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.

Jan Svankmajer wrote this remarkable book on tactile art when he stopped directing films after censorship by the Czechoslovakian government and experimented intensively with tactile phenomena and the creative imagination. Illustrated with over 100 images, the book is organized around many reproductions of Svankmajer's wondrous tactile art objects, tactile poems, experiments and games. It also includes dialogues with, and artworks by, other collaborating artists from the Group of Czech and Slovak Surrealists. Svankmajer also gathers together as contributors such notable exponents of tactual experience as Edgar Allen Poe, Guillaume Apollinaire, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Meret Oppenheim, Ay-O, and F.T. Marinetti.Michael Havas, producer of some of Svankmajer's films, says of the book: 'it is typically Svankmajer: erudite and very consequential. Sometimes also very funny and erotic. Totally unique.'

Reading Graphic Design in Cultural Context explains key ways of understanding and interpreting the graphic designs we see all around us, in advertising, branding, packaging and fashion. It situates these designs in their cultural and social contexts. Drawing examples from a range of design genres, leading design historians Grace Lees-Maffei and Nicolas P. Maffei explain theories of semiotics, postmodernism and globalisation, and consider issues and debates within visual communication theory such as legibility, the relationship of word and image, gender and identity, and the impact of digital forms on design. Their discussion takes in well-known brands like Alessi, Nike, Unilever and Tate, and everyday designed things including slogan t-shirts, car advertising, ebooks, corporate logos, posters and music packaging.

South African artist Irma Stern (1894–1966) is one of the nation’s most enigmatic modern figures. Stern held conservative political positions on race even as her subjects openly challenged racism and later the apartheid regime. Using paintings, archival research, and new interviews, this book explores how Stern became South Africa’s most prolific painter of Black, Jewish, and Colored (mixed-race) life while maintaining controversial positions on race. Through her art, Stern played a crucial role in both the development of modernism in South Africa and in defining modernism as a global movement. Spanning the Boer War to Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa and into the contemporary #RhodesMustFall movement, Irma Stern’s work documents important 20th-century cultural and political moments. More than 50 years after her death, Stern’s legacy challenges assumptions about race, gender roles, and religious identity and how they are represented in art history.

A compelling introduction to the life and artistic output of a trailblazing Norwegian painter, printmaker, and horticulturist Nikolai Astrup (1880-1928) was a highly individual Norwegian Modernist artist known for intensely colored paintings and woodcuts of his native landscape. Astrup received a formal art education in Kristiania (now Oslo), Germany, and Paris, but he later rebelled against certain aspects of his training, such as the traditional conventions of optical perspective. He rejected metropolitan cultural centers in favor of his rural childhood home in western Norway, where he produced a remarkable body of work. This volume brings Astrup's life and work to a North American audience, situating him within the history and culture of Norway and late 19th- and early 20th-century art. Astrup's horticultural achievements in the service of his art on the farm where he lived are also explored. The book's beautiful illustrations highlight the intensity of Astrup's palette, the innovative nature of his prints, and the magical realism of his landscapes steeped in folklore and local customs. Distributed for the Clark Art Institute in cooperation with KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes, Bergen, Savings Bank Foundation DNB, and Prince Eugen's Waldemarsudde Exhibition Schedule: Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (June 19-September 19, 2021) KODE Art Museums and Composer Homes, Bergen (October 15, 2021-January 23, 2022) Prince Eugen's Waldemarsudde, Stockholm (February 19-May 29, 2022)

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.

A beautiful celebration of six decades of work by Edgar Degas, published in the centennial year of the artist's death Edgar Degas's (1834-1917) relentless experimentation with technical procedures is a hallmark of his lifelong desire to learn. The numerous iterations of compositions and poses suggest an intense self-discipline, as well as a refusal to accept any creative solution as definitive or finite. Published in the centenary year of the artist's death, this book presents an exceptional array of Degas's work, including paintings, drawings, pastels, etchings, monotypes, counter proofs, and sculpture, with approximately sixty key works from private and public collections in Europe and the United States, some of them published here for the first time. Shown together, the impressive works represent well over half a century of innovation and artistic production. Essays by leading Degas scholars and conservation scientists explore his practice and recurring themes of the human figure and landscape. The book opens with a study of Degas's debt to the Old Masters, and it concludes with a consideration of his artistic legacy and his influence on leading artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Ryan Gander, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, R. B. Kitaj, Pablo Picasso, and Walter Sickert. Published in association with the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Exhibition Schedule: The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (10/3/17-1/14/18) Denver Art Museum (02/18/18-05/20/18)

In 1977, Max Neuhaus turned a triangle of pedestrian space between 45th and 46th Streets in Times Square into an island of harmonic sound. The rich textures of that sound continue today, emanating from beneath the sidewalk grating, to anonymously reach an individual's ears as if one has stumbled upon a secret. Known as Times Square, the celebrated installation was restored in 2002 with support from Dia Art Foundation, which further commissioned a site-specific piece, Time Piece Beacon, from Neuhaus in 2006 for its museum in Beacon, New York. This stunning book-the only volume in print dedicated solely to the work of Neuhaus-takes these two projects as a point of departure from which to consider the singular impact this artist has had in establishing sound as a medium in contemporary art. An interview with Neuhaus is complemented with essays by multidisciplinary scholars who investigate and situate his work within a historical context. Distributed for Dia Art Foundation

Under the label Atelier Zanolli, a fantastic world of silk fabrics that were painted and imprinted with patterns, opulently embroidered cushions, colourful pearl creations, as well as finely crafted leather and wood articles, was created between 1905 and 1939 in Zurich. The Zanollis had immigrated from Italy in 1905. Their family business was entirely women-run by mother Antonietta and her daughters Pia, Lea, and Zoe Zanolli. The cultural and stylistic influences manifested in the Zanollis' visually appealing product world range from the avant-garde to a typically Swiss aesthetic forged by a national spirit of defence against the increasingly felt threat that Nazi Germany posed to the country in the 1930s. Driven by a striving for artistic self-realisation, the atelier defied the many economic challenges of the period and carried out many commissions for Zurich's leading textile businesses and department stores. This book traces the history of Atelier Zanolli, places its work in the context of the development of Zurich and the Swiss textile industry in the first half of the 20th century, and for the first time also positions the "Zanolli style" internationally. More than 600 images show the wealth of colours and shapes of the cosmos of textiles and crafted objects, as well as templates, sketches, private photographs, business cards, and letters. The essays illuminate the techniques and work processes used, discuss entire motif families and unique designs, and grant a rare comprehensive insight into the tastes of the time.

Over a long, turbulent life, Picasso continually discovered new ways of seeing the world and translating it into art. A restless genius, he went through a blue period, a rose period, and a Cubist phase. He made collages, sculptures out of everyday objects, and beautiful ceramic plates. True Kelley's engaging biography is a wonderful introduction to modern art.

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.

This revelatory book concentrates on Scottish women painters and sculptors from 1885, when Fra Newbery became Director of the Glasgow School of Art, until 1965, the year of Anne Redpath's death. It explores the experience and context of the artists and their place in Scottish art history, in terms of training, professional opportunities and personal links within the Scottish art world. Celebrated painters including Joan Eardley, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh and Phoebe Anna Traquair are examined alongside lesser-known figures such as Phyllis Bone, Dorothy Johnstone and Norah Neilson Gray, in order to look afresh at the achievements of Scottish women artists of the modern period. The book accompanies a show which will be held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Two in Edinburgh from 7 November 2015 to 26 June 2016.

Some of the most innovative art of the past decade has been created far outside conventional galleries and museums. In a parking garage in Oakland, California; on a pleasure boat on the Lake of Zurich in Switzerland; at a public market in Chiang Mai, Thailand - artists operating at the intersection of art and cultural activism have been developing new forms of collaboration with diverse audiences and communities. Their projects have addressed such issues as political conflict in Northern Ireland, gang violence on Chicago's West Side, and the problems of sex workers in Switzerland. Provocative, accessible, and engaging, this book, one of the first full-length studies on the topic, situates these socially conscious projects historically, relates them to key issues in contemporary art and art theory, and offers a unique critical framework for understanding them. Grant Kester discusses a disparate network of artists and collectives - including The Art of Change, Helen and Newton Harrison, Littoral, Suzanne Lacy, Stephen Willats, and WochenKlausur - united by a desire to create new forms of understanding through creative dialogue that crosses boundaries of race, religion, and culture. Kester traces the origins of these works in the conceptual art and feminist performance art of the 1960s and 1970s and draws from the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, Jurgen Habermas, and others as he explores the ways in which these artists corroborate and challenge many of the key principles of avant-garde art and art theory.

Is contemporary art a friend or foe of Christianity? In "God in the Gallery" art historian, critic, and curator Daniel Siedell constructs a framework for interpreting modern art from a Christian worldview. He contends that art is not antithetical or hostile to Christianity but is in resonant dialogue with it. Siedell also examines the function of art criticism and the role of visual art in Christian worship and experience.

"Dan Siedell is an exceptionally thoughtful and articulate observer of the very difficult intersection of religious belief and contemporary art. The book is full of unexpected and promising confluences. Here a reader will find the principal secular theorists of modernism, but this book is also 'nourished by Nicene Christianity' and informed by a wonderful range of authors, from Florensky, Levinas, and Wyschogrod to Seerveld, Wolterstorff, Walford, and Dyrness. This is a tremendous book, a genuine effort at dialogue in an arena marked by the near-complete absence of open exchange."--James Elkins, E. C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

""God in the Gallery" is a seminal work of interpretation, a guide for skeptics and faithful alike, in which Siedell offers a most profound, encouraging survey of contemporary art. An Emmaus Road encounter for those traveling on the path of contemporary art, Siedell's careful and loving attention paid to known and unknown artists will surely open our eyes. A must read for all of us laboring in the art world and in the arts academia."--Makoto Fujimura, artist; founder/creative director, International Arts Movement

"Daniel Siedell's passionate appreciationfor common grace is apparent on every page of "God in the Gallery," This is a book that should be widely read not only for its penetrating account of the contemporary art world but also for its larger understanding of Christ and culture."--John Wilson, editor, "Books & Culture"

Camouflage has been linked with military and natural history contexts, but growing interest in the connections with areas such as ecology, evolution, visual deception and warfare has taken the concept of camouflage beyond the politics of appearance, the art of disappearance or simple strategies of mimicry.Approaching this subject from the disciplines of art history and theory, art practice, biology, cultural theory, literature and philosophy, Camouflage Cultures greatly expands the reach of camouflage's cultural terrain. The result is a collection that provides a new perspective on the developing discourse of camouflage and contributes to debates about the roles that physical, artistic and social camouflage play in contemporary life.

In this book Frances Spalding reassesses the astonishing achievements of British artists from the Edwardians Ben Nicholson and Walter Sickert to the Bloomsbury painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant; from the work of Paul Nash and David Jones between the wars to that of Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, David Hockney and the host of younger artists who have emerged since the 1960s. While modernist ideas from Europe and, more recently, American trends have had their influence, the author argues that British artists have drawn much of their inspiration from native traditions and are distinguished by their passionate adherence to individualism.

A fascinating look at how Mapplethorpe and Munch, although separated by many years, shared certain affinities in their lives and artwork This revelatory catalogue delves into the many affinities shared between two widely renowned and discussed artists, Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) and Edvard Munch (1863-1944), whose intensely studied work has, until now, never been considered in relation to one another. Mapplethorpe + Munch brings to light how these two monumental figures curiously relate on an existential level, in how they deal with questions concerning sexuality, and in their way of utilizing self-portraiture as a means to explore issues of personal identity. Featuring essays that examine the thematic impulses behind the accompanying exhibition, this publication establishes a previously unexplored association between two equally contentious art figures, while working to impart alternative perspectives and new insight into their respective outputs. Although distinct in their legacies, Mapplethorpe and Munch remain remarkably intertwined. Distributed for Mercatorfonds Exhibition Schedule: Munch Museum, Oslo (02/06/16-05/29/16)

The art and culture of Spain significantly influenced many of America's most renowned 19th- and 20th-century artists. Mary Cassatt visited the country early in her career and first garnered the attention of the French Impressionists with her paintings of Spanish themes. William Merritt Chase, fascinated with Spanish art, traveled to Madrid and its environs to paint landscapes and study at the Prado. And Robert Henri not only drew on the country's culture and traditions as a personal muse but repeatedly brought his art students to Spain as part of their training. Featuring works by all of these artists, as well as others such as John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins, this handsome volume reveals the important and varied ways that Spain inspired a century of American artists. Distributed for the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Chrysler Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (February 12-May 16, 2021) Milwaukee Art Museum (June 11-October 3, 2021)

Barry Le Va is back. After more than 10 years without a major exhibition in the United States, a mini-blockbuster of a retrospective at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Contemporary Art in early 2005 rescattered Le Va's felt, reimbedded his cleavers in a wall, and rebroke his sheets of plate glass--to extraordinary critical acclaim. Now, to complement that exhibition and for insight into a mind that has remained consistently true to a renegade vision for some 35 years, we have a collection of writings, studies, notes, drawings, sketches, and more from a cult artist who has influenced a younger generation that includes Jason Rhoades, Cady Noland, Karen Kilimnik, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. The book brings together for the first time in one place three major early interviews, and adds a new one with Christophe Cherix.

What is form in modern art? How could a work of art achieve its organic life in a world increasingly dominated by mechanism, by new technology? In this new book, Brandon Taylor proposes that biology and the life sciences themselves supplied many of the analogies and metaphors by which modern artists were guided. For the creative giants of the period - Picasso, Miro, Kandinsky, Strzeminski, Dali, Arp, Motherwell and Pollock, as well as less-known figures such as Taeuber, Erni and Kobro - questions of 'living' form loomed large in studio conversation, in the press, and in the writings of the artists themselves. In a book rich in new research and fresh thinking, a well-known art historian proposes six modalities of organic and vital life that pervade the radical experiments of modern art: the organic, the biomorphic, the ambiguous, the monstrous, the dialectical, and the liquid.

In 2000, the NVA arts organisation created The Path: a light and sound event that attracted 5,000 people and stunned audiences. The Path was a night-time walk through Perthshire's Glen Lyon where music, light and international performances created an intense sense of pilgrimage that aimed to enhance the participants' sense of the power of the natural landscape and rediscover what we may have forgotten about the world around us. Now this unforgettable event is to be taken to one of Europe's most hauntingly beautiful landscapes - the high cliffs of Coire Faion and The Storr on Skye. Around midnight, groups, equipped with head torches and walking sticks, will be guided through this inspiring landscape as the words of Skye's legendary poet Sorley MacLean echo down from the mountain. This book of essays and photographs from the storr event will capture what promises to be one of the greatest single site-specific environmental artworks ever to be staged in Britain.

Maqbool Fida Husain (1913-2011) is a central figure in Indian modern art, and the most represented artist in Mathaf's collection. A founding member of the Progressive Artists Group, formed in Bombay in 1947, Husain played a leading role in revolutionising art in India by parting ways with the dominant genres of academic painting and miniaturist nostalgia. This book investigates the work produced in all six decades of Husain's artistic practice, and includes paintings, prints, poetry, architecture, textile and film. It is divided into three themes: first, the idea of home as a habitat, a repository of Husain's childhood memories, and a space of exploration; second, the human passion for creativity and knowledge; and third, a multitude of approaches to the cosmic and divine aspects of being - expressed in myths, philosophies, world religions, narratives and symbols. The book also presents Husain's portfolio on Islamic Civilisations, a series of 99 works commissioned by Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser in 2007.

The Richter Interviews collects together a series of conversations between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Gerhard Richter over the course of more than two decades of discussion and collaboration. Subjects range from Richter's place within art history to artists books, architecture, religion, unrealised projects and his advice for young artists. The collection also includes a previously unpublished interview focused on Richter's much-lauded window for Cologne Cathedral, unveiled in 2007. Obrist's vast knowledge and interrogating mind coupled with his longstanding friendship with Richter make him a unique interlocutor for an artist whose work spans more than 60 years and ranges from painting to photography, glass to printmaking, watercolours to books. Obrist deftly guides the reader through a dazzling array of topics and offers an invaluable historical perspective on Richter s place within the art world of the 20th and 21st centuries. Illustrations of discussed artworks by Richter feature thro

'POPism reads like a novel... Social history of the rarest kind, set down in ultra-sharp focus by someone who helped shape the events he describes' The New Yorker A cultural storm swept through the 1960s - Pop Art, Bob Dylan, psychedelia, underground movies - and at its centre sat a bemused young artist with silver hair: Andy Warhol. Andy knew everybody (from the cultural commissioner of New York to drug-driven drag queens) and everybody knew Andy. His studio, the Factory, was the place: where he created the large canvases of soup cans and Pop icons that defined Pop Art, where one could listen to the Velvet Underground and rub elbows with Edie Sedgwick and where Warhol himself could observe the comings and goings of the avant-guarde.