Based on original archival research, Early Cinema, Modernity and Visual Culture: The Imaginary of the Balkans is the first study on early cinema in the region from a transnational and cross-cultural perspective. It investigates how the unique geopolitical positioning of the Balkan space and its multiculturality influenced and shaped visual culture and cinema. Countering Eurocentric modernity paradigms and reframing hierarchical relations between centres and peripheries, this book adopts an alternative methodology for interstitial spaces. By deploying the notion of the haptic, it establishes new connections between moving image artefacts and print media, early film practitioners, the socio-political context and cultural responses to the new visual medium.

Volume 4 of Visual Century: South African Art in Context 1907-1948 is part of a four-volume publication that reappraises South African visual art of the twentieth century from a postapartheid perspective. The years 1990 to 2007 are covered in Volume 4, edited by Thembinkosi Goniwe, Mario Pissarra and Mandisi Majavu. The end of the Cold War and subsequent emergence of globalisation, along with the advent of democracy in South Africa introduced new social and political orders, with profound implications for South African artists. Concurrently, the persistence of economic inequalities and conflicts within and beyond national borders constantly mitigated against an unbridled celebration of `freedom'. The essays in this volume critically address some of the most notable developments and visible trends in postapartheid South African art. These include South Africa's entry into the international art community, its struggle to address its past, and artists' persistent and often provocative preoccupations with individual and collective identity. The widespread and often unsettling representation of human bodies, as well as animal forms, along with the steady increase in use of new technologies and the development of new forms of public art are also discussed. While much of the art of the period is open-ended and non-didactic, the persistence of engagement with socially responsive themes calls into question the reductive binary between `resistance' and post-apartheid art that has come to dominate accounts of `before' and `after'.

A multitude of literary and cinematic works were spawned by the Vietnam war, but this is a unique book, combining moving prose with powerful illustrations created by combat artists in the U.S. military. Dr. Noble has assembled a remarkable collection of 153 reproductions printed in black and white, arranged with oral histories, letters and other commentaries to give the reader a more intimate understanding of the combat soldier who served in Vietnam and what he had to endure. Forgotten Warriors is not intended to argue the merits of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. Rather, through the visual impact of the illustrations, the soldiers themselves express what the Vietnam experience was like in a way that is different and more profound than perhaps any other work on the subject.

The main focus of the book is on the way artists saw the world of the grunt: patrols, life in the rear, fighting the terrain and weather, tests of endurance, the machines of war and the effects of combat and its aftermath. The reader is also given a sense of how some writers and artists felt about the country and the people of South Vietnam. To date, our perceptions of the Vietnam war have been influenced largely by movies, television and novels. Recognizing this, Dr. Noble enlisted Professor William J. Palmer, a noted authority on the media and their reportage fo the war, to provide an essay that allows the reader to compare his or her past impressions with the art works contained in this book. A moving collection, "Forgotten WarriorS" offers the truest picture of the Vietnam war in human terms.

Offering a fresh perspective on the making of the American nation, Forging America: New Lands and High Culture shows how the various "new" portions of the country--the Northeastern wilderness, the West, and later the South and Midwest--were assimilated into the national and intellectual consciousness of the young nation. Specifically, author David P. DeVenney examines the ways in which the arts helped achieve this assimilation, primarily through music and painting, but also through literature and architecture. The search for "American-ness" in the arts, for what it meant to be an American painter, composer, or writer, occupied artists for the entire 19th century and for the first part of the 20th. Intellectuals viewed America in the 1800s as a new Eden, a primordial wilderness, and viewed themselves as chosen by God to begin a new chapter in the development of the world. This Romantic idea included exploring and taming the vast regions of the country and making their beauties accessible to the nation's Eastern population centers, filtering notions of the West through the arts and arriving at an idyllic vision absent any signs of danger or exoticism. DeVenney writes for the educated nonspecialist as well as the scholar, making Forging America a fascinating and useful tool for understanding a key way in which America became America.

Offering a wealth of perspectives on African modern and Modernist art from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, this new Companion features essays by African, European, and North American authors who assess the work of individual artists as well as exploring broader themes such as discoveries of new technologies and globalization. * A pioneering continent-based assessment of modern art and modernity across Africa * Includes original and previously unpublished fieldwork-based material * Features new and complex theoretical arguments about the nature of modernity and Modernism * Addresses a widely acknowledged gap in the literature on African Art

Volume 3 of Visual Century: South African Art in Context 1907-1948 is part of a four-volume publication that reappraises South African visual art of the twentieth century from a postapartheid perspective. Edited by Mario Pissarra, the volume looks at the years 1973 to 1992. The forw0rd by Rashied Araeen titled `Art and Human Struggle', sets the theme for this period. Bracketed by porous transitional moments in the early 1970s and 1990s, this volume covers a period characterised by a deepening of the struggle for democracy, a time when historical preoccupations with race were increasingly complemented with growing discourses on class and gender. It was a time when unprecedented internal and external pressure resulted in heightened introspection and action in and through the visual arts. The essays address a multiplicity of ways in which artists responded directly and indirectly to the challenges of this period, mostly as individuals but also through organisations. Resistance and complicity, and the spaces between, found expression in the use of everyday themes, biblical sources, ethnically derived themes, subtle and extreme forms of humour, as well as through representations of conflict. This is a period when challenging art was produced in community arts centres, universities and in public places, a time when the cultural boycott simultaneously united and polarised artists, and exiles mediated the ambivalences of `home'.

CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI

Constantin Brancusi is one of the greatest of all sculptors, and a key sculptor of the modern era, with Auguste Rodin and Pablo Picasso. Brancusi's influence can be seen in a wide range of Western sculptors, including Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Henry Moore, Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Minimalists and land artists.

This new book studies the religious and mythical dimensions of Constantin Brancusi's distinctive scultpural forms, the 'eggs', 'fishes', 'heads' and 'columns'. His central quest was for the 'essence of things', which resulted in purifying a form until only the essence was left.

It was Constantin Brancusi's project to strip away the detritus that had accumulated around sculpture, Henry Moore said, and to offer the pure, simple shape. What Brancusi did was 'to concentrate on very simple shapes, to keep his sculpture, as it were, one-cylindered, to refine and polish a single shape to a degree almost too precious.'

As well as being a sculptor, Constantin Brancusi was also an accomplished photographer. Quite a few artists (not all of them sculptors) have expressed for Brancusi's photographs, and the way he would set up his sculptures inhis studio and photograph them at particular times of the day, when the lightingwas just right. They are early examples of installation art (and some of the best, too). Andy Goldsworthy said he admired how Brancusi created the right conditions in his studio so that his work 'comes alive at a particular time of the day as the light momentarily touches it'. For Goldsworthy, Brancusi's works were at their best when they were arranged by the sculptor in his studio and photographed. Somehow, it wasn't quite the same when they were displayed in modern art museums (such as the Pompidou Centre in Paris or the Museum of Modern Art in Gotham, which have important Brancusi pieces).

Fully illustrated, including many photos of Brancusi's studio in Paris, Brancusi's works in museums in New York, Washington and L.A., and the art of his contemporaries.

With bibliography and notes. ISBN 9781861713391. 180 pages.

This new (4th) edition has been revised.

www.crmoon.com

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The art of Constantin Brancusi never ceases to fascinate and inspire, and it always seems fresh, as if it had been created fives minutes ago, no matter how many times you look at it. When you encounter a Brancusi sculpture in a museum, it pops out, clear and direct; there is simply nothing else like Brancusi's art in history. I have tried to explore the key elements of Brancusi's art, and the important events in his development as a sculptor. I have also included comparisons with other artists of the period, and also how Brancusi's art has influenced many subsequent artists.

Sometimes considered to be America's first indigenous modernist art style, Precisionism, a movement principally of the 1920s and 1930s, concentrated on depicting the urban and industrial landscape, emphasizing the formal geometrical qualities of solid mass and clean lines and rendering these vistas with simplified, sharp-edged shapes and smooth, unmodulated application of pigment, void of extraneous details and impersonal in tone. This annotated bibliography deals with Precisionism and its ten leading practitioners: George Ault, Peter Blume, Ralston Crawford, Charles Demuth, Preston Dickinson, O. Louis Guglielmi, Louis Lozowick, Morton L. Schamberg, Charles Sheeler, and Niles Spencer. Each artist's chapter begins with a biographical sketch and includes sections for Writings, Statements, and Interviews; Monographs and Exhibition Catalogues; Articles and Essays; Exhibition Reviews; Book Reviews; Dissertations and Theses; Reference Sources; and Archival Sources. A special section at the end of each chapter lists annotated reproductions of the artist's work appearing in any of approximately 225 source volumes. Coverage extends to painting, drawings, lithographs, and photographs. An opening chapter, also divided by types of materials, covers Precisionism in general and cites material in which two or more of the ten artists are discussed. A keyword index provides full citations for the source volumes. Three other indexes facilitate access by author, short-title of exhibition catalogues, and subjects. The only annotated bibliography on Precisionism, this volume will be a valuable aid to research on a variety of subjects relating to modern American art.

This guide summarizes and evaluates the available literature concerning the Dutch artistic movement De Stijl, which was headed by art critic and painter Theo van Doesburg and was comprised of such architects and artists as J.J.P. Oud, Piet Mondrian, Rovbert van 't Hoff and Georges Vantongerloo. The loose-knit group took its name from the avant garde journal they first published in October 1917: "De Stijl" (The Style). Although it was limited to Holland, De Stijl promoted ideas about a universal art, combining tenets of theosophy, an holistic view of the oneness of all things, including arts and culture, and socialism. This bibliography examines publications that deal with the movement and with affiliated groups and individual members.

Art historians and scholars of modern and of Dutch art and architecture will appreciate this comprehensive tool for further research. Within individual sections for the movement and for its members, entries are chronologically arranged with separate categories for books, monographs and catalogs, and periodicals. A final section analyzes and presents the contents of the journal "De Stijl."

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp sent out a 'telegram' in the guise of a urinal signed R. Mutt. When it arrived at its destination a good forty years later it was both celebrated and vilified as proclaiming that anything could be art; from that point on, the whole Western art world reconfigured itself as 'post-Duchamp'. This book offers a reading of Duchamp's telegram that sheds new light onto its first reception, corrects some historical mistakes and reveals that Duchamp's urinal in fact heralds the demise of the fine arts system and the advent of what Thierry de Duve calls the 'Art-in-General' system. Further, the author shows that this new system does not date from the 1960s but rather from the 1880s. Duchamp was neither its author nor its agent, but rather its brilliant messenger.

Gothic effigy brings together for the first time the multifarious visual motifs and media associated with Gothic, many of which have never received serious study before. This guide is the most comprehensive work in its field, a study aid that draws links between a considerable array of Gothic visual works and artifacts, from the work of Salvator Rosa and the first illustrations of Gothic Blue Books to the latest Gothic painters and graphic artists. Currently popular areas such as Gothic fashion, gaming, T.V. and film are considered, as well as the ghostly images of magic lantern shows. This groundbreaking study will serve as an invaluable reference and research book. In its wide range and closely detailed descriptions, it will be very attractive for students, academics, collectors, fans of popular Gothic culture and general readers. -- .

The most influential 20th century architects espousing modernism are brought together in critical discussion and independent profiles. This is accomplished through a short but discriminating examination of each architect's design work, an essay outlining the historical course and events that confirms his or her vital position, and a substantial bibliography at the completion of each profile. This sourcebook examines the life and creative activities of such founding architects as Wright, Eisenman, Van der Rohe, and Kahn, as well as their disciples. This volume will be of interest to social and cultural historians, scholars, students of all ages, architects, and the appreciative lay audience.

The architects and or firms chosen for the sourcebook were selected as a result of many years of research that required extensive reading of materials by respected experts. From such research, the editors were able to determine the individuals or groups who have been most influential in charting the course of a Westernized modern architecture. From evidence of their productive activities--proof in timber--there is a consensus that each made a unique contribution. The nature and measure of the contribution is discussed within each profile. Those whose reputations are based on paper only, with few buildings to prove their worth, are not included. The editors believe that architecture is an experiential art: all the senses must participate, and that requires the actual built product.

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.

Modern Art: A Critical Introduction traces the historical and contemporary contexts for understanding modern art movements, and the theories which influenced and attempted to explain them. This approach forgoes the chronological march of art movements and isms in favour of looking at the ways in which art has been understood. It investigates the main developments in art interpretation from the same period, from Kant to post-structuralism, and draws examples from a wide range of art genres including painting, sculpture, photography, installation and performance art. The book includes detailed discussions of visual art practices both inside and outside the museum. This new edition has been restructured to make the key themes as accessible as possible and updated to include many more recent examples of art practice . An expanded glossary and margin notes also provide definitions of the range of terms used within theoretical discussion and critical reference. Individual chapters explore key themes of the modern era, such as the relationship between artists and galleries, the politics of representation, the changing nature of self-expression, the public monument, nature and the urban,

For two centuries, Gesamtkunstwerk-the ideal of the "total work of art"-has exerted a powerful influence over artistic discourse and practice, spurring new forms of collaboration and provoking debates over the political instrumentalization of art. Despite its popular conflation with the work of Richard Wagner, Gesamtkunstwerk's lineage and legacies extend well beyond German Romanticism, as this wide-ranging collection demonstrates. In eleven compact chapters, scholars from a variety of disciplines trace the idea's evolution in German-speaking Europe, from its foundations in the early nineteenth century to its manifold articulations and reimaginings in the twentieth century and beyond, providing an uncommonly broad perspective on a distinctly modern cultural form.

A new understanding of Francis Bacon’s art and motivations.

The second in a series of books that seeks to illuminate Francis Bacon’s art and motivations, and to open up fresh and stimulating ways of understanding his paintings.

Francis Bacon is one of the most important artists of the 20th century. His works continue to puzzle and unnerve viewers, raising complex questions about their meaning. Over recent decades, two theoretical approaches to Bacon’s work have come to hold sway: firstly, that Bacon is an existentialist painter, depicting an absurd and godless world; and secondly, that he is an anti-representational painter, whose primary aim is to bring his work directly onto the spectator’s ‘nervous system’.

Francis Bacon: Painting, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis brings together some of today’s leading philosophers and psychoanalytic critics to go beyond established readings of Bacon and to open up radically new ways of thinking about his art. The essays bring Bacon into dialogue with figures such as Aristotle, Hegel, Freud, Lacan, Adorno and Heidegger, as well as situating his work in the broader contexts of modernism and modernity. The result is a timely and thought-provoking collection that will be essential reading for anyone interested in Bacon, modern art and contemporary aesthetics.

In this collection of essays, a range of scholars from different disciplines look through the prism of technology at the much-debated notion of cultural memory, analyzing how the past is shaped or unsettled by cultural texts including visual art, literature, cinema, photographs and souvenirs.

Born in Berlin in 1931 to Jewish parents, the eight-year-old Auerbach was sent to England in 1939 to escape the Nazi regime. His parents stayed behind and died in a concentration camp in 1943. Now in his eighties, Auerbach is still producing his distinctly sculptural paintings of friends, family and surroundings in north London, where he has made his home since the war. The art historian and curator Catherine Lampert has had unique access to the artist since 1978 when she first became one of his sitters. With an emphasis on Auerbach's own words, culled from her conversations with him and archival interviews, she provides a rare insight into his professional life, working methods and philosophy. Auerbach also reflects on the places, people and inspirations that have shaped his life. These include his experiences as a refugee child, finding his way in the London art world of the 1950s and 1960s, his friendships with Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Leon Kossoff, among many others, and his approaches to looking and painting throughout his career. For anyone interested in how an artist approaches his craft or his method of capturing reality this is essential reading.

Futurism and early cinema shared a fascination with dynamic movement and speed, presenting both as harbingers of an emerging new way of life and new aesthetic criteria. And the Futurists quickly latched on to cinema as a device with great potential to manipulate our perceptions in order to create a new world. In the edited collection Futurist Cinema, Rossella Catanese explores that conjunction, bringing in avant-garde artists and their manifestos to show how painters and other artists turned to cinema as a model for overcoming the inherently static nature of painting in order to rethink it for a new era.