his place in the traditions of African American ""outsider"" art. This exhibition revisits Edmonson's work within these frameworks, but also seeks to reevaluate his sculpture on its own terms and as part of a comprehensive practice that included the creation of commercial objects rather than strictly fine art. The exhibition's title references the sign that hung on the outside of Edmondson's studio, advertising what was for sale and on view to the public in his yard, including tombstones, birdbaths, and statuary meant to be used and intended for outdoor rather than gallery display. This catalog expands upon the exhibition, including photos of Edmondson's grave markers and his yard art.

Surrealism expanded our reality by drawing upon myths, dreams, and the subconscious as sources of artistic inspiration. Beginning in the 1930s, the movement made a crucial impact on design, and it continues to inspire designers to this day. "Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design" is the first book to document this fascinating conversation. It includes numerous essays and a comprehensive selection of images which traces these reciprocal exchanges by juxtaposing exemplary artworks and design objects. Among the featured artists and designers are Gae Aulenti, Achille Castiglioni, Giorgio de Chirico, Le Corbusier, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, ntoni Gaudi, Frederick Kiesler, Rene Magritte, Carlo Mollino, Meret Oppenheim, and many others. The book is rounded off with historical text material as well as short texts and statements by contemporary designers. This in- depth examination makes one thing abundantly clear: form does not always follow function - it can also follow our obsessions, our fantasies, and our hidden desires.

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.

What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? Rene Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambiguities of Magritte's visual critique of language, he finds the painter less removed than previously thought from the pioneers of modern abstraction.

The second of an important multi-volume catalogue project, this publication features work by Francis Picabia (1879-1953) that dates from 1915 into mid-1927. Beginning with Picabia's elaboration of a personal machinist aesthetic, the book continues by looking at the artist's central role in the formulation of the Paris Dada movement. That irreverent movement included Picabia's increasingly provocative mechanomorphic compositions, complemented by his unorthodox writings and graphic designs as well as socially powerful performances. In the 1920s, Picabia turned to striking geometrical abstractions, subversive figurative art, and a collaboration in 1924 with the Swedish Ballet. The volume finishes with a look at Picabia's creations of the mid-1920s, which included memorable collages and flamboyant figurative compositions known as the "monsters." Distributed for Mercatorfonds