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.

One of Poland's most important and independent postwar artists, Andrzej Wroblewski (1927-57) in his short life created his own highly individual, suggestive, and prolific form of abstract and figurative painting that continues to inspire artists today. This volume offers a stunning presentation and thorough re-evaluation of his work and its legacy in the international context of art history. Offering an insightful picture of the world of postwar painting in communist Europe, and highlighting Wroblewski's political engagement, the book helps us to understand the immensely evocative vision of war and oppression that he created. This close look at a painter and a period that are of growing interest for international art historians will serve to further cement Wroblewski in the postwar pantheon.

"My aim is to express in a natural way what I feel, what is in me, both rhythmically and spiritually, all that which in time has been saved up in my family of primitiveness and tradition, and which is now concentrated in me." -William H. Johnson

An essential figure in modern American art, William H. Johnson (1901-1970) was a virtuoso skilled in various media and techniques, who produced thousands of works over a career that spanned decades, continents, and genres. This volume considers paintings from the collection of Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, that show the pivotal stages in Johnson's career as a modernist painter of post-impressionist and expressionist works reminiscent of Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Soutine, and the vernacular paintings in which he articulates his specific, unforgettable voice as an artist.

In this lavishly illustrated book, some of the world's premier scholars of William H. Johnson and African American art history examine the artist and his artistic genius in fresh new ways, including his relationship with one of his earliest patrons, the Harmon Foundation; the critical role played by scholars at the nation's historically black colleges and universities; the context of Johnson's experiences living in Harlem and his deep southern roots; and Johnson as a trailblazer in the genres of still life and landscape painting.

Richard J. Powell is the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University. Other contributors are Aaron Bryant, David C. Driskell, Leslie King-Hammond, and Lowery Stokes Sims.

One of Singapore's most prominent performance artists, Lee Wen produced a body of provocative, thought-provoking and sharply satirical works over three decades. Despite Singapore's decade- long proscription of funding for performance art, Lee Wen was indefatigable, pioneering the art form with searing expressive intensity. He confronted identity politics and issues of race, society and culture through a wide-ranging series of expansive, experimental performances. Presented in this title are writings, lyrics and drawings from Lee's extensive archives, offering personal insight to the rich associations, metaphors and tongue-in-cheek humour found in Lee's imaginative world.

With essays on sojourning artists like Situ Qiao and local artists such as Tchang Ju Chi, Singaporean scholar and educator Yeo Mang Thong demonstrates how Singapore was an important hub for artists who travelled to and lived in Singapore. Yeo's research, originally in Chinese, lls a gap in scholarship on the pre-war visual arts scene in Singapore; this English translation aims to bring his research to a broader audience.

Revolutionary essays on design, aesthetics and materialism - from one of the great masters of modern architecture Adolf Loos, the great Viennese pioneer of modern architecture, was a hater of the fake, the fussy and the lavishly decorated, and a lover of stripped down, clean simplicity. He was also a writer of effervescent, caustic wit, as shown in this selection of essays on all aspects of design and aesthetics, from cities to glassware, furniture to footwear, architectural training to why 'the lack of ornament is a sign of intellectual power'. Translated by Shaun Whiteside With an epilogue by Joseph Masheck

Art = New Vision. This formula shaped the avant-garde. With moving images abruptly expanding the boundaries of the visible world, new printing techniques triggering a pictorial turn in graphic art, and literature becoming almost inseparable from visual media, we still regard the avant-garde as heyday for modernism's obsession with the eye. But what are the blind spots of this optocentrism? Focusing on the gestures of giving, touching, showing, and handcrafting, this study examines key scenes of tactile interaction between subject and artifact. Hand movements, manual maneuvers and manipulations challenge optics and expose the crises of a visually dominated perspective on the arts. The readings of this book call for a revision of an optically obscured aesthetics and poetics to include haptic experience as an often overlooked but pivotal part of the making, as well as the perception, of literature and the arts.

From its foundation in 1957 to its self-dissolution in 1972, the Situationist International established itself as one of the most radical revolutionary organisations of the twentieth century. This book brings together leading researchers on the SI to provide a comprehensive critical analysis of the group's key concepts and contexts, from its relationship to earlier artistic avant-gardes, romanticism, Hegelianism, the history of the workers' movement and May '68 to the concepts and practices of 'spectacle', 'constructed situations', 'everyday life' and 'detournement'. The volume also considers historically underexamined areas of the SI, including the situation of women in the group and its opposition to colonialism and racism. With contributions from a broad range of thinkers including Anselm Jappe and Michael Loewy, this account takes a fresh look at the complex workings of a group that has come to define radical politics and culture in the post-war period.

In Surrealist sabotage and the war on work, art historian Abigail Susik uncovers the expansive parameters of the international surrealist movement's ongoing engagement with an aesthetics of sabotage between the 1920s and the 1970s, demonstrating how surrealists unceasingly sought to transform the work of art into a form of unmanageable anti-work. In four case studies devoted to surrealism's transatlantic war on work, Susik analyses how artworks and texts by Man Ray, Andre Breton, Simone Breton, Andre Thirion, Oscar Dominguez, Konrad Klapheck, and the Chicago surrealists, among others, were pivotally impacted by the intransigent surrealist concepts of principled work refusal, permanent strike, and autonomous pleasure. Underscoring surrealism's profound relevance for readers engaged in ongoing debates about gendered labour and the wage gap, endemic over-work and exploitation, and the vicissitudes of knowledge work and the gig economy, Surrealist sabotage and the war on work reveals that surrealism's creative work refusal retains immense relevance in our wired world. -- .

The First World War is usually believed to have had a catastrophic effect on British art, killing artists and movements, and creating a mood of belligerent philistinism around the nation. In this book, however, James Fox paints a very different picture of artistic life in wartime Britain. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he examines the cultural activities of largely forgotten individuals and institutions, as well as the press and the government, in order to shed new light on art's unusual role in a nation at war. He argues that the conflict's artistic consequences, though initially disruptive, were ultimately and enduringly productive. He reveals how the war effort helped forge a much closer relationship between the British public and their art - a relationship that informed the country's cultural agenda well into the 1920s.

This is the first volume to focus on the diverse permutations of international surrealist cinema after the canonical interwar period. The collection features eleven original contributions by prominent scholars such as Tom Gunning, Michael Loewy, Gavin Parkinson and Michael Richardson, alongside other leading and emerging researchers. An introductory chapter offers a historical overview as well as a theoretical framework for specific methodological approaches. The collection demonstrates that renowned figures such as Leonora Carrington, Maya Deren, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Jan Svankmajer took part in shaping a vibrant and distinctive surrealist film culture following the Second World War. Addressing highly influential films and directors related to international surrealism during the second half of the twentieth century, it expands the purview of both surrealism and film studies by situating surrealism as a major force in postwar cinema. -- .

Territorial Hues: The Color Print and Washington State, 1920-1960 will consist of prints that display the cultural and stylistic influences used by Washington State artists to produce highly exceptional works that reflect the color, light, and atmosphere that is unique to this region. The book focuses on several mediums including color woodcut, intaglio, serigraphy, and lithography. The influences of Japanese prints and regional appropriations of international movements will be examined as well as the local production of white-line prints.

'Describes with plenty of colour how surrealism, from Rene Magritte's bowler hats to Salvador Dali's watches, was born and developed' The Times During the 1920s, in the Parisian neighbourhood of Montparnasse, a unique flowering of avant-garde artistic creativity became the cradle of Dada and Surrealism. In this crowd biography, Sue Roe tells the story - from Duchamp to Dali, via Man Ray and Max Ernst - of the salons and cafes, alliances and feuds, love affairs and scandals, successes and suicides of one of the most important and long-lasting artistic achievements of the twentieth century. 'Supercharged. Highly colourful . . . they're all here, the big names of the time - behaving badly, and, at times, quite madly too' Observer 'Roe is a talented writer, fascinated by la vie Boheme. She can find phrases that perfectly capture the feeling of a neighbourhood' Sunday Times 'Brings together some of the chief protagonists in one of the 20th century's most inventive art movements. A vivid read' Radio Times 'A skilled and graceful writer' Daily Telegraph

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.

This catalogue for a show at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels, brings Picasso's relationship to abstraction into focus. With more than 120 exceptional works of art in dialogue with some of the great works of the early 20th century abstraction movement, it addresses the major stages that punctuated the links between Picasso's work and the history of abstract art. It covers the period from the first Cubist experiments of 1907, carried out simultaneously with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, to his later work, which is sometimes situated on the borders of gestural painting.

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.

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.

The First World War is usually believed to have had a catastrophic effect on British art, killing artists and movements, and creating a mood of belligerent philistinism around the nation. In this book, however, James Fox paints a very different picture of artistic life in wartime Britain. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he examines the cultural activities of largely forgotten individuals and institutions, as well as the press and the government, in order to shed new light on art's unusual role in a nation at war. He argues that the conflict's artistic consequences, though initially disruptive, were ultimately and enduringly productive. He reveals how the war effort helped forge a much closer relationship between the British public and their art - a relationship that informed the country's cultural agenda well into the 1920s.

With this book, Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen brings a new formal and conceptual rubric to the study of turn-of-the-century modernism, transforming our understanding of the era's canonical works. Butterfield-Rosen analyzes a hitherto unexamined formal phenomenon in European art: how artists departed from conventions for posing the human figure that had long been standard. In the decades around 1900, artists working in different countries and across different media began to present human figures in strictly frontal, lateral, and dorsal postures. The effect, both archaic and modern, broke with the centuries-old tradition of rendering bodies in torsion, with poses designed to simulate the human being's physical volume and capacity for autonomous thought and movement. This formal departure destabilized prevailing visual codes for signifying the existence of the inner life of the human subject. Exploring major works by Georges Seurat, Gustav Klimt, and the dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky- replete with new archival discoveries-Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition combines intensive formal analysis with inquiries into the history of psychology and evolutionary biology. In doing so, it shows how modern understandings of human consciousness and the relation of mind to body were materialized in art through a new vocabulary of postures and poses.

Departing from his earlier figurative works and engagement with Futurist ideals, Italian painter Osvaldo Licini (1894-1958) turned away from realism in 1940 and painted only abstract works from then on. His paintings from that fruitful decision engage in a surrealist language of precise lines, solid colors and pregnant signs; colors and signs that Licini viewed as expressions of energy, willpower, ideas and magic. This catalog of Licini's show at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the most comprehensive monograph of his work, marks the 60th anniversary of his death. That same year, Licini won the National Grand Prize for Painting at the 29th Venice Biennale, where he had shown 53 works--executed between 1925 and 1958--in a room of his own, mounted by Carlo Scarpa. This catalog gathers his complete works, including those displayed in that same venue 60 years prior to this 2018 show.

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.

Although she is only now just coming into much deserved global renown as the woman behind "Awkward Objects," one of ArtForum's Best of 2012, the Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow has long been recognized in her country as one of the most accomplished female artists of the twentieth century. Collected in this volume for the first time are Szapocznikow's letters to and from the art critic and former director of the Lodz Museum of Art Ryszard Stanislawski, which span from the inception of their relationship through their marriage and divorce.

"Lovely, Human, True, Heartfelt" documents Szapocznikow's artistic process and inspirations and is a rare window through which to view the complex internal life of Szapocznikow as an artist, Holocaust survivor, and woman. For art historians and enthusiasts, this correspondence offers an important context for understanding Szapocznikow's often enigmatic work and id a fascinating look at the recovery of the artistic community in Europe after World War II. The volume includes comprehensive notes on the political and artistic climate surrounding each letter, as well as providing biographical information that creates an even more nuanced portrait of the two writers.

More than simply a historical resource, "Lovely, Human, True, Heartfelt "offers readers an intimate epistolary romance written with deep passion and remarkable literary flair.