One of the most important and underappreciated visual artists of the twentieth century, Romare Bearden started as a cartoonist during his college years and emerged as a painter during the 1930s, at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance and in time to be part of a significant community of black artists supported by the WPA. Though light-skinned and able to "pass, " Bearden embraced his African heritage, choosing to paint social realist canvases of African-American life. After World War II, he became one of a handful of black artists to exhibit in a private gallery-the commercial outlet that would form the core of the American art world's post-war marketplace. Rejecting Abstract Expressionism, he lived briefly in Paris. After he suffered a nervous breakdown, Bearden returned to New York, turning to painting just as the civil rights movement was gaining ground with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott. By the time of the March on Washington in 1963, Bearden had begun to experiment with collage-or Projection, as he called it-the medium for which he would ultimately become famous. In An American Odyssey, Mary Schmidt Campbell offers readers an enlightening analysis of Bearden's influences and the thematic focus of his mature work. Bearden's work provides an exquisite portrait of memory and the African American past; according to Campbell, it also offers a record of the narrative impact of visual imagery in the twentieth century, revealing how the emerging popularity of photography, film and television depicted African Americans during their struggle to be recognized as full citizens of the United States.

The Greek-American artist Kosta Alex (1925-2005) initially trained in figure sculpture in Manhattan. In 1947 he moved to Paris, where he mingled with and exhibited alongside the avant-garde artists of his day. His interest in the flattening of forms led him to create his first series of decoupage-collages in about 1950. Like many other artists of the time, he was drawn to using humble, utilitarian materials such as corrugated cardboard, packaging, newspapers, magazines, wallpaper, timetables, lists, maps, and other scraps culled from daily urban life. He integrated these elements into his art in an often poetic and humorous manner, using screws, nuts, staples, rope, string, and glue to connect them into a cohesive whole. Alex also drew inspiration from classical sculpture, primitive art, and Islamic art, and employed repetitive themes and rhythmic arrangements in his compositions. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he produced groundbreaking collage-reliefs in expanded polystyrene, which Man Ray praised for breaking "the two-dimensional barrier." Handsomely illustrated, Kosta Alex is the first monograph on this intriguing artist. Distributed for Editions Hazan, Paris

This title takes an illuminating look at the unique work and artistic vision of Gerhard Richter. Born in Dresden in 1932, Gerhard Richter was first educated under the prevailing doctrine of Socialist Realism, but retrained after emigrating to West Germany, thus uniquely embodying the division of Germany during the Cold War. This volume brings together new studies of his early career by an international group of scholars. The authors approach the context from a variety of angles including the social and political histories of a divided Germany, the conflicted development of Soviet Socialist Realism in East Germany, a Cold War visuality integrating pre- and post- resettlement works, the archival dimension of the artist's output in relation to "Richter's Atlas", and the artist's involvement in the representation of his work in archives, exhibitions, and catalogues.

This beautifully written study focuses on the life and public sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller (1877-1968), one of the early twentieth century's few African American women artists. To understand Fuller's strategy for negotiating race, history, and visual representation, Renee Ater examines the artist's contributions to three early twentieth-century expositions: the Warwick Tableaux, a set of dioramas for the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition (1907); Emancipation, a freestanding group for the National Emancipation Exposition (1913); and Ethiopia, the figure of a single female for the America's Making Exposition (1921). Ater argues that Fuller's efforts to represent black identity in art provide a window on the Progressive Era and its heated debates about race, national identity, and culture.

In Avant-Garde Canadian Literature, Gregory Betts draws attention to the fact that the avant-garde has had a presence in Canada long before the country's literary histories have recognized, and that the radicalism of avant-garde art has been sabotaged by pedestrian terms of engagement by the Canadian media, the public, and the literary critics. This book presents a rich body of evidence to illustrate the extent to which Canadians have been producing avant-garde art since the start of the twentieth century.

Betts explores the radical literary ambitions and achievements of three different nodes of avant-garde literary activity: mystical revolutionaries from the 1910s to the 1930s; Surrealists/Automatists from the 1920s to the 1960s; and Canadian Vorticists from the 1920s to the 1970s. Avant-Garde Canadian Literature offers an entrance into the vocabulary of the ongoing and primarily international debate surrounding the idea of avant-gardism, providing readers with a functional vocabulary for discussing some of the most hermetic and yet energetic literature ever produced in this country.

Surrealist artist Max Ernst defined collage as the "alchemy of the visual image." Students of his work have often dismissed this comment as simply a metaphor for the transformative power of using found images in a new context. Taking a wholly different perspective on Ernst and alchemy, however, M. E. Warlick persuasively demonstrates that the artist had a profound and abiding interest in alchemical philosophy and often used alchemical symbolism in works created throughout his career.

A revival of interest in alchemy swept the artistic, psychoanalytic, historical, and scientific circles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Warlick sets Ernst's work squarely within this movement. Looking at both his art (many of the works she discusses are reproduced in the book) and his writings, she reveals how thoroughly alchemical philosophy and symbolism pervade his early Dadaist experiments, his foundational work in surrealism, and his many collages and paintings of women and landscapes, whose images exemplify the alchemical fusing of opposites. This pioneering research adds an essential key to understanding the multilayered complexity of Ernst's works, as it affirms his standing as one of Germany's most significant artists of the twentieth century.

In Mother Stone Anne Middleton Wagner looks anew at the carvings of the first generation of British modernists, a group centered around Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Jacob Epstein. Wagner probes the work of these sculptors, discusses their shared avant-garde materialism, and identifies a common theme that runs through their work and that of other artists of the period: maternity. Why were artists for three turbulent decades after the First World War seemingly preoccupied with representations of pregnant women and the mother and child? Why was this the great new subject, especially for sculpture? Why was the imagery of bodily reproduction at the core of the effort to revitalize what in Britain had become a somnolent art? Wagner finds the answers to these questions at the intersection between the politics of maternity and sculptural innovation. She situates British sculpture fully within the new reality of "bio-power"-the realm of Marie Stopes, Brave New World, and Melanie Klein. And in a series of brilliant studies of key works, she offers a radical rereading of this sculpture's main concerns and formal language. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British 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.

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

When R.S. Thomas died in 2000, two seminal studies of modern art were found on his bookshelves - Herbert Read's Art Now (1933) and Surrealism (1936), edited by Read and containing essays by key figures in the Surrealist movement. Some three dozen previously unknown poems handwritten by Thomas were then discovered between the pages of the two books, poems written in response to a selection of the many reproductions of modern art in the Read volumes, including works by Henry Moore, Edvard Munch, George Grosz, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Graham Sutherland - many of whom were Thomas's near contemporaries. These poems are published here for the first time - alongside the works of modern art that inspired them. Thomas's readings of these often unsettling images demonstrate a willingness to confront, unencumbered by illusions, a world in which old certainties have been undermined. Personal identity has become a source of anguish, and relations between the sexes a source of disquiet and suspicion.Thomas's vivid engagements with the works of art produce a series of dramatic encounters haunted by the recurring presence of conflict and by the struggle of the artist who, in a frequently menacing world, is 'too brave to dream'. At times we are offered an unflinching vision of 'a landscape God / looked at once and from which / later he withdrew his gaze'.

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.

Thorvald Hellesen (1888-1937) was a Norwegian avant-garde artist who lived and worked in Paris in the 1910s and 1920s. He and his wife, the French artist Helene Perdriat, were part of a circle of artists that included Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger, Constantin Brancusi, Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, and many others. In his short yet intense life, Thorvald Hellesen created an impressive unique oeuvre, oriented on Modernism, consisting of oil paintings, watercolours, gouaches, drawings, design projects, and textiles. Nevertheless, even in Norway he is only known to a few. With this publication the authors Dag Blakkisrud, Matthew Drutt, and Hilde Morch have created a written portrait of Hellesen. In addition to classifying him within the history of art, they try to find explanations as to why his artistic practice is only now being considered important and interesting for Norwegian and international art history.

A bold and richly illustrated survey of the traditions and stylistic evolution of landscape painting in the Americas As nations in the Americas gained independence in the early 19th century, a pictorial landscape tradition emerged. By 1840, landscape painting had become the primary medium for articulating conceptions of land and nation in the development of North and South American cultural identity. Picturing the Americas offers the first comprehensive treatment of this genre on both American continents, bringing into dialogue the landscape traditions of artists practicing between 1840 and 1940. The catalogue is brilliantly illustrated with 260 color images, including works by U.S. artists Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Church, and Georgia O'Keeffe; Canadian artists Joseph Legare, Frances Anne Hopkins, and Lawren Harris; Mexico's Jose Maria Velasco, Uruguay's Joaquin Torres-Garcia, and Brazil's Tarsila do Amaral, among many others. Leading scholars offer a Pan-American perspective on these landscape traditions: essays consider the emergence of modernism, as well as how the development of landscape imagery reflects the intricately intertwined geographies and sociopolitical histories of the peoples, nations, regions, and diasporas of the two continents. Published in association with the Art Gallery of Ontario Exhibition Schedule: Art Gallery of Ontario (06/20/15-09/20/15) Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (11/06/15-01/18/16) Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo, Brazil (02/27/16-05/29/16)

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.

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.

Salvador Dali is one of the most popular artists in the world, known for his lavish lifestyle, gravity-defying moustache, and bizarre art. This book tells the story of Dali's life and explores the meaning of his Surrealist paintings. It goes beyond his fine art practice and discusses his venture into the commercial world from his extravagant jewelry to his cheeky design for the Chupa Chups lollipops. Surrealism is revealed as a way of life; illustrations bring to life the extraordinary Dream Ball at the Coq Rouge, his fabulous home at Port Lligat, and his underwater fantasy at the World Fair's Surrealist pavilion. Fun, provoking, and endlessly frustrating, Dali is brought under the spotlight.
Catherine Ingram brings her specialized knowledge to the book, while Andrew Rae, an award-winning illustrator, vividly portrays the text.

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.

This book considers questions of materiality and painting, focalized through the notoriously obscure work of Georges Rouault, and offers an innovative critical approach to the various questions raised by this challenging modernist. Described as a difficult and dark painter, Rouault's oeuvre is deeply experimental. Images of the circus emerge from a plethora of chaotic marks, while numerous landscapes appear as if ossified in thick paint. Rouault's work explodes the genre of painting, drawing upon the residue of Gustave Moreau's symbolism, the extremities of Fauvism, and the radical theatrical experiments of Alfred Jarry. The repetitions and re-workings at the heart of Rouault's process defy conventional chronological treatment, and place the emphasis upon the coming-into-being of the work of art. Ultimately, the book reveals the process of making as both a search for understanding and a response to the problematic world of the 20th century.

In a post-digital media landscape tracked endlessly by streams and feeds of images, it is clearer than ever that photography is an art poised between arresting singularity and ambiguous plurality. Drawing on work in visual culture studies that emphasizes the interplay between still and moving images, In and Out of Sight provides a provocative new account of the relationship between photography and modernist literature-a literature which has long been considered to trace, in its formal experimentation, the influence of modern visual technologies. Making pioneering claims about the importance of photography to the writing of Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alix Beeston traverses the history of photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the composite experiments of Francis Galton to the epic portrait project of August Sander; from the surrealist self-fashioning of Claude Cahun to the reappropriation of lynching photographs by black activist groups; from the collectable postcards of Broadway stars to the glamor shots of Hollywood celebrities-these and other serialized photographic projects provide essential contexts for understanding the fragmentary, composite forms of literary modernism. In a series of richly detailed literary analyses, Beeston argues that the gaps and intervals of the composite literary text model the visual syntax of photography-as well as its silences, absences, and equivocations. In them, the social and political order of modernity is negotiated and reshaped. Moving in and out of these textual openings, In and Out of Sight pursues the fleeting, visible and invisible figure of the woman-in-series, who recasts absence and silence as forms of presence and witness. This shadowy figure emerges as central to the conceptual space of modernist literature-a terrain not only gendered but radically constructed around the instability of female bodies and their desires.

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)

Baroque between the Wars is a fascinating and new 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 yet in dialogue 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, by 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. Accessibly written and generously illustrated, the volume focuses on artists, artefacts, clients, places, and publicists to demonstrate how baroque offered a whole way of being modern which was actively subversive of the tenets of modernism and practised by the people modernism habitually defined as not worth listening to, particularly women and homosexuals.

This publication is the first to focus solely on the abstract strategies and processes contained in Gerhard Richter's body of work. In the early 1960s, the artist began to call painting into question, an exploration that continues to occupy him to this day. In the 1970s, he responded to the rejection of painting by creating a series of monochrome works in gray. Moreover, he viewed the colour gray as a means of addressing political themes without depicting them in an idealized manner. In his Inpainting series of the 1970s, Richter made brushstrokes and the application of paint his subject. In other works, he photographed small details from his palette and transferred them onto large canvases in a photorealistic manner. In his colour charts, he subjected painting to an objective process by leaving the arrangement of the colours to chance. Since 1976, Richter has created a series of abstract works by applying paint with a brush, scraper, and palette knife, alternating between conscious decision-making and random processes.

MAINTENANT 12: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art serves up the controversial theme, "WE ARE ALL A 'LIKE'." With the rise in social media use-and abuse-the concept of "like" has reached whole new levels. There's the idea of an individual's reaction to events, people, images, etc. as a reduction to "Like" or "Dislike" without need for deeper consideration. Then there is the status factor: that something which is "Liked" by the largest number of people is of value. In fact, in the social media orbit, it is seemingly beneficial to offer strong, sharp, simplistic opinions-instead of nuanced, deeper, shaded considerations-simply because they provoke the greatest likelihood of widespread attention. How will this reduction of thought shape the future of interpersonal relations, intellectual advancement, and politics? As we teeter on the brink of nuclear war, the concepts of Dada brilliantly encompass the urgency of present times with both clarity and purposeful confusion. The MAINTENANT series, established in 2005, gathers the work of renowned and emerging dada artists and writers from around the world. The series has been archived in leading international institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art-New York, the BelVUE Museum-Brussels, and more. Renowned contributors have included artists Mark Kostabi, Raymond Pettibon, Giovanni Fontana, Jean-Jacques Lebel, and Kazunori Murakami. Writers have included Allen Ginsberg, Gerard Malanga, Charles Plymell, Jerome Rothenberg, and more, with a strong contingent of punk musician-artist-writers including Grant Hart, Mike Watt, and Exene Cervenka.