This book analyzes a wide range of Beardsley's most characteristic work. It establishes his assumptions about the underlying nature of his world, and clarifies why so many observers have considered Beardsley's art indispensable to understanding fin-de-siecle Victorian culture. Beardsley's pictures present a dialogue between seemingly polarized impulses: a desire to scandalize and destabilize the old order, and, equally strong, a need to affirm traditional authority.
Beardsley depicted various grotesque shapes, caricatures, and mutated figures, including foetus/old man, dwarf, Clown, Harlequin, Pierrot, and dandy (the icon of the Decadent "Religion of Art"). Incarnating the fearful contradictions of decadence, these images served as objective correlatives of some "monstrous" metaphysical contortion. His grotesques suggest the impossibility of resolving these contradictions, even as his elegant designs try formalistically to control and recuperate the disfiguration.
As a canonical style, Beardsley's "dandy" sensibility and grotesque caricatures become his means of realigning canonical meaning. Thus, he effects what might be termed a "caricature" of traditional signification. An aesthete devoted to the "Religion of Art," Beardsley, nonetheless, creates a world inescapably "de-formed." He is a Dandy of the Grotesque."

The production of this book stems from two of the editors' longstanding research interests: the representation of architecture in print media, and the complex identity of the second phase of modernism in architecture given the role it played in postwar reconstruction in Europe. While the history of postwar reconstruction has been increasingly well covered for most European countries, research investigating postwar architectural magazines and journals across Europe - their role in the discourse and production of the built environment and particularly their inter-relationship and differing conceptions of postwar architecture - is relatively undeveloped. Modernism and the Professional Architecture Journal sounds out this territory in a new collection of essays concerning the second phase of the reception and assimilation of modernism in architecture, as it was represented in professional architecture journals during the period of postwar reconstruction (1945-1968). Professional architecture journals are often seen as conduits of established facts and knowledge. The role mainstream publications play, however, in establishing 'movements', 'trends' or 'debates' tends to be undervalued. In the context of the complex undertaking of postwar reconstruction, the shortage of resources, political uncertainty and the biographical complexities of individual architects, the chapters on key European architecture journals collected here reveal how modernist architecture, and its discourse, was perceived and disseminated in different European countries.

A lavishly illustrated survey of American Art Deco architecture.

Art deco flourished in cities and small towns throughout America during the 1920s and 1930s. Extremely popular as a statement of modernity and technological progress, art deco movie palaces, dime stores, department stores, courthouses, and schools were ubiquitous in the American landscape; numerous examples of the style continue to be viable spaces.

American art deco was unique. Unlike their European counterparts, architects in the United States had "exotic" indigenous cultures for inspiration. Arts such as Navajo chiefs' blankets, Hopi pottery, and Sioux beadwork, characterized by geometric ornament, were easily assimilated into the art deco style. Regionalism—a good example of which is the Prairie style, advocated by Frank Lloyd Wright and other progressive architects—also influenced American art deco. America's pioneering and westward migration provided powerful themes and motifs, producing an art deco with authentic national and regional characteristics.

American Deco features descriptions—and over 500 color photographs—of 75 opulent buildings across the country that have been preserved. The photographs document interiors, exteriors, and details of deco skyscrapers, courthouses, theaters, and other significant buildings.

Insane Acquaintances explores a range of exhibitions, organisations and institutions that mediated and promoted modernism in Britain. In a series of case studies on subjects ranging from the first Postimpressionist exhibition in London in 1910, the teaching of modernist art in schools, the decoration and design of the modernist home, the International Surrealist exhibition in London in 1936 and the Festival of Britain in 1951, Insane Acquaintances charts some of the ways in which modernism not only sought to improve the quality of art but also the quality of art's reception in Britain. It also provides an institutional history of some of the groups and organisations that fostered modernist art in Britain during that period.

Working from a discourse analysis perspective, MA1/4ller examines how a national art history was constituted through its linguistic construction and transmission. The study demonstrates how German art history was a ~manufactureda (TM) through language, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries. The study operates at the interface between text linguistics, the history of concepts and the history of words and makes an important contribution to the history of national consciousness.

Four major communities, four buildings constructing their identities in the contested urban space of Jerusalem. This book examines a fascinating and critical epoch in the architectural history of Jerusalem. It proposes a fresh and analytical discussion of British Mandate-era architecture by studying four buildings that have had a lasting impact on Jerusalem's built environment. Applying relational history methodology, the book reveals how these building projects evolved as an outcome of cross-cultural influences and relations among the British, American, Jewish-Zionist and Muslim-Palestinian communities. Further, the building and design processes behind these structures give new perspectives on the adaptation of modern architecture in the Middle East and the negotiation of historicism and vernacular architecture during the first half of the 20th century.

Beautifully designed and featuring breathtaking photography, this is the ultimate Christmas gift for home design enthusiasts - from cultural phenomenon THE MODERN HOUSE! 'A source of fascination, inspiration and fantasy' Guardian In 2005, childhood friends Matt Gibberd and Albert Hill set out to convince people of the power of good design and its ability to influence our wellbeing. They founded The Modern House - in equal parts an estate agency, a publisher and a lifestyle brand - and went on to inspire a generation to live more thoughtfully and beautifully at home. As The Modern House grew, Matt and Albert came to realise that the most successful homes they encountered - from cleverly conceived studio flats to listed architectural masterpieces - had been designed with attention to the same timeless principles: Space, Light, Materials, Nature and Decoration. In this lavishly illustrated book, Matt tells the stories of these remarkable living spaces and their equally remarkable owners, and demonstrates how the five principles can be applied to your own space in ways both large and small. Revolutionary in its simplicity, and full of elegance, humour and joy, this book will inspire you to find happiness in the place you call home. PRAISE FOR THE MODERN HOUSE: 'One of the best things in the world' GQ 'The Modern House transformed our search for the perfect home' Financial Times 'Nowhere has mastered the art of showing off the most desirable homes for both buyers and casual browsers alike than The Modern House' Vogue

An urban history of modern Britain, and how the built environment shaped the nation's politics Foundations is a history of twentieth-century Britain told through the rise, fall, and reinvention of six different types of urban space: the industrial estate, shopping precinct, council estate, private flats, shopping mall, and suburban office park. Sam Wetherell shows how these spaces transformed Britain's politics, economy, and society, helping forge a midcentury developmental state and shaping the rise of neoliberalism after 1980. From the mid-twentieth century, spectacular new types of urban space were created in order to help remake Britain's economy and society. Government-financed industrial estates laid down infrastructure to entice footloose capitalists to move to depressed regions of the country. Shopping precincts allowed politicians to plan precisely for postwar consumer demand. Public housing modernized domestic life and attempted to create new communities out of erstwhile strangers. In the latter part of the twentieth century many of these spaces were privatized and reimagined as their developmental aims were abandoned. Industrial estates became suburban business parks. State-owned shopping precincts became private shopping malls. The council estate was securitized and enclosed. New types of urban space were imported from American suburbia, and planners and politicians became increasingly skeptical that the built environment could remake society. With the midcentury built environment becoming obsolete, British neoliberalism emerged in tense negotiation with the awkward remains of built spaces that had to be navigated and remade. Taking readers to almost every major British city as well as to places in the United States and Britain's empire, Foundations highlights how some of the major transformations of twentieth-century British history were forged in the everyday spaces where people lived, worked, and shopped.

In the 1920s, German-Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879-1940) began his long-lasting engagement with polyphonic art-multi-voiced way of painting analogous to music. A relentless experimenter, Klee began these studies while teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau, developed them further during his tenure at the art academy in Dusseldorf, and brought them to conclusion after his return to Switzerland in 1933. In this book, distinguished art historian Oskar Batschmann explores Klee's seminal painting Ad Parnassum (1932). Painted shortly after the artist's departure from the Bauhaus, it symbolises a new era, also one of Klee's own self-discovery. Batschmann documents how the artist strove for a connection of music and painting in his colour hues and in the rhythmic movement of coloured dots. Richly illustrated, this book places Klee's polyphonic understanding of art in an art-historical context by using this key work and offers insight into the synesthetic thinking that emerged in the art world during that time. Text in English and German.

The fascinating untold story of how Nazi architects and planners envisioned and began to build a model "Aryan" society in Norway during World War II Between 1940 and 1945, German occupiers transformed Norway into a vast construction zone. This remarkable building campaign, largely unknown today, was designed to extend the Greater German Reich beyond the Arctic Circle and turn the Scandinavian country into a racial utopia. From ideal new cities to a scenic superhighway stretching from Berlin to northern Norway, plans to remake the country into a model "Aryan" society fired the imaginations of Hitler, his architect Albert Speer, and other Nazi leaders. In Hitler's Northern Utopia, Despina Stratigakos provides the first major history of Nazi efforts to build a Nordic empire-one that they believed would improve their genetic stock and confirm their destiny as a new order of Vikings. Drawing on extraordinary unpublished diaries, photographs, and maps, as well as newspapers from the period, Hitler's Northern Utopia tells the story of a broad range of completed and unrealized architectural and infrastructure projects far beyond the well-known German military defenses built on Norway's Atlantic coast. These ventures included maternity centers, cultural and recreational facilities for German soldiers, and a plan to create quintessential National Socialist communities out of twenty-three towns damaged in the German invasion, an overhaul Norwegian architects were expected to lead. The most ambitious scheme-a German cultural capital and naval base-remained a closely guarded secret for fear of provoking Norwegian resistance. A gripping account of the rise of a Nazi landscape in occupied Norway, Hitler's Northern Utopia reveals a haunting vision of what might have been-a world colonized under the swastika.

Art Deco is arguably the twentieth century's most popular and memorable design movements. The style defined the interwar period with its clean sleek lines, streamlined shapes, bold abstract forms, and luscious colours.This book charts the impact of this daring new style on the production of tiles and architectural faience in Britain. It shows how they were made and decorated, examines the output of firms like Carter, Pilkington's and Doulton and describes the innovations introduced by creative designers like Edward Bawden and Dora Batty.With photographs of the tiles and architectural faience, individually and in situ of buildings and homes, the author examines the diverse range of animal, floral, human and abstract Art Deco designs.

Mervyn Taylor - wood engraver, painter, illustrator, sculptor and designer - was one of the most celebrated New Zealand artists of the 1930s to 1960s. He was highly connected to modernism and nationalism as it was expressed in New Zealand art and literature of the period. In the 1960s he created twelve murals for major new government and civic buildings erected in that era of great economic prosperity, during which New Zealand first began to loosen its apron-string ties to England. Tragically, some have been destroyed and others presumed lost - until now. This fascinating book, bursting with archival material, details the detective hunt for the murals and tells the stories of their creation. They cement Taylor's place as one of New Zealand's most significant artists, and are a celebration of the art and culture of our modernist era.