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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > From 1900 > Art styles, First World War to 1960
Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) was a pivotal figure in Abstract Expressionism and stands as one of the most important characters of post-war American art. This ground-breaking catalogue raisonne of paintings, which has been painstakingly researched over sixteen years, is both an invaluable scholarly resource and a celebration of Hofmann's remarkable artistic achievements. Hofmann's long and productive career began in Paris in 1904 where the young artist absorbed the manifold influences of the city's avant-garde. Drawn back to Germany due to war, Hofmann, exempt from military service, opened an innovative school for art in Munich. The school's reputation spread internationally and, as the political situation in Germany deteriorated during the 1930s, Hofmann re-located his school to New York. The city, a center for emerging artistic talent, was the perfect environment for Hofmann to continue his teaching practice, which he did until 1958, when he devoted himself entirely to painting. Throughout his American years, Hofmann enlarged the expressive language of abstraction, through his innovative use of color, materiality and structure. This impressive three-volumed catalogue marks a milestone in the scholarship and understanding of Hofmann's huge contribution to twentieth-century art. Through insightful essays, meticulous catalogue entries and supporting academic apparatus, it is shown how Hofmann's exceptional body of work often defies categorization - his was a highly personal visual language with which he endlessly explored pictorial structures and chromatic relationships. Both visually stunning and academically robust, this publication is an essential purchase for all those with a keen interest in one of the twentieth century's most significant and original artists.
In early 1910s, two pioneering women entrepreneurs, Nadezhda Dobychina in St Petersburg and Klavdia Mikhailova in Moscow set up two of the first art galleries in Russia. Skilfully balancing current art market trends and daring avant-garde experimentations, Dobychina and Mikhailova soon transformed their establishments into vibrant centres of Russian artistic life. Their exhibitions of well-established national and international artists attracted enthusiastic crowds and won acclaim from leading art critics. They did not hesitate to engage in more provocative ventures, including the controversial Goncharova retrospectives in 1914, which for the first time put on view over 500 cutting-edge avant-garde works, and the famous 0.10 exhibition of 1915 at Dobychina's Art Bureau in St. Petersburg, where Malevich's famous Black Square was displayed for the very first time. Based on previously unpublished archival materials and illustrations, this book will tell the story of the lives and adventures of these two remarkable women. Operating in a predominantly man's world, they focussed on discovering and promoting those Russian artists who later went on to become major figures in the history of world modernism.
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.
With its unprecedented depth and range, this massive new history of Surrealism from veteran French philosopher and art critic Durozoi will be the one-volume standard for years to come. . . . The book discusses expertly the main surrealist artists like Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dali and Joan Miro, but also treats with considerable understanding the surrealist writing by Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, Julien Gracq and, of course, the so-called 'Pope of Surrealism, ' Andre Breton. . . . This book should turn up in all serious collections on 20th century art.--Publishers Weekly, starred review From Dada to the Automatists, and from Max Ernst to Andre Breton, Gerard Durozoi here provides the most comprehensive history of the Surrealist movement. Tracing the movement from its origins in the 1920s to its decline in the 1950s and 1960s, Durozoi tells the history of Surrealism through its activities, publications, and reviews, demonstrating its close ties to some of the most explosive political, as well as creative, debates of the twentieth century. Drawing on a staggering amount of documentary and visual evidence--including 1,000 photos--Durozoi illuminates all the intellectual and artistic facets of the movement, from literature and philosophy to painting, photography, and film, thus making History of the Surrealist Movement its definitive encyclopedia.
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.
As part of the feminist movement of the 1970s, female artists began consciously using their works to challenge social conceptions and the legal definitions of rape and incest and to shift the dominant narrative of violence against women. In this dynamic book, Vivien Green Fryd charts this decades-long radical intervention through an art-historical lens. Fryd shows how American artists such as Suzanne Lacy, Leslie Labowitz, Faith Ringgold, Judy Chicago, and Kara Walker insisted on ending the silence surrounding sexual violence and helped construct an anti-rape, anti-incest counternarrative that remains vibrant today. She looks at how second-wave feminist artists established and reiterated the importance of addressing sexual violence against women and how their successors in the third wave then framed their works within that visual and rhetorical tradition. Throughout, Fryd highlights specific themes-rape and incest against white and black female bodies, rape against white and black male bodies, rape and pornography-that intersect with other challenges to and critiques of the sociocultural and political patriarchy from the 1970s through the present day. Featuring dozens of illustrative works and written by an art historian who is a scholar of PTSD and herself a survivor, this groundbreaking and timely project explores sexual violence as a discrete subject of American art with open eyes and unflinching analysis. Against Our Will challenges the reader to serve as witness to the trauma in much the same way as the works Fryd studies.
"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"
The highly anticipated, definitive reference on Stuart Davis's paintings, watercolors, drawings, and published illustrations Stuart Davis (1892-1964) made a mark on the art world early in his career, first with his Ashcan works and then with his highly personal version of Cubism, which firmly established American modernism as a force that could rival its European counterpart. Over the course of six decades, Davis produced artworks that drew inspiration from the European modernists but were deeply rooted in the popular culture of the United States. Jazz music and hipster talk, vaudeville stages, city streetscapes, New England fishing villages, gasoline stations, store fronts, and commercial packaging and advertising images were among the sources that infused his art with energy, bringing crisp edges, radiant color, and syncopated rhythms to a vast body of paintings, watercolors, and drawings. Documenting the life's work of this prolific and highly influential artist-who affected almost every development in American art from second-generation Ashcan realism around 1912 to color field and geometric painting in the 1960s-is a monumental achievement. In these three volumes, the editors have catalogued 1,749 artworks by the artist-including more than 600 works never previously illustrated-providing extensive documentation and information about each one. A detailed chronology of Davis's life, as well as an enlightening discussion of the compositional relationship between certain works spanning his oeuvre, rounds out this study. Exquisitely designed and produced, Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonne will be the definitive reference on the artist's work for many years to come. Published in association with the Yale University Art Gallery
This is volume 2: E-K, 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.
Each of the five volumes in the Stone Art Theory Institutes series, and the seminars on which they are based, brings together a range of scholars who are not always directly familiar with one another's work. The outcome of each of these convergences is an extensive and "unpredictable conversation" on knotty and provocative issues about art. This third volume in the series, What Do Artists Know?, is about the education of artists. The MFA degree is notoriously poorly conceptualized, and now it is giving way to the PhD in art practice. Meanwhile, conversations on freshman courses in studio art continue to be bogged down by conflicting agendas. This book is about the theories that underwrite art education at all levels, the pertinent history of art education, and the most promising current conceptualizations. The contributors are Areti Adamopoulou, Glenn Adamson, Rina Arya, Louisa Avgita, Jan Baetens, Su Baker, Ciarin Benson, Andrew Blackley, Jeroen Boomgaard, Brad Buckley, William Conger, John Conomos, Christopher Csikszentmihalyi, Anders Dahlgren, Jonathan Dronsfield, Marta Edling, Laurie Fendrich, Michael Fotiadis, Christopher Frayling, Miguel Gonzalez Virgen, R.E.H. Gordon, Charles Green, Vanalyne Green, Barbara Jaffee, Tom McGuirk, William Marotti, Robert Nelson, Hakan Nilsson, Saul Ostrow, Daniel Palmer, Peter Plagens, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, Howard Singerman, Henk Slager, George Smith, Martin Soberg, Ann Sobiech Munson, Roy Sorensen, Bert Taken, Hilde Van Gelder, Frank Vigneron, Janneke Wesseling, Frances Whitehead, Gary Willis, and Yeung Yang.
This newly expanded book on Louis Icart - one of France's most well known art deco artists - now includes a section on his oil paintings, as well as over 512 different etchings, painstakingly acquired and photographed. Particular attention has been given to the early years (1911-1924), when Icart was a relatively unknown artist and his edition sizes were small. With few exceptions, the book contains large, full color illustrations that give the reader a true representation of the full-size etchings. The authors clarify some of the existing confusion surrounding Icart's work, explaining the variations in his signature, the use of the "Windmill" seal and other seals, and the myriad copyright notations found on his artwork. The illustrations have been carefully measured and dated. This is a great addition to the Icart legacy.
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 recent years, many prominent and successful artists have claimed that their primary concern is not the artwork they produce but the artistic process itself. In this volume, Kim Grant analyzes this idea and traces its historical roots, showing how changing concepts of artistic process have played a dominant role in the development of modern and contemporary art. This astute account of the ways in which process has been understood and addressed examines canonical artists such as Monet, Cezanne, Matisse, and De Kooning, as well as philosophers and art theorists such as Henri Focillon, R. G. Collingwood, and John Dewey. Placing "process art" within a larger historical context, Grant looks at the changing relations of the artist's labor to traditional craftsmanship and industrial production, the status of art as a commodity, the increasing importance of the body and materiality in art making, and the nature and significance of the artist's role in modern society. In doing so, she shows how process is an intrinsic part of aesthetic theory that connects to important contemporary debates about work, craft, and labor. Comprehensive and insightful, this synthetic study of process in modern and contemporary art reveals how artists' explicit engagement with the concept fits into a broader narrative of the significance of art in the industrial and postindustrial world.
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.
The crumpled sculptures by American artist John Chamberlain, welded together from deformed car body parts, revolutionised the art world back in the 1950s. Through the unusual use of industrially prefabricated materials and their completely free repurposing, he released new processes of artistic forms and a consumer-oriented aesthetic. At first assigned to Nouveau Realisme, his work at the same time evinces relationships with Abstract Realism and Minimal Art, but ultimately asserts a great measure of autonomy in its form of expression. As early as the mid-1950s, he turned to the industrial scrap from cars, which he squashed, pressed into shape and welded together. Just as important as the form is the interplay of colours which make his works dazzle and sometimes bring them into a certain proximity with colour-happy Pop Art. In addition to his internationally renowned sculptural work, Chamberlain occupied himself intensively with photography, a theme extensively addressed in this book. Sculpture and photography interact directly with each other. Unlike the sculptures, which are positioned in their materiality, Chamberlain's photographs are marked by great blurring and fleetingness. At the same time, they absorb the element of movement in space. Chamberlain himself put it in terms of 'bending space'. One may think of them, even more readily than of his sculptures, as the spontaneous gestural structures of Abstract Expressionist paintings. Text in English and German.
"Ambiguous work. Where can we start?", wrote the art historian Oscar Schurer in the historic series Junge Kunst about Pablo Picasso's multi - faceted oeuvre back in 1927. Picasso, who was investigating Surrealism at the time, was regarded as a genius even then - and had another 40 years of creativity before him. The magnificent legacy of a talent which showed twentieth - century art the way forward consists of an almost unimaginable number of paintings, drawings, graphic works, sculp tures and ceramic items. The art historian Markus Muller knows where and above all how we can begin to grasp a multilayered oeuvre like Picasso's. In this newly edited artist monograph he skilfully guides the reader through the virtuoso plethora of styles of Pablo Picasso, explains key works from the various periods and provides a fascinating impression of the bubbling energy of this multi - talented artist. Not least as a result of the author's personal acquaintance with the Picasso family, the archive sect ion of the work promises a number of finds which are seldom on view.
In an era when technology, biology, and culture are becoming ever more closely connected, The Dada Cyborg explains how the cyborg as we know it today actually developed between 1918 and 1933 when German artists gave visual form to their utopian hopes and fantasies in a fearful response to World War I. In what could be termed a prehistory of the posthuman, Matthew Biro shows the ways in which new forms of human existence were imagined in Germany between the two world wars through depictions of cyborgs. Examining the work of Hannah Hoech, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Otto Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter, he reveals an innovative interpretation of the cyborg as a representative of hybrid identity, as well as a locus of new modes of awareness created by the impact of technology on human perception. Tracing the prevalence of cyborgs in German avant-garde art, Biro demonstrates how vision, hearing, touch, and embodiment were beginning to be reconceived during the Weimar Republic. Biro's unique and interdisciplinary analysis offers a substantially new account of the Berlin Dada movement, one that integrates the group's poetic, theoretical, and performative practices with its famous visual strategies of photomontage, assemblage, and mixed-media painting to reveal radical images of a "new human."
Contemporary feminist critics have often described Surrealism as a misogynist movement. In "Automatic Woman," Katharine Conley addresses this issue, confirming some feminist allegations while qualifying and overturning others. Through insightful analyses of works by a range of writers and artists, Conley develops a complex view of Surrealist portrayals of Woman. Conley begins with a discussion of the composite image of Woman developed by such early male Surrealists as Andre Breton, Francis Picabia, and Paul Eluard. She labels that image "Automatic Woman"--a term that comprises views of Woman as provocative and revolutionary but also as a depersonalized object largely devoid of individuality and volition. This analysis largely confirms feminist critiques of Surrealism. The heart of the book, however, examines the writings of Leonora Carrington and Unica Zurn, two women in the Surrealist movement whose works, Conley argues, anticipate much contemporary feminist art and theory. In concluding, Conley shows how Breton's own views on women evolved in the course of his long career, arriving at last at a position far more congenial to contemporary feminists. "Automatic Woman" is distinguished by Katharine Conley's judicious understanding of how women--and the image of Woman--figured in Surrealism. The book is an important contemporary account of a cultural movement that continues to fascinate, influence, and provoke us.
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.
David Park (1911-1960), transplanted Bostonian turned ground-breaking West Coast painter, led the way in creating what became known as Bay Area Figurative Art - a daring move during the post-World War II years when abstract expressionism held sway. In this beautifully illustrated biography, compiled from comprehensive and sweeping interviews, Nancy Boas traces Park's resolute search for a new kind of figuration, one that would penetrate abstract expressionism's thickly layered surfaces and infuse them with human presence. Boas changes our understanding of Park as a painter, highlighting his strong influence on Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and other artists at the California School of Fine Arts and the University of California, Berkeley. She plunges us into the lively 1940s and 1950s Bay Area art scene, pointing to Park's work as a bold alternative to the abstractions of Clyfford Still. As the book deepens our admiration for Park's figurative paintings, it affirms his stature as a major figure in American art, one who spurred the figurative impulse across the United States and abroad.
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 this provocative and stimulating book, David Hopkins addresses the homosocial structures in Dada and Surrealist art with an eye to their relevance to current artistic and theoretical debate. Bestriding the book is the pivotal figure of the artist Marcel Duchamp, who was at the center of various groups of artistic and literary figures--predominantly male--in Europe and America. And at the heart of the investigation are Duchamp's relationships with these men, the various interactions of those within the groups, and the impact of this type of male camaraderie on the artworks they produced. Hopkins looks at specific moments in the careers of Duchamp and some of his associates--Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Max Ernst and Andre Breton--and discusses in detail the reception of Duchamp's ideas in the post-war period. He goes on to trace the influence of the homosocial nature of Surrealism and Dada on the art world from the 1950s to the work of contemporary male and female artists.
Norman Bel Geddes has long been considered the 'founder' of American industrial design. During his long career he worked on everything from theatre design, world fairs and cars to houses and product and packaging design. Nicolas P. Maffei's magisterial biography draws on original material from the archive at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, and places Bel Geddes' work within the fast-changing cultural and intellectual contexts of his time. Maffei shows how Bel Geddes' futuristic but pragmatic style - his notion of 'practical vision' - was central to his work, and highly influential on the professional practice of American industrial design in general. |
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