Born in Buenos Aires in 1899, and reborn in Paris in 1928, Eileen Agar was an artist whose work throughout her long career synthesized elements of the two main art movements of the twentieth century: Cubism and Surrealism. This monograph, the first full account of Agar's complete works, including paintings, collages, photographs and objects, comes at a time when there is a major revival of interest in Surrealism in the UK and worldwide. Drawing on personal conversations with the artist as well as original research, Michel Remy examines the life and work of the artist through-out her long career, from her passage through Cubism and abstraction to Surrealism, as well as her dedicated participation in Surreal-ist activities in England and abroad. Each period is illustrated with many striking images, including rare photographs, and supported by penetrating interpretations. The powerful myth-making drive that underlies Agar's output is revealed, as well the tenderness, humour, poetry, love of nature and the world, subversion of the laws of reality, and celebration of femininity that suffuses each of her works.This is a timely, fresh and cogent account of a fascinating woman artist whose quality of work, independence of mind and freedom of imagination refute the assertion that women have not played a major role in the story of Surrealism. The book will appeal to anyone interested in art history and Surrealism.

We use the term ""modernism"" almost exclusively to characterize the work of European and American writers and artists who struggled to portray a new kind of fractured urban life typified by mechanization and speed. Between the 1880s and 1930s, Latin American artists were similarly engaged - but with a difference. While other modernists drew from ""primitive"" cultures for an alternative sense of creativity, Latin American modernists were taking a cue from local sources, primarily indigenous and black populations in their own countries. Although these artists remained outsiders to modernism elsewhere as a result of their race, nation, and identity, their racial heritage served as a positive tool in negotiating their relationship to the dichotomy between tradition and modernity. In Mestizo Modernism Tace Hedrick focuses on four key artists who represent Latin American modernism - Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo, Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Hedrick interrogates what being ""modern"" and ""American"" meant for them and illuminates the cultural contexts within which they worked, as well as the formal methods they shared, including the connection they drew between ancient cultures and modern technologies. In so doing, she defines ""modernism"" more as a time frame at the turn of the twentieth century, marked broadly across the arts and national boundaries, than as a strict aesthetic or formal category. In fact, this look at Latin American artists will force the reconceptualization of what modernism has meant in academic study and what it might mean for future research.

No other introductory book presents the diversity and complexity of postwar American art from Abstract Expressionism to the present as clearly and succinctly as this groundbreaking survey. David Joselit traces and analyses the often contradictory formal, ideological and political conditions during this period which made American art predominant throughout the world. Social and cultural transformations rooted in mass-media technologies - photography, television, video and the Internet - elevated consumer commodities to the status of legitimate art subjects, as in Pop and Installation art, and brought about a mechanization of the creative act. Artists also increasingly engaged with issues of gender, race, identity and power. Canonical movements and figures are discussed - Pollock, Rothko, Krasner, Oldenburg, Johns, Warhol, Paik, Ruscha, Sherman, Holzer, Koons and Barney - in juxtaposition with lesser known contemporary artists and practices.

Early twentieth-century art and art practice in Britain and the United States were, Janet Wolff asserts, marginalized by critics and historians in very similar ways after the rise of post-Cubist modern art. In a masterly book on the sociology of modernism, Wolff explores work that was primarily realist and figurative and investigates the social, institutional, political, and aesthetic processes by which that art fell by the wayside in the postwar period. Throughout, she shows that questions of gender and ethnicity play an important role in critical, curatorial, and historical evaluations. For example, Wolff finds that the work of the artists central to the development of the Whitney Museum was relegated to a secondary status in the postwar period, when realism was labeled "feminine" in contrast to the aggressive masculinity of abstract expressionism.The three key periods considered in AngloModern are the early twentieth century, when modernist art and existing and new realist traditions coexisted in a certain tension; the postwar period, in which modernism claimed superiority over realism; and the late twentieth century, when a retrieval of the realist and figurative traditions seemed to occur. Wolff concludes by considering this re-emergence, as well as the limitations of earlier discussions of the struggles of realist and figurative art to endure the currents of modernism.

The African diaspora a direct result of the transatlantic slave trade and Western colonialism generated a wide array of artistic achievements in the past century, from blues to reggae, from the paintings of Henry Ossawa Tanner to the video installations of Keith Piper. Richard Powell's study concentrates on the works of art themselves and on how these works, created during a time of major social upheaval and transformation, use black culture as both subject and context. From musings on the "the souls of black folk" in early twentieth-century painting, sculpture, and photography to questions of racial and cultural identities in performance, media, and computer-assisted arts in the 1990s, the book draws on the works of hundreds of artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Lois Mailou Jones, Wifredo Lam, Jacob Lawrence, Spike Lee, Archibald Motley, Jr., Faith Ringgold, and Gerard Sekoto. This revised edition includes expanded coverage of video art and a new chapter that discusses work by a number of artists who have newly risen to prominence, such as Chris Ofili, Kara Walker, and Renee Cox. Biographies of more than 170 key artists provide a unique art-historical reference. Placing its emphasis on black cultural themes rather than on black racial identity, this groundbreaking book is an important exploration of the visual representations of black culture throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

A timely celebration of the last ten years of Artangel, which has been responsible for commissioning some of the most important artworks of recent years from such internationally acclaimed artists as Juan Munoz. Rachel Whiteread. Robert Wilson, Douglas Gordon, Janet Cardiff, Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson and Matthew Barney. "Off Limits: 40 Artangle Projects is of huge relevance to anyone interested in the broader issues of contemporary art.

Jam are a design collective with a very individual take on their consumer environment. Their projects include a recent collaboration with Sony, in which they explored the virtues of the flat screen TV by making it into a coffee table. This sense of humour in their re-interpretations creates a dynamic relationship between large corporation and designer in the creation of a 'brand identity' through the generation of recognisable, if unusual products. Since Jam's formation in 1996 they have won international recognition for their quirky take on everyday objects, with their work being exhibited in the Guggenheim, New York and at 100% Design in London.

It focuses on a continuing tradition and its gradual transformation into an international art mode reflecting in it the contemporary nuances and aspirations. The tradition of temple murals, palmleaf manuscript paintings, pata paintings, Saura tribal paintings and Osakothi folk paintings were the factors that came together in diverse, eclectic, yet sustaining ways to shape the contemporary art of the State. The book makes a historical encounter with analytical anecdotes of an emerging Indian art trend. It speaks of a regional spell, virgin overawe and a future promise. It impresses the reader with the paraphernalia of an art movement trying to match the glory and distinction of its past art heritage.

This engaging cultural history examines the emergence of a professional identity for American women artists. By focusing on individual sculptors, painters, and illustrators, Laura Prieto gives us a compelling picture of the prospects and constraints faced by women artists in the United States from the late eighteenth century through the 1930s.

Prieto tracks the transformation from female artisans and ladies with genteel "artistic accomplishments" to middle-class professional artists. Domestic spaces and familial metaphors helped legitimate the production of art by women. Expression of sexuality and representation of the nude body, on the other hand, posed problems for these artists. Women artists at first worked within their separate sphere, but by the end of the nineteenth century "New Women" grew increasingly uncomfortable with separatism, wanting ungendered recognition. With the twentieth century came striking attempts to reconcile domestic lives and careers with new expectations; these decades also ruptured the women's earlier sense of community with amateur women artists in favor of specifically professional allegiances. This study of a diverse group of women artists--diverse in critical reception, geographic location, race, and social background--reveals a forgotten aspect of art history and women's history.

"Allen J. Christenson offers us in this wonderful book a testimony to contemporary Maya artistic creativity in the shadow of civil war, natural disaster, and rampant modernization. Trained in art history and thoroughly acquainted with the historical and modern ethnography of the Maya area, Christenson chronicles in this beautifully illustrated work the reconstruction of the central altarpiece of the Maya Church of Tz'utujil-speaking Santiago Atitla n, Guatemala. The much-loved colonial-era shrine collapsed after a series of destructive earthquakes in the twentieth century. Christenson's close friendship with the Cha vez brothers, the native Maya artists who reconstructed the shrine in close consultation with village elders, enables him to provide detailed exegesis of how this complex work of art translates into material form the theology and cosmology of the traditional Tz'utujil Maya.

"With the author's guidance, we are taught to see this remarkable work of art as the Maya Christian cosmogram that it is. Although it has the triptych form of a conventional Catholic altarpiece, its iconography reveals a profoundly Maya narrative, replete with sacred mountains and life-giving caves, with the whole articulated by a central axis mundi motif in the form of a sacred tree or maize plant (ambiguity intended) that is reminiscent of well-known ancient Maya ideas. Through Christenson's focused analysis of the iconography of this shrine, we are able to see and understand almost firsthand how the modern Maya people of Santiago Atitla n have remembered the imagined universe of their ancestors and placed upon this sacred framework their received truths in time present." -- Gary H. Gossen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Latin American Studies, University at Albany, SUNY

"This important study is the first to confront head-on the avoidance of the visual that has plagued black studies in the United States. "The Art of History" opens the often hermetic world of black visual culture to a much broader realm in which questions central to contemporary feminism, black studies, and cultural theory are brought to bear."--Judith Wilson, University of California, Irvine""The Art of History" is an important book that expands the significance of visual culture to African American studies debates. It provides cogent and insightful explorations of the work of contemporary African American women artists. Scholars and general readers alike are sure to be compelled by this original and innovative study."--Valerie Smith, author of "Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings"In this lively and engaging book, Lisa Gail Collins examines the work of contemporary African American women artists. Her study comes at a time when an unprecedented number of these artists--photographers, filmmakers, painters, installation and mixed-media artists--have garnered the attention and imagination of the art-viewing public.To better understand the significance of this particular historical moment in American visual arts, Collins focuses on four "problems" that recur when these artists confront their histories: the documentation of truth; the status of the black female body; the relationship between art and cultural contact and change; and the relationship between art and black girlhood. By examining the social and cultural histories which African American women artists engage, Collins illuminates a dialogue between past and present imagemakers.
"
The Art of History" is a major contribution to the study of American visual culture. It will be of use to both scholars and students in art history, African American studies, American studies, and women's studies.

The twentieth century will be remembered for great innovation in two particular areas: art and culture, and technological advancement. Much of its prodigious technical inventiveness, however, was pressed into service in the conduct of warfare. Why, asks Margot Norris, did violence and suffering on such an immense scale fail to arouse artistic and cultural expressions powerful enough to prevent the recurrence of these horrors? Why was art not more successful--through its use of dramatic, emotionally charged material, its ability to stir imagination and arouse empathy and outrage--in producing an alternative to the military logic that legitimates war?

Military argument in the twentieth century has been fortified by the authority of the rationalism that we attribute to science, Norris argues. Warfare is therefore legitimized by powerful discourses that art's own arsenal of styles and genres has limited power to counter. Art's difficulty in representing the violent death of entire generations or populations has been particularly acute.

Choosing works that have become representative of their historically violent moment, Norris explores not only their aesthetic strategies and perspectives but also the nature of the power they wield and the ethical engagements they enable or impede. She begins by mapping the altered ethical terrain of modern technological warfare, with its increasing targeting of civilian populations for destruction. She then proceeds historically with chapters on the trench poetry and modernist poetry of World War I, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, both the book and the film of Schindler's List, the conflicting historical stories of the Manhattan Project, a comparison of American and Japanese accounts of Hiroshima, Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now, and the effects of press censorship in the Persian Gulf War.

By looking at the whole span of the century's writing on war, Norris provides a fascinating critique of art's ethical power and limitations, along with its participation in--as well as protest against--the suffering that human beings have brought upon themselves.

This collection of essays, based on international collaboration by scholars in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States, is a systematic, interdisciplinary attempt to address the social, political, and spiritual significance of the modern arts both in Japan and its empire between 1920 and 1960. These 40 years, punctuated by war, occupation, and reconstruction, were turbulent and brutal, but also important and even productive for the arts. The volume takes a trans-war (rather than an inter-war) approach, beginning with the cultural politics of painting, poetry, and fiction in Japanese-occupied Korea and Taiwan following World War I. The narrative continues with the impact of Japan's war in China and the Pacific War on major Japanese novelists, playwrights, painters, and filmmakers, before moving on to the final stage, Japan's defeat and initial recovery. During the Allied Occupation of Japan and in its aftermath, Japanese artists both confronted and dismissed the question of war responsibility by preserving, reviving, or reinventing the political cartoon, Kabuki drama, literature of the body, and the aesthetics of decadence.

Mid-Century Modern Interiors explores the history of interior design during arguably its most iconic and influential period. The 1930s to the 1960s in the United States was a key moment for interior design. It not only saw the emergence of some of interior design's most globally-important designers, it also saw the field of interior design emerge at last as a profession in its own right. Through a series of detailed case studies this book introduces the key practitioners of the period - world-renowned designers including Ray and Charles Eames, Richard Neutra, and George Nelson - and examines how they developed new approaches by applying systematic and rational principles to the creation of interior spaces. It takes us into the mind of the designer to show how they each used interior design to express their varied theoretical interests, and reveals how the principles they developed have become embodied in the way interior design is practiced today. This focus on unearthing the underlying ideas and concepts behind their designs rather than on the finished results creates a richer, more conceptual understanding of this pivotal period in modernist design history. With an extended introduction setting the case studies within the broader context of twentieth-century design and architectural history, this book provides both an introduction and an in-depth analysis for students and scholars of interior design, architecture and design history.

Lawrence L. Langer, perhaps the most important literary critic of the Holocaust, here explores the use of Holocaust themes in literature, memoirs, film, and painting. Among the authors he examines are Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Cynthia Ozick, Art Spiegelman, and Simon Wiesenthal. He appraises the art of Samuel Bak, considered by many the premier Holocaust painter of our time, and assesses the "Holocaust Project" by Judy Chicago. He also offers a critical interpretation of Undzere Kinder, a neglected but important Yiddish film made in Poland after the war about Holocaust orphans. Langer focuses his attention on a variety of controversial issues: the attempt of a number of commentators to appropriate the subject of the Holocaust for private moral agendas; the ordeal of women in the concentration camps; the conflicting claims of individual and community survival in the Kovno ghetto; the current tendency to conflate the Holocaust with other modern atrocities, thereby blurring the distinctive features of each; and the sporadic impulse to shift the emphasis from the crime, the criminals, and the victimized to the question of forgiveness and the need for healing. He concludes with some reflections on the challenge of teaching the Holocaust to generations of students who know less and less of its history but continue to manifest an eager curiosity about its human impact and psychological roots.

Brasilia, Caracas, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro ... these are cities synonymous with some of the most innovative and progressive architecture of the twentieth century. The period between 1930 and 1960 in particular, when many Latin American economies expanded rapidly, was an era of incomparable inventiveness and creative production, as the various governments strove to shake off their colonial pasts and make public their modernising intentions.

This book focuses on major state-funded architectural projects, featuring not only the high-profile prestigious building like the House of Representatives in Barsilia but also social architecture such as schools and los-cost housing developments. Architects like Pani, Costa, Reidy and Niemeyer, who undertook this work with considerable autonomy and significant financial resources, in effect became social planners, their avant-garde aesthetic and technical experimentation often being teamed with radical social agendas.

By 1960, the year in which Brasilia was inaugurated, economic growth in the region was slowing and faith in the modernist project in general was faltering. The English-speaking world, which had previously endorsed and even envied Latin American architectural production, changed its opinion and largely dismissed it from the history of twentieth-century architecture. Building the New World redresses the balance. It provides an accessible introduction to the most important examples of state-funded modernism in Latin America during a period of almost unimaginable optimism, when politicians and architects saw architecture as, literally, a way of building themselves out of underdevelopment and into the new world of a culturally rich and socially inclusive future.

The history of modern architecture as constructed by historians and key texts. Writing, according to Panayotis Tournikiotis, has always exerted a powerful influence on architecture. Indeed, the study of modern architecture cannot be separated from a fascination with the texts that have tried to explain the idea of a new architecture in a new society. During the last forty years, the question of the relationship of architecture to its history-of buildings to books-has been one of the most important themes in debates about the course of modern architecture. Tournikiotis argues that the history of modern architecture tends to be written from the present, projecting back onto the past our current concerns, so that the "beginning" of the story really functions as a "representation" of its end. In this book the buildings are the quotations, while the texts are the structure. Tournikiotis focuses on a group of books by major historians of the twentieth century: Nikolaus Pevsner, Emil Kaufmann, Sigfried Giedion, Bruno Zevi, Leonardo Benevolo, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Reyner Banham, Peter Collins, and Manfredo Tafuri. In examining these writers' thoughts, he draws on concepts from critical theory, relating architecture to broader historical models.

Since the eighteenth century, artists--especially so-called avant-garde artists--have played a conflicting role in society. Part of the reason for their complex position, argue Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello, is the survival of the culture of idolatry in the modern age. In the twentieth century, artists can criticize the worship of material things or they can produce the things themselves. They can paint the scenes of worship of the golden calf--as the German expressionist Emil Nolde did in "Dance Around the Golden Calf" (1910), in which garish exaggerations reflect a condemnation of materialistic culture--or they can be the ones fabricating the idol for a fee.

Part radical critics, part celebrity servants of bourgeois tastes, avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Rene Magritte, Andy Warhol, the Christos, and Keith Haring have captured the twentieth-century imagination and inspired the artistic community to reconsider its social, political, and cultural roles. Charting the uneasy middle ground occupied by these artists and their work, Sassower and Cicotello argue that their success has as much to do with their complicity with capitalist forces as it does with their defiance of them. Indeed, the major theme of The Golden Avant-Garde is the inability of any cultural subgroup to withstand the overwhelming power of capitalism, commercialism, and science and technology.

While some artists are paid by governments and institutions to construct national and religious monuments that express and honor society's most valuable principles and goals, the same society has fabricated a romantic myth of artists as revolutionary heroes who defy the authorities and pay dearly for their passion and vision. The Golden Avant-Garde is a unique collaboration between a philosopher and an artist, who bring their different perspectives to bear on how the avant-garde navigates the cultural, financial, and technological challenges presented by this postmodern dilemma. Often, Sassower and Cicotello conclude, avant-garde artists have become adept at manipulating the same forces that they seek to exaggerate and articulate in their work.

Since the eighteenth century, artists--especially so-called avant-garde artists--have played a conflicting role in society. Part of the reason for their complex position, argue Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello, is the survival of the culture of idolatry in the modern age. In the twentieth century, artists can criticize the worship of material things or they can produce the things themselves. They can paint the scenes of worship of the golden calf--as the German expressionist Emil Nolde did in "Dance Around the Golden Calf" (1910), in which garish exaggerations reflect a condemnation of materialistic culture--or they can be the ones fabricating the idol for a fee.

Part radical critics, part celebrity servants of bourgeois tastes, avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Rene Magritte, Andy Warhol, the Christos, and Keith Haring have captured the twentieth-century imagination and inspired the artistic community to reconsider its social, political, and cultural roles. Charting the uneasy middle ground occupied by these artists and their work, Sassower and Cicotello argue that their success has as much to do with their complicity with capitalist forces as it does with their defiance of them. Indeed, the major theme of The Golden Avant-Garde is the inability of any cultural subgroup to withstand the overwhelming power of capitalism, commercialism, and science and technology.

While some artists are paid by governments and institutions to construct national and religious monuments that express and honor society's most valuable principles and goals, the same society has fabricated a romantic myth of artists as revolutionary heroes who defy the authorities and pay dearly for their passion and vision. The Golden Avant-Garde is a unique collaboration between a philosopher and an artist, who bring their different perspectives to bear on how the avant-garde navigates the cultural, financial, and technological challenges presented by this postmodern dilemma. Often, Sassower and Cicotello conclude, avant-garde artists have become adept at manipulating the same forces that they seek to exaggerate and articulate in their work.

As art critic for "The New Republic," Jed Perl is renowned for combining a passion for art and a skepticism about the current art establishment with an ability to write about art in the context of our larger culture. In this collection of essays, including two written especially for this book, he delivers a brilliant mixture of first-rate art criticism and politically informed insight into the true workings of the American art world.Perl offers incisive analysis into the marketing mentality that dominates today's museums, the poverty of academic criticism, and the changing expectations of the gallery-going public. He re-evaluates the old masters, and turns an avid, unprejudiced eye on the works of his contemporaries. He laments the collapse of a gallery culture that once allowed artists to develop slowly, and argues for a radical reassessment of the way art is presented to--and is viewed by--the public.

In a series of newly commissioned essays by both established and emerging scholars, Globalization and Contemporary Art probes the effects of internationalist culture and politics on art across a variety of media. Globalization and Contemporary Art is the first anthology to consider the role and impact of art and artist in an increasingly borderless world. * First major anthology of essays concerned with the impact of globalization on contemporary art * Extensive bibliography and a full index designed to enable the reader to broaden knowledge of art and its relationship to globalization * Unique analysis of the contemporary art market and its operation in a globalized economy

"What is art? Is that art?" At the end of the twentieth century, these questions continue to provoke and to bedevil discussion. The uncertainty that prompts them can be productive for artists, who may thrive on such a state of tension. Yet uncertainty can also shade into the suspiciousness with which many people approach the work of those artists.

Reasonable questions deserve articulate answers, and Julian Bell provides them in this lucid, straightforward, and often challenging book. In the process he offers an incisive guide to artistic thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to the complexities of contemporary theory. Among the many fields of activity covered by the word "art, " Bell, himself a painter, focuses on "flat things" -- the paintings that modern theories seek to explain. The questions he addresses include:
-- What is painting? Does anything unite these objects we call paintings?
-- What happened to the idea of representation in "modern art"? What has caused the vast changes in painting over the last two centuries?
-- What does the ancient practice of painting amount to in today's world at the turn of the twenty-first century?

Bell writes with a wide-ranging curiosity about what other painters have produced in the last two hundred years, giving fresh accounts of the most influential works and introducing many painters who may lie outside fashionable canons. What Is Painting? is a book for everyone interested in making sense of modern art and of the cultural debates it provokes.