Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei demonstrates that the exotic, as reflected in major works of German literature and in the philosophy and art that inspires it, provokes central questions about the modern self and the spaces it inhabits. Exotic spaces in the writings of such authors as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gottfried Benn, and Bertold Brecht, along with the thought of Nietzsche, Freud, Levi-Strauss, and Simmel and the art of German Expressionism, are shown to present alternatives to the landscape and experience of modernity. In an examination of the concept of the exotic and of spatial experience in their cultural, subjective, and philosophical contingencies, Gosetti-Ferencei shows that exotic spaces may contest and reconfigure the relationship between the familiar and the foreign, the self and the other. Exotic spaces may serve not only to affirm the subject in a symbolic conquering of territory, as emphasized in post-colonial interpretations, or project the fantasy of escapism to a lost paradise, as utopian readings suggest, but condition moral, aesthetic, or imaginative transformation. Such transformation, while risking disaster or dissolution of the self as well as endangerment of the other, may promote new possibilities of perceiving or being, and reconfigure the boundaries of a familiar world. As exotic spaces are conceived as mystical, liberating, erotic, infectious, frightening or mysterious, several possibilities for transformation emerge in their exposure: re-enchantment through epiphany; the collapse of the rational self; liberation of the imagination from the confines of the familiar world; and aesthetic transformation, revealing the paradoxically 'primitive' nature of modern experience. In strikingly original readings of canonical authors and compelling rediscoveries of forgotten ones, this study establishes that exotic experience can evidence the fragility of the European or Germanic self as depicted in modernist literature, revealing the usually unconsidered boundaries of the subject's own familiar world.

Throughout his career, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner employed a highly inventive and original use of colour. He favoured novel applications of paint in unusual matte finishes. For Kirchner, colour was of primary importance, coupled with technique and style. He was one of the leading Expressionist painters of the time and was one of the founding members of the Brucke. In his deeply personal depictions, he focused on the places where he lived and worked and his close friends and associates. This book, accompanying a major exhibition at the Neue Galerie New York, provides a visual survey of Kirchner's oeuvre and offers an in-depth analysis of different aspects of the artist's output. Essays by leading experts examine Kirchner's approach to colour, his interest in the decorative arts, how electric light affected his treatment of colour, the impact of Nietzsche on his work, and how he was profoundly changed by World War I. This book includes illustrations of nearly 40 paintings, 30 prints, as well as drawings, sketchbooks, photographs, and decorative work.

Now available again, this visually stunning collection of Gustav Klimt's landscape paintings brings to light a lesser-known aspect of the Viennese painter's oeuvre. While Gustav Klimt is largely revered for his opulent, symbolladen portraits of the Viennese bourgeoisie, these works were just one aspect of his artistic expression. His landscapes represent an important facet of his career and are a valuable contribution to the school of European nature painting. For many years the artist travelled to the Austrian and Italian countryside during the summer, where he took advantage of the extraordinary light and spectacular hues to paint and sketch landscapes. Among the most exquisite of Klimt's landscapes are those in which he experimented with composition and style. Accompanied by scholarly essays, the images reproduced in this book comprise all extant landscapes from this brilliant artist, proving that his mastery extends beyond portraiture and revealing themes that appeared throughout his life's work.

The celebrated survey of female Abstract Expressionist artists revealing the richness and lasting influence of their work The artists Jay DeFeo, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Elaine de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and many other women played major roles in the development of Abstract Expressionism, which flourished in New York and San Francisco in the 1940s and 1950s and has been recognized as the first fully American modern art movement. Though the contributions of these women were central to American art of the twentieth century, their work has not received the same critical attention as that of their male counterparts. Women of Abstract Expressionism is a long-overdue survey. Lavishly illustrated with full-color plates emphasizing the expressive freedom of direct gesture and process at the core of the movement, this book features biographies of more than forty artists, offering insight into their lives and work. Essays by noted scholars explore the techniques, concerns, and legacies of women in Abstract Expressionism, shedding light on their unique experiences. This groundbreaking book reveals the richness of the careers of these important artists and offers keen new reflections on their work and the movement as a whole. Published in association with the Denver Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Mint Museum, Charlotte, N.C. (10/22/16-01/22/17) Palm Springs Art Museum (02/18/17-05/28/17)

Treasury of portraits, character studies, nudes, more, by great Viennese Expressionist.

This book reveals that James Ensor did not develop his fantastic and grotesque universe of masks and skeletons out of his melancholic soul, but that he re-used and transformed an old image tradition that was collected and published by the French author and art critic Jules Champfleury in his History of Caricature. A second essay analyses how these weird creatures infiltrate the image borders and the frames of Ensor's paintings in order to disturb the 'normal' world.

The foundation stone for the exceptional collection of Gabriele and Anna Braglia was laid by an exhibition of German Expressionism in Venice. The collection will be made accessible to the public in Lugano starting in September. Fascinated by the vivid colours and great expressive power of the paintings, the Swiss couple acquired select paintings, watercolours and drawings, in particular those by Paul Klee, Emil Nolde and the Blauer Reiter artists. These are accompanied by works of art by Lyonel Feininger and Max Pechstein. This publication is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of the approximately fifty works of art, which represent important contributions to Expressionism.

This important publication accompanies a major exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, London, of paintings by Edvard Munch, one of the world's greatest modern artists. The exhibition and catalogue showcase 18 major works from the collection of KODE Art Museums in Bergen. The works span the most significant part of Munch's artistic development and have never before been shown as a group outside of Scandinavia. KODE houses one of the most important collections of paintings by Edvard Munch (1863-1944) in the world. The collection was assembled at the beginning of the 20th century by the Norwegian industrialist, mill owner and philanthropist Rasmus Meyer (1858-1916), who was one of the first significant early collectors of Munch's work. Meyer knew Munch personally and was astute in acquiring major canvases by the artist that chart his artistic development. Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen explores this group of remarkable works in detail and considers the important role of Rasmus Meyer as a collector. The exhibition and publication include seminal paintings from Munch's early 'realist' phase of the 1880s, such as Morning (1884), which was made when the artist was just twenty years old, and Summer Night (1889), a pivotal work that shows the artist's move towards the expressive and psychologically charged work for which he became famous. These paintings launched Munch's career and set the stage for his renowned, highly expressive paintings of the 1890s when his compositions became powerful projections of his emotions and imaginative states. Such works are a major feature of the exhibition that includes remarkable canvases from Munch's famous 'Frieze of Life' series, such as Evening on Karl Johan (1892), Melancholy (1894-96) and At the Death Bed (1895). Through his 'Frieze of Life' works, Munch intended to address profound themes of human existence, from love to death. The artist used his own experiences as source material to make visceral depictions of the human psyche, which he hoped would help others understand their own life. Munch's powerful use of colour and form to convey his subjects marked him out as one of the most radical painters at the turn of the 20th century. This fully illustrated publication includes a catalogue of the works, with contributions by leading experts in their fi eld from KODE and The Courtauld.

Colourful, emotional, impulsive and modern - these are the qualities which characterise our ideas of German Expressionist painting. It is hard to believe that the works caused a scandal when they were first created. And yet, artists and writers were united in the vision of a new beginning combined with fundamental social criticism. Many aspects like the social problems of the big city, the sleazy glamour of the world of entertainment and the rejection of new technology remain surprisingly topical to this day. Immerse yourself in the powerful images and texts of world literature and embark on a journey of discovery through the world of the early 20th century with its atmosphere of change and decay. With works by Max Beckmann, Heinrich Campendonck, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Alexej von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, August Macke, Franz Marc, Ludwig Meidner, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Otto Mueller, Gabriele Munter, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Marianne von Werefkin et al. With texts by Walter Benjamin, Gottfried Benn, Anton Chekhov, Alfred Doblin, Theodor Fontane, Oskar Maria Graf, Franz Kafka, Else Lasker-Schuler, Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Vladimir Nabokov, Rainer Maria Rilke, Joseph Roth, Arthur Schnitzler, Herwarth Walden, Stefan Zweig et al.

For Bataille, the absence of myth had itself become the myth of the modern age. In a world that had lost the secret of its cohesion, Bataille saw surrealism as both a symptom and a beginning of an attempt to address this loss. His writings on this theme are the result of a profound reflection in the wake of World War Two. The Absence of Myth is the most incisive study yet made of surrealism, insisting on its importance as a cultural and social phenomenon with far-reaching consequences. Clarifying Bataille's links with the surrealist movement, and throwing revealing light on his complex and greatly misunderstood relationship with Andre Breton, The Absence of Myth shows Bataille to be a much more radical figure than his postmodernist devotees would have us believe: a man who continually tried to extend Marxist social theory; a pessimistic thinker, but one as far removed from nihilism as can be.

'The idea of one form inside another form may owe some of its incipient beginnings to my interest at one stage when I discovered armour. I spent many hours in the Wallace Collection, in London, looking at armour.' Henry Moore, 1980. Coinciding with the major exhibition of the same name, Henry Moore: The Helmet Heads traces the footsteps of the artist through the armouries of the Wallace Collection, where he encountered 'objects of power' that profoundly influenced his work for the rest of his career. Captivated by helmets in particular, Moore saw in them a fundamental form idea - an outer shell which could protect something vulnerable inside. Tobias Capwell identifies the specific helmets which inspired the artist and examines these alongside Moore's sculptures for the very first time. The reasons for his fascination with armour and the implications it had on his art, are explored by Hannah Higham and set in the context of Moore's life and work - one punctuated by global conflicts and artistic experiment. Richly illustrated, this catalogue reveals the origins of some of Henry Moore's most innovative works and examines in depth for the first time this largely unknown aspect of his career.

Apocalypse, the city, war, religion, the portrait, exile and existential trauma - Ludwig Meidner (1884-1966) is regarded as one of the outstanding artists of German Expressionism. With the accuracy of a seismograph he recorded in his pictorial and literary works the shocks which reverberated through his time. To mark the 50th anniversary of the death of the Jewish artist Ludwig Meidner attention has been focused on the works produced during his period of exile in London between 1939 and 1953 - sketchbooks, watercolours and charcoal and chalk drawings produced under the most difficult conditions. They represent an intense mixture of internal experience and contemporary commentary. With merciless directness and symbolic condensation the works tell of terror, isolation, persecution and destruction as well as a grotesquely absurd world which Meidner spotlighted in an idiosyncratic way, combining mockery with mordant humour and sarcasm with bizarre exaggeration.

This graphic novel by an Expressionist master offers a stunning depiction of urban Europe between the world wars. First published in Germany in 1925, it presents 100 woodcuts of remarkable force and beauty that depict scenes of work and leisure, wealth and deprivation, and joy and loneliness.

Over 100 works by Beckmann, Feininger, Kirchner, Kollwitz, Nolde, Marc, others.

The artists as explorers: the Expressionist artists Kirchner and Nolde studied non-Western lifestyles and incorporated them into their artistic projects. Between "armchair anthropology" practised in the museums and "field-work anthropology", which also took place in the colonies, both artists contributed to the construction of an (imagined) "other", offering an alternative to bourgeois, "civilised" society in Germany. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde both spent time between 1910-11 studying objects and materials in ethnographic museums, but before long they expanded their investigations to include travels to colonial regions (Nolde) and the staging of "exotic" studio environments (Kirchner). The publication examines how both approaches evolved through an interplay between art, early German anthropology and colonial enterprise within the German Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. It contains not only paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, posters and documents, but also a variety of texts offering a broad overview as well as relating a specific narrative. Languages: English, Dutch, Danish

Invisible Cathedrals places Wilhelm Worringer in the foreground of discussions of Expressionism and German Modernism for the first time. These essays not only reveal the complexities of his individual works, such as Abstraction and Empathy (1908) and Form Problems of the Gothic (1911), they also examine his lesser-known books and essays of the post-World War I years, the 1920s, and beyond.

Invisible Cathedrals offers both a basic introduction to Worringer's writings and their broad influence, and a profound and detailed revisionist analysis of his significance in German and European Modernism. It also provides the most comprehensive bibliography to date of his own work and of the scattered criticism devoted to Worringer in different disciplines.

Worringer's works were provocative, widely read, and often reprinted and were highly influential among artists and writers in Germany. As a result, they both raised suspicion in his own academic discipline of art history and excited discussion in other diverse fields, such as literary and social theory, psychology, and film theory. Worringer emerges here not solely as a scholarly commentator on the history of art, but also as an activist scholar who engaged his historical criticism of other periods directly in the production of culture in his own time.

Contributors are Magdalena Bushart, Neil H. Donahue, Charles W. Haxthausen, Michael W. Jennings, Joseph Masheck, Geoffrey Waite, and Joanna E. Ziegler.

"An indispensable anthology that immediately renders its predecessors obsolete. With its gathering of public and private documents, it carries us through the rise and fall of one of the great upheavals of modern art."--Robert Rosenblum, New York University

"These essays, including many previously unavailable in English, are rich with startling new insights into the German Expressionist psyche. Elucidating the artists' view of government, the role of women in modern society, and their own ambivalence about the effectiveness of abstract art, this anthology is essential reading for all scholars and students of twentieth-century art."--Joan Marter, author of "Alexander Calder

The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context is a challenging exploration of the transnational formation, dissemination, and transformation of expressionism outside of the German-speaking world, in regions such as Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltics and Scandinavia, Western and Southern Europe, North and Latin America, and South Africa, in the first half of the twentieth century. Comprising a series of essays by an international group of scholars in the fields of art history and literary and cultural studies, the volume addresses the intellectual discussions and artistic developments arising in the context of the expressionist movement in the various art centers and cultural regions. The authors also examine the implications of expressionism in artistic practice and its influence on modern and contemporary cultural production. Essential for an in-depth understanding and discussion of expressionism, this volume opens up new perspectives on developments in the visual arts of this period and challenges the traditional narratives that have predominantly focused on artistic styles and national movements.

German Expressionism was first presented in France's most important museum of modern art, the Musee national d'art moderne in Paris, starting in the 1960s, more than fifty years after its emergence. In light of the numerous contacts between German artists and the art scene in Paris at the start of the twentieth century, this is surprising. Based on source material on four special exhibitions in Paris between 1960 and 1978 that presented Expressionist works from Germany, the author analyzes an eventful German-French history of perception that was shaped for a long time, until into the 1970s, by national and nationalistic discourses. Written from a bilateral German-French perspective, the book makes an important contribution to the writing of art history from a transnational perspective.

Harold Rosenberg was undoubtedly the most important American art critic of the twentieth century. It was he who first coined the term "Action Painters" to refer to the American Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock, Kline, and de Kooning. Rosenberg's seminal writings on this movement, as well as on other artists such as Newman and Rothko, appear in The Tradition of the New (1959), his first and most influential book its effects on subsequent art criticism, and the practice of art itself, are still felt today. The essays in this book are not limited to the art world, however: He also discusses poetry, political and cultural theory, and popular culture. As wide-ranging, independent, and deeply probing as the essays of Walter Benjamin, Harold Rosenberg's The Tradition of the New is a true classic of twentieth-century criticism.