"Theorizing Modernism" is a re-reading of the modernist tradition in the visual arts that provides a unique view of the history of modern art and art criticism.

Concentrating on canonical critical texts and images, the book examines modern art through a rhetoric of representation rather than through formalist criticism or the history of the avant-garde.

Roy Cross RSMA GAvA began work as an illustrator in Fairey Aviation during World War II. Over the next thirty years, he progressed from line illustration, via colour artwork, to top-class advertising art for the aircraft industry and other companies, including Airfix, for whom he produced many hundreds of artworks to adorn model kit boxes over a ten-year period. His illustrations for Airfix included superb depictions of aircraft, cars, ships, spacecraft, armoured vehicles and dioramas. Though Roy is perhaps most famous for his Airfix box art, his work has encompassed book and magazine illustrations, including highly detailed cutaways and other technical drawings. In more recent years, Roy has concentrated on the production of his magnificent maritime paintings.

This book examines the legacy of international interwar modernism as a case of cultural transfer through the travels of a central motif: the square. The square was the most emblematic and widely known form/motif of the international avant-garde in the interwar years. It originated from the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich who painted The Black Square on White Ground in 1915 and was then picked up by another Russian artist El Lissitzky and the Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg. It came to be understood as a symbol of a new internationalism and modernity and while Forgács uses it as part of her overall narrative, she focuses on it and its journey across borders to follow its significance, how it was used by the above key artists and how its meaning became modified in Western Europe. It is unusual to discuss interwar modernism and its postwar survival, but this book’s chapters work together to argue that the interwar developments signified a turning point in twentieth-century art that led to much creativity and innovation. Forgács supports her theory with newly found and newly interpreted documents that prove how this exciting legacy was shaped by three major agents: Malevich, Lissitzsky and van Doesburg. She offers a wider interpretation of modernism that examines its postwar significance, reception and history up until the emergence of the New Left in 1956 and the seismic events of 1968.

A cultural history of modern lifestyle viewed through film and multimedia experiments of midcentury designers Charles and Ray Eames For the designers Charles and Ray Eames, happiness was both a technical and ideological problem central to the future of liberal democracy. Being happy demanded new things but also a vanguard life in media that the Eameses modeled as they brought film into their design practice. Midcentury modernism is often considered institutionalized, but Happiness by Design casts Eames-era designers as innovative media artists, technophilic humanists, change managers, and neglected film theorists. Happiness by Design offers a fresh cultural history of midcentury modernism through the film and multimedia experiments of Charles and Ray Eames and their peers-Will Burtin, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Gyoergy Kepes, among others-at a moment when designers enjoyed a new cultural prestige. Justus Nieland traces how, as representatives of the American Century's exuberant material culture, Cold War designers engaged in creative activities that spanned disciplines and blended art and technoscience while reckoning with the environmental reach of media at the dawn of the information age. Eames-era modernism, Nieland shows, fueled novel techniques of culture administration, spawning new partnerships between cultural and educational institutions, corporations, and the state. From the studio, showroom floor, or classroom to the stages of world fairs and international conferences, the midcentury multimedia experiments of Charles and Ray Eames and their circle became key to a liberal democratic lifestyle-and also anticipated the look and feel of our networked present.

Contemporary artists and writers reflect on the Great Migration and the ways that it continues to inform the Black experience in America The Great Migration (1915-70) saw more than six million African Americans leave the South for destinations across the United States. This incredible dispersal of people across the country transformed nearly every aspect of Black life and culture. Offering a new perspective on this historical phenomenon, this incisive volume presents immersive photography of newly commissioned works of art by Akea, Mark Bradford, Zoe Charlton, Larry W. Cook, Torkwase Dyson, Theaster Gates Jr., Allison Janae Hamilton, Leslie Hewitt, Steffani Jemison, Robert Pruitt, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, and Carrie Mae Weems. The artists investigate their connections to the Deep South through familial stories of perseverance, self-determination, and self-reliance and consider how this history informs their working practices. Essays by Kiese Laymon, Jessica Lynne, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, and Willie Jamaal Wright explore how the Great Migration continues to reverberate today in the public and private spheres and examine migration as both a historical and a political consequence, as well as a possibility for reclaiming agency. Published in association with the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Mississippi Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson (April 9-September 11, 2022) Baltimore Museum of Art (October 30, 2022-January 29, 2023) Brooklyn Museum (March 3-June 25, 2023) California African American Museum, Los Angeles (August 5, 2023-March 3, 2024)

Why, and in what manner, did artist Paul Klee have such a significant impact on twentieth-century thinkers? His art and his writing inspired leading philosophers to produce key texts in twentieth-century aesthetics, texts that influenced subsequent art history and criticism.
Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard, Sartre, Foucault, Blanchot, Derrida, and Marion are among the philosophers who have engaged with Klee's art and writings. Their views are often thought to be distant from each other, but Watson puts them in conversation. His point is not to vindicate any final interpretation of Klee but to allow his interpreters' different accounts to interact, to shed light on their and on Klee's work, and, in turn, to delineate both a history and a theoretical problematic in their midst. "Crescent Moon over the Rational" reveals an evolving theoretical constellation of interpretations and their questions (theoretical, artistic, and political) that address and continually renew Klee's rich legacies.

This book is about a shared journey made by John and Myfanwy Piper who early on settled down in a small hamlet on the edge of the Chilterns, whence they proceeded to produce work which placed them centre stage in the cultural landscape of the twentieth century. Here, too, they fed and entertained many visitors, among them Kenneth Clark, John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, Benjamin Britten, and the Queen Mother. Their creative partnership encompasses not only a long marriage and numerous private and professional vicissitudes, but also a genuine legacy of lasting achievements in the visual arts, literature and music. Frances Spalding also sheds new light on the story of British art in the 1930s. In the middle of this decade John Piper and Myfanwy Evans (they did not marry until 1937) were at the forefront of avant-garde activities in England, Myfanwy editing the most advanced art magazine of the day and John working alongside Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and others. But as the decade progressed and the political situation in Europe worsened, they changed their allegiances, John Piper investigating in his art a sense of place, belonging, history, memory, and the nature of national identity, all issues that are very much to the fore in today's world. Myfanwy Piper is best known as 'Golden Myfanwy', Betjeman's muse and for her work as librettist with Benjamin Britten. John Piper was an extraordinarily prolific artist in many media, his fertile career stretching over six decades and involving him in many changes of style. Having been an abstract painter in the 1930s, he became best known for his landscapes and architectural scenes in a romantic style. This core interest, in the English and Welsh landscape and the built environment, developed in him a sensibility that took in almost everything, from gin palaces to painted quoins, from ruined cottages to country houses, from Victorian shop fronts to what is nowadays called industrial archeology. His capacious and divided sensibility made him defender of many aspects of the English landscape and the built environment, while in his art he became an heir of that great tradition encompassing Wordsworth and Blake, Turner, Ruskin, and Samuel Palmer. He was torn between the pleasures of an abstract language liberated from time and place and those embedded in the locale, in buildings, geography, and history. Today, this expansive contradictoriness seems quintessentially modern, his divided response finding an echo in our own ambivalence towards modernity. Both Pipers created what seemed to many observers an ideal way of life, involving children, friendships, good food, humour, the pleasures of a garden, work, and creativity. Running through their lives is a fertile tension between a commitment to the new and a desire to reinvigorate certain native traditions. This tension produced work that is passionate and experimental. 'Only those who live most vividly in the present', John Russell observed of John and Myfanwy Piper, 'deserve to inherit the past'.

Cedric Morris (1889-1982) was an accomplished painter of flowers and landscapes, and a plantsman whose irises are an enduring legacy. This is a timely study of a man whose stock has risen appreciably in recent years, with two London exhibitions, a stand at the Chelsea Flower Show and a surge in prices for his paintings. With his lifelong partner, Arthur Lett-Haines, Cedric Morris set up the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Suffolk, where students included the young Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling. Drawing on archive material and extensively illustrated with the work of Morris as well as artists who became part of his circle, this book explores Morris's family roots in South Wales, follows his travels in Europe and beyond in the 1920s, and evokes the singular camaraderie of the East Anglian School.

Since the 1970s, it has been argued that Abstract Expressionism was exhibited abroad by the post-war US establishment in an attempt to culturally match and reinforce its newfound economic and military dominance. The account of Abstract Expressionism developed by the American critic Clement Greenberg is often identified as central to these efforts. However, this book rereads Greenberg's account through Theodor Adorno and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in order to contend that Greenberg’s criticism in fact testifies to how Abstract Expressionism opposes the ends to which it was deployed. With reference not only to the most famous artists of the movement, but also female artists and artists of colour whom Greenberg himself neglected, such as Joan Mitchell and Norman Lewis, it is argued that, far from reinforcing the capitalist status quo, Abstract Expressionism engages corporeal and affective elements of experience dismissed or delegitimated by capitalism, and promises a world that would do justice to them.

When the body is foregrounded in artwork - as in much contemporary performance, sculptural installation and video work - so is gendered and sexualised difference. Feminist Perspectives on Art: Contemporary Outtakes looks to interactions between art history, theory, curation, and studio-based practices to theorise the phenomenological import of this embodied gender difference in contemporary art. The essays in this collection are rooted in a wide variety of disciplines, including art-making, curating, and art history and criticism, with many of the authors combining roles of curator, artist and writer. This interdisciplinary approach enables the book to bridge the theory-practice divide and highlight new perspectives emerging from creative arts research. Fresh insights are offered on feminist aesthetics, women's embodied experience, curatorial and art historical method, art world equity, and intersectional concerns. It engages with epistemological assertions of 'how the body feels', how the land has creative agency in Indigenous art, and how the use of emotional or affective registers may form one's curatorial method. This anthology represents a significant contribution to a broader resurgence of feminist thought, methodology, and action in contemporary art, particularly in creative practice research. It will be of particular value to students and researchers in art history, visual culture, cultural studies, and gender studies, in addition to museum and gallery professionals specialising in contemporary art.

When Pam Valois, a young photographer, met Jacomena Maybeck in 1979, she saw the woman she wanted to be in her own later years. Tarring roofs and splitting logs into her eighties, Jackie presided over the legacy of Bernard Maybeck and his clan on Berkeley's legendary Nut Hill. The friendship between the two women led to a best-selling book-Gifts of Age, a treasury of stories about successful aging. Blooming in Winter is an intimate portrait of Jackie that gives us a paradigm for living exuberantly until the very end.

Examines how and why religion matters in the history of modern American art.   Andy Warhol is one of the best-known American artists of the twentieth century. He was also an observant Catholic who carried a rosary, went to mass regularly, kept a Bible by his bedside, and depicted religious subjects throughout his career. Warhol was a spiritual modern: a modern artist who appropriated religious images, beliefs, and practices to create a distinctive style of American art.   Spiritual Moderns centers on four American artists who were both modern and religious. Joseph Cornell, who showed with the Surrealists, was a member of the Church of Christ, Scientist. Mark Tobey created pioneering works of Abstract Expressionism and was a follower of the Bahá’í Faith. Agnes Pelton was a Symbolist painter who embraced metaphysical movements including New Thought, Theosophy, and Agni Yoga. And Warhol, a leading figure in Pop art, was a lifelong Catholic. Working with biographical materials, social history, affect theory, and the tools of art history, Doss traces the linked subjects of art and religion and proposes a revised interpretation of American modernism.  

Since 1983, Bob Ross has been television's favorite artist. His Joy of Painting show captures higher ratings than any other art program in history, year after year. Bob's quick painting style and easy, encouraging manner reach millions of viewers around the world each day.

His third book -- New Joy of Painting -- is now available in paperback, containing another sixty of his favorite landscape paintings. Each is presented in full color, along with written instructions and detailed black-and-white how-to photographs. Now you really can complete your very own beautiful masterpiece -- you can do it.

"Remember, there is no failure, only learning," says author Annette Kowalski. "As I've heard Bob Ross say a thousand times, I hope you never create a painting that you're totally satisfied with, for it's this dissatisfaction that will create the motivation necessary for you to start your next painting, armed with the knowledge you acquired from the previous one."

An acclaimed history of Harlem’s journey from urban crisis to urban renaissance With its gleaming shopping centers and refurbished row houses, today’s Harlem bears little resemblance to the neighborhood of the midcentury urban crisis. Brian Goldstein traces Harlem’s Second Renaissance to a surprising source: the radical social movements of the 1960s that resisted city officials and fought to give Harlemites control of their own destiny. Young Harlem activists, inspired by the civil rights movement, envisioned a Harlem built by and for its low-income, predominantly African American population. In the succeeding decades, however, the community-based organizations they founded came to pursue a very different goal: a neighborhood with national retailers and increasingly affluent residents. The Roots of Urban Renaissance demonstrates that gentrification was not imposed on an unwitting community by unscrupulous developers or opportunistic outsiders. Rather, it grew from the neighborhood’s grassroots, producing a legacy that benefited some longtime residents and threatened others.

Laurence was born in London and became a very successful commercial artist, producing many famous railway posters. Pick Up a Pencil covers his whole painting life, from the early drawings of detailed explosives for MI5 (they were used to help the army to disarm the bombs), through to his own fine art paintings. Jean's book is also full of stories including one where he took one of the bomb devices home to draw it, kept it under his bed, then found it was live

Masters and monographs: An encyclopedia of 20th century photographers and their finest publications A comprehensive overview of the most influential photographers of the last century and their finest monographs. Arranged alphabetically, this biographical encyclopedia features every major photographer of the 20th century, from the earliest representatives of classical Modernism right up to the present day. Richly illustrated with facsimiles from books and magazines, this book includes all the major photographers of the last one hundred years especially those who have distinguished themselves with important publications or exhibitions, or who have made a significant contribution to the culture of the photographic image. The entries include photographers from North America and Europe as well as from Japan, Latin America, Africa, and China. Photographers A-Z focuses on photographic images and culture, but also features photographers working in applied areas, whose work goes beyond the merely illustrative, and is regarded as photographic art and is conserved by major museums, such as Julius Shulman, Terry Richardson, Cindy Sherman, and David LaChapelle."

Why taunt and flout us, as Beckett's writing does? Why discourage us from seeing, as Mark Rothko's paintings often can? Why immobilize and daze us, as Alain Resnais' films sometimes will? Why, Leo Bersnai and Ulysse Dutoit ask, would three acknowledged masters of their media make work deliberately opaque and inhospitable to an audience? This book shows how such crippling moves may signal a profoundly original - and profoundly anti-modernist - renunciation of art's authority. Our culture, while paying little attention to art, puts great faith in its edifying and enlightening value. Yet Beckett's threadbare plays "Company" and "Worstword Ho", so insistent on their poverty of meaning; Rothko's nearly monochromatic paintings in the Houston Chapel; Resnais' intensly self-contained, self-referential films "Night and Fog" and "Muriel" all seem to say "I have little to show you, little to tell you, nothing to teach you." Bersnai and Dutoit consider these works as acts of resistance; by inhibiting our movement toward them, they purposely frustrate our faith in art as a way of appropriating and ultimately mastering reality. As this book demonstrates, these artists train us in new modes of mobility, which differ from the moves of an appropriating consciousness. As a form of cultural resistance, a rejection of a view of reality - both objects and human subjects - as simply there for the taking, this training may even give birth to a new kind of political power, one paradoxically consistent with the renunciation of authority.

During the prosperous, forward-thinking era after the Second World War, a growing number of men, women, and children across the United States were wearing fashions that evoked the Old West. Westernwear: Postwar American Fashion and Culture examines why a sartorial style with origins in 19th-century agrarian traditions continued to be worn at a time when American culture sought balance between technocratic confidence in science and technology on one side, and fear and anxiety over global annihilation on the other. By analysing well-known and rarely considered western manufacturers, Westernwear revises the common perception that fashionable innovation came from the East coast and places western youth cultures squarely back in the picture. The book connects the history of American working class dress with broader fashionable trends and discusses how and why Native American designs and representations of Native American people were incorporated broadly and inconsistently into the western visual vocabulary. Setting westernwear firmly in context, Sonya Abrego addresses the incorporation of this iconic style into postwar wardrobes and popular culture, and charts the evolution of westernwear into a modern fashion phenomenon.

A revelatory resituation of Van Gogh's familiar works in the company of the surprising variety of nineteenth-century art and literature he most revered Vincent van Gogh's (1853-1890) idiosyncratic style grew out of a deep admiration for and connection to the nineteenth-century art world. This fresh look at Van Gogh's influences explores the artist's relationship to the Barbizon School painters Jean-Francois Millet and Georges Michel-Van Gogh's self-proclaimed mentors-as well as to Realists like Jean-Francois Raffaelli and Leon Lhermitte. New scholarship offers insights into Van Gogh's emulation of Adolphe Monticelli, his absorption of the Hague School through Anton Mauve and Jozef Israels, and his keen interest in the work of the Impressionists. This copiously illustrated volume also discusses Van Gogh's allegiance to the colorism of Eugene Delacroix, as well as his alliance with the Realist literature of Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Although Van Gogh has often been portrayed as an insular and tortured savant, Through Vincent's Eyes provides a fascinating deep dive into the artist's sources of inspiration that reveals his expansive interest in the artistic culture of his time. Published in association with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Published in association with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Columbus Museum of Art (November 12, 2021-February 6, 2022) Santa Barbara Museum of Art (February 27-May 22, 2022)

The Micmac Indian Craftsmen of Elsipogtog (then known as Big Cove) rose to national prominence in the early 1960s. At their peak, they were featured in print media from coast to coast, their work was included in books and exhibitions -- including at Expo 67 -- and their designs were featured on prints, silkscreened notecards, jewellery, tapestries, and even English porcelain. Primarily self-taught and deeply rooted in their community, they were among the first modern Indigenous artists in Atlantic Canada. Inspired by traditional Wabanaki stories, they produced an eclectic range of handmade objects that were sophisticated, profound, and eloquent. By 1966, the withdrawal of government support compromised the Craftsmen's resources, production soon ceased, and their work faded from memory. Now, for the first time, the story of this ground-breaking co-operative and their art is told in full. Accompanying a major exhibition at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery opening in 2022, Wabanaki Modern features essays on the history of this vibrant art workshop, archival photographs of the artisans, and stunning full-colour images of their art.

From antiquity to the Enlightenment, astrology, magic, and alchemy have always been considered important tools in unravelling the mysteries of nature and human destiny. As a result of the West's exposure to the astrological beliefs of Arab philosophers and the mystical writings of late antiquity, these occult traditions became rich sources of inspiration for Western artists.This latest volume in the "Guide to Imagery" series, presents an intelligent analysis of occult iconography in many of the great masterpieces of Western art - from the astrological symbols that decorated churches and illuminated manuscripts, through the work of a wide range of Renaissance artists, including Bosch, Brueghel, Durer and Caravaggio, to the visionary works of nineteenth-century artists, such as Fuseli and Blake, as well as in the creative output of the Surrealists during the twentieth century.