"Robert Motherwell was not just a great painter, he was a brilliant thinker. As the founding editor of "The Documents of Twentieth-Century of Art," he decisively shaped our understanding of modernism. This new and expanded selection of Motherwell's criticism provides an essential guide to the art of the high modern period, both American and European."--Pepe Karmel, author of "Picasso and the Invention of Cubism"
"In the past two decades Abstract Expressionism has become one of the most dynamic subjects in art history; sometimes the reading is so dense it is like swimming through peanut butter. But, cutting through to the essential questions that generated the movement, the writings of Robert Motherwell are a treasure. Written at the same time he was painting, Motherwell's texts make me feel like a witness to the philosophical curiosity that generated one of the most powerful art movements of the twentieth century."--Michael Auping, author of "Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments"
"This book is essential reading for anyone thinking about the uneasy clash of modernism and postmodernism in postwar America; Motherwell's writing played a decisive role and this volume is an admirably full account of it."--Jonathan Fineberg, author of "When We Were Young: New Perspectives on the Art of the Child"

The radical changes wrought by the rise of the salon system in nineteenth-century Europe provoked an interesting response from painters in the American South. Painterly trends emanating from Barbizon and Giverny emphasized the subtle textures of nature through warm colour and broken brush stroke. Artists' subject matter tended to represent a prosperous middle class at play, with the subtle suggestion that painting was indeed art for art's sake and not an evocation of the heroic manner. Many painters in the South took up the stylistics of Tonalism, Impressionism, and naturalism to create works of a very evocative nature, works which celebrated the Southern scene as an exotic other, a locale offering refuge from an increasingly mechanized urban environment. Scenic Impressions offers an insight into a particular period of American art history as borne out in seminal paintings from the holdings of the Johnson Collection of Spartanburg, South Carolina. By consolidating academic information on a disparate group of objects under a common theme and important global artistic umbrella, Scenic Impressions will underscore the Johnsons' commitment to illuminating the rich cultural history of the American South and advancing scholarship in the field, specifically examining some forty paintings created between 1880 and 1940, including landscapes and genre scenes. A foreword, written by Kevin Sharp, director of the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee, introduces the topic. Two lead essays, written by noted art historians Pennington, Estill Curtisand Martha R. Severens, discuss the history and import of the Impressionist movement--abroad and domestically--and specifically address the school's influence on art created in and about the American South. The featured works of art are presented in full colour plates and delineated in complementary entries written by Pennington and Severens. Also included are detailed artist biographies illustrated by photographs of the artists, extensive documentation, and indices. Featured artists include Wayman Adams, Colin Campbell Cooper, Elliott Daingerfield, G. Ruger Donoho, Harvey Joiner, John Ross Key, Blondelle Malone, Lawrence Mazzanovich, Paul Plaschke, Hattie Saussy, Alice Ravenel, Huger Smith, Anthony Thieme, and Helen Turner.

In Abstract Art Against Autonomy, Mark Cheetham provides a revolutionary account of abstraction in the visual arts since the decline of the formalist paradigms in the 1960s. He claims that abstract work remains a vital contributor to contemporary visual culture, but that it performs in a way that is different from its predecessors of the early and mid-twentieth century and cannot adequately be assessed without new models of understanding. Cheetham posits that abstraction has reacted to paradigms of purity with practices of impurity. By examining abstract art since the 1960s within a narrative of infection, resistance and cure, Cheetham provides an opportunity to rethink paradigmatic genres - the monochrome and the mirror - and to link in new ways the work of artists whose work extends and complicates the tradition of abstract art, including Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, James Turrell, Gerhard Richter, Peter Halley, General Idea and Taras Polataiko.

Reprint of the 1935 edition of a study that balances the different manifestations of surrealism in order to see it whole, not just as an art movement backed up by ideas. Gascoyne (author, translator, and early champion of surrealism) also includes the movement's ancestors, such as Dada. Part history

This is volume 1: A-D, 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.

In Surrealism at Play Susan Laxton writes a new history of surrealism in which she traces the centrality of play to the movement and its ongoing legacy. For surrealist artists, play took a consistent role in their aesthetic as they worked in, with, and against a post-World War I world increasingly dominated by technology and functionalism. Whether through exquisite-corpse drawings, Man Ray's rayographs, or Joan Miro's visual puns, surrealists became adept at developing techniques and processes designed to guarantee aleatory outcomes. In embracing chance as the means to produce unforeseeable ends, they shifted emphasis from final product to process, challenging the disciplinary structures of industrial modernism. As Laxton demonstrates, play became a primary method through which surrealism refashioned artistic practice, everyday experience, and the nature of subjectivity.

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

This book reconstructs the efforts of avant-garde artists, primarily Natal'ia Goncharova and her Muscovite colleagues, to reclaim Russia's 'Eastern' cultural heritage. Before the First World War, art addressed a crisis in self-representation that was a consequence of Russia's dual cultural legacies, Asian and European. This text represents Goncharova's leading role in this project, both as a spokesperson and a painter. The animated and often polarizing debates concerning the cultural identity of contemporary art were often preceded by Goncharova's practices that react to a critical tradition that, for at least a decade, had accused the radical 'left' Muscovite artists of failing to create a national tradition.

Remains-Tomorrow: Themes in Contemporary Latin American Abstraction offers a thought-provoking perspective on the dynamic field of contemporary abstraction in Latin America. It proposes abstraction as an expanded field of reality in direct dialogue with life and as a strategy for critically examining the social, political, and cultural arenas. Highlighting 280 artists, the book explores different manifestations of post 90s Latin American abstraction, underlining its relationships to and differences from modern abstraction, and examines how it may relate to issues such as gender, interculturality, contextual specificity, popular culture, and the everyday. The book is structured by theme; it includes essays by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and a historical essay by Juan Ledezma, as well as 28 short texts by participating artists. The publication contains biographies and over 700 illustrations. Remains-Tomorrow is an Abstraction in Action initiative of the Sammy Sayago Collection.

The Edwardian age was as brief as the Victorian era that preceded it was long. It has been depicted as an indolent summer afternoon of imperial and elite complacency, but also as a period of rapid political, economic, and artistic change, culminating in the First World War. This magnificent book explores themes of power, nostalgia, and a contrasting lightness of touch that characterized the period. Issues of creation, consumption, and display are examined through a range of objects, including portraits by Sargent and Boldini, diamond tiaras and ostrich-feather fans, jewel-like Autochrome color photography, and a spectacular embroidered gown that belonged to the American-born Vicereine of India. Spanning divides of class and geography, this book identifies opulence and leisure as driving forces for the domestic and imperial British economic engine in the early years of the 20th century. Published in association with the Yale Center for British Art Exhibition Schedule: Yale Center for British Art (02/28/13-06/02/13)

In 1932, at the peak of French colonialism, a group of Martiniquan students at the Sorbonne established a Caribbean Surrealist Group, and published a single issue of a journal called Legitime defense. Immediately banned by the authorities, it passed almost unnoticed at the time. Yet it began a remarkable series of debates between surrealism and Caribbean intellectuals that had a profound impact on the struggle for cultural identity. In the next two decades these exchanges greatly influenced the evolution of the concept of negritude, initiated revolution in Haiti in 1946, and crucially affected the development of surrealism itself. This fascinating book presents a series of key texts-most of them never before translated into English-which reveal the complexity of this relationship between black anti-colonialist movements in the Caribbean and the most radical of the European avant-gardes. Included are Rene Menil's subtle philosophical essays and the fierce polemics of Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, appreciations of surrealism by Haitian writers, lyrical evocations of the Caribbean by Andre Breton and Andre Masson, and rich explorations of Haiti and voodoo religion by Pierre Mabille and Michel Leiris.

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

The Russian Revolution and Civil War - as never seen before! Packed with jaw-dropping, at times blood-curdling images, Russia Accursed! showcases the reaction of Ivan Vladmirov (1869-1947) to the human suffering and Bolshevik barbarity he observed as an artist-reporter during the years 1917-25. Some of his paintings and watercolours appeared in magazines and periodicals, including London weekly The Graphic (Vladimirov's mother was English). But other scenes - featuring point-blank executions, passers-by cutting chunks of meat from a dead horse or dogs gnawing at a human corpse - were deemed too shocking for publication and had to be secretly exported from the USSR by American relief workers. Selected from private collections, Russian museums and the Hoover Library at Stanford University, California, most of the 160 Vladimirov images in this majestic 324-page volume are published here for the first time. Placed in their historic context by scholarly essays, contemporary photographs and eye-witness quotes, they revolutionize our understanding of the beginnings of the Soviet Union.

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was a fighting spirit. Despite a cancer diagnosis in 1941, increasing frailty, and the confines of a wheelchair, the indomitable Frenchman never stopped in his quest to make art. With what he called une seconde vie, a second life, he embarked on a remarkable collage period, cutting and pasting pieces of colored paper into gouaches decoupees of birds, plants, flowers, and the female form. Emphasizing color and contrast, the cut-out technique generated both striking lines and vivid juxtapositions. In works such as Icarus (1943), The Blue Nude (1952), The Snail (1953), and The Sheaf (1953), clean forms and elemental structures power a compositional force that belies the work's decorative appeal, at once tightly organized and infectious with joie de vivre. As his work progressed, Matisse's excitement with his results fueled ever-larger pieces, advancing from small works to vast wall-sized murals. As his final years approached, Matisse reveled in the simplicity and brilliance of these pieces, avowing, "Only what I created after the illness constitutes my real self: free, liberated..." In this essential introductory book, we revisit this joyful final chapter of Matisse's long and prodigious career, examining how the cut-outs encapsulated the artist's many years exploring the possibilities of composition, form, and color. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

An immigrant from a small Armenian village in eastern Turkey, Arshile Gorky (c. 1900-1948) made his way to the U.S. to become a painter in 1920. Having grown up haunted by memories of his alternately idyllic and terrifying childhood - his family fled the Turks' genocide of Armenians in 1915 - he changed his name and created a new identity for himself in America. As an artist, Gorky bridged the generation of the surrealists and that of the abstract expressionists and was a very influential figure among the latter. His work was an inspiration to Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, among others. Matthew Spender illuminates this world as he tells the story of Gorky's life and career.

Arte Vetraria Muranese (AVEM) emerged from the liquidation of Successori Andrea Rioda in November 1931. The new factory placed a very personal accent on contemporary artistic glass production on Murano: while designs prior to the Second World War were generally still the responsibility of master glassblowers themselves, after the war designers and freelance artists increasingly determined production. Giulio Radi began experimenting in 1940, obtaining the company's signature chromatic effects by superimposing mould-blown layers of glass, often opaque and transparent in alternation, and inlaying them with gold and silver foil. This latest volume of Marc Heireman's ongoing Murano manufactory books features over 800 design drawings, numerous archive images and new photos of AVEM masterpieces, making this anthology of the company's history indispensable for all Murano glass lovers.

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)

This early autobiography, which takes Dalá through his late thirties, is as startling and unpredictable as his art. On its first publication, the reviewer of Books observed: "It is impossible not to admire this painter as writer . (Dalá) succeeds in doing exactly what he sets out to do ... communicates the snobbishness, self-adoration, comedy, seriousness, fanaticism, in short the concept of life and the total picture of himself he sets out to portray." Superbly illustrated with over eighty photographs of Dalá and his works, and scores of Dalá drawings and sketches.

Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) was an acclaimed Abstract Expressionist and one of the most influential art teachers of the 20th century. While his paintings have been the subject of many exhibitions and publications, his works on paper are comparatively little known, despite how central they were to his artistic practice and to the evolution of his style and technique. This is the first full-length book devoted to Hofmann's works on paper, presenting a valuable new perspective from which to appreciate the achievements of this giant of postwar art. More than fifty examples from across his long career and from many genres-including self-portraits, figural studies, interiors, landscapes, and abstractions-are all attractively illustrated in color. In addition, works in different stages of finish, from rough sketches to polished pieces, offer an intimate glimpse into Hofmann's methods and creative process. Distributed for MOCA Jacksonville Exhibition Schedule: Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, FL (01/28/17-05/14/17) Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME (06/16/17-09/10/17)

Established in 1919 in Weimar, the Bauhaus college for design influenced one of the world's most important Modernist movements. Divided into three geographic sections that follow the locations of the school-Weimar (1919-25), Dessau (1925-33), and Berlin (1933)-this unique travel guide leads readers through the most important Bauhaus structures in Germany. Each section features important sites that are given historical background. These entries are illustrated with historic and contemporary photography, and are accompanied by up-to-date tourist information. Throughout the book short essays highlight significant events and figures of the Bauhaus movement. This guidebook is an indispensible reference for anyone traveling to Germany's greatest extant Bauhaus structures.

In 1967, sex between consenting men in England and Wales was finally decriminalised - an entire century after the death penalty was abolished for sodomy in Britain in 1861. Between these legal landmarks lies a century of seismic shifts in gender and sexuality which found expression across the arts as artists, collectors and consumers explored transgressive identities, experiences and perspectives. Some of the resulting artworks were intensely personal, celebrating lovers or expressing private desires. Others addressed a wider public, helping to forge a sense of community at a time when the modern categories of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender were largely unrecognised. Ranging from the playful to the political, the explicit to the domestic, these works reveal the rich diversity of queer British art. This beautiful book explores coded desires in aestheticism; the impact of the new science of sexology; queer domesticities; eroticism in the artist's studio; intersections of gender and sexuality; seedy dives and visions of Arcadia; and love and lust in sixties Soho. Featuring works by major artists such as Simeon Solomon, Clare Atwood, Ethel Sands, Duncan Grant, Francis Bacon and David Hockney among others, Queer British Art pays homage to the wealth of queer creativity in Britain between the 1860s and the 1960s.

A portrait of a young artist's formative years studying sculpture in Paris, recounted in her own words. Angela Gregory is considered by many the doyenne of Louisiana sculpture and is a notable twentieth century American sculptor. In A Dream and a Chisel, Angela Gregory and Nancy Penrose explore Gregory's desire, even as a teenager, to learn the art of cutting stone and to become a sculptor. Through sheer grit and persistence, Gregory achieved her dream of studying with French artist Antoine Bourdelle, one of Auguste Rodin's most trusted assistants and described by critics of the era as France's greatest living sculptor. In Bourdelle's Paris studio, Gregory learned not only sculpting techniques but also how to live life as an artist. Her experiences in Paris inspired a prolific sixty-year career in a field dominated by men. After returning to New Orleans from Paris, Gregory established her own studio in 1928 and began working in earnest. She created bas-relief profiles for the Louisiana State Capitol built in 1932 and sculpted the Bienville Monument, a bronze statue honoring the founder of New Orleans, in the 1950s. Her works also include two other monuments, sculptures incorporated into buildings, portrait busts, medallions, and other forms that appear in museums and public spaces throughout the state. She was the first Louisiana woman sculptor to achieve international recognition, and, at the age of thirty-five, became one of the few women recognized as a fellow of the National Sculpture Society. Gregory's work appeared in group shows at many prestigious museums and in exhibitions, including the Salon des Tuileries and the Salon d'Automne in Paris, the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, the National Collection of Fine Arts in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This memoir is based on Penrose's oral history interviews with Gregory, as well as letters and diaries compiled before Gregory's death in 1990. A Dream and a Chisel demonstrates the importance of mentorships, offers a glimpse into the realities of an artist's life and studio, and captures the vital early years of an extraordinary woman who carved a place for herself in Louisiana's history.

Mamas of Dada focuses on the lives and works of six representative female supporters of the Dada movement: Emmy Hennings, Gabrielle Buffet, Germaine Everling, Celine Arnauld, Juliette Roche, and Hannah Hoech. Paula K. Kamenish selected these women for their avant-garde pursuits in the chief centers of Dada's rebellious activity and, more important, because they left behind a written record of their involvement with the movement, which was short lived - from 1916 to 1924 - but widespread geographically. The rebellious spirit of the Dada period proved portable and adaptable, and the movement led to later forms of surrealism at the same time that it borrowed from Expressionism, Constructivism, Futurism, and Cubism. Its influence was felt on sculpture, painting, dance, music, textile art, film, decoupage, photomontage, mask making, and poetry. Some female Dadaists were active participants - appearing in literary journals, on stage, or in galleries - while others were observant and recording witnesses, but each played a role in supporting the movement and its more prominent members. Female Dadaists motivated the hesitant Hugo Ball, tempered the mechanical Francis Picabia, and nurtured the inventive but temperamental Raoul Hausmann. Some women inspired or gave a home to a wandering Tristan Tzara, while another provided a satiric chastisement of Dadaists in New York, Barcelona, and Paris. Each woman helps us chronicle and better understand Dada's European (and sometimes American) manifestations. Unlike their Futurist and Surrealist sisters, whose contributions were grudgingly accepted by male artists and writers, female Dadaists were able to join more readily in the movement's unified attack on social norms. And, because of their individual talents and insights, they did so in ways that were often quite different from methods adopted by their male counterparts.

In this study of surrealism and ghostliness, Katharine Conley provides a new, unifying theory of surrealist art and thought based on history and the paradigm of puns and anamorphosis. In Surrealist Ghostliness, Conley discusses surrealism as a movement haunted by the experience of World War I and the repressed ghost of spiritualism. From the perspective of surrealist automatism, this double haunting produced a unifying paradigm of textual and visual puns that both pervades surrealist thought and art and commemorates the surrealists' response to the Freudian unconscious. Extending the gothic imagination inherited from the eighteenth century, the surrealists inaugurated the psychological century with an exploration of ghostliness through doubles, puns, and anamorphosis, revealing through visual activation the underlying coexistence of realities as opposed as life and death. Surrealist Ghostliness explores examples of surrealist ghostliness in film, photography, painting, sculpture, and installation art from the 1920s through the 1990s by artists from Europe and North America from the center to the periphery of the surrealist movement. Works by Man Ray, Claude Cahun, Brassai and Salvador Dali, Lee Miller, Dorothea Tanning, Francesca Woodman, Pierre Alechinsky, and Susan Hiller illuminate the surrealist ghostliness that pervades the twentieth-century arts and compellingly unifies the century's most influential yet disparate avant-garde movement.