A teacher to Jacques Lacan, Andre Breton, and Albert Camus, Kojeve defined art as the act of extracting the beautiful from objective reality. His poetic text, "The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky," endorses nonrepresentational art as uniquely manifesting beauty. Taking the paintings of his renowned uncle, Wassily Kandinsky, as his inspiration, Kojeve suggests that in creating (rather than replicating) beauty, the paintings are themselves complete universes as concrete as the natural world. Kojeve's text considers the utility and necessity of beauty in life, and ultimately poses the involuted question: What is beauty? Including personal letters between Kandinsky and his nephew, this book further elaborates the unique relationship between artist and philosopher. An introduction by Boris Groys contextualizes Kojeve's life and writings.

In 1925 the artists Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious moved to the Essex village of Great Bardfield, at first sharing lodgings. Over the course of several years and encouraged by Bawden and Ravilious' work, other artists came to live in the village, forming a community of artists and designers that has continued to the present. Among the first to join them were the Rowntrees, Kenneth and Diana, and Michael Rothenstein and his wife Duffy Ayers. They were followed by John Aldridge, painter and designer of wallpapers (printed, like Bawden's papers, by the Curwen Press); Walter Hoyle, printmaker and also a wallpaper designer; Marianne Straub, textile designer and weaver; illustrators and printmakers Bernard Cheese and his wife Sheila Robinson. Though the careers of Bawden and Ravilious are well-documented, many of the other artists are less well-known but equally talented, such as George Chapman, Stanley Clifford-Smith and Laurence Scarfe.This book tells the story of Great Bardfield and its artists, and their famous 'open house' exhibitions, showing how the village and neighbouring landscape nurtured a distinctive style of art, design and illustration from the 1930s to the 1970s and beyond. '..their shared artistic legacy is immediately obvious from this beautiful book.' --Country Life 16th 23rd December 2015'..Beautifully designed.' --Evening Standard 24th December 2015'..splendidly illustrated' -- The Spectator, 28th November 2015

For the first time, explore John Singer Sargent's fascination with Spain as seen in stunning landscapes, architectural views, figure studies, and scenes of everyday life American artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) experienced Spain, including the picturesque island of Majorca, as a source of rejuvenation and inspiration. Sargent and Spain features scores of the artist's dazzling watercolors, oil paintings, and drawings, from landscapes and seascapes to architectural studies, scenes of everyday life, and sympathetic portraits of the Roma and other local people he encountered. Immersing himself in the country's rich culture, he studied Spanish masters old and new, lavishing particular attention on works by Diego Velazquez in the Prado. He rendered the distinctive architecture of the Alhambra as well as other palaces and churches, and he captured lively scenes of ports and villages. Intrigued by Spanish dance and music, Sargent created dynamic views of flamenco and the famous dancer La Carmencita. A map and an illustrated chronology document the artist's seven trips to and travels through Spain. This handsome book showcases, for the first time, Sargent's captivation with Spain and the remarkable works of art now associated with it. Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington Exhibition Schedule: National Gallery of Art, Washington (October 2, 2022-January 2, 2023) Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Legion of Honor (February 11-May 14, 2023)

While there have been monographs on British artist-travellers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there has been no equivalent survey of what the writer, Henry Blackburn, described as 'artistic travel' a hundred years later. By 1900, the 'Grand Tourist' became a 'globe-trotter' equipped with a camera, and despite the development of 'knapsack photography', visual recording by the old media of oil and watercolour on-the-spot sketching remained ever-popular. Kenneth McConkey's exciting new book explores the complex reasons for this in a series of chapters that take the reader from southern Europe to north Africa, the Middle East, India and Japan revealing many artist-travellers whose lives and works are scarcely remembered today. He alerts us to a generation of painters, trained in academies and artists' colonies in Europe that acted as creches for those would go on to explore life and landscape further afi eld. The seeds of wanderlust were sown in student years in places where tuition was conducted in French or German, and models were often Spanish, Italian, or North African. At fi rst the countries of western Europe were explored afresh and cities like Tangier became artists' haunts. Training that prioritized plein air naturalism led to the common belief that a well-schooled young painter should be capable of working anywhere, and in any circumstances. At the height of British Imperial power, and facilitated by engineering and technological advance, the burgeoning tourism and travel industry rippled into the production of specialist goods and services that included a dedicated publishing sector. Essential to this phenomenon, the artist-traveller was often commissioned by London dealers to supply themed exhibitions that coincided with contracts for colour-illustrated books recording those exotic parts of the world that were newly available to the tourist, traveller, explorer, emigrant, or colonial civil servant. These works were not, however, value-neutral, and in some instances, they directly address Orientalism, Imperialism, and the Post-Colonial, in pictures that hybridize, or mimic indigenous ways of life. Behind each there is a range of interesting questions. Does experience live up to expectation? Is the street more desirable than the ancient ruin or sacred site? How were older ideas of the 'picturesque' reborn in an age when 'Grand Tours' once confi ned to Italy, now encompassed the globe? McConkey's wideranging survey hopes to address some of these issues. This richly illustrated book explores key sites visited by artist-travellers and investigates artists including Frank Brangwyn, Mary Cameron, Alfred East, John Lavery, Arthur Melville, Mortimer Menpes, as well as other under-researched British artists. Drawing the strands together, it redefi nes the picturesque, by considering issues of visualization and verisimilitude, dissemination and aesthetic value.

'Rich and funny' Julian Barnes, Guardian

'Poirier's hugely enjoyable, quick-witted and richly anecdotal book is magnifique' The Times

A captivating portrait of those who lived, loved, fought, played and flourished in Paris between 1940 and 1950 and whose intellectual and artistic output still influences us today.

After the horrors of the Second World War, Paris was the place where the world's most original voices of the time came - among them Norman Mailer, Miles Davis, Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Juliette Greco, Alberto Giacometti, Saul Bellow and Arthur Koestler. Fuelled by the elation of the Liberation, these pioneers hoped to find an alternative to the Capitalist and Communist models for life, art and politics - a Third Way.

Agnès Poirier transports us to a time when Paris was at the heart of all that was new and brave and controversial, skilfully weaving together a collage of images and destinies.

Nancy Spero (born in Cleveland, Ohio, 1926) is a pioneer of feminist art and a key figure in the New York protest scene of the 1960s and 70s, as highly regarded as famed artists Martha Rosler and Adrian Piper. With a career spanning over 50 years, Spero continues even today to engage, question, and defy our current political, social and cultural scene. Her work has recently been exhibited throughout the US and Europe, including the last edition of the "Venice Biennial". This book focuses on the artist's search to create her own language, featuring the best of her work, from early student works on paper to her latest presentation at the Venice Biennial.

Collage and Literature analyzes how and why the history of literature and art changed irrevocably beginning in the early years of the twentieth century, and what that change has meant for late modernism and postmodernism. Starting from Pablo Picasso's 1912 gesture, breaking the fundamental logic of representation, of pasting a piece of oilcloth onto a canvas, and moving up to Kenneth Goldsmith's 2015 reading of an autopsy report of an unarmed young black man shot by police (which he framed as a poem entitled Michael Brown's Body) this volume moves through a series of case studies encapsulating issues of juxtaposition and framing, the central ways identify collage. Its thesis is that collage-and, in fact, only collage-meaningfully overcomes formal and generic boundaries between the literary and the non-literary. The overwriting of these traditional boundaries happens in the service of collage's anti-narrative drive, a drive that may be, in turn, interruptive or destructive. The expansion of collage's horizons- broadly, to include the use of radical juxtaposition in the arts-reveals a surprisingly wide range of American artists and writers using the logic of juxtaposition as they imagine new worlds, disrupt accepted narratives about society and art, and create meaning through form as much as through paraphrasable content. In addressing a wide range of contested issues, recent artists realize the shocking force of collage. By recovering this shock, Collage and Literature restores collage to its multimedia origins in order to reveal its powerful and political affects.

Elegant monograph by Nicholas Usherwood of one of Britain's outstanding figurative artists.

This book draws parallels between literature and the arts, and between drama and painting, in terms of Time and Symbolism, as they appear in the play The Lady of the Castle by Leah Goldberg, and in a group of selected paintings by Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Paul Klee and Edward Munch. Discussion focuses on the connection between the written play-text and the paintings through their common visual qualities and in terms of their common thematic, structural and stylistic characteristics. In a world dominated by science and technology, which renders belief in any "absolute" problematic, two seminal events have left a permanent mark on the contemporary concept of time: Einstein's theory of relativity and Bergson's philosophy of duration (simultaneite and duree). In their wake, Time has become relative and fragmented -- a central theme in the play and in the selected works of art under discussion. Objective, scientific and chronological time is contrasted with inner, psychological time (duration), which differs from individual to individual and from culture to culture. Four categories of time are assessed: historical, physical-chronological, psychological and eternal. The primary meaning behind a symbol makes the basic assumption that a particular object or entity may represent another essence. In attempting to understand the temporal/symbolic linkages of the text and paintings, much importance is attributed to the relationship between representer' and represented' and between concrete and abstract. Through symbolic abstraction one is able to better comprehend the human and cosmic phenomena the symbol seeks to decipher. The book deals with a castle. This central symbol of the play and the paintings is multifaceted, representing what is manifest and what is hidden within the castle, revealing a magical encounter between the world of words and the world of colour.

This book brings together some of Nicholson's most eloquent essays with extracts from previously unpublished letters between the artist and Ede, and the words of their mutual friends, the poet Kathleen Raine and collector Helen Sutherland. With an introduction by Kettle's Yard curator Elizabeth Fisher exploring Nicholson's relationship with Ede, the book is richly illustrated and includes reproductions of all works in the collection, a biography and bibliography.

This book represents the first study dedicated to Twentieth Century German Art, the 1938 London exhibition that was the largest international response to the cultural policies of National Socialist Germany and the infamous Munich exhibition Degenerate Art. Provenance research into the catalogued exhibits has enabled a full reconstruction of the show for the first time: its contents and form, its contributors and their motivations, and its impact both in Britain and internationally. Presenting the research via six case-study exhibits, the book sheds new light on the exhibition and reveals it as one of the largest emigre projects of the period, which drew contributions from scores of German emigre collectors, dealers, art critics, and from the 'degenerate' artists themselves. The book explores the show's potency as an anti-Nazi statement, which prompted a direct reaction from Hitler himself.

Phenomenal Difference grants new attention to contemporary black British art, exploring its critical and social significance through attention to embodied experience, affectivity, the senses and perception. Featuring attention to works by the following artists: Said Adrus, Zarina Bhimji, Sonia Boyce, Vanley Burke, Chila Burman, Mona Hatoum, Bhajan Hunjan, Permindar Kaur, Sonia Khurana, Juginder Lamba, Manjeet Lamba, Hew Locke, Yeu-Lai Mo, Henna Nadeem, Kori Newkirk, Johannes Phokela, Keith Piper, Shanti Thomas, Aubrey Williams, Mario Ybarra Jr. Much before scholars in the arts and humanities took their recent 'ontological turn' toward the new materialism, black British art had begun to expose cultural criticism's overreliance on the concepts of textuality, representation, identity and difference. Illuminating that original field of aesthetics and creativity, this book shows how black British artworks themselves can become the basis for an engaged and widely-reaching philosophy. Numerous extended descriptive studies of artworks spell out the affective and critical relations that pertain between individual works, their viewers and the world at hand: intimate, physically-involving and visceral relations that are brought into being through a wide range of phenomena including performance, photography, installation, photomontage and digital practice. Whether they subsist through movement, or in time, through gesture, or illusion, black British art is always an arresting nexus of making, feeling and thought. It celebrates particular philosophical interest in: - the use of art as a place for remembering the personal or collective past; - the fundamental 'equivalence' of texture and colour, and their instances of 'rupture'; - figural presence, perceptual reversibility and the agency of objects; - the grounded materialities of mediation; - and the interconnections between art, politics and emancipation. Drawing first hand on the founding, historical texts of early and mid-twentieth century phenomenology (Heidegger; Merleau-Ponty), and current advances in art history, curating and visual anthropology, the author transposes black British art into a freshly expanded and diversified intellectual field. What emerges is a vivid understanding of phenomenal difference: the profoundly material processes of interworking philosophical knowledge and political strategy at the site of black British art.

Modern Art in Cold War Beirut: Drawing Alliances examines the entangled histories of modern art and international politics during the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Positing the Cold War as a globalized conflict, fraught with different political ideologies and intercultural exchanges, this study asks how these historical circumstances shaped local debates in Beirut over artistic pedagogy, the social role of the artist, the aesthetics of form, and, ultimately, the development of a national art. Drawing on a range of archival material and taking an interdisciplinary approach, Sarah Rogers argues that the genealogies of modern art can never be understood as isolated, national histories, but rather that they participate in an ever contingent global modernism. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art history, Cold War studies, and Middle East studies.

This book follows Chagall's life through his art and his understanding of the role of the artist as a political being. It takes the reader through the different milieus of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - including the World Wars and the Holocaust - to present a unique understanding of Chagall's artistic vision of peace in an age of extremes. At a time when all identities are being subsumed into a "national" identity, this book makes the case for a larger understanding of art as a way of transcending materiality. The volume explores how Platonic notions of truth, goodness, and beauty are linked and mutually illuminating in Chagall's work. A "spiritual-humanist" interpretation of his life and work renders Chagall's opus more transparent and accessible to the general reader. It will be essential reading for students of art and art history, political philosophy, political science, and peace studies.

This transnational volume examines innovative women artists who were from, or worked in, Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sapmi, and Sweden from the emergence of modernism until the feminist movement took shape in the 1960s. The book addresses the culturally specific conditions that shaped Nordic artists' contributions, brings the latest methodological and feminist approaches to bear on Nordic art history, and engages a wide international audience through the contributors' subject matter and analysis. Rather than introducing a new history of "rediscovered" women artists, the book is more concerned with understanding the mechanisms and structures that affected women artists and their work, while suggesting alternative ways of constructing women's art histories. Artists covered include Else Alfelt, Pia Arke, Franciska Clausen, Jessie Kleemann, Hilma af Klint, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, Greta Knutson, Aase Texmon Rygh, Hannah Ryggen, Juliana Sveinsdottir, Ellen Thesleff, and Astri Aasen. The target audience includes scholars working in art history, cultural studies, feminist studies, gender studies, curatorial studies, Nordic studies, postcolonial studies, and visual studies.

A major new study of Black figurative art from Africa and the African diaspora, covering 100 years from the early 20th century to now. Published to accompany a major exhibition at Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, this book presents a comprehensive exploration of Black self representation through portraiture and figuration, celebrating Black subjectivity and Black consciousness from Pan-African and Pan-Diasporic perspectives. With a primary focus on representational painting, When We See Us celebrates how artists from Africa and the African diaspora have imagined, positioned, memorialized and asserted African and African diasporic experiences during a 100-year period spanning from the early 20th century to the present. The publication demonstrates how generations of artists throughout the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st have critically engaged with multiple notions of Blackness and Africanity. Figurative painting by Black artists has risen to a new prominence in the field of contemporary art over the last decade. This timely and revelatory publication and exhibition will highlight the many ways in which artists have contributed to the critical discourse on topics such as Pan-Africanism, the Civil Rights Movement, African Liberation and Independence movements, the Anti-Apartheid and Black Consciousness mobilisations, Decoloniality and Black Lives Matter.

Adrian Stokes: An Architectonic Eye

Originally published in 1998, The Handbook of Modern British Painting and Printmaking 1900-1990 has been designed for people who enjoy, study and buy British art. The only portable dictionary-style guide to the life and work of modern British painters and printmakers, the book provides information on some 2,000 artists, as well as entries on schools of art, on museums, galleries and collections, on societies and groups, and critics and patrons who have influenced the development of modern art in Britain. Compiled by scholars, the entries are cross-referenced and each concise biographical outline provides the relevant facts about the artist's life, a brief characterisation of the artist's work, and major bibliographic references. Wherever possible, one or two suggestions for further reading are cited.

This book examines contemporary feminist visual activism(s) through the lens of embodiment(s). The contributors explore how the arts articulate and engage with the current sense of crisis and political concerns (e.g. equality, decolonisation, social justice, democracy, precarity, vulnerability), negotiated with and through the body. Drawing upon the legacy of feminist art historical critique, the book scrutinises activist strategies, practices and resilience techniques in intersectional and transnational frameworks. It interrogates how the arts enable the creation of civil and political resilience, become engaged with politics as a response to disaster capitalism and attempt to reform and improve society. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, fine arts, women's studies, gender studies, feminism and cultural studies.

Hot Art, Cold War - Northern and Western European Writing on American Art 1945-1990 is one of two text anthologies that trace the reception of American art in Europe during the Cold War era through primary sources. With the exception of those originally published in English, the majority of these texts are translated into English for the first time from eight languages, and are introduced by scholarly essays. They offer a representative selection of the diverse responses to American art in Great Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany (FRG), Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. There was no single European discourse, as attitudes to American art were determined by a wide range of ideological, political, social, cultural, and artistic positions that varied considerably across the European nations. This volume and its companion, Hot Art, Cold War - Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990, offer the reader a unique opportunity to compare how European art writers introduced and explained contemporary American art to their many and varied audiences. Whilst many are fluent in one or two foreign languages, few are able to read all twenty-five languages represented in the two volumes. These ground-breaking publications significantly enrich the fields of American art studies and European art criticism. This book, together with its companion volume Hot Art, Cold War - Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990,, is a joint initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art and the editors of the journal Art in Translation at the University of Edinburgh. The journal, launched in 2009, publishes English-language translations of the most significant texts on art and visual cultures presently only available only in their source language. It is committed to widening the perspectives of art history, making it more pluralist in terms of its authors, viewpoints, and subject matter.

British artist Euan Uglow (1932-2000) maintained a lower profile than others of his generation, yet his beautiful, intelligent, humane, and often witty landscapes, still lifes, and figure studies are today gaining the recognition they so clearly deserve. Many critics and admirers now consider Uglow one of Britain's greatest post-war artists. This is the first book devoted to Uglow and his oeuvre. Richard Kendall's essay explores Uglow's fundamental attitudes, beliefs, and processes in the years 1950 to 1970, and Catherine Lampert looks at the content and personal nature of the artist's paintings over a lifetime, emphasizing his growing attention to color and light. The volume reproduces every known oil painting by Uglow-a total of more than 400 works--some 80 of which are here reproduced for the first time. In addition to a chronology, bibliography, and exhibition history for each work, the catalogue entries provide many other details and illuminating notes, including the artist's own observations. Exhibition Schedule: Marlborough Gallery, London (opens May 2007)

One of the most powerful painters of our age, Francis Bacon lived and worked for the last thirty years of his life in a modest building in London's South Kensington. After he died in 1992, access was granted to award-winning photographer Perry Ogden to work undisturbed for days on end to produce this riveting record of the house and its contents. In the studio itself, thirty years of inspired artistic endeavor had accumulated unchecked: the slashed and discarded canvases scattered across the floor; the brushes, rags, and tins encrusted with paint; the doors and walls used as impromptu palettes; the piles of photographs of friends and models; the crumpled and torn pages of magazines and books that served as a stimulus for Bacon's work; the notes, sketches, and ideas for paintings jotted down and then cast aside; the last unfinished self-portrait on the easel.

For some of those close to Bacon, the studio was a heroic statement, a work of art in its won right, secretly constructed over many years to distill and give form to his aesthetic intentions. Now in this astonishing book we are invited to take a privileged look around this private space, to become intimate witnesses to the amazing conditions in which Bacon lived and worked, to gain unrivaled insights into how, why, and what he painted.

Published in its entirety, Frida Kahlo's amazing illustrated journal documents the last ten years of her turbulent life. These passionate, often surprising, intimate records, kept under lock and key for some 40 years in Mexico, reveal many new dimensions in the complex personal life of this remarkable Mexican artist. The 170-page journal contains the artist's thoughts, poems, and dreams-many reflecting her stormy relationship with her husband, artist Diego Rivera-along with 70 mesmerizing watercolor illustrations. The text entries, written in Frida's round, full script in brightly colored inks, make the journal as captivating to look at as it is to read. Her writing reveals the artist's political sensibilities, recollections of her childhood, and her enormous courage in the face of more than 35 operations to correct injuries she had sustained in an accident at the age of 18. This intimate portal into her life is sure to fascinate fans of the artist, art historians, and women's culturalists alike.