Eye on a Century celebrates a cornerstone of the Yale University Art Gallery's holdings: the Charles B. Benenson Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art. This major bequest includes works by a veritable pantheon of modern and contemporary artists-among them Jean-Michel Basquiat, Stuart Davis, Fernand Leger, Joan Miro, James Rosenquist, and David Smith. The catalogue provides exciting new scholarship on some of the collection's most significant objects, including works by Alexander Calder, Kurt Schwitters, and Pablo Picasso, alongside lesser-known works, by artists such as Alicia Penalba, David Wojnarowicz, and Martin Wong, several of which have never before been published. The introduction, which examines the context of Benenson's collecting, is followed by more than fifty catalogue entries and an illustrated checklist of the complete collection. Distributed for the Yale University Art Gallery

This book is dedicated to the great Georgian modern artist David Kakabadze (1889-1952). This book compares the importance of David Kakabadze's creative work against the background of world avant-garde art of the beginning of the 20th century. This book is of interest for art historians and other experts, studying Georgian and Soviet art/culture, modern art and, especially, abstract art.

With the emergence of Abstract Expressionism after World War II, the attention of the international art world turned from Paris to New York. Dore Ashton captures the vitality of the cultural milieu in which the New York School artists worked and argued and critiqued each other's work from the 1930s to the 1950s. Working from unsifted archives, from contemporary newspapers and books, and from extensive conversations with the men and women who participated in the rise of the New York School, Ashton provides a rich cultural and intellectual history of this period. In examining the complex sources of this important movement--from the WPA program of the 1930s and the influx of European ideas to the recognition in the 1950s of American painting on an international scale--she conveys the concerns of an extraordinary group of artists including Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Philip Guston, Barnett Newman, Arshile Gorky, and many others. Rare documentary photographs illustrate Ashton's classic appraisal of the New York School scene.

The artist Francis Picabia--notorious dandy, bon vivant, painter, poet, filmmaker, and polemicist--has emerged as the Dadaist with postmodern appeal, and one of the most enigmatic forces behind the enigma that was Dada. In this first book in English to focus on Picabia's work in Paris during the Dada years, art historian and critic George Baker reimagines Dada through Picabia's eyes. Such reimagining involves a new account of the readymade--Marcel Duchamp's anti-art invention, which opened fine art to mass culture and the commodity. But in Picabia's hands, Baker argues, the Dada readymade aimed to reinvent art rather than destroy it. Picabia's readymade opened art not just to the commodity, but to the larger world from which the commodity stems: the fluid sea of capital and money that transforms all objects and experiences in its wake. The book thus tells the story of a set of newly transformed artistic practices, claiming them for art history--and naming them--for the first time: Dada Drawing, Dada Painting, Dada Photography, Dada Abstraction, Dada Cinema, Dada Montage. Along the way, Baker describes a series of nearly forgotten objects and events, from the almost lunatic range of the Paris Dada "manifestations" to Picabia's polemical writings; from a lost work by Picabia in the form of a hole (called, suggestively, The Young Girl) to his "painting" Cacodylic Eye, covered in autographs by luminaries ranging from Ezra Pound to Fatty Arbuckle. Baker ends with readymades in prose: a vast interweaving of citations and quotations that converge to create a heated conversation among Picabia, Andre Breton, Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others. Art history has never looked like this before. But then again, Dada has never looked like art history.George Baker is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an editor at October magazine and October Books. He is the editor of James Coleman (MIT Press) and a frequent contributor to Artforum."

In 1943, while the world was convulsed by war, a few visionaries--in the private sector and in the military--committed to protect Europe's cultural heritage from the indiscriminate ravages of World War Two.
And so the Allies appointed the Monuments Officers, a motley group of art historians, curators, architects, and artists, to ensure that the masterpieces of European art and architecture were not looted or bombed into oblivion. Often working as shellfire exploded around them, the Monuments men and women of Italy shored up tottering palaces and cathedrals, safeguarded Michelangelos and Giottos, and even blocked a Nazi convoy of stolen paintings bound for Goring's birthday celebration. Sometimes they failed. But to an astonishing degree they succeeded, and their story is an unparalleled adventure with the gorgeous tints of a Botticelli as its backdrop.

Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson, and Stanley Spencer were five of the most important British artists of the 20th century. From diverse backgrounds, they all met at The Slade in London between 1908 and 1910, in what was later described at the school's 'last crisis of brilliance'.

In a parlor game played by the Surrealist group--the foremost avant-gardists of their time--participants made their marks on the quadrants of a folded sheet of paper: a many-eyed head, a distorted torso, hands fondling swollen breasts, snarling reptilian-dog feet descending from an egg-shaped midsection. The "Exquisite Corpse," as it was called, is still very much alive, having found artistic and critical expression from the days of the Surrealists down to our own. This method has been used in collective artistic protocols as the "rules of engagement" for experimental art, as a form of social interaction, and as an alternative mode of critical thinking. This collection is the first to address both historical and contemporary works that employ the ritual of the "cadavre exquis." It offers a unique overview of the efforts of scholars and artists to articulate new notions of crossing temporal and spatial boundaries and to experience in a new way the body's mutability through visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic frames. Bringing together diverse writers from across disciplinary boundaries, this volume continues the cultural and methodological innovations that have unfolded since the first days of the "Exquisite Corpse."

Often referred to as the last Surrealist and first Abstract Expressionist, Arshile Gorky (c. 1900-1948) appears as an interstice within art history's linear progression. Gorky embraced dream imagery in the tradition of the Surrealists, used all-over patterning before Jackson Pollock, promoted disembodied color before Mark Rothko, exploited the physicality of paint before Willem de Kooning, and anticipated stain painting. His life--he escaped the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and struggled as an immigrant artist in New York in the 1930s and 1940s--and his tumultuous personal relationships have cast the artist as a tragic figure and often overshadowed the genius of his art.

Rethinking Arshile Gorky is an examination of the artist and his work based on themes of displacement, self-fashioning, trauma, and memory. By applying a multitude of techniques, including psychoanalytic, semiotic, and constructivist analyses, to explain and demythologize the artist, Kim Theriault offers a contemporary critique of both the way we construct the idea of the "artist" in modern society and the manner in which Arshile Gorky and his art have historically been addressed.

This is an unflinching and honest portrayal of how numerous artists and their works were used during the German occupation of France. "Art of the Defeat" provides an unflinching an honest look at the art scene in France during the German occupation of World War II. Beginning with Adolf Hitler's staging of the armistice at Rethondes, it offers a survey of Nazi and Vichy artistic policies, key events and organizations, and individual acts of collaboration and resistance. It examines the demonization of foreigners, the looting of state museums and Jewish collections, the glorification of Philippe Petain and French national identity, and the official junket by French artists to Germany. Drawing on research and discussions of the works of artists such as Gerard Ambroselli, Arno Breker, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and dozens of others, this volume is a pioneering look at how art can be used to hold despair and defeat at bay.

COLOURFIELD PAINTING

Sixties painting was variously termed Colourfield, Hard Edge, Minimal, and post-painterly abstraction, and was linked with Pop Art, Op (optical) Art, chromatic art, kinetic abstraction, wholistic art, pure-painting, geometric abstraction, ABC Art, Cool Art, Non-gestural Painting, Non- Relationalism, Abstract Mannerism and Abstract Sublime painting.

The painters linked in this study with Colourfield, Hard Edge Minimal and Post-Painterly Abstraction painting include Minimal artists such as Brice Marden, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt and Robert Ryman; Colourfield painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Sam Gilliam and Morris Louis; post-painterly abstractionists such as Frank Stella, David Novros, Richard Diebenkorn, Al Held, Jo Baer and Jules Olitski; and Hard Edge painters such as Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Mangold, Joseph Albers and Elisabeth Murray.

Colourfield, Minimal, Hard Edge and Post-Painterly Abstract painting had a distinctly American (and New York) flavour to it, even if it was not produced in America or by US artists. In Bruce Glaser s Questions to Andre and Judd, Donald Judd continually stressed the point that the new (Minimal) art was definitely American and non-European. Time and again Judd insisted that the new art was to trying to get away from the European tradition. It suits me fine if that s all down the drain, Judd said. I m totally uninterested in European art and I think it s over with.

Many of the Colourfield and Sixties painters have made extremely brilliantly colourful works in the 1960s, then turned back to the sombre colours of grey and black in the late 1980s and 1990s. Painters such as Brice Marden, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns and Jules Olitski are ambiguous about saturated colour: they moved back and forth from monochrome greys and blacks to full colour. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, painters such as Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Jules Olitski and Larry Poons moved from bright colour to muted monochrome. Mid-1990s works by Frank Stella were unpainted, using instead the natural colours of metal and wood; Brice Marden turned from his luscious monochromes of the 1970s and 1980s to the black-and-white of Chinese calligraphy in the Cold Mountain series and other works.

Fully illustrated, with notes and bibliography.

Making a vital contribution to the understanding of Latin American modernism, Esther Gabara rethinks the role of photography in the Brazilian and Mexican avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s. During these decades, intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil were deeply engaged with photography. Authors who are now canonical figures in the two countries' literary traditions looked at modern life through the camera in a variety of ways. Mario de Andrade, known as the "pope" of Brazilian modernism, took and collected hundreds of photographs. Salvador Novo, a major Mexican writer, meditated on the medium's aesthetic potential as "the prodigal daughter of the fine arts." Intellectuals acted as tourists and ethnographers, and their images and texts circulated in popular mass media, sharing the page with photographs of the New Woman. In this richly illustrated study, Gabara introduces the concept of a modernist "ethos" to illuminate the intertwining of aesthetic innovation and ethical concerns in the work of leading Brazilian and Mexican literary figures, who were also photographers, art critics, and contributors to illustrated magazines during the 1920s and 1930s.

Gabara argues that Brazilian and Mexican modernists deliberately made photography err: they made this privileged medium of modern representation simultaneously wander and work against its apparent perfection. They flouted the conventions of mainstream modernism so that their aesthetics registered an ethical dimension. Their photographic modernism strayed, dragging along the baggage of modernity lived in a postcolonial site. Through their "errant modernism," avant-garde writers and photographers critiqued the colonial history of Latin America and its twentieth-century formations.

A new title of the 5-volume series covering the fundamental events and pivotal works of international art in the 20th century. With the third volume, this history of art goes past the halfway mark of the 20th century to enter the contemporary sphere. The book relates how artists reacted to the greatest tragedy of the 20th century and responded to the advent of the society of mass communication and consumption, to the moulding of the world in which we find ourselves ever more deeply immersed today. The collapse and rebirth of Europe, the years of the Cold War and the evolution leading to the upheavals of 1968 are fundamental themes of this third volume.

In this critical biography of Robert Desnos (1900-1945), Katharine Conley reevaluates the surrealist movement through the life and works of one of its founders. Desnos was as famous among the surrealists for his independence of mind as for his elaborate "automatic" drawings and his brilliant oral and written performances during the incubational period of the group. He stayed with the official surrealist movement in Paris for only six years but was pivotal during that time in shaping the surrealist notion of "transforming the world" through radical experiments with language and art. After leaving the group, Desnos continued his career of radio broadcasting and writing for commercials. Though no longer part of the official movement, he remained committed to his own version of popular surrealism: Desnosian surrealism and the search for the "marvelous" in everyday life. Near the end of World War II he was deported and imprisoned for his work in the French Resistance and died at the newly liberated camp of Terezin in Czechoslovakia. Reports from within the camp indicate that Desnos took with him into Terezin his most deeply held surrealist beliefs.

This series offers a complete, up-to-date survey of the phenomena of the 1900s and the first years of the new millennium through an original, transversal and interdisciplinary analysis of artistic culture in the twentieth century. The second volume analyses and presents the hugely diverse world of artistic production between the two world wars, taking into consideration not only the environment that took shape in the immediate wake of the First World War, from the so-called 'return to order' to the re-emergence of a figurative approach (The New Objectivity, Novecento Italiano, and Magic Realism) that was profoundly anti-avant-garde yet imbued with strong plastic and semantic values, but also the evolution of an avant-garde that was now historicised, with its second-generation artists (Aerial Painting, the second generation of Futurism). Also considered in this title are the codification of certain phenomena, such as Surrealism, changes in taste (from Art Deco to Novecentismo), as well as art as the expression of the totalitarian regimes, and the outbreak of the Second World War, with the embracing of environments outside Europe, particularly the USA. The chronological boundaries are marked by the birth of the Dadaist experience in Germany and the establishment of Metaphysics in Italy (1917- 1920) on one side and by the birth of the great season of U.S. Abstract Expressionism (1943-1945) on the other.

A revisionist history of New York Dada, with appearances by Baroness Elsa as the embodiment of irrational modernism. In Irrational Modernism, Amelia Jones gives us a history of New York Dada, reinterpreted in relation to the life and works of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Jones enlarges our conception of New York Dada beyond the male avant-garde heroics of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Francis Picabia to include the rebellious body of the Baroness. If they practiced Dada, she lived it, with her unorthodox personal life, wild assemblage objects, radical poetry and prose, and the flamboyant self-displays by which she became her own work of art. Through this reinterpretation, Jones not only provides a revisionist history of an art movement but also suggests a new method of art history. Jones argues that the accepted idea of New York Dada as epitomized by Duchamp's readymades and their implicit cultural critique does not take into consideration the contradictions within the movement-its misogyny, for example-or the social turmoil of the period caused by industrialization, urbanization, and the upheaval of World War I and its aftermath, which coincided with the Baroness's time in New York (1913-1923). Baroness Elsa, whose appearances in Jones's narrative of New York Dada mirror her volcanic intrusions into the artistic circles of the time, can be seen to embody a new way to understand the history of avant-gardism-one that embraces the irrational and marginal rather than promoting the canonical. Acknowledging her identification with the Baroness (as a "fellow neurasthenic"), and interrupting her own objective passages of art historical argument with what she describes in her introduction as "bursts of irrationality," Jones explores the interestedness of all art history, and proposes a new "immersive" understanding of history (reflecting the historian's own history) that parallels the irrational immersive trajectory of avant- gardism as practiced by Baroness Elsa.

Luigi Russolo (1885OCo1947)OCopainter, composer, builder of musical instruments, and first-hour member of the Italian Futurist movementOCowas a crucial figure in the evolution of twentieth-century aesthetics. As creator of the first systematic poetics of noise and inventor of what has been considered the first mechanical sound synthesizer, Russolo looms large in the development of twentieth-century music. In the first English language study of Russolo, Luciano Chessa emphasizes the futuristOCOs interest in the occult, showing it to be a leitmotif for his life and a foundation for his art of noises. Chessa shows that RussoloOCOs aesthetics of noise, and the machines he called the "intonarumori," were intended to boost practitioners into higher states of spiritual consciousness. His analysis reveals a multifaceted man in whom the drive to keep up with the latest scientific trends coexisted with an embrace of the irrational, and a critique of materialism and positivism.

Bringing together many Surrealist texts that have never previously been available in English, this collection is an essential guide for anyone who wishes to understand the Surrealist movement. Including a wealth of original works, it traces its development in the words of the Surrealists themselves, offering a definitive expression of Surrealism as a collective movement. It shows the extent of Surrealist positions and interests and shows how, having become a major cultural phenomenon of the twentieth century, the issues it has raised remain central to current debates.Covering the period 1922-91, these key texts illuminate its philosophical, political and ethical positions and locate Surrealism in a broader social and cultural context. Comprising statements from Surrealist groups in Paris, Belgium, Romania, Sweden and Czechoslovakia, and signed by the major participants, it reveals the international dimension of Surrealism and shows how it has maintained vitality in response to changing social and political exigencies. Chapters cover the historical orientation of Surrealism; its involvement with revolutionary politics; its ethical concerns and its defense of the 'security of the spirit'; and its position on colonialism. In particular, the volume brings attention to the extent to which Surrealism represented a 'collective adventure' in which their shared interests brought together groups of individuals to explore themes in common. In this sense, Surrealism truly represented, as Andre Masson once described it, a 'collective experience of individualism'.

This final volume in the British Sculptors and Sculpture series addresses the work of the important but neglected British sculptor Francis Derwent Wood RA (1871-1926). A student of Edouard Lanteri at the Royal College of Art, Derwent Wood's early artistic career was distinguished. His reputation grew rapidly and a period as Director of Modelling at the Glasgow School of Art saw him working on public commissions with many of the city's most important architects. Simultaneously, he built his London practice, perfecting the art of the rapidly executed, observationally astute portrait bust, and becoming a well-connected member of the Chelsea set. He exhibited at the Royal Academy every year from 1895 until his death in 1926, becoming a full Academician in 1920. During the First World War he carried out pioneering work in the field of facial prosthetics. He was appointed Professor of Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 1918, where Henry Moore was amongst his many pupils. Derwent Wood's Machine Gun Corps memorial at Hyde Park Corner in London, completed in the year of his death, is amongst the best-known and most consistently reviled sculptures in Britain. Matthew Withey offers readers a subtle and layered interpretation of the career that led up to this iconic and misunderstood work, together with a comprehensive catalogue of Derwent Wood's diverse body of work.

When Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion was exhibited in 1945, Francis Bacon (1909-1992) instantly became the most controversial painter in the country. By the end of his life, his status as one of the giants of modern art was established, as was his reputation for hard drinking, heavy gambling and sado-masochistic homosexuality. Andrew Brighton casts fresh light on Bacon's formation as an artist in gay and aristocratic bohemian London circles. He locates Bacon at the core of contesting ideas and values, while firmly grounding his reading of Bacon's work in an understanding of his working methods and technique. Penetrating the seeming horror of Bacon's painting, this book reveals the ideas, the beliefs and the life that formed one of the most successful artists of the twentieth century.

In Infinite Regress, David Joselit considers the plurality of identities and practices within Duchamp's life and art between 1910 and 1941, conducting a synthetic reading of his early and middle career. There is not one Marcel Duchamp, but several. Within his oeuvre Duchamp practiced a variety of modernist idioms and invented an array of contradictory personas: artist and art dealer, conceptualist and craftsman, chess champion and dreamer, dandy and recluse. In Infinite Regress, David Joselit considers the plurality of identities and practices within Duchamp's life and art between 1910 and 1941, conducting a synthetic reading of his early and middle career. Taking into account underacknowledged works and focusing on the conjunction of the machine and the commodity in Duchamp's art, Joselit notes a consistent opposition between the material world and various forms of measurement, inscription, and quantification. Challenging conventional accounts, he describes the readymade strategy not merely as a rejection of painting, but as a means of producing new models of the modern self.

Deborah Solomon's biography sets Jackson Pollock in his time and portrays him as a shy, often withdrawn person, full of insecurities and self-doubts, and frequently unable to express himself about his art or its meaning. Solomon interviewed two hundred people who knew Pollock and his work and she has drawn extensively on Pollock's own writings and other personal papers. She examines the artist's relationships with his family; his wife and fellow artist Lee Krasner; art patron Peggy Guggenheim; the painters Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and many more.

Intimate, revealing memoir of Picasso as man and artist by influential literary figure. Highly readable amalgam of biographical fact, artistic and aesthetic comments: Picasso as founder of Cubism, associate of Apollinaire, Braque, Derain, other notables; titanic, creative spirit. One of Stein's most accessible works. 61 black-and-white illustrations. Index.

Marcel Duchamp's stature in the history of art has grown steadily since the 1950s, as several artistic movements have embraced him as their founding father. But although his influence is comparable only to Picasso's, Duchamp continues to be relatively unknown outside his narrow circle of followers. This book seeks to explain his oeuvre, which has been shrouded with mystery.
Duchamp's two great preoccupations were the nature of scientific truth and a feeling for love with its natural limit, death. His works all speak of eroticism in a way that pushes the socially acceptable to its outer limits. Juan Antonio Ramirez addresses such questions as the meaning of the artist's ground-breaking ready-mades and his famous installation "Etant donnes"; his passionate essay reproduces all of Duchamp's important works, in addition to numerous previously unpublished visual sources. "Duchamp: Love and Death, even" is a seminal monograph for understanding this crucial figure of modern art.

In the wake of World War II, the paintings of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, and other New York School artists participated in a culture-wide initiative to reimagine the self. At a time when widely held beliefs about human nature and the human condition were coming to seem to many commentators increasingly outdated and inadequate, Abstract Expressionism gave compelling visual form to a new subjectivity-a new experience and idea of self. In this original and wide-ranging study, Michael Leja argues that the interest of these artists in tapping "primitive" and unconscious components of self aligns them with many contemporary essayists, Hollywood filmmakers, journalists, and popular philosophers who were turning, like the artists, to psychology, anthropology, and philosophy in the effort to reformulate individual identity. Taking Pollock's paintings and their reception as a case study, Leja shows that critics located in Pollock's abstract forms a web of metaphors-including spatial entrapment, conflicted production, energy flow, gendered opposition, and unconsciousness-that situated the paintings in mainstream cultural discourses on the individual's sense of self and identity. In this interpretative frame, the cultural and ideological character of the art is illuminated. According to Leja, Abstract Expressionism effectively enacted and represented the new, conflicted, layered subjectivity, a feature that helps to account for the support and interest it garnered from cultural and political institutions alike.