This intriguing book examines how material objects of the 20th century—ranging from articles of clothing to tools and weapons, communication devices, and toys and games—reflect dominant ideas and testify to the ways social change happens. Objects of everyday life tell stories about the ways everyday Americans lived. Some are private or personal things—such as Maidenform brassiere or a pair of patched blue jeans. Some are public by definition, such as the bus Rosa Parks boarded and refused to move back for a white passenger. Some material things or inventions reflect the ways public policy affected the lives of Americans, such as the Enovid birth control pill. An invention like the electric wheelchair benefited both the private and public spheres: it eased the lives of physically disabled individuals, and it played a role in assisting those with disabilities to campaign successfully for broader civil rights. Artifacts from Modern America demonstrates how dozens of the material objects, items, technologies, or inventions of the 20th century serve as a window into a period of history. After an introductory discussion of how to approach material culture—the world of things—to better understand the American past, essays describe objects from the previous century that made a wide-ranging or long-lasting impact. The chapters reflect the ways that communication devices, objects of religious life, household appliances, vehicles, and tools and weapons changed the lives of everyday Americans. Readers will learn how to use material culture in their own research through the book's detailed examples of how interpreting the historical, cultural, and social context of objects can provide a better understanding of the 20th-century experience.

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1950-1975 is the first publication to deal with the postwar avant-garde in the Nordic countries. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations in arts and culture: literature, the visual arts, architecture and design, film, radio, television and the performative arts. It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective that includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field but in a broader cultural and political context: The cultural politics, institutions and new cultural geographies after World War II, new technologies and media, performative strategies, interventions into everyday life and tensions between market and counterculture.

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900-1925 is the first publication to deal with the avant-garde in the Nordic countries at the start of the twentieth century. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations in arts and culture: literature, the visual arts, painting as well as photography, architecture and design, film, radio, and performing arts like music, theatre and dance. It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective which includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field, but in a broader cultural context. It examines the social and cultural context of the avant-garde: its media, its locations, its reception and audiences, the transmissions between Scandinavia and Europe, and its cultural consequences. The essays trace the connections between the avant-garde and the cultural discourses of contemporary currents such as revolutionary socialism, radical nationalism and occultism, and discuss questions of gender, ideology and politics, geographical location and technological innovation. The cultural history thus focuses on the role of the avant-garde in shaping the ideas of cultural modernity in the Nordic countries.

Are artistic engagements evolving, or attracting more attention? The range of artistic protest actions shows how the globalisation of art is also the globalisation of art politics. Here, based on multi-site field research, we follow artists from the MENA countries, Latin America, and Africa along their committed transnational trajectories, whether these are voluntary or the result of exile. With this global and decentred approach, the different repertoires of engagement appear, in all their dimensions, including professional ones. In the face of political disillusionment, these aesthetic interventions take on new meanings, as artivists seek alternative modes of social transformation and production of shared values. Contributors are: Alice Aterianus-Owanga, Sebastien Boulay, Sarah Dornhof, Simon Dubois, Shyam Iskander, Sabrina Melenotte, Franck Mermier, Rayane Al Rammal, Kirsten Scheid, Pinar Selek, and Marion Slitine.

Considering how culturally indispensable digital technology is today, it is ironic that computer-generated art was attacked when it burst onto the scene in the early 1960s. In fact, no other twentieth-century art form has elicited such a negative and hostile response. When the Machine Made Art examines the cultural and critical response to computer art, or what we refer to today as digital art. Tracing the heated debates between art and science, the societal anxiety over nascent computer technology, and the myths and philosophies surrounding digital computation, Taylor is able to identify the destabilizing forces that shape and eventually fragment the computer art movement.

Sunday Times Art Book of the Year 2018 'If you are interested in modern British art, the book is unputdownable. If you are not, read it.' - Grey Gowrie, Financial Times 'All the good stories, and more, are here ... this is a genuinely encyclopaedic work, unlike anything else I have come across on the topic, informed by a deep love and understanding of modern painting. Everybody interested in the subject should read it.' - Andrew Marr, Sunday Times A masterfully narrated account of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s, illustrated throughout with documentary photographs and works of art The development of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s is the story of interlinking friendships, shared experiences and artistic concerns among a number of acclaimed artists, including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Gillian Ayres, Frank Bowling and Howard Hodgkin. Drawing on extensive first-hand interviews, many previously unpublished, with important witnesses and participants, the art critic Martin Gayford teases out the thread connecting these individual lives, and demonstrates how painting thrived in London against the backdrop of Soho bohemia in the 1940s and 1950s and 'Swinging London' in the 1960s. He shows how, influenced by such different teachers as David Bomberg and William Coldstream, and aware of the work of contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock as well as the traditions of Western art from Piero della Francesca to Picasso and Matisse, the postwar painters were allied in their confidence that this ancient medium, in opposition to photography and other media, could do fresh and marvellous things. They asked the question 'what can painting do?' and explored in their diverse ways, but with equal passion, the possibilities of paint.

An edited collection of essays exploring the work and legacy of the academic and theatre-maker Clive Barker. Together, the essays trace the development of his work from his early years as an actor with Joan Littlewood's company, Theatre Workshop, via his career as an academic and teacher, through the publication of his seminal book, Theatre Games (Methuen Drama). The book looks beyond Barker's death in 2005 at the enduring influence of his work upon contemporary theatre training and theatre-making. Each writer featured in the collection responds to a specific aspect of Barker's work, focusing primarily on his early and formative career experiences with Theatre Workshop and his hugely influential development of Theatre Games. The collection as a whole thereby seeks to situate Clive Barker's work and influence in an international and multi-disciplinary context, by examining not only his origins as an actor, director, teacher and academic, but also the broad influence he has had on generations of theatre-makers.

The artist Mark Hearld finds his inspiration in the flora and fauna of the British countryside: a blue-eyed jay perched on an oak branch; two hares enjoying the spoils of an allotment; a mute swan standing at the frozen water's edge; and a sleek red fox prowling the fields. Hearld admires such twentieth-century artists as Edward Bawden, John Piper, Eric Ravilious and Enid Marx, and, like them, he chooses to work in a range of media - paint, print, collage, textiles and ceramics. Work Book is the first collection of Hearld's beguiling art. The works are grouped into nature-related themes introduced by Hearld, who narrates the story behind some of his creations and discusses his influences. He explains his particular love of collage, which he favours for its graphic quality and potential for strong composition. Art historian Simon Martin contributes an essay on Hearld's place in the English popular-art tradition, and also meets Hearld in his museum-like home to explore the artist's passion for collecting objects, his working methods and his startling ability to view the wonders of the natural world as if through a child's eyes.

Hierdie publikasie gee ’n volledige beeld van die kunstenaar Frans David Oerder (1867–1944) se oeuvre – sy Anglo-Boereoorlogtekeninge, landskappe, genrestukke, portrette, blomstudies en stillewes, interieurs, dierestudies en grafiese werk. Geen moeite is ontsien om hierdie boek so volledig en betroubaar moontlik te maak nie. Argivale bronne in die Kunsargief van die Universiteit van Pretoria, die Argief van die Johannesburg Kunsmuseum en die Nasionale Argief van Suid-Afrika in Pretoria het grootliks bygedra tot die toevoeging van inligting oor hierdie kunstenaar wat nie voorheen bekend was nie. Dieplakboek van Gerda Oerder en ’n lang lesing met detailinligting oor Oerder se vroee lewe deur mev. Lorimer in die Kunsargief van die Universiteit van Pretoria het bygedra tot ’n nuwe vertolking van die lewe en werk van hierdie belangrike Suid-Afrikaanse kunstenaar. Tydens die Anglo-Boereoorlog was Oerder die enigste amptelike kunstenaar aan Boerekant, maar tot dusver is nog geen volledige geskiedenis van sy deelname aan die oorlog geskryf nie. In hierdie boek word Oerder se Anglo-Boereoorlogtekeninge nou vir die eerste keer so volledig moontlik afgedruk en beskryf.

Rejecting broad-brush definitions of post-revolutionary art, What People Do with Images provides a nuanced account of artistic practice in Iran and its diaspora during the first part of the twenty-first century. Careful attention is paid to the effects of shifts in internal Iranian politics; the influence of US elections, travel bans and sanctions; and global media sensationalism and Islamophobia. Drawing widely on critical theory from both cultural studies and anthropology, Mazyar Lotfalian details an ecosystem for artistic production, covering a range of media, from performance to installations and video art to films. Museum curators, it is suggested, have mistakenly struggled to fit these works into their traditional-modern-contemporary schema, and political commentators have mistakenly struggled to position them as resistance, opposition or counterculture to Islam or the Islamic Republic. Instead, the author argues that creative artworks neutralize such dichotomies, working around them, and playing a sophisticated game of testing and slowly shifting the boundaries of what is acceptable. They do so in part by neutralizing the boundaries of what is inside and outside the nation-state, travelling across the transnational circuits in which the domestic and diasporic arenas reshape each other. While this book offers the valuable opportunity to gain an understanding of the Iranian art scene, it also has a wider significance in asking more generally how identity politics is mediated by creative acts and images within transnational socio-political spheres.

Presenting a massive, comprehensive graphic design collection exploding with a blend of psychedelic and pop imagery. This convergence of styles is flourishing today in the art and design world. Through art and images, Pop Psychedelic examines the current synthesis of '60s and '70s psychedelia and pop art of the '80s. The lasting influence of these two art forms continues in fashion, music, spirituality, the art world at large, and even revolutionary movements. Pop Psychedelic considers the history of these two movements and their unique contributions, ideologically, aesthetically and culturally. Then, looking at the evolution of these ideas over time, relates it to the psychedelic pop phenomenon in illustration and graphic arts. Artists relate their personal beliefs, discuss the form and its potential to create meaning, and to look at the underlying messages in the work.

Joan Eardley (1921-1963) is one of Scotland's most admired artists. During a career that lasted barely fifteen years, she concentrated on two very distinct themes: children in the Townhead area of central Glasgow, and the fishing village of Catterline, just south of Aberdeen, with its leaden skies and wild sea. The contrast between this urban and rural subject matter is self-evident, but the two are not, at heart, so very different. Townhead and Catterline were home to tight-knit communities, living under extreme pressure: Townhead suffered from overcrowding and poverty, and Catterline from depopulation brought about by the declining fishing industry. Eardley was inspired by the humanity she found in both places. These two intertwining strands are the focus of this book, which looks in detail at Eardley's working processes. Her method can be traced from rough sketches and photographs through to pastel drawings and large oil paintings. Identifying many of Eardley's subjects and drawing on unpublished letters, archival records and interviews, the authors provide a new and remarkably detailed account of Eardley's life and art.