This collection of new feminist essays represents the work of young critics researching and teaching in British Universities. Aiming to set the agenda for feminist criticism in the nineties, the essays debate themes crucial to the development of feminist thought: among them, the problems of gendered knowledge and the implications of accounts of gendered language, cultural restraints on the representation of sexuality, women's agency, cultural and political change, a feminist aesthetics and new readings of race and class. This variety is given coherence by a unity of aim - to forge new feminist discourses by addressing conceptual and cultural questions central to problems of gender and sexual difference. The topics of discussion range from matrilinear thought to seventeenth-century prophecy; the poetry of Amelia Lanyer to Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs; from Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf to eighteenth-century colonial painting of the South Pacific; from medieval romance to feminist epistemology. The essays utilise and question the disciplines of literary criticism, art history, photography, psychoanalysis, Marxist history and post-structuralist theory.

The Art of Love tells the stories of the most fascinating couples of the art world - uncovering the passionate, challenging and loving relationships behind some the world's greatest works of art. Kate Bryan (broadcaster, writer and curator) delves into the complex world of artistic relationships, exploring the nuanced ways in which art and love can share the same space. When two married artists collaborate, do they ever get a moment off? What happens when love fades and two artists, known by one moniker, part? When a couple work independently, how do they manage jealousy and competition? In this book, you'll meet love in all its glorious and complicated forms, including unlikely couples with conflicting philosophies (Yayoi Kusama & Joseph Cornell); unconventional marriages that prove love has many guises (Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera); couples who suffered from intense, public burnout (Marina Abramovic & Ulay); soul mates who found safety in each other (Ethel Mars & Maud Hunt Squire); and bitter rivalries that weren't built to last (Jasper Johns & Robert Rauschenberg). Through evocative stories and beautiful illustrations, Kate tells of the formation, and sometimes breakdown, of each romance - documenting their highs and lows and revealing just how powerful love can be in the creative process. Whether long-lasting, peaceful collaborations, or short-lived tumultuous affairs, The Art of Love, opens the door on some of the greatest love stories of the twentieth century.

The art of Francis Bacon (1909-1992) epitomises the angst at the heart of the modern human condition. His dramatic images of screaming figures and distorted anatomies are painted with a richly gestural technique, alluding to such old masters as Titian, Velazquez and Rembrandt. Displaying repressed and raw emotion, his body of work includes portraits of Lucian Freud and John Deakin."

The new, updated edition of the Skira best-seller on twentieth-century art. This handy manual is for those who wish to understand what art was in the last century and what it represents today. The book, whose structure is essential and synthetic, aims to divulge the pleasure of art to those who have never delved beyond its surface, and above all to describe how it has become spectacle and performance in recent years. Following an analysis of the theories and poetics that tempestuously traversed the historical avant-gardes and the neo-avant-gardes of the twentieth century and contributed to their extraordinary vitality, the author focuses on and explains the principal artistic phenomena that, starting in 1980, marked the period defined as post-modern, which was characterised by performance and a system of economic-financial art. The last chapter describes the arrival of postmodern up to its possible decline, marked by the social events of 2007 that, by abandoning the special effects of immateriality, has headed in a direction that is more tangible, worldly and concrete.

An insightful study of the progressive politics animating a great work of modernist mural painting In 1936 the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project commissioned Stuart Davis (1892-1964) to paint a mural for the Williamsburg Houses, a New York City housing project. Though the mural, Swing Landscape, was never installed in its intended location, it survives as an impressive testament to Davis's energetic, colorful brand of abstraction and the progressive politics that animated it. This study explores the painting, one of the greatest of twentieth-century America and arguably Davis's most ambitious work. This book challenges the prevailing tendency to separate Davis's leftist activism from his art and contextualizes Swing Landscape within 1930s abstract mural painting in New York, emphasizing the politics of abstraction. The book also offers the first comprehensive look at the Williamsburg mural commission, including works by Willem de Kooning, Ilya Bolotowsky, and others. The result is an indispensable resource on interwar modernism, mural painting, and urban development.

Nicolas Eekman (1889-1973) is the heir of the great creators of his native Flanders, from Jerome Bosh to James Ensor, as well as one of the representatives of the School of Paris. Born in Brussels where he studied architecture, he turned to painting and exhibited for a few years in Holland before settling in Paris in 1921. Close to his compatriot Mondrian with whom he exhibited at the Jeanne Bucher gallery (1928), he is also closely linked to the artists Jean Lurcat, Marcoussis, Max Jacob, Lipchitz, and later with Moise Kisling and Frans Masereel. Influenced by Cubism to which he devoted a few outstanding years, he gradually returned, in the 1930s, to realism and then from the 1950s turned to the fantastic, reviving the Flemish painting of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Author of an abundant painted work, he is also a renowned draftsman, illustrator and engraver whose works have been collected by numerous print studios (Brussels, Hanover, Berlin, Hamburg, Basel, Budapest). Text in English and French.

As Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals made their way into Western European and Anglo-American cultural centers, they encountered a society obsessed with decadence. An avant-garde movement characterized by self-consciously artificial art and literature, philosophic pessimism, and an interest in nonnormative sexualities, decadence was also a smear, whereby Jews were viewed as the source of social and cultural decline. In The Jewish Decadence, Jonathan Freedman argues that Jewish engagement with decadence played a major role in the emergence of modernism and the making of Jewish culture from the 1870s to the present. The first to tell this sweeping story, Freedman demonstrates the centrality of decadence to the aesthetics of modernity and its inextricability from Jewishness. Freedman recounts a series of diverse and surprising episodes that he insists do not belong solely to the past, but instead reveal that the identification of Jewishness with decadence persists today.

A major new look at the work of one of America's foremost self-taught artists Bill Traylor (ca. 1853-1949) came to art-making on his own and found his creative voice without guidance; today he is remembered as a renowned American artist. Traylor was born into slavery on an Alabama plantation, and his experiences spanned multiple worlds-black and white, rural and urban, old and new-as well as the crucibles that indelibly shaped America-the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration. Between Worlds presents an unparalleled look at the work of this enigmatic and dazzling artist, who blended common imagery with arcane symbolism, narration with abstraction, and personal vision with the beliefs and folkways of his time. Traylor was about twelve when the Civil War ended. After six more decades of farm labor, he moved, aging and alone, into segregated Montgomery. In the last years of his life, he drew and painted works depicting plantation memories and the rising world of African American culture. Upon his death he left behind over a thousand pieces of art. Between Worlds convenes 205 of his most powerful creations, including a number that have been previously unpublished. This beautiful and carefully researched book assesses Traylor's biography and stylistic development, and for the first time interprets his scenes as ongoing narratives, conveying enduring, interrelated themes. Between Worlds reveals one man's visual record of African American life as a window into the overarching story of his nation. Published in association with the Smithsonian American Art Museum

First published in 1996, this irreplaceable resource has now been updated, revised, and expanded by Kristine Stiles to represent thirty countries and more than one hundred new artists. Stiles has added forty images and a diverse roster of artists, including many who have emerged since the 1980s, such as Julie Mehretu, Carrie Mae Weems, Damien Hirst, Shirin Neshat, Cai Guo-Qian, Olafur Eliasson, Matthew Barney, and Takashi Murakami. The writings, which as before take the form of artists' statements, interviews, and essays, make vivid each artist's aesthetic approach and capture the flavor and intent of his or her work. The internationalism evident in this revised edition reflects the growing interest in the vitality of contemporary art throughout the world from the U.S. and Europe to the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Australia.

Shizuko Yoshikawa (born 1934 in Japan, based in Switzerland) was one of the first and few Japanese students at the Ulm Hochschule fur Gestaltung, known as the postwar "Bauhaus." She later married the renowned designer Josef Muller-Brockmann (1914-1996), a pioneer of Swiss Graphic Design, and moved to Switzerland, where she became an artist and a member of the second generation of concrete art. Amongst the very few women belonging to this art movement, she takes a special position due to her Japanese origins and education. Her work combines the rational concepts of European modern art with the poetry and ease of the intuitional Japanese Zen tradition.

Henry Moore has influenced the history of twentieth - century sculpture more decisively than anyone else. He was one of the first contemporary sculptors to realise his ideas in the public space throughout the world. His oeuvre was a lasting source of inspiration for an entire generation of artists - from Hans Arp, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso to the younger generation of German sculptors. Henry Moore (1898 - 1 986), known as the "Picasso of Sculpture", is regarded as one of the most important sculptors of the twentieth century and the epitome of the modern artist. Typical of his work is the interrelationship between nature and abstraction. He discovered the "voi ds", so - called openings and holes which heighten the sculptural, three - dimensional effect of his works. With this new approach Moore exercised a strong influence on younger sculptors, who gained decisive impulses from his sculptures. This volume presents M oore as the dominant personality of modern sculpture in collaboration with the members of the younger generation of artists.

A fascinating history of Irishmen, woven through the clothes they wear. Taking the clothes they wore as a starting point, Paul Galvin skilfully weaves together a collection of stories of Irish men who defined the culture and mood of their time. In 'Push' he tells the story of the legendary Walker Brothers - cyclists and soldiers who pedalled through a storm for Ireland at the 1912 Stockholm Games. In 'Born Mad', discover another side to Samuel Beckett - sartor and prolific sportsman who had knockout power as a champion boxer in school. In 'Boland' we learn about Harry Boland's background as a trained tailor, and in 'Jack' we encounter Jack B. Yeats at the Olympic Games in Paris. These are just some of men who have inspired Paul's own fashion collections and whom he writes about here in a fascinating collection that shines a light on how history is woven into the clothes Irishmen wear.

The fashion show and its spaces are sites of otherness, representing everything from rebellion and excess through to political and social activism. This conceptual and stylistic variety is reflected in the spaces they occupy, whether they are staged in an industrial warehouse, on a city street, or out in the open landscape. Staging Fashion is the first collection of essays about the presentation and staging of fashion in runway shows in the period from the 1960s to the 2010s. It offers a fresh perspective on the many collaborations between artists, architects and interior designers to reinforce their interdisciplinary links. Fashion, architecture and interiors share many elements, including design, history, material culture, aesthetics and trends. The research and ideas underpinning Staging Fashion address how fashion and the spatial fields have collaborated in the creation of the space of the fashion show. The 15 essays are written by fashion, interior, architecture and design scholars focusing on the presentation of fashion within the runway space, from avant-garde practices and collaboration with artists, to the most spectacular and commercial shows of recent years, from Prada to Chanel.

The pioneering work of Johann Winckelmann (1717-1768) identified a homoerotic appreciation of male beauty in classical Greek sculpture, a fascination that had endured in Western art since the Greeks. Yet after Winckelmann, the value (even the possibility) of art's queer beauty was often denied. Several theorists, notably the philosopher Immanuel Kant, broke sexual attraction and aesthetic appreciation into separate or dueling domains. In turn, sexual desire and aesthetic pleasure had to be profoundly rethought by later writers.

Whitney Davis follows how such innovative thinkers as John Addington Symonds, Michel Foucault, and Richard Wollheim rejoined these two domains, reclaiming earlier insights about the mutual implication of sexuality and aesthetics. Addressing texts by Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Sigmund Freud, among many others, Davis criticizes modern approaches, such as Kantian idealism, Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and analytic aesthetics, for either reducing aesthetics to a question of sexuality or for removing sexuality from the aesthetic field altogether. Despite these schematic reductions, sexuality always returns to aesthetics, and aesthetic considerations always recur in sexuality. Davis particularly emphasizes the way in which philosophies of art since the late eighteenth century have responded to nonstandard sexuality, especially homoeroticism, and how theories of nonstandard sexuality have drawn on aesthetics in significant ways.

Many imaginative and penetrating critics have wrestled productively, though often inconclusively and "against themselves," with the aesthetic making of sexual life and new forms of art made from reconstituted sexualities. Through a critique that confronts history, philosophy, science, psychology, and dominant theories of art and sexuality, Davis challenges privileged types of sexual and aesthetic creation imagined in modern culture-and assumed today.

Glamour is one of the most tantalizing and bewitching aspects of contemporary culture - but also one of the most elusive. The aura of celebrity, the style of the fashion world, the vanity of the rich and beautiful, and the publicity-driven rites of cafe society are all imbued with its irresistible magnetism. But what exactly is glamour? Where does it come from? How old is it? And can anyone quite capture its magic? Stephen Gundle answers all these questions and more in this first ever history of the phenomenon, from Paris in the tumultuous final decades of the eighteenth century through to Hollywood, New York, and Monte Carlo in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from Napoleon to Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe, from Beau Brummell to Gianni Versace. Throughout, the book captures the excitement and sex appeal of glamour while exposing its mechanisms and exploring its sleazy and sometimes tragic underside. As Gundle shows, while glamour is exciting and magnetic, its promise is ultimately an illusion that can only ever be partially fulfilled.

This book is based on the artwork of Sue Jane Taylor. She is no stranger to extreme working environments, having worked for over thirty years recording the lives of workers in the North Sea oil industry on sites such as Piper Alpha, Piper B, Forties platforms and recently Murchison in the Northern Seas. Her work now extends to the offshore renewable energy industry. The book brings a unique perspective to the relationship between art, environment and industry while revealing a relatively alien way of life on board a North Sea oil platform. Among other themes it will consider the future of energy in Scotland. The book has an introductory essay by Elsa Cox, Senior Curator of Technology at National Museums Scotland, illustrated by relevant objects from the collections in the National Museum. This is followed by Sue Jane Taylor's artwork, with extended captions.

Richly illustrated with images of her art and views of the two homes she designed and furnished in New Mexico, the book also includes never before published photographs of O'Keeffe's clothes. The author has attributed some of the most exquisite of these garments to O'Keeffe, a skilled seamstress who understood fabric and design, and who has become an icon in today's fashion world as much for her personal style as for her art. As one of her friends stated, O'Keeffe "never allowed her life to be one thing and her painting another." This fresh and carefully researched study brings O'Keeffe's style to life, illuminating how this beloved American artist purposefully proclaimed her modernity in the way she dressed and posed for photographers, from Alfred Stieglitz to Bruce Weber. This beautiful book accompanies the first museum exhibition to bring together photographs, clothes, and art to explore O'Keeffe's unified modernist aesthetic.Published in association with the Brooklyn Museum

This is the third of three text books, published in association with the Open University, which offer an innovatory exploration of art and visual culture. Through carefully chosen themes and topics rather than through a general survey, the volumes approach the process of looking at works of art in terms of their audiences, functions and cross-cultural contexts. While focused on painting, sculpture and architecture, it also explores a wide range of visual culture in a variety of media and methods. "1850-2010: Modernity to Globalisation" includes essays which engage directly with topical issues around art and gender, globalisation, cultural difference and curating, as well as explorations of key canonical artists and movements and of some less well-documented work of contemporary artists.

Engraved shell-cases, bullet-crucifixes, letter openers and cigarette lighters made of shrapnel and cartridges, miniature aeroplanes and tanks, talismanic jewellery, embroidery, objects carved from stone, bone and wood - all of these things are trench art, the misleading name given to the dazzling array of objects made from the waste of war, in particular the Great War of 1914-1918 and the inter-war years. And they are the subject of Nicholas Saunders's pioneering study which is now republished in a revised edition in paperback. He reveals the lost world of trench art, for every piece relates to the story of the momentous experience of its maker - whether front-line soldier, prisoner of war, or civilian refugee. The objects resonate with the alternating terror and boredom of war, and those created by the prisoners symbolize their struggle for survival in the camps. Many of these items were poignant souvenirs bought by battlefield pilgrims between 1919 and 1939 and kept brightly polished on mantelpieces, often for a lifetime. Nicholas Saunders investigates their origins and how they were made, exploring their personal meaning and cultural significance. He also offers an important categorization of types which will be a useful guide for collectors.

'Inspired, innovative, remarkable' Independent 'Spurling has done better than anyone else at uncovering intimate information about Matisse' Guardian The abridged, one-volume edition of Hilary Spurling's critically acclaimed biography of Henri Matisse, one of the greatest artistic geniuses of the twentieth century Henri Matisse was one of the most important and beloved artists of the twentieth century, rivalled only by his friend and competitor Pablo Picasso. Hilary Spurling's The Unknown Matisse and Matisse the Master were together heralded as the definitive biography of the artist, and Matisse the Master went on to win the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 2005. This essential abridged edition of the Life reveals the origins of Matisse's astonishing talent, provides a unique insight into his life and work, and, by documenting the difficult path he took alone, clearly places him at the front rank of those who made art modern.

A must-have for the core contemporary art audience: Robert Storr's singular and long-awaited book is unprecedented in treating the full range of Louise Bourgeois's artistic achievement. In a career spanning nearly 75 years, Louise Bourgeois created a vast body of work that enriched the formal language of modern art while it expressed her intense inner struggles with unprecedented candor and unpredictable invention. Her solo 1982 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art launched an extraordinarily productive late career, making her a much-honored and vivid presence on the international art scene until her death in 2010 at the age of 98. Trained as a painter and printmaker, Bourgeois embraced sculpture as her primary medium and experimented with a range of materials over the years, including marble, plaster, bronze, wood, and latex. Bourgeois contributed significantly to Surrealism, Postminimalist, and installation art, but her work always remained fiercely independent of style or movement. With more than 1000 illustrations, Intimate Geometries: The Art and Life of Louise Bourgeois comprehensively surveys her immense oeuvre in unmatched depth. Writing from a uniquely intimate perspective, as a close personal friend of Bourgeois, and drawing on decades of research, Robert Storr critically evaluates her achievements and reveals the complexity and passion of one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.