Assembling the foremost scholars in this innovative, distinctive and expanding subject, internationally well-known critical theorists John Armitage and Joanne Roberts present a ground-breaking aesthetic, design-led and media-related examination of the relations between historical and, crucially, contemporary ideas of luxury. Critical Luxury Studies offers a technoculturally inspired survey of the mediated arts and design, as well as a means of comprehending the socio-economic order with novel philosophical tools and critical methods of interrogation that are re-defining the concept of luxury in the 21st century.

This anthology springs out of a productive environment that in recent years has been created in Norway for research into the art of Edvard Munch. Comprising scholars from both the University of Oslo and the Munch Museum, this environment is seeking to internationalise the research and broadening the network of scholars working on Munch's art. The nine essays written by art historians from USA, Germany, Switzerland and Norway shed new light upon different sides of Munch and his art, as well as on the impact he has had in art history. The authors in this anthology are more critical of their sources than has been seen earlier in research on Munch, and their interpretations of works are increasingly based on information that can be documented. A diversity of theory now supplements the traditionally biographical approach.One of the authors describes the process of identifying a formerly unknown Munch painting, Seated nude and three male heads, as well as addressing general problems of dating concerning Munch's oeuvres. Another essay focuses on Munch's portrayals of one of the most radical Norwegian art movements in the late 19th century, Kristianiabohemen, and the importance of this movement for Munch's development as an artist. Through analysis of Munch's paintings the authors also focus on Munch's role in the creation of a national identity, and his perception of the male role in contemporary society. In the last essay of the book it is being argued that Munch and his works have often been better comprehended by other artists than by traditional art historians. The essay shows how certain artists, most of them American such as Jim Dine, Andres Serrano and Elizabeth Jones, have appropriated and developed Munch's pictorial imagination, in independent works or in visual quotations.

This groundbreaking book surveys the shifts in the aesthetic discourse and artistic practises that decisively influenced the shaping of the avant-garde during Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975). On the basis of extensive, so far unpublished, archival material, it discusses the intellectual and cultural field as an important battlefield for fighting the regime from within. The study opens with a comprehensive historical overview on the cultural world from the end of the Spanish Civil War throughout Francoism and reveals for the first time the broader intellectual and cultural context of vanguard art considering the special relations and negotiation processes between artist, critics and institutions during a major gap in the historiography of post-war Spanish culture: the late Franco dictatorship (1959-1975). It then analyses in depth the important role that a group of art critics played as theoreticians and peers in key artistic movements from the 1950s onwards. Using their extensive international networks in the midst of the Cold War period, they decisively influenced the aesthetic and cultural debates of their time and very concretely helped shaping a completely new discourse for the avant-garde in Spain. This book discusses the creation of this new discourse that linked culture and ethics/politics and analyses its impact on the intellectual and artistic landscape (visual, print and exhibition culture) during the last decades of Franco's regime. It is indebted to a cultural historic approach that takes high culture, popular culture, politics as well as the history of ideas in account studying the reciprocal transfer processes within these fields and across European and American geographies. This study and its interdisciplinary approach will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual, cultural and museum studies of modern Spain in particular and Europe in general.

Deeply influenced by studies of female iconology, the medieval, the subconscious and hybrid bodies, Faith Wilding's art is instantly recognisable. In keeping with Wilding's own artworks, this book is a bricolage: memoirs and watercolours sit alongside critical essays and family photographs to form an overall history of both Wilding's life and works as well as the wider feminist art movement of the 1970s and beyond.   This collection spans fifty years of Wilding's artistic production, feminist art pedagogy and participation in, and organising of, feminist art collectives, such as the Feminist Art Program, Womanhouse, Womanspace Gallery and the Woman's Building. Featuring contributions from scholars and artists, including Amelia Jones, the book is the first of its kind to celebrate the career of an artist who helped shape the feminist art of today. Intimate, philosophical and insightful, Faith Wilding's Fearful Symmetries is a beautiful book intended for artists, scholars and a broader audience.

In January 2006 a man tried to break Marcel Duchamp's Fountain sculpture with a small hammer. The sculpted foot of Michelangelo's David was damaged in 1991 by a purportedly mentally ill artist. Each such incident confronts us with the unsettling dynamic between destruction and art. Renowned art historian Dario Gamboni is the first to tackle this weighty issue in depth. Starting with the sweeping obliteration of architecture and art under the Communist regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, Gamboni investigates other instances of destruction around the globe, uncovering a surprisingly widespread phenomenon. As he demonstrates through analyses of nineteenth- and twentieth-century incidents in the U.S. and Europe, a complex relationship exists between the evolution of modern art and a long history of iconoclasm. Gamboni probes the concept of artists' rights, the power of political protest and the ways in which iconoclasm offers a unique interpretation of society's relationship to art and material culture. This compelling and thought-provoking study, now in B-format paperback and with a new preface by the author, forces us to rethink the ways in which we interact with art and its power to shock or subdue.

Women, Art and Money in England establishes the importance of women artists' commercial dealings to their professional identities and reputations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Grounded in economic, social and art history, the book draws on and synthesises data from a broad range of documentary and archival sources to present a comprehensive history of women artists' professional status and business relationships within the complex and changing art market of late-Victorian England. By providing new insights into the routines and incomes of women artists, and the spaces where they created, exhibited and sold their art, this book challenges established ideas about what women had to do to be considered 'professional' artists. More important than a Royal Academy education or membership to exhibiting societies was a woman's ability to sell her work. This meant that women had strong incentive to paint in saleable, popular and 'middlebrow' genres, which reinforced prejudices towards women's 'naturally' inferior artistic ability - prejudices that continued far into the twentieth century. From shining a light on the difficult to trace pecuniary arrangements of little researched artists like Ethel Mortlock to offering new and direct comparisons between the incomes earned by male and female artists, and the genres, commissions and exhibitions that earned women the most money, Women, Art and Money is a timely contribution to the history of women's working lives that is relevant to a number of scholarly disciplines.

What made art modern? What is modern art? The Legends of the Modern demystifies the ideas and "legends" that have shaped our appreciation of modern art and literature. Beginning with an examination of the early modern artists Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Cervantes, Didier Maleuvre demonstrates how many of the foundational works of modern culture were born not from the legendry of expressive freedom, originality, creativity, subversion, or spiritual profundity but out of unease with these ideas. This ambivalence toward the modern has lain at the heart of artistic modernity from the late Renaissance onward, and the arts have since then shown both exhilaration and disappointment with their own creative power. The Legends of the Modern lays bare the many contradictions that pull at the fabric of modernity and demonstrates that modern art's dissatisfaction with modernity is in fact a vital facet of this cultural period.

Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874-1925) was one of the most important Jewish artists of modern times. As a successful illustrator, photographer, painter and printer, he became the first major Zionist artist. Surprisingly there has been little in-depth scholarly research and analysis of Lilien’s work available in English, making this book an important contribution to historical and art-historical scholarship. Concentrating mainly on his illustrations for journals and books, Lynne Swarts acknowledges the importance of Lilien’s groundbreaking male iconography in Zionist art, but is the first to examine Lilien’s complex and nuanced depiction of women, which comprised a major dimension of his work. Lilien’s female images offer a compelling glimpse of an alternate, independent and often sexually liberated modern Jewish woman, a portrayal that often eluded the Zionist imagination. Using an interdisciplinary approach to integrate intellectual and cultural history with issues of gender, Jewish history and visual culture, Swarts also explores the important fin de siècle tensions between European and Oriental expressions of Jewish femininity. The work demonstrates that Lilien was not a minor figure in the European art scene, but a major figure whose work needs re-reading in light of his cosmopolitan and national artistic genius.

In light of the recent rise of right-wing populism in numerous political contexts and in the face of resurgent nationalism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and demagoguery, this book investigates how historical and contemporary cultural producers have sought to resist, confront, confound, mock, or call out situations of political oppression in Germany, a country which has seen a dramatic range of political extremes during the past century. While the current turn to nationalist populism is global, it is perhaps most disturbing in Germany, given its history with its stormy first democracy in the interwar Weimar Republic; its infamous National Socialist (Nazi) period of the 1930s and 1940s; and its split Cold-War existence, with Marxist-Leninist Totalitarianism in the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany's barely-hidden ties to the Nazi past. Equally important, Germans have long considered art and culture critical to constructions of national identity, which meant that they were frequently implicated in political action. This book therefore examines a range of work by artists from the early twentieth century to the present, work created in an array of contexts and media that demonstrates a wide range of possible resistance.

Since it was first published in 1992, this book has become one of the leading anthologies of art theoretical texts in the English-speaking world. This expanded edition includes the best recent reflections, taking the anthology up to the turn of the 21st century. The book offers comprehensive representation of the theories which underpinned developments in the visual arts during the 20th century. As well as writings by artists, the anthology includes texts by critics, philosophers, politicians and literary figures. The content is clearly structured into eight broadly chronological sections, starting from the legacy of symbolism at the beginning of the century and concluding with contemporary debates about postmodernism. The editors provide introductions to all of the more than 300 texts, placing theories and critical approaches in context.

"Reaction and the Avant-Garde" illuminates a vital facet of right-wing thought in the first decades of the century, which had a powerful hold on Europe's intellectual elite. Prominent literary figures, such as Ezra Pound, Hilaire Belloc and the Chestertons, led a revolt against liberal parliamentary democracy in Britain. This group despised parliaments as representing and embodying a 'nation'. Villis examines the literary works, private papers, correspondence and memoirs of the leaders of this anti-Semitic, anti-modern, anti-women's rights movement that formed the intellectual underpinning of European fascism.