A beautiful presentation of fifty masterworks of late 19th- to mid-20th-century avant-garde European art from one of America's most distinguished private collections Cezanne and the Modern showcases fifty masterworks of late 19th- to mid-20th-century avant-garde European art from the Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection, one of the most distinguished private collections of modern art in the United States. Among the iconic images represented are Paul Cezanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire, Vincent van Gogh's Tarascon Stagecoach, and Amedeo Modigliani's portrait of Jean Cocteau, as well as an outstanding suite of sixteen watercolors by Cezanne. The volume opens with Henry Pearlman's "Reminiscences of a Collector," a fascinating first-person narrative, newly annotated to identify key individuals and dates mentioned in the text. An essay by art historian Rachael Z. DeLue places Pearlman in the context of mid-20th-century American collecting, and a detailed chronology illuminates Pearlman's collecting practices in relation to noteworthy events in the art world. A series of sixteen brief essays by leading scholars focuses on each of the represented artists and their works, richly illustrated with sumptuous color plates, select details, and numerous comparative images. A comprehensive checklist documenting each of the works-including detailed provenance, exhibition history, bibliographic references, and commentary by a conservator-rounds out this handsome volume, which is published to accompany the first international tour of this important collection. Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford (03/13/14-06/22/14) Musee Granet, Aix-en-Provence (07/11/14-10/05/14) High Museum of Art, Atlanta (10/25/14-01/11/15) Vancouver Art Gallery (02/07/15-05/18/15) Princeton University Art Museum (09/12/15-01/03/16)

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."

A mural renaissance swept the United States in the 1930s, propelled by the New Deal Federal Art Project and the popularity of Mexican muralism. Perhaps nowhere more than in New York City, murals became a crucial site for the development of abstract painting Artists such as Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Lee Krasner created ambitious works for the Williamsburg Housing Project, Floyd Bennett Field Airport, and the 1939 World's Fair. Modernism for the Masses examines the public murals (realized and unrealized) of these and other abstract painters and the aesthetic controversy, political influence, and ideological warfare that surrounded them. Jody Patterson transforms standard narratives of modernism by reasserting the significance of the 1930s and explores the reasons for the omission of the mural's history from chronicles of American art. Beautifully illustrated with the artists' murals and little-known archival photographs, this book recovers the radical idea that modernist art was a vital part of everyday life.

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.

This intellectual history chronicles the processes of compromise and negotiation between high and low art, federal and local interests, and the Progressive Era and New Deal. Victoria Grieve examines how intellectual trends in the early twentieth century combined with government forces and structures of the New Deal's Federal Art Project to redefine American taste in the visual arts. Representing more than a response to the emergency of the Great Depression, the Federal Art Project was rooted in Progressive Era cultural theories, the modernist search for a usable past, and developments in the commercial art world in the early decades of the twentieth century. In their desire to create an art for the "common man," FAP artists and administrators used the power of the federal government to disseminate a specific view of American culture, one that combined ideals of uplift with those of accessibility: a middlebrow visual culture. Grieve discusses efforts by thinkers and reformers such as John Dewey, John Cotton Dana, and Constance Rourke to democratize art amid a blossoming consumer culture around World War I. Against this backdrop of ideas about aesthetics and the purposes of art, Grieve explores how the FAP, more than merely employing artists during the Great Depression, used government resources to create a space for the "everyman" to make and appreciate art. Two programs in particular--the Index of American Design and the Community Art Center program--attempted to bring art to the masses. By the end of the 1930s, however, the nationalism and cultural egalitarianism of middlebrow visual art came under attack. But the FAP had laid the groundwork for a postwar resurgence of American art, and by the 1960s, the federal government would once again enter the cultural arena. By linking the FAP to its roots in earlier cultural movements, The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture expands the historiography of the New Deal, illuminating the role of the visual arts in the 1930s. Focusing specifically on the fundamentally different and competing views of culture that informed the Federal Art Project, this study chronicles a controversial program that, to many, represented a unique opportunity to create a cultural democracy in America.

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.

This deluxe 3-volume edition offers an engaging, visually stunning, and highly informative analysis of the 49 artists featured in over 900 full-color plates. The title of this work takes its inspiration from Towards a New Abstraction, the catalog of an exhibition organized by Ben Heller in 1963 at the Jewish Museum in New York. The theme unites the artists of this "New Abstraction" through their spirit, as opposed to through the "spirit of the times" reflected in other movements such as Minimalism and Pop Art. "New Abstraction" is not to be taken as a movement, but as a meeting of similar artistic sensibilities. This major achievement is an authoritative contribution to what has been called "New Abstraction" and an essential addition to any collection on 20th-century art.

An investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. The Bauhaus (1919-1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century's most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school's engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories. The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers-notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauhausler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members' spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed "spirit photographs" and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities; the "queer hauntology" of certain Bauhaus works; and the role of radical politics on both the left and the right-during the school's Communist period, when some of the Bauhausler put their skills to work for the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis. With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational movement of modern art, architecture, and design, she also provides the first sustained investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. This is a fresh, wild ride through the Bauhaus you thought you knew.

"Distinction" "and Denial "challenges conventional theories of race and art by examining the role early twentieth-century art critics played in marginalizing African American artists. Mary Ann Calo dispels the myth of a unified African American artistic tradition through an engaging study of the germinal writing of Alain Locke and other significant critics of the era, who argued that African American artists were both a diverse group and a constituent element of America's cultural center. By documenting the effects of the "Negro aesthetic" on African American artists working in the interwar years, "Distinction" "and Denial "shows that black artistic production existed between the claims of a distinctly African American tradition and full inclusion into American modernist culture--never fully inside or outside the mainstream. "A major contribution to the scholarship of African American artists in the inter-war period. With scrupulous research and probing analyses, Calo's study enables scholars, students, and those interested in the Harlem Renaissance to grasp the intellectual debates, institutional support, and art world promotion that advanced an emerging cohort of African American artists." --Patricia Hills, Boston University "A careful, thorough, historically grounded study that builds a new and significant argument challenging conventional histories of African American art. Sure to become indispensable to any scholarly discussion of American art or African American cultural studies."--Helen Langa, American University Mary Ann Calo is Professor of Art History and Director of the Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts at Colgate University. She is author of "Bernard Berensonand the Twentieth Century" and editor of "Critical Issues in American Art: A Book of Readings,"

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.

Alberto Giacometti's 1934 Cube stands apart for many as a typical of the Swiss artist, the only abstract sculptural work in a wide oeuvre that otherwise had as its objective the exploration of reality. With The Cube and the Face, renowned French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman has conducted a careful analysis of Cube, consulting the artist's sketches, etchings, texts, and other sculptural works in the years just before and after Cube was created. Cube, he finds, is indeed exceptional - a work without clear stylistic kinship to the works that came before or after it. At the same time, Didi-Huberman shows, Cube marks the transition between the artist's surrealist and realist phases and contains many elements of Giacometti's aesthetic consciousness, including his interest in dimensionality, the relation of the body to geometry, and the portrait - or what Didi-Huberman terms "abstract anthropomorphism." Drawing on Freud, Bataille, Leiris, and others whom Giacometti counted as influences, Didi-Huberman presents fans and collectors of Giacometti's art with a new approach to transitional work.

Fran att tidigare ha betraktats som en konstnarernas konstnar har Hilma af Klint (1862 - 1944), efter den foersta retrospektiva utstallningen pa Moderna Museet i Stockholm 2013 och den foeljande utstallningsturnen som sags av en miljonpublik, numera en etablerad plats i den abstrakta konstens historia. Centralt i hennes maleri ar aven fragan om andlighet. Hilma af Klint var en klassiskt skolad konstnar och ett medium som foervandlade andliga meddelanden till abstrakta och fargrika bilder. Ur en rad perspektiv undersoeks i den har katalogen hur denna banbrytande abstrakta konstnar kopplade sin konstnarliga praktik till ett hoegre medvetande. I essaer av konsthistoriker, en kvantfysiker, en larare i andlighet, en historiker i teosofi och esoterism, men flera, ges insikter om en varld bortom det synliga som fascinerar, nu kanske mer an nagonsin. Katalogen har producerats i samband med utstallningen med samma namn pa Moderna Museet i Malmoe, sommaren 2020. Once considered an outsider artist, after her show at the Guggenheim Museum was seen by more than half-a-mil-lion visitors, Hilma af Klint firmly established her place in art history. She has also been the subject of documenta-ry films and biographies. In 2013, Iris Muller-Westermann organized the first institutional exhibition of af Klint's work. Now she presents us with the latest information and research in an extensive survey show at the Moder-na Museet in Malmoe. Of crucial importance is the issue of spirituality in af Klint's painting-how she managed to translate both the material and the immaterial world into a pictorial vision. The accompanying exhibition catalogue is the first to investigate, from a variety of perspectives, the question of how this trailblazing abstract artist linked her painting to a higher consciousness. Essays by leading historians of theosophy and a quantum physicist, among others, provide enlightening insight into a world in which both the visualization of atoms and spiritual seances alike became artistic material-a world that fascinates us even more than ever.

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. -- .

This work features essays by Stanley K. Abe, Mark A. Cheetham, David Clarke, David Craven, Iftikhar Dadi, Wilson Harris, Kellie Jones, Nathaniel Mackey, Kobena Mercer, Angeline Morrison. It is edited by Kobena Mercer. "Discrepant Abstraction" is hybrid and partial, elusive and repetitive, obstinate and strange: it includes almost everything that does not neatly fit into the institutional narrative of abstract art as a monolithic quest for artistic 'purity'. Exploring cross-cultural scenarios in 20th Century art, this groundbreaking collection alters the understanding of abstract art as a signifier of modernity by revealing the multiple directions it has taken in diverse international contexts. Featuring internationally renowned scholars and curators at the critical edge of contemporary research, "Discrepant Abstraction" is the second volume in the "Annotating Art's Histories" series.

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.

Paintings, graphic works, sculptures, textiles and furniture - Johannes Itten was an unusually versatile artist who during the six decades of his creative career also produced one of the most important works on the theory of colours in the twentieth century. His artistic work is examined here for the first time scientifically on the basis of 120,000 biographical documents and sources and is being expanded in comparison with the catalogue raisonne of 1972 by more than 1,000 works from all creative periods. The three-volume catalogue raisonne includes the latest provenance research, an index of exhibitions and literature and provides for the first time a complete overview of the artistic cosmos of Johannes Itten.

For many years scholars have been aware that Michelangelo included his own image in his art. In this study, Edith Balas discusses two previously unrecognized double self-portraits. The earliest of these, a statue known as the Victory, was a private project in which an aging Michelangelo of depicted himself surmounted by an idealized alter ego, a figure associated with his younger self, his beloved friend Tommaso Cavalieri, and the David and Goliath theme that preoccupied him through much of his career. In the second of these double self-portraits, The Conversion of Paul in the Pauline Chapel of the Vatican, the artist, again portraying himself in youth and old age, used a central event in sacred history to make a statement about his own spiritual transformation from Neoplatonist "paganism" to a more orthodox form of Christian piety. Dr. Balas carefully explores the meaning of both works with reference to Michelangelo's life, art and poetry, and reveals them to be among the profoundest autobiographical statements in the history of Western art.

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.

The collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum includes an astonishing array of objects, including renowned paintings, rare books, sculpture, and decorative arts, as well as more personal items such as collected letters, Isabella's own correspondence, and ephemera. Mirroring Isabella's inimitable gallery installations, this publication uses both fine and decorative art, photographs, and correspondence to provide a snapshot in time of the first few years of the museum, in which the collection and its carefully curated spaces inspired new works of art. As the museum's first artist-in-residence, Sargent fulfilled Gardner's hopes for a new kind of cultural institution in Boston, one that would inspire creativity, cultivate artistic talent, and bring joy to artists and amateurs alike. Sargent painted five portraits during his stay at the museum and John Templeman Coolidge, a friend of Gardner's, captured Sargent at work in the Gothic Room in seven candid photographs. Cigarette in mouth, brush in hand, and a smile on his face, Sargent is seen painting Gretchen Osgood Warren and her daughter who are posing and laughing. This vibrant double portrait stands as a testament to Sargent's absorption of the museum's inspirational qualities and his sensitivity to his subject. Gretchen Osgood Warren was intellectually ambitious and after sitting for her portrait with Sargent, she moved to England with her family and pursued a degree in philosophy and metaphysics at Oxford University; when she returned to Boston, she pursued writing poetry. Gardner embraced an increasingly progressive view of women's rights by the turn of the century and looked approvingly on the educational, political, and professional ambitions of Gretchen Warren's generation. In Warren, Gardner also discovered a deeply appreciative and sympathetic friend. The eighteen letters between the two women, published here for the fi rst time, illustrate an intimate thirty-five year friendship sharing life's joys, successes, hardships, and losses. This publication is the latest in the Close Up series of books accompanying Gardner Museum exhibitions which showcase aspects of the museum's outstanding permanent collection.

Since the rediscovery of British Surrealism at the Children of Alice exhibition at Marcel Fleiss's Galerie 1900-2000 in Paris in 1982, there has been a major revival of interest in Surrealism outside France. Surrealism in Britain is the first comprehensive study of the British Surrealist movement and its achievements. Lavishly illustrated, the book provides a year-by-year narrative of the development of Surrealism among artists, writers, critics and theorists in Britain, from the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London right through to the present day. Michel Remy has conducted personal interviews with many of the artists involved and the book includes an examination of the work of, among others, Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, Len Lye, Humphrey Jennings, David Gascoyne, Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff, Roland Penrose, F. E. McWilliam, Conroy Maddox, Emmy Bridgwater, Edith Rimmington, Desmond Morris, Lee Miller, Julian Trevelyan and John Tunnard. Poetry, prose, painting, sculpture, photography and artists' texts all have their place in this fascinating and attractive book.

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'.

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.

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.

This publication offers for the first time an inter-disciplinary and comparative perspective on Futurism in a variety of countries and artistic media. 20 scholars discuss how the movement shaped the concept of a cultural avant-garde and how it influenced the development of modernist art and literature around the world.