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.

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?

Luis Bunuel: A Life in Letters provides access for the first time to an annotated English-language version of around 750 of the most important and most widely relevant of these letters. Bunuel (1900-1983) came to international attention with his first films, Un Chien Andalou (with Dali, 1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930): two surprisingly avant-garde productions that established his position as the undisputed master of Surrealist filmmaking. He went on to make 30 full-length features in France, the US and Mexico, and consolidated his international reputation with a Palme d'Or for Viridiana in 1961, and an Academy Award in 1973 for The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. He corresponded with some of the most famous writers, directors, actors and artists of his generation and the list of these correspondents reads like a roll call of major twentieth-century cultural icons: Fellini, Truffaut, Vigo, Aragon, Dali, Unik - and yet none of this material has been accessible outside specialist archives and a very small number of publications in Spanish and French.

This is a fascinating and superbly illustrated look at how the First World War influenced an entire generation of visual artists. Much of how WWI is understood today is rooted in the artistic depictions of the brutal violence and extensive destruction that marked the conflict. Nothing but the Clouds Unchanged examines how the physical and psychological devastation of the war altered the course of 20th-century artistic Modernism. Following the lives and works of fourteen artists before, during, and after the war, this book demonstrates how the conflict and the resulting trauma actively shaped artistic production. Materials from the Getty Research Institute's special collections, including letters, popular journals, posters, sketches, books, propaganda, and photographs - situate the works of the artists within the historical context, both personal and cultural, in which they were created.

This is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the making of a post-war masterpiece and its restoration. In many ways, Mural, Jackson Pollock's (1912-1956) first large-scale painting represents the birth of his legend. The controversial artist's creation of this painting has been recounted in dozens of books and dramatized in the Oscar-winning Pollock. Rumours about its creation abound - such as it being painted in one alcohol-fuelled night and at first didn't fit the intended space. But never in doubt was that it was pivotal, not only for Pollock but for the Abstract Expressionists who would follow his radical conception of art - "no limits, just edges." Mural, painted in 1943, was Pollock's first major commission. It was made for the entrance hall of the Manhattan duplex of Peggy Guggenheim who donated it to the University of Iowa in the 1950s where it stayed until its 2012 arrival for conservation and study at the Getty Center. This book unveils the findings of that examination providing a more complete picture of Pollock's process than ever before and includes an essay by eminent Pollock scholar Ellen Landau and an introduction by comedian Steve Martin.

Featuring new essays by established and emerging scholars, Intersections: Women artists/surrealism/modernism redefines conventional surrealist and modernist canons by focusing critical attention on women artists working in and with surrealism in the context of modernism. In doing so it redefines critical understanding of the complex relations between all three terms. The essays address work produced in a wide variety of international contexts and across several generations of surrealist production by women closely connected to the surrealist movement or more marginally influenced by it. Intersections explores work in a wide range of media, from painting and sculpture to film and fashion, by artists including Susan Hiller, Maya Deren, Birgit Jurgenssen, Aube Elleouet, Dorothea Tanning, Claude Cahun, Elsa Schiaparelli, Joyce Mansour, Leonor Fini, Mimi Parent, Lee Miller, Leonora Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun and Eileen Agar. -- .

Ben Uri Gallery and Museum was founded 100 years ago in July 1915 in Whitechapel in London's East End by Russian-Jewish emigre Lazar Berson and likeminded, mostly emigre, artists and craftsmen, who were unable to access the cultural bastions of the British art establishment. From its inception as an Art Society in 1915, steeped in a vibrant Yiddish culture, to its position today as the only specialist Jewish museum of art in Europe working wholly in the mainstream, Ben Uri's unique international collection has grown to more than 1,300 artworks across a wide range of subjects and media, created by more than 380 artists, primarily (but not exclusively) of Jewish origin and from 35 countries.

In a 1985 series of "Lectures on one's own country: Germany", given at the Munich Kammerspiele, Joseph Beuys said that he developed his work "from language." He regarded language as equal to visual art-a flexible material through which every individual could physically, intellectually, and communicatively participate in the process of re-ordering society. His exploration of language ranges from silence to hours of debate, from animal sounds to precise discussions of concepts and puzzling writings. Accordingly, the chapters are divided into the themes of "silence," "sounds," "concepts," "writing," "mystery," "legends," and "speech." Both exhibition and catalogue assemble sculptures, drawings, installations, films, posters, and documents from the Nationalgalerie, the Sammlung Marx, the Kupferstichkabinett, and the Art Library of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Presenting the art of David Czupryn and Jochen Muhlenbrink, this publication explores two contemporary approaches to painting. They subtly challenge our perception of the world and investigate reality: What is reality, what is illusion? What is true and what is false? The paintings by both artists are designed to trick the eye. In his own unique style, Jochen Muhlenbrink creates a semblance of reality by imitating various materials that deceive viewers with their realism. Cardboard, plastic foil, adhesive tape, stacks of pictures leaning against a wall, used pizza boxes, or dry bread - Muhlenbrink paints light, shadows, brilliant reflections, surfaces, and signs of wear and tear in such lifelike detail that people sometimes fail to notice that they are looking at a painting. David Czupryn takes an opposite approach. He does not aim to trick us into believing that his surreal visual worlds are real. His images recall theatre stages where human hybrids appear next to carefully arranged still lifes whose different textures are meticulously depicted. In the spirit of classical trompe-l'oeil painting, Czupryn is a master of aesthetic deception who translates the pictorial language and techniques of past ages into the present and skillfully integrates numerous references to the history of art and religion, iconography and allegory, politics and society into his paintings. Text in English and German.

Enchanted Ground is about the challenge to modernist criticism by Surrealist writers-mainly Andre Breton but also Louis Aragon, Pierre Mabille, Rene Magritte, Charles Estienne, Rene Huyghe and others-who viewed the same artists in terms of magic, occultism, precognition, alchemy and esotericism generally. It introduces the history of the ways in which those artists who came after Impressionism-Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh-became canonical in the 20th century through the broad approaches we now call modernist or formalist (by critics and curators such as Alfred H. Barr, Roger Fry, Robert Goldwater, Clement Greenberg, John Rewald and Robert L. Herbert), and then unpacks chapter-by-chapter, for the first time in a single volume, the Surrealist positions on the same artists. To this end, it contributes to new strains of scholarship on Surrealism that exceed the usual bounds of the 1920s and 1930s and that examine the fascination within the movement with magic.

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.

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.

From its auspicious beginnings in the summer of 1966 to the present, the Chicago Surrealist Group-and the Surrealist Movement in the United States, which grew out of it-have continued to foment an exhilarating whirlwind of revolt while playfully igniting the sparks of Poetry, Freedom and Love in the crucible of the Unfettered Imagination. In so doing, it has brightly illuminated the pathways of absolute divergence that define the intrinsically anarchist trajectory of the surrealist adventure. Drawing on the full range of U.S. surrealist publications, from the original journal Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion to the very latest millennial communique from the front lines of the ongoing battle against miserabilism, this volume contains over 200 texts (more than two dozen appearing here for the first time) by more than fifty participants in the Surrealist Movement, making this the most comprehensive, diverse and lavishly illustrated compilation of American surrealist writings to have ever been assembled. Contributors include: Gale Ahrens, Jennifer Bean, Jen Besemer, Daniel C. Boyer, Paul Buhle, Ronnie Burk, Leonora Carrington, Laura Corsigilia, Jayne Cortez, Guy Ducornet, Rikki Ducornet, Schlechter Duvall, Alice Farley, J. Allen Fees, Beth Garon, Paul Garon, Eugenio F. Granell, Robert Green, Miriam Hansen, Diedra Harris-Kelley, Jan Hathaway, Corinna Jablonski, Joseph Jablonski, Ted Joans, Gerome Kamrowski, Robin D. G. Kelley, Don LaCoss, Philip Lamantia, Clarence John Laughlin, Mary Low, Herbert Marcuse, Tristan Meinecke, Casandra Stark Mele, Anne Olson, Nancy Joyce Peters, Charles Radcliffe, Myrna Bell Rochester, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, Penelope Rosemont, Ody Saban, Louise Simons, Martha Sonnenberg, Christopher Starr, Ivan Svitak, Cheikh Tidiane Sylla, Claude Tarnaud, Debra Taub, Dale Tomich, Patrick Turner, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, Jordan West, Joel Williams, Marie Wilson, Haifa Zangana

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.

'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

The catalogue to accompany a major solo presentation of the work of the influential New York-based artist Mary Heilmann, her first in a public institution in the UK in 15 years. Born in California in 1940, Heilmann studied ceramics and poetry before moving to New York in 1968 and taking up painting. A pioneer of infusing abstract painting with influences from craft traditions and popular culture (especially rock music and California's beach culture), Heilmann is one of the most important yet still underrecognised artists working today. This publication explores Heilmann's approach to abstraction from two distinct but interrelated perspectives: the formal and the personal. The personal is reflected in the title Looking at Pictures, named after a section in the artist's memoir The All Night Movie (1999), in which she writes, `Each of my paintings can be seen as an autobiographical marker', clearly represented here through works that relate to moments in the artist's friendships, memories of places where she has lived or spent time and her love of music and film. The juxtaposing formal aspect of her work is also explored, most evidently in her early paintings of grids and squares rendered in primary colours and in works that are based on architectural or interior planes, such as doors and mirrors. As well as new essays by Lydia Yee (Chief Curator, Whitechapel Gallery) and Briony Fer (Professor of History of Art, University College London), and writings by the artist on key works, the publication will feature 100 beautiful full-colour illustrations of paintings, works on paper, furniture and ceramics from Heilmann's five-decade career.

This publication sets the precedent for the next generation of Lawrence scholars and studies in modern and contemporary discourse. The American Struggle explores Jacob Lawrence's radical way of transforming history into art by looking at his thirty panel series of paintings, Struggle . . . from the History of the American People (1954-56). Essays by Steven Locke, Elizabeth Hutton Turner, Austen Barron Bailly, and Lydia Gordon mark the historic reunion of this series-seen together in this exhibition for the first time since 1958. In entries on the panels, a multitude of voices responds to the episodes representing struggle from American history that Lawrence chose to activate in his series. The American Struggle reexamines Lawrence's lost narrative and its power for twenty-first century audiences by including contemporary art and artists. Derrick Adams, Bethany Collins, and Hank Willis Thomas invite us to reconsider history through themes of struggle in ways that resonate with Lawrence's artistic invention. Statements by these artists amplify how they and Lawrence view history not as distant period of the past but as an active imaginative space that is continuously questioned in the present tense and for future audiences.

Flags and Faces, based on David Lubin's 2008 Franklin D. Murphy Lectures at the University of Kansas, shows how American artists, photographers, and graphic designers helped shape public perceptions about World War I. In the book's first section, Art for War's Sake," Lubin considers how flag-based patriotic imagery prompted Americans to intervene in Europe in 1917. Trading on current anxieties about class, gender, and nationhood, American visual culture made war with Germany seem inevitable. The second section, Fixing Faces," contemplates the corrosive effects of the war on soldiers who literally lost their faces on the battlefield, and on their families back home. Unable to endure distasteful reminders of war's brutality, postwar Americans grew obsessed with physical beauty, as seen in the simultaneous rise of cosmetic surgery, the makeup industry, beauty pageants, and the cult of screen goddesses such as Greta Garbo, who was worshipped for the masklike perfection of her face. Engaging, provocative, and filled with arresting and at times disturbing illustrations, Flags and Faces offers striking new insights into American art and visual culture from 1915 to 1930.

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.

I 2019 er det 150-arsjubileum for Harald Sohlbergs fodsel. Utstillingen i Nasjonalgalleriet hosten 2018 og i London og Wiesbaden i 2019 vil danne en flott opptakt til aktiviteter og fornyet interesse for denne viktige norske kunstneren. Magiske landskaper, myke blomsterenger og kalde vinternetter: Sohlbergs motivkrets kombinerer elementer fra en romantisk naturoppfattelse med tendenser fra det samtidige kunstuttrykket. Hans bilder tilhorte ingen spesifikk kunstnerisk retning, selv om den er sterkt knyttet til symbolismen. Det er spenningen mellom det tradisjonstro og det moderne som gjor hans billedverden spesiell bade i norsk og internasjonal sammenheng. Utstillingskatalogen presenterer rundt 60 malerier samt en rekke av kunstnerens tegninger, trykk og fotografier. Katalogtekstene setter Sohlberg inn i en kunstnerisk kontekst, bade nar det gjelder forholdet til tidligere tiders kunst og hans samtidige norske og internasjonale kollegaer. Sohlberg hadde noen spesifikke steder han hentet sine motiver fra. Den stedlige tilknytningen til Rondane, Roros, Oslo og Helgeroa inngar som et viktig gjentagende element i hans billedverden. Bildene til Sohlberg legger til rette for at betrakteren skaper sine egne fortellinger. I mange av landskapsmaleriene er fravaeret av mennesker pafallende, ikke minst fordi de samtidig inneholder spor etter menneskelig aktivitet; landbruk, bygninger, veier, telegrafstolper, industri, for a nevne noe. Mennesket og det moderne liv i historiske omgivelser er et sentralt tema, ofte med et modernitetskritisk blikk.

Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) explored fundamental issues of life with an urgency and persistence unique among British artists of his generation. His art comments on religion, love, sexuality, fraternity and community. Charting the trajectory of Spencer's painting career in depth, this original publication provides a comprehensive analysis of the artist's oeuvre. Central to understanding Spencer's work is the man himself - deeply subjective, his paintings reflect the ideas and beliefs that motivated him. While he had less emotional attachment with his landscapes, he viewed each figure painting as constituent of a body of work which, viewed as a whole, was representative of his personal and professional evolution. Examining critically the artist's key works from all periods, Andrew Causey places Spencer's art within the wider context of the spiritual, social and even, exceptionally, political values that underpin his work and make him such an outstanding painter. While strong emphasis is placed on Spencer's 'visionary' paintings of the 1910s and1920s and the important crowd scenes and portraiture of the 1930s, Stanley Spencer gives due attention to the works produced later in the artist's career. The result is a well-rounded, original analysis of one of Britain's greatest painters that will enhance the libraries of general and specialist readers alike.

In the 1890s, French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry founded pataphysics, the absurdist "science of imaginary solutions," a concept that has been nominally recognized as the precursor to Dadaism, Surrealism, and the Theater of the Absurd, among other movements. Over a century after Jarry "made the gesture of dying," Katie L. Price and Michael R. Taylor argue that it is time to take the comedic intervention of pataphysics seriously. 'Pataphysics Unrolled collects critical and creative essays to create an unauthorized account of pataphysical experimentation from its origins in the late nineteenth century through the contemporary moment. Reaching beyond the geographic and cultural boundaries normally associated with pataphysics, this volume presents rich readings of pataphysical syzygy, traces the influence of pataphysics across disciplines and outside of coteries such as the College de 'Pataphysique, and asks fundamental questions about the field of modern and contemporary studies that challenge distinctions between the modern and the postmodern, high and low culture, the serious and the comic. Touching on disciplines such as literature, art, architecture, education, music, and technology, this book reveals how pataphysics has been a platform and medium for persistent intellectual, poetic, conceptual, and artistic experimentation for over a century. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Charles Bernstein, Marc Decimo, Adam Dickinson, Johanna Drucker, Craig Dworkin, Catherine Hansen, James Hendler, John Heon, Ted Hiebert, Andrew Hugill, Steve McCaffery, Seth McDowell, Jerome McGann, Anne M. Mulhall, Marcus O'Dair, Jean-Michel Rabate, Orchid Tierney, and Brandon Walsh.

When the First World War broke out, Morris Meredith Williams was living in Edinburgh with his wife Alice, a sculptor, and earning his living from book illustration and teaching. A short man, his attempt to join the army in 1914 failed, but six months later he was accepted by the 17th Battalion, The Welsh Regiment, the first Bantam battalion to be raised in Wales. From June 1916, he spent ten months in and out of the trenches of the Western Front near Loos, Arras and the Somme, later mapping enemy positions from aerial reconnaissance shots with the Heavy Artillery. In 1918 he joined the Royal Engineers' camouflage unit at Wimereux. After the peace, he was among a handful of artists kept back to make paintings for the official record and toured the shattered landscape in an old ambulance car. Never without a sketchbook and pencils in his pocket, he drew at every opportunity, producing an extraordinary record of his surroundings. After the war some of the sketches became oil paintings while others inspired a series of war memorials in bronze, stone, wood and stained glass, most notably for the Scottish National War Memorial, on which he and Alice worked together. In this stunning book, the Meredith Williams's art is displayed in fine style, ranging from the touching and heartfelt to the most brutal, stark images of the waste and loss of war.