Vienna, 1900: the heart of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire and a city populated with people from across the Imperial territories - stretching from central Europe to the Crown lands that reached far into South-eastern Europe. This was a dynamic capital brimming with economic and cultural prosperity; a centre that was fertile ground for the revolutionary artistic practices that emerged at the end of the 19th century and the backdrop to this fascinating new study. Gustav Klimt's election as the first President of the Secession Artists' Association in 1897 formalised the rejection of conservatism and heralded a celebration of the innovative and the modern. Alongside Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka have been championed as the key protagonists in the painting revolution that re-defined the traditional genres of portrait, landscape and allegory. However, this ignores the significant contribution made by Koloman Moser whose painting is considered alongside that of Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka for the first time in this book. Highlighting a decisive moment in the birth of modernity and offering previously unpublished insight into the relationship of Klimt, Schiele, Moser and Kokoschka from 1890 to 1918, this book, with its wealth of stunning images, makes an invaluable contribution to Secessionist scholarship and as such is essential reading for anyone wishing to seek a fresh perspective on a fascinating period in the history of art.

In 1926 22 year - old Dutchman Willem de Kooning (1904 - 1997) travelled to the USA on a British freighter - without papers and hidden in the machine room. The young art student eked out a living by painting houses, signs and facades, before he was able aft er eight years to dedicate himself entirely to painting. In the United States he established contacts with the art scene and forged friendships with artists such as Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Clifford Still, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Today De Ko oning belongs to the outstanding painters of Abstract Expressionism and together with Jackson Pollock is regarded as a pioneer of Action Painting. This publication vividly examines De Kooning's life, marked by self - doubts, successes, new beginnings, excess es, and scandalous paintings, as well as the evolution of his artistic work. In addition, author Corinna Thierolf opens up exciting perspectives on De Kooning's work by revealing entirely new, surprising relationships with the works of fellow artists such as Franz Marc, Piet Mondrian, or Wassily Kandinsky.

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.

An alternative genealogy of abstract art, featuring the crucial role of 19th-century German literature in shaping it aesthetically, culturally, and socially. Once upon a time (or more specifically, in 1911!) there was an artist named Wassily Kandinsky who created the world's first abstract artwork and forever altered the course of art history - or so the traditional story goes. A good story, but not the full story. The Myth of Abstraction reveals that abstract art was envisioned long before Kandinsky, in the pages of nineteenth-century German literature. It originated from the written word, described by German writers who portrayed in language what did not yet exist as art. Yet if writers were already writing about abstract art, why were painters not painting it? To solve the riddle, this book features the work of three canonical nineteenth-century authors - Heinrich von Kleist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Gottfried Keller - who imagine, theorize, and describe abstract art in their literary writing, sometimes warning about the revolution it will cause not just in art, but in all aspects of social life. Through close readings of their textual images and visual analyses of actual paintings, Andrea Meyertholen shows how these writers anticipated the twentieth-century birth of abstract art by establishing the necessary conditions for its production, reception, and consumption. The first study to bring these early descriptions of abstraction together and investigate their significance, The Myth of Abstraction writes an alternative genealogy featuring the crucial role of literature in shaping abstract art in aesthetic, cultural, and social terms.

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.

In the mid-1950s, declaring "there is no reason not to consider the world as a gigantic painting," Robert Rauschenberg began a series of radical experiments with what he called "Combines," a term he coined to describe works that fused cast-off items like quilts or rubber tires with traditional supports. "Canyon" (1959), one of the artist's best-known Combines, is a large canvas affixed with paper, fabric, metal, personal photographs, wood, mirrors and one very striking object: a large stuffed bald eagle, wings outstretched, carrying a drooping pillow, and balanced upon a wooden plank jutting out from the canvas. "Canyon" is one of six Combines in MoMA's collection, and a landmark work that helped to revolutionize art in the postwar period. An essay by curator Leah Dickerman explores the legacy of this extraordinary piece, and places it within a key period in Rauschenberg's career.

1918 marked the end of a golden era: it was the year that Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Koloman Moser, and Otto Wagner died. Artistic activity, however, had already freed itself of their influence. Hardly affected by the political disruptions taking plac e, artists in the countries of the former Austro - Hungarian monarchy were busily productive, driven by a desire for a new start. The period between the two World Wars is characterised in the arts by international networks that transcended political and id eological borders. A lively artistic exchange took place, stimulating constructive, expressionist, and fantastic tendencies. An increasingly important role was played by magazines that disseminated new positions. The outbreak of World War II abruptly inter rupted these cosmopolitan art networks. This publication examines the fascinating, artistically fruitful epoch between the wars.

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.

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.

"The journey to understand the painting is also the journey to understand Rothko, because the work is so thoroughly suffused with the man."--Christopher Rothko Mark Rothko (1903-1970), world-renowned icon of Abstract Expressionism, is rediscovered in this wholly original examination of his art and life written by his son. Synthesizing rigorous critique with personal anecdotes, Christopher, the younger of the artist's two children, offers a unique perspective on this modern master. Christopher Rothko draws on an intimate knowledge of the artworks to present eighteen essays that look closely at the paintings and explore the ways in which they foster a profound connection between viewer and artist through form, color, and scale. The prominent commissions for the Rothko Chapel in Houston and the Seagram Building murals in New York receive extended treatment, as do many of the lesser-known and underappreciated aspects of Rothko's oeuvre, including reassessments of his late dark canvases and his formidable body of works on paper. The author also discusses the artist's writings of the 1930s and 1940s, the significance of music to the artist, and our enduring struggles with visual abstraction in the contemporary era. Finally, Christopher Rothko writes movingly about his role as the artist's son, his commonalities with his father, and the terms of the relationship they forged during the writer's childhood. Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out is a thoughtful reexamination of the legendary artist, serving as a passionate introduction for readers new to his work and offering a fresh perspective to those who know it well.

'Any fool can paint, but drawing is the thing and drawing is the test. If you are a good draughtsman you are ipso facto a good painter' - Walter Sickert. The drawings included in this publication reveal the working practice of Walter Sickert (1860-1942), an artist considered by many the 'father' of modern British art. Sickert was a prolific draughtsman throughout his career and used his drawings as preparatory works for his paintings. Drawn from nature, his sketches capture the intricacies of architectures, the infectious thrill of performance, and even the nuances of a subject's character. Sickert frequently visited locations again and again, investing long periods of time in locations to detail certain elements or even redraw entire views. In doing so, he was able to develop ideas and concepts before an image was possibly transferred to canvas. As a mentor and teacher to a younger generation of artists he also attempted to teach the use of preparatory drawings to his proteges, steering the course of arts practice in Britain. Stored in Tate's collection and archive, this selection of drawings not only serve as a record of Sickert's creative process but express his engagement with the world around him, both in Britain and abroad.

This is the first comprehensive study of bodily images in Dada. Travelling between the international centres of the movement, from Zurich to Berlin, Paris to New York, it examines a diverse range of media, including art, literature, performance, photography and film. Its overall approach is to confront Dada's bodily images not as organic unities but as fictions that reflect on the disjunctive, dehumanised society of war-torn Europe. These fictions occupy an ambivalent space between the battlefield (in their satirical exposure of ideology) and the fairground (in their playful manipulation and joyful renewal of the body). The book features analyses of works by Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Hannah Hoech, Marcel Duchamp and others, and will appeal to scholars and students of European history, cultural history, art and literature. -- .

Arthur Dove, often credited as America's first abstract painter, created dynamic and evocative images inspired by his surroundings, from the farmland of upstate New York to the north shore of Long Island. But his interests did not stop with nature. Challenging earlier accounts that view him as simply a landscape painter, Arthur Dove: Always Connect reveals for the first time the artist's intense engagement with language, the nature of social interaction, and scientific and technological advances. Rachael Z. DeLue rejects the traditional assumption that Dove can only be understood in terms of his nature paintings and association with photographer and gallery director Alfred Stieglitz and his circle. Instead, she uncovers deep and complex connections between Dove's work and his world, including avant-garde literature, popular music, machine culture, meteorology, mathematics, aviation, and World War II, just to name a few. Arthur Dove also offers the first sustained account of Dove's Dadaesque multimedia projects and the first explorations of his animal imagery and the role of humor in his art. Beautifully illustrated with works from all periods of Dove's career, this book presents an unprecedented vision of one of America's most innovative and captivating artists-and reimagines how the story of modern art in the United States might be told.

Paul Nash, the British landscape and Surrealist painter, lived through both the First and Second World Wars. His depictions of these human catastrophes, with their damaged landscapes and broken machinery are much remembered today. His painting life moved from representational landscapes, through to the Surrealist and symbolist styles of his later years where he experimented with abstraction and the everyday. He was regarded as a fine book illustrator and often created work for other graphic and theatrical forms. This new book offers 100 images, with an introduction to his art and contribution made by Nash to the cultural sophistication of the modern world.

In 1932, at the peak of French colonialism, a group of Martiniquan students at the Sorbonne established a Caribbean Surrealist Group, and published a single issue of a journal called Legitime defense. Immediately banned by the authorities, it passed almost unnoticed at the time. Yet it began a remarkable series of debates between surrealism and Caribbean intellectuals that had a profound impact on the struggle for cultural identity. In the next two decades these exchanges greatly influenced the evolution of the concept of negritude, initiated revolution in Haiti in 1946, and crucially affected the development of surrealism itself. This fascinating book presents a series of key texts-most of them never before translated into English-which reveal the complexity of this relationship between black anti-colonialist movements in the Caribbean and the most radical of the European avant-gardes. Included are Rene Menil's subtle philosophical essays and the fierce polemics of Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, appreciations of surrealism by Haitian writers, lyrical evocations of the Caribbean by Andre Breton and Andre Masson, and rich explorations of Haiti and voodoo religion by Pierre Mabille and Michel Leiris.

Focusing on the period 1905-1913, this provocative and groundbreaking new book refutes the popular view of Matisse as the painter of relaxed pleasures, the master of decorative line and sensuous color. Alastair Wright discovers a darker, more complex side to Matisse: an artist whose work, caught in the uneasy space between modernism and tradition, was fundamentally engaged with the most pressing of modernity's artistic and ideological debates. Presenting a series of brilliant and highly original analyses of Matisse's most important early paintings, Wright locates the artist within a wider cultural field in which the identities of modernism--and of its viewers--were highly contested. Wright offers a penetrating examination of the public response to Matisse's work, arguing that his early-twentieth-century audience found in his painting a deeply disturbing challenge to contemporary concepts of the self, of the nation, and of the West.

This sumptuously illustrated book positions the work of Matisse and a number of his contemporaries in relation to key aspects of modernity--the commodification of the individual, the dislocation of cultural identity, and the effacement of racial boundaries under the pressure of imperial expansion--and provides a compelling account of how these contradictory historical materials fused to give birth to Matisse's modernism. What emerges is a renewed sense of the rich complexity of an artistic practice suspended between the seductive potential of pure color and an always ambivalent engagement with tradition. Tracing the interplay between Matisse's painting and discourses of art and subjectivity, Wright offers a significant new reading of one of the central figures of early-twentieth-century modernism.

After Many Springs is the title of a Thomas Hart Benton painting that evokes nostalgia for a fertile, creative time gone by. This bold new book--taking the name of this work by Benton--examines the intersections between Regionalist and Modernist paintings, photography, and film during the Great Depression, a period when the two approaches to art making were perhaps at their zenith. It is commonly believed that Regionalist artists Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood reacted to the economic and social devastation of their era by harking back in tranquil bucolic paintings to a departed utopia. However, this volume compares their work to that of photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn and filmmakers such as Josef von Sternberg-all of whom documented the desolation of the Depression-and finds surprising commonalities. The book also notes intriguing connections between Regionalist artists and Modernists Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston, countering prevailing assumptions that Regionalism was an anathema to these New York School painters and showing their shared fascination with the Midwest. Distributed for the Des Moines Art Center Exhibition Schedule: Des Moines Art Center (January 30 - May 17, 2009)

A penetrating inquiry into the motives, moral dilemmas, and compromises of Walter Gropius, Emil Nolde, and other celebrated artists who chose to remain in Nazi Germany "What are we to make of those cultural figures, many with significant international reputations, who tried to find accommodation with the Nazi regime?" Jonathan Petropoulos asks in this exploration of some of the most acute moral questions of the Third Reich. In his nuanced analysis of prominent German artists, architects, composers, film directors, painters, and writers who rejected exile, choosing instead to stay during Germany's darkest period, Petropoulos shows how individuals variously dealt with the regime's public opposition to modern art. His findings explode the myth that all modern artists were anti-Nazi and all Nazis anti-modernist. Artists Under Hitler closely examines cases of artists who failed in their attempts to find accommodation with the Nazi regime (Walter Gropius, Paul Hindemith, Gottfried Benn, Ernst Barlach, Emil Nolde) as well as others whose desire for official acceptance was realized (Richard Strauss, Gustaf Grundgens, Leni Riefenstahl, Arno Breker, Albert Speer). Collectively these ten figures illuminate the complex cultural history of Nazi Germany, while individually they provide haunting portraits of people facing excruciating choices and grave moral questions.

The most comprehensive compilation of its kind in print, this edition presents more than 500 full-colour works by famous and lesser-known artists from the heyday of book and magazine illustration. Featured artists include Walter Crane, Edmund Dulac, Maxfield Parrish, Howard Pyle, Arthur Rackham, N. C. Wyeth, and many others.

Radical Women tells an original story of British modernism from the perspective of Jessica Dismorr's career, along with the women artists - some famous, some lesser-known - she worked and exhibited with. The work of Jessica Dismorr (1885-1939) has been described as encapsulating 'the stylistic developments of twentieth-century British Art', and her oeuvre certainly encompasses some of its most exciting moments - from Rhythm in the early 1910s, through Vorticism, towards post-war modernist figuration and finally into the abstraction she shared with radical political artists groups in the 1930s. Within this period of intense creativity, which extended beyond art to literary and design accomplishments too, Dismorr was privileged to work and exhibit alongside some of the most exciting female artists of the time, including Barbara Hepworth and Winifred Nicholson, to lesser-known figures such as Dorothy Shakespear, Anne Estelle Rice and Helen Saunders. Bringing a web of fascinating connections to light for the first time, this publication provides a fresh interpretation of a pioneering period and the role women played within it.

"What is abstract art good for? What's the use--for us as individuals, or for any society--of pictures of nothing, of paintings and sculptures or prints or drawings that do not seem to show anything except themselves?" In this invigorating account of abstract art since Jackson Pollock, eminent art historian Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, asks these and other questions as he frankly confronts the uncertainties we may have about the nonrepresentational art produced in the last five decades. He makes a compelling argument for its history and value, much as E. H. Gombrich tackled representation fifty years ago in "Art and Illusion," another landmark A. W. Mellon Lectures volume. Realizing that these lectures might be his final work, Varnedoe conceived of them as a statement of his faith in modern art and as the culminating example of his lucidly pragmatic and philosophical approach to art history. He delivered the lectures, edited and reproduced here with their illustrations, to overflowing crowds at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the spring of 2003, just months before his death.

With brilliance, passion, and humor, Varnedoe addresses the skeptical attitudes and misunderstandings that we often bring to our experience of abstract art. Resisting grand generalizations, he makes a deliberate and scholarly case for abstraction--showing us that more than just pure looking is necessary to understand the self-made symbolic language of abstract art. Proceeding decade by decade, he brings alive the history and biography that inform the art while also challenging the received wisdom about distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, and minimalism and pop. The result is a fascinating and ultimately moving tour through a half century of abstract art, concluding with an unforgettable description of one of Varnedoe's favorite works.

Are women s orgasms more intense than men s? What did Andre Breton think of homosexuality? Can love be separated from physical desire? In 1928 a group of surrealist writers and artists held twelve round table discussions to address these questions.

Calling them researches into sexuality, their bizarre and humorous conversations are now made available in this new edition in all their surreal and salacious detail. Their research spanned the most critical period for surrealism, a time of bitter political disputes, echoed in the intensity of these meetings and in the range of participants, including Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Yves Tanguy, Benjamin Peret and Pierre Naville.

Well before the so-called sexual revolution, their erotic exchanges broke sexual taboos and encouraged surrealists to openly share the libidinal themes they explored in their writing and art. In doing so, JoAnn Wypijewski writes in the new introduction, they are revealed as lovers and prigs, fantasists and humanists, adventurers in mind if not always in flesh flawed, foolish, brilliant, clangingly sexual human beings.

Lightstream represents Nigel Grierson's most recent foray into photographic abstraction as he makes long exposures of figures beside the light of the ocean. Taking the maxim from Dieter Appelt "A snapshot steals life that it cannot return. A long exposure (creates) a form that never existed", Grierson makes beautiful images, which on the surface might appear to owe as much to the medium of painting as they do to photography. However, it is important to him that these are un-manipulated images straight from the camera: "From the outset, my work has been largely about 'photographic seeing' as I'm fascinated by what Garry Winogrand so simply described as 'how something looks when photographed'. Hence, a sense of discovery within the work itself is very important to me; finding something new that I didn't already know. There's a huge element of 'chance, and the embrace of the happy accident within this approach, which is a sort of photographic equivalent of action painting. I'm often more interested in what something suggests rather than what it actually is, each image becoming a starting point for our imagination as it edges towards abstraction". Yet what is unique about photography is that it always keeps something of the original subject. So there's a dynamic duality, a dramatic to and fro in the viewer's mind, between what it is and what it suggests. The marks and traces created by the moving light, at times have a simplicity like a child's drawings. On occasion, the residue of a human figure might be reduced to little more than their posture or demeanor, which then seems more significant than ever, a sort of essence, whether that be elusive or illusive.