What is artistic resonance and how can it be linked to one's life and one's art? This latest book of essays from legendary theatre director Anne Bogart, considers the creation of resonance in the artistic endeavour, with a focus on the performing arts. The word 'resonance' comes from the Latin meaning to 're-sound' or 'sound together'. From music to physics, resonance is a common thread that evokes a response and, in general, is understood as a quality that makes something personally meaningful and valuable. For Bogart, curiosity is a key personal quality to be nurtured throughout life and that very same curiosity, as an artist, thinker and human being. Creating pathways between performance theory, art history, neuroscience, music, architecture and the visual arts, and consistently forging new thought-paths, the writing draws upon Anne Bogart's own life and artistic journeys to illuminate potent philosophical ideas. Woven with personal anecdotes, stories and reflections, this is a book that will be of interest to any theatre artist and anyone who reflects on the power of the arts, of theatre-making and what it means to be engaged in the artistic process.

From Paris to Stalingrad, the Nazis systematically plundered all manner of art and antiquities. But the first and most valuable treasures they looted were the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire. In "Hitler's Holy Relics, "bestselling author Sidney Kirkpatrick tells the riveting and never-before-told true story of how an American college professor turned Army sleuth recovered these cherished symbols of Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich before they could become a rallying point in the creation of a Fourth and equally unholy Reich.
Anticipating the Allied invasion of Nazi Germany, Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler had ordered a top-secret bunker carved deep into the bedrock beneath Nurnberg castle. Inside the well-guarded chamber was a specially constructed vault that held the plundered treasures Hitler valued the most: the Spear of Destiny (reputed to have been used to pierce Christ's side while he was on the cross) and the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire, ancient artifacts steeped in medieval mysticism and coveted by world rulers from Charlemagne to Napoleon. But as Allied bombers rained devastation upon Nurnberg and the U.S. Seventh Army prepared to invade the city Hitler called "the soul of the Nazi Party," five of the most precious relics, all central to the coronation ceremony of a would-be Holy Roman Emperor, vanished from the vault. Who took them? And why? The mystery remained unsolved for months after the war's end, until the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, ordered Lieutenant Walter Horn, a German-born art historian on leave from U.C. Berkeley, to hunt down the missing treasures.
To accomplish his mission, Horn must revisit the now-rubble-strewn landscape of his youth and delve into the ancient legends and arcane mysticism surrounding the antiquities that Hitler had looted in his quest for world domination. Horn searches for clues in the burnt remains of Himmler's private castle and follows the trail of neo-Nazi "Teutonic Knights" charged with protecting a vast hidden fortune in plundered gold and other treasure. Along the way, Horn has to confront his own demons: how members of his family and former academic colleagues subverted scholarly research to help legitimize Hitler's theories of Aryan supremacy and the Master Race. What Horn discovers on his investigative odyssey is so explosive that his final report will remain secret for decades.
Drawing on unpublished interrogation and intelligence reports, as well as on diaries, letters, journals, and interviews in the United States and Germany, Kirkpatrick tells this riveting and disturbing story with cinematic detail and reveals-- for the first time--how a failed Vienna art student, obsessed with the occult and dreams of his own grandeur, nearly succeeded in creating a Holy Reich rooted in a twisted reinvention of medieval and Church history.

Renowned artist Damien Hirst (b.1965) is reviewed in an exhibition of works spanning twenty years, held at Tate Modern from April to September 2012.The review explores the development of his art from the potent animal vitrines and butterfly composites to the series of extensive spot paintings, where the artist engaged in a complex invigilation of the coded systems that govern daily existence. The exhibition at Tate Modern features 'For The Love of God', the celebrated diamond studded skull, to be centred in the vast Turbine Hall of the converted power station at Bankside.

While there have been monographs on British artist-travellers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there has been no equivalent survey of what the writer, Henry Blackburn, described as 'artistic travel' a hundred years later. By 1900, the 'Grand Tourist' became a 'globe-trotter' equipped with a camera, and despite the development of 'knapsack photography', visual recording by the old media of oil and watercolour on-the-spot sketching remained ever-popular. Kenneth McConkey's exciting new book explores the complex reasons for this in a series of chapters that take the reader from southern Europe to north Africa, the Middle East, India and Japan revealing many artist-travellers whose lives and works are scarcely remembered today. He alerts us to a generation of painters, trained in academies and artists' colonies in Europe that acted as creches for those would go on to explore life and landscape further afi eld. The seeds of wanderlust were sown in student years in places where tuition was conducted in French or German, and models were often Spanish, Italian, or North African. At fi rst the countries of western Europe were explored afresh and cities like Tangier became artists' haunts. Training that prioritized plein air naturalism led to the common belief that a well-schooled young painter should be capable of working anywhere, and in any circumstances. At the height of British Imperial power, and facilitated by engineering and technological advance, the burgeoning tourism and travel industry rippled into the production of specialist goods and services that included a dedicated publishing sector. Essential to this phenomenon, the artist-traveller was often commissioned by London dealers to supply themed exhibitions that coincided with contracts for colour-illustrated books recording those exotic parts of the world that were newly available to the tourist, traveller, explorer, emigrant, or colonial civil servant. These works were not, however, value-neutral, and in some instances, they directly address Orientalism, Imperialism, and the Post-Colonial, in pictures that hybridize, or mimic indigenous ways of life. Behind each there is a range of interesting questions. Does experience live up to expectation? Is the street more desirable than the ancient ruin or sacred site? How were older ideas of the 'picturesque' reborn in an age when 'Grand Tours' once confi ned to Italy, now encompassed the globe? McConkey's wideranging survey hopes to address some of these issues. This richly illustrated book explores key sites visited by artist-travellers and investigates artists including Frank Brangwyn, Mary Cameron, Alfred East, John Lavery, Arthur Melville, Mortimer Menpes, as well as other under-researched British artists. Drawing the strands together, it redefi nes the picturesque, by considering issues of visualization and verisimilitude, dissemination and aesthetic value.

Considered on of the most important religious structures of the twentieth century, the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence was regarded by Matisse himself as his great masterpiece. He dedicated four years to the creation of this convent chapel on the French Riviera, and the result is one of the most remarkable and comprehensive ensemble pieces of twentieth-century art. Every element of the chapel bears the artists touch, from the vivid Mediterranean hues of the stained glass windows to the starkly powerful murals; even the vestments and altar were designed by Matisse. This beautifully illustrated volume captures the chapel in exquisite detail, allowing an unparalleled view of this iconic and sacred space. With stunning new photography that captures the dramatic effects of the changing light in the building throughout the day, this book is the first to present the experience of being within the chapel exactly as Matisse himself envisaged it, while Marie-Therese Pulvenis de Selignys authoritative and insightful text explores the extraordinary story of the chapels creation and the challenges faced by the 77-year-old artist in realising his great vision."

The texts gathered in this volume embrace women artists-only exhibitions, festivals, collective art projects, groups and associations, organised in the long 1970s in Europe (1968-1984). These all-women art initiatives are closely related to developments within the political and politicized women's movement in Europe and America but what emerges is the varied and plural manner of their engagements with feminism(s) alongside their creation of `heterotopias' in relation to specific sites/ politics/ collaborative art practices. This book presents examples from Italy, Spain, UK, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Denmark, Germany (East and West), The Netherlands, France and Sweden. While each chapter is largely devoted to one country, the authors point to how the local and specific political situation in which these initiatives emerged is linked to global tendencies as well as inter-European exchanges. Each chapter of this book thus assesses the impact of travelling views of feminism, by considering connections made between women artists (often when travelling abroad) or their knowledge of art practices from abroad. Distinct and highly varied attitudes towards political activism (from strong engagement to a clearly pronounced distance and even hostility) are shown in each essay and, what is more, they are shown as based on radically different premises about feminism, politics and art.

Pop art has traditionally been the most visible visual art within popular culture because its main transgression is easy to understand: the infiltration of the "low" into the "high". The same cannot be said of contemporary art of the 21st century, where the term "Gaga Aesthetics" characterizes the condition of popular culture being extensively imbricated in high culture, and vice-versa. Taking Adorno and Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry" and Adorno's Aesthetic Theory as key touchstones, this book explores the dialectic of high and low that forms the foundation of Adornian aesthetics and the extent to which it still applied, and the extent to which it has radically shifted, thereby 'upending tradition'. In the tradition of philosophical aesthetics that Adorno began with Lukacs, this explores the ever-urgent notion that high culture has become deeply enmeshed with popular culture. This is "Gaga Aesthetics": aesthetics that no longer follows clear fields of activity, where "fine art" is but one area of critical activity. Indeed, Adorno's concepts of alienation and the tragic, which inform his reading of the modernist experiment, are now no longer confined to art. Rather, stirring examples can be found in phenomena such as fashion and music video. In addition to dealing with Lady Gaga herself, this book traverses examples ranging from Madonna's Madam X to Moschino and Vetements, to deliberate on the strategies of subversion in the culture industry.

Phenomenal Difference grants new attention to contemporary black British art, exploring its critical and social significance through attention to embodied experience, affectivity, the senses and perception. Featuring attention to works by the following artists: Said Adrus, Zarina Bhimji, Sonia Boyce, Vanley Burke, Chila Burman, Mona Hatoum, Bhajan Hunjan, Permindar Kaur, Sonia Khurana, Juginder Lamba, Manjeet Lamba, Hew Locke, Yeu-Lai Mo, Henna Nadeem, Kori Newkirk, Johannes Phokela, Keith Piper, Shanti Thomas, Aubrey Williams, Mario Ybarra Jr. Much before scholars in the arts and humanities took their recent 'ontological turn' toward the new materialism, black British art had begun to expose cultural criticism's overreliance on the concepts of textuality, representation, identity and difference. Illuminating that original field of aesthetics and creativity, this book shows how black British artworks themselves can become the basis for an engaged and widely-reaching philosophy. Numerous extended descriptive studies of artworks spell out the affective and critical relations that pertain between individual works, their viewers and the world at hand: intimate, physically-involving and visceral relations that are brought into being through a wide range of phenomena including performance, photography, installation, photomontage and digital practice. Whether they subsist through movement, or in time, through gesture, or illusion, black British art is always an arresting nexus of making, feeling and thought. It celebrates particular philosophical interest in: - the use of art as a place for remembering the personal or collective past; - the fundamental 'equivalence' of texture and colour, and their instances of 'rupture'; - figural presence, perceptual reversibility and the agency of objects; - the grounded materialities of mediation; - and the interconnections between art, politics and emancipation. Drawing first hand on the founding, historical texts of early and mid-twentieth century phenomenology (Heidegger; Merleau-Ponty), and current advances in art history, curating and visual anthropology, the author transposes black British art into a freshly expanded and diversified intellectual field. What emerges is a vivid understanding of phenomenal difference: the profoundly material processes of interworking philosophical knowledge and political strategy at the site of black British art.

A Financial Times Book of the Year 2022 A landmark volume presenting the history of Indian art across the subcontinent and South Asia from the late 19th century to the present day, published in association with Art Alive. Recent decades have seen significant growth in the interest, acquisition and exhibition of modern Indian and South Asian art and artists by major international museums. This essential textbook, primarily aimed at students, presents an engaging, informative history of modern art from the subcontinent as seen through the eyes of prominent Indian academics. Illustrated throughout with strong narrative content, key experts contribute multiple perspectives on modernism, modernity and plurality, and expansive ideas about contemporary art practices. A range of subjects and topics feature including Group 1890, the Madras Art Movement, Regional Modern and Dalit art, as well as artists such as Amrita Sher-Gil and Raqs Media Collective. This book also has sections devoted to the art of Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and other parts of South Asia. Together with lively academic discussions and a selection of absorbing interviews with artists, this title meets a clear demand for a comprehensive and authoritative sourcebook on modern, postmodern and contemporary Indian art. It is the definitive reference for anyone with an interest in Indian art and non-Western art histories. Published in association with Art Alive

Celebrated children's book illustrator Fritz Wegner (b.Vienna 15th September 1924, d. London 15th March 2015,). Early work included assignments for Lilliput, Dorothy L.Sayers and Enid Blyton, with book covers for Raymond Chandler and J.D.Salinger. In the late 1950s he moved away from advertising and commercial art to focus on children's literature. Significant titles include The Hamish Hamilton Book of Princes and Princesses (1963), The Marvellous Adventures and Travels of Baron Munchausen (1967), Fatipuffs and Thinifers (Andre Maurois), to books by Alan Ahlberg, Michael Rosen and Brian Alderson in the 1980s and '90s. He also created over thirty stamp designs for the Royal Mail.The Fritz Wegner Archive documents phases of his work from the 1950s to the 2000s, and includes comprehensive images scanned from the originals kept ion seventeen folders in his studio. The publication is authorised by executors of the estate of the artist.