Attention is fundamental to how we experience reality, and yet this notion has been understood and practised in very different ways across history. This interdisciplinary study explores the dynamic relationship between attention and its supposed opposite, distraction, as it unfolds from the eighteenth century to the present day. Its primary focus is on twentieth-century Germany and Austria, where matters of (in)attention gained a unique urgency during a period of social change and political crisis. Building on Enlightenment practices of self-observation, nineteenth-century Germany was the birthplace of experimental psychology, a discipline which sought to measure and potentially enhance human attention. This approach was also adopted outside the psychological laboratory-for instance in the First World War, when psychological testing was used to select soldiers for particular strategic positions. After the war these techniques filtered through into everyday life. Weimar Germany was unique in the western world in rolling out the methods of 'psychotechnics' across civilian society-in fields such as work and education, advertising and mass entertainment. This state-sponsored programme aimed to reshape people's minds and behaviour in order to build a more efficient, streamlined society. But as this study shows, this initiative also had profound repercussions in the fields of thought, literature, and culture. New readings of leading writers and intellectuals of the period-Kafka, Musil, Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno-are interspersed with broader cultural-historical chapters dedicated to the history of psychology and psychiatry, to Weimar self-help literature, portrait photography, and musical culture.

A stunning volume celebrating the work of Agostino Bonalumi during the 1960s and 1970s and its connection with other artists of the Azimut group. A selection of Bonalumi's paintings from the 1960s and 1970s--including some unpublished and never before exhibited--form the core of this volume and confirm the important role played by this internationally lesser known artist in the development of modern art in Italy.

Born into slavery in around 1853 on a cotton plantation in Benton, Alabama, Traylor has become one of the most important self-taught artists of the twentieth century and certainly one of the most celebrated African-American artists, along with Thorton Dial and William Edmondson. The story of Bill Traylor's life and work is a remarkable one. It is a story that deserves attention both nationally and internationally. This publication, generously illustrated with full-page high-quality reproductions, will provide a close examination of Traylor's recurrent themes, composition schemes, favoured iconography and contextual information related to the artist's biography, creative process and tools, visual environment and artistic mindset. Each artwork is considered in a context beyond that of an isolated image and in response to one another, forming a series of intricate and consistent narratives, intriguingly cinematic in its development. The elements of Traylor's biography are the anchors of an individual mythology. Instead of merely being a basic depiction, the subject becomes a visual statement structuring Traylor's mind, bringing together hidden symbols from Kongo Vodou, Hoodoo, Southern Baptist, Freemasonry and Blues sources, as well as layers of references: slavery, uncensored violence in the Jim Crow era and turbulence within the black enclave known as "Dark Town" in Montgomery, Alabama.

This volume presents three of Meyer Schapiro's finest essays on Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Given that we esteem artists whose work epitomizes particular styles, how can we likewise value Picasso, an artist who demonstrates a wide range of artistic styles? In his first essay, The Unity of Picasso's Art, Schapiro dismantles this apparent paradox by finding unity through hidden associations among seemingly disparate works and unsuspected ties to Picasso's personal experiences. In Einstein and Cubism: Science and Art, Schapiro investigates potential connections between the two most important radical innovations in science and art of the early 20th century: Einstein's 1905 Theory of Relativity and Braque and Picasso's Cubism at the end of the same decade. Schapiro uses the assumed relationship between the two to analyse the classic themes of space, time and movement in art, celebrating the innovations of both Relativity and Cubism as models of the searching, questioning mind, in short, of freedom of thought. In the final essay, Schapiro shows that Guernica, although the greatest political work of art of the 20th century, nevertheless embodied many of Picasso's artistic and personal obessions. This book offers comprehensive analysis of the 20th century's most prolific artist - Pablo Picasso. It will appeal to all those who have followed Picasso's career and to those intrigued by the multi-faceted connections between art and social changes.

83 moving works: The Weavers, Peasant War, War, Death, and others. "To see the beautiful examples of her work reproduced in this well-printed, reasonably priced volume is to sit at the feet of a great modern master..."-School Arts.

When a world-famous artist begins to lose her eyesight and puts down her brushes, it is a tragedy. When she starts to paint again, it must surely be a miracle. "What are those colors?" I asked, shouting over the wind. O'Keeffe raised her eyes skyward, resting both hands on the cane. She looked slowly all around, squinting against the flying sand, her white dress flapping loudly. Then she lowered her eyes toward me. "You tell me what they are," she said. At first I thought she was jesting. I knew she could see them, or I thought she could. But she waited patiently, looking at me. I turned back to the sky. "They're like pastels." I stopped, focusing on one cloud near to us. "This cloud is like a grainy orange and red--no, it's more like a peach, with yellows in there too." I gestured widely. It seemed as if one color was superimposed on traces of another. The air was full of fragrances enhanced by a hint of moisture and sharpened by the wind as it passed quickly over the surface of sage and stone, sand and pinon. Somehow, all that was part of what I saw. "But there are reds, too." I struggled to think of how to describe the colors. "There is a gray or white behind the reds; and some orange." O'Keeffe's head declined slightly as she listened, her lips creased in a faint smile. In late summer 1975, John Poling left college to wander the beauty of northern New Mexico and wound up in Abiquiu doing odd jobs for Georgia O'Keeffe. Never did he imagine that one day O'Keeffe's request for help in preparing a canvas would lead to a two-year collaboration that would prove the most rewarding yet most painful of his life.

This is the premier collection of dialogues, talks, and writings by Philip Guston (1913-1980), one of the most intellectually adventurous and poetically gifted of modern painters. Over the course of his life, Guston's wide reading in literature and philosophy deepened his commitment to his art - from his early Abstract Expressionist paintings to his later gritty, intense figurative works. This collection, with many pieces appearing in print for the first time, lets us hear Guston's voice - as the artist delivers a lecture on Renaissance painting, instructs students in a classroom setting, and discusses such artists and writers as Piero della Francesca, de Chirico, Picasso, Kafka, Beckett, and Gogol.

Reviewing the work of Bonnard, one of the best-loved artists of the modern period, this book draws insights into his personality from his paintings. It is published on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London, in February 1998. Bonnard's association with the Nabis, especially Vuillard, inspired him to develop Impressionist notions, by treating light and colour in an entirely fresh way. Influenced by Japanese prints, Bonnard's style evolved into decorative intimate evocations of interiors; in his mature work, the rich and sometimes near-abstract compositions of the 1930s and 1940s recall Matisse's monumental treatments. His best-known figure paintings, the many intimate portraits of his wife Marthe, express profoundly human concerns, characteristic of all Bonnard's painting.

The author was one of the major Expressionist painters of the first half of the 20th century, and also wrote a number of plays, poems, and stories. These autobiographical writings, first written for his wife, are an intense evocation of incidents and moments which reveal his spiritual development. Translated from 'Das schriftliche Werk'.

A patron of art since the 1930s, Peggy Guggenheim, in a candid self-portrait, provides an insider's view of the early days of modern art, with revealing accounts of her eccentric wealthy family, her personal and professional relationships, and often surprising portrayals of the artists themselves. Here is a book that captures a valuable chapter in the history of modern art, as well as the spirit of one of its greatest advocates. 13 photos.

An engaging and accessible introduction to one of the 20th century's greatest and most enigmatic artists This richly illustrated publication explores the full career of the hugely influential and endlessly fascinating French-American artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). A pioneer whose creative output was predicated on a fundamental questioning of what art is, Duchamp is well known despite remaining mysterious as an artist, owing to his elusive persona and the unconventional nature of his work. Focusing on the world-renowned Duchamp collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Essential Duchamp tells the artist's story through four key periods. The book begins with his early paintings and engagement with the avant-garde, then charts his abandonment of painting and invention of the readymade. This is followed by the creation of his alter ego Rrose Selavy and the optical experiments of the interwar years, and, finally, by the making of Etant donnes (1946-66), the project that occupied the artist in the final two decades of his life. Shorter accompanying texts include explanations of key terms Duchamp used for his innovative ideas-readymade, precision optics, pictorial nominalism, and infrathin-as well as interviews and statements by the artist about his own art and ideas. Published in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Tokyo National Museum (10/02/18-12/09/18) National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (12/22/18-04/07/19) Art Gallery New South Wales, Sydney (April-August 2019)

Often regarded as an artistic movement of interwar Paris, Surrealism comprised an international community of artists, writers, and intellectuals who have aspired to change the conditions of life itself over the course of the past century. Consisting of a wide range of dedicated case studies from the 1920s to the 1970s, this book highlights the international dimensions of the Surrealist Movement, and the radical chains of thought that linked its followers across the globe: from France to Romania, and from Canada to the former Czechoslovakia. From very early on, the surrealists approached magic as a means of bypassing, discrediting, and combatting rationalism, capitalism, and other institutionalized systems and values that they saw to be constraining influences upon modern life. Surrealist Sorcery maps out how this interest in magic developed into a major area of surrealist research that led not only to theoretical but also practical explorations of the subject. Taking an international perspective, Atkin surveys this important quality of the movement and how it's remained an important element in the surrealist project and its ongoing legacy.

Still Modernism offers a critique of the modernist imperative to embrace motion, speed, and mobility. In the context of the rise of kinetic technologies and the invention of motion pictures, it claims that stillness is nonetheless an essential tactic of modernist innovation. More specifically, the book looks at the ways in which photographic stillness emerges as a counterpoint to motion and to film, asserting its own clear visibility against the blur of kinesis. Photographic stillness becomes a means to resist the ephemerality of motion and to get at and articulate something real or essential by way of its fixed limits. Combining art history, film studies and literary studies, Louise Hornby reveals how photographers, filmmakers, and writers, even at their most kinetic, did not surrender attention to points of stillness. Rather, the still image, understood through photography, establishes itself as a mode of resistance and provides a formal response to various modernist efforts to see better, to attend more closely, and to remove the fetters of subjectivity and experience. Still Modernism brings together a series of canonical texts, films, and photographs, the selection of which reinforces the central claim that stillness does not lurk at the margins of modernism, but was constitutive of its very foundations. In a series of comparisons drawing from literary and visual objects, Hornby argues that still photography allows film to access its own diffuse images of motion; photography's duplicative form provides a serial structure for modernist efforts to represent the face; its iterative structure articulates the jerky rhythms of experimental narrative as perambulation; and its processes of development allow for the world to emerge independent of the human observer. Casting new light on the relationship between photography and film, Hornby situates the struggle between the still and the kinetic at the center of modernist culture.

Erika Szivos places the fine arts and their practitioners in the political, cultural, and social context of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. She investigates the influence of European patterns on the public role of the arts and the changing status of the artist in fin-de-si?cle Hungary.

Some 200 illustrations of objects designed by Knox.

Fahrelnissa Zeid (1901-1991) was one of the most influential Turkish artists, best known for her large-scale abstract paintings. Marrying influences from Islamic, Byzantine and Eastern art with the bold colour of the Fauvists, the geometrical dissonance of the Cubists and the precise lines of Mondrian, Zeid developed an abstract vocabulary that was a synthesis of East and West and was uniquely her own. Born in Istanbul in 1901 into a family of highly creative intellectuals, Zeid's artistic career began in the 1920s in Paris and took her to Istanbul, Berlin and Budapest, before she returned to Paris again in 1946. There she joined the Nouvelle Ecole de Paris, a melting pot movement of international artists that championed a new abstract aesthetic. In the mid-1970s Zeid moved permanently to Amman, Jordan, where she established the Royal Fahrelnissa Zeid Institute. She worked and taught there for the rest of her life; her work was exhibited widely and internationally throughout her career. This new book traces her development from the first works she made in Turkey, through her engagement with the D-Group, her later experiments with abstraction and, finally, her return to figuration. It also examines the pivotal role she played in the cross-pollination of artistic ideas in the twentieth century through her involvement with key groups and movements in diverse regions and communities. Documentary photography from the period gives new insight into the historical and art historical events that formed the backdrop to her ever evolving style. Featuring over 100 reproductions of Zeid's bold and colourful paintings, from her earlier geometric, calligraphic style to the later, more expressive portraits, the catalogue showcases the depth and range of her work. Zeid's works have recently been the subject of renewed attention, with prominent displays at the Sharjah Biennial and the fourteenth Istanbul Biennale in 2015. Accompanying an exhibition at Tate Modern, Fahrelnissa Zeid will be the only book available on the life and work of this pioneering artist and will bring her unique sensibility to the wider audience she deserves.

Eliza Pratt Greatorex (1819-1897) was America's most famous woman artist in the mid-nineteenth century, but today she is all but forgotten. Beginning with her Irish roots, this biography brings her art and life back into focus. Breaking conventions for female artists at that time, Greatorex specialized in landscapes and streetscapes, traveling from the Hudson River to the Colorado Rockies and across Europe and North Africa. Her crowning achievement, a monumental tome of drawings and narratives titled Old New York, awakened the public to the destruction of the city's architectural heritage during the post-Civil War era. Exploring Greatorex's fierce ambition and creative path, Katherine Manthorne reveals how her success at forging an independent career in a male-dominated world shaped American gender politics, visual culture, and urban consciousness.

In 1931, Diego Rivera was the subject of The Museum of Modern Art's second monographic exhibition, which set attendance records in its five-week run. The Museum brought Rivera to New York six weeks before the opening and provided him a studio space in the building. There he produced five portable murals large blocks of frescoed plaster, slaked lime and wood that feature bold images drawn from Mexican subject matter and address themes of revolution and class inequity. After the opening, to great publicity, Rivera added three more murals, taking on New York subjects through monumental images of the urban working class. Published in conjunction with an exhibition that brings together key works from Rivera's 1931 show and related material, this vividly illustrated catalogue casts the artist as a highly cosmopolitan figure who moved between Russia, Mexico and the United States and examines the intersection of art-making and radical politics in the 1930s.

Emilio Vedova's artistic career began in Venice in the mid-1930s. He immediately felt the deep allure of grand Venetian painting and sculpture and, guided by the restless agitation and dynamic mobility of the baroque, was soon plunged into total and extreme three-dimensional involvement. The work in "Emilio Vedova Scultore" originates precisely from his feeling of being a living and breathing part of the beloved spaces he encountered along his way, inexhaustible sources of stimuli and incitement, which he transformed into volumetric works of sculpture, architecture, opera and theatre. In his 1958 exhibition in Warsaw, the geometrical work mounted on the ceiling of the Zachenta Palace confirms Vedova's interest in sculpture and his penchant for articulating spatial implications.
This is followed in 1959 in Venice by the L-shaped teleri in the painting/ambient of Palazzo Grassi and then by his opera Intolleranza '60 (Intolerance '60) at the Teatro La Fenice, in collaboration with Luigi Nono. With the Plurimi (1961-1965), foreshadowed by the Rilievi (Reliefs, 1960-1964), Vedova removes the painting from the wall and installs it in the space of a fragmented, intersected set of surfaces somewhere between painting, sculpture and architecture. In Berlin he creates the Plurimi of the Absurdes Berliner Tagebuch '64, which found their natural development a few years later in Spazio/Plurimo/Luce (Space/Plurimo/Light), executed for Expo 1967 in Montreal. In this work, fourteen glass slides produced by the artist on Murano are projected simultaneously up to a height of 16 metres in the asymmetrical space by an equal number of large-format projectors. In 1977-1978, he works on the Plurimi/Binari from his Lacerazione (Laceration) cycle, where sliding, superimposed surfaces and black and white paintings squeezed into massive steel frames create images in continual transformation. In the same period he also dedicates himself to the Frammenti/Schegge (Fragments/Splinters) cycle - precarious, solitary and asymmetrical presences - and to the ... Cosiddetti Carnevali... (... So-called Carnivals...). Lastly, in the 1980s Vedova began his large installations of the Dischi (Discs) and Tondi - refound, vital and aggressive repossessions of space.
This book addresses the artist's entire career as a sculptor and includes a study of his series of models - his way of taking notes in three dimensions - which mark out his tireless daily quest for expression of the total work, towards which Emilio Vedova was inexorably drawn.

British realist art of the 1920s and 1930s is visually stunning - strong, seductive and demonstrating extraordinary technical skill. Despite this, it is often overshadowed by abstract art. This book presents the very first overview of British realist painting of the period, showcasing outstanding works from private and public collections across the UK. Of the forty artists featured in the show, many were major figures in the 1920s and 1930s but later passed out of fashion as abstraction and Pop Art became the dominant trends in the post-war years. In the last decade their work has re-emerged and interest in them has grown. Interwar realist art embraces a number of different styles, but is characterised by fine drawing, meticulous craftsmanship, a tendency towards classicism and an aversion to impressionism and visible brushwork. Artists such as Gerald Leslie Brockhurst, Meredith Frampton, James Cowie and Winifred Knights combine fastidious Old Master detail with 1920s modernity. Stanley Spencer spans various camps while Lucian Freud's early work can be seen as a realist coda which continued into the 1940s and beyond.Featuring many Scottish and women artists, this book promises a fascinating insight into this captivating period of British art. Exhibition to be held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh from 1 July to 29 October 2017.

A comprehensive study of one of the most versatile artists and acute observers of our time, who fuses art and fashion American artist Sterling Ruby works in a large variety of media, including sculpture, ceramics, painting, and video art. Ruby is influenced by a wide range of sources, including marginalized societies, maximum-security prisons, modernist architecture, artefacts and antiquities, graffiti, waste and consumption, and urban gangs. Through these, he examines the psychological space where individual expression confronts social constraint.

This unique series of paintings takes the viewer on a graphic, visionary journey through the physical, metaphysical, and spiritual anatomy of the self. From anatomically correct rendering of the body systems, Grey moves to the spiritual/energetic systems with such images as "Universal Mind Lattice," envisioning the sacred and esoteric symbolism of the body and the forces that define its living field of energy.

Includes essays on the significance of Grey's work by Ken Wilber, the eminent transpersonal psychologist, and by the noted New York art critic, Carlo McCormick.

The versatility of modern commercial house paints has ensured their use in a broad range of applications, including the protection and decoration of historic buildings, the coating of toys and furniture, and the creation of works of art. Historically, house paints were based on naturally occurring oils, gums, resins, and proteins, but in the early twentieth century, the introduction of synthetic resins revolutionized the industry. Good quality ready-mixed products became available and were used by artists worldwide. While the ubiquity of commercial paints means that conservators are increasingly called upon to preserve them, such paints pose unique challenges including establishing exactly which materials are present. This book traces the history of the household paint industry in the United States and United Kingdom over the first half of the twentieth century. It includes chapters on the artistic use of commercial paints and the development of ready-mixed paints and synthetic resins; oil paints, oleoresinous gloss and enamel paints, water paints, nitrocellulose lacquers, oil-modified alkyds, and emulsion paints; and the conservation implications of these materials. The book will be of interest to conservators and conservation scientists working on a broad range of painted surfaces, as well as curators, art historians, and historians of architectural paint.