A spellbinding portrait of the Hampstead Modernists, threading together the lives, loves, rivalries and ambitions of a group of artists at the heart of an international avant-garde. Hampstead in the 1930s. In this peaceful, verdant London suburb, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson have embarked on a love affair - a passion that will launch an era-defining art movement. In her chronicle of the exhilarating rise and fall of British Modernism, Caroline Maclean captures the dazzling circle drawn into Hepworth and Nicholson's wake: among them Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Herbert Read, and famed emigres Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, and Piet Mondrian, blown in on the winds of change sweeping across Europe. Living and working within a few streets of their Parkhill Road studios, the artists form Unit One, a cornerstone of the Modernist movement which would bring them international renown. Drawing on previously unpublished archive material, Caroline Maclean's electrifying Circles and Squares brings the work, loves and rivalries of the Hampstead Modernists to life as never before, capturing a brief moment in time when a new way of living seemed possible. United in their belief in art's power to change the world, her cast of trailblazers radiate hope and ambition during one of the darkest chapters of the twentieth century.

"A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900-1925" is the first publication to deal with the avant-garde in the Nordic countries at the start of the twentieth century. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations in arts and culture: literature, the visual arts, painting as well as photography, architecture and design, film, radio, and performing arts like music, theatre and dance. It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective which includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field, but in a broader cultural context. It examines the social and cultural context of the avant-garde: its media, its locations, its reception and audiences, the transmissions between Scandinavia and Europe, and its cultural consequences. The essays trace the connections between the avant-garde and the cultural discourses of contemporary currents such as revolutionary socialism, radical nationalism and occultism, and discuss questions of gender, ideology and politics, geographical location and technological innovation. The cultural history thus focuses on the role of the avant-garde in shaping the ideas of cultural modernity in the Nordic countries.

Reconciling Art and Mothering contributes a chorus of new voices to the burgeoning body of scholarship on art and the maternal and, for the first time, focuses exclusively on maternal representations and experiences within visual art throughout the world. This innovative essay collection joins the voices of practicing artists with those of art historians, acknowledging the fluidity of those categories. The twenty-five essays of Reconciling Art and Mothering are grouped into two sections, the first written by art historians and the second by artists. Art historians reflect on the work of artists addressing motherhood-including Marguerite Gerard, Chana Orloff, and Renee Cox-from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Contributions by contemporary artist-mothers, such as Gail Rebhan, Denise Ferris, and Myrel Chernick, point to the influence of past generations of artist-mothers, to the inspiration found in the work of maternally minded literary and cultural theorists, and to attempts to broaden definitions of maternity. Working against a hegemonic construction of motherhood, the contributors discuss complex and diverse feminist mothering experiences, from maternal ambivalence to queer mothering to quests for self-fulfillment. The essays address mothering experiences around the globe, with contributors hailing from North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

Since its establishment in 1949, the People's Republic of China has upheld a nationwide ban on pornography, imposing harsh punishments on those caught purchasing, producing, or distributing materials deemed a violation of public morality. A provocative contribution to Chinese media studies by a well-known international media researcher, "People's Pornography" offers a wide-ranging overview of the political controversies surrounding the ban, as well as a fascinating glimpse into the many distinct media subcultures that have gained widespread popularity on the Chinese Internet as a result. Rounding out this exploration of the many new tendencies in digital citizenship, pornography, and activist media cultures in the greater China region are thought-provoking interviews with individuals involved.A timely contribution to the existing literature on sexuality, Chinese media, and Internet culture, "People's Pornography "provides a unique angle on the robust voices involved in the debate over about pornography's globalization.

Even when there is no direct contact, artists and writers develop many comparable techniques for coping with problems specific to their time. In "Modernist Patterns," Murray Roston explores the relationships between modernist artists and writers and their responses to the immediate challenges of their time, to the implications of Freudian psychology, molecular theory, relativist theory, and the general weakening of religious faith.

By placing the literary works of such writers as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway within the context of the changes that occurred in the visual arts, "Modernist Patterns" expands our understanding of literature and identifies the cultural shifts that generated stylistic innovations within the visual arts.

This literature-centered study offers an interdisciplinary approach to Romantic culture. If is pioneering in that it employs the complexity method of anthropology. Recent literary studies employ the complexity/chaos theory adapted from the natural sciences; however, here is presented for the first time a complexity method taken from the social/human sciences. This complexity method is useful in mediating not only contradictions within Romanticism, but the chaos of contemporary theories concerning it. One of the intensifying literary debates is that between the so-called "Greens" and "Reds," naturalists and humanists. Mediating Order and Chaos not only traces the split between nature and man to Romantic Culture but finds there, too, a Spinozian vision of man and nature in unity - thereby denying any naturalist/humanist split. This volume is of interest for those who wish to see essays in the holistic approach to culture. Centering on hydraulics, hydrology, and meteorology, this study examines literature, painting, music, economics, and the rhetoric of science, philosophy, and politics, it therewith demonstrates how the water cycle was transformed into a cosmic metaphor that mediated, in the form of several complex adaptive systems, between the chaos of too much change and that of not enough.

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"The essays probe the growing vocabulary of Holocaust imagery and address the various ways (in varied venues) that the Holocaust has been remembered, represented, and received."--"American Jewish History"

"This challenging collection of essays which also contains some stunning art work, should find a place in every library that deals with the memory of the Holocaust and its effects that transcend the generation."
--"Conservative Judaism"

"(Makes) a cogent case for a deeper, unmastered engagement with Holocause trauma."--"Journal of Jewish Studies"

Impossible Images brings together a distinguished group of contributors, including artists, photographers, cultural critics, and historians, to analyze the ways in which the Holocaust has been represented in and through paintings, architecture, photographs, museums, and monuments.

Exploring frequently neglected aspects of contemporary art after the Holocaust, the volume demonstrates how visual culture informs Jewish memory, and makes clear that art matters in contemporary Jewish studies. Accepting that knowledge is culturally constructed, Impossible Images makes explicit the ways in which context matters. It shows how the places where an artist works shape what is produced, in what ways the space in which a work of art is exhibited and how it is named influences what is seen or not seen, and how calling attention to certain details in a visual work, such as a gesture, a color, or an icon, can change the meaning assigned to the work as a whole.

Written accessibly for a general readership and those interested in art and art history, the volume also includes 20 colorplates from leading artists Alice Lok Cahana, Judy Chicago, Debbie Teicholz, and Mindy Weisel.

Art. Art Criticism. This monograph traces Sonia Boyce's trajectory from early graphic work to her recent mixed-media pieces which draw on elements of British popular culture and cinema to address society's positioning of individuals in terms of race, class and gender. Unquestionably serious and with an unquestionable sense of humor, Boyce's work, ranging from photography to painting and installations, is here widely represented, and well-complemented by three intelligent essays by Gilane Tawadros, a biography of the artist, and, alongside the essays, excellently chosen excerpts from Boyce's working diaries. Tawadros' essays address cultural, racial, gender and visual/art historical issues raised over the trajectory of Boyce's artistic development, using such theorists as Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, Italo Calvino, and Stuart Hall to contextualize the artist's magnificent and provocative work.

Women Artists in Interwar France: Framing Femininities illuminates the importance of the Societe des Femmes Artists Modernes, more commonly known as FAM, and returns this group to its proper place in the history of modern art. In particular, this volume explores how FAM and its most famous members"Suzanne Valadon, Marie Laurencin, and Tamara de Lempicka"brought a new approach to the most prominent themes of female embodiment: the self-portrait, motherhood, and the female nude. These women reimagined art's conventions and changed the direction of both art history and the politics of their contemporary art world. FAM has been excluded from histories of modern art despite its prominence during the interwar years. Paula Birnbaum's study redresses this omission, contextualizing the group's legacy in light of the conservative politics of 1930s France. The group's artistic response to the reactionary views and images of women at the time is shown to be a key element in the narrative of modernist formalism. Although many FAM works are missing"one reason for the lack of attention paid to their efforts"Birnbaum's extensive research, through archives, press clippings, and first-hand interviews with artists' families, reclaims FAM as an important chapter in the history of art from the interwar years.

Henry McBride (1867-1962) became a towering figure in art criticism during a long career that began in 1913 -- the year of the famous Armory Show in New York that opened American eyes to avant-garde developments in European art -- and continued until the advent of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. A sensitive and discerning observer of the changing cultural landscape, McBride not only wrote prolifically for publication but also corresponded extensively. In this remarkable collection of selected letters, Henry McBride describes some of the most important events and figures of twentieth-century modernism. Written in a characteristically charming, gossipy, and warm-hearted style, these letters reveal McBride's responses to revolutionary changes in the world of art and in the world at large.

Closely allied to the pivotal circles that shaped modern culture, McBride counted among his correspondents such friends as Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, the Stettheimer sisters, Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keefe, and Marianne Moore. His letters, along with the biographical introduction, headnotes, and rich annotation provided in this volume, present a unique perspective on twentieth-century modernism by one of its most ardent supporters.

The New Press is proud to publish a new paperback edition of "Mixed Blessings," the first book to discuss the cross-cultural process taking place in the work of contemporary Latino, Native, African, and Asian American artists. Rich with illustrations of artworks in many different media, and filled with incisive quotes and unsettling reports, it is more than a book about art; it is a complex meditation on the relationships of people to their cultures. Lucy R. Lippard, one of our most original and insightful writers on art, challenges conventional approaches and explores the role of images in a changing society. Among her subjects are the uncertainty of exile; the confusion of identity in attempts to climb out of the melting pot; and art that speaks for itself, reversing stereotypes and reclaiming history and memory. The New Press edition features a new introduction by Lippard that reconsiders the issues first presented in "Mixed Blessings " when it appeared in 1990 and evaluates the state of multicultural art today.

Provides a counter history to conventional accounts of American art. Close historical examinations of particular events in Los Angeles and New York in the 1960s are interwoven with discussion of the location of these events, normally marginalized or overlooked, in the history of cultural politics in the United States during the postwar era. Contradictions both within dissident art practices and the mainstream avant-garde are explored. So, too, are the significance of cultural institutions in relation to the production of art, the function of cultural canons within national politics, the construction of collective memories, and the ways in which culture is embedded in ideology and politics. The book is based on detailed and new research from a range of sources including the alternative press, such as the Los Angeles Free Press; public and private archives; interviews and oral histories.

"...here's eye candy on every page of the book." - Natural Diamonds This sumptuous book showcases the work of women jewellers in the 20th century. Beginning with Arts & Crafts jewellers in Britain, Europe and North America, the author then examines the key figures and movements of the pre-war period including Coco Chanel's legendary 'Bijoux de Diamants' exhibition of 1932, the designs of Suzanne Belperron and the roles of Jeanne Toussaint at Cartier and Renee Puissant at Van Cleef & Arpels. From the 1950s to the present day, a wide range of international designers are examined in detail with many examples of their work clearly illustrated. The author focuses on themes associated with jewellery, including colour, light, proportion, nature and legends. Among the many names included are Vivianna Torun Bulow-Hube (designer for Georg Jensen), Margaret De Patta, Wendy Ramshaw, Angela Cummings, Paloma Picasso, Marina B, Lydia Courteille and Michelle Ong. Jewellery firms include: Boivin, Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Bulgari, Jensen, Tiffany & Co. Designers featured: Alma Pihl, Coco Chanel, Suzanne Belperron, Juliette Moutard, Olga Tritt, Elisabeth Treskow, Margaret de Patta, Jeanne Toussaint, Line Vautrin, Margret Craver, Vivianna Torun Bulow-Hube, Nanna Ditzel, Marianne Ostier, Barbara Anton, Gerda Floeckinger, Astrid Fog, Cornelia Roethel, Catherine Noll, Angela Cummings, Elsa Peretti, Wendy Ramshaw, Marina B, Marie-Caroline de Brosses, Marilyn Cooperman, Paloma Picasso, Victoire de Castellane, Alexandra Mor, Ornella Iannuzzi, Neha Dani, Paula Crevoshay, Nathalie Castro, Claire Choisne, Bina Goenka, Carla Amorim, Monique Pean, Michelle Ong - Carnet, Kara Ross, Lydia Courteille, Suzanne Syz, Sylvie Corbelin, Kaoru Kay Akihara - Gimel, Katey Brunini, Luz Camino, Cindy Chao, Aida Bergsen, Anna Hu, Barbara Heinrich, Jacqueline Cullen, Cynthia Bach.

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.

Modern Art Culture: A Reader provides an essential resource for understanding the culture of modern art since the 1960s.

In recent years, media theorists and historians have asked whether works of imaginative art can have any impact in our image-saturated culture. Given the power of institutions, how do radical artists produce effective cultural interventions? In the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, many argue that pressing questions about works of art and their meanings are inseparable not only from contemporary social and political issues but also from major debates and developments in the last four decades.

To explore such questions and issues, the Reader is divided into six related parts with articles from journals, magazines and exhibition catalogues that exemplify important interventions from the 1960s onwards: Histories, Representations and Remembrance; Art and Visual/Mass/Popular Culture; Institutions; Inclusions/Exclusions; Bodies and Identities; Power and Permissibility.

Texts range from artists? engagement with the veil and veiling as metaphors for post-colonialist understandings of representation and contemporary art to early debates about, for example, ?activist art?, discourses of the ?body?, civil rights, ethnicity, and cultural power. Importantly these selected texts offer examples of analysis that can enable readers to examine, critically, their own selection of representations produced in a variety of contexts.

A racy account of the London contemporary art scene by celebrated art critic Matthew Collings, giving a snapshot of the new Bohemia of the 90s interwoven with episodes from the author's own life in London. From Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst, specially-commissioned photographs by documentary film-maker Ian MacMillan brings London's artists, dealers and critics face to face with the reader.

Art and Science in Word and Image investigates the theme of 'riddles of form', exploring how discovery and innovation have functioned inter-dependently between art, literature and the sciences. Using the impact of evolutionary biologist D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form on Modernist practices as springboard into the theme, contributors consider engagements with mysteries of natural form in painting, photography, fiction, etc., as well as theories about cosmic forces, and other fields of knowledge and enquiry. Hence the collection also deals with topics including cultural inscriptions of gardens and landscapes, deconstructions of received history through word and image artworks and texts, experiments in poetic materiality, graphic re-mediations of classic fiction, and textual transactions with animation and photography. Contributors are: Dina Aleshina, Marcia Arbex, Donna T. Canada Smith, Calum Colvin, Francis Edeline, Philippe Enrico, Etienne Fevrier, Madeline B. Gangnes, Eric T. Haskell, Christina Ionescu, Tim Isherwood, Matthew Jarron, Philippe Kaenel, Judy Kendall, Catherine Lanone, Kristen Nassif, Solange Ribeiro de Oliveira, Eric Robertson, Frances Robertson, Cathy Roche-Liger, David Skilton, Melanie Stengele, Barry Sullivan, Alice Tarbuck, Frederik Van Dam.

Awarded an Honourable Mention by the Association for Israeli Studies. Exploring the politics of the image in the context of Israeli militarized visual culture, Civic Aesthetics examines both the omnipresence of militarism in Israeli culture and society and the way in which this omnipresence is articulated, enhanced, and contested within local contemporary visual art. Looking at a range of contemporary artworks through the lens of "civilian militarism", Roei employs the theory of various fields, including memory studies, gender studies, landscape theory, and aesthetics, to explore the potential of visual art to communicate military excesses to its viewers. This study builds on the specific sociological concerns of the chosen cases to discuss the complexities of visuality, the visible and non-visible, arguing for art's capacity to expose the scopic regimes that construct their visibility. Images and artworks are often read either out of context, on purely aesthetic or art-historical ground, or as cultural artefacts whose aesthetics play a minor role in their significance. This book breaks with both traditions as it approaches all art, both high and popular art, as part of the surrounding visual culture in which it is created and presented. This approach allows a new theory of the image to come forth, where the relation between the political and the aesthetic is one of exchange, rather than exclusion.

Ben Vautier, Niki De Saint Phalle, Francois Morellet, Louise Bourgeois, Alexandre Hollan, Claude Viallat, Sophie Calle, Bernard Pages, Jean-Pierre Pincemin, Annette Messager, Gerard Titus-Carmel: eleven major French artists of the last forty years or so, examined in the light of their uniqueness and their rootedness, the specificities of their differing and at times overlapping plastic practices and the swirling and often highly hybridised conceptions entertained in regard to such practices. Thus does analysis range from discussion of the feisty, Fluxus-inspired, free-spirited funkiness of Ben Vautier s work to the various modes of transcendence of trauma and haunting fear generated by the exceptional gestures of Niki de Saint Phalle and Louise Bourgeois, to the alyrical formalism yet imbued with irony and ludicity of Francois Morellet, through to the serene intensities of Alexandre Hollan s "vies silencieuses," the infinite a-signatures of Claude Viallat s adventure in the sheer joy of a "poiein" of self-reflexive coloration, the powerfully elegant and muscular disarticulations of Bernard Pages sculpture, the great sweep through art s history implied by Jean-Pierre Pincemin s chameleon-like gestures, the vast swirling programme of socio-psychological analysis the arts of Annette Messager and Sophie Calle offer in their radically distinctive manners, the obsessively serialised oeuvre of Gerard Titus-Carmel allowing a burrowing deep into the opaque logic of a real though dubious presence to the world .

As featured in the New York Times, ARTnews, Colossal, Metropolis and New York Magazine's The Strategist A groundbreaking A-Z survey of the work of over 300 modern and contemporary artists born or based in Africa Modern and Contemporary African art is at the forefront of the current curatorial and collector movement in today's art scene. This groundbreaking new book, created in collaboration with a prestigious global advisory board, represents the most substantial appraisal of contemporary artists born or based in Africa available. Features the work of more than 300 artists, including El Anatsui, Marlene Dumas, David Goldblatt, Lubaina Himid, William Kentridge, Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, and Robin Rhode, as well as lesser-known names from across Africa, with stunning and surprising examples of their art paired with insightful texts that demonstrate their contribution to the painting, sculpture, installation, photography, moving image, and performance art. Advisory Panel: Alayo Akinkugbe, Kavita Chellaram, Raphael Chikukwa, Julie Crooks, Tandazani Dhlakama, Oumy Diaw, Janine Gaelle Dieudji, Ekow Eshun, Ndubuisi C. Ezeluomba, Joseph Gergel, Danda Jaroljmek, Omar Kholeif, Rose Jepkorir Kiptum, Alicia Knock, Nkule Mabaso, Lucy MacGarry, Owen Martin, Aude Christel Mgba, Bongani Mkhonza, Riason Naidoo, Paula Nascimento, Simon Njami, Robert Njathika, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Hannah O'Leary, Sean O'Toole, John Owoo, Brenda Schmahmann, Mark Sealy, Yasmeen Siddiqui, and Joseph L. Underwood

This anthology of literary and dramatic works introduces writers from across Asia and the Asian diaspora. The landscapes and time periods it describes are rich and varied: a fishing village on the Padma River in Bangladesh in the early twentieth century, the slums of prewar Tokyo, Indonesia during the anti-leftist purge of the 1960s, and contemporary Tibet. Even more varied are the voices these works bring to life, which serve as testimony to the lives of those adversely impacted by poverty, rapid social change, political suppression, and armed conflict. In the end, the works in this anthology convey an attitude of spiritual and communal survival and even of hope. This anthology presents the complex dynamic between a diversity of Asian lives and the universalized concept of the individual "human" entitled to clearly specified "rights." It also asks us to think about what standards of analysis we should employ when considering a historical period in which universal human rights and civil liberties are considered secondary to the collective good, as has so often been the case when nation states are undergoing revolutionary change, waging war, or championing so-called Asian values. This book's use of the term Global Asia reflects an interest in rethinking "Asia" as more than an area determined by national borders and geography. Rather, this book portrays it as a space of movement and fluidity, where societies and individuals respond not only to their local frames of reference, but also to broader ideas and ideals. Many of the works anthologized here are the subject of scholarly analysis in the companion volume Human Rights and the Arts: Perspectives on Global Asia, also published by Lexington Books.