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.

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

'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.

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.

The Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) achieved world fame with his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes. In this detailed biography, Rudiger Goerner masterfully depicts the multifaceted artist's life and long career. He traces Kokoschka's path from being the bugbear of the bourgeoisie and a 'hunger artist' to becoming a wealthy and cosmopolitan political and critical artist who went on to shape the European art scene of the 20th century and beyond. The great painter's works as a playwright, essayist and poet bear witness to his remarkable literary quality. Music played a central role in his work, and his passion for teaching led him to establish in 1953 the School of Seeing, an unconventional art school conceived by Kokoschka as an attempt to revive humanist ideals in the horrific aftermath of war. The life and work of Oskar Kokoschka are a reaction against the monochrome monotony of existence; Goerner's biography portrays the artist in all his fascinating and contradictory complexity.

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)

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.

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.

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

"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

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.

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.

Forgacs examines the development of the Bauhaus school of architecture and applied design by focusing on the idea of the Bauhaus, rather than on its artefacts. What gave this idea its extraordinary powers of survival? Founded in 1919, with the architect Walter Gropius as its first director, the Bauhaus carried within it the seeds of conflict from the start. The duration of the Bauhaus coincides very nearly with that of the Weimar Republic; the Bauhaus idea - the notion that the artist should be involved in the technological innovations of mechanization and mass production - is a concept that was bound to arouse the most passionate feelings. It is these two strands - personal and political - that Forgacs so cleverly interweaves. The text has been extensively revised since its original publication in Hungarian, and an entirely new chapter has been added on the Bauhaus's Russian analogue, VkhUTEMAS, the Moscow academy of industrial art.

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.

Carla Schulz-Hoffmann is Director of the Collection of Twentieth-century art in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Germany. She teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and has edited several catalogues on expressionist and modern art.