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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > From 1900 > General
The Making of the Modern Indian Artist-Craftsman is intended to be
a biographical and critical insight into the work of the potter,
painter and photographer Devi Prasad. Apart from the making of his
personal history and his times, it leads us to why the act of
making (art) itself takes on such a fundamental philosophical
significance in his life. This, the author explains, derives
directly from his absorption of Gandhi's philosophy that looked at
the act of making or doing as an ethical ideal, and further back to
the impact of the Arts and Crafts Movement on the ideology of
'Swadeshi' and on the milieu of Santiniketan. This book examines
his art along with his role in political activism which, although
garnered on Indian soil made him crisscross national borders and
assume an important role in the international arena of war
resistance. Devi Prasad graduated from Tagore's Santiniketan in
1944 when he joined the Hindustani Talimi Sangh (which promulgated
Nayee Taleem) at Gandhi's ashram Sevagram as Art 'Teacher'. His
political consciousness saw him participate actively in the Quit
India Movement in 1942, in Vinoba Bhave's Bhoodan and later from
1962 onward as Secretary General (later Chairman) of the War
Resisters' International, the oldest world pacifist organisation
based in London. From there he was able to extend his Gandhian
values internationally. All of this, while continuing with his life
as a prolific artist. Rather than view them as separate worlds or
professions, Devi harmonises them within an ethical and
conscionable whole. He has written widely on the inextricable link
between peace and creativity, on child /basic education, Gandhi and
Tagore, on politics and art, in English, Hindi and Bangla. In 2007
he was awarded the Lalit Kala Akademi Ratna and in 2008, the
Desikottama by Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan.
An exceptionally thoughtful and well-written biography of one of
the most influential studio potters in Britain Widely recognized as
the father of studio pottery, Bernard Leach (1887-1979) played a
pioneering role in creating an identity for artist potters in
Britain and around the world. Born in the East (Hong Kong) and
educated in the West (England), throughout his life Leach perceived
himself as a courier between the disparate cultures. His exquisite
pots reflect the inspiration he drew from East and West as well as
his response to the basic tenets of modernism-truth to materials,
the importance of function to form, and simplicity of decoration.
This outstanding biography provides for the first time a vivid and
detailed account of Leach's life and its relation to his art.
Emmanuel Cooper, himself a potter of international reputation,
explores Leach's working methods, the seams of his pottery, his
writings and philosophy, his recognition in Japan and Britain, and
his continuing legacy, bringing into sharp focus a complex man who
captured in his work as a potter the "still center" that always
eluded him in his tumultuous personal life. Distributed for the
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Norman Rockwell gave us a picture of America that was familiar -
astonishingly so - and at the same time unique, because only he
could bring it to life with such authority. Rockwell best expressed
this vision of America in his justly famous cover illustrations for
the Saturday Evening Post, painted between 1916 and 1963. All of
his Post covers are reproduced in splendid full colour in this
oversized volume, with commentaries by Christopher Finch, the noted
writer on art and popular culture.
Preserving art, freedom, and human dignity in the age of the
totalitarian state was one of the great challenges of the twentieth
century. In Centaur, Slavic scholar Albert Leong chronicles the
life and work of the greatest living Russian sculptor and
philosopher of art. Based on extensive research in the formerly
closed Soviet archives, exclusive interviews with Neizvestny, his
family, and friends, Centaur tells the amazing story of a visionary
artist and World War II commando officer who narrowly escaped death
on the battlefield, successfully defied Stalin, Khrushchev,
Brezhnev, and the KGB to create acclaimed works of monumental art.
Forced into exile to the West in 1976, Ernst Neizvestny returned in
triumph to the Soviet Union in 1989 to design the first monuments
in Russia to the countless victims of Stalinist political
repression. Supplemented by 75 photographs, Centaur will engross
specialists and general readers interested in biography, cultural
history, art, architecture, politics, and Russian/Soviet studies.
Visit the Ernst Neizvestny Studio Web site.
The first English collection of writings by Henry van de Velde, one
of the most influential designers and theorists of the twentieth
century. Belgian artist, architect, designer, and theorist Henry
van de Velde (1863-1957) was a highly original and influential
figure in Europe beginning in the 1890s. A founding member of the
Art Nouveau and Jugendstil movements, he also directed the
Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, Germany,
which eventually became the Bauhaus under Walter Gropius. This
selection of twenty-six essays, translated from French and German,
includes van de Velde's writings on William Morris and the English
Arts and Crafts movement, Neo-Impressionist painting, and
relationships between ornament, line, and abstraction in German
aesthetics. The texts trace the evolution of van de Velde's
thoughts during his most productive period as a theorist in the
artistic debates in France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
Katherine M. Kuenzli expertly guides readers to see how van de
Velde's writings reconcile themes of aesthetics and function, and
expression and reason, throughout the artistic periods and regions
represented by these texts. With introductory discussions of each
essay and full annotations, this is an essential volume for a broad
range of scholars and students of the history of fine and applied
arts and ideas.
From cannibalism to light calligraphy, from self-harming to animal
sacrifice, from meat entwined with sex toys to a commodity-embedded
ice wall, the idiosyncratic output of Chinese time-based art over
the past twenty-five years has invigorated contemporary global art
movements and conversation. In Beijing Xingwei, Meiling Cheng
engages with artworks created to mark China's rapid social,
economic, cultural, intellectual, and environmental transformations
in the post-Deng era. Beijing Xingwei - itself a critical artwork
with text and images unfolding through the author's experiences
with the mutable medium - contemplates the conundrum of creating
site-specific ephemeral and performance-based artworks for global
consumption. Here, Cheng shows us how art can reflect, construct,
confound, and enrich us. And at a moment when time is explicitly
linked with speed and profit, "Beijing Xingwei" provides multiple
alternative possibilities for how people with imagination can
spend, recycle, and invent their own time.
Isamu Noguchi, born in Los Angeles as the illegitimate son of an
American mother and a Japanese poet father, was one of the most
prolific yet enigmatic figures in the history of twentieth-century
American art. Throughout his life, Noguchi (1904-1988) grappled
with the ambiguity of his identity as an artist caught up in two
cultures.
His personal struggles--as well as his many personal
triumphs--are vividly chronicled in "The Life of Isamu Noguchi,"
the first full-length biography of this remarkable artist.
Published in connection with the centennial of the artist's birth,
the book draws on Noguchi's letters, his reminiscences, and
interviews with his friends and colleagues to cast new light on his
youth, his creativity, and his relationships.
During his sixty-year career, there was hardly a genre that
Noguchi failed to explore. He produced more than 2,500 works of
sculpture, designed furniture, lamps, and stage sets, created
dramatic public gardens all over the world, and pioneered the
development of environmental art. After studying in Paris, where he
befriended Alexander Calder and worked as an assistant to
Constantin Brancusi, he became an ardent advocate for abstract
sculpture.
Noguchi's private life was no less passionate than his artistic
career. The book describes his romances with many women, among them
the dancer Ruth Page, the painter Frida Kahlo, and the writer Anais
Nin.
Despite his fame, Noguchi always felt himself an outsider.
"With my double nationality and my double upbringing, where was my
home?" he once wrote. "Where were my affections? Where my
identity?" Never entirely comfortable in the New York art world, he
inevitably returned to his father's homeland, where he had spent a
troubled childhood. This prize-winning biography, first published
in Japanese, traces Isamu Noguchi's lifelong journey across these
artistic and cultural borders in search of his personal
identity."
This book on Virginia Dwan and her galleries in Los Angeles and New
York tells for the first time the unique story of a fundamental
actor on the global art scene, which has rarely been explored The
Dwan Gallery opened in Los Angeles in 1959 and showed works by
artists such as Arman, Yves Klein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert
Rauschenberg, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Jean Tinguely, becoming a
West Coast point of reference for international art. In 1965,
Virginia Dwan also opened a gallery in New York, where she
exhibited pieces by the protagonists of Minimal and Conceptual Art.
Through a rich collection of images and rare testimonies published
for the first time, as well as a detailed chronology, in this
volume Germano Celant recounts the years 1959-71 in the Dwan
Gallery, whose shows were as important as those organized by
personalities such as Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend, also
focusing on earlier and subsequent events in Virginia Dwan's career
up to the present.
Ink-Stained Hands fulfils a considerable gap in Irish visual arts
publications as the first book to present the activities of
printmakers in Ireland from the end of the nineteenth century to
the present. The central narrative of this profusely illustrated
and documented book is the foundation of Graphic Studio Dublin in
1960, an event which revolutionized the graphic arts in Ireland and
made the European tradition of printmaking available to Irish
artists.
Four artists who are today relatively or almost entirely unknown -
one woman and three men - nevertheless played a part in the
aesthetic upheavals that led to abstraction in 1940s Montreal. Very
active in the art milieu throughout the decade, Marian Dale Scott,
Fritz Brandtner, Henry Eveleigh, and Gordon Webber captured the
attention of critics of the time, who employed the term "abstract
art" to describe both non-objective works and bold formal
explorations that retained some reference to visible reality. An
examination of these artists' practices reveals a remarkable
openness to international contemporary art trends - French, German,
British, and American. Their work and its critical reception
conjure a complex picture of the debates on abstraction that took
place in Montreal during the 1940s, so often reduced to the
controversies surrounding the emergence of the Automatiste
movement. The artistic innovations of Paul-Emile Borduas and his
group and the radical tone of their 1948 manifesto Refus global
cemented their status as Quebec's abstract avant-garde but also had
the effect of eclipsing other visions of abstraction being explored
during the same period. This book reinstates the oeuvres of these
forgotten protagonists in the narrative of abstract art,
illustrating how their practices encompassed a variety of themes:
emotion, science, human experience in the broadest sense - but
also, as the Second World War unfolded, the violence that marked
their era.
An accessible introduction to American painter Winslow Homer,
examining his work through the lens of conflict A fresh exploration
of the work of iconic American painter Winslow Homer (1836-1910)
through the lens of conflict, a recurring theme in his prolific
career. A persistent fascination with struggle permeates Homer's
art -from emblematic images of the Civil War and Reconstruction to
dazzling tropical works and monumental marines -and reveals his
lifelong engagement with the charged subjects of race, nature, and
the environment. This publication illuminates Homer's preoccupation
with the complex social and political issues of his era-war,
slavery, imperialism-as well as his broader concerns with the
fragility of human life and dominance of nature. These powerful
themes are present in his earliest Civil War and Reconstruction
paintings, which explore the effect of the conflict on the
landscape, soldiers, and the formerly enslaved. They continue
through his later images of rural life, dramatic rescues, and
hunting -paintings that grapple with the often uneasy relationship
between humans and the natural world. Toward the end of his life,
human figures were reduced to tiny, irrelevant presences, while the
ocean acquired a pivotal role. This richly illustrated volume will
be published to accompany a retrospective at the National Gallery,
organized in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York. Published by National Gallery Global/Distributed by Yale
University Press Exhibition Schedule: The National Gallery, London
September 10, 2022-January 8, 2023
Although Franz Kline was one of the seminal figures of the American
Abstract Expressionist movement, he is less well known than
contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. This
is partly because Kline, unlike most artists in his circle, did not
like to write or talk about his own art. In fact, when asked in a
panel to discuss abstract art, Kline said, "I thought that was the
reason for trying to do it, because you couldn't [talk about it]."
Still, his impact was such that the critic and art historian April
Kingsley wrote, "Abstract Expressionism as a movement died with
him." This volume, the newest addition to the Artist's Materials
series from the Getty Conservation Institute, looks closely at both
Kline's life and work, from his early years in Pennsylvania to his
later success in New York City. Kline's iconic paintings are poised
on a critical cusp: some have already undergone conservation, but
others remain unaltered and retain the artist's color, gloss, and
texture, and they are surprisingly vulnerable. The authors'
presentation of rigorous examination and scientific analysis of
more than thirty of Kline's paintings from the 1930s through the
1960s provides invaluable insight into his life, materials, and
techniques. This study provides conservators with essential
information that will shape future strategies for the care of
Kline's paintings, and offers readers a more thorough comprehension
of this underappreciated artist who is so central to American
Abstract Expressionism.
The Triangle region of North Carolina is a little-known hotbed of
outstanding modern architecture with roots that trace back to the
Bauhaus and has helped to shape the history of modern American
architecture. While the Triangle has seen a great increased
interest in modern architecture, the understanding of this design
and the reasons and history behind it, have not been shared in a
clear and meaningful way. There is an information gap between what
is appreciated by architects and by the general public.
The Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos (*1971) is famous
internation-ally for her three- dimensional works, in which she
explores the boundaries between tradi tion and modernism, high and
everyday culture, craftsmanship and industrial production in a work
rich in allusions. Objects and installations from the last 20 years
provide an insight into her fascinating uvre. In her mostly
monumental works Joana Vasconcelos links different materials,
fabrics and items in daily use to create an unconventional form of
surreal object art. Her works treat questions of cultural identity
and gender dimensions and show points of contact to artistic
strategies which also inspired Max Ernst and the Surrealists. The
publication to accompany the artist's first museum exhibition in
Germany presents early and current works in combination with
installation views and provides an in-depth insight into the
unusual working methods adopted by Joana Vasconcelos.
Shortlisted, Best Atlantic Published Book Award and Canadian
Regional Design AwardA major publication comprising 240 pages with
75 colour plates and 60 black-and-white photographs provides
extensive documentation of the exhibition Masterworks from the
Beaverbrook Art Gallery. Along with a complete catalogue of
artworks, it features an overview and history of the historic
collection, along with curatorial commentary on each work of art by
the Beaverbrook Art Gallery's Curator and Deputy Director, and
curator of the exhibition, Terry Graff. Further, it includes
important essays by five internationally respected art historians,
scholars, and curators, Elliot King, James Hamilton, Richard
Calvocoressi, Angus Stewart, and Katharine Eustace, that focus on
several key works of art.In addition, Bernard Riordon, Director and
CEO of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, provides a foreword and timely
essay documenting the recently resolved legal battle with the
Beaverbrook Foundation (UK) over ownership of several works. Elliot
King, art historian and leading specialist on the work of Salvador
Dali and curator of the recent exhibition Dali: The Late Work at
the High Museum of Art, examines Dali's monumental painting
Santiago El Grande. James Hamilton, curator and art historian, who
has written several books, lectured internationally, and curated
several important exhibitions on JMW Turner, examines Turner's
Fountain of Indolence. Richard Calvocoressi, Director of the Henry
Moore Foundation and former Director of the Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, provides special insight into
Lucien Freud's Hotel Bedroom. Angus Stewart, independent curator
known for his many exhibitions at the Olympia London fine art and
antiques fair, including the major 2003 project that marked the
centenary of artist Graham Sutherland's birth, examines important
Sutherland works, such as Helena Rubinstein, Studies for Churchill,
and Portrait of Lord Beaverbrook. Katharine Eustace, art historian
and curator, whose publications include Continuity and Change:
Twentieth Century Sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum, provides a
thoughtful essay on Walter Sickert in relation to the Beaverbrook
Art Gallery's Sickert paintings, such as H.M. King Edward VIII.
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