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widely held beliefs about human nature and the human condition were coming to seem to many commentators increasingly outdated and inadequate, Abstract Expressionism gave compelling visual form to a new subjectivity-a new experience and idea of self.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.

"Free Rein" is a gathering of seminal essays by Andre Breton, the foremost figure among the French surrealists. Written between 1936 and 1952, they include addresses, manifestoes, prefaces, exhibition pamphlets, and theoretical, polemical, and lyrical essays. Together they display the full span of Breton's preoccupations, his abiding faith in the early principles of surrealism, and the changing orientations, in light of crucial events of those years, of the surrealist movement within which he remained the leading force.

Having broken decisively with Marxism in the mid-1930s, Breton repeatedly addresses the horrors of the Stalinist regime (which denounced him during the Moscow trials of 1936). He argues for the autonomy of art and poetry and condemns the subservience to "revolutionary" aims exemplified by socialist realism. Other articles reflect on aesthetic issues, cinema, music, and education and provide detailed meditations on the literary, artistic, and philosophical topics for which he is best known. "Free Rein" will prove indispensable for students of Breton, surrealism, and modern French and European culture.

This groundbreaking collection of thirteen original essays analyzes connections between film and two highly influential twentieth-century movements. The essays, which comment on specific films and deal with theoretical and topical questions, are framed by a documentary section that includes a photographic reproduction of the manuscript scenario for Robert Desnos's and Man Ray's "L'Etoile de mer," and an introduction by the editor that provides a cogent working model for the difference between Dada and Surrealist perspectives.

This is an analysis of the interrelation between the abstract artist Mondrian's paintings, and his theories on art and life as expressed in his public writings and largely unpublished letters. Mondrian's art was not based on reasoning or calculation (on the contrary, intuition was central to his concept of the artistic process), but he always felt a strong urge to position his art in a wider cultural and philosophical context. Central to his thought was the theosophical notion of evolution, which required the destruction of the old to make room for the new - in life, in society, and in art. The book concentrates on the paintings, Mondrian's major achievement, examining the influences that shaped his art: fauvism and cubism circa 1910, and the work of Bart van der Leck, De Stijl and the Parisian art world during the 1920s. Mondrian appears not as an isolated figure, but as an artist who took a keen interest in the world around him, a veritable avant-garde painter who saw his role as creator of a new, modern culture.

In 1977, Margaret Wood was a twenty-four-year-old living an ordinary life in Lincoln, Nebraska. That year, her life changed as she came to Abiquiu, a remote village in northern New Mexico, where she began a five-year stay as companion and caretaker to then eighty-nine year old Georgia O'Keeffe. There were no sign posts in the village in those years, and few markers for a young woman managing the complex role as companion to a woman of O'Keeffe's stature who nonetheless was now dependent on others to maintain the independent life she had cultivated so fiercely. Growing and preparing food was one of O'Keeffe's greatest pleasures, with the artist mentoring her young caregiver on the art of gardening and cooking. Wood and O'Keeffe often walked the red hills of Ghost Ranch in early evenings, the place where the artist experienced true freedom. The artist had a reputation of living a secluded life, but in fact enjoyed welcoming a host of visitors to her home. Wood shares anecdotes about these social exchanges, along with a treasure trove of stories intimately shared. When Wood's father -- the photographer Myron Wood -- came to visit, he asked for and received permission to photograph O'Keeffe. A dozen of these historic images, published a decade later in the seminal publication, O'Keeffe's Abiquiu, are reproduced to complement Margaret Wood's quiet insights of life spent with O'Keeffe.

De Stijl (`The Style') was the name given to the work of the architects, designers and artists associated with the magazine of the same name edited by Theo van Doesburg and founded in Holland in 1917. De Stijl was international in its outlook: in contact with the Bauhaus and the Russian Constructivists, it helped to create the ideology and formal language of modernism. Mondrian is De Stijl's best-known artist, while Oud, Wils, Huszar and Rietveld were its major architects and designers. Their aim was an objective art concerned with universal values, expressed in primary geometric forms and pure colours. In this book, De Stijl is reassessed by Paul Overy in the light of Post-modernist debates and documentary material only recently made available.

With these words the sculptors Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner pronounced the official birth of constructivist art, the most revolutionary, challenging, and enigmatic of twentieth-century artistic movements. Since the time of their "Realistic Manifesto," constructivism has spread throughout the world, opposing personal, expressionistic art with abstraction and formal construction. In this book, Stephen Bann has collected the most important constructivist documents, including the writings of EI Lissitzky, Theo Van Doesburg, Hans Richter, Victor Vasarely, and Charles Biederman--many of which have never before been available in English--and supplemented them with a critical introduction, a chronology of constructivism, and an invaluable bibliography of close to four hundred items. This volume is illustrated with thirty-eight constructivist prints, paintings, drawings, and sculptures, some of them are rare and previously unpublished.

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is without doubt the most famous Latin-American painter of the 20th century and a fundamental figure in Mexican art. Her work has been celebrated internationally as emblematic of Mexican national and indigenous traditions, and by feminists for its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form. This fabulously illustrated volume brings together a series of stunning portraits, each one giving readers a glimpse into the many and varied ways in which Frida Kahlo has inspired countless artists across the globe.

What do we mean when we call a work of art `beautiful`? How have artists responded to changing notions of the beautiful? Which works of art have been called beautiful, and why? Fundamental and intriguing questions to artists and art lovers, but ones that are all too often ignored in discussions of art today. Prettejohn argues that we simply cannot afford to ignore these questions. Charting over two hundred years of western art, she illuminates the vital relationship between our changing notions of beauty and specific works of art, from the works of Kauffman to Whistler, Ingres to Rossetti, Cezanne to Jackson Pollock, and concludes with a challenging question for the future: why should we care about beauty in the twenty-first century?

Home - signaling a dwelling, residence or place of origin - embodies one of the most basic concepts for understanding an individual or group within a larger physical and social environment. Yet home has been a little noted, although prevalent, feature in art since the 1950s, a period in which artists challenged the traditional "object" of the visual arts through the use of material and media culture, new forms, and performative actions and processes. This volume explores works by diverse U.S. Latino and Latin American artists whose engagement with the concept of "home" provides the basis for an alternative narrative of post-war art. Their work brings together an impressive array of formal languages, conceptual strategies, and art historical references with the varied social concerns characterizing both the postwar period in the Americas and an emerging global economy impacting day-to-day life. The artists featured in this volume engage home as both concept and artifact. This can be seen in the use of building fragments or excisions (Gordon Matta-Clark, Gabriel de la Mora, and Leyla Cardenas), household furniture (Raphael Montanez Ortiz, Beatriz Gonzalez, Doris Salcedo, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Guillermo Kuitca), and personal possessions (Carmen Argote, Maria Teresa Hincapie, Camilo Ontiveros), and also in the use of coca leaves as a material base of the American Dream and its economic exchange with Colombia (Miguel Angel Rojas). Within more representational work, home is the re-creation of fraught domiciles (Abraham Cruzvillegas, Pepon Osorio, Daniel J. Martinez), a collage of spaces, styles, and materials (Antonio Berni, Andres Asturias, Jorge Pedro Nunez, Miguel Angel Rios, Juan Sanchez), and a juxtaposition of bodies and place (Laura Aguilar, Myrna Baez, Johanna Calle, Perla de Leon, Ramiro Gomez, Jessica Kaire, Vincent Valdez). In more conceptual work, home is all these things reduced to form-a floor plan (Luis Camnitzer, Leon Ferrari, Maria Elena Gonzalez, Guillermo Kuitca), a catalog of objects (Antonio Martorell, Hincapie), or a housing development plan (Livia Corona Benjamin, Martinez). In the end, home is a journey without arrival (Allora y Calzadilla, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Christina Fernandez, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Julio Cesar Morales, Teresa Serrano). Home-So Different, So Appealing reveals the departures and confluences that continue to shape US Latino and Latin American art and expands our appreciation of these artists and their work.

Werner Graeff - painter, graphic artist, typographer, photographer and sculptor - is an important Bauhaus artist and a significant representative of Constructivism in Germany. Prompted by his friend Mies van der Rohe he wrote his moving autobiography "Hurdenlauf durch das 20. Jahrhundert" (The Obstacle Race of the 20th century), which this volume publishes for the first time with a representative selection of texts. Werner Graeff ( 1901 - 1978 ) was a student at the Bauh aus in Weimar and from 1921 a member of the De Stijl Dutch artists' group. Together with Willi Baumeister he was also closely associated with the "ring neue werbegestalter" founded in 1927 by Kurt Schwitters. At an early stage he focused much of his attent ion on film and photography, but in 1951 after his return to the Ruhr region from exile in Switzerland he once again increasingly devoted himself to his work as an independent artist. Illustrated with a large number of paintings, pictograms, multiples, dra wings and graphic works from the artist's estate, this volume leads the reader through Graeff's life and works and is at the same time a fascinating journey through the German art history of the 20 th century.

This is volume 4: S-Z, of a four-volume set. The complete four-volume set presents the careers of 320 women artists working in California, with more than 2,000 images, over the course of a century. Their work encompasses a broad range of styles-from the realism of the nineteenth century to the modernism of the twentieth-and of media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, illustration and print-making. While some of the profiled artists are already well known, others have been previously ignored or largely forgotten. Yet all had serious careers as artists: they studied, exhibited, and won awards. These women were trailblazers, each one essential to the momentum of a movement that opened the door for heartfelt expression and equality. Much of the information and many of the images in the book have never before been published. Artists are presented alphabetically; also included are additional primary sources that put the artists' work in context.

This book is a glorious celebration of Rhoda Pritzker's collection of 20th-century British art, much of which has been donated to the Yale Center for British Art. Pritzker, who was born in Manchester in1914 and emigrated to the United States during the Blitz, was an avid and daring collector of paintings, sculptures, and drawings. Keen to support artists whose reputations were still emerging, and loyal to no single school or style, she developed a unique and impressively diverse collection. While Pritzker most actively purchased pieces in the 1950s and 1960s, her collection offers a fascinating window onto postwar artistic production. Beautifully illustrated, this catalogue features a number of unpublished works and archival materials. Among the artists discussed are key figures, including L. S. Lowry, Barbara Hepworth, Anthony Caro, and Henry Moore, as well as lesser-known artists. The texts elucidate the factors that made Pritzker's method of collecting so singular-namely her relationship to an evolving transatlantic artistic community and the deeply personal nature of the works she procured. Distributed for the Yale Center for British Art Exhibition Schedule: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (05/11/2016-08/21/2016)

Since the 2011 Arab Spring street art has been a vehicle for political discourse in the Middle East, and has generated much discussion in both the popular media and academia. Yet, this conversation has generalised street art and identified it as a singular form with identical styles and objectives throughout the region. Street art's purpose is, however, defined by the socio-cultural circumstances of its production. Middle Eastern artists thus adopt distinctive methods in creating their individual work and responding to their individual environments. Here, in this new book, Sabrina De Turk employs rigorous visual analysis to explore the diversity of Middle Eastern street art and uses case studies of countries as varied as Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, Palestine, Bahrain and Oman to illustrate how geographic specifics impact upon its function and aesthetic. Her book will be of significant interest to scholars specialising in art from the Middle East and North Africa and those who bring an interdisciplinary perspective to Middle East studies.

American Modern presents a fresh look at The Museum of Modern Art's holdings of American art made between 1915 and 1950, and considers the cultural preoccupations of a rapidly changing American society in the first half of the 20th century. Organized thematically and featuring paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and film, the publication brings together some of the Museum's most celebrated masterworks, contextualizing them across mediums and amidst lesser-seen but revelatory works. The selection of works by artists such as Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, Charles Burchfield and Stuart Davis include urban and rural landscapes, scenes of industry, still-life compositions and portraiture. Although varying in style and specifics, they share certain underlying visual and emotional tendencies. Cityscapes and factories are eerily emptied of the crush of residents that flocked to them, becoming both a celebration of clean modern form and technological advances, as in Sheeler's paintings and photographs, and a reflection of anxiety about increasingly urban life-styles and their consequences for the American individual, as in Hopper's iconic Night Windows. Equally silent rural scenes are no less haunting, but perhaps reflect a nostalgia for seemingly simpler times, and a celebration of early American traditions and values. Rather than an encyclopedic view of American art of the period, this volume is a focused look at the strengths and surprises of MoMA's collection in an area that has played a rich and major role in the institution's history.

This authoritative reference work examines literary and artistic responses to the war's upheavals across a wide range of media and genres, from poetry to pamphlets, sculpture to television documentary, and requiems to war reporting. Rather than looking at particular forms of artistic expression in isolation and focusing only on the war and inter-war period, the 27 essays collected in this volume approach artistic responses to the war from a wide variety of angles and, where appropriate, pursue their inquiry into the present day. In 6 sections, covering Literature, the Visual Arts, Music, Periodicals and Journalism, Film and Broadcasting, and Publishing and Material Culture, a wide range of original chapters from experts across literature and the arts examine what means and approaches were employed to respond to the shock of war as well as asking such key questions as how and why literary and artistic responses to the war have changed over time, and how far later works of art are responses not only to the war itself, but to earlier cultural production.

Eschewing the traditional focus on object/viewer spatial relationships, Timothy Scott Barker's Time and the Digital stresses the role of the temporal in digital art and media. The connectivity of contemporary digital interfaces has not only expanded the relationships between once separate spaces but has increased the complexity of the temporal in nearly unimagined ways. Invoking the process philosophy of Whitehead and Deleuze, Barker strives for nothing less than a new philosophy of time in digital encounters, aesthetics, and interactivity.
Of interest to scholars in the fields of art and media theory and philosophy of technology, as well as new media artists, this study contributes to an understanding of the new temporal experiences emergent in our interactions with digital technologies.

The work of German cultural theorist and art historian Aby Warburg (1866 1929) has had a lasting effect on how we think about images. This book is the first in English to focus on his last project, the encyclopedic Atlas of Images: Mnemosyne. Begun in earnest in 1927, and left unfinished at the time of Warburg's death in 1929, the Mnemosyne-Atlas consisted of sixty-three large wooden panels covered with black cloth. On these panels Warburg carefully, intuitively arranged some thousand black-and-white photographs of classical and Renaissance art objects, as well as of astrological and astronomical images ranging from ancient Babylon to Weimar Germany. Here and there, he also included maps, manuscript pages, and contemporary images taken from newspapers. Trying through these constellations of images to make visible the many polarities that fueled antiquity's afterlife, Warburg envisioned the Mnemosyne-Atlas as a vital form of metaphoric thought.

While the nondiscursive, frequently digressive character of the Mnemosyne-Atlas complicates any linear narrative of its themes and contents, Christopher D. Johnson traces several thematic sequences in the panels. By drawing on Warburg's published and unpublished writings and by attending to Warburg's cardinal idea that "pathos formulas" structure the West's cultural memory, Johnson maps numerous tensions between word and image in the Mnemosyne-Atlas. In addition to examining the work itself, he considers the literary, philosophical, and intellectual-historical implications of the Mnemosyne-Atlas. As Johnson demonstrates, the Mnemosyne-Atlas is not simply the culmination of Warburg s lifelong study of Renaissance culture but the ultimate expression of his now literal, now metaphoric search for syncretic solutions to the urgent problems posed by the history of art and culture."

Otto Fried was born in Koblenz in 1922. Due to the emerging anti-Semitism in Germany, his family sent him to the United States, where he arrived in Portland, Oregon, United States in 1936. In 1943 he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps and was deployed to various theatres of war in India, China and Burma. Upon his return, he enrolled in the Art and Architecture Department at the University of Oregon in 1947. At the end of 1949 he travelled to France to work with Fernand Leger, in whose studio he worked for two years. In 1951 he received his first solo exhibition in the American Library in Paris. Works by him were shown in New York as early as 1952. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, bought a monotype for the permanent collection in 1960. The exhibition catalogue offers an overview on Otto Fried's career: works from the early days (1950s), which are presented with a few oil paintings and almost cubist-like drawings, form the foundation of an almost exclusively abstract visual language that the artist developed later. Compositions based primarily on cosmic disks and circles, of which Fried formulates numerous variations that are very lively in colour. This creates interweaving of depth and space, of a mostly melodic sound, which he concentrates in the center of the picture and allows it to subside towards the edges. Some sculptures expand the view of his work, which is multifaceted and varied to the present day. Text in English and German.

Clifford Gleason (1913-1978), who grew up in Salem and spent his adult life in both Salem and Portland, was a talented and highly original artist whose work remains of keen interest to a small and loyal group of collectors and artists but whose accomplishments are less generally known than those of other Oregon mid-century artists.Clifford Gleason: The Promise of Paint serves as both an introduction and a definitive study of an 'artist's artist,' who until now has not received the sustained attention that he and his work are due. It traces his career from the 1930s until the last months of his difficult life-difficult because of alcoholism, near poverty, and homosexuality in a repressive era. In paint, Gleason found the only realm in which he felt competent, confident, and successful; paint offered the promise of accomplishment. Roger Hull's knowledgeable text offers a chronological study combining biography, analysis of Gleason's artworks, and assessment of his place within the broader context of contemporary and Pacific Northwest art. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University, this richly illustrated monograph examines Gleason's identity as a modern artist as he responded to the rapid changes in artistic modernism from the late 1930s, when he studied with Louis Bunce at the Salem Federal Art Center, to the 1970s, when he rethought the legacy of Abstract Expressionism in works that are unique to him, visually beautiful and poetically expressive.

Analyzing the modernist art movement that arose in Cairo and Alexandria from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s, Alex Dika Seggerman reveals how the visual arts were part of a multifaceted transnational modernism. While the work of diverse, major Egyptian artists during this era may have appeared to be secular, she argues, it reflected the subtle but essential inflection of Islam, as a faith, history, and lived experience, in the overarching development of Middle Eastern modernity. Challenging typical views of modernism in art history as solely Euro-American, and expanding the conventional periodization of Islamic art history, Seggerman theorizes a "constellational modernism" for the emerging field of global modernism. Rather than seeing modernism in a generalized, hyperconnected network, she finds that art and artists circulated in distinct constellations that encompassed finite local and transnational relations. Such constellations, which could engage visual systems both along and beyond the Nile, from Los Angeles to Delhi, were materialized in visual culture that ranged from oil paintings and sculpture to photography and prints. Based on extensive research in Egypt, Europe, and the United States, this richly illustrated book poses a compelling argument for the importance of Muslim networks to global modernism.

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. Text in Norwegian.

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.