Since the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps and recognition of the Holocaust as a watershed event of the twentieth century, if not in Western Civilization itself, the capacity of art to represent this event adequately has been questioned. Contributors provide case studies that include a broad spectrum of artists from North America, Europe and Israel, and examine some of the dominant themes of their work.

From painters and photographers to sculptors and performance artists, fifty of the most influential contemporary artists are profiled in this colorful and engaging book that traces the various artistic movements and radical changes of the second half of the twentieth century. Presented chronologically, each artist is featured in one or two double page spreads that include brilliant reproductions of their most important works, a succinct text about their work and life, an insightful biography with key dates in their career, and informative background on major developments in the art world. As diverse and inspiring as the artists themselves, this book is a voyage of discovery into art's cutting edge.

In presenting his best work from the mid-1990's to the present, we see how popular visual artist Frank Kozik elevates low culture to high art. His work, originating in the Austin, Texas, punk scene, manipulates pop culture and subculture icons in meticulously rendered, eye-catching combinations that are both engaging and controversial.

The Romare Bearden Reader brings together a collection of new essays and canonical writings by novelists, poets, historians, critics, and playwrights. The contributors, who include Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, August Wilson, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Kobena Mercer, contextualize Bearden's life and career within the history of modern art, examine the influence of jazz and literature on his work, trace his impact on twentieth-century African American culture, and outline his art's political dimensions. Others focus on specific pieces, such as A Black Odyssey, or the ways in which Bearden used collage to understand African American identity. The Reader also includes Bearden's most important writings, which grant readers insight into his aesthetic values and practices and share his desire to tell what it means to be black in America. Put simply, The Romare Bearden Reader is an indispensable volume on one of the giants of twentieth-century American art. Contributors. Elizabeth Alexander, Romare Bearden, Mary Lee Corlett, Rachel DeLue, David C. Driskell, Brent Hayes Edwards, Ralph Ellison, Henri Ghent, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Harry Henderson, Kobena Mercer, Toni Morrison, Albert Murray, Robert G. O'Meally, Richard Powell, Richard Price, Sally Price, Myron Schwartzman, Robert Burns Stepto, Calvin Tomkins, John Edgar Wideman, August Wilson

This is the first critical examination of Pablo Picasso's use of religious imagery and the religious import of many of his works with secular subject matter. Though Picasso was an avowed atheist, his work employs spiritual themes--and, often, traditional religious iconography. In five engagingly written, accessible chapters, Jane Daggett Dillenberger and John Handley address Picasso's cryptic 1930 painting of the Crucifixion; the artist's early life in the Catholic church; elements of transcendence in Guernica; Picasso's later, fraught relationship with the church, which commissioned him in the 1950s to paint murals for the Temple of Peace chapel in France; and the centrality of religious themes and imagery in bullfighting, the subject of countless Picasso drawings and paintings.

This book focuses on the visual and material culture of St Petersburg and Moscow at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The twilight of Imperial Russia witnessed a sudden renaissance that left a profound imprint on the visual, literary and performing arts: here was a Silver Age as luminous perhaps as the Golden Age of Russian literature many decades before. Advancing in roughly chronological sequence, Moscow and St Petersburg in Russia’s Silver Age highlights the essential social and political developments of this turbulent era, which painting, poetry, music and dance both reflected and affected. A dazzling array of artists, writers, composers, actors, singers, dancers and designers are presented in context, including Tolstoy, Pasternak, Gorky, Akhmatova, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov, Nijinsky, Scriabin, Karsavina, Meyerhold, Chaliapin, Stanislavsky, Diaghilev, Roerich, Repin, Serov, Somov, Vrubel, Bakst, Kandinsky, Malevich, Mayakovsky and many more. The book carries a rich repertoire of artistic images and vintage documentary photographs, many of which have not been published before. With a clear narrative and comprehensive bibliography, this volume will appeal both to the specialist and to the general student of Russian history and culture.

This absorbing biography, often conveyed through Peter Selz's own words, traces the journey of a Jewish-German immigrant from Hitler's Munich to the United States and on to an important career as a pioneer historian of modern art. Paul J. Karlstrom illuminates key historical and cultural events of the twentieth-century as he describes Selz's extraordinary career - from Chicago's Institute of Design (New Bauhaus), to New York's Museum of Modern Art during the transformative 1960s, and as founding director of the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley. Karlstrom sheds light on the controversial viewpoints that at times isolated Selz from his colleagues but nonetheless affirmed his conviction that significant art was always an expression of deep human experience. The book also links Selz's long life story - featuring close relationships with such major art figures as Mark Rothko, Dore Ashton, Willem de Kooning, Sam Francis, and Christo - with his personal commitment to political engagement.

""Art history after modernism" does not only mean that art looks different today; it also means that our discourse on art has taken a different direction, if it is safe to say it has taken a direction at all."
So begins Hans Belting's brilliant, iconoclastic reconsideration of art and art history at the end of the millennium, which builds upon his earlier and highly successful volume, "The End of the History of Art?." "Known for his striking and original theories about the nature of art," according to the "Economist," Belting here examines how art is made, viewed, and interpreted today. Arguing that contemporary art has burst out of the frame that art history had built for it, Belting calls for an entirely new approach to thinking and writing about art. He moves effortlessly between contemporary issues--the rise of global and minority art and its consequences for Western art history, installation and video art, and the troubled institution of the art museum--and questions central to art history's definition of itself, such as the distinction between high and low culture, art criticism versus art history, and the invention of modernism in art history. Forty-eight black and white images illustrate the text, perfectly reflecting the state of contemporary art.
With "Art History after Modernism," Belting retains his place as one of the most original thinkers working in the visual arts today.

In The Future of the Image, Jacques Ranciere develops a fascinating new concept of the image in contemporary art, showing how art and politics have always been intrinsically intertwined. He argues that there is a stark political choice in art: it can either reinforce a radical democracy or create a new reactionary mysticism. For Ranciere there is never a pure art: the aesthetic revolution must always embrace egalitarian ideals.

A brand new look at the extremely beautiful, if underappreciated, later works of one of the most inventive artists of the 20th century Between 1935 and his death at midcentury, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) undertook many decorative projects and commissions. These include mural paintings, stained glass, ceramic tiles, lead crystal pieces, carpets, tapestries, fashion fabrics, and accessories--work that has received no significant treatment until now. By presenting a wealth of new insights and unpublished material, including from the artist's own correspondence, John Klein, an internationally acclaimed specialist in the art of Matisse, offers a richer and more balanced view of Matisse's ambitions and achievements in the often-neglected later phases of his career. Matisse designed many of these decorations in the innovative--and widely admired--medium of the paper cut-out, whose function and significance Klein reevaluates. Matisse and Decoration also opens a window onto the revival and promotion, following World War II, of traditional French decorative arts as part of France's renewed sense of cultural preeminence. For the first time, the idea of the decorative in Matisse's work and the actual decorations he designed for specific settings are integrated in one account, amounting to an understanding of this modern master's work that is simultaneously more nuanced and more comprehensive.

Prokop’s meticulous history restores Jacques and Jacqueline Groag to their rightful places in the pantheon of Viennese Modernists. Prokop explores their individual careers in Vienna and Czechoslovakia, their early collaborations in the 1930s, their lives as Jewish émigrés, and the couple’s unique contributions in Britain for postwar exhibitions, monuments, furniture and textile design, even a dress for future-queen Elizabeth II. Full color edition, supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

In this important new anthology, Venetria K. Patton and Maureen Honey bring together a comprehensive selection of texts from the Harlem Renaissance -- a key period in the literary and cultural history of the cultural life of the United States. The collection revolutionizes our way of viewing this era, as it redresses the ongoing emphasis on the male writers of this time. Double-Take offers a unique, balanced collection of writers -- men and women, gay and straight, familiar and obscure.

The editors have also included works from a wide variety of genres -- poetry, short stories, drama, essays, music, and art -- allowing readers to understand the true interdisciplinary quality of this cultural movement. Biographical sketches of the authors are provided and most of the pieces are included in their entirety. Double-Take also includes artwork and illustrations, many of which are from periodicals and have never before been reprinted. Significantly, Double-Take is the first book to include music lyrics to illustrate the interrelation of various art forms.

Arranged by author, rather than by genre, this anthology includes works from major Harlem Renaissance figures as well as often-overlooked essayists, poets, dramatists, and artists.

Barbara Hepworth: The Sculptor in the Studio is the first study devoted to Hepworth's St Ives studio in which the centrality of Trewyn Studio and garden to her art and life is brought to the fore. 'It affects my whole life & work most profoundly', she wrote to a friend in 1949 shortly before acquiring it. A history and a portrait of a unique place, the book illuminates the ways in which the place and the work are bound together. It explores Hepworth's working environment and the development of her practice over a period of 25 years. The studio, and especially the garden that Hepworth shaped, was the primary and ideal context in which her sculptures were viewed. Following Hepworth's death in 1975, Trewyn Studio was opened as the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, fulfilling the hopes she had expressed at the end of her life. The adaptation of Hepworth's studio-home to create the Museum is examined in detail. The Museum was given to the Tate Gallery in 1980, becoming the first of Tate's outstations and helping to lay the foundations for Tate St Ives. It contains the largest group of Hepworth's works, permanently on display in the place in which they were created. Here the visitor is closest to Hepworth's work and to the sources of her inspiration.

Not every artist is suited to catalogue raisonne treatment, but the oeuvre of Ed Ruscha, comprised as it is of series, repetitions and documentations, looks great under such clerical scrutiny. Projected as a seven-volume edition under the guidance of Robert Dean and Lisa Turvey, the Ruscha Catalogue Raisonne Project lends the serial quality of Ruscha's early artist's books to the entire body of his work, while providing a definitive resource for fans, scholars and collectors in the most efficient style possible. The three previous volumes collected works from 1958-1970, 1971-1982 and 1983-1987. Such esteemed artists and critics as Walter Hopps, Lawrence Weiner, Dave Hickey, Peter Wollen and Yves-Alain Bois have contributed essays celebrating and reviewing Ruscha's steadily incremental accomplishment. Each volume of the catalogue has a stitched binding and a cloth cover with silver-colored embossing, protected with an embossed slipcase. Volume 4 is a co-publication of Gagosian Gallery and Steidl and documents 198 paintings from 1988 to 1992. In addition to almost 200 color reproductions, it includes a comprehensive exhibition history, bibliography and biographical chronology, as well as a text by artist Mel Bochner and an essay by art historian Briony Fer.

Dada is often celebrated for its strategies of shock and opposition, but in Dada Presentism, Maria Stavrinaki provides a new picture of Dada art and writings as a lucid reflection on history and the role of art within it. The original (Berlin-based) Dadaists' acute historical consciousness and their modern experience of time, she contends, anticipated the formulations of major historians such as Reinhart Koselleck and, more recently, François Hartog. The book explores Dada temporalities and concepts of history in works of art, artistic discourse, and in the photographs of the Berlin Dada movement. These photographs—including the famous one of the First International Dada Fair—are presented not as simple, transparent documents, but as formal deployments conforming to a very concrete theory of history. This approach allows Stavrinaki to link Dada to more contemporary artistic movements and practices interested in history and the archive. At the same time, she investigates what seems to be a real oxymoron of the movement: its simultaneous claim to the ephemeral and its compulsive writing of its own history. In this way, Dada Presentism also interrogates the limits between history and fiction.

Why, and in what manner, did artist Paul Klee have such a significant impact on twentieth-century thinkers? His art and his writing inspired leading philosophers to produce key texts in twentieth-century aesthetics, texts that influenced subsequent art history and criticism.
Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard, Sartre, Foucault, Blanchot, Derrida, and Marion are among the philosophers who have engaged with Klee's art and writings. Their views are often thought to be distant from each other, but Watson puts them in conversation. His point is not to vindicate any final interpretation of Klee but to allow his interpreters' different accounts to interact, to shed light on their and on Klee's work, and, in turn, to delineate both a history and a theoretical problematic in their midst. "Crescent Moon over the Rational" reveals an evolving theoretical constellation of interpretations and their questions (theoretical, artistic, and political) that address and continually renew Klee's rich legacies.

"Princeton and the Gothic Revival" investigates America's changing attitudes toward medieval art around the turn of the twentieth century through the lens of Princeton University and its role as a major patron of Gothic Revival art and architecture. Johanna Seasonwein charts a shift from eclecticism to a more unified, "authentic" approach to medieval art, and examines how the language of medieval forms was used to articulate a new model of American higher education in campus design and the classroom.

The catalog for an exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum, "Princeton and the Gothic Revival" breaks new ground by addressing why universities, and Princeton in particular, were so effective at bringing together what had been disparate interests in the Middle Ages. Revivalists and Medievalists were often at odds, yet at Princeton they used the language of the Middle Ages to create a new identity for the American university, one that was steeped in the traditions of Oxford and Cambridge but also embraced the model of the German research university.

"Princeton and the Gothic Revival" provides an overview of Princeton's Romanesque and Gothic Revival architecture and examines the changing approach to the idea of the "Gothic" by looking at three Princeton buildings and their stained glass windows: the Marquand Chapel, Procter Hall at the Graduate College, and the University Chapel.

The third volume of The Cambridge History of the Gothic is the first book to provide an in-depth history of Gothic literature, film, television and culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (c. 1896-present). Identifying key historical shifts from the birth of film to the threat of apocalypse, leading international scholars offer comprehensive coverage of the ideas, events, movements and contexts that shaped the Gothic as it entered a dynamic period of diversification across all forms of media. Twenty-three chapters plus an extended introduction provide in-depth accounts of topics including Modernism, war, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, counterculture, feminism, AIDS, neo-liberalism, globalisation, multiculturalism, the war on terror and environmental crisis. Provocative and cutting edge, this will be an essential reference volume for anyone studying modern and contemporary Gothic culture.

Bakhtin and the Visual Arts assesses the relevance of Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas as they relate to painting and sculpture. First published in the 1960s, Bakhtin's writings introduced the concepts of carnival and dialogue or dialogism, which have had significant impact in such diverse fields as literature and literary theory, philosophy, theology, biology and psychology. In his four early aesthetic essays, written between 1919 and 1926, and before he began to focus on linguistic and literary categories, Bakhtin worked on a larger philosophy of creativity, which was never completed. Deborah Haynes's in-depth 1995 study of his aesthetics, especially his theory of creativity, analyses its applicability to contemporary art theory and criticism. The author argues that Bakhtin, with such categories as answerability, outsideness and unfinalizability, offers a conceptual basis for interpreting the moral dimensions of creative activity.

A long-awaited, new interpretation of Charlotte Salomon's singular and complex modern artwork, Life? or Theatre? Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) is renowned for a single, monumental, modernist artwork, Life? or Theatre? (Leben? oder Theater?), comprising 784 paintings and created between 1941 and 1942. This major art-historical study sheds new light on the remarkable combination of image, text, and music, revealing Salomon's wealth of references to cinema, opera, Berlin cabaret, and the painter's self-consciously deployed modernist engagements with artists such as Van Gogh, Munch, and Kollwitz. Additionally, Griselda Pollock draws attention to affinities in Salomon's work with that of others who shared her experience of statelessness and menaced exile in Nazi-dominated Europe, including Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin. Confronting new evidence for the extremity of the young artist's last months, Pollock examines this significant work for its equally profound testimony to the crimes of the everyday: the sexual abuse of women in their own families. Seeking to reconcile the grandeur of this project's sweep of a violent history with its unique testimony to the anguish of women, Pollock challenges the prevailing interpretations of Salomon's paintings as a kind of visual autobiography by threading into her detailed and illuminating visual analyses of the painter's philosophical art-making a dynamic range of insights from feminist and Jewish studies of modern subjectivity, story-telling, memory work, and historical trauma.

This is the third volume in the ongoing series documenting Ruschas entire corpus of paintings. As in the previous two volumes, each painting is given a double-page spread with exhibition and bibliographic history, and is reproduced in colour. The artists notebook sketches for paintings are reproduced in facsimile.This volume contains 165 paintings and, in addition, includes a major public commission for the Philip Johnson-designed Miami-Dade Public Library, which was a watershed mark for Ruscha. Paintings done immediately prior to this commission can be seen as a summation of the artists earlier preoccupations and techniques, while those done after the commission show a major shift in Ruschas direction occasioned by the artists use of airbrush techniques to produce dark, atmospheric canvases that correspond to film noir and such Los Angeles writers as Raymond Chandler. The book includes an introductory essay by the editor, Robert Dean, and a personal tribute by artist Lawrence Weiner. It contains a chronology to 1987, as well as a comprehensive bibliography and list of exhibitions.

Explores contemporary art that challenges deadly desires for mastery and dominion. Amid times of emboldened cruelty and perpetual war, Rosalyn Deutsche links contemporary art to three practices that counter the prevailing destructiveness: psychoanalytic feminism, radical democracy, and war resistance. Deutsche considers how art joins these radical practices to challenge desires for mastery and dominion, which are encapsulated in the Eurocentric conception of the human that goes under the name "Man" and is driven by deadly inclinations that Deutsche calls masculinist. The masculinist subject-as an individual or a group-universalizes itself, claims to speak on behalf of humanity, and meets differences with conquest. Analyzing artworks by Christopher D'Arcangelo, Robert Filliou, Hans Haacke, Mary Kelly, Silvia Kolbowski, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Martha Rosler, James Welling, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, Deutsche illuminates the diverse ways in which they expose, question, and trouble the visual fantasies that express masculinist desire. Undermining the mastering subject, these artworks invite viewers to question the positions they assume in relation to others. Together, the essays in Not-Forgetting, written between 1999 and 2020, argue that this art offers a unique contribution to building a less cruel and violent society.